Benedict Jacka

The powers of a novice mage manifest in weird and unpredictable ways.  The magical energy is channelled into effects, but since the mage has no real idea what he’s doing it’s anyone’s guess what the result will be – they’re incomplete, uncontrolled, and often dangerous.

At some point – sometimes sooner, sometimes later – a mage realises that he’s the source of the weirdness that keeps following him around.  He begins to understand his power, and starts trying to master it.  He learns to keep his abilities dormant when he doesn’t need them, and learns to send a surge of magical energy at something when he does.

Mages who keep practising start to develop a finer control over that magical energy.  Over time they notice that their magic can be shaped to form patterns.  By using these patterns in certain ways they can create consistent effects that do the same thing each time.  These patterns are called spells.

What Is A Spell?

A spell is a magical formula.  It’s not exactly a step-by-step process like a cooking recipe, or a technique like an athletic skill, or a principle to be applied like a mathematical theorem, or a meditative practice to achieve a certain internal state, but it has elements in common with all of those things.

It’s hard to generalise about spells because the spells of different types and families of magic work in very different ways.  Elemental mages tend to think of their spells as similar to skills – for them, learning to use their magic in a different way is like learning how to kick a ball or throw a dart.  Living mages usually develop their skills by interacting with other people, and they’re more likely to compare a spell with some kind of social activity.  For universal mages, spells are more like abstract principles that they understand and apply.

That said, there are a few things all spells have in common.

The Things Spells Have In Common

Spells are mental:  Although spells can contain other components (see Encyclopaedia Arcana #12 for details) the core of a spell is concentration and will.  In theory a mage could use their magic without moving, speaking, or even opening their eyes (though as will be seen, it doesn’t always work that way in practice).

Spells are personal:  Every spell is designed to work with the unique magic of the mage who developed it.  It’s possible that an unaltered spell will work for another mage, but it’s pretty unlikely.

Spells need skill:  Learning a spell is just like learning any other skill – it takes practice.  No mage, no matter how talented, can pick up a new spell and use it perfectly on the first try.  To get good with a spell takes time and hard work.

Spells take effort:  Using spells is tiring, just like any other physical or mental activity.  How tiring it is depends on how inherently difficult the spell is and upon how well-practised the mage is with the spell.

Practice Makes Perfect

For a novice, casting a spell is a draining experience.  They have to try several times before they succeed and the mental focus required to perform it exhausts them quickly.  As they practice they learn to perform the spell more and more efficiently until they can do it with only a few seconds’ concentration.

Mages who are really determined to master a spell keep going.  They practise over and over again until it becomes as natural as breathing, reducing the amount of effort the spell consumes and the amount of concentration it requires until they can keep it active without trying.  Once they reach this point, they become able to maintain the spell even while casting another one.  For everyday use this kind of mastery isn’t really necessary, but for mages who regularly find themselves in difficult or dangerous situations it’s crucial.

Time is one of the more common types of universal magic, though given the rarity of universal mages time mages are still vastly outnumbered by elementalists.  It’s a notoriously difficult type to master:  many time adepts give up in frustration before learning to use their powers and time mages typically take decades to become true masters of their craft.

Timesight

The signature trick of time magic is seeing into the past.  While diviners have to juggle probabilities, a time mage can view the past with certainty, seeing exactly what happened.  The basic difficulty depends on how far back the time mage attempts to go – a novice can manage a few minutes, a competent mage can handle days, and real masters can go back years.  It’s not one hundred percent reliable and certain natural or artificial conditions can make timesight much more difficult, but time magic used with sufficient skill can theoretically provide a perfect depiction of any past event.

As you’d expect, this has major effects on magical society.  The fastest way to answer any question along the lines of “What happened at place X at time Y?” is usually to get a time mage to look it up.  This has the potential to trivialise a lot of investigations – instead of interviewing witnesses, combing the scene for evidence, performing forensic analysis, etc., the response is more like “Bob did it.  Go find Bob.”

Of course there’s a counter to everything, and timesight is no exception.  Time mages can screen off the area around them from temporal scrying, and items exist called shrouds that perform the same function.  More importantly, everybody in magical society knows about timesight.  Even the most sheltered of Light mages knows that in the event of a major crime, the first thing the Council does is call in a time mage to see what happened.  This means that while time mages can roll up mundane investigations with ease, they rarely catch mages so easily unless the mage is unusually stupid.

