Inheritance of Magic in Germany, and Book 4 Delays

With the Sigl Recycling series done and March coming to a close, here’s some general news.

An Inheritance of Magic has had its German language release as of last week.  There’s some good news about its sales numbers which I’m not allowed to share until they’re released officially on Monday, so I’ll save the details on this one for next week!

Unfortunately, Book #4 is going slower than I’d hoped.  I’ve had some family matters to take care of, and they’ve ended up taking up quite a lot of the early parts of this year.  My writing’s largely a one-man operation – the job involves both writing, rewriting, and editing, along with marketing- and business-related tasks, as well as maintaining and doing the posts for this website, and while I do get some help from my publishers and beta readers, the majority of the work is stuff that can’t really be delegated.  In general I’m fine with this, but it does mean that if I get called away, there isn’t anyone I can hand things off to while I’m gone.  So when something urgent happens and I have to spend a few weeks dealing with it (as I had to this March) everything pretty much grinds to a halt.  As a result, Book #4 is currently sitting at around 25,000 words, which, while it isn’t nothing, is quite a way behind where I need it to be if I want to make that end-of-summer deadline I set myself.  I’ll do my best to catch up, but I’m not sure how good my chances are.

Anyway, the good news from the point of view of you guys is that none of this is going to affect the release of book #3, A Judgement of Powers – all the work for that was completed a while ago and it’s lined up for its release on November 4th, 2025.

Next week’s post, as mentioned, is going to be on the German release of Inheritance of Magic.  After that we’re back into worldbuilding articles – the first will be a general one on measurements of strength in drucraft (skill, capacity, affinities) followed by a couple of articles on one of the topics you guys voted on earlier in the year, Essentia Capacity.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #33: Sigl Recycling (III)

General summary:

  • A sigl or piece of aurum can be ‘recycled’ into essentia, and from there converted into another sigl.
  • This process always involves a certain efficiency loss.

Factors that affect this efficiency:

Positive

  • High shaping skill:  Although attempts have been made to standardise the process, an experienced shaper will always waste less essentia than an inexperienced one.
  • Using pure aurum instead of a sigl:  Sigls are typically not designed to be reshaped.  A good shaper can turn them back into essentia anyway, but a lump of pure aurum is easier to work with.
  • Using a permanent Well and a sigl created at that same Well (ideal)
  • Using a permanent Well and a sigl of the same branch and of compatible essentia (still good)
  • Using a shaping chamber (not ideal, but often the only option available)

Negative

  • No Well or shaping chamber:  Almost always leads to a failed shaping.
  • Inexperienced shaper:  Commonly leads to a failed shaping.  However, a bad shaper with a Well or shaping chamber can do more than a good shaper with nothing.
  • Old sigl or aurum:  Very old sigls can be difficult to reshape, though sufficient skill/familiarity can compensate for this.
  • Cross-contamination from mixed essentia:  Mixing essentia sources with poor compatibility usually harms the sigl’s attunement, and may cause it to fail entirely.

Note 1:  Efficiency can never reach 100%.  There is always at least some loss.

Note 2:  Negative factors have a greater impact than positive ones.  One strong negative will usually outweigh any number of positives.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #32: Sigl Recycling (II)

The previous article in this series discussed how permanent Wells can be used as a way to ‘recycle’ sigls;  by returning the essentia within a sigl to the same or a compatible Well, the Well can eventually be used as a kind of reprocessing tool to turn one sigl into another.  This, however, is a slow and delicate process that requires a permanent Well, not to mention a significant amount of skill and patience.  So what if you don’t have a permanent Well, or the expertise to use it?

This was the position that the drucraft corporations of the UK found themselves in when they tried to move into the sigl recycling business.  Their solution was that if they couldn’t use existing Wells, they’d make their own.

Well Substitution

The idea of creating an artificial Well is not new;  given how valuable sigls are, the idea of producing A- and S-rank Wells on demand is of course one that drucrafters found enormously appealing.  Historical attempts to do this, however, mostly ended in disappointment.  Although drucraft researchers successfully pioneered ways to create artificial Wells with reasonably high success rates, they eventually were forced to realise that, in doing so, they were spending more resources than it would have cost them to use ones that existed already.  While their artificial Wells mimicked the retaining effect of natural ones, it was much harder to get them to fill.

