Will start editing this later.
this thing better still be here when I come back…
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19 Likes
damn, forgot to take my thought suppression pills today, what is up with me?
guess it’s off to banland 
Ok, ok, that was pretty good.
I have made a severe and continuous lapse in my judgement, and I don’t expect to be forgiven: I’m simply here to apologize.
You have been charged with the following criminal acts:
- Thinking
This represents treason of the highest order.
The court proclaims you guilty on behalf of the government of Arcane Odyssey Forum-ville.
The sentence is death by chicken slap.
8 Likes
Not the chicken slap! The most ghastly, horrid, morbid, and terrible punishment. Oh sir, oh my, he doesn’t deserve this!
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Idea #1
STATUS: Complete [?]
STARTING DATE: 2021-05-19
FINISHING DATE: 2021-05-20 [?]
Was just thinking about magic systems, mana, and fictional universes (mainly due to @DubiousLittleTyp0’s thread), and had an idea. It’s a bit premature as of now, and I am far too lazy to do anything with it, but it has enough within it that I feel that it can be posted here.
The ideas I’m about to write below mainly come from my exploration of this thought: “where could magic energy come from and how do I tie ghosts into it”. Any criticism is welcome as long as it counts as actual criticism and is presented in a reasonable manner.
Mankind
Basically all mortal beings (all living things that normally live on Earth) have three main components: the body, the soul, and the spirit. This isn’t a particularly creative idea since it’s basically copy-pasted from a specific way of interpreting the bible, but it works here.
The Body
The body allows life to interact with other substances on Earth, and without one you should theoretically be imperceptible to anyone who does have a body. Some exceptions to this rule include most magic users, who often learn or are naturally able to increase the strength of their spirit to perceive the non-physical, and non-mortal relics/beings.
A great deviation from the typical view of the soul in this universe is that the memories and personality of an individual is actually stored in the body, and is killed just as the body is. With the exception of phenomena such as soul staining and spirit convergences, neither the soul nor the spirit contain the actual “identity” of their owner, although they are the same person.
The Soul
The soul acts as a glue: a binding force holding the body and the spirit together. It is closely tied with health and vitality, and things such as sickness and prolonged emotional distress may actually weaken the soul.
Although one needs a body to interact with the mortal world, it is actually the soul that allows you to remain inside it at all, as any individual that is rid of their soul is immediately transported to the realm of the dead.
As most human beings’ souls lose their strength just before or immediately after they die, it can be said that the natural destination of the dead is in the realm of the dead. This does not always hold true, however. In some cases, the soul somehow loosens its grip on one of the components while still latching on to the other. A vessel-less soul which still maintains a spirit is referred to as a ghost, and a corpse still containing a soul is called a zombie. Both are somewhat rare occurrences.
Because the soul is tightly bound to the body and spirit most of the time, it can get stained by both of them. A soul stain occurs when the soul of an individual retains strong emotions or desires from its body, and usually refers to when these strong emotions or desires animate a normally dormant soul to affect the mortal world. This is usually seen in the form of curses, which are manifestations of grudges and desires imprinted onto the souls of the dead.
Stray souls, rid of their former bodies and spirits, transform into raw soul energy, floating aimlessly across the mortal world. They completely lose any form they once had, and, like water, mix up with other souls that surround them.
Sometimes, when a group of nearby souls have similar stains, they and the stains they carry will converge. This potent energy, most commonly referred to as a soul convergence, often occurs when a group of people die with a similarly strong emotions and desires, and is capable of hurting human beings. It is for this reason that places where a significant amount of bloodshed has occurred are often evacuated until the strength of the convergence has weakened.
Because souls can not be created nor destroyed, all newly born babies simply draw their souls from the soul energy in the atmosphere, although because of the sheer quantity of this energy it is highly unlikely that a human baby will draw from even 1% of the soul of another human.
The Spirit
The spirit contains the “essence” and consciousness of a human being, and allows the body to function correctly. It is the only out of the three components that is not bound to the mortal world. The spirit finds its origin in the realm of the dead, where it does not require a soul nor body to flourish.
When a person dies, they are transported to this realm, and are robbed of all their memories, emotions, and interests which they cultivated in the mortal realm. This will be explained in further detail in another segment.
The strength of the spirit is what allows human beings to use magic, although magic is not fueled by it. One of the basic steps to becoming a mage is strengthening your spirit, as one can not realistically use magic without having a particularly strong spirit.
Magic
Magic refers to any phenomena caused by the Favilla’s Worm, a parasitic worm which can only live in environments of high spiritual energy. Although it is technically possible to artificially implant this worm into a human being, most mages are born with these worms already within them, having been contracted by their parents.
Favilla’s Worms
The worms have a two step life cycle, starting from a larval state in which they passively feed on spiritual energy and ending up as fully grown worms who more actively feed on the user and grant them magic abilities. They typically only develop into adults when the magic user’s spiritual strength has reached a certain level.
