Four kind of Magic

In the Beasts’ Nations, specific professions and specific animal people go hand in hand, at least stereotypically: the Snakes are innkeepers, the Ravens are moneychangers, the Bulls are longshoremen, the Cats are knitter and seamstress.
Sometimes is much more than a simple clichè: the Felinars (cat-folk) have a long and complex tradition connected to knitting, crocheting, and similar textile workings.
The real reasons for this “relationship” are unknown but there are some folk explanations.

The most credible is that the claws of felinar offer an advantage: every finger can become an additional needle to help perform complex stitching. This is true: many felinar knitters have techniques that involve a careful retracting and extending of the claws. Some professional felinar knitters even file the end of their claws as minuscule hooks and perform a form of free-hand crotcheting.
But a question remains: “what comes first”? Did their interest in stitching make them develop strategies involving claws? Or were the “availability” of claws the origin of such interest?

Another explanation starts from the assumption that knitting is a female activity, taken up girls. The story goes that the parents close their daughters home during the “romance season”. From late spring until the last days of summer, young men are on the prowl for lovers, and the young woman are more than willing to “concede” themselves. The girls, confined home during the summer nights, spend their nights at the window, knitting, waiting for a gallant to serenade them.

This is of course an exaggeration: the biological cycle of felines indeed makes them more inclined to relationships in the summer but it’s far from an uncontrollable urge (it’s more a mood, as they explain). Some parents are controlling but it’s not a diffuse custom to lock up the girls for a whole season barring them from social life and productive activity.

Also, there are some male knitting traditions that can not be explained by this colorful tale: felinar shepherds of the north-west are known for their wool sweaters, and in the city of Loghap crocheting is associated with the virile profession of the town guard.

There is also the far-fetch explanation of an innate connection between felinar and threads and therefore magic. This stems from the idea that the Mana Field is made of strands of energies and so an intrinsic desire to knot monodimensional shapes is an unconscious desire to manipulate the magical energies and so to cast spells. But most of the Felinar doesn’t see mana this way.

This is an old vision of things, disproved by the development in magic traditions. Seeing the Mana Field as a series of threads, strands and yarn is culturally determined: you have to be trained to see it like that as a way to make sense of the vague sensation opening your sense to magic. For example, bards sense magic as music, druids as smells and temperatures.

In the Beasts’ Nations rose another tradition that sees mana as animate beings. This arcane tradition is entwined with the religion of the Spirits’ Way, the main creed among animal people. The Mana Field is alive and sentient: casting a spell is not twisting mana in a shape to obtain an effect but it’s to ask a spirit to appear and do a task for you.

The “spirits’ paradigm” can be subsumed in the “strands’ paradigm” but there are differences in approaching magic in such different ways.

The Summoner’s Doilies are a good example of a magical practice naturally developed inside a tradition that would be counterintuitive in another tradition.
Some felinars knitters knit doilies as places “where the spirit like to come”: if you put a small offer, usually food, and ask with the right formula you can make a specific kind of spirit appear in the doily, and then it can do a thing for you.

One can see it as making a magic sigil and using it as a focus for a spell, with the help of magic formula and a chemical component. The strange thing is that even if one doesn’t believe in the “spirit paradigm” they will still see the spirit materialize ad a translucent energy construct

.One common doily is the one for calling the “salubrious mouse” a spirit that helps with simple ailments, like headaches or soreness.

Even people completely ignorant of magic can call a spirit this way, albeit unreliably. People with some experience, like Cleric and Wizards, would be more efficient in “convincing” the spirit to appear.

You don’t need special training in magic to knit a Summoners’ Doily, just in that specific craft. It’s one of a few examples of a magic object made by non-magic users, the other notable one being the Void Rugs of the Orc Kingdoms.

A Summoner Doily takes months to make: small errors in stitching, and even “errors” in the mantras recite during the knitting, can compromise all the work already done.

In this case, one has to unravel and start again.

The Mana Field is a vast sea of potentiality, amorphous energies waiting to become a reality. Mana is not something that exists but something that could exist.

The undefined nature of the Mana Field makes it elude the sense, and someone can only get the most fleeting impressions from it. Only an exceptional predispostion or a long and exhausting training can make one follow this impalpable thread of sensations to a whole new way of perceiving.

Bardic Magic revolves around the hearing. The Mana Field for a bard is like an immense orchestra constantly tuning. Every timbre of this wall of sound is linked to an aspect of magic, similar to how arcane wizards see mana in different colors.