However, once the Golden Age of drucraft research was underway and the demand for sigls continued to rise, some enterprising drucrafters realised that if all you wanted to do was recycle a sigl, an artificial Well that only retained essentia would work just fine.  From these early experiments came what are now referred to as ‘shaping chambers’.

Shaping Chambers

A shaping chamber is to a natural Well what a man-made reservoir is to a lake or a pond.  Since they’re typically built at locations convenient to the corporation in question, rather than in accordance with the flows of essentia across the land, they don’t fill naturally.  However, if you’re only planning to use a shaping chamber for recycling (which is generally all drucraft corporations use them for anyway) this isn’t a problem;  in fact, it’s an advantage, since it creates the equivalent of a ‘sterile environment’ with minimal cross-contamination.

Shaping chambers are, as the name suggests, usually built in the form of rooms.  The size depends on the chamber’s intended capacity.  A shaping chamber only intended to create D-class or D+ sigls might be the size of a living room, while one intended to create A- or S-rank sigls would be the size of a factory floor.  The edges of the chamber incorporate trace amounts of low-grade aurum, and the overall architecture is designed so as to draw essentia inwards to the centre.

Return on Investment

Even more so than in the rest of the drucraft world, shaping chambers are built for entirely economic reasons:  they exist to make their owner money, and nothing more.  Shaping chambers are thus rated on their ‘Three Cs’:  capacity (how large a sigl they can make), CP (conversion percentage, which measures how much of the input aurum is converted into a sigl as opposed to being lost in the recycling process), and cost (how expensive the shaping chamber is to build and maintain).  Higher capacity and higher CP means higher cost.  Shaping chambers are usually viewed as long-term investments expected to lose money over their first few years of operation but make it back thereafter.

Efficiency

Shaping chambers are relatively inefficient.  Even the best ones have a lower conversion percentage than a Well recycling a compatible sigl, and a much lower CP than a Well recycling a sigl made at that same Well.  And in practice, most corporations do not use ‘the best’ – high-grade shaping chambers are expensive, and this expense can only be justified if the corporation in question expects to use the chamber many, many times.  Since the bottleneck in sigl production is (as always) the supply of essentia, this means shaping chambers sit idle much of the time.  As a result, many corporations choose to economise on their shaping chambers, accepting a lower CP in exchange for a lower up-front cost.  Smaller drucraft corporations are likely to just avoid the whole business entirely and sell off their recycled sigls instead.

The main benefit to shaping chambers is how indiscriminate they are.  Someone hoping to use a recycled sigl to refill a permanent Well has to spend a significant amount of time matching the right Well to the right sigl, and even more time monitoring the Well to make sure the essentia is harmonising.  Shaping chambers, on the other hand, will accept basically any sigl or piece or aurum, no matter its origin.  The efficiency on the conversion may not be very good, but you’ll always get something.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #31: Sigl Recycling (I)

A common question asked by novice drucrafters is whether it’s possible to ‘recycle’ sigls.  Sigls are made of aurum, and there are well-known and well-tested drucraft effects that turn aurum back into essentia.  So in theory, shouldn’t it be possible to turn a sigl into essentia and then turn that essentia into a new sigl?

The short answer is ‘yes, but’.  In theory, it’s possible to sublimate and then re-shape a sigl, turning it into a new sigl and bypassing the Blood Limit and the Limit of Creation entirely.  In practice, there are some problems.

The First Problem:  Diffusion

The first issue that a would-be sigl recycler has to deal with is that free essentia does not behave like matter.  It behaves much more like a gas, which spreads from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure.  This means that as soon as a drucrafter begins to sublimate a sigl into free essentia, that free essentia does not wait around to be reshaped;  it immediately starts to spread outwards in all directions.  The drucrafter can try to gather this essentia, but this is rather like trying to gather up a spilt drink.

