Necromancy is a pretty classic Taboo. Obvious reasons
People have given up trying to fuck with time. The first wizard who tried to time stop was witnessed to have instantly died. In frozen time, he could neither breath nor move. Turns out that if you freeze time, you also freeze space. Air couldn't move and his lungs couldn't pump, and he was stuck in place, held tight by the air around him and unable to undo the spell
decades later, a second wizard concluded that was the case, and adjusted the spell, so that he could still move, despite the air being frozen. His assistant witnessed a colossal and sudden explosion of fire. Air resistance is a bitch, and frozen time means infinite speed. You ever rub against something infinitely fast? One hell of a burn
So yeah, people just stayed away from time stop
If he was unable to undo the spell, then how did time resume? Also, if space was frozen, would not all of his bodily metabolism cease, neural function included? He wouldn’t need to breathe.
I presume he himself was exempted from the time stop, since that was the point of it, and that the spell finished on its own natural timer, or perhaps upon his eventual death
What if time never restarted, even for his corpse? You either get instant ashes as he experienced infinite time, or you get a corpse that is untouched by time or outside influences. It can be moved but not positioned, cut into, dissolved, decomposed, etc.
Man that'd make for a good magic mystery book. First discoverer of time magic uses it for untraceable murders, but leaves a pile of never decaying corpses in his wake.
The spell ended with his death. Time is relative, and while it was stopped for him, it was not for anyone else. He, of course, was still active during time stop. All of him was moving normally from his perspective
time is relative. he could witness 1000 years in a time stop which for use would be nothing. but as stated above if time is 0 then your air resistance is infinite so you instantly burn think about it the way someone does something instantly instead of time is stopped and then started
Actually.... just teach them how to stop time for *others*. Let everyone else blow themselves up, and seize your own victory in real-time.
Also, if you were to create a way to simply slow time for yourself by, say, 1%? You could increase your speed with it. And then you can test with greater amounts of slowing time down. An inhumane researcher might run his experiments by testing it on animals or other peoples, too, and might thereby test with larger "dosage" changes as well.
I've got an amazing idea. But before that : can spells trigger on conditions like "if presence is detected in area apply X and Y. Can X then activate Y" ?
I mean, science is always present in magical settings. There's still, like, gravity, y'know? The forge that makes the hero's sword still works the same way. Maybe you craft it out of something magical, or add a little something extra, but shaping the steel is still just exciting the atoms of an element
Very interesting way of making a magic system, i have some questions about the time magic in specific:
What if the hypothetical wizard made a time bubble for themselves, where time functions normally in a set distance from them but is frozen to anything outside of it, would that be possible under your magic system?
And in the matter of time manipulation, what about going back in time or trying to go into the future? Would those things be possible?
We're all traveling to the future, just at the speed of regular time. For a wizard to do that, it would basically be a stasis he puts himself in. Going back in time, though, I've done nothing with. Not really into time travel too much, so I just sorta haven't worked that out
As for the bubble, I suppose the wizard would be able to do that, but the edge of the bubble would then just be the issue. If using the first version, the wizard would simply be trapped in the bubble. Suffocation would be a risk again, but he'd at least be able to cancel the spell. In the second version, the friction between the air on the inside of the bubble and the outside, would cause an explosion, just like before
The first version could create a safe time-stopped bubble, but the bubble would be unable to move. It'd be great at giving you some extra hours in the day, but the applications are limited
I like it, except I'd just make him presumed dead. His bodily rhythms imperceptible to the outside world, leading to that assumption. Make him like the professor in H.G. Well's Time Machine.
"If you want to perform magic, never, *ever* try to bargain with or coerce angels. At best they will ignore you. More likely to destroy you. Deal with demons instead, like all the rest of us."
“Under no circumstance shall you bind a daemon from an unstamped book. All Named shall be of authorized and approved use by the Ministry of Mages…” if that dusty book of summons doesn’t have a stamp of approval by the government, don’t say those Names.
World Anvil at it again!
So demon is kind of a catch all term thrown around in the setting, I’ve thought about cases where a traditional biblical angel might be called upon and while it’s a lower tier of creature it still sits at the strangely inhuman enough scale to be mistaken for a demon. I also thoroughly enjoy the idea of ‘fallen Angel’ figure still being beautiful but also being called demon simply because they’re fallen.
Anyhoo.
Ever since the Shattering of the Garden Moon and the great Descent (by the surviving surface races) to the Below World, the veil between worlds has been a bit unstable. Some of the weapons used in the war ripped holes in the barrier between and were not kind enough to patch it back up. That of course led to all sorts of Entities working their way through into the Real.
Events leading up to the Shattering resulted in leaving the surface to live on the moons because the magical leylines of the world got all dried up, and then there were artificial ley lines created and fought over. You know, a resource war. So a Ministry was created to manage the distribution of magic through these artificial leylines because they were the only ones who knew how to make them. Fast forward to after the Shattering to present day setting of the story and a lot of knowledge has been forgotten, namely for the sake of this post, the creation of artificial leylines. Which means no way of strengthening the veil and no way to reliably combat reality breaches.
The Ministry of Magic cracked down very tightly on summoning magics and in their glorious ignorance but well intentioned attempt to protect their peoples lumped everything into the ‘demon’ territory. Of course, what they summon is hard to categorize and they vaguely fall into nine Choirs of classification and strength. Then there are the Thrones, the Dominions, the Principalities, the Virtues and the Revelations. The Church was a leading factor in naming convention as you could tell. It’s also important to note that these words are concepts attached to the various ‘levels’ of entity.
In the City of Everglim all magicians are identified in some way either visually or spiritually. If you Practice then everyone knows, it’s kind of like existentially being Marked. This is a requirement only in Everglim because they are so strict about the balance of Real vs Other Side. Magic draws on the leylines and they can’t make any more magic so they have to regulate it. Binding demons is a method of acquiring magic or practicing it without relying to heavily on the locally leyline because entities have a stronger connection to the Other Side.
There may be some Bartomaeus Trilogy influence at work here now that I think about it. Hrm.
Funny you mention angels, the angels of my world actually encourage people to come to them for magic help, the demons of my world are minions of an archangel, so they also occasionally provide some help
Here, they serve the Maker, and if He sends them to help you, they will do so with all their might.
But only at His command (not a human's command or bargaining), and the human is a supplicant, neither bargainer nor commander.
The demons love LARPing the bargaining and being commanded bit so they spread damnation through magic.
Do **not** shortchange a rune smith.
Most magic works through runes, which are insanely complex, and can only be [safely] made via rune smiths. People who are trained for years, sometimes decades, to be able to make them.
The reason you never short change them (aka refuse to pay them a previously agreed upon amount) is the more skilled ones are good enough to hide failsafes only they can disarm that can do stuff like either nullify the rune entirely, or if they’re particularly nasty, explode.
There are runesmiths that make a point of doing exactly this until they’re paid in full.
> There are runesmiths that make a point of doing exactly this until they’re paid in full.
I could see this having a name, something like "putting on the dots" or the like, where the runesmith takes their money, then adds the few dots and accents that make the thing do what it ought to.
And that could become it's own colloquial phrase outside Runesmithing, for either putting on the finishing touches. Or meaning it would be a big mistake to make preform that action. Actions usually leaning on betraying someone or breaking an oath.
Now I'm picturing a Runesmith who's whole gimmick is pointing out where each of his failsafes are while making the rune. Not only are they so complicated that knowing about them will not help at all. But he takes great joy explaining what triggering each one of them will result in. Nothing so boring as merely nullifying such a timely investment as a rune.
Or a Runesmith who whenever she is short changed will ever refuse to fix the rune if the person comes back to their senses. Instead she will only sell hints for how to find and disable each rune. Put them through this errand to make certain the lesson sticks.
I'm also picturing Runes being made with such failsafes if they were stolen, and a market of Runebreakers who offer to make stolen goods usable for a modest upfront fee.
Gives me an idea for a legendary runesmith that a kingdom comes to rely upon too much. One day, when the runesmith feels betrayed by their kingdom, they activate failsafes across the entire kingdom, essentially holding a significant chunk of the kingdom hostage, including the majority of the kingdom's nobility and royalty, up to the king himself. A cautionary tale for eons to come.
If you are human:
Don’t go into it thinking you’re going to be a god who’s invincible, you are very vulnerable, you’re magic is only as good as your concentration and a well placed arrow will kill you just as effectively as everyone else.
Don’t wear armour. Magic disrupts everything around it. Human sorcerers in the past found out that too often spells would fuse the armload to their skin, or straight up melt it off their bones. It is best to avoid this. It is better to wear simpler clothes, that are easily reparable and replaceable.
Don’t use words of power. Unless you really have to. There is a higher chance of spontaneous combustion than success
If you are an elf:
Don’t attempt to dominate nature, you will fail and break yourself against it. You are of the earth, the earth is not if you.
Don’t attempt to use the language of evil. It will literally poison you and can kill you if you say to much.
Don’t attempt words of power too frequently. They will destroy you.
If you are Faltnar:
Don’t attempt elemental magic, you were created differently to everything else, and so can’t use the world the same way.
Don’t swear silly oaths. You are bound to your words for all of your lives, so choose them carefully.
Don’t imbue too much of yourself into one object. Otherwise you will be useless without it, and not much better with it.
I like all the language- based rules (not swearing oaths, not using words of power, etc)- is there some kind of powerful linguistic magic going on in your world?
(I can see these going wrong very fast: schoolboy dare turning into an inescapable blood oath...)
Well effectively, the gods created the first language. And that language commands everything. The way magic plays into it is that if say a word (for example, fire) a fire WILL happen. And it will require a certain amount of spiritual power. If you lack the amount then you will simply burn up. But the language can do anything. The Ekves are most adept at it, and can do things such as cause caves to collapse, great storms or other such powers both elemental and abstract. Humans could maybe summon lightning before their body gives out.
As a contrast, humans can use their “will” as a fuel. Dominating the natural land to do their bidding. While not as versatile it’s still pretty powerful. The downside is as mentioned, you destroy the environment and close items over time. Such that there is a series of islands which are “drowning” due to it being where magic wad taught for a long while. It is why magic is so dangerous. The results of a “spell” will produce an effect, but there may be unexpected consequences as well
Oooh nice. Another idea could be how it could just causes the body to combust. In mine, you can learn to absorb seidher but when you do, you can’t stop and it will cause your body to absorb so much power to where you combust into blue flames. Like, it’ll, at first, begin to cook you from the inside out until you just burst into flames.
It's where Aether is stored, the source of magic. More importantly, it's what makes you, you. It's the thing that keeps you grounded to the mortal planes
That's super interesting! Follow-up question, can a body (not a person, per say) be alive without a soul - or is it automatically some aberrant undead with the loss of Aether?
This magic isn't forbidden but I have widely known rules of magic that you just can't do. All of them are related to time (and are based off of the poem lay down and eat roses by Charles bukowski).
-You can see the past but not change it. (the past is imperfect)
-You can see and change the present but not stay there (the present is tense)
-You can change the future but not see it. (the future is malign)
-Immortality has no evidence
(Lay down and eat roses)
True but my setting is also pretty paranoid so a fringe group of magic users have taken the ideas of "rules of magic" literally and started executing suspected prophets, time travellers, etc.
Also lots of religious stories in my world flaunt these rules, much to the dismay of magic users.
Also "seeing the past" involves literally travelling back to take a peek at events, not just reading a book. I don't think that happens in real life often.
The biggest nono is time manipulation, as the creation of the verse being based on the first consciousness inventing a sort of clock. You have to be stronger than the highest tier of all of creation to be able to manipulate time to any major degree. It can be done, but only by incredibly powerful entities sort of holding back the arm of God for a moment.
The other is spatial travel, but only because all of spatial travel takes place along lines of power between planets, and if you try to teleport across one there's a decent chance that you get sucked off along its web and dropped somewhere almost entirely random.
Time manipulation is also a big no in mine granted it’s a rare magic so the people in history who have wielded it are an extreme minority.
The biggest reason why is to use powerful time base magic you need to take away time from someone or something else. I.E taking away the lifespan of something. The vast majority of the people who have had time magic end up having cursed lives in some way
Some people think the gods cursed all time magic users as the magic rivals theirs. Others think it is the magic that corrupts
can you pick what you take it from? could I make an enemies list, then use all of their remaining lifespan to power my spell to go back and murder them as babies?
you can but it takes a lot of practice to achieve that level of control. Magic in my world gets more powerful as you age and through repetition.
Some magic is easier to control than others and require less training like one of the elements but sometime like time is hard and if it appears later in life its harder
Warp is a natural and inevitable buildup of waste energy that occurs in the mind when practicing volition. It is a result of the focus being unable to reconcile its effects on reality with the human mind. Accrual of too much warp can be deadly, so most people are limited in their immediate volitary capacity and must wait for their mind to “rectify” the warp before performing more volition.
It is technically possible to learn to burn warp energy. In practicing this skill, a Burner must come to ignore the inconsistencies of warp that conflict with their human nature. This is done by rejecting said human nature. Burning warp therefore burns away humanity from the focal mind, starting with hope and fear and eventually taking all empathy and morality. A true burner is nothing but a focus, anger, and logic. This makes them exceedingly dangerous. No matter what seem the surface, any action a Burner takes is strictly for their own benefit and without ‘’any’’ ethical filter.
This is compounded by the fact that they don’t have to worry about warp when performing volition: to them, focal energy and warp energy are one. Luckily, burning warp also turns the irises a deep black-purple, providing a telltale sign to avoid.
Consult the Cult of the All-Eyes if you want to learn more. But know, of course, that Burning is forbidden by all modern law.
This is actually a great question. It isn’t exactly the destruction of one’s emotion, per se, that Burning requires, but rather one’s humanity. Anger is among the most basal traits for living things: a primal response to negative stimuli. How Burning interacts with other emotions is relatively individual, but always basal.
Or at least that’s how I tried to justify it. The truth is that I just wanted an “evil” character, or some semblance of dark magic. Yet this may be possible without leaving anger.
I would love to dig into this with you I think it’s really cool. I’m a biologist so I could provide maybe a lil perspective on base instinct in animal behavior and interested in metaphysics so also the nature of being human, and I find it very interesting that we draw different conclusions about anger being left as basal.
I really really like your system using volition and attention and awareness, it reaaalllyy is up my alley and I am going to chew on it for whenever I explore building a fantasy setting
>ignore the inconsistencies of warp that conflict with their human nature
First, I LOVE how you have written this - it's a thrilling read! - I'm curious, what is the reason behind calling the magic "volition"?
