Essentia channelling is very short-ranged. To channel through a sigl, a drucrafter needs that sigl to be very close – preferably, touching their skin. This means that if you plan to make a habit of using sigls, you’re either going to have to hold them, or you’re going to have to wear them.
The ‘hold them’ option is not recommended. Using a sigl freehand is not usually dangerous (except in the case of particularly aggressive combat sigls) but it’s a great way for it to get lost. Sigls are tiny – a regular C-class sigl is only a third of a centimetre across – and if you try to carry one in your pocket, then you’re likely to either drop it somewhere really inconvenient, have it get lost under a bunch of other, bigger things, or both. This is especially the case if you have to use the sigl under pressure – if you’re in a rush or in danger, trying to fish out something barely bigger than a match head and use it without fumbling and dropping it is a recipe for disaster.
For this reason, if you’re a drucrafter, it’s convenient to find some way of wearing your sigls on your body in such a way they’re both secure and conveniently accessible. It should come as no surprise that – after thousands of years of practice – drucrafters have come up with many, many ways to do this.
Here are a few of the more popular methods.
Necklace/Pendant
Probably the oldest and simplest way to wear a sigl; just loop a cord, string, or thread around your neck and hang the sigl from it. You still need to figure out some way to fix the sigl to the cord, but this isn’t usually too hard.
The biggest advantage of this method is security. It’s really, really hard to steal something that’s hanging from someone’s neck and under their clothes – in fact, unless they’re in beachwear or a low-cut top, you probably won’t be able to tell that they’re wearing a sigl at all. Items worn on a necklace also conveniently tend to hang around the middle of the wearer’s chest, which is an ideal location for many Life and Matter enhancement effects.
The main drawback of the necklace method is that, while potential thieves can’t see a sigl worn on a necklace under your clothes, neither can you. This isn’t usually an issue if you’re only wearing one, but once you start stringing more than one together, you can start running into issues where you lose track of which sigl is which, meaning that you could channel essentia into one sigl when it was meant for another (quite embarrassing if you’ve got a combat sigl mixed in with several others). This also makes this location less than ideal for most Light sigls, which tend to need to be uncovered to work – you can get around this by having windows cut out of your clothing, but that tends to negate any benefit from wearing the sigl under your clothing in the first place.
This location is also a bad choice for any sigls designed to produce harmful effects, for fairly obvious reasons.
Belt/Waist
A somewhat less common variant of the necklace approach, where the sigl is set into a belt buckle or worn on a band or chain around the waist. Not as secure as a necklace, but has the advantage of being closer to the wielder’s centre of mass, which can matter for sigls that project a field – these often have a sharply limited range, so wearing them at the chest can mean the sigl doesn’t reach down to the drucrafter’s ankles and feet. The question of whether certain Light or Matter sigls are best worn high on the waist vs. low on the abdomen is a perennial argument amongst drucrafters.