To turn this essentia back into a sigl, the drucrafter has to continually turn the free essentia into the construct and form of a new sigl, transferring it immediately from one state to the other without allowing it to diffuse.  Effectively this is like shaping a sigl (already a difficult task) while doing two other difficult tasks at the same time.  Even for an expert, this is close to impossible.  Usually the result is that somewhere over 90% of the essentia is wasted, what’s left isn’t enough to exceed the Faraday Point, and the sigl doesn’t work.

The Solution:  Wells

If essentia naturally diffuses, how can drucrafters shape sigls at all?  By doing it at Wells.  Wells are locations which attract essentia;  rather than diffusing, the essentia is pulled in, where it can be gathered and shaped.

(Some readers may note that the behaviour of Wells on Earth is very similar to the behaviour of a gravity well in space;  just as a gravity well draws in matter, a Well draws in essentia.  This resemblance is not surprising, since Wells and gravity wells are named after the exact same thing.)

So in theory, this allows a simple and straightforward method of recycling sigls.  Simply go to a Well, sublimate the sigl into essentia, then use the newly-filled Well to create a new sigl.  This, however, creates a new problem.

The Second Problem:  Admixture

There’s a reason that sigls are created at one Well, and not at multiple Wells.  The more uniform the essentia used to create a sigl, the better it works.  Making a Matter sigl out of a mixture of Matter and Life essentia is like trying to make a machine out of a mixture of metal and oak leaves.  The metal parts will work fine;  the machine as a whole, not so much.

Using matching Wells of course makes things much easier.  A Matter Well that’s been ‘refilled’ with Matter essentia is much more likely to produce a functional sigl.  However, even then, the variation in the essentia can cause difficulties.  Essentia from different Wells has subtle differences and reacts differently to shaping techniques;  the end result may work, but may also not.  As a general rule, the more powerful, delicate, or sophisticated a sigl is, the more likely it is that using mixed essentia inputs will cause it to fail.  Conversely, the weaker and cruder a sigl is, the better the chance that you can build one out of the essentia equivalent of scrap metal.

Of course, the best way to make sure that the essentia is compatible is to use a sigl (or piece of aurum) that came from that Well in the first place.  This can allow a Well’s essentia to be stored safely in aurum or sigl form, then returned to it when it’s time to shape a sigl.  With care, the efficiency loss from such conversion can be reduced to a very small percentage (though it can never be eliminated completely).

Logistics of Refilling Wells

Refilling Wells via sigls or aurum has both advantages, and disadvantages.

One advantage is that it allows a Well to be ‘over-filled’.  If you leave a D-class Well for long enough, it’ll eventually fill to capacity;  no matter how long you leave it thereafter, it won’t get any fuller.  However, if you make a D-class sigl, wait six months or a year, then come back, the Well will have filled again.  You can then turn the first D-class sigl into essentia and use the over-filled Well to make a sigl of D+ rank.  Houses of the UK are fond of using this particular technique in order to create sigls that are stronger than their Wells should theoretically be able to produce.

The drawback to this is that a D-class Well is rated D-class for a reason.  It won’t retain extra essentia forever, and the more you over-fill it, or the longer you leave it over-filled, the more of the essentia will be wasted.

Essentia in a Well naturally harmonises over time.  If a Matter Well is refilled with a reasonably compatible (though not identical) source of Matter essentia, then left to settle, then eventually the essentia will attune to the Well and become uniform.  This requires time and careful tending, but a patient and skilled Well tender can, with sufficient work, use this technique to recycle a sigl with a fairly high success rate.

Alternatives

All of these techniques assume you have access to (and ownership of) an appropriate permanent Well.  For those who don’t, there is an alternative:  they can build their own.

Posted in A Beginner's Guide to Drucraft | 6 Comments

End of Winter Update

Winter’s ending, spring’s coming.  Now that the poll’s done, here’s a look at how things are going with the Inheritance of Magic series!

Main news is that Inheritance of Magic #4 is rolling along.  I’ve just finished the first section of 15,000-ish words and sent it out to my beta readers – my books usually run to about 90,000 to 100,000 words and are made up of about six of these sections, so we’re about one-sixth of the way there.  Which might not sound like much, but I usually find that starting the book and completing the early segments is by far the hardest part, so this is actually more than it sounds.