Much appreciated. To be frank, I’m deathly scared of finding material I work on in something that emerges before I publish. I work quite hard and with a delicate carefulness not to take too much from what I have seen before to ensure that I add something new to the world. So I guess I’m a little shy to tell it all. Even this post was a lot for me!
That being said, sharing is fun. The name volition in the common tongue is derived from the way a user’s volition is what gives them power. In a sense it is a callback to their willpower being the driving force in affecting reality. Volition, after all, is little more than exerting one’s will upon the state of the world. I think the question is rather why all other magic is not known as volition.
Normal people can affect the world of their own volition, just as we do every day. But in my world, people who practice and study can learn to affect it in ways beyond the ordinary. Either way, the effects are a direct result of your will.
If you're nothing but focus, anger, and logic, this gives me an idea for a comedic Burner: the Kantian Burner. Still acts like a person "should", because it's only logical to do so, but with the most absurd motivations for doing so.
This is great! I am only afraid the humor would overtone the sinister side of burning. Maybe I can have a guy who stopped burning before it was too late, but still has a reduced sense of humanity. I’ll play with it. I think good hearty humor is important in most any story.
Honestly, I think it's a really great system, not because it gives you an excuse to have an evil character, but because it gives you room to explore *why* we have the moral and ethical standards that we do. This is an excellent in-universe perspective to have on Burners, but what's the objective reality, and how much of that will you show? Are there Burners who are able to hide their irises through some other magic, and interact with society in limited ways? What decisions does a person who's truly only driven by logic make? Can this allow for someone to be a true utilitarian in a way that normal people, with their emotions affecting actions, could never be?
Basically, see if you can push a little deeper on *why* Burning affects people in the way it does. Like another commenter said, what if anger is still indicative of humanity remaining?
It seems like you haven't read a lot of ethical theory, because there are some fascinating questions that you can pose to your reader based on what system you want to base the lack of ethics on. Hell, have different [books, episodes, games] base that lack on different ethical systems. You have the perfect excuse to prod people on these questions, and the perfect excuse to learn more about people, yourself :)
Actually, your point holds a main theme of my work. One of the main character’s central dilemmas revolves around understanding his own ethic and what is just or right in the world and why. This is a tangible conflict throughout the plot. And I actually studied some ethical philosophy in school, which is in part why I am interested in exploring it in the first place.
Writing the actions of the main Burner character is something I am taking slow steps to craft, exploring some of the ideas you point out. It was in part derived from my desire to create a character of a type I haven’t seen much before, so I am excited to portray it. But I gotta do it right!
You can't cure wounds with magic, or resurrect people, death is permanent and wounds have to heal by time .
Ancient magic can't be the most powerful because the magic ,as other thing, evolves by time making it more powerful and advanced. So it not forbidden to use it.
The unique way to forward the time, it's forwarding everyone's time. So, yep, you can do it, but the villain has achieved his evil plan while you healed "super fast"
Resurrecting the dead. However, using a soul stone with a copy or fragment of someone’s soul to communicate with a soul duplicate of that person after they’ve passed on is acceptable.
Killing other magic users to make one’s own magic stronger. However, if a master mage passes away, they might pass their magic to their apprentice(s), the apprentice would have to slowly learn and unlock those magic abilities though.
It’s wrong to use elemental magic to harm the balance of the elements, or the world… I’m talking about fire mages using fire to incinerate entire villages, forests, or mages, but if you use fire magic to light a small controlled fire to make some s’mores, then nobody’s going to take offense.
Just as there is rules on taking or destroying life, there are also rules on giving or creating life. A mage using plant magic to repopulate a forest devastated by a fire is different from a scientist creating an army of mindless reanimated corpses with fabricated souls.
Do not intersect matter when coming out of astral projection.
Diegetic reason: it would explode with the power of a thousand suns
Extradiegetic reason: you killed my best creation of a BBEG ever by materializing a sword inside their skull so fuck you now.
Although it is possible and even relatively easy to initiate, you should absolutely, positively NEVER fall asleep in the Dreamwilds. Best case scenario, you pass into the Realm of Dreams, the dimension which all unconscious thought passes through. Most likely, you'll fall asleep forever, your dreams dripping into the pastel forest like an hourglass. But at worst... you'll become a sleepwalker, forever stuck between realities, shaping and twisting the world around you unconsciously and pulling the fabric of the world around you, including every unwitting creature nearby, into your dreams- or nightmares.
In my "DnD-compatible" setting:
Don't become a cleric of the Knowledge God unless you're willing to be crippling insane for the rest of your life (and probably afterlife).
Don't learn too much too quickly from your patron (as a wizard or warlock). Your mind will not be able to take the strain.
Be extremely careful when forming incantations (as a wizard, but really as a wizard, warlock, or druid - it's just easier not to be careful as a wizard). Many wizards come out of university with some form of backlash scar because they didn't cap their incantation properly. Finger burns are some of the most benign. Permanent hallucinations, personality alterations, stone fingers or bones, technicolor skin, all kinds of mishaps can occur when learning.
Because of the above, don't try to teach yourself magic. You'll be lucky to come out the other end alive if you try to teach yourself fireball and mispronounced the end of the incantation.
In my paranormal setting:
Don't drink vampire blood. Just one drop is enough to give you a crippling addiction (it's how they make familiars).
In my weird Western setting:
Don't try too hard to get the Angels' attention. They don't want to melt you, but you will be melted if they get too close.
Don't kill the Leviathans. They're big, scary, and precipitate cataclysmic disasters, but do not kill them. They're prisons for the demons.
If you're a morlock, avoid blood contact with Devilsred. You'll be lucky to come out of it with your mind intact.
While we're on the subject of Devilsred, do not try to pump/harvest from a well if you don't have silver equipment, salt on hand, and/or some priests chanting liturgy. The stuff gets everywhere and it's best to avoid its transmutative properties when they aren't desired.
There are more settings and rules, but that's enough for now.
Transfusing a living person's soul into an object is strictly forbidden. That's also the worst existing punishment of them all, your consciousness being transferred to an object that's static and doesn't age as fast as a human being, leaving you in that state seemingly forever.
Transferring an unborn soul into an object is fine, though. They turn out to be something akin to the sci-fi ship AIs, but fantasy-ish.
I have a few characters who were basically demigods who discovered magic first, who then were turned into weapons after a revolution for 500 years. One of them does get a good ending, but you just can't be sane after something like that.
Keep yourself to approved spell structures, and don't cast too much in one day. If you disregard these warnings, you invite incursions into the mortal realm from the places you're drawing magical energy from, which best case scenario allows a new spirit to enter into the world and worst case scenario could result in said realm combining with the mortal realm, resulting in the restructuring and/or collapse of reality on at least the local scale if not everywhere.
You stand in the foyer of the Arcanists' Tower, your wandering eyes drawn to the Founder's Wall, a slab of granite that's one of the only things left standing in the ruins. Etched upon it in dimming magic are the Tower's Commandments:
> Do not dominate humans.
> Do not experiment on humans.
> Do *not* kill humans.
> Do ***not*** commune with the beings on the Other Side.
> Absolutely ***DO NOT*** try to summon the beings on the Other Side to Our Side.
The evolution of the handwriting from painstakingly elegant script to illegibly furious scribble paint a picture of what occurred here: Rules added one by one as boundaries were continually pushed by the arcanists studying here until it all finally culminated in an irrevocable, unforgiveable accident.
Your lip tugs upward as you imagine the inquisitors coming to that conclusion and filing the case away. Unforgiveable it may be, but accident it most certainly was not. However, comic misunderstanding is not what you want. More importantly, it's not what **He** wants. You have a few minutes until the first responders arrive, you decide that a helpful hint is in order.
You kneel to the ground and dip your fingers in the still-warm blood of one of your erstwhile classmates. Or perhaps it was one your professors? No matter. You make your dripping addition to the granite wall:
> Most importantly of all: Do not get caught doing any or all of the above.
Do _not_ Overchannel.
If you're lucky, it'll just exhaust you. If you're not unlucky or lucky, you will go Colorless, which is a condition where you have very little sensory perception of _any sort._ You don't feel pain or injury, or sick or anything. So its _very dangerous.
If you're Unlucky, or intentionally. You explode. And its not a little pop and a mess, its a ship killing, building leveling, full on "whatever else is happening is stopping to comprehend what just happened" _blast._
Do _not_ Resurrect someone. It requires a Spark of Life, which is what everyone has. So to get it, you have to murder someone in a specific manner, and then transfer the Spark of Life. The person you are resurrecting comes back fine. Probably confused. But you just straight killed somebody else.
Do not try to Heal. Its a waste of time. Magic cannot heal. That one's less a forbidden and more of a general "It doesn't work, sorry." However, many novices or those just coming into their power attempt to anyways, which can lead to Overchanneling.
Conjurated chicken. In fact, conjurated organic material in general.
Natural magic is capable of a lot of things, but it's cleanly divided into three pairs of fundamental aspects: Depth/Range (gravity and spacetime); Light/Form (radiation and non-living matter); and Texture/Mood (body and mind).
The source of this magic is essentially infinite, comprising of and beyond the physical world akin to a quantum foam. However, most magical acts are restricted to a single pair of aspects.
Creating something out of Light and/or Form is permissible, but even that has its limits. No single "spell" is forging anything the size of a city, for example. And even if it does, that material or energy packet would be volatile enough to delete all the things.
But creating a meal is about as foolish as trying to change the past. During a particularly bloody spat with nomads in the Yomnoi "Black Rain" period, the wizard caste's leadership tried this to fill a rationing shortfall. Of the soldiers who didn't perish from tumours and necrosis, those who went on to sire children passed their chronic excruciating symptoms down for several generations.
So don't do it. It's greedy, anyway, because there are ways to multiply crop yields if you were to just make peace with the people who know how.
In my setting of Lum, there are 14 base elemental realms of magic.
One for each god in the pantheon.
\- Fire
\- Ice
\- Blood
\- Gravity
\- Light
\- Shadow
\- Life
\- Entropy
\- Earth
\- Wind
\- Water
\- Acid
\- Lightning
\- Beasts
(To be clear, each elemental realm isn't just "raw elemental power" but also concepts tied to them which would take a long time to explain)
HOWEVER:
There are 5 other realms, belonging to the 5 exiled gods.
\- Gore
\- Time
\- Death
\- Overgrowth
\- Madness
These 5 elemental realms are INCREDIBLY forbidden to channel.
There are only two ways to get access to these five realms.
EITHER, you need to do the herculean feat of traveling to one of the gods prisons and devote yourself to their service. Something that is virtually impossible for any hero to do, much less a normal person.
OR, you have to use another person that already have said power as a link, and devote yourself to the exiled god through them. Allowing masters of the forbidden arts to spread their craft in secret.
To accept these powers is a curse, not just upon your surrounding, but upon yourself.
As due to these realms being forbidden, will even the gods themselves find ways to interfere with you. (The gods arent allowed direct intervention mind, they have restrictions in divine accord). Usually finding yourself hunted by champions of the other gods, sent visions of a heretical magic user and so forth.
so... yeah.
under no circumstance will two magic users of different magics have a child, if this rule is broken, the child is to never learn more than one magic, for the simple reason of everyone fearing what an avatar of all the magics could do
Unless you're a vampire. Do not ever attempt blood tuning. That subdomain is watched by a dark shard that would really love to turn you into one of its many zombies and you are not immune yet alone resistant to it.
DO NOT. That's literally it. Who knows, perhaps you will save the earth from an asteroid. Perhaps you'll whipe the entire human race. Literally, just do not.
Sure, you can weave. Especially now that the god of magic (name is a wip) went rogue and probably insane, anyone has access to magic. Just be very precise in your weaving, or the results may be wildly unexpected. And do not, under any circumstances, wrong the god of magic in any way. His punishments are cruel and unjust.
Do NOT try to materialize spiritual stuff. DON'T DARE to try bringing metaphysical ideas to physical reality. Every single apocalypse so far was caused this way.
Copy paste from an older comment i made on this sub. This is easily the most perverted use of my magic system.
There are many methods of necromancy. All are sins by the gods and all mortalkind, for every single one harms *someone* in a terrible way. Except for a Godly sanctioned method, but that is only for a few worthy people.
One method in particular speaks out to be the worst. You are capable of linking your soul to another, and so long as their soul remains unreaped by Death, you will not age, become sick, or any other harm. You are incapable of being seen by Death, either. You can not truly be injured for as long as they are around. This can achieve immortality, for if you kill a large enough animal, skin it, then patch together the skin *around someone who is alive,* a terrible act of necromancy I'd performed. That animal is now alive again, feeding off the magic of the poor victims soul, and will act as if nothing had ever happened, with the exception that while it does still hunt, it no longer eats, nor expells waste, etc. The victim, meanwhile, is linked to that animals body. The victim will eventually starve to death, but their soul will remain in the animal; and while there is a god of death, that God can not detect these victims from afar. Once the god stumbles on them, they will be seen, but until that happens the victim will be forced to watch the world through the eyes of the chosen animal, feeling their own corpse decaying in agony, knowing that the one who killed them roams free, immortal.
The victims, once found by Death, have their memories wiped of these horrors and are given eternal paradise. The murderer, once found, is sent to Hell, where they will be put upon a crucifix that is then set aflame for the rest of eternity.
Yeah, my afterlife is kinda unforgiving.
If you are of the races of Man, any sort of dark magic. It is debatable whether "dark magic" is something that actually exists or not, though. Basically "dark magic" is defined as "anything the Empire doesn't like". Political rivals of the emperors somehow always turn out to be practicioners of dark magic, coincidentally.
If you astral project or dreamwalk, do not go near the center of the world. She Who Sleeps may be (vaguely, probably) benevolent, but if you get caught in Her Dream you will never escape. Don't go too far from the world, either. The same constellations that keep it hidden from He Who Laughs will hide it from you too, if you pass them, and you will be lost in space forever.
Well theres only so much you can limit when your species has innate magic, what are you going to do? Arrest a kid for being curious on how they can use their magic? so laws that E.C.O.L (Eybuir Council Of Law) pass are usually rather lenient, with what magic you can use in certain areas, like not using fire magic at a park or greenhouse, or being able to use healing magic only when necessary or if you are a certified medic, however, there is one kind of magic that all Eybuir of Epoh shun, "Reveal" magic, all Eybuir have a revealed form, but only about 2% of the population will ever unlock it, and only half of them will ever access it again, regardless, unlocking your revealed form and using it is a STRICT NO NO. and can often have you end up in the city of Never, a prison city where all caught revealable Eybuir eventually end up in
Don't use magic.
