Learning magic the hard way

You want to, what now? To learn the ways to make spells? To become a wizard? Pfah!

Ah, you see, the fools who call themselves "wizards" in the Isen School, they'll tell you that it's all an exact technique, they think the formulas and the rituals they stole from the ruins of the empire are all they need. In quadrata numerus primus de ordo Averrinae, in triangulus numerus secundus de ordo Academae - fools, all of them! Do they not realise that the imperial scripts and codicils they so treasure are themselves bastardised copies of the originals from the Hidden Isles, forged when the empire marched over and burned the mystery cults to the ground? 

Of course not. You won't find a single one of their so-called high wizards or lore-masters who can even tell you the history of practical magic. Theirs is not curiosity, but a lust for power. They do not seek to understand, but rather to master, and in doing so ensure that they will fail at both. A child given a toy does not ask where it comes from, after all. Their so-called metrics and laws have limits, limits that the mystics taught and respected, limits even the imperial mages understood, limits that they have forgotten. Yea, with every forced spell they channel the fabric of the weave wears a little thinner, I shouldn't be surprised if their entire sky-fortress disappears into nullspace one day or the other in the near future.

Still want to learn magic, eh? Fine. But don't call me a wizard. I'm not fool enough to misuse the old names like that. You know, the word wizard used to mean someone too smart for their own good. Wizards disappear, wizards are cast out, wizards get burned at the stake, and for good reason. When a wizard goes bad, they take entire nations and islands with them. Me, I'm in no hurry to go any time soon.

A spell is like a pot, you see. How big is a pot? Should it be clay, or copper, or steel? Should it have handles, decorations, ridges to mark the water level? The answer is, it depends. Do you want your pot for water? For wine? For cooking? All of this is your decision - except, of course, when it is not. If the pot is too thin it will shatter, if the pot is made of copper and placed in a furnace it will melt, if the pot has holes it will leak. The making of a pot is a negotiation, one that occurs silently between yourself, your needs, and the elder laws of the universe. So too the making of a spell. And remember, if it ever comes to choosing between your wishes and the elder laws, the elder laws always win. You cannot negotiate with a hurricane.

To understand the elder laws, you must first observe what you wish to manipulate. To summon fire, first light a candle. In time you will understand the comings and goings of the fire spirits, the ways in which the lamplighter makes his benediction known. Then you must meditate upon them, and find the secret language by which all things are described. No, I can't tell you the language. If you're of the right talent, they will come to you. Once you see it you will realise that magic runes and elven script and even the bastardised imperial longhand of the Isen wizards are all the same thing. You may find some other notation easier, I don't know. Do what suits you. Do what feels natural.

The next step is to understand the distance between what is and what you wish to be. Where there is no light, you wish for light. Where there is stone, you wish for flesh. Where there is a lock, you wish for a key. The difference is what you must bridge with your art. Aye, it's easiest to just do the thing by hand first until you find out what the difference is. It's harder than you think. The first time you make a pebble shatter with magic will feel like a triumph. 

But it's still not over yet. the spell now lives half in your head and half in this mess of observations and notes that you've built up. Then you must refine your words, over and over, until they cease to be symbols and the higher thing, the spell-construct, descends from the Theoretic plane and enters your mind. This will be brutally uncomfortable, mind. Many a magic user-to-be has died trying to intuit their first six-hundred dimensional eigenconstruct. I never said learning magic was easy.

After all that, if you still have your wits about you, I'd say you have a spell.

One last piece of advice. Magic, well, the more you learn about it, the less you want to use it. Even if you're a first rate talent, especially if you're a first rate talent, you'll know how strange a thing magic is. The mystery cults allowed themselves to be wiped out by brutes with spears and bows, rather than fight back with fireballs and lightning bolts. Think on that, if you want to keep your skull intact and your family safe.

The Great Song of the Universe (Mechanic)

This mechanic is intended to be used in systems where death is common, life is short, and greed explicitly rewarded. In some sense this is not a mechanic at all. The players should not see it, and they should definitely not be optimising for it. However, if your players are trying, despite the will of the dice and the laws of the power, to be decent people, this may be a good way of reminding them of certain things which were once known in the great world of A'Tuin, but forgotten in the cruel and harsh times that have passed since that golden age.

Every time the players go out of their way to help someone, take on a responsibility at a great personal cost, or turn down power in the name of goodness, make a roll with 2d6. If they have a habit of doing this, add 1. If they are doing this for selfish reasons, subtract 1.

9-: Nothing happens. 

10-11: Roll on the Odd Happenings chart.

12+: Roll on the Odder Happenings chart.