Timesight is so useful that the demand for the services of time mages far outstrips their supply.  Even a mediocre time mage has no trouble at all finding people willing to pay for his services, even if most of the requests are for the magical equivalent of finding someone’s car keys.  As always though, the power it gives has its dangerous side – time mages always run the risk of turning up the wrong secret.

Time Manipulation

The second major branch of time magic involves altering the flow of time directly.  Time mages can speed things up or slow them down in a particular area, accelerating themselves or slowing down a threat or an enemy.  Another popular trick is to temporarily boot something all the way out of the timestream, causing it to seemingly disappear then reappear shortly afterwards.  These sort of effects require concentration and are usually highly taxing, but they give options no other mage can match.

Most time mages have a natural inclination towards one of the two branches over the other – historian types prefer timesight, while the more active sorts specialise in time manipulation.  While the second group are better able to look after themselves, they don’t have anywhere near the influence the first group do.  Speeding up time might be cool, but lots of mages can affect the physical world one way or another.  It’s seeing into the past that’s really unique.

Nature and Demeanour

Personality-wise, time mages have a lot in common with diviners.  They both tend to be analytical and curious, valuing accuracy and clarity.  Where they differ is more in goals.  Diviners tend to be pragmatic:  they want to know things, but it’s usually with a view to getting something done.  For time mages, knowledge is the goal, and they don’t much care if what they learn is useful.  They’re quite happy researching historical puzzles and debating their findings with each other.

It’s common for time mages not to realise the significance of much of the information they pick up – they’re more interested in finding things out than in putting what they know to use.  Most time mages are much more comfortable dealing with the past than with the present, and they have a reputation for being ivory-tower academics as a result.  The reputation’s half true, but only half.

Chance magic is also called luck or fortune magic, and just like divination it’s a type of universal magic.  A mage who can use it is called a chance mage, a luck mage, or sometimes (especially if the mage is female) a witch.

Chance magic affects luck and probability.  A chance mage can affect physical reality, but not in the direct ways that an elemental or a living mage can.  She can’t conjure an orb of light or throw a fireball or transport herself through space.  Instead she nudges things slightly so that events turn out a different way.

Prediction and Control

Chance magic can only affect the random element in any series of events.  The more static and predictable a system, the harder it is for chance magic to affect it.  For a normal person, knocking over a chair is easy but getting a set of dice to come up all sixes is hard.  For a chance mage using their magic, it’s the other way around.

Why is a set of dice easier to affect than a chair?  It’s not because the chair’s heavier, it’s because the dice are moving.  When a human being throws a die, there are thousands of tiny factors affecting which way it rolls:  the person’s conscious decision, their subconscious actions, their reflexes, the way the die slips in their hand, the air resistance, the angle at which it bounces off the table and any obstacles . . . all of those factors add up to a result that’s completely unpredictable.  But for a chance mage, those thousands of factors are exactly what their magic needs.  The more unpredictable an event, the easier it is for a chance mage to control.

A big advantage of chance magic is that since it only works on what’s already there, it’s almost impossible for normal people to realise that it’s being used.  In fact, most of the time chance magic doesn’t look like magic at all – things work out so smoothly that no-one notices it until it’s over.  Even when they do notice, random chance is so much a part of the world that very few people indeed ever figure out that something’s causing it.

Good Luck, Bad Luck

Being able to affect random events is useful enough on its own – you can make a killing at casinos, and that’s just the start of it.  But a chance mage can also string together whole chains of coincidences, and that’s where it becomes really powerful.

As long as they have time to use their magic chance mages never have to worry about accidents – random misfortunes will always just miss them.  They can hex anything electronic into uselessness, causing it to suffer from short circuits and compounded errors until it locks up.  And if they need help with something, they can arrange for random circumstances and odd bits of good luck to stack the odds in their favour until the most difficult task becomes easy.  Chance magic can’t teach you a skill, but it can often substitute for it – more than one chance mage has ‘accidentally’ guessed exactly the right sequence of commands to type into a computer, or picked up a rifle and hit the bullseye on the first try.

But chance magic also has a dark side – just as chance mages can bring good luck to themselves and their friends, they can bring bad luck to their enemies.  This is the witch’s curse of legend, dooming the victim to misfortune.  Sometimes the curse names a specific fate, but just as often it’s general, making the target a magnet for bad luck of every conceivable sort.  Even weak curses are dangerous if the victim happens to be doing something risky, while powerful curses can easily cause death through a series of unlikely events.  Such curses are notoriously difficult to counter, and often the only thing to be done is just to let them run their course.