A mage who was born with already implanted Favilla’s Worms has their spiritual energy passively increase over the course of their life due to the larvae within them, and thus has two advantages over a mage that was not born with them:
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The worms have had the time to acclimate and familiarize itself with the user’s body and spiritual energy signature, which for reasons unknown boosts the quality of the spells that the mage can create.
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Even before the mage is ready to learn magic, the worms constantly eat on their spiritual energy which allows the mage’s body to learn on its own how to regenerate and regulate its spiritual energy. This also allows them to increase the strength of their spiritual energy faster.
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Since the worms were transmitted from a parent that was most likely also a mage, they are more used to living within a human host. Furthermore, a parent’s spirit signature is often very similar to their child’s, which allows the worms to adapt more to their environment.
Some individuals have been known to have been born fully capable of using magic, though this almost always occurs in very prestigious, long-enduring mage families for the reasons listed above.
Magic Techniques
Generally, magic techniques can be divided into three categories:
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Caloric magics, which involve the conversion of magic energy into a real life form of energy (kinetic, magnetic, etc.) and the manipulation and/or emission of said energy. Elemental Magic such as fire magic fall into this category.
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Mutative magics, which involve the manipulation of the form and physical construction of physical objects and entities. Spells that involve summoning some sort of weapon often fall under this category, as they are often done by changing some surrounding matter into said weapon.
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Miscellaneous Magic, which involve reality-altering techniques such as the creation of portals and the ability to control someone’s fate. These have the ability to drastically alter the world around them.
Magic Schooling and Training
Although all teachers and institutions are the same, there are general steps that most teachers take while teaching their students magic. This particular method is widely considered to be the best at helping the students improve in all areas needed to become a powerful mage.
Doesn’t include most of the physical activities added to the method, that’s kind of boring.
Generally, magic training begins immediately after the would-be-mage has awakened; that is to say, when their Favilla’s Worms have fully matured. After this, they are trained in all three categories of magic release, alternating between offensive and defensive magic techniques.
The most common first technique learnt and by far the most used magic technique in magic combat is a basic spherical barrier that converts spiritual energy to a zone of potential kinetic energy that pushes away from the user and gets stronger as it reaches the center. This is often used to deflect ranged magic spells.
After the student can create a strong enough barrier, the tutor will then either teach them a simple Mutative Spell like a technique to manipulate the shape of some rigid material like a stone or ice, or continue working with Caloric magics, depending on how far in their mastery of those magics they want their students to get to, after which they teach them Mutative magics. After that, they focus on Miscellaneous spells and then alternate in the same fashion from there, teaching their students progressively harder techniques.
Although most magic schools require abnormally difficult levels of physical training for their students, mages still possess relatively normal bodies, capable of succumbing to illnesses and being damaged by the forces of nature. Spells just provide a way to protect oneself from these things.
Notable Magic Spells
TBA
or not, we shall see.
The Realm of the Dead
The realm of the dead is the afterlife of this universe, and it is both where most spirits reside and where people go after they do die. Physically, it is a flat, broad plain with a surface area about 7 times that of Earth’s.
The most significant difference between it and Earth is that living organisms are not required to possess souls in order to survive there. This means that the activities and processes associated with life that its inhabitants do are fueled solely by spiritual energy.
Another key difference is in the spiritual content present in its “atmosphere”. The amount of spiritual energy drenched in its air is about 50x the concentration of that on Earth. Since earthen life doesn’t need that much of it (basically all of the processes of life are covered by the soul and body), its air is drenched with soul energy and sparsely filled with spiritual energy.
Something similar to the soul staining phenomenon on Earth exists here, where the longer an organism stays “alive”, the more “stained” and impure their spirits seem to be when compared to the pure, atmospheric spiritual energy.
The more complex a process is, the more spiritual energy is required. For a being to have the mental and intellectual capacity of a human, ridiculous levels of spiritual energy are required, and when that level of spiritual energy is no longer available, creatures devolve to a state that can handle the amount of energy they currently intake.
One of the biggest mysteries in this universe is how human beings come to acquire spirits in the first place. Because the atmospheric concentration of spiritual energy is too sparse to even contain a city, and spirits do not stay in the physical realm for that long, no one knows how that tiny amount of spiritual energy got there, and how human beings possess spiritual energy in the first place.
I already have a basic idea of why this is, just need to work on it more. It has to do with how human beings and other animals were created in the first place.
Denizens of the Realm of the Dead
The realm of the dead is inhabited by numerous “living” creatures which feed on the spiritual energy in the atmosphere or directly from other living creatures. These creatures are created by particularly dense concentrations of energy being touched by the breath of life, which animates them.
All organisms in this realm are built in with a strong desire to reach the final stage in their evolution, which allows them to grow and develop. This is also why they predate on each other so often.