I’m also about halfway through the copy-edits on the third book in the Inheritance of Magic series, A Judgement of Powers.  And if you’re feeling like you’ve heard me saying I’m done with the edits an awful lot of times by now . . . don’t worry, it’s not just you.  My books get a lot of editing rounds before they’re done.  Partly this is due to me having two editors (one UK and one US), partly it’s just the standard process for traditional publishing, and partly it’s because I’m unusually fussy about editing my books and tend to go over them multiple times before I’m satisfied enough to put them out.  I could write a fair bit faster if I wasn’t so picky, but if you saw the difference between my first drafts and finished manuscripts, you’d realise why I do it this way.

Speaking of A Judgment of Powers, the provisional release date is 4th November, 2025.  This isn’t anything I heard from my publishers, it’s just what Amazon is saying, but it’s probably just as reliable.

Content on this blog for the next couple of months will be the long-promised Sigl Recycling series and . . . well, probably just the Sigl Recycling series.  There isn’t very much news to share since I’m going to be writing for the next 5-6 months or so straight.  But I’ll let you know if anything changes!

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Worldbuilding Articles: 2025 Reader Poll Results

And we’re done!  Here are the results from last week’s poll.

Scoring Method

1st choice:  10 points
2nd choice:  8 points
3rd choice:  6 points
4th choice:  5 points
5th choice:  4 points
6th choice:  3 points
7th choice:  2 points
8th and thereafter:  1 point

Results

Sigl Recycling:  117
Essentia Capacity:  95
The Board:  88
Branch Affinities:  85
Corporations:  78
Sigl Fashion:  77
Attunement:  64
Country Affinities:  60

Conclusions

Honestly, I was surprised at how close the results all were.  Almost all the topics came in within 1 first-place vote of one another.  I was kind of expecting a few to get significantly lower ratings.

The only real outlier seems to be Sigl Recycling, which is the clear winner as far as popularity goes.  Unfortunately, it’s also one of the more difficult ones to do, since it has some major implications for how the economy of the setting works (which is one of the reasons I’ve held off on fixing numbers for it).  Still, it is important, so I should really get around to it.

After the #1 slot, though, all of the others are clustered fairly close together – the gap between ranks #2 and #8 is really not very big.  So I’ll probably do #2 through #8 in one large group.  Most should be relatively short, although some (like Corporations) will be their own mini-series.

Oh, and as for write-ins, the most popular was Animal Sigls with 14 points, followed by several asking about various secrets and mysteries of the setting, which unfortunately I had to disqualify.  (Come on, guys, ‘Beginner’s Guide’ means ‘general introductory knowledge’, not ‘closely guarded secrets’.)  No breakaway favourites, in any case.

In any case, the 8 topics above should amount to another 10-14 articles or so, which’ll probably provide me with material for a full 6 months-ish of worldbuilding essays, possibly more if I go down some side tangents.  By the time that’s done, we’ll probably be approaching the release date for Book 3!

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Worldbuilding Articles: Reader Poll (2025 Edition)

So about a year ago, in February 2024, I wrote a post asking for you to vote for which worldbuilding articles you’d like to see.  I posted the results a couple of weeks later, and the four subjects with the most votes were:

  1. The Five Limits
  2. The Branches
  3. Houses
  4. Limiters

So I decided to do those first.

All of these have now been completed (okay, half completed in the case of the branches), and since it’s been almost exactly a year and since it worked well the last time, it seems like a good time to give it another go.  So, time for our 2025 worldbuilding poll!

Which subjects would you like me to cover next?

Here are the options.  I’m describing them in a bit more detail this time since I’ve had more time to think things through.

Corporations:  This will be similar to the mini-series on Houses that I did in May of last year.  It’ll mostly involve a one-by-one look at the bigger and more influential corporations in the drucraft world, focusing on the UK and US, but with some others from elsewhere around the world.

Country Affinities:  Drucrafters can have affinities for countries as well as for branches.  This hasn’t come up much for Stephen in the books so far, but it matters for others.  This article goes into what that means for drucrafters who like to travel.

