Drucraft is comprised of three disciplines, namely:
- Sensing: Perceiving essentia.
- Channelling: Controlling essentia.
- Shaping: Creating sigls.
All drucraft is an application of one or more of these things.
Sensing is the first and most basic of the disciplines. A drucrafter’s sensing skill is a measure of their ability to feel the essentia around them: both the personal essentia in their body, and the ambient essentia in their surroundings. Although sometimes looked down upon, this is an absolutely essential foundational skill that must be mastered before a drucrafter can progress any further. Most failed drucrafters fail because of an inability to learn sensing.
Once a drucrafter has learned to sense their own personal essentia, they can begin to control it. Channelling allows a drucrafter to command their own essentia, moving it around inside of their body and eventually sending it flowing into a sigl. Sigls vary greatly in the amount of channelling skill required to use them effectively: learning to use a basic triggered ‘on/off’ sigl is relatively easy, but more complex or variable sigls require much more precision. The ability to channel is generally considered to be the point at which someone becomes a true drucrafter, and most are content to stop at this stage.
A minority instead choose to push on and learn the third and most difficult of the disciplines: shaping. Shapers are the creators of sigls, and as such are absolutely necessary for the survival of drucraft as a whole, but relatively few channellers choose to pursue this path due to how demanding it is in terms of time, skill, and resources. A prospective shaper must first have a high level of skill in both sensing and channelling, then must spend a significant amount of time and effort in mastering the creation of essentia constructs. Finally, they must learn to turn those essentia constructs into actual sigls. Since this requires a Well, opportunities to practice can be rare, and failures costly.
The three disciplines must be learned in ascending order; one cannot channel without first learning to sense, and both channelling and sensing are a prerequisite for learning to shape.
Learning drucraft is not a quick process. Even a gifted and hard-working student will typically take at least a year to learn each of the disciplines, and this is very much a lower limit. In practice two years per discipline is more common, and this is only to reach competence, not mastery. Achieving manifester level, which is the point at which one may fairly be considered ‘expert’ at all three disciplines, can easily take a decade or more. This, combined with the high cost of sigls, tends to put drucraft mastery out of reach of those without the resources to be tutored in it from an early age.
Very interesting magic system
Can’t wait for explanation for what signs do