A spell is heard like a song, a short melody, a dissonant chord: a form of organized sound.
Playing music in the real world will make the “sounds of mana” react and respond. Sometimes is the reverse, with the players following the pattern they encounter to enhance or stifle them.
The rules of this interaction among notes and “magical sounds” are obscure and full of contradictions, as all the laws of magic are, but the musical approach helps intuition and improvisation: a spell “out of tune” can be rearranged on the fly.

The timbres of mana are unique and not easy to describe, there are some parallelisms with the real-world instruments used to give an idea to the uninitiated and the laymen.

Substance — percussion, organic (drum, timpani, maracas, castanets)
Form — strings, plucked (guitar, clavichord, harp, mandolin)
Vitality — percussion, inorganic (bells, vibraphone, gong, triangle)
Spatiality — strings, bowed (violin, cello, hurdy-gurdy)
Cognizance — winds (flute, clarinet, trumpet, horn)
Metaphysics — voice (humming, singing, whistle

)It’s not necessary to use a similar timbre to the one associated with the mana prevalent for the effect desired. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it hinders: magic is like that, governed by unfathomable laws one can scratch the surface of with many trials and errors.

The bardic magic tradition takes its name from the bard of the Holy Infernal Empire, traveling musicians that offered entertainment as well as small magical services from town to town.
But they were not the only nomadic musicians: the Triton Troubadours of the Confederacy, the flute-playing errant monks of the Angelic Unison, the dwarven hurdy-gurdy beggars, the orcs’ whistling witches… all this tradition met and connected, creating a sort of “international standard” as well as a network of shared knowledge.

The hubs of this network of ideas are the colleges, places where adept to musical arts are welcome to stay, learn and teach. Some of them are institutional, like the Musical Academy of Astaroth, in the Empire; others are shrouded in hearsay and stories, like the marshes of Golkon, in the Southern Orc Kingdom, a desolate place where, if you find a Witch, she has to teach you a cursing melody.

With a recently renewed interest and trust in magic, more and more people are taking up the mystical arts, spell are more and more used in entertainment.
Now every musical show that can afford some decent bards will employ them to have “special effects”. It could be an opera, a religious celebration, a seasonal festival… everything can benefit from some dazzling lights and illusion scenery.
Of course, using magic for swaying the heart public is absolutely taboo. Nobody should charm their way to success! Usually, the public can tell: one can be mesmerized in liking a sonata but they will remember for what it was. Some bards go to look at the performance of fast ascending colleagues to be sure they haven’t found a way to cheat the public.

Bardic magic it is also mixing with other magic traditions, birthing new and interesting techniques.
The Angelic Unison is investing more and more in choral magic, using dozens of spellcasters to create large-scale effects, like quenching and tempering acres of land with one hymn.
In the Holy Infernal Empire, some “Audiomages” are trying to record sounds in a reliable way, usable to the non initiated. But also weaponizing songs through high-frequency pitch shifts and hyper-loud volumes.
In the beast nation “spirit charmers” are using melodies to contact new species of spiritual creatures.
The Gnomes’ Dune Druids can shape a stretch of desert to help the caravan using droning cello-like instruments and drum circles.

One of the most interesting development is the dwarven mix of Golem-building and instrument crafting.
Dwarven are renowned for their mechanical instruments, especially keyboards like virginal, spinet, harpsichord. Form that template, using the magical technique that makes golem understand orders, some artificers have developed “the thinking harpsichord”.
A melody played on such an instrument is like an idea put into a mind, after a while, the instrument will play an answer back, and a trained bard can then interpret the “answer song”. The questions can be the calculation of the optimal route for a voyage or the best path for a mineshaft, it can be an estimate on a future event or a conjecture about something past.

The Dwarves are famous for their constructs, magi-mechanical creation able to perform many different tasks.

The most common constructs are the Engines, used to move ships, chariots, cranes, drills. These constructs are pragmatic and blunt tools, but they are the backbone of dwarven society. Animal-less Caravans and Self-moving wagons allow the Dwarven league to expand in the vast and hostile Salt Desert, a place where beasts of burden have a hard time surviving. Similarly, mining, sea trading, and construction all benefit from the help of artificers and their creations.
But like all magic enterprises, constructs ( also known as golems) have onerous limitations. Firstly, constructs are expensive and time-consuming to build; furthermore, they need specialized engineers and handlers, with a decade of training.