Mages and Adepts

Chance mages tend to use their power in a more intuitive way than other mages.  While an elemental mage will visualise in his mind exactly what he wants a spell to do, a chance mage’s spells are more likely to be vague and general.  In personality chance mages tend to be quick and impulsive – they rarely plan ahead, trusting to their magic and intuition to get them out of trouble.

Like the other types of universal magic, true chance mages are rare.  However, chance adepts are disproportionately common.  They typically have one particular way in which they can bring good or bad luck, or one situation in which they’ve learnt to apply it.  Chance adepts have an advantage over other adepts in that their magic is almost impossible for normals to detect, which makes it relatively easy for them to blend into mundane society.  In fact, their magic is so hard to detect that often the adepts themselves don’t realise they’re using it.  From their perspective they’re just born lucky, and in a way it’s true.

The first part of this entry explained that divination magic allows its user to see the probability of future events.  This second part will take a look at what that means in practice.

A Hundred and One Uses for Seeing the Future

For a start diviners don’t get surprised much, at least not in the short term.  A diviner can see the next few seconds of his own immediate future very clearly and trying to give them a surprise (pleasant or unpleasant) rarely works unless the diviner is asleep at the wheel.

Divination magic is also great for finding your way around.  A diviner can move in pitch darkness as fast as a normal person can in full daylight.  He can’t actually see, but he knows which futures lead to him bumping into something or tripping over and he can choose different ones.  He can also quickly pick out a route through an unfamiliar location by taking a second to find out where a path leads and whether there are obstacles on it.

Divination is a powerful defence as well.  Diviners are very good at dodging and with a bit of practice can quite literally dodge bullets.  It’s not that they’re fast – they’re no quicker than a normal man – but no matter how swift the attack they’re just not there when it lands.  They can look through the futures, find the ones in which they’re not hit, and take the necessary actions to lead to them, often without seeming to make any particular effort.  There are limits and they can’t dodge things that simply can’t be dodged, but trying to hit an alert diviner is frustratingly difficult.

Finally, although it’s rarely used in this way, divination magic can be surprisingly effective as a means of attack.  Most mages tend to assume diviners have no offensive ability, and in a way it’s true – divination magic is completely useless for directly hurting someone.  But there’s nothing stopping a diviner from picking up a weapon and an attack from someone who knows exactly how to get through your defences and where to hit to do the most damage can be very nasty indeed.  They don’t have the brute force that an elemental mage does, but their knowledge gives them powerful leverage.

Secrets and Shadows

Although the tricks above can help diviners deal with short-term problems, it’s not what they specialise in.  A diviner’s real power lies in information.

Other mages tend to assume that diviners can find out the answer to any question by thinking about it.  This is both right and wrong.  Diviners can’t simply ask a question and get an answer – the universe doesn’t run a question-and-answer hotline (or if it does, diviners don’t know the number).  However, diviners can look into possible futures.  They can find out what would happen in conversations if they introduced a certain subject, see what would be visible to their eyes if they moved a certain way, discover what’s behind a door or inside a private room . . .

What this adds up to is a lot of information.  Most of it’s useless, but odd bits aren’t.  And while diviners usually don’t know what they’re going to get, they have a lot of practice at putting pieces together and they can nearly always find out far more than other people would like them to.

Which doesn’t necessarily make them many friends.

No-One Likes A Know-It-All

Other mages have very mixed feelings about diviners.  Almost every type of magic has more direct ability to influence the physical world than divination does, and for all their tricks diviners are no match for a battle-mage.  What this means is that practically any mage who looks at a diviner knows that he could beat him up without much effort.

On the other hand that mage also knows that said diviner, given time and motivation, could find out every one of the mage’s most private, embarrassing, and dangerous secrets.  And mages – especially ones who play the deadly political games of the Light Council and the Dark cabals – have a lot of secrets.  Mages like the idea of diviners working for them, but they most definitely don’t like the idea of diviners working against them, and they’re never quite sure which one a diviner is doing.

As a result mages tend to prefer to keep diviners at a distance, and the feeling’s often mutual.  Diviners know how other mages see them and are keenly aware of exactly how easily a battle-mage could crush them in a direct conflict.  It’s usually much safer for a diviner to stay on the edges of magical society, out of sight.