Make any adjustments to your notes as necessary. Do not tell the players that you have made these adjustments.

Odd Happenings (1d8)

1. The weather is nice for the next 1d4 days.
2. They run into an old NPC that they have since forgotten. They are helpful.
3. Their next reaction roll is made more favourable by one tier.
4. There is fresh food and water left behind at the next camp they find, or supplies they sorely need.
5. A grudge they have acquired is lessened, without their knowledge.
6. The difficulty of their next save or check is lowered.
7. The next fight they are in, their enemies automatically fail their next morale check.
8. Skip a random encounter roll.

Odder Happenings (1d8)

1. An NPC decides to do something to help the players without their knowledge.
2. An acquired debt, grudge, or enmity is forgiven.
3. Their next desperate scheme or action with a one-in-a-million chance somehow works.
4. The villains are hindered in some way the players are not involved in, or a piece of good news reaches the players that they are not involved in.
5. The next massive enemy force they fight is wounded already and fails their next morale check.
6. Someone who could hinder the players does not.
7. In a place of danger, the players find respite from an unlikely source.
8. Do something nice for them.

'Now Théoden son of Thengel, will you hearken to me?' said Gandalf. 'Do you ask for help?' 

He lifted his staff and pointed to a high window. There the darkness seemed to clear, and through the opening could be seen, high and far, a patch of shining sky. 

'Not all is dark. Take courage, Lord of the Mark; for better help you will not find. No counsel have I to give to those that despair. Yet counsel I could give, and words I could speak to you. Will you hear them? They are not for all ears. I bid you come out before your doors and look abroad. Too long have you sat in shadows and trusted to twisted tales and crooked promptings.' 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

The Giftschrank (Dungeon description)

TOMORROW and TOMORROW and TOMORROW
Creeps in this petty pace from DAY to DAY

 <Sound of a button press. Machine clicks. Vocator input track spooling.>

Electric garamond, SEBASTIAN
Deep in the shadow of the MOONLIT CLAY

-- Recorded Analects of the Semiotic-Symbolic Vocator, Sc. III. XV

The Giftschrank is where banned books go to die. 

The officers of the Public Health and Safety Directorate come in the night, between 8pm and 11pm, though sometimes their work keeps them out until the witching hour. They are unfailingly polite, their black trench coats do not mind the rabble on the street. They will always show you their badge and their Extraordinary Warrant authorised under the Defense of National Safety Statute. They will take pains to explain the consequences if you do not cooperate fully and willingly.

Very few find it in them to resist. After all, these are bookshop owners, literary types, poet wannabes, tenured professors in the capital. They can talk of bravery and resistance in their book clubs and seminars, but when the call comes they are so eager to comply that for some time they cannot bear to look themselves in the mirror. Sometimes, when the call comes during some gentle soiree, they must even show their true colours in front of their assembled guests. Then, inevitably, they convince themselves in time that they could have done nothing, that refusal would have mean prison or worse, and most of the time that is true. 

When everything is done the officer leaves a printed affidavit to be signed and sent to the relevant Directorate office in three working days. The books go into the van, into special bookcases with metal shutters and numbered padlocks. (The unmistakeable callsign of the Safety Officer is the jangling of their many keys.) Then the long journey begins to the outskirts of the capital, to the angular concrete fortress they call the Giftschrank, the poison cabinet.

The republic no longer conducts book-burnings. If necessary, excess copies of collected books are mulched, but the policy is always that at least two copies of any book must be kept for archival and evidentiary purposes in the Restricted Document Holding Facility. This is the official name of the sprawling brutalist tumour that at night looms over the wasting grass. Exposed concrete stairways wind up a massive ziggurat-like structure, manned with a circle of watchtowers and surrounded by secondary expansion silos connected to the main building by covered tunnels. It is a nightmare of knowledge, every dangerous and seditious thought contained within a massive barbed-wire hexagon. They say that the foundation is rigged with explosives, in the event of a catastrophic security failure.

Sometimes, abridged or corrected editions of particularly well-known but problematic works are created with vocators and circulated in bookstores. This creates a healthy amount of confusion in the general public about the exact state of censorship within the nation. During this process it is often necessary to consult the original copies, for certain stylistic elements as well as to avoid unnecessary redactions. The rewriters employed by the Literary Bureau are careful and conscientious types. Often they are assigned to work on some of their favourite authors from their university days. Sometimes, an external auditor or reference source must be summoned. This is a possible way in.