Branch Affinities:  A brief look at how drucraft affinities work;  what it means to be strong in Light vs. weak in Light, and vice versa.  Basically an expansion of the discussion that Maria has with Stephen in Chapter 10 of An Inheritance of Magic, when she gives him his essentia reading.

Essentia Capacity:  Again, this is an expansion of the subject mentioned briefly by Maria in Chapter 10 of An Inheritance of Magic.  A discussion of what essentia capacity is, why it matters, and the consequences of having a low essentia capacity versus a high one.

Sigl Fashion:  Once you’ve made a sigl, you have to figure out where on the body you’re going to wear it.  Unsurprisingly, drucrafters have come up with lots of answers to this question.

Attunement:  The Blood Limit says that you can’t use someone else’s sigl . . . but it’s a little more complicated than that.  The more in-depth answer involves attunement, personal essentia, and the difference between making your own sigl and having someone else make one for you.

The Board:  A look at the government body that covers drucraft in the United Kingdom – what it is, how it works, and how secret it is (or isn’t).  This is unlikely to feature in the books any time soon since it’s way over Stephen’s head, but may be interesting to those of you who like this kind of world-building.

Sigl Recycling:  While the Limit of Creation says that you can’t change a sigl after it’s made, you can turn the sigl into essentia and use that essentia to make a new one.  This isn’t as easy as it sounds, though, and it’s become its own mini-industry in the corporate world.

How to Vote

Just leave a comment below listing the articles you’d most like to see, in order.  Like this:

  1. [First Choice]
  2. [Second Choice]
  3. etc

. . . and so on.  You don’t have to list all 8, just put down the ones you like the sound of.

Write-ins are allowed if the one you’d most like to see isn’t on the list.  Note that all the articles above are all definitely going to get covered – this is just about what order I do them in.

Post your votes below!

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A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #30: Motion Sigls (II)

Kinetic Barrier

Type:  Triggered
Appearance: Gold, faceted square
Rank: C to B+

Creates a field in front of the sigl that converts the kinetic energy of momentum into free essentia, slowing or stopping any object that enters.  Typically used as a shield;  projectiles fired towards the wielder slow to a stop and drop to the ground.

The speed at which a kinetic barrier can drain kinetic energy is dependent on the sigl’s power – a C-rank version might completely stop a subsonic round, slow down (but not stop) a supersonic round, and do almost nothing to a rifle shot.

Different models project the field in different ways.  Some are designed to create a vertical shield, others create a curved partial sphere, and some create a full sphere that encloses the wielder completely.  As you would expect, the greater the coverage, the more power the sigl draws and the higher a rank it needs to be.

Balancing a kinetic barrier’s drain speed, coverage, and cost is a trade-off.  Typically you can get at most two out of three.

Since the effect is triggered, it’s useless against an attack that the wielder doesn’t know is coming.  As such, many consider this sigl suitable only for drucrafters who expect to know in advance when they’re getting into a fight (most likely because they’re going to be the one starting it).

Kinetic Shield

Type:  Continuous
Appearance: Gold, faceted sphere
Rank: C+ to A

A more advanced version of the kinetic barrier designed to operate automatically.  Projects a field around the user that slows down anything entering that field moving above a certain speed.  These sigls generally (but not always) are designed on the assumption that they’re meant to be defending against bullets – as such, they’re optimised for slowing down small things moving at a high speed, and don’t do much against bigger things, such as cars, falling objects, or people.

Has the big advantage that it works automatically, so it’ll still protect you if you get shot in the back.  The price you pay for this is a small constant essentia drain (or a large one if you’re under active attack), but most drucrafters consider this a worthwhile trade-off.

Always made as a sphere – in theory could be made with any kind of coverage, but in practice if you’re going to spend the resources to make this powerful and expensive a sigl, it makes no sense not to have it also provide all-around protection.

Versions of this sigl tend to be split into continuous and hybrid models.  Continuous models are designed to operate constantly with no input from the wielder (usually because it’s assumed that the wielder can’t channel or is bad at it).  Hybrid models can be triggered manually, allowing the wielder to control the amount of essentia flowing through the shield and reinforce it against specific attacks.

