We all have a lot of gripes with the way the lore is going, don’t we? I’ll write down my ideal version of fully rebooted Arcane physical logic and lore.
The Foundation
So, the universe started with Magic and Spirit. Magic is the foundation of the things we see all around. You may know hits like Wood, Growth, Water, or Earth. Spirit is the actual composition of stuff. Magic is the cookie cutter, and Spirit is the cookie.
Life magic is responsible for shaping creatures like gods, humans, and whatever Ormolu is. Gods are just like how they are in Greek Mythology. Every god has a special power. Titans are lumped in this as a subcategory, the only difference is that they have less incest.
This is a good time to mention curses. A curse can do impossible things when it comes in contact with a mortal creature. It can bring their body back in time, it can make them unable to die, a curse can make any living creature into anything. The thing is, all curses come with the perk of making you immortal, so you’re not a mortal once you get one, thus you can’t collect any more. It was a precaution made by the gods who created the curses so that somebody could never get more than one.
There were also combinations between human and god, these were called Olympians. We’ll wait until Vetex decides what that means, but that includes the AO MC, Morden, and Tucker.
Introducing: Magic
Although magic was mentioned previously, a Mr. “Prometheus” did something to make it somehow more important that it already was. Prometheus is the god of forethought, but he’s absolutely terrible at his job, and decided to put on a disguise and set up a “get magic here” booth in the middle of a town called Ian’s Cross. To the shock of everybody, this guy wasn’t crazy, if you gave him a common gemstone called Aurem, he’d give you and your descendants elemental powers. Prometheus however still needed more Aurem, and his plan was about to be discovered, so he offered to make peoples’ magic ever better for a lot more Aurem. Most people were cool with that, it’s still pretty common at this point. He told the people that if you drew a circle with the magic, it made it more precise, he simply taught them to master it.
Turns out Prometheus wanted to perform a ritual with all that Aurem, and if you fiddle with it just right, then you can create an element of your own being. Prometheus actually had so much that he made the most powerful and amazingly destructive power ever conceived.
A bit of a problem came about for Prometheus. King Arthur of the local Camelot city had been a valuable customer of Prometheus for the past few weeks, and of course a king would have a baleful collection of pretty red rocks to give away. King Arthur wasn’t loyal though, he wanted the power of Aurem to himself. King Arthur and his vast army of close friends and employees went all the way up to the summit out Mount Othrys and started beating Prometheus to death, including Arthur’s good friend Torren, who got shadow magic AND fire magic, the first example of somebody having two magics.
Each magic is based in an element, and elements that are rarer, stronger, or harder to use, are less likely to be somebody’s magic. There are only 12 magics that can be unlocked at the start of a magic-haver’s lifespan.
- Water
- Earth
- Plasma
- Fire
- Wood
- Frost (Basically ice, but without the water connotations)
- Light
- Shadow
- Wind
- Lightning
- Poison
And - Metal
The selection is just to expand the boundaries of the Seven Seas magic set, eventually some seas will expand their sights, and have rarer and rarer magics in their genetics, as magic is passed down genetically. If magic is dormant in somebody’s genetics, while their bloodline has a history of magic (which eventually became all non-magic-users) then they can harness it through extreme techniques, like the fighting styles and weapon auras we know today.
Sea Curses
After successfully beating up Prometheus, Arthur wanted Prometheus to make a little artsy craft with the Aurem, but just one magic was too simple for Arthur. After making his dream element, Blaze, Arthur told Prometheus to make Sea Curses, named after Arthur’s ironic love of sailing, which are much like the curses previously mentioned, but they bring somebody to their fullest physical potential.
The way it works: The curse takes the strengths of the user and amps it up to as much as physically possible. If you had an adeptness with sword fighting, then you’ll become the greatest swordsman you could have ever pushed yourself to be, including an expansive weapon aura.
If you’ve practiced extreme durability, you become nigh undentable.