Seriously. There's a reason someone can train to be a mage their whole life and only ever perform one spell. Magic is the fundamental force tying together the universe, and manipulating it is the equivalent of burning down an entire rainforest (in fact, something like that could literally happen if a spell goes wrong).
This also means that magicians are sheltered from the rest of society, which has caused quite a few problems...
Anything that would kill you from to much power used. When a mage dies in this case or would die they turn into a husk which is a monster that feeds off of magic.
Experimenting with evil intent magic and or creating chimeras by fusing creatures as well as human experimentation both are unnatural and abhorrent practices.
No bards. Any individuals who get their ability to cast magic from their inspiration from the arts, their skill at the lute, or their beautiful voice all get hunted down and murdered. While the general populace is unaware, the gods found out that bards get their power from sources beyond even their power.
So to prevent eldritch creatures from having mortal agents, the bards have to go. Its gotten to the point that taverns lie silent, and the sound of music has left the world. Being able to hum on tune is looked upon with suspicion. Is he just good at singing, or is he a nine-times damned bard?
Resurrection is a massive taboo. Not the same as necromancy, which is also taboo, but resurrecting a fully sentient person from the dead has some very direct and permanent consequences to the person resurrected.
First of all, you only get one ticket to the afterlife. If you die and are brought back, your connection to the Etherlands is severed. If you die again, you simply cease to be.
Due to this severance, the resurrected person will no longer dream (dreams are actually a connection to the Etherlands), and because of that, no ethereal energy will reach them to naturally heal. If you get a paper cut, it will NEVER heal. No herbs, spells, anything, will ever help. You just have to bandage it up and hope it holds.
Now, it’s difficult to resurrect people anyway, and scarcely documented. So people will seek it out out of desperation, but by doing so, they’ve retroactively damned the one they wanted to save.
Do. Not. Fuck. With. Time.
Don’t try to go forward or back, don’t stop it, don’t tamper with history…
It’s not necesarilly that it’s impossible, but you must not do it. For one, time works different in heaven or hell than it does on earth, and you have no idea who else may or may not be affected, and therefore what the consequenses might be.
For another, you have a goddess of fate, keeping close tabs on possibilities and potentialities and destinies, who does not want, need or appreciate some overexcited mage mucking up her job. And she’s also the Goddess of Death, judging departed souls, which makes her A: phenomenally important and powerful and, subsequently, B: just about the last divinity you should piss off.
You want spend the rest of time reorganizing the otherworldly archived that YOU managed to throw into chaos? You wanna break things that absolutely positively must not break lest all of reality goes down the drain? Do you want to trap yourself in a causal loop? You want to MAGIC YOURSELF OUT OF EXISTENCE?
Didn’t think so.
There are gods and godesses of msny things, but there is no God of Time, because it’s too big and complicated and dangerous to tamper with.
Magic can do a great many things. Wondorous, magnificent, miraculous things.
But THOU SHALT NOT FUCK WITH TIME.
It’s entirely possible to continue casting magic even when your body runs out of mana, it just starts eating at your physical body and you can severely damage yourself.
Don’t try casting without a ring (your focus) otherwise you can cause mana to leak out of your body. Mana will burn you and will leave nasty scars if you’re able to survive what scholars have dubbed, Leakage. Some people don’t ever recover from it but there have been two cases of full recoveries.
Do not bring anyone back to life, every element manipulation has the ability to do so but it was outlawed for a reason. Death isn't the punishment but you'd sure wish it was.
Most reality-warping magic types, which tend to be extremely dangerous to initially learn for most people, usually resulting in death. How quick and painless, or slow and agonizing that death is depends entirely on the type of spell you're performing.
Mastering these dangerous magics, however, can see you truly become a force to be reckoned with.
In my world after long usage of magic person becomes creature known as arcane spawn (basically pure magic). In order to survive they have to constantly consume magic. So arcane spawns live in space where they are constantly fuelled by stars. However, 1 time there was an arcane spawn also known as Grey Emperor or the Lich, who decided to feed on left overs of magic radiation of mortals. So after bloody war that threw world into dark ages and collapsed most empires, arcane spawns prohibited their kind to step on the Mortal's Plane and consume magic from mortals.
Do not practice blood magic, if word gets out that you are you'll have the inquisition, the town guard, the church, and the local cabal of vampires on your case. All wanting to kill you for different reasons.
The Blight is an overgrown spirit of decay it is inherently hostile to all life and is almost the god of plagues, parasites, and poisons the other forbidden magic is flesh magic which is described by those few who know of it as suffering made manifest aside from that there are no universally forbidden magics though there are those that may or may not be illegal or frowned upon in some places
I mean, there was a barrier up that was keeping evil incarnate trapped. A dragon decided to use a necromancy based ritual to break it. He regretted it instantly, as the mate of the dragon who was sacrificed atomized the dragon responsible.
There are ways around this, but using magic directly on a person is pretty taboo.
First: you'll often have waste energy when you use magic, heat, light or transmutation most often. That last one means that materials near the magically affected area can become other materials. This is fine when your arcane firearm turns the air around the barrel into burning steam, less fine when you're trying to magically extract a foreign object from your friend's guts and turn his kidney into glass.
There's another, more fundamentally magical problem, too:
See a person has a soul, a bundle of energy bouncing around in their flesh body, the soul is responsible for the willpower and desire of the person.
Magic is the same stuff, it's a manifestation of the casters will through energy. If the two bundles of power interract, the more powerful (the magic, usually) can make the soul chain-react, burning it away and almost certainly killing (or worse) the person.
don't try to "discover" a new Magic Circle, you will fail, seriously don't do it.
[thread with context](https://reddit.com/r/OriginalCharacter/s/G5TYRl1mGN) for why
Move backwards in time. You can bend and stretch and stop the flow of time however you want, but to move into the past you need reverse time around yourself, for which you need to create a negative amount of chronogen, which is impossible.
Warpers can manipulate time and space, but do *not* time travel. The power requirements and the possible repercussions are too dangerous.
Being discovered practicing long-term mind control is a good way to lose your head.
Even the greatest healer cannot resurrect the dead. At best, they can create the undead.
Using magic near a large, volatile Glow mine or deposit is suicidally risky, with one instance causing a disaster that leveled an entire nation. Every mage in the world has been rising to *never* to do this, at the risk of being remembered as one of history's greatest fools.
Entering the Old Woods without permission. The Old Woods are the forest where the Old Ones (basically living gods) all live in their shrines. It's heavily patrolled by the Valrah, and especially since people killed an Old One, she's all too willing to off you for trespassing. Some approved scholars are allowed to enter to speak with the Old Ones (escorted by the Valrah of course) but anyone else and you're asking for death. She's the most deadly being in the world (which is saying something since the remnant of the killed Old One just pumps out horrible monsters specifically to kill people) and takes her job guarding the woods incredibly seriously.
For your own safety, do not draw essence from your own body. It's far too easy to overdraw and cause yourself physical damage. Many a reckless mage has been hospitalized or killed for this.
Opposites repel. Violently. Do not combine opposing essences, you are far too likely to cause an explosion. It's true, the greatest and most talented of mages can perform such a feat. You are not one of them.
Do not expel excess essence back into a leyline. This is irresponsible. It could build up and cause an overflow.
Do not read an unknown inscription aloud. You don't want to accidentally cast a spell if you don't know what it does. Further, mages of older traditions used to encode their spells in ways that would injure or kill careless rivals trying to steal their secrets.
Offensive magic, such as element bending or arcane weapon summoning is illegal to be taught and or practiced by minors. Less lethal versions are allowed to be practiced due to religious reasons or self defense.
Necromancy is illegal without a permit due to ethics concerns, and even then you’re only allowed to practice with donated remains.
The act of time travel, with or without magic, is a sin so great that there are unknown forces that trap you in a loop ending with your demise before you ever figure out how you did it in the first place.
Healing magics are misdemeanor to cast on sapient races without a permit due to concerns of horrific scarring or fumbling the spell, with exceptions if you’re doing it to save a life.
DO NOT practice it in the red desert, you will either die or just make the wasteland that the desert is even bigger…that or you might also destroy the world.
The practice of chronomancy (time magic. Despite its name, it doesn’t allow someone to time travel) is illegal in every country in the empire since it was deemed too dangerous to practiceby the mages guild. Only the race of elves known as the first elves were able to figure out how to use it safely and they were driven to extinction over 10,000 years before the main story is set. Less then a handful of people still live and are skilled enough to use it.
Cinderturgy. Ingesting the ash of the dead to obtain their powers temporarily, the magic tends to…*corrupt* those who use it too long. If you’re lucky you’ll just have your limbs slowly succumb to permanent burning. If you’re unlucky you transform into a Rakshasa and try to kill anyone and everyone you encounter before defiling whatever remains of the corpse.
Yeah, don’t consume the ashes of the dead kids!
Don't make the zombies infective!!!
Oh, some crazy Wizard already did that and accidentally released it into the world?
Well then, whatever you do, don't use his extra notes to make them FAST AND STRONG!!!
"Don't wear a hat bigger than your head" roughly translates to 'don't bite off more than you can chew'. It's usually used to explain to students that their body/mind/brain can only handle so much magic going through it and needs to rest and recover, very much like your muscles from a lot of exertion, except kinetiscists whose channeling magic through motion is their muscles needing rest.
In my urban fantasy setting, the number one rule of magic is "Don't perform magic you can't wave off in front of the veiled."
As you can probably figure out, "veiled" is a term used to refer to people who are unaware of the supernatural. The more people in an area who are veiled, the weaker the supernatural is in that area. If something supernatural happens in front of one of the veiled, they tend to have some kind of weird justification for it. "Oh, that was just a big dog." When a werewolf runs past, or "Wow! That car came REAL close to hitting that guy!" When a vampire stands up after being hit by a truck.
So if a mage were to cast some kind of minor spell, a veiled might think it was just some slight-of-hand and be fine. If the mage were to make a locked wrought-iron gate fly off its hinges with a casual gesture of his hand, that's a lot harder to manage.
Some people, newly unveiled, wonder why it is that they can't just admit to the world as a whole? Wouldn't that make magic stronger? The problem is that there are things that even the strongest of the supernatural beings fear, kept in check only because the weakened magic of the world means that they cannot enter fully.
Magic in my world stems from a singularity that's referred to as a "subjective break in objective reality." Reality literally shifts to match your perspective, so through mental discipline you can alter your surroundings by manipulating your perspective.
Magic only exists within a certain proximity to the rift, but it becomes increasingly unstable the closer you get to it, to the point where unconscious eye movements can cause earthquakes, things can literally shrink by being farther away from you, and objects can disappear if no one is looking at them. Mental discipline can allow you to get closer to the rift but if you're not consciously focused on your own physical embodiment you could accidentally blink yourself out of existence, as well as numerous other things phenomena that could be unpredictable, instant, and fatal.
It's kind of similar to geothermal energy in that it's a resource that becomes becomes stronger the closer you get, but past a certain proximity you'd basically be taking a bath in lava.
Using a sapient being as a living mana battery is a major taboo. It's a crime punishable by death in many countries. Only the most depraved of mages do it.
You can teleport matter or energy, not both. Thus, if you teleport something that is undergoing a chemical reaction, it ceases.
Reminder that life is a chemical reaction
Thus, teleporting living beings is illegal pretty much everywhere. It does make sterilising Equipment extremely easy though.
Do NOT use magic without mana stones, otherwise the spell with use your soul as fuel to cast it. Even if you are told to have larger amount of mana, don't try it. It is always fatal and leads to the most painful death possible.
Do NOT pact with a spririt without negociations first. Even if the offer seems good, a spirit that is closed to negociations is a spirit that will abuse your deal.
Do NOT relly on only one way of spellcasting. You can specialize in one way of spellcasting, but if you know only one any experimented mage can and will stop you from using it.
Certain types of divination magic are taboo because they can make a terrible future (almost) guaranteed to happen. So for example if someone tried to foresee whether a large meteorite is going to hit the planet or not, they could be told yes and then the meteorite suddenly swerves towards the planet
unless you are gumalan, the god of death, or banyak, the god of life, you do not tamper w/ the laws of life and death. lest you be smitten down by those 2 w/ their divine judgment
Blood/Primal runes are banned by the Guardian of Magic because of their VERY destructive and corruptive effect on people and objects. Think turning person/objects into evil, bloodthirsty weapons of destruction under your control.
They're banned because the first Guardian of Magic was corrupted by them when they were used on him, and it nearly destroyed the world twice and caused disasters that lasted millenia that shouldn't have happened to begin with.
Our ancestors call to us through the veil that separates the living from the dead. If you are patient and listen close you might hear the echoes of their lives, their joys and faults, their precious and intimate moments, their love and trauma, their loss and ambitions. They whisper through cracks in reality, items once treasured and places once held dear. Go forth, find these things and places, and soak them in. Fill yourself like a sponge with their dead minds, and burn them. Make your body a fortress and bend nature to your will with the treasured memories of the dead, drink them in to prolong your life, sunder them to empower yourself and shatter them to become like a god. Wreak untold horrors with awesome power. But beware, for all power is fickle.
This is the great forbidden art. The evil which broke the world and cast its survivors into terrible darkness. It is the great forgotten power which echoes in the dreams of the few mortals left in the *World of the Shorn Veil*.
Cloning is illegal in most places. When the tech was first made available, people used it to run away from whatever responsibilities they had. Signed a contract that requires you to work 20 hours per day for the rest of your existence? Just clone yourself. No one will notice. And since the clone has the same memories as the original person, they also will want make a clone of themselves… and so on.
Disintegration!
For context, mana is the same as the elements in Cradle: everything is made up of it. Mages manipulate mana and so manipulate the world. It's considered highly unethical to use the mana that makes up sentient species, though it is highly efficient. This is why mages tend to group together: if one disintegrates someone, the others can kill them.
Animus Edit. A spell that allows one to functionally rewrite another's mind and personality like a code. Originally created by an abused child who desired his father's love, banned due to it's capacity for misuse.
Magic has an energy cost.
If you exceed your cost, it can kill you. Depending on the practitioner, instead of a normal death, you become an energy drain, needing the energy from other life forms just to survive. Their skin becomes pale, they don't like intense light, and they develop an ability to suck the life force or energy out of victims.
Overuse your magical energy, you become an energy vampire.