Menial staff are also employed for the purposes of cleaning, accounting, and general maintenance. The interior of the Giftschrank is not unlike that of a library, and has similar needs. They are not given keys to the bookshelves and are searched on the way in or out. Still, very little care is given to the janitors, who are presumably too feeble to understand what they are often inches away from reading. This is a possible way in.

A forward assault on the facility is possible, but costly. The guards will shoot those who approach without authorisation after a warning. It will take blood and sweat, but this is a possible way in.

Once inside, the facility is a maze of concrete stairwells, opaquely labelled shelves, and administrative offices. Guards patrol in seemingly random patterns and aides rush to and fro with requisition slips from the writers underground. The archives are also periodically re-catalogued, copied and stored electromechanically for the production of novel vocator designs. The building works through the night. There is a cafeteria and several break rooms. The coffee is less bad than you think. The shelves mock you with their shutters and locks.

Why are you here? For a book? For a memento? To rescue a writer you once had respect for? To destroy something forever? To burn this building to the ground?

Whatever it is, make sure you don't get caught. The basements extend many floors beneath the ground.

Stand Tall and Proud (Combat System)

Stand Tall and Proud

This combat system modifies Into the Odd, Cairn, or another similar system.

If you go knowingly into combat, roll 1d6 for your HP value. If you are surprised or caught off guard, start with 0 HP.

Gain 1 extra HP for each of the following:

• If you slept well last night.
• If you are in good health (No injuries).
• If you are not starving, weak, or distracted (No status effects).
• If you are young and strong (>15 STR).
• If you are wily and quick (>15 DEX).
• If you are of iron will (>15 WIL).

If you are in single combat and not surprised or off guard, gain 3 extra HP for each of the following:

• If you have fought your enemy before.
• If you have a learned technique or weapon which counters that of the enemy.
• If you know your enemy's fighting style.
• If you know your enemy's history and hometown.
• If you loved your enemy, once.

And Lose The Restraining Hand of Mercy

Each round of combat you can choose to attack, dodge, or gambit. Each action is associated with an ability score: attack (STR), dodge (DEX), gambit (WIL). All combatants decide simultaneously and reveal their choice. Then they must make a save with the relevant ability score. 

If you roll under your ability score, that is your initiative. Combatants take their turns from highest to lowest, with ability scores breaking ties. If ability scores are tied the combatants roll 1d6 with higher going first. 

If you roll above your ability score you fumble. Your initiative is 1, but you can still take your action as planned.

Actions:

If you attack, you deal your weapon's damage to an opponent of your choosing.

If you dodge, you can either avoid the next attack, or escape melee combat.

If you gambit, you can either recover 1d4 HP or take some cunning and complicated action in the environment. If you choose to take an action that targets an enemy, the enemy must make an appropriate saving throw or suffer the consequences.

For Fate Has Crowned Thee Immortal

If you lose all HP any remaining damage goes on a wound table of the DM's choosing. This is a new injury for the purposes of HP calculation in future combats.

Alternatively, if you reach 0 HP you are on the ground, dying. Any more damage will finish you off.

The Cure (Setting Vignette)

A vignette for a setting/game that I want to eventually flesh out. Inspirations: The Matrix, 1984, writings of Václav Havel, X-Men-style superheroes.

I

The apartment block is run-down and grey, just a standard-issue concrete-glass prefab in the outskirts of the city. Even the doorbell is government-issue. The plaque, once something like brass but destroyed by time, neglect, and vandalism, might have once said "Victory Estates". Underneath is a laminated plastic warning notice:

BEWARE - RATS

There is a CRT television in the corner of the flat, next to thick yellow curtains and in front of floral yellow wallpaper. The psychologist looks like Sigmund Freud, his hands are tapping on a brown book whose cover is in Cyrillic. On the TV you can see the fuzzy silhouette of a spaceship ready for launch. You ask to sit and watch the launch together before you start.

You loved the launches, as a boy. The roar coming out of the speakers is strange and distant, and you can’t tell if the therapist is actually watching you or the screen. His gaze is languid, like he has all the time in the world.

“I assume you did not come here to talk about rockets,” he says eventually, so you tell him about the dreams.

“I understand. It is a difficult time to be young. I have seen many… many cases of such dreams.” With fumbling fingers he pulls open a cabinet under the TV, revealing rows and rows of pill bottles with foreign names. As he fumbles with the pillbox you see something propped up in the cabinet such that it was directly under the lip of the television, a sliver of a note with thin, broken handwriting.

Careful - they are watching through the screen.

He closes the drawer without saying anything. The pills are silver-blue, almost too clean for the room you're in. Two a day. Antipsychotic. As he does this you notice that the book he is holding has almost fallen open. He tells you to follow him as he gets a prescription slip, then he shows you to the door. Framed against the heavy steel gate he opens the book as if to show you some notes, standing so that the screen only sees his back.