If you’re adept at fist fighting, you can decimate any opponent if you land a punch right.
If you use magic, your magic capabilities immediately become fully-charged. This means gaining 3 of the strongest magics you could have ever gotten, and already being great with them.
Prometheus didn’t make sea curses without drawbacks though. They have a specific distain for any and all natural water, and fizzle up and explode like water in boiling oil, and when the sea curse explodes, so does anybody using it.
On top of the water thing, a Sea Curse amps up your biggest personality traits alongside your physical strengths. This can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you are. Torren for example was about to become a deranged blood-hungry maniac.
Arthur made enough for everyone in his army, but Prometheus flung all the sea curses other than Arthur and Torren’s curses into random parts of the world. Arthur would have immediately executed Prometheus if he didn’t fly away as soon as he did this, and Prometheus flew right to Mount Olympus, to beg the incestual gods for help. This resulted in a giant war between the supercharged Cursebeard and Torren against all the gods, which eventually turned into a god genocide, including the titans that survived Prometheus’ initial beating. The only remaining survivor was Hades, because he was quite literally too busy with work to show up to the war. The perks of being god of the underworld.
The Apocalyse
We meet our new protagonist, Durza, historically known as Acheron, because he kept telling people that was his name.
Durza was 12 years old when he randomly found an experimental curse that just fell through the ceiling into his room. Whoever had this thing first must have just died. As Durza attempted to move the heavy cuboid object out of the way of the door to his room, it sort of fell into him. He looked around, but the object had completely disappeared, not the hole in the ceiling though.
Durza was often publicly shamed for not having magic, unlike everyone else in his town, but since he found the experimental curse, he discovered something. One time a boy flicked some fire magic into Durza’s face to annoy him, but Durza did something unexpected, he reached out angrily at the fire magic user, as if he was trying to cast a blast at him, and nothing seemed to happen, but when the fire magic user started to mock Durza, he collapsed to the floor, and he never used fire magic again, but Durza did, Durza had the magic now.
Hades created the absorption curse, and he did it to exterminate magic once and for all without even lifting a finger himself, but it didn’t go to plan. Durza went along his way absorbing every magic and curse in his path, which was exactly as planned, but he started destroying things with it. Instead of bringing every magic to one person to kill him off later, he made one person unkillable by bringing them every magic.
There wasn’t any foe who could defeat Durza but 3. King Arthur, Torren, and a man called Theos, the War Phoenix, (WHO IS FROM SPAIN, NOT BRITAIN). Theos was the only one who took a chance at fighting Durza, to stop his destructive reign, but it went wrong. Durza had only been using a fraction of his destructive power. With every magic came the power of another magic, and Durza tried something that he had never tried before to defeat Theos, he casted every magic and curse-amplified magic all at once. The attack didn’t hit Theos though, the blast travelled miles, it spanned continents causing panic to anybody who it crossed overhead, and it landed on Mount Fuji. Initially all the energy of the blast had been compacted, but when it landed, it exploded, and it exploded hard. Continents split, seas flooded, and everybody who could have died, did die.
The remaining members of humanity were the strongest among the populus, leading to everybody left having both a magical bloodline, and a famous ancestry. Over the course of 1800 years it wasn’t so hard for humanity to recover actually. The magic radiation from the blast died down in some spots, and life thrived. Arthur became a rich king again, Theos continued doing things for the sake of the good people of the world, and Torren was locked up by a few powerful figures so that he couldn’t make things worse.
Cultures mingled, kings dueled for land, it was a beautifully chaotic sight. Everything was destructive, but just enough that the world managed to keep going like before. And thus began their Arcane Odyssey.
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As an author’s note, I’d like to add
When coming up with a logical universe, it sort of just comes to you. It came to Vetex when he was young, but he doesn’t like it anymore, and instead of retailoring it, he works with the mess that he made years ago to no avail, time after time, all presumably so that he doesn’t have to reiterate everything, but is it even worth it?
oh no