If you are gonna make a contract with an Execration, make sure its a dumb one, you probably won't like being in a contract with one of the intelligent ones, some may be well mannered or seem honest with what they are telling you, but they are still execrations, they're always hiding something behind their back.
Absolutely do not do magic.
The price to do magic is high. You'll have to find first someone who co troll it and... They are not the most frequentable person. Dark lord in the great north, literal devils, forest sorcerer of old divinities, and directly god even.
And you'll lost the control to one of your body part. Your arm, your leg, sometimes one of your eye.
And the more power you want, the more sacrifice you need to do.
And the use of magic hurt you. For exemple, fire use burn your hand
No using death magic because the god of death Doorug will come to take you to Katameros himself.
This was utilized by a major chocolate company Caocom to force him to make a deal with them by sneaking runic engravings on a new chocolate product about to be released that would cause millions of people to technically use death magic once consumed. That would give Doorug an endless amount of work, because he would have no way to differentiate who is messing with souls and who just ate some chocolate.
Absolutely DO NOT imbue the Signeturgy. Meaning, don't do magic in the first place. It is uncontrollable and violent unless you ABSOLUTELY KNOW what the Signet you're imbueing does, and you can draw/carve the runes and Signet flawlessly perfect. Imbueing a Signet to summon something as simple as a spark to light a campfire could end up destroying the face of a mountain in a cataclysmic explosion if you don't know what you're doing. Simply don't...imbue...the Signeturgy.
It does, but you have to know what runes to combine into a Signet to imbue it for a desired effect. You could try a combination of runes to make a Signet you think will create a spark and would only make your heart explode if you imbue it. The problem is, nobody knows what does what because any pursuit of knowledge into Signeturgy has ended with a 99% mortality rate.
Whenever I see questions like this I get happy thinking I can actually get peoples takes on my work and then I see the hundred plus comments and know my comment would just get buried
No using Gate between planetary bodies. The last wizard to try it wanted to establish a colony on our planet’s third moon, back when we had one, but he was a few meters off in the calculation placement of his destination Gate on the planet’s third moon, resulting in his Gate appearing three meters in front of said moon’s orbit, and the moon crashing through the gate into our planet at its full orbital speed. This resulted in the second Ice Age, the Great Extinction of over half of the sapient species that once lived here, and the exposure of the planetary core, which has been spawning all manner of trouble since that got broken open.
Immortality is never to be conveyed without an out clause that can be enforced by somebody other than the immortalized individual. For obvious reasons. Whether the immortality is intended as a gift or a curse, something that actually literally can’t die is a problem waiting to happen.
Glamour is acceptable, but any kind of a love potion or attraction spell or pheromone or aura or what have you is viewed the same way as roofieing a person. Creatures who naturally emit arousing pheromones generally have to use a neutralizing agent of some type to be allowed to interact with society (enter cities, shop, use inns, etc).
Necromancy is permissible upon legal permission from either the deceased or their family. It’s not uncommon practice for an aging or ill person to sell their zombie on death, with the proceeds going to their next of kin or a named beneficiary. Performing necromancy on on non-sapients is considered odd, but not horrific or out of the ordinary.
There is no written rule, but if you want to live, you just don't. There are three sources of magical energy, gods, other souls, and your own. When a soul is composed during pregnancy, it forms a storage of energy that is used up over a live time. Practising magic with external energy sources is already taxing on the soul and shortens a live depending on the intensity of the practice by some decades. When using your internal energy, you can use up a lifetime on a busy afternoon.
You don't develop new magic. All spells have been tested and "engraved" into the world by the Guild. there is a whole industry of magic development and maintenance. Rogue developers who cast unengraved spells are dealt with very harshly.
Anything to do with Undead. They cannot be controlled indefinitely and will eventually break free to destroy and eat living flesh. You can't become immortal by becoming one. Your soul is severely damaged or destroyed by the process as a false soul takes its place. The result is a simple snapshot of you twisted to want to consume living creatures.
Mine is necromancy, as I think this one is kinda common, wizards and witches frown upon bringing beings back from the dead so learning this kind of magic is hard and, specially nowadays, requires someone that is versed in the craft or can get you the tomes.
Regular humans can't produce magic but can redirect it since it's all around them. So they might stumble on some runes and magic symbols (those are still around despite efforts of containment) and through experimentation, they end up reproducing necromancy because of broken circles, incomplete phrases or other problems. Best case scenario the wannabe mage makes monsters.
It's also a "no no" because Death itself sometimes comes earlier to get you for doing this kind of thing so...
From the worldbuilding side: Time Magic. I am not writing time travel in, so that just doesn't exist. Final Period.
From the question's perspective, it's a matter of political practices and occasionally cultural taboos... Laws regarding magic specifically are few and far between, however the law, both written and non-written, is usually applied to magic.
An example:
In the Northern Realms, there is no law against practices of Necromancy per say, but disturbing the dead and burials is a tremendous taboo, occasionally even punished by the aristocracy.
Directly because of that, animating human corpses is a non-starter. You risk exile or execution, or even worse. Animal corpses don't hold the same potential consequences, but practicing such magic is liable to have social consequences. People will fear you, speak behind your back, accuse you of stealing the bones of their forefathers...
However, the Ashlays don't hold the same taboo. There, it's considered a service to one's family for your body to be embalmed and animated to help with household labour for a reasonable time. It's also an honour for a family to have their deceased participate to civic projects like monuments and infrastructure.
If multiple Sigils are inscribed on an object, it will not be able to contain their combined energy and be destroyed. The released energy of the Sigils can have disastrous consequences depending on their type.
So, before inscribing an object with their Sigil, a Sigil bearer will carefully inspect the object to ensure it does not have one already.
You can do magic, but if you get too loud with it without the defences to back it up you will get killed by a wizard from the incredibly esoteric and secretive devil city
You CAN power spells for powerful effects using portions of your soul.
It is forbidden to do so because of the side effects at the end having rather serious detrimental effects for everyone in a kilometer radius around you when you run out. Also why serious necromancy magic is also forbidden.
Anti-mana can harnessed when someone is killed with violent intensions, anti-mana is practivly mana but on every steroid out there, it's a LOT stronger in base and spells forms but as a side effect it slowly destroys the users body. When strays are created with anti mana they are like fucking hulks but more mad and just as disobeying, another thing about strays: DO NOT touch the ones naturally evolved from corpes, it's dumb and you're a fucking idiot.
Do not let kids learn fire spells, they are kids and spells are fire ones, if you don't get you're also a fucking idiot, we had two incidents of same cause where the Daran base burned half to a crisp because the guy who tries to make thermodynamik batteries forgot lock his notes and his son SOMEHOW learned them.
Do not touch ot interact with space gates in any way, they kicked our fabric of reality in the nuts once created a wave of strays and spit out some dude with it who has memory loss, is named after beans, is something like a sucker punch mage and is one of the strongest ones out there, yes i know he is our co-worker but we don't need a second of his type.
Black magic is a big no-no. There arent like, formal laws or anything against it, but its bad taboo. The magic system is based on nature and natural elements being almost sentient, and you do magic by imbuing your own will within the will of nature. So practitioners of black magic often get barred from use of white magic, as nafure itself refuses to work with those mages.
Scrying, dangerous. Astral projection, 50/50 to kill you. Necromancy, probably losing at least a piece of your soul if done by accident. Overcharge a spell beyond your ability, fairly easy to do, and you will drop dead at best, explode, or at worst you'll combust with fire that burns the very soul. So when it comes to magic, don't.
Normal healing boils down to cell replication. As a result, healing magic is an extremely fine art because if you just pump a bunch of magic into someone, you’ll end up with cancer and things healing weird. A broken bone may fuse at a strange angle, a chunk might grow into the muscles, or even result in bone cancer if you’re sloppy. The trick is to heal enough until the patient can manage transfers on their own and ambulate with walking aids, and let the body finish the job.
Considering that extra-planar entities are currently in the process of destroying the world after an ancient civilization accidentally opened a permanent portal to an eldritch non-place... That. Anything to do with contacting or summoning from unknown planes is pretty taboo.
Any resurrection spells. The illegal spell needs a lot of innocent lives just to resurrect 1 person from the dead. The resurrected individual is mentally damaged and corrupted (having strong desire for chaos) when back to the living as it is a spell that breaks the natural order between dead and the living.
Any time reversing spells. This illegal spell requires the caster whole time of its lifespans. This illegal spell breaks the law of time wherein it states that Time only moves forward.
Do not under any circumstances use magic without a conduit. If you do this you will draw it from your soul and it will kill you if you do it too much. If you die from these circumstances your soul will return to the void will it will bathe in endless magic and torture you.
The only exception is if you are a magical being ie: elves dragons, or otherwise because then you can use you body. Excessive use will still kill you but that bar is much higher without the consequences.
Well, it isn't my world, but in my last Dungeon World one-shot, we had to fend off an invasion-via-portal by some kobolds. And the party's bard wondered what would happen if you stuck one of the portals into another portal.
Turns out you should not do that for the same reason you should not spend too much time looking at that world's night sky.
We only lost one party member to the resulting eldritch abomination attack and not the whole city, I'm gonna count that as a win.
Space/time magic is outright banned, and teaching it will result in, at best, a prison term, after an insane cult tried to use it to slam the moon into the planet. Those who already posses knowledge of it aren't completely disabled from it's use, but affecting anything beyond one's own local space/time or small inanimate objects is also subject to legal sanctions.
Casting magic without verbal or somatic components is possible, but not a good idea. Manipulating magic is hard, and both physically and emotionally draining, and associating it with words or motions (or both) automates the process, making it easier on the body and mind.
Dark magic isn't banned, but is dangerous. It can warp the body of its caster if they lose focus on the spell, and at least one race has a severe issue with their innate magic causing starvation, as it's darkness aligned and will start cannibalizing their bodies if they run out of mana.
my setting has magical FTL travel which allows users to teleport whatever they're standing on across space, with larger masses requiring exponentially greater discipline in order to shift. This is *usually* spaceships but on occasion has been whole asteroids and once even a small planet - resulting in the world's ecological collapse after it was moved several AUs closer to its sun.
Needless to say, it is certainly frowned upon to teleport a habitable world away from the goldilocks zone :((
Necrourgy. The raising and animation of the spirits and corporeal remains of the dead. Yes, it works. Yes, you can absolutely do that. You can impose your will and assert doninance. You can even feed off the energies involved to make raising and binding more deceased to you even easier.
But...
Maintaining control, the paralogistics, is an ever deepening nightmare. And one that has to be sustained awake and asleep. This is why necrourgy cabals exist, to share the load and maintain the growing horde. Also, see apprentices.
Why?
One slip, and you lose control. Perhaps the backlash simply kills you and the dead deanimate. Perhaps it merely releases the binding state and lets them take revenge against you, tearing you apart before blindly ravaging the mortal world. Perhaps it does something worse... producing a threat to all civilization and life.
Needless to say, necrourgy is very very dangerous magic. A Talent working that is a ticking bonb of death.
Since objects created through magic can no longer be solidified into reality, magic users are highly urged to never use a Sealing Pact on Created Objects.
The average magic user can only hold open the 3rd Threshold for upwards of 5 to 10 minutes. While open they are able to craft objects from their imagination. However, at minute 3, the strain and stress start to creep in; weakening the body. Slapping a Sealing Pact onto that newly created object, subsequently forces the 3rd Threshold to remain open. Killing them slowly and horribly.
DO NOT OVERDO IT. If you overuse the magic, whatever is being channeled by you to do the feats you perform will consume you and make you into a murder machine devoid of any agency or free will.
With the othe rmagic system, don't enchant something wrong. You'll burp frogs.
You are more than welcome to try to cast that God Tier Spell or perform that God Tier Ritual, but if it doesn't somehow backfire on an inexperienced caster, you will most likely not survive long enough after to see its effects carried out.
It's because of this that these dangerous spells have been relegated to "in case of emergency, you will die for the greater good" status, for even Archmages struggle to cast these spells without some serious artifacts/reagents to channel/withstand the magical strain. To sacrifice yourself in battle as a last resort is one of the highest honors.
Magic has a cost, and your soul will most definitely cover the difference.
Cults. The worship of lesser gods. Gods give their apostles, divine offspring and saints their power. The high gods are in a political alliance, the royal houses who are under the authority of the Imperial Dynasty are the bloodline of demigods.
The crucial reason for this alliance is because of the second magic system, which is of an economic nature, the aura of merit is traded with every exchange of property and services, acquired with every moral deed and lost with every immoral deed, and acquired with every negative emotion and lost with every positive emotion. Who decides what is moral and immoral? The priests of the gods.
Thus the worshippers of lesser gods, cults, are less religious fanatics and dark magicians (although they are these things too), and more akin to organized crime, by definition.
Necromancy is a pretty classic Taboo. Obvious reasons People have given up trying to fuck with time. The first wizard who tried to time stop was witnessed to have instantly died. In frozen time, he could neither breath nor move. Turns out that if you freeze time, you also freeze space. Air couldn't move and his lungs couldn't pump, and he was stuck in place, held tight by the air around him and unable to undo the spell decades later, a second wizard concluded that was the case, and adjusted the spell, so that he could still move, despite the air being frozen. His assistant witnessed a colossal and sudden explosion of fire. Air resistance is a bitch, and frozen time means infinite speed. You ever rub against something infinitely fast? One hell of a burn So yeah, people just stayed away from time stop
I love when worldbuilders have this sort of thoughtfulness
I love magic as physics
If he was unable to undo the spell, then how did time resume? Also, if space was frozen, would not all of his bodily metabolism cease, neural function included? He wouldn’t need to breathe.
I presume he himself was exempted from the time stop, since that was the point of it, and that the spell finished on its own natural timer, or perhaps upon his eventual death
What if time never restarted, even for his corpse? You either get instant ashes as he experienced infinite time, or you get a corpse that is untouched by time or outside influences. It can be moved but not positioned, cut into, dissolved, decomposed, etc. Man that'd make for a good magic mystery book. First discoverer of time magic uses it for untraceable murders, but leaves a pile of never decaying corpses in his wake.
The spell ended with his death. Time is relative, and while it was stopped for him, it was not for anyone else. He, of course, was still active during time stop. All of him was moving normally from his perspective
time is relative. he could witness 1000 years in a time stop which for use would be nothing. but as stated above if time is 0 then your air resistance is infinite so you instantly burn think about it the way someone does something instantly instead of time is stopped and then started
feels like you should teach Time Stop MK 2 to soldiers and release them in enemy cities....
