Tag Archive for 'Delgar'

Demystifying Magic

Published on December 14, 2009 in Delgar. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

This post will begin the task of explaining how magic works in Delgar. This is not a discussion of game mechanics or rules, but one of concepts and story.

Magic is most often thought of in a cause-and-effect manner. Magic is thought of as a characterization of instances wherein spells of its nature provoke changes in the natural state. This is exceedingly myopic. To say that the average person in Delgar is ignorant of the way magic works is, to be sure, a grave understatement in the least. Even those who practice it rarely truly understand it.

But let’s not trouble ourselves with what magic is not when we are endeavoring to ascertain what it is.

The first step in understanding the magic of Delgar is to understand that it is not, strictly speaking, a force. It is a living, palpable thing that can be somewhere or not. The magic of Delgar is native to Delgar, and it does not extend far beyond the world itself. Just as water flows to fill its basin, so does magic flow over the land, growing weak at times and strong at others.

This flowing magical energy is called Aether. It is the living, breathing incarnation of chaos, foaming on the banks of the material world, rushing around some places and pooling in others, a wind of energy drawn to places where its influence is most appreciated, and circumnavigating those places where it is rarely drawn. The flows of Aether form a network of magical energy buzzing along invisible currents, carrying the wills of magi in its wake.

Where these flows join, the greatest magi are born. One such place is an otherwise desolate crag on the north coast of Narthrall where the Obsidian Tower claws at the harsh, dark sky. Here, the Void stream joins the Trans-Garadic Shade flow, creating one of the most dangerous persistent Aether storms in the world. It was in this place that Demiar Ebonblade was born, raised, and taught the depths of the dark magics the draphen covet.

Araxian magic theory represents the most complete understanding of the workings of this mysterious energy. It works by building up from simple atomic concepts rather than the traditional approach of dividing spells into schools. In this, it hits much nearer the mark of understanding just what is going on when a magus bends the Aether flows to her whim.

The theory consists of the so-called Aspects, Axioms, and Axes. (The fact that these three words all begin with “A” is incidental – bear in mind that these are the English words for them, and no one on Delgar speaks English.) An Aspect is a form which a spell takes. For instance, the Guardian’s Aspect is defensive, while the Archer’s Aspect is offensive. The two Axioms are Order and Chaos. The Axes are Energy, Luminescence, and Substance. The combination of an Axiom and an Axis produces a foundational element – Earth, Air, Fire, Ice, Light, or Shadow.

The type of spellcaster a person is is related to what components they invoke in spell creation. A person who binds all three – an Aspect, and Axiom, and an Axis – together to form a specific spell is galled a magus, plural magi, or similarly mage, magicker, etc. A caster who manipulates elements directly, whose spells have no Aspect, is called an elementalist, a shaman, or a feral. Ferals are widely feared, because their magic is thought to be uncontrolled and changes shape fluidly during channeling. Specialists are casters whose magics lack an Axiom, being bound to Balance, between the two extremes of Order and Chaos. Healers, druids, and enchanters are all specialists. Many more exist.

The last, and most extraordinary caster type is the almost-mythical savant. A savant, also called a conduit or a channeler, is exceedingly dangerous, as typically they are utterly overwhelmed by their powers and have incredible capacity for destruction. Savants channel an Axiom directly, having neither Aspect nor Axis to their invocations. A channeler is said to be as likely to turn a drought into a flood as they are to turn a village into a crater. Most savants unintentionally self-immolate at some point, typically the instant the floodgates of their power are opened. The last savant in memory who was able to control her powers was known simply as The Nameless Girl. She was responsible for returning Chaos magic to Delgar after the Great Imbalance caused by the Rule of Order, enforced by Eversummer Tower for centuries. She single-handedly leveled the Tower and its armies and exposed the dangers of imbalance caused by the Rule.

Balance is a central concept to Delgar magic. All invocations must ultimately be balanced, and when significant imbalances arise, savants are born. A magus must balance his or her own spells, as their lack of axiomatic and axial affinity means that they will suffer ill opposite effects otherwise. For instance, a magus who casts an unbalanced fireball might suffer hypothermia or frostbite. They trade an increased risk of personal harm and a decreased overall ability to invoke magic for increased flexibility. An elementalist does not balance his or her own magic – instead, an elementalist’s magic is balanced by other elementalists of opposing affinity.