The book is hollow and there is an envelope inside. It’s labelled with the same handwriting as before:

This is all we can do for you now.

You quietly pocket the envelope as you ask him about his career and the weather. He’s been a national psychologist for twenty years, twenty-one come October.

II

On the way back in you stare out of the bus window as concrete gives way to grass, brick, and then steel. The metropolitan interior you see outside the window looks like a model out of a city builder game, polished marble statues perfectly braced against new international skyscrapers. Under a nest of CCTV cameras you see one of those massive stock tickers that you thought only lived in movies. Everything, everywhere, all at once, data streaming in from New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo. And, in the background, over and over again:

These premises are under video surveillance for your safety. This scheme is operated by…

At home you open the envelope. It’s a thick cluster of papers, photocopied and poorly scanned. Some of them look like they’re from the 80s. Some of them look like screenshots from websites with long strings of alphanumeric characters as the address. You pick one up.

THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS

You pick another one up.

Report on manifestations of atypical physiological and neurochemical behaviour in youth under stress incl. “savant syndrome”

And then you see it. A handwritten letter amongst the ephemera. The handwriting is different.

If you are reading this, you are one of us. The dreams are not just dreams. You have the potential to change everything.

Hold Court in Hermeneutic Asphodel (Class: Scholar)

The Cloak-and-Sword compel souls that seek a life beyond the cold rules of caste and class. Often people imagine that such folk must be adventurers, wanderers, cutthroats at worst and pilgrims at best. But there are other ways to violate the laws of modesty. Some find excellence in the arts of the mind.

Class: Scholar

Start with a post in a university, monastery, or abbey. Depending on the wealth of your host institution, this can mean a sinecure for life or a roof over your head so long as you have a good hand for copying out old books. You can be of the cloth (a monk or ordained clergyman, with all the commitments and oaths that implies) or not. If not, your options for advancement are limited. You are always literate in the local and official languages. This means that you can read words out loud and transcribe words into text, with a good working vocabulary and the ability to parse and form grammatically correct sentences. You will also take a discipline, an academic specialty: Numeracy (ability to do arithmetic), History (either regional or imperial history), Doctrine (church scripture and religious ritual), Grammar (oratory and writing skill), or Philosophy (either concerning politics, logic, or naturalism).

Initial Posting

If you want, roll 3d6 to determine your initial post:

3-6: Outskirts of Propriety
7-8: Town School or Church
9-11: Monastery, Nunnery, or Hermitage
12-14: Urban Academy or Gymnasium
15-17: University or Cathedral-school
18: High Stations

Outskirts of Propriety: You are the student of a hermit in a cave, scribe for a retired alderman, or the procurator for an anchoress in a small village. Your education is ad-hoc, often improvised, and probably heretical in more than one aspect. You share in the esoteric beliefs of your teacher, and cannot easily find a posting elsewhere using what you have learned here. Still, there are benefits to being taught free from the constrictions of official doctrine. For one, your education stands a chance of intersecting with lived reality. Choose any discipline. You hold espirit for your teacher.

Town School or Church: In these enlightened times any town with more than a hundred souls probably has a school of some sort, and definitely a church. If you are lucky, your town is host to a beguinage where you can learn useful trades as well as scripture from beguines or berghards. If you are unlucky, your days will be spent as an improvised record-keeper, scribe, and amanuensis for the local church or town officials. Still, if you perform well there's often a chance of being offered a scholarship to the city, or a chance to join an order of the cloth. Your discipline is numeracy. If you were taught by beguines or berghards, you also know the basics of a trade.

Monastery, Nunnery, or Hermitage: You are either a lay scribe to or a member of an order who live in seclusion. Your days are spent in prayer, reflection, idle hypothesizing, and furthering the preservation of important texts by copying them. Sometimes, you scrape off useless books from the valuable parchment they are bound to, such that you can overwrite it with more useful text in the scriptorium. You live in vague antagonism to the towns nearby and the religious and temporal authorities above you: too independent to be subjugated, too useful to be annihilated, taking tithes from the farmers and orders for books and scripts from nobles. Your discipline is grammar.

Urban Academy or Gymnasium: You live and study in a great city of the empire, a centre of commerce and moral decay. You keep your student's tonsure so that you are not subject to temporal laws when you get into a drunken brawl and are hauled before the city magistrate. Of all the posts this one is the most easy to escape. Of all the posts this one is the most likely to teach you nothing. You start with no discipline, and take on a vice.