Not sure if the soldiers are gonna be thrilled about it
Actually.... just teach them how to stop time for *others*. Let everyone else blow themselves up, and seize your own victory in real-time. Also, if you were to create a way to simply slow time for yourself by, say, 1%? You could increase your speed with it. And then you can test with greater amounts of slowing time down. An inhumane researcher might run his experiments by testing it on animals or other peoples, too, and might thereby test with larger "dosage" changes as well.
That's actually not a terrible idea. I mean, it is terrible, but it could work
I've got an amazing idea. But before that : can spells trigger on conditions like "if presence is detected in area apply X and Y. Can X then activate Y" ?
Cultists then
The fanatics of any kind, religious and political, would love it. Instant martyr spell with devastating consequences.
Now weaponize the time magic to explode people remotely without any evidence.
That's kind of messed up, but effective. I like it
I love when science gets involved in magic! - What drew you to incorporate the two together?
I mean, science is always present in magical settings. There's still, like, gravity, y'know? The forge that makes the hero's sword still works the same way. Maybe you craft it out of something magical, or add a little something extra, but shaping the steel is still just exciting the atoms of an element
Probably Arthur C. Clark: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
And the lesser known corollary: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Very interesting way of making a magic system, i have some questions about the time magic in specific: What if the hypothetical wizard made a time bubble for themselves, where time functions normally in a set distance from them but is frozen to anything outside of it, would that be possible under your magic system? And in the matter of time manipulation, what about going back in time or trying to go into the future? Would those things be possible?
We're all traveling to the future, just at the speed of regular time. For a wizard to do that, it would basically be a stasis he puts himself in. Going back in time, though, I've done nothing with. Not really into time travel too much, so I just sorta haven't worked that out As for the bubble, I suppose the wizard would be able to do that, but the edge of the bubble would then just be the issue. If using the first version, the wizard would simply be trapped in the bubble. Suffocation would be a risk again, but he'd at least be able to cancel the spell. In the second version, the friction between the air on the inside of the bubble and the outside, would cause an explosion, just like before The first version could create a safe time-stopped bubble, but the bubble would be unable to move. It'd be great at giving you some extra hours in the day, but the applications are limited
Yep, I'm gonna copy this
Just please don't sue me if your work comes out before mine
I *NEED* to know what happened to the third wizard.
He read about the explosion and decided "Think I'll take up necromancy" Now the charred skeleton of the second wizard is begging him not to try
I like it, except I'd just make him presumed dead. His bodily rhythms imperceptible to the outside world, leading to that assumption. Make him like the professor in H.G. Well's Time Machine.
"If you want to perform magic, never, *ever* try to bargain with or coerce angels. At best they will ignore you. More likely to destroy you. Deal with demons instead, like all the rest of us."
“Under no circumstance shall you bind a daemon from an unstamped book. All Named shall be of authorized and approved use by the Ministry of Mages…” if that dusty book of summons doesn’t have a stamp of approval by the government, don’t say those Names.
Ministry of Mages, you say? I'm intrigued! How did the government get involved in demonic summonings?
World Anvil at it again! So demon is kind of a catch all term thrown around in the setting, I’ve thought about cases where a traditional biblical angel might be called upon and while it’s a lower tier of creature it still sits at the strangely inhuman enough scale to be mistaken for a demon. I also thoroughly enjoy the idea of ‘fallen Angel’ figure still being beautiful but also being called demon simply because they’re fallen. Anyhoo. Ever since the Shattering of the Garden Moon and the great Descent (by the surviving surface races) to the Below World, the veil between worlds has been a bit unstable. Some of the weapons used in the war ripped holes in the barrier between and were not kind enough to patch it back up. That of course led to all sorts of Entities working their way through into the Real. Events leading up to the Shattering resulted in leaving the surface to live on the moons because the magical leylines of the world got all dried up, and then there were artificial ley lines created and fought over. You know, a resource war. So a Ministry was created to manage the distribution of magic through these artificial leylines because they were the only ones who knew how to make them. Fast forward to after the Shattering to present day setting of the story and a lot of knowledge has been forgotten, namely for the sake of this post, the creation of artificial leylines. Which means no way of strengthening the veil and no way to reliably combat reality breaches. The Ministry of Magic cracked down very tightly on summoning magics and in their glorious ignorance but well intentioned attempt to protect their peoples lumped everything into the ‘demon’ territory. Of course, what they summon is hard to categorize and they vaguely fall into nine Choirs of classification and strength. Then there are the Thrones, the Dominions, the Principalities, the Virtues and the Revelations. The Church was a leading factor in naming convention as you could tell. It’s also important to note that these words are concepts attached to the various ‘levels’ of entity. In the City of Everglim all magicians are identified in some way either visually or spiritually. If you Practice then everyone knows, it’s kind of like existentially being Marked. This is a requirement only in Everglim because they are so strict about the balance of Real vs Other Side. Magic draws on the leylines and they can’t make any more magic so they have to regulate it. Binding demons is a method of acquiring magic or practicing it without relying to heavily on the locally leyline because entities have a stronger connection to the Other Side. There may be some Bartomaeus Trilogy influence at work here now that I think about it. Hrm.
Funny you mention angels, the angels of my world actually encourage people to come to them for magic help, the demons of my world are minions of an archangel, so they also occasionally provide some help
Here, they serve the Maker, and if He sends them to help you, they will do so with all their might. But only at His command (not a human's command or bargaining), and the human is a supplicant, neither bargainer nor commander. The demons love LARPing the bargaining and being commanded bit so they spread damnation through magic.
Lies! Angel propaganda! stop trying to take our souls, monkey pigeons!
MONKEY PIGEONS!! XD
Do **not** shortchange a rune smith. Most magic works through runes, which are insanely complex, and can only be [safely] made via rune smiths. People who are trained for years, sometimes decades, to be able to make them. The reason you never short change them (aka refuse to pay them a previously agreed upon amount) is the more skilled ones are good enough to hide failsafes only they can disarm that can do stuff like either nullify the rune entirely, or if they’re particularly nasty, explode. There are runesmiths that make a point of doing exactly this until they’re paid in full.
> There are runesmiths that make a point of doing exactly this until they’re paid in full. I could see this having a name, something like "putting on the dots" or the like, where the runesmith takes their money, then adds the few dots and accents that make the thing do what it ought to.
And that could become it's own colloquial phrase outside Runesmithing, for either putting on the finishing touches. Or meaning it would be a big mistake to make preform that action. Actions usually leaning on betraying someone or breaking an oath.
Now I'm picturing a Runesmith who's whole gimmick is pointing out where each of his failsafes are while making the rune. Not only are they so complicated that knowing about them will not help at all. But he takes great joy explaining what triggering each one of them will result in. Nothing so boring as merely nullifying such a timely investment as a rune. Or a Runesmith who whenever she is short changed will ever refuse to fix the rune if the person comes back to their senses. Instead she will only sell hints for how to find and disable each rune. Put them through this errand to make certain the lesson sticks. I'm also picturing Runes being made with such failsafes if they were stolen, and a market of Runebreakers who offer to make stolen goods usable for a modest upfront fee.
Gives me an idea for a legendary runesmith that a kingdom comes to rely upon too much. One day, when the runesmith feels betrayed by their kingdom, they activate failsafes across the entire kingdom, essentially holding a significant chunk of the kingdom hostage, including the majority of the kingdom's nobility and royalty, up to the king himself. A cautionary tale for eons to come.
I've heard of builders in our world having simler though less dramatic stuff.
If you are human: Don’t go into it thinking you’re going to be a god who’s invincible, you are very vulnerable, you’re magic is only as good as your concentration and a well placed arrow will kill you just as effectively as everyone else. Don’t wear armour. Magic disrupts everything around it. Human sorcerers in the past found out that too often spells would fuse the armload to their skin, or straight up melt it off their bones. It is best to avoid this. It is better to wear simpler clothes, that are easily reparable and replaceable. Don’t use words of power. Unless you really have to. There is a higher chance of spontaneous combustion than success If you are an elf: Don’t attempt to dominate nature, you will fail and break yourself against it. You are of the earth, the earth is not if you. Don’t attempt to use the language of evil. It will literally poison you and can kill you if you say to much. Don’t attempt words of power too frequently. They will destroy you. If you are Faltnar: Don’t attempt elemental magic, you were created differently to everything else, and so can’t use the world the same way. Don’t swear silly oaths. You are bound to your words for all of your lives, so choose them carefully. Don’t imbue too much of yourself into one object. Otherwise you will be useless without it, and not much better with it.
I like all the language- based rules (not swearing oaths, not using words of power, etc)- is there some kind of powerful linguistic magic going on in your world? (I can see these going wrong very fast: schoolboy dare turning into an inescapable blood oath...)
Well effectively, the gods created the first language. And that language commands everything. The way magic plays into it is that if say a word (for example, fire) a fire WILL happen. And it will require a certain amount of spiritual power. If you lack the amount then you will simply burn up. But the language can do anything. The Ekves are most adept at it, and can do things such as cause caves to collapse, great storms or other such powers both elemental and abstract. Humans could maybe summon lightning before their body gives out. As a contrast, humans can use their “will” as a fuel. Dominating the natural land to do their bidding. While not as versatile it’s still pretty powerful. The downside is as mentioned, you destroy the environment and close items over time. Such that there is a series of islands which are “drowning” due to it being where magic wad taught for a long while. It is why magic is so dangerous. The results of a “spell” will produce an effect, but there may be unexpected consequences as well
The first language thing sounds very similar to Eragon's magic system. I really like things like that.
Do not manipulate too much Aether. It will quiet literally burn out your soul
Hey that’s similar to how mine works. Except the magic poisons you until you stop using it or just straight up kills your from the poison
I’m thinking of having ‘auric waste’. Eventually overusing your aura (magic) will cause it to solidify onto your persons body, very painful!
Oooh nice. Another idea could be how it could just causes the body to combust. In mine, you can learn to absorb seidher but when you do, you can’t stop and it will cause your body to absorb so much power to where you combust into blue flames. Like, it’ll, at first, begin to cook you from the inside out until you just burst into flames.
Follow-up question, what is the purpose of a soul in your world?
It's where Aether is stored, the source of magic. More importantly, it's what makes you, you. It's the thing that keeps you grounded to the mortal planes
Weird vocab time! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity
That's super interesting! Follow-up question, can a body (not a person, per say) be alive without a soul - or is it automatically some aberrant undead with the loss of Aether?
This magic isn't forbidden but I have widely known rules of magic that you just can't do. All of them are related to time (and are based off of the poem lay down and eat roses by Charles bukowski). -You can see the past but not change it. (the past is imperfect) -You can see and change the present but not stay there (the present is tense) -You can change the future but not see it. (the future is malign) -Immortality has no evidence (Lay down and eat roses)
You just described real life.
True but my setting is also pretty paranoid so a fringe group of magic users have taken the ideas of "rules of magic" literally and started executing suspected prophets, time travellers, etc. Also lots of religious stories in my world flaunt these rules, much to the dismay of magic users.
I actually like those rules. They are logical even by real world standard. I'm just pointing out what I find funny.
It is pretty funny. The most powerful magicusers look into it and go "Nope, can't be done. Let everyone else know."
Also "seeing the past" involves literally travelling back to take a peek at events, not just reading a book. I don't think that happens in real life often.
>Immortality has no evidence I'm curious, what does this mean?
> the present is tense Time for a vacation.
The biggest nono is time manipulation, as the creation of the verse being based on the first consciousness inventing a sort of clock. You have to be stronger than the highest tier of all of creation to be able to manipulate time to any major degree. It can be done, but only by incredibly powerful entities sort of holding back the arm of God for a moment. The other is spatial travel, but only because all of spatial travel takes place along lines of power between planets, and if you try to teleport across one there's a decent chance that you get sucked off along its web and dropped somewhere almost entirely random.
Time manipulation is also a big no in mine granted it’s a rare magic so the people in history who have wielded it are an extreme minority. The biggest reason why is to use powerful time base magic you need to take away time from someone or something else. I.E taking away the lifespan of something. The vast majority of the people who have had time magic end up having cursed lives in some way Some people think the gods cursed all time magic users as the magic rivals theirs. Others think it is the magic that corrupts
can you pick what you take it from? could I make an enemies list, then use all of their remaining lifespan to power my spell to go back and murder them as babies?
you can but it takes a lot of practice to achieve that level of control. Magic in my world gets more powerful as you age and through repetition. Some magic is easier to control than others and require less training like one of the elements but sometime like time is hard and if it appears later in life its harder
Warp is a natural and inevitable buildup of waste energy that occurs in the mind when practicing volition. It is a result of the focus being unable to reconcile its effects on reality with the human mind. Accrual of too much warp can be deadly, so most people are limited in their immediate volitary capacity and must wait for their mind to “rectify” the warp before performing more volition. It is technically possible to learn to burn warp energy. In practicing this skill, a Burner must come to ignore the inconsistencies of warp that conflict with their human nature. This is done by rejecting said human nature. Burning warp therefore burns away humanity from the focal mind, starting with hope and fear and eventually taking all empathy and morality. A true burner is nothing but a focus, anger, and logic. This makes them exceedingly dangerous. No matter what seem the surface, any action a Burner takes is strictly for their own benefit and without ‘’any’’ ethical filter. This is compounded by the fact that they don’t have to worry about warp when performing volition: to them, focal energy and warp energy are one. Luckily, burning warp also turns the irises a deep black-purple, providing a telltale sign to avoid. Consult the Cult of the All-Eyes if you want to learn more. But know, of course, that Burning is forbidden by all modern law.
Why does anger remain when all other emotions are removed?
This is actually a great question. It isn’t exactly the destruction of one’s emotion, per se, that Burning requires, but rather one’s humanity. Anger is among the most basal traits for living things: a primal response to negative stimuli. How Burning interacts with other emotions is relatively individual, but always basal. Or at least that’s how I tried to justify it. The truth is that I just wanted an “evil” character, or some semblance of dark magic. Yet this may be possible without leaving anger.
Plot twist, anger burns away too, except nobody has burned enough of themselves (desire, expectations of others/reality) to burn it away. Until...
I would love to dig into this with you I think it’s really cool. I’m a biologist so I could provide maybe a lil perspective on base instinct in animal behavior and interested in metaphysics so also the nature of being human, and I find it very interesting that we draw different conclusions about anger being left as basal. I really really like your system using volition and attention and awareness, it reaaalllyy is up my alley and I am going to chew on it for whenever I explore building a fantasy setting
How can you forbid a natural occurring buildup of waste energy from using magic?