When the overall balance of magic gets pushed too far in one direction or the other, it creates great potential energy in the opposite direction and decreases the potential in its own. When Chaos mages were hunted to extinction in AY 700-1200, the powers of Order magic, as they were used without balance, waned to the point that the powers of magi from centuries prior began to pass into the realm of mythology. New students at the Eversummer Tower could scarcely conjure a light to read by. Dependence on ancient magical artifacts became widespread. Just as a bowstring becomes harder and harder to stretch as it is stretched to its limit, so does magic of one axiom wane as it strays from balance.

As the overall power of one axiom wanes, the other builds proportionally. Those who feared Chaos magic so were, in effect, directly empowering it. Their actions, superficially in opposition to Chaos magic, were fueling the fire that would eventually consume them. When the Nameless Girl managed to survive to rein her powers, she inherited half a millennium of stored Chaos energies. Stopping her was a task all the world was not capable of. She did more than destroy Eversummer Tower, though. She created Towers all over the world to train local casters in the arcane arts. Today, the world of Delgar is again in a state of relative balance, and few savants are born.

In most of the world, Shadow magic is not known. Narthrall is one of few places where Shadow magic is practiced openly, and the draphen are often seen as evil as a result. The draphen rely on Shadow magic to defend themselves against the monsters that inhabit Narthrall. Because its opposite, Light, is practiced freely in most of the world, the draphen gain a considerable advantage in power due to the imbalance. In addition, Narthrall is bathed in the Trans-Garadic Shade flow, which is the strongest Shadow-aligned Aether stream in the world. In the rest of the world, so-called shadecasters are the closest thing to a savant most people will ever meet. Most are thieves or assassins, operating on a bare understanding of the craft due to its obscurity and prohibition.

In Ao Gin, the desert city where the luminants practice their art and light-weaving is as common as basket-weaving, the Ao Delta spreads over the parched landscape. These streams of Light Aether empower Ao Gin’s world-renown healers to perform their amazing feats of restoration. The light and fire shows put on at night by the luminants of the Incandescent Tower draw travelers from all over Garad and beyond.

This post is still pretty raw, but I’ve been cooking it so long that I figure I should get it out there anyway. I’ll leave it where it is now and work on expanding these ideas in subsequent posts.

Delgar Bestiary – Cwara

Published on November 19, 2009 in Delgar. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Yesterday I mentioned cwara. Today I’ll expand upon that in what is to be the first in a series of bestiary entries.

Cwara are somewhat like turtles and somewhat not. They are amphibious reptiles, though more at home in the water, whose backs and heads are armored in thick plates similar to those of dinosaurs. There are many species of cwara across Delgar, from the small tropical varieties known for their bright colors and long spine-like plates that inhabit the epeiric seas of the equatorial islands of Aun Ceartu to their large, squat cousins who dwell in the caverns of Narthrall, known for their dark hues and remarkable tolerance to Void Aether, for which their toxin, capable of conferring that benefit, is prized.

While some species of cwara are poisonous, such as the Narthrallian cave-dwelling uocari, most are not. The tropical varieties form a staple food source of Aun Ceartu, while the eggs of the migratory shallows-dwelling adiapa are a seasonal delicacy in Araxia, when they come to nest on the beaches in southern summer.

All species of cwara are relatively commonplace, with the extreme exception of the uocari, which have been hunted to the brink of extinction by the draphen, who, in calling Narthrall home, are constantly in danger from their poison as well as dependent on it for protection against the voidborn.

Uocari are also eaten in Narthrall, though the practice is forbidden by the Ascended due to the value of their toxin. Their skin, dried and smoked, while all but inedible, is desired for its hallucinogenic properties. Their salivary glands, where the toxin is produced, are used to brew the tea that forms the core of the Ascension rite.

The last species of note is matarca, the so-called giant cwara. These massive beasts are more common than uocari, though less often encountered as they live in the deep ocean. The sheness are said to domesticate them, but what the sheness do or don’t do has always been the realm of wild speculation. Matarca are famed for bringing down ships at sea, but most folk prefer to view such fish stories with skepticism. Matarca rarely come within viewing distance of a landmass.

I apologize for all the italicized words, but Delgar is, of course, not Earth, and so its names for things are, understandably, not from languages we would recognize. I have consistently used Delgar’s common tongue, Araxei, in rendering this. It is a brief summary of the cwara of Delgar, true, but I think I hit all the important points.

I have introduced a lot of new topics here which I will expand on in the coming days. I hope some of these have piqued your interest.

On the Nature of Delgar

Published on November 18, 2009 in Delgar. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Delgar is like a room with no doors and many different windows. Inside are a few basic tenets which are absolutely true, but the different windows provide a variety of ways of looking at the same things.