Probably the single most popular defensive Motion sigl.  Guns are by far the most common lethal weapon in the modern age, and anything that can defend against them is highly prized.   

Missile

Type:  Triggered
Appearance: Yellow, faceted
Rank: D+ to B+

A more powerful version of the Slam sigl which charges an item with kinetic energy.  Like the Slam sigl, this works by compressing air, but with the aim of imparting the kinetic energy to a projectile.  The air behind the projectile is heavily compressed, then released;  kinetic energy shapes a ‘barrel’ of force that means that the expanding air and projectile can only travel in one direction.  If the Slam sigl is the equivalent of an unloaded air gun, this is the equivalent of a loaded one.

Due to how a missile sigl works, it’s necessarily single-shot, with reload speed being dependent on how quickly the wielder can feed ammunition into their hand.  On the positive side, it’s also quiet, concealable, and accurate;  the mundane weapon whose performance it most closely matches is probably a crossbow.  At rank C and above, it’s potentially lethal to a human target.

Due to how subtle a missile sigl is, it’s quite hard to threaten someone with it – you can’t point it at someone to scare them the way you can a gun, meaning there’s little reason to carry this sigl unless you’re planning to actually use it against a target.  It’s less of a weapon for police or security, and more of a weapon for soldiers or assassins.  Unsurprisingly, this gives it a fairly bad reputation, and in most countries higher-power versions are sold only under licence.

Missile sigls are usually designed to work with a specific projectile type, such as a sphere, pellet, or flechette, though there are higher-end generalist models designed to be able to accept any kind of ammunition.

Hurl

Type:  Triggered
Appearance: Yellow, variable shape
Rank: D+ to B+

A very simple and straightforward sigl that projects a surge of kinetic energy into whatever the wielder touches, hurling them away from the wielder (hence the name).

Similar conceptually to the missile sigl, but designed to throw larger objects at lower velocities.  Unlike the missile sigl it doesn’t charge up a pocket of compressed air or use kinetic energy to form a barrel;  this makes the sigl relatively inaccurate, but it also makes it much simpler to shape and much easier and faster to use.

Most commonly used as a self-defence weapon to push opponents away.  Typically this is intended to be used defensively against attackers who’ve closed the distance to the wielder, but there’s nothing actually stopping a drucrafter from using it aggressively by closing the distance themselves.  Lower-level models will typically give a target no more than a few bruises, but higher-level ones can easily break bones.

Can be used in conjunction with Matter sigls to throw large objects;  this tactic is generally considered rather ineffective in practical terms, but is sometimes employed for intimidation purposes.

Posted in A Beginner's Guide to Drucraft | 10 Comments

New Beginnings

Book #4 in the Inheritance of Magic series is underway!  My milestones for starting a new book are generally 1) creating the new file, 2) writing the first paragraph, and 3) writing the first page.  At the moment I’m halfway through the first chapter, meaning that I’m past all three of those milestones.  So even though the book’s only 2,500 words long so far, it feels to me like it’s come a long way . . . and it has, because the gap between writing the first notes and step 1) is usually longer than the gap between step 3) and being 9 chapters in.

Writing this book feels a lot like starting fresh.  Now that they’re done and I can look back on them, volumes #1, #2, and #3 in the Inheritance of Magic series feel a bit like a self-contained trilogy.  They start with Stephen in one place and end with him in another.  Not all the plot threads get tied up, but all of them do move out of one phase and into another. This means that now that I’m starting on book #4, I’m free to come up with relatively new stuff.  It’s actually quite fun.

Next week will be the last Motion Sigls article, and after that I’m finally going to take a break from going through the branches and do something a bit different for variety’s sake.  Definitely going to do corporations, attunement, and sigl recycling, but haven’t decided yet what order to cover them in.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #29: Motion Sigls (I)

Slam

Type:  Triggered
Appearance: Pale yellow, faceted
Rank: D to D+

A basic self-defence sigl that compresses air into a cylinder before releasing it outwards in a concussive blast.  The effect is rather like firing an unloaded air gun, but much stronger.  Since the air immediately begins to disperse once no longer directed by the sigl’s essentia, the range is very short – a few feet at most.  Still, within that range, it’s effective enough at what it does, hitting with the force of a moderately strong punch.