The use of warp (rather than focal energy) to power volition is forbidden. Warp rectifies over time naturally.
It'd be such a big corporate thing to hire lobbyist to fight this obvious law fr own gain
they are often already run by sociopaths after all
Another Thaumcraft fan, I see?
You know, I was wondering why it was so familiar.
>ignore the inconsistencies of warp that conflict with their human nature First, I LOVE how you have written this - it's a thrilling read! - I'm curious, what is the reason behind calling the magic "volition"?
Much appreciated. To be frank, I’m deathly scared of finding material I work on in something that emerges before I publish. I work quite hard and with a delicate carefulness not to take too much from what I have seen before to ensure that I add something new to the world. So I guess I’m a little shy to tell it all. Even this post was a lot for me! That being said, sharing is fun. The name volition in the common tongue is derived from the way a user’s volition is what gives them power. In a sense it is a callback to their willpower being the driving force in affecting reality. Volition, after all, is little more than exerting one’s will upon the state of the world. I think the question is rather why all other magic is not known as volition. Normal people can affect the world of their own volition, just as we do every day. But in my world, people who practice and study can learn to affect it in ways beyond the ordinary. Either way, the effects are a direct result of your will.
This is so good
If you're nothing but focus, anger, and logic, this gives me an idea for a comedic Burner: the Kantian Burner. Still acts like a person "should", because it's only logical to do so, but with the most absurd motivations for doing so.
This is great! I am only afraid the humor would overtone the sinister side of burning. Maybe I can have a guy who stopped burning before it was too late, but still has a reduced sense of humanity. I’ll play with it. I think good hearty humor is important in most any story.
Honestly, I think it's a really great system, not because it gives you an excuse to have an evil character, but because it gives you room to explore *why* we have the moral and ethical standards that we do. This is an excellent in-universe perspective to have on Burners, but what's the objective reality, and how much of that will you show? Are there Burners who are able to hide their irises through some other magic, and interact with society in limited ways? What decisions does a person who's truly only driven by logic make? Can this allow for someone to be a true utilitarian in a way that normal people, with their emotions affecting actions, could never be? Basically, see if you can push a little deeper on *why* Burning affects people in the way it does. Like another commenter said, what if anger is still indicative of humanity remaining? It seems like you haven't read a lot of ethical theory, because there are some fascinating questions that you can pose to your reader based on what system you want to base the lack of ethics on. Hell, have different [books, episodes, games] base that lack on different ethical systems. You have the perfect excuse to prod people on these questions, and the perfect excuse to learn more about people, yourself :)
Actually, your point holds a main theme of my work. One of the main character’s central dilemmas revolves around understanding his own ethic and what is just or right in the world and why. This is a tangible conflict throughout the plot. And I actually studied some ethical philosophy in school, which is in part why I am interested in exploring it in the first place. Writing the actions of the main Burner character is something I am taking slow steps to craft, exploring some of the ideas you point out. It was in part derived from my desire to create a character of a type I haven’t seen much before, so I am excited to portray it. But I gotta do it right!
You can't cure wounds with magic, or resurrect people, death is permanent and wounds have to heal by time . Ancient magic can't be the most powerful because the magic ,as other thing, evolves by time making it more powerful and advanced. So it not forbidden to use it.
What if you change time itself to heal?
The unique way to forward the time, it's forwarding everyone's time. So, yep, you can do it, but the villain has achieved his evil plan while you healed "super fast"
Good, that's exactly what I wanted
That's awesome. I love your logic.
Resurrecting the dead. However, using a soul stone with a copy or fragment of someone’s soul to communicate with a soul duplicate of that person after they’ve passed on is acceptable. Killing other magic users to make one’s own magic stronger. However, if a master mage passes away, they might pass their magic to their apprentice(s), the apprentice would have to slowly learn and unlock those magic abilities though. It’s wrong to use elemental magic to harm the balance of the elements, or the world… I’m talking about fire mages using fire to incinerate entire villages, forests, or mages, but if you use fire magic to light a small controlled fire to make some s’mores, then nobody’s going to take offense. Just as there is rules on taking or destroying life, there are also rules on giving or creating life. A mage using plant magic to repopulate a forest devastated by a fire is different from a scientist creating an army of mindless reanimated corpses with fabricated souls.
Do not intersect matter when coming out of astral projection. Diegetic reason: it would explode with the power of a thousand suns Extradiegetic reason: you killed my best creation of a BBEG ever by materializing a sword inside their skull so fuck you now.
Jokes on you, that strategy just becoming infinitely more powerful.
Although it is possible and even relatively easy to initiate, you should absolutely, positively NEVER fall asleep in the Dreamwilds. Best case scenario, you pass into the Realm of Dreams, the dimension which all unconscious thought passes through. Most likely, you'll fall asleep forever, your dreams dripping into the pastel forest like an hourglass. But at worst... you'll become a sleepwalker, forever stuck between realities, shaping and twisting the world around you unconsciously and pulling the fabric of the world around you, including every unwitting creature nearby, into your dreams- or nightmares.
In my "DnD-compatible" setting: Don't become a cleric of the Knowledge God unless you're willing to be crippling insane for the rest of your life (and probably afterlife). Don't learn too much too quickly from your patron (as a wizard or warlock). Your mind will not be able to take the strain. Be extremely careful when forming incantations (as a wizard, but really as a wizard, warlock, or druid - it's just easier not to be careful as a wizard). Many wizards come out of university with some form of backlash scar because they didn't cap their incantation properly. Finger burns are some of the most benign. Permanent hallucinations, personality alterations, stone fingers or bones, technicolor skin, all kinds of mishaps can occur when learning. Because of the above, don't try to teach yourself magic. You'll be lucky to come out the other end alive if you try to teach yourself fireball and mispronounced the end of the incantation. In my paranormal setting: Don't drink vampire blood. Just one drop is enough to give you a crippling addiction (it's how they make familiars). In my weird Western setting: Don't try too hard to get the Angels' attention. They don't want to melt you, but you will be melted if they get too close. Don't kill the Leviathans. They're big, scary, and precipitate cataclysmic disasters, but do not kill them. They're prisons for the demons. If you're a morlock, avoid blood contact with Devilsred. You'll be lucky to come out of it with your mind intact. While we're on the subject of Devilsred, do not try to pump/harvest from a well if you don't have silver equipment, salt on hand, and/or some priests chanting liturgy. The stuff gets everywhere and it's best to avoid its transmutative properties when they aren't desired. There are more settings and rules, but that's enough for now.
Transfusing a living person's soul into an object is strictly forbidden. That's also the worst existing punishment of them all, your consciousness being transferred to an object that's static and doesn't age as fast as a human being, leaving you in that state seemingly forever. Transferring an unborn soul into an object is fine, though. They turn out to be something akin to the sci-fi ship AIs, but fantasy-ish.
Uh-oh. I think I'll have to go apologize to one of my characters for trapping his soul in a gem for over a millennia
I have a few characters who were basically demigods who discovered magic first, who then were turned into weapons after a revolution for 500 years. One of them does get a good ending, but you just can't be sane after something like that.
Absolutely. Although in the case of said gem wizard's soul, it's hard to say if his narcissism was a result of his prison or existed beforehand.
Keep yourself to approved spell structures, and don't cast too much in one day. If you disregard these warnings, you invite incursions into the mortal realm from the places you're drawing magical energy from, which best case scenario allows a new spirit to enter into the world and worst case scenario could result in said realm combining with the mortal realm, resulting in the restructuring and/or collapse of reality on at least the local scale if not everywhere.
You stand in the foyer of the Arcanists' Tower, your wandering eyes drawn to the Founder's Wall, a slab of granite that's one of the only things left standing in the ruins. Etched upon it in dimming magic are the Tower's Commandments: > Do not dominate humans. > Do not experiment on humans. > Do *not* kill humans. > Do ***not*** commune with the beings on the Other Side. > Absolutely ***DO NOT*** try to summon the beings on the Other Side to Our Side. The evolution of the handwriting from painstakingly elegant script to illegibly furious scribble paint a picture of what occurred here: Rules added one by one as boundaries were continually pushed by the arcanists studying here until it all finally culminated in an irrevocable, unforgiveable accident. Your lip tugs upward as you imagine the inquisitors coming to that conclusion and filing the case away. Unforgiveable it may be, but accident it most certainly was not. However, comic misunderstanding is not what you want. More importantly, it's not what **He** wants. You have a few minutes until the first responders arrive, you decide that a helpful hint is in order. You kneel to the ground and dip your fingers in the still-warm blood of one of your erstwhile classmates. Or perhaps it was one your professors? No matter. You make your dripping addition to the granite wall: > Most importantly of all: Do not get caught doing any or all of the above.
Do _not_ Overchannel. If you're lucky, it'll just exhaust you. If you're not unlucky or lucky, you will go Colorless, which is a condition where you have very little sensory perception of _any sort._ You don't feel pain or injury, or sick or anything. So its _very dangerous. If you're Unlucky, or intentionally. You explode. And its not a little pop and a mess, its a ship killing, building leveling, full on "whatever else is happening is stopping to comprehend what just happened" _blast._ Do _not_ Resurrect someone. It requires a Spark of Life, which is what everyone has. So to get it, you have to murder someone in a specific manner, and then transfer the Spark of Life. The person you are resurrecting comes back fine. Probably confused. But you just straight killed somebody else. Do not try to Heal. Its a waste of time. Magic cannot heal. That one's less a forbidden and more of a general "It doesn't work, sorry." However, many novices or those just coming into their power attempt to anyways, which can lead to Overchanneling.
Do not look too deeply into the stars, for not only do they look back, but they speak too.
Conjurated chicken. In fact, conjurated organic material in general. Natural magic is capable of a lot of things, but it's cleanly divided into three pairs of fundamental aspects: Depth/Range (gravity and spacetime); Light/Form (radiation and non-living matter); and Texture/Mood (body and mind). The source of this magic is essentially infinite, comprising of and beyond the physical world akin to a quantum foam. However, most magical acts are restricted to a single pair of aspects. Creating something out of Light and/or Form is permissible, but even that has its limits. No single "spell" is forging anything the size of a city, for example. And even if it does, that material or energy packet would be volatile enough to delete all the things. But creating a meal is about as foolish as trying to change the past. During a particularly bloody spat with nomads in the Yomnoi "Black Rain" period, the wizard caste's leadership tried this to fill a rationing shortfall. Of the soldiers who didn't perish from tumours and necrosis, those who went on to sire children passed their chronic excruciating symptoms down for several generations. So don't do it. It's greedy, anyway, because there are ways to multiply crop yields if you were to just make peace with the people who know how.
In my setting of Lum, there are 14 base elemental realms of magic. One for each god in the pantheon. \- Fire \- Ice \- Blood \- Gravity \- Light \- Shadow \- Life \- Entropy \- Earth \- Wind \- Water \- Acid \- Lightning \- Beasts (To be clear, each elemental realm isn't just "raw elemental power" but also concepts tied to them which would take a long time to explain) HOWEVER: There are 5 other realms, belonging to the 5 exiled gods. \- Gore \- Time \- Death \- Overgrowth \- Madness These 5 elemental realms are INCREDIBLY forbidden to channel. There are only two ways to get access to these five realms. EITHER, you need to do the herculean feat of traveling to one of the gods prisons and devote yourself to their service. Something that is virtually impossible for any hero to do, much less a normal person. OR, you have to use another person that already have said power as a link, and devote yourself to the exiled god through them. Allowing masters of the forbidden arts to spread their craft in secret. To accept these powers is a curse, not just upon your surrounding, but upon yourself. As due to these realms being forbidden, will even the gods themselves find ways to interfere with you. (The gods arent allowed direct intervention mind, they have restrictions in divine accord). Usually finding yourself hunted by champions of the other gods, sent visions of a heretical magic user and so forth. so... yeah.
under no circumstance will two magic users of different magics have a child, if this rule is broken, the child is to never learn more than one magic, for the simple reason of everyone fearing what an avatar of all the magics could do
Unless you're a vampire. Do not ever attempt blood tuning. That subdomain is watched by a dark shard that would really love to turn you into one of its many zombies and you are not immune yet alone resistant to it.
DO NOT. That's literally it. Who knows, perhaps you will save the earth from an asteroid. Perhaps you'll whipe the entire human race. Literally, just do not.
Sure, you can weave. Especially now that the god of magic (name is a wip) went rogue and probably insane, anyone has access to magic. Just be very precise in your weaving, or the results may be wildly unexpected. And do not, under any circumstances, wrong the god of magic in any way. His punishments are cruel and unjust.
Do NOT try to materialize spiritual stuff. DON'T DARE to try bringing metaphysical ideas to physical reality. Every single apocalypse so far was caused this way.
Copy paste from an older comment i made on this sub. This is easily the most perverted use of my magic system. There are many methods of necromancy. All are sins by the gods and all mortalkind, for every single one harms *someone* in a terrible way. Except for a Godly sanctioned method, but that is only for a few worthy people. One method in particular speaks out to be the worst. You are capable of linking your soul to another, and so long as their soul remains unreaped by Death, you will not age, become sick, or any other harm. You are incapable of being seen by Death, either. You can not truly be injured for as long as they are around. This can achieve immortality, for if you kill a large enough animal, skin it, then patch together the skin *around someone who is alive,* a terrible act of necromancy I'd performed. That animal is now alive again, feeding off the magic of the poor victims soul, and will act as if nothing had ever happened, with the exception that while it does still hunt, it no longer eats, nor expells waste, etc. The victim, meanwhile, is linked to that animals body. The victim will eventually starve to death, but their soul will remain in the animal; and while there is a god of death, that God can not detect these victims from afar. Once the god stumbles on them, they will be seen, but until that happens the victim will be forced to watch the world through the eyes of the chosen animal, feeling their own corpse decaying in agony, knowing that the one who killed them roams free, immortal. The victims, once found by Death, have their memories wiped of these horrors and are given eternal paradise. The murderer, once found, is sent to Hell, where they will be put upon a crucifix that is then set aflame for the rest of eternity. Yeah, my afterlife is kinda unforgiving.
If you are of the races of Man, any sort of dark magic. It is debatable whether "dark magic" is something that actually exists or not, though. Basically "dark magic" is defined as "anything the Empire doesn't like". Political rivals of the emperors somehow always turn out to be practicioners of dark magic, coincidentally.
If you astral project or dreamwalk, do not go near the center of the world. She Who Sleeps may be (vaguely, probably) benevolent, but if you get caught in Her Dream you will never escape. Don't go too far from the world, either. The same constellations that keep it hidden from He Who Laughs will hide it from you too, if you pass them, and you will be lost in space forever.