The simpler, cheaper, and quicker to build the golems are, the more they need direct intervention by the artificer, behaving more like puppets than automatons. These constructs are analogous to foci, tools to help channel spalls, basically massive magical wands with limbs or wheels.
More complex constructs are easier to use and in need of less attention: clockwork mechanisms and other mechanical gears make them able to perform tasks ordered to them instead of being moved step by step by the handler. As one can imagine, this kind of golem is expensive in terms of time, expertise and materials needed: a complex semi-automated engine for a caravel could cost as much, if not more, than the rest of the ship. A simpler construct-engine could cost half or less, but it would need a trained artificer at the helm at all times (and their wages are not cheap).
The best golems are like a true-magical object: enabling anyone, even non-spell casters, to have them at their service. These are the masterpieces worthy of awe, the culmination of an artificer career: they take years, decades, to make and rarely are for sale.

The day-to-day research of most artificers is to find the optimal mean between the complex, easy-to-use, but expensive models and the simple, cheap, but demanding ones.
Other golem-engineers are trying instead to “crack the code” and find a way to make something simple, cheap, and manageable at the same time. The quest to “optimize” the creation of magical objects is a common goal to many arcanists around the world, but the dwarven ones have perhaps had more breakthroughs than most.

To finance their research, many artificers create novelties and trinkets to amuse the rich and the aristocrat of the world, but they don’t sell them in person.
Every big port city has at least a Mechanical Menagerie, a shop where to buy these small creations. They could be clockwork birds, able to sing dozens of songs, metallic cats that will hunt mice for you, bronze cubes able to record a memory. The cheapest ones cost like a nice dress, the more extravagant like a two-story house. The Mechanical Menageries trade also in Gnomish clockworks and mecha-magical items of all origins, trying to get money as they can: they are the commercial side of the artificer profession. The innovators and visionaries don’t dabble in material things.

Elves are known for their elemental magic: they can “summon” creatures made of natural elements to do their bidding.
Considering the development of magical theory, “summon” is an incorrect term: there are no outer planes from where these “spirits” can come.
Elementals are just temporary constructs, ephemeral golems, a form of embodied spells. Elves don’t believe they are calling spirits: they use this language as a metaphor, a relic from the times before the Collapse when the “true” elementals from other dimensions still existed.
This approach differs from the spirits’ magic of the Beast Folk: Minotaurs, Felinars, Nagas, and Kenkus, really believe in spirits (for them the Mana Field is a nascent spiritual world, the embryonic form of a new multiverse).
“Calling” on spirits, elemental or otherwise, is taxing in terms of consumed life energy, the vitality that fuels magic, but has a lesser cognitive load.
If you want to build a wall with a “normal” spell, you’ll have to concentrate on moving every brick, one by one. You can create a “meta-magical algorithm”, a spell made of other spells, but it can be a complex puzzle to solve.
A spirit can be seen as a cognitive shortcut to get a meta-magical template: instead of calculating the position and movement of the brick, you can “ask the spirit” to build the wall.
What’s strange is that the Elves create a physical body for the spells, sometimes shaping existing matter, sometimes creating it ex nihilo. At first glance, the energy needed to do so is just too much, vanishing all the advantages of this approach.
What makes elemental magic a viable option for the elves is their long lives and the environment where they live.
Elves have long lives and can easily reach 400 years, with some elders getting to 600. Every elf has enough time to learn at least some magic, and dedicated wizards can tune and refine their craft to an exquisite degree. Even an apparently “wasteful” approach, like elementalism, can be mastered at such a level it becomes efficient and effective. The elves don’t mind taking the “long road” to get to their goal, they even prefer it: it’s a way to distinguish themselves from the “mayflies”, the short-lived humanoids. They see themselves as guardian of ancient traditions, the bridge between the Old World that collapsed and the New World that will come: this millennium is just an interlude.
The other key factor of elementalism is to have “pure” elementals at hand. Pieces of the elemental planes ended on the world and retain part of their metaphysical proprieties: “pure elements” are reactive to magic, offering less resistance to manipulation and even aiding some spells. The Elven territory has some of the biggest and more useful elemental shards: magma, steam, and radiance.

The Magma Archipelago, a chain of ever erupting islands, is the mining and metallurgy center of the Elven Sultanate. There the lava masters “ask” the mineral, mainly the Pure Obsidian, to come to them and take the desired shape.

The Radiance Aurora shines perpetually on a vast region of sky near the pole, and the ability to gather its energy allows elves to explore the freezing climate.

The Steam Oasis are geyser-like vents, always spouting out elemental steam. Prosperous settlements thrive in the middle of the tundra thanks to the heat and healing proprieties of these stream springs.
“Vaporists” channel and distribute the steam around the walled city, shaping it in the form of servants that tend to the glasshouses. These gaseous farmers are the backbone of agriculture but can be mobilized as soldiers, using scalding hot jets as weapons.