Given its low rank and power, this is a surprisingly difficult sigl to make;  it requires far more finesse than most D-rank sigls and is correspondingly more expensive to buy.  However, despite this, it’s reasonably popular as an entry-level self defence sigl due to how safe it is for the wielder to use.  Motion sigls like knife and mighty blow can be just as dangerous to the wielder as their intended target, but with a slam sigl, it’s almost impossible to hurt yourself with it, making it a good choice for someone who you don’t really trust to carry around a lethal weapon.

Mighty Blow

Type:  Triggered
Appearance: Pale yellow, teardrop shape
Rank: D to C

Probably the easiest and most straightforward Motion sigl out there, this is widely believed to be the first Motion sigl ever created.  It boosts the kinetic energy in a strike, making it swing faster and hit harder.

This sigl is most effective when used on tools such as a hammer or axe, or on weapons such as a sword or club.  It can also be used to enhance a punch or a kick, but this is dangerous – the extra momentum means that the wielder’s hand or foot will strike with immense force and is quite likely to be injured in the process.  Even at D-rank this is likely to lead to broken bones unless the wielder is careful.

Can theoretically be made at any power, but in practice almost never made above C-rank due to the risk of self-damage to the wielder.

Jump

Type:  Triggered
Appearance: Pale yellow, teardrop shape
Rank: D to D+

Produces a surge of kinetic energy, allowing a wielder to throw themselves through the air.  The early models of jump sigl were designed as a pure telekinetic effect, but this tended to work rather badly, and modern designs are instead designed so as to enhance a high jump or long jump (hence the name), which drucrafters have found tends to lead to far fewer injuries.  It turns out that having someone jump and then boosting it (so that they fly 2x or 4x as far as their own muscles could take them) works much better than just telekinetically hurling them through the air.  Note however:  while this sigl lets you jump safely, it gives you no corresponding ability to land safely.  Injuries from use of this sigl are common.

Can be made at virtually any rank, but once you go above a rank of D+, the UK (as well as most other European countries) no longer permits you to call it a Jump sigl.  This is because at C-rank and up, this sigl lets a wielder jump so high and so far that they need a Featherfall sigl (or equivalent) to land without broken bones.  Any jumping sigl of rank C and above is legally required to be sold under a different name and with extensive safety warnings.

Featherfall

Type:  Triggered/Continuous
Appearance: Pale yellow, ovate
Rank: D+ to C

Slows down the wielder’s movement by transforming the kinetic energy of their momentum into free essentia.  The main use of this is to prevent damage from falls by reducing the wielder’s terminal velocity – a fall of five feet and a fall of five hundred feet both result in the same impact.

Comes in triggered and continuous models.  Triggered models are much more flexible, allowing the wielder to slow themselves to exactly the speed they want to, when they want to.  The problem is that this requires the wielder to realise that they’re in danger, stay calm enough to channel into the sigl, then maintain concentration and continue to channel into the sigl until they touch the ground – not necessarily an easy thing to do while in free-fall.  Many drucrafters have died due to not activating their featherfall sigls in time.

As such, continuous featherfall sigls are more popular.  Continuous featherfall works by ‘capping’ the wielder’s top speed, activating automatically if the wielder is moving sufficiently fast relative to their surroundings.  The exact size of the cap is chosen at time of creation, and there’s a long-running debate among Motion shapers as to the best figure to choose;  the higher the number, the less likely the sigl will activate when you don’t want it to, but the more a fall is going to hurt.

Continuous featherfall sigls have drawbacks.  First, they can’t tell the difference between moving fast by accident, and moving fast because you want to – as such, they have a habit of activating at the wrong time.  Second, they require a constant flow of essentia.  So long as the sigl is not actively working to slow the user, this flow is small, but even so, most wielders of featherfall sigls elect to take them off much of the time to avoid annoyances.

Posted in A Beginner's Guide to Drucraft | 1 Comment