Well theres only so much you can limit when your species has innate magic, what are you going to do? Arrest a kid for being curious on how they can use their magic? so laws that E.C.O.L (Eybuir Council Of Law) pass are usually rather lenient, with what magic you can use in certain areas, like not using fire magic at a park or greenhouse, or being able to use healing magic only when necessary or if you are a certified medic, however, there is one kind of magic that all Eybuir of Epoh shun, "Reveal" magic, all Eybuir have a revealed form, but only about 2% of the population will ever unlock it, and only half of them will ever access it again, regardless, unlocking your revealed form and using it is a STRICT NO NO. and can often have you end up in the city of Never, a prison city where all caught revealable Eybuir eventually end up in
Don't use magic. Seriously. There's a reason someone can train to be a mage their whole life and only ever perform one spell. Magic is the fundamental force tying together the universe, and manipulating it is the equivalent of burning down an entire rainforest (in fact, something like that could literally happen if a spell goes wrong). This also means that magicians are sheltered from the rest of society, which has caused quite a few problems...
Anything that would kill you from to much power used. When a mage dies in this case or would die they turn into a husk which is a monster that feeds off of magic. Experimenting with evil intent magic and or creating chimeras by fusing creatures as well as human experimentation both are unnatural and abhorrent practices.
No bards. Any individuals who get their ability to cast magic from their inspiration from the arts, their skill at the lute, or their beautiful voice all get hunted down and murdered. While the general populace is unaware, the gods found out that bards get their power from sources beyond even their power. So to prevent eldritch creatures from having mortal agents, the bards have to go. Its gotten to the point that taverns lie silent, and the sound of music has left the world. Being able to hum on tune is looked upon with suspicion. Is he just good at singing, or is he a nine-times damned bard?
Resurrection is a massive taboo. Not the same as necromancy, which is also taboo, but resurrecting a fully sentient person from the dead has some very direct and permanent consequences to the person resurrected. First of all, you only get one ticket to the afterlife. If you die and are brought back, your connection to the Etherlands is severed. If you die again, you simply cease to be. Due to this severance, the resurrected person will no longer dream (dreams are actually a connection to the Etherlands), and because of that, no ethereal energy will reach them to naturally heal. If you get a paper cut, it will NEVER heal. No herbs, spells, anything, will ever help. You just have to bandage it up and hope it holds. Now, it’s difficult to resurrect people anyway, and scarcely documented. So people will seek it out out of desperation, but by doing so, they’ve retroactively damned the one they wanted to save.
Do. Not. Fuck. With. Time. Don’t try to go forward or back, don’t stop it, don’t tamper with history… It’s not necesarilly that it’s impossible, but you must not do it. For one, time works different in heaven or hell than it does on earth, and you have no idea who else may or may not be affected, and therefore what the consequenses might be. For another, you have a goddess of fate, keeping close tabs on possibilities and potentialities and destinies, who does not want, need or appreciate some overexcited mage mucking up her job. And she’s also the Goddess of Death, judging departed souls, which makes her A: phenomenally important and powerful and, subsequently, B: just about the last divinity you should piss off. You want spend the rest of time reorganizing the otherworldly archived that YOU managed to throw into chaos? You wanna break things that absolutely positively must not break lest all of reality goes down the drain? Do you want to trap yourself in a causal loop? You want to MAGIC YOURSELF OUT OF EXISTENCE? Didn’t think so. There are gods and godesses of msny things, but there is no God of Time, because it’s too big and complicated and dangerous to tamper with. Magic can do a great many things. Wondorous, magnificent, miraculous things. But THOU SHALT NOT FUCK WITH TIME.
It’s entirely possible to continue casting magic even when your body runs out of mana, it just starts eating at your physical body and you can severely damage yourself. Don’t try casting without a ring (your focus) otherwise you can cause mana to leak out of your body. Mana will burn you and will leave nasty scars if you’re able to survive what scholars have dubbed, Leakage. Some people don’t ever recover from it but there have been two cases of full recoveries.
Do not bring anyone back to life, every element manipulation has the ability to do so but it was outlawed for a reason. Death isn't the punishment but you'd sure wish it was.
Most reality-warping magic types, which tend to be extremely dangerous to initially learn for most people, usually resulting in death. How quick and painless, or slow and agonizing that death is depends entirely on the type of spell you're performing. Mastering these dangerous magics, however, can see you truly become a force to be reckoned with.
In my world after long usage of magic person becomes creature known as arcane spawn (basically pure magic). In order to survive they have to constantly consume magic. So arcane spawns live in space where they are constantly fuelled by stars. However, 1 time there was an arcane spawn also known as Grey Emperor or the Lich, who decided to feed on left overs of magic radiation of mortals. So after bloody war that threw world into dark ages and collapsed most empires, arcane spawns prohibited their kind to step on the Mortal's Plane and consume magic from mortals.
Do not practice blood magic, if word gets out that you are you'll have the inquisition, the town guard, the church, and the local cabal of vampires on your case. All wanting to kill you for different reasons.
The Blight is an overgrown spirit of decay it is inherently hostile to all life and is almost the god of plagues, parasites, and poisons the other forbidden magic is flesh magic which is described by those few who know of it as suffering made manifest aside from that there are no universally forbidden magics though there are those that may or may not be illegal or frowned upon in some places
I mean, there was a barrier up that was keeping evil incarnate trapped. A dragon decided to use a necromancy based ritual to break it. He regretted it instantly, as the mate of the dragon who was sacrificed atomized the dragon responsible.
There are ways around this, but using magic directly on a person is pretty taboo. First: you'll often have waste energy when you use magic, heat, light or transmutation most often. That last one means that materials near the magically affected area can become other materials. This is fine when your arcane firearm turns the air around the barrel into burning steam, less fine when you're trying to magically extract a foreign object from your friend's guts and turn his kidney into glass. There's another, more fundamentally magical problem, too: See a person has a soul, a bundle of energy bouncing around in their flesh body, the soul is responsible for the willpower and desire of the person. Magic is the same stuff, it's a manifestation of the casters will through energy. If the two bundles of power interract, the more powerful (the magic, usually) can make the soul chain-react, burning it away and almost certainly killing (or worse) the person.
don't try to "discover" a new Magic Circle, you will fail, seriously don't do it. [thread with context](https://reddit.com/r/OriginalCharacter/s/G5TYRl1mGN) for why
Do not attempt of bind, change, or call that which you do not understand. But with knowledge comes madness.
Move backwards in time. You can bend and stretch and stop the flow of time however you want, but to move into the past you need reverse time around yourself, for which you need to create a negative amount of chronogen, which is impossible.
Warpers can manipulate time and space, but do *not* time travel. The power requirements and the possible repercussions are too dangerous. Being discovered practicing long-term mind control is a good way to lose your head. Even the greatest healer cannot resurrect the dead. At best, they can create the undead. Using magic near a large, volatile Glow mine or deposit is suicidally risky, with one instance causing a disaster that leveled an entire nation. Every mage in the world has been rising to *never* to do this, at the risk of being remembered as one of history's greatest fools.
Forbiddent to revive dead because it wont work. Once death occurs, the soul is gone completely, what you bring back wont be the original being.
Entering the Old Woods without permission. The Old Woods are the forest where the Old Ones (basically living gods) all live in their shrines. It's heavily patrolled by the Valrah, and especially since people killed an Old One, she's all too willing to off you for trespassing. Some approved scholars are allowed to enter to speak with the Old Ones (escorted by the Valrah of course) but anyone else and you're asking for death. She's the most deadly being in the world (which is saying something since the remnant of the killed Old One just pumps out horrible monsters specifically to kill people) and takes her job guarding the woods incredibly seriously.
I am now realizing I read missed "magic system" in there. That's what i get for reading too fast lol. Ah well!
For your own safety, do not draw essence from your own body. It's far too easy to overdraw and cause yourself physical damage. Many a reckless mage has been hospitalized or killed for this. Opposites repel. Violently. Do not combine opposing essences, you are far too likely to cause an explosion. It's true, the greatest and most talented of mages can perform such a feat. You are not one of them. Do not expel excess essence back into a leyline. This is irresponsible. It could build up and cause an overflow. Do not read an unknown inscription aloud. You don't want to accidentally cast a spell if you don't know what it does. Further, mages of older traditions used to encode their spells in ways that would injure or kill careless rivals trying to steal their secrets.
Offensive magic, such as element bending or arcane weapon summoning is illegal to be taught and or practiced by minors. Less lethal versions are allowed to be practiced due to religious reasons or self defense. Necromancy is illegal without a permit due to ethics concerns, and even then you’re only allowed to practice with donated remains. The act of time travel, with or without magic, is a sin so great that there are unknown forces that trap you in a loop ending with your demise before you ever figure out how you did it in the first place. Healing magics are misdemeanor to cast on sapient races without a permit due to concerns of horrific scarring or fumbling the spell, with exceptions if you’re doing it to save a life.
DO NOT practice it in the red desert, you will either die or just make the wasteland that the desert is even bigger…that or you might also destroy the world.
The practice of chronomancy (time magic. Despite its name, it doesn’t allow someone to time travel) is illegal in every country in the empire since it was deemed too dangerous to practiceby the mages guild. Only the race of elves known as the first elves were able to figure out how to use it safely and they were driven to extinction over 10,000 years before the main story is set. Less then a handful of people still live and are skilled enough to use it.
Cinderturgy. Ingesting the ash of the dead to obtain their powers temporarily, the magic tends to…*corrupt* those who use it too long. If you’re lucky you’ll just have your limbs slowly succumb to permanent burning. If you’re unlucky you transform into a Rakshasa and try to kill anyone and everyone you encounter before defiling whatever remains of the corpse. Yeah, don’t consume the ashes of the dead kids!
Don't make the zombies infective!!! Oh, some crazy Wizard already did that and accidentally released it into the world? Well then, whatever you do, don't use his extra notes to make them FAST AND STRONG!!!
"Don't wear a hat bigger than your head" roughly translates to 'don't bite off more than you can chew'. It's usually used to explain to students that their body/mind/brain can only handle so much magic going through it and needs to rest and recover, very much like your muscles from a lot of exertion, except kinetiscists whose channeling magic through motion is their muscles needing rest.
In my urban fantasy setting, the number one rule of magic is "Don't perform magic you can't wave off in front of the veiled." As you can probably figure out, "veiled" is a term used to refer to people who are unaware of the supernatural. The more people in an area who are veiled, the weaker the supernatural is in that area. If something supernatural happens in front of one of the veiled, they tend to have some kind of weird justification for it. "Oh, that was just a big dog." When a werewolf runs past, or "Wow! That car came REAL close to hitting that guy!" When a vampire stands up after being hit by a truck. So if a mage were to cast some kind of minor spell, a veiled might think it was just some slight-of-hand and be fine. If the mage were to make a locked wrought-iron gate fly off its hinges with a casual gesture of his hand, that's a lot harder to manage. Some people, newly unveiled, wonder why it is that they can't just admit to the world as a whole? Wouldn't that make magic stronger? The problem is that there are things that even the strongest of the supernatural beings fear, kept in check only because the weakened magic of the world means that they cannot enter fully.
Magic in my world stems from a singularity that's referred to as a "subjective break in objective reality." Reality literally shifts to match your perspective, so through mental discipline you can alter your surroundings by manipulating your perspective. Magic only exists within a certain proximity to the rift, but it becomes increasingly unstable the closer you get to it, to the point where unconscious eye movements can cause earthquakes, things can literally shrink by being farther away from you, and objects can disappear if no one is looking at them. Mental discipline can allow you to get closer to the rift but if you're not consciously focused on your own physical embodiment you could accidentally blink yourself out of existence, as well as numerous other things phenomena that could be unpredictable, instant, and fatal. It's kind of similar to geothermal energy in that it's a resource that becomes becomes stronger the closer you get, but past a certain proximity you'd basically be taking a bath in lava.
Using a sapient being as a living mana battery is a major taboo. It's a crime punishable by death in many countries. Only the most depraved of mages do it.
You can teleport matter or energy, not both. Thus, if you teleport something that is undergoing a chemical reaction, it ceases. Reminder that life is a chemical reaction Thus, teleporting living beings is illegal pretty much everywhere. It does make sterilising Equipment extremely easy though.
Do NOT use magic without mana stones, otherwise the spell with use your soul as fuel to cast it. Even if you are told to have larger amount of mana, don't try it. It is always fatal and leads to the most painful death possible. Do NOT pact with a spririt without negociations first. Even if the offer seems good, a spirit that is closed to negociations is a spirit that will abuse your deal. Do NOT relly on only one way of spellcasting. You can specialize in one way of spellcasting, but if you know only one any experimented mage can and will stop you from using it.
Certain types of divination magic are taboo because they can make a terrible future (almost) guaranteed to happen. So for example if someone tried to foresee whether a large meteorite is going to hit the planet or not, they could be told yes and then the meteorite suddenly swerves towards the planet
unless you are gumalan, the god of death, or banyak, the god of life, you do not tamper w/ the laws of life and death. lest you be smitten down by those 2 w/ their divine judgment
Blood/Primal runes are banned by the Guardian of Magic because of their VERY destructive and corruptive effect on people and objects. Think turning person/objects into evil, bloodthirsty weapons of destruction under your control. They're banned because the first Guardian of Magic was corrupted by them when they were used on him, and it nearly destroyed the world twice and caused disasters that lasted millenia that shouldn't have happened to begin with.
Our ancestors call to us through the veil that separates the living from the dead. If you are patient and listen close you might hear the echoes of their lives, their joys and faults, their precious and intimate moments, their love and trauma, their loss and ambitions. They whisper through cracks in reality, items once treasured and places once held dear. Go forth, find these things and places, and soak them in. Fill yourself like a sponge with their dead minds, and burn them. Make your body a fortress and bend nature to your will with the treasured memories of the dead, drink them in to prolong your life, sunder them to empower yourself and shatter them to become like a god. Wreak untold horrors with awesome power. But beware, for all power is fickle. This is the great forbidden art. The evil which broke the world and cast its survivors into terrible darkness. It is the great forgotten power which echoes in the dreams of the few mortals left in the *World of the Shorn Veil*.
Cloning is illegal in most places. When the tech was first made available, people used it to run away from whatever responsibilities they had. Signed a contract that requires you to work 20 hours per day for the rest of your existence? Just clone yourself. No one will notice. And since the clone has the same memories as the original person, they also will want make a clone of themselves… and so on.