University or Cathedral-School: The greatest sites of learning in the realm, sponsored by regents and founded by dead kings. Here the locus of power is within reach. Students here act like nobles, often because they are descended from nobles. What is debated here may, in time, become law or church doctrine. Be careful and courteous, and you too can one day sit on a solemn wooden throne to eat great feasts of flesh and blood. Your discipline is philosophy or doctrine.

High Stations: Beyond even the University of Saunt-Theresia (mater scholarum, mater philosophorum) are the three Great Schools: The Imperial Academy in Widdernmark, the Court of His Revealed Excellency the Emperor at the Capitol Mount where He was borne, or the Cathedral-school of the Great Fountain of the Numinous Divine. Here the highest matters of policy and scripture are but bread and butter, fodder for demonstrations of wit and lunchtime chit-chat. Here we learn the hollowness of words and letters, as men twist them into pretty patterns in service of power. Choose any discipline. You hold esprit for the emperor.

The Path to Acclaim

Working in your post often involves researching or resolving academical questions. An assignment will usually combine 1d6+3 such questions with a deadline, usually in a week's time. As you climb the ladder to higher and higher postings, the number of questions in each assignment will increase (1d6+3, 2d6, 2d6+3, 3d6...). Failure to complete too many assignments will lead to your expulsion from your post or your order. Success may mean promotion up the cursus honorum, going from town schoolmaster to rector of a college to advisor to the Imperial Court.

The Path to Wisdom

When you make a esprited attempt to attack some academical question, make an esprit reaction roll against the Spirit of Wisdom herself using Intelligence instead of Charisma. This is an Academics roll.

• If you roll 2 or less, you are frustrated. Lose 2d6+3 hours of work and 1d6 HP.
• If you roll 3-5, you are lost, wasting 2d6+3 hours of work and 1d4 HP. If you want to answer your question, you must become frustrated.
• If you roll 6-8, your question is answered after 2d6+3 hours of work and 1d4-1 HP.
• If you roll 9-11, your question is answered after 2d6+3 hours of work. 
• If you roll 12 or more, the question is answered after 1d6+3 hours of work, and you can see whether it was the correct question to ask in the first place.

Frustration

When you are frustrated, you make all checks and saves with disadvantage. Frustration goes away after 1d6+3 hours of non-strenuous activity and smelling the daisies, or a good night's sleep. If you make any more attempts to work while frustrated, you make any Academics roll at -1. If you become frustrated again, roll 1d6 on the following table.

1-2: You become obsessed.
3-5: You become enraged. Break a quill or scratch some parchment, or go outside and howl at the uncaring skies. Until you lose your frustrated status, further Academics rolls take an additional -1 penalty.
6: The Spirit consoles you in your distress. Clear frustration. Your next Academics roll is done with +2.

Obsession

Once you become obsessed, you can no longer choose whether to work on the problem or not. You will make Academics rolls until you either lose all HP and become unconscious or until you solve the problem and make a breakthrough. If you make a breakthrough, you now hold esprit for the Spirit of Wisdom. You gain +1 permanent Intelligence for the purposes of Academics rolls and can no longer voluntarily leave the vocation of Scholar.

The City of Mind

Once you have made a breakthrough, the higher arts are known to you. In addition to resolving Academics rolls, you can enter the City of Mind. Here you can mythologise your struggle against questions in geometry and ars poetica by turning them into literal monsters. Death in the City of Mind ejects you from intense concentration, costing you 1d12 HP. Triumph over these monsters means that you can answer 1d3 questions in one go, and you earn one Insight.

Insight

Something lurks behind all these facile, surface-level problems. There is a greater issue, a greater rot which prevents you from seeing the heart of Truth. There is an order to the world, something which defies basic observation and challenges the reasonable animal to seek her out. Once you accumulate 6 Insight, the words of your colleagues and the happenings of the world begin to betray this special character. You begin learn the secrets of magic and spellcasting (Spending 1 Insight = 1 point, spells once discovered during adventures in the City of Mind cost points equal to their spell level) while possessing no magical talent at all. Once you accumulate 10 Insight, the connections are obvious. You gain knowledge in disciplines not your own, and surprise yourself with conclusions that you did not consciously reach. Once you accumulate 14 Insight, you can challenge any grandmaster in any field of study and begin to work on your Magnum opus, the great work that will reveal your higher learning to all.

Once you accumulate 20 Insight, you retreat permanently into the City of Mind and become a consort of the Spirit of Wisdom. They find your bed empty in the morning, one last manuscript on the bedside table. If you are lucky, some neophyte will dedicate their life to studying it, beginning the cycle anew.