What Magic Is
Magic is spirit-negotiation. It is not something distinct from material reality.
The soil beneath your feet is an element, which is a kind of elemental; elementals are spirits, and spirits are gods, including your spirit, your soul, which is itself a kind of god. All spell-casting & Totem-management fundamentally comes down to the simple question: can I communicate with this entity? And, if so, can I figure out what it wants? And, if so, can I negotiate with it to act in a way that benefits us both? A magician is someone who has figured out how to make the answer “yes.”
Magic may manifest as a streak of flame that transforms itself into a fireball, or as the quiet hum of a ghostly crow as it aids you in ripping out a fresh corpse’s soul from the corpse-Totem that was a human body. It doesn’t matter. In the end, you offered both the fire spirit & the crow’s ghost something they wanted — a nice trinket to call home & to form a Totem inside, and a small chunk of your vital life-force as payment for services rendered.
What Magic Isn’t
- Scholarships & books. Magic is learnt through tortuous physical experiences in the field. A book will teach you bookish magic, book-spirit magic. It will never help you conjure a flame any more than pouring water on a fire could grow it. You would be lucky to find a Lord who would sponsor you as a Magician, let alone a college.
- Intangible. Every Totem is a literal physical 1/4# object containing a spirit that must be carried around with you. A magician with many “spells” is hauling around a portable shrine complex instead of a backpack.
- Complicated. There are no spell slots or spell levels.
- Safe. Magic is horrifically dangerous. Magicians are not super-powered wizards who commands spells & their consequences the way one does your own limbs. They can blow up, mutate, spontaneously combust while casting spells, and suffer all kinds of other horrific fates as a direct consequences of meddling with dangerous spirits.
Magical Traditions
Your ability to interact with spirits is warped by your own character. Just as people may find specific personalities intolerable, so too do spirits have preferences for mentalities & mindsets in you. Most magicians specialize heavily, developing unorthodox philosophies & world-views that alter their lifestyle until they’re hardly recognizable as humans at all — and it is this process that puts them into a close familiarity with spirits of their kind. Such a practice, if widely known, is called a magical tradition.
The Magician Class contains the core traditions currently available in Glass Empires.
Divination
Another form of magic is divination, which is the act of offering sacrifices to gods in order to poll their opinions. If you’ve ever rolled up to a friend’s house with a box of chocolates to prepare them for a big ask, you’ve performed divination of a sorts before. The difference between your childhood crush & god of fire is merely a matter of scale, preference, and means of communication. (The author’s preferred sacrifice is Fireball whiskey & most readily responds via email.) In fact, the only difference between spell-casting & divination is that in spell-casting, your offering is Spell Dice, while in divination, you’re usually offering something else of value (such as future promises, or oxen sacrificed upon an altar).
If anything about this frame seems confusing, consider consulting the lore pages on practical polytheism.
Ritual Cooking
Ritual cooking is the process of capturing a soul’s essence through meals that transfer power to the consumer.
Ritual cooking is situationally taboo & is often outlawed, but is practiced nearly universally across Aia, especially by the warrior classes of each realm. The siren song of power rewards the legal & moral stories that justify the act rather than suppressing it. It is a key motivator for hunting lodges & ritual war Disc-wide.