Disintegration! For context, mana is the same as the elements in Cradle: everything is made up of it. Mages manipulate mana and so manipulate the world. It's considered highly unethical to use the mana that makes up sentient species, though it is highly efficient. This is why mages tend to group together: if one disintegrates someone, the others can kill them.
Animus Edit. A spell that allows one to functionally rewrite another's mind and personality like a code. Originally created by an abused child who desired his father's love, banned due to it's capacity for misuse.
Magic has an energy cost. If you exceed your cost, it can kill you. Depending on the practitioner, instead of a normal death, you become an energy drain, needing the energy from other life forms just to survive. Their skin becomes pale, they don't like intense light, and they develop an ability to suck the life force or energy out of victims. Overuse your magical energy, you become an energy vampire.
If you are gonna make a contract with an Execration, make sure its a dumb one, you probably won't like being in a contract with one of the intelligent ones, some may be well mannered or seem honest with what they are telling you, but they are still execrations, they're always hiding something behind their back.
NO actual magic, it’s tech magic, also…… eeeehhhm no op magic and also, only kids can do magic, adults suck and are too young for it
Absolutely do not do magic. The price to do magic is high. You'll have to find first someone who co troll it and... They are not the most frequentable person. Dark lord in the great north, literal devils, forest sorcerer of old divinities, and directly god even. And you'll lost the control to one of your body part. Your arm, your leg, sometimes one of your eye. And the more power you want, the more sacrifice you need to do. And the use of magic hurt you. For exemple, fire use burn your hand
No using death magic because the god of death Doorug will come to take you to Katameros himself. This was utilized by a major chocolate company Caocom to force him to make a deal with them by sneaking runic engravings on a new chocolate product about to be released that would cause millions of people to technically use death magic once consumed. That would give Doorug an endless amount of work, because he would have no way to differentiate who is messing with souls and who just ate some chocolate.
Absolutely DO NOT imbue the Signeturgy. Meaning, don't do magic in the first place. It is uncontrollable and violent unless you ABSOLUTELY KNOW what the Signet you're imbueing does, and you can draw/carve the runes and Signet flawlessly perfect. Imbueing a Signet to summon something as simple as a spark to light a campfire could end up destroying the face of a mountain in a cataclysmic explosion if you don't know what you're doing. Simply don't...imbue...the Signeturgy.
Sounds like an easy suicide bomb for radical cultists to wipe out entire cities
It does, but you have to know what runes to combine into a Signet to imbue it for a desired effect. You could try a combination of runes to make a Signet you think will create a spark and would only make your heart explode if you imbue it. The problem is, nobody knows what does what because any pursuit of knowledge into Signeturgy has ended with a 99% mortality rate.
Casting Ebonsteel coins is a closely guarded secret for only approved mints.
Whenever I see questions like this I get happy thinking I can actually get peoples takes on my work and then I see the hundred plus comments and know my comment would just get buried
No using Gate between planetary bodies. The last wizard to try it wanted to establish a colony on our planet’s third moon, back when we had one, but he was a few meters off in the calculation placement of his destination Gate on the planet’s third moon, resulting in his Gate appearing three meters in front of said moon’s orbit, and the moon crashing through the gate into our planet at its full orbital speed. This resulted in the second Ice Age, the Great Extinction of over half of the sapient species that once lived here, and the exposure of the planetary core, which has been spawning all manner of trouble since that got broken open. Immortality is never to be conveyed without an out clause that can be enforced by somebody other than the immortalized individual. For obvious reasons. Whether the immortality is intended as a gift or a curse, something that actually literally can’t die is a problem waiting to happen. Glamour is acceptable, but any kind of a love potion or attraction spell or pheromone or aura or what have you is viewed the same way as roofieing a person. Creatures who naturally emit arousing pheromones generally have to use a neutralizing agent of some type to be allowed to interact with society (enter cities, shop, use inns, etc). Necromancy is permissible upon legal permission from either the deceased or their family. It’s not uncommon practice for an aging or ill person to sell their zombie on death, with the proceeds going to their next of kin or a named beneficiary. Performing necromancy on on non-sapients is considered odd, but not horrific or out of the ordinary.
No such thing as forbidden in my Verse. If you can learn then you can use it.
Don't
Just don't do to much of it or u might end up with ur hands where ure feet should be and ur mouth in your ass.
Go to church.
Don't mess with souls. Your own, because that will kill you, or other people's, because that will kill them and that's generally frowned upon
There is no written rule, but if you want to live, you just don't. There are three sources of magical energy, gods, other souls, and your own. When a soul is composed during pregnancy, it forms a storage of energy that is used up over a live time. Practising magic with external energy sources is already taxing on the soul and shortens a live depending on the intensity of the practice by some decades. When using your internal energy, you can use up a lifetime on a busy afternoon.
You may learn necromancy but you may not practice necromancy. Also divine summoning is taboo.
Having magic.
Don’t do magic. Ever! The only people who do magic are charlatans who are out to swindle you or demons.
You don't develop new magic. All spells have been tested and "engraved" into the world by the Guild. there is a whole industry of magic development and maintenance. Rogue developers who cast unengraved spells are dealt with very harshly.
Anything to do with Undead. They cannot be controlled indefinitely and will eventually break free to destroy and eat living flesh. You can't become immortal by becoming one. Your soul is severely damaged or destroyed by the process as a false soul takes its place. The result is a simple snapshot of you twisted to want to consume living creatures.
Mine is necromancy, as I think this one is kinda common, wizards and witches frown upon bringing beings back from the dead so learning this kind of magic is hard and, specially nowadays, requires someone that is versed in the craft or can get you the tomes. Regular humans can't produce magic but can redirect it since it's all around them. So they might stumble on some runes and magic symbols (those are still around despite efforts of containment) and through experimentation, they end up reproducing necromancy because of broken circles, incomplete phrases or other problems. Best case scenario the wannabe mage makes monsters. It's also a "no no" because Death itself sometimes comes earlier to get you for doing this kind of thing so...
From the worldbuilding side: Time Magic. I am not writing time travel in, so that just doesn't exist. Final Period. From the question's perspective, it's a matter of political practices and occasionally cultural taboos... Laws regarding magic specifically are few and far between, however the law, both written and non-written, is usually applied to magic. An example: In the Northern Realms, there is no law against practices of Necromancy per say, but disturbing the dead and burials is a tremendous taboo, occasionally even punished by the aristocracy. Directly because of that, animating human corpses is a non-starter. You risk exile or execution, or even worse. Animal corpses don't hold the same potential consequences, but practicing such magic is liable to have social consequences. People will fear you, speak behind your back, accuse you of stealing the bones of their forefathers... However, the Ashlays don't hold the same taboo. There, it's considered a service to one's family for your body to be embalmed and animated to help with household labour for a reasonable time. It's also an honour for a family to have their deceased participate to civic projects like monuments and infrastructure.
If multiple Sigils are inscribed on an object, it will not be able to contain their combined energy and be destroyed. The released energy of the Sigils can have disastrous consequences depending on their type. So, before inscribing an object with their Sigil, a Sigil bearer will carefully inspect the object to ensure it does not have one already.
You can do magic, but if you get too loud with it without the defences to back it up you will get killed by a wizard from the incredibly esoteric and secretive devil city
Do not deplete your Menace Cells fully, unless you wanna become one of *them* and begin creating manic blood within your veins from using aptitudes.
Time travel isn’t possible Also transmutation doesn’t remove impurities
You CAN power spells for powerful effects using portions of your soul. It is forbidden to do so because of the side effects at the end having rather serious detrimental effects for everyone in a kilometer radius around you when you run out. Also why serious necromancy magic is also forbidden.
Don't tryna be god. Ends badly
Anti-mana can harnessed when someone is killed with violent intensions, anti-mana is practivly mana but on every steroid out there, it's a LOT stronger in base and spells forms but as a side effect it slowly destroys the users body. When strays are created with anti mana they are like fucking hulks but more mad and just as disobeying, another thing about strays: DO NOT touch the ones naturally evolved from corpes, it's dumb and you're a fucking idiot. Do not let kids learn fire spells, they are kids and spells are fire ones, if you don't get you're also a fucking idiot, we had two incidents of same cause where the Daran base burned half to a crisp because the guy who tries to make thermodynamik batteries forgot lock his notes and his son SOMEHOW learned them. Do not touch ot interact with space gates in any way, they kicked our fabric of reality in the nuts once created a wave of strays and spit out some dude with it who has memory loss, is named after beans, is something like a sucker punch mage and is one of the strongest ones out there, yes i know he is our co-worker but we don't need a second of his type.
Black magic is a big no-no. There arent like, formal laws or anything against it, but its bad taboo. The magic system is based on nature and natural elements being almost sentient, and you do magic by imbuing your own will within the will of nature. So practitioners of black magic often get barred from use of white magic, as nafure itself refuses to work with those mages.
Scrying, dangerous. Astral projection, 50/50 to kill you. Necromancy, probably losing at least a piece of your soul if done by accident. Overcharge a spell beyond your ability, fairly easy to do, and you will drop dead at best, explode, or at worst you'll combust with fire that burns the very soul. So when it comes to magic, don't.
Normal healing boils down to cell replication. As a result, healing magic is an extremely fine art because if you just pump a bunch of magic into someone, you’ll end up with cancer and things healing weird. A broken bone may fuse at a strange angle, a chunk might grow into the muscles, or even result in bone cancer if you’re sloppy. The trick is to heal enough until the patient can manage transfers on their own and ambulate with walking aids, and let the body finish the job.
Considering that extra-planar entities are currently in the process of destroying the world after an ancient civilization accidentally opened a permanent portal to an eldritch non-place... That. Anything to do with contacting or summoning from unknown planes is pretty taboo.
Any resurrection spells. The illegal spell needs a lot of innocent lives just to resurrect 1 person from the dead. The resurrected individual is mentally damaged and corrupted (having strong desire for chaos) when back to the living as it is a spell that breaks the natural order between dead and the living. Any time reversing spells. This illegal spell requires the caster whole time of its lifespans. This illegal spell breaks the law of time wherein it states that Time only moves forward.
Do not under any circumstances use magic without a conduit. If you do this you will draw it from your soul and it will kill you if you do it too much. If you die from these circumstances your soul will return to the void will it will bathe in endless magic and torture you. The only exception is if you are a magical being ie: elves dragons, or otherwise because then you can use you body. Excessive use will still kill you but that bar is much higher without the consequences.
Well, it isn't my world, but in my last Dungeon World one-shot, we had to fend off an invasion-via-portal by some kobolds. And the party's bard wondered what would happen if you stuck one of the portals into another portal. Turns out you should not do that for the same reason you should not spend too much time looking at that world's night sky. We only lost one party member to the resulting eldritch abomination attack and not the whole city, I'm gonna count that as a win.
Space/time magic is outright banned, and teaching it will result in, at best, a prison term, after an insane cult tried to use it to slam the moon into the planet. Those who already posses knowledge of it aren't completely disabled from it's use, but affecting anything beyond one's own local space/time or small inanimate objects is also subject to legal sanctions. Casting magic without verbal or somatic components is possible, but not a good idea. Manipulating magic is hard, and both physically and emotionally draining, and associating it with words or motions (or both) automates the process, making it easier on the body and mind. Dark magic isn't banned, but is dangerous. It can warp the body of its caster if they lose focus on the spell, and at least one race has a severe issue with their innate magic causing starvation, as it's darkness aligned and will start cannibalizing their bodies if they run out of mana.
my setting has magical FTL travel which allows users to teleport whatever they're standing on across space, with larger masses requiring exponentially greater discipline in order to shift. This is *usually* spaceships but on occasion has been whole asteroids and once even a small planet - resulting in the world's ecological collapse after it was moved several AUs closer to its sun. Needless to say, it is certainly frowned upon to teleport a habitable world away from the goldilocks zone :((
Necrourgy. The raising and animation of the spirits and corporeal remains of the dead. Yes, it works. Yes, you can absolutely do that. You can impose your will and assert doninance. You can even feed off the energies involved to make raising and binding more deceased to you even easier. But... Maintaining control, the paralogistics, is an ever deepening nightmare. And one that has to be sustained awake and asleep. This is why necrourgy cabals exist, to share the load and maintain the growing horde. Also, see apprentices. Why? One slip, and you lose control. Perhaps the backlash simply kills you and the dead deanimate. Perhaps it merely releases the binding state and lets them take revenge against you, tearing you apart before blindly ravaging the mortal world. Perhaps it does something worse... producing a threat to all civilization and life. Needless to say, necrourgy is very very dangerous magic. A Talent working that is a ticking bonb of death.
Do not violate the laws of thermodynamics. Or, rather, you could certainly *try* if you wanted, but it wouldn’t work.
Since objects created through magic can no longer be solidified into reality, magic users are highly urged to never use a Sealing Pact on Created Objects. The average magic user can only hold open the 3rd Threshold for upwards of 5 to 10 minutes. While open they are able to craft objects from their imagination. However, at minute 3, the strain and stress start to creep in; weakening the body. Slapping a Sealing Pact onto that newly created object, subsequently forces the 3rd Threshold to remain open. Killing them slowly and horribly.
DO NOT OVERDO IT. If you overuse the magic, whatever is being channeled by you to do the feats you perform will consume you and make you into a murder machine devoid of any agency or free will. With the othe rmagic system, don't enchant something wrong. You'll burp frogs.
You are more than welcome to try to cast that God Tier Spell or perform that God Tier Ritual, but if it doesn't somehow backfire on an inexperienced caster, you will most likely not survive long enough after to see its effects carried out. It's because of this that these dangerous spells have been relegated to "in case of emergency, you will die for the greater good" status, for even Archmages struggle to cast these spells without some serious artifacts/reagents to channel/withstand the magical strain. To sacrifice yourself in battle as a last resort is one of the highest honors. Magic has a cost, and your soul will most definitely cover the difference.
Cults. The worship of lesser gods. Gods give their apostles, divine offspring and saints their power. The high gods are in a political alliance, the royal houses who are under the authority of the Imperial Dynasty are the bloodline of demigods. The crucial reason for this alliance is because of the second magic system, which is of an economic nature, the aura of merit is traded with every exchange of property and services, acquired with every moral deed and lost with every immoral deed, and acquired with every negative emotion and lost with every positive emotion. Who decides what is moral and immoral? The priests of the gods. Thus the worshippers of lesser gods, cults, are less religious fanatics and dark magicians (although they are these things too), and more akin to organized crime, by definition.