How magic pervades Kuithne

From Kuithne

Essence is a highly responsive and visible force of nature on Kuithne. Almost all beings have a connection to it and manipulate it to varying degrees. The key here is that it is suspectible only to the influence of living beings. This manifests in a number of ways:

The land

The land takes on characteristics according to its past and present inhabitants. This shapes geography, how magic works, and subtly how things work in general. Essence respond to the collective force of beings.

The people

Although wizards who devote themselves purely to the mastery of essence do exist, everybody can to some degree manipulate it. In fact, pretty much everything is a potential channel to manipulate essence provided it is refined enough. Hence master warriors learn how intuitively accomplish magical feats to amplify their skills the more refined their mastery gets, master smiths learn how to imbue their items with magical properties by masterful craftmanship and so forth. There are schools of training in how to harness the latent magical potential of virtually any discipline. The key here is refinement and mastery - completely ordinary people generally do not manifest much aptitude except to perform minor shticks.

Animals

Animals, unlike most intelligent beings, tend to manifest their magical potential genetically, hence their magical traits are more uniform to race. It seems intelligence naturally diversies the mind in ways for greater diversities of magical manifestation but also potentially more shallow manifestation.

How to channel essence:

There are many ways to access and harness essence, but here is a layout of the primary ones:

Words

The secret behind the mastery of wizards was the ancient discovery that words seem to have a particular mystic resonance to essence. It is as if there exist some realm of true words (the same way it is posited by some today that numbers truly exist and are not just mental constructs) in which everything is somehow represented by wordings. People can find out their own true names to attain mystic atunement to the essence (so can others to control them), people with great power and influence on the world can find their names taking on power of their simply by being invoked and so forth. And of course, wizards cast spells by mastering arcane formulas. Other variations on this theme include symbols like runes, gestures and rituals. These are more considered different languages of magic talking about the same thing, with their own benefits and drawbacks in terms of interpreting and harnessing essence. Some even combine them.

Item foci

The same way the land can take on attributes of its past and present inhabitants, items can take on attributes from their past and present owners, usually relative to their power. This is a very common practise as harnessing essence by items as a focus seems to make it easier. The power of the item is relative to how much power is invested into it, but likewise the ease attained is relative to how much power is invested into an item. In a way, items function as a kind of memorized pattern of harnessing essence. For example, a ritual warrior who can make his blade flaming might normally require focus, energy and time to harness this ability but by investing his power into his chosen weapon, this happens more automatically and easier.

Likewise many wizards will have some kind of item to harness and focus their spellcasting through, like a staff, gem, ring or whatever. Those without one will find their spellcasting made less efficient.

There are many degrees of focus and empowerment. Some will pour virtually all the potential into one item to harness their power most efficiently whilst running the risk of losing all of it if they lose the item. Others will pour focus into an item to a degree that they can recover their power if they should lose the item.

Some materials and items seem to have special affinity and focus with particular essence manifestations. This is the cause for spell components for certain spells acting as a focus or for certain weapons having certain qualities.

The gods

Another way to harness the essense is by divine empowerment. Although it is the same basic force used, divine empowerment is a way for the gods to attune their followers to the essence in particular ways to serve their purpose. Others receive empowerment from other forces like native spirits and extra-planar beings. Sometimes, extremely powerful wizards can accomplish this as well. It is by some considered a shortcut to power, but also a restrictive due to its submissive nature to the gods. By others, it is considered merely another discipline for harnessing magical potential among many others.

How spellcasting Works - Why mages do what they do?

Why do wizards mumble words to cast spells, use bat guano and make arcane gestures? And why does drawing a symbol on the floor sometimes help? and what's with the rituals?

The concept of words harnessing essence has been discussed above, but why do wizards primarily use words to cast spells? Mostly because it is considered the most complex form of harnessing essence and hence one that allows for the greatest variety.

Movement

Movement is harder to learn and would require extraordinary dexterity for some feats to master the subtleties of it and because of this, the magic mastered through this discipline tends to be very specialised. Although gestures and such are regularly utilised by mages, these are usually supportive means that don't require the same exactness as their wordings. Usually, it is warriors and other masters of physical disciplines who tend to discover the ways of harnessing magic through movement.

Symbols

Symbols is another way of harnessing essence, and one which does have some appeal to wizards. The problem is that it tends to take more time as the sublety is in the writing or etching of the symbol, a subtlety invisible to the untrained eye. On the other hand, symbol magic is very stable and tend to have more lasting effects. And given the time can often be used to access more subtle and thus powerful magic more easily. These things considered this is often a secondary craft for many wizards. Some do make it their primary focus for this reason.

Words and Words of POWER

As mentioned above, words is considered by most the most flexible and easily learned way of harnessing and manipulating essence and thus the most widely used discipline by those who take the study of magic as their primary focus. It is by no means an easy art however and every spell requires 100% exact phrasing, tonation and pacing to work. Generally, the more powerful the effect, the more subtle and hence difficult the spells required to manifest it. It is possible for wizards to split up words into longer structures to make it easier to cast and thus by taking longer time, wizards can at times cast spells they might not otherwise be capable of. Likewise, very skilled wizards have mastered some wordings to such a degree they can shorten it to a mere syllable without losing any of the subtle intonation and phrasing to activate the spell. It is rumoured some extremely powerful wizards have even discovered mythical words of power where but a simple syllable or two can invoke epic consequences. Some say they are as difficult to control as they are short to cast but this has not put off mages from searching them out.

Thought

There are some adepts who learn to harness essence purely through the power of their minds. This is by most considered the most demanding discipline of all, as it requires exceptional concentration and control to harness and arrange the mind in the exact patterns needed. Some nonetheless master this discipline and study the inner world to find their source of power.