Since the realm of the dead does not have much variety in climatic conditions (since it’s a fucking flat plate), there is no real variety between species in the first stage, and most of the variation begins to occur when the creatures are forced to interact with their fellow creatures. The lifeforms in this realm can be divided into 5 categories:
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Plant-like Organisms: These is the first stage that a creature born in this domain takes. In this sessile grounded state, it mostly feeds on the atmospheric energy that surrounds it, as it can survive pretty well off it. Because they are particularly simple organisms, they are unable to consume spiritual energy that has been stained in any way.
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Decomposers: In the second stage, the creatures gain the ability to digest somewhat stained spiritual energy, and passively feeds on the recently dead bodies of other organisms. They are also able to survive on atmospheric spiritual energy, but absorbing the energy of other creatures allows them to grow faster.
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Predating Organisms: The first predating organisms are still mostly bound to the ground, but are able to actively hunt other living organisms in order to absorb their energy. It is at this point that organisms begin to develop an aversion to pure spiritual energy.
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Moving Organisms: Spurred on by the desire to acquire nourishment, these organisms are able to move in order to actively hunt for their food. The most variety in organisms exist here. It is important to note that at this state they are unable to digest any organisms in the first and second stage, and must thus either live on stage three organisms or hunt each other.
Because the flow of the breath of life is uneven and inconsistent across the entire realm and the flow of spiritual energy is just as inconsistent, sometimes there might be a significant lack of Stage 3 organisms. In these droughts, Stage 4 organisms are forced to hunt and kill each other to survive, and will do so freely. -
Sapient Organisms: Stage 4 organisms reach their final stage as a Stage 5 when they have amassed enough spiritual energy to gain self-awareness. The process to get to this state usually takes millennia, and once one reaches this level, it’s pretty rare for them to be killed, as the amount of strength amassed in order to reach this state is tremendous.
Most Stage 5 organisms that exist in the realm right now have existed for tens of thousands of years, and a new one is rarely ever born. When an organism reaches this state, they mostly survive on Stage 4 organisms, as the fear of devolution and the loss of their ability to think is enough to stop them from challenging each other.
Abilities and More on Behavioral Patterns
The abilities and forms that the creatures gain while evolving are dependent both on the environment they live in and on pure luck. All creatures undergo a kind of adaptive evolution in the third and fourth stages, where their body’s shape will mutate over time in areas where change is needed in order to have a higher chance of survival.
For instance, if a Stage 4 grunt lives in an area where there is an abundance of Stage 3 organisms, it will be less likely to attack other Stage 4 organisms, and thus will be less specialized for that kind of combat. However, because Stage 3 organisms are fully capable of killing them as well, they may develop quick legs that enable them to evade attacks from them, or more developed eyes to spot hidden Stage 3 organisms.
Heavily traumatic events like losing a body part or almost dying are more likely to lead to specialization in areas that would help avoid said injury, though the specific change that occurs is largely due to chance. If a creature loses its leg in a fight between another Stage 4, it might either develop tougher, stronger legs, a higher healing factor, or smoother legs to escape other creatures’ grips.
Very rarely, some Stage 4 organisms will develop symbiotic relationships with other Stage 4’s or Stage 3’s. This happens very rarely though, due to the overly competitive nature of the environment and the frequency of droughts. It is even rarer for organisms in this relationship to survive very long, but when they do they almost always develop into Stage 5 creatures.
More on Stage 5 organisms
Stage 5 organisms are usually extremely well-rounded (due to having survived life as Stage 4 organisms for so long) and are able to take down other Stage 4 organisms due to their superior intellect. They will usually avoid gorging on too many of them though, as they barely get any nutrients from other stages, and a shortage of Stage 4s during a drought would be catastrophic. Some of them even domesticate Stage 4s, feeding them and taking care of them in order to have a steady supply of food.
They aren’t pack animals like humans and wolves, though. The desire to congregate is not something that was built into them, and although they do have the potential to make connections with others of their kind, they mostly live either in tiny groups or alone. Most of them that do live in groups tend only to group up with Stage 5s that they were in symbiotic relationships with since they were in the fourth stage.
Because of the utility that comes with having hands or tentacles (creating tools), most of them possess them.
When compared to a human mage, these creatures are superior in almost every way, being able to digest most spiritual attacks and possessing great physical strength and strange powers. Realistically though, any fight between a mage and a Stage 5 would have to occur in the spiritual realm, as they can not survive in the conditions on Earth.
On the Favilla’s Worms and their relation to the Realm of the Dead
Curiously enough, there are no attested worm-like organisms in the Realm of the Dead. Most of the information on these lands come from expeditions that take place with some frequency (not a lot, but they have been going on for about a thousand years now), although they are rarely any survivors. The current theory is that there is actually an entirely different world underneath the realm which is filled with a more liquid-like spiritual atmosphere. This is mainly based on the fact that the worms do not simply feed on the spiritual energy but soak themselves in it, something that spiritual lifeforms in the Realm of the Dead tend not to do.