In this post, I’m going to try to illuminate those core truths as well as touch on one of the manifold ways the diverse societies of Delgar approach them. I will switch tenses quite often, as my words slip in and out of character depending on whether I’m recalling something or analyzing it. Hopefully this won’t cause too much confusion.

The Loceri

Delgar is a world of many cultures, and each of these has its own way of looking at the one reality laid out before it. For centuries, the forces of the world were described in various mutually exclusive contexts. To one people, the morning star Ao was the flaming shield of a great deity, taking its name from his. To another, the continents were heaped up on the shells of massive cwara adrift in a boundless ocean, driven on by the earth-mother Lakaia. To yet another, the moon Eua was the savage realm of the dead, governed by its eponymous mistress of the hunt.

Delgar, in fact, is not one world at all. It is a word that means “the world” in the sense we use it in ours. It refers to all that is, was, and ever will be. It is not so much the world as it is the entire universe. To the most influential of ancient peoples, the Loceri, Delgar was the word for everything in existence – but not, strictly speaking, the spaces between them. Delgar was not the bits and bobs from which the planets and stars and all life are constructed, though – not atoms, though the people didn’t know of those, of course… Delgar was, as the word is held to have meant, the pattern of these things. Just as our same twenty-six letters can be plucked judiciously to wright words of hate or of love, so were all things merely a consequence of the way their components were connected.

To the Loceri, they were Delgar as surely as the earth, the moon, and the stars.

It was in this state of mind that the Loceri laid down, so long ago, those thoughts that led to the foundation of magical theory. It is true that only recently has that term been coined and its precepts set down, but these are the inheritors, not the progenitors, of great truth.

The sun, Ao, the Loceri postulated, was no great god wielding fiery shield. It was a force of nature. It served, however, as a profound symbol for certain realities of Delgar, and most keen among these were Fire and Light.

The moon, Eua, they went on, could not possibly be the resting place of the dead. The dead were observed to go nowhere except back into the earth, so clearly this too must be symbolic. In that vein, Eua served quite handily as an icon of two other concepts, Ice and Shadow.

Lastly, dispelling the obviously ludicrous notion that the landmasses lay on the backs of cwara, the Loceri suggested that Lakaia, the earth, was a symbol of the last two primal realities, Earth and Air.

But what, then, was the ocean? The Loceri had not set out to assign to every domain a symbolic anchor, but the question simply demanded an answer. The oceans were places of incredible violence without cause: storms and waves drowning the coasts and crushing vessels at sea, incredible monsters, and torrential downpours. They were also, conversely, thought to be the place where life had originated. The Loceri had long studied the fossils of things long gone from the world, and that study had made it manifestly clear that life had changed over time, originally from oceanic forms, becoming increasingly complex over time and eventually moving onto land.

The oceans, the Loceri decided, were the domain of Chaos, that entropic spark which foamed at the boundaries of all orderly things, evinced in the wearing down of rocks in a stream, the origin of life, and the essence of all things where inertia gives way to activity.

In opposition to Chaos, the Loceri observed the reality of Order, that contrary condition deep within the confines of solid things, the impregnability of diamonds against the reckless march of time, and those necessary constants of existence, like the timeless rules of mathematics, logic, and physics.  Order had no true place in the physical world, so its domain, they said, must be the space between things. In the ultimate nonexistence between this and that, Order finds its most comfortable state. Nothing, the Loceri figured, could be more orderly than the absolute nothingness of the Void.

The six realities of the more familiar world – Light, Shadow, Fire, Ice, Air, and Earth – were seen to lean to one side of the Order-Chaos continuum or the other, even as they shared a respectable balance. Light, Fire, and Air are, of course, more chaotic forces than their counterparts, in order, Shadow, Ice, and Earth.

Naturally, Ice is not so much ice as it is cold, as is Fire not really fire but heat. They are opposite extremes of a similar nature, for which the best examples were arguably fire and ice. This polarization had clear echelons of strength. The least polarized were thought to be Earth and Air. These two realities are different very inertly: one is solid while the other is vaporous. More strongly opposed were Fire and Ice, which actively compete. Stronger still was the opposition between Light and Shadow, which are physical opposites, and strongest of all was the disparity between Order and Chaos, which are mutually antithetical.

It is from these prolific forebears that we inherit the most central of our ideas of the nature of reality: that we are as much a part of the world as is the sky or the sea, that profound order can come from utter chaos as surely as immaculate peace can erupt into unimaginable violence, that the whole of existence is built up of rather few and simple concepts, and that, perhaps most critically, the only thing separating us from the stars is a twist of the pattern that is Delgar.