It is more likely, however, that the Favilla’s Worm comes from an entirely different realm, though the theory of multiple realms is not a readily accepted one in the current age, mostly due to its implications on both the religious and the magic world.
If they do come from a different realm, that only strengthens the questions on the nature and peculiarity of the soul. What if there are way more than two realms, and Earth is the only one that possesses an entity even vaguely similar to the soul? Why does Earth have so much soul energy in the first place?
Some Notes:- Yes, the names need some work. That applies to almost all the names in this whole post.
- Will probably pick a whole language (or make one up) to use for the spell names.
Hello
So
Symbiote moment
Jesus, that’s a lot of stuff.
Didn’t even know I could write that much in a few hours.
I guess in this case I already had a vague idea before I started writing and developing them, so it doesn’t even matter.
I’m probably not done yet, just gonna think on it some more.
China
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Kind of bored of this now, interested in the Aristotelian elements. Gonna base a magic system off that.
Idea #2
STATUS: Inomplete [?]
STARTING DATE: 2021-06-01
FINISHING DATE: 2021-06-06 (got bored, it’s kind of like any other magic system except it doesn’t give any physical boosts)
Having read and re-read the Wikipedia article on Aristotelian elements (yeah ik, just the wiki idrc), I feel as though I have a good enough understanding (READ: basic understanding) on the subject from which my ideas might stem. I don’t plan on using the ideas on the physical properties of each element, and was quite unevenly fascinated with the concept of Aether, which seems to be a sort of element of the gaps, a default explanation for the inexplicable.
Taking inspiration from the numerous connections made with the motion or nature of the heavenly bodies and aether, I decided to make this element the embodiment of the sky itself - that great firmament that engulfs the earth entire and whose depth cannot be comprehended. I renamed it lift, which seemed fitting. That’s also subject to change.
Lift
Lift is thought to be the explanation for most heavenly phenomena. The general belief of the world where this power exists is that the heavens are composed of all four elements: fire (the sun), water (the clouds), wind (the firmament itself), and earth (the stars). Therefore, lift should be able to convert itself into any of these elements, though this is a one way process as there is no known way to convert an impure form of matter back to lift.
Lift is able to add itself to another impure form of matter in order to enhance its properties. This can be used for many things - for making a sword sharper, making a torch burn brighter, etc. Lift is seen as the embodiment of perfection and thus perpetuity. Imbuing objects with lift allows them to attain a small measure of this perfection.
Other Information
Of the four elements, earth is the hardest to convert to, and fire is the easiest. Something to do with their thickness. This heavily limits what is possible with the earth element, and is why the most common spells by far are simple enhancement spells and fire/freezing spells.
In this universe, fire magic refers both to the process of gaining and losing heat. They are one and the same.
The process of using lift involves commanding it to act with your soul (or “voice”). The shape that your soul takes while commanding the lift to act determines the spell used. There are multiple criteria used to judge the effectiveness of a magic user in this regard:
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Volume
The volume that the individual can amass. -
Steadiness
The amount of time the individual can maintain control over the amassed lift. -
Malleability
The ability of the user to change the shape of their soul.
Because the lift is not an earthly element, it cannot be perceived by anyone except those who can use it. Moreover, it can not directly harm anyone, and can only cause harm by being transformed into another element or used to boost an already existing physical item. Since lift is not physical, it can’t be used to directly defend anyone, either.
This means that most fights are about landing a solid hit on the opponent, as most professional spells can kill a human being easily.
Now I’m interested in making mythologies for fictional cultures/universes. The rule I’m setting for myself is to not go too far in the Proto-Indo-European mythology rabbit hole by having deities basically be carbon copies of Greek gods, for instance.
In the first place, what even is a god? Different religions probably think of their deities in different ways, and the ways in which deities are thought of can evolve over time. Gods can rise and fall in significance and popularity, and certain concepts can be emphasized and de-emphasized as time goes on. In the natural ever-flowing marketplace of religious ideas and motifs, change is not only expected but mandatory.
I think supernatural entities are central to religions, but they don’t really need to think of divine beings in the same way more popular western religions do. I was reading the Rogue Lineage / Tales from the Valley lore and it’s pretty interesting and cool, but, perhaps most importantly, it seems unique and novel, which just amplifies the mystery aspect of the world. If only Rogue Lineage had placed more emphasis on that…
Yeah, we get to meet Ya’alda appears, but that’s about it I think.
Having said this, it shouldn’t be a problem if I start with a mythology eerily similar to Greek or Jewish or Irish or Germanic mythology as long as I make it mine, whatever that’s supposed to mean.