Benedict Jacka

So far this Encyclopaedia has mainly dealt with mages.  There’s a good reason for this – mages represent the greatest concentration of power in the magical world.  They don’t rule every corner of it, but it’s very much built in their image.

That said, the vast majority of humans aren’t mages.  In fact, most estimates guess at a ratio of somewhere around 10,000 normals to 100 sensitives to 10 adepts to 1 mage: in other words, mages probably only make up around 0.01% of the population.  This entry will talk about the remaining 99.99%.  Note that just like magic types these categories are fuzzy, particularly between sensitive and normal and between adept and mage.

Normals

The majority of the population of the Earth are normals.  This is the name that mages and adepts give to them – they don’t call themselves ‘normals’ and in fact don’t really call themselves anything at all, since if you don’t believe in magic you don’t need a name for people who can’t use it.  That said, if they were to choose a name ‘normal’ perhaps isn’t so different from how they see themselves.

Normals can neither perceive nor use magic.  It’s a closed book to them: they couldn’t figure it out if they tried.  In practice there’s almost zero chance that they would try, because normals have a strong psychological disinclination to believe in magic.  Given any situation which has a magical and a non-magical explanation, they’ll pick the non-magical explanation so long as it’s even the tiniest bit believable.  If they see a picture of a spell they’ll assume it’s Photoshopped and if they watch a video of magic they’ll assume it’s CGI and if they see a mage using their powers they’ll assume it’s a trick.  After all, this is the 21st century – you’d have to be nuts to believe in that stuff, right?

It’s possible to get a normal to believe in magic, but it’s very difficult; you have to do the equivalent of hitting them over the head with it, not once but over and over again.  Doing so is rarely a kindness, as a normal who does come to believe in magic will be seen as crazy by all his friends.  Most mages find that it’s much easier to let them come up with their own explanation of things.

Sensitives

Like normals sensitives can’t use magic, but unlike normals they can feel it.  Sensitives are open to a wider world than normals – all the supernatural elements in the world around us, the weird and the fantastic and the terrifying and the wonderful and the strange.

It’s hard for a normal to understand the workings of a sensitive’s mind.  Everything is more intense for sensitives – they feel more strongly, perceive more clearly, and experience everything to a heightened degree.  This can be either a blessing (sensitives tend to be very good at anything that requires perception or creativity) or a curse (sensitives have much higher rates of mental instability or outright insanity than normals and often have trouble fitting into everyday society) and often both.  Sensitives tend to be naturally drawn to each other and instinctively recognise one another as kindred spirits.

From the point of view of mages and adepts the most important thing about sensitives is that they don’t have the aversion to magic that normals do, so if they see magic being used there’s a much higher chance that they’ll figure out what’s really going on.  In fact, sensitives can actually perceive magic to a limited degree.  They can’t analyse it with the precision that a mage can, but they can sense that something weird is happening, even if they don’t know exactly what.  This means that a sensitive is much better equipped to enter the magical world.

That said, most don’t.  The majority of sensitives are born, live out their lives, and die without ever getting involved in magical society.  From their point of view this is probably for the best.  A sensitive’s abilities give them a way in to magical society but don’t do anything to help them survive in it, and unusual as they are sensitives fit better into the normal world than into the magical one.

Adepts

Depending on how you look at it an adept is either a sensitive who can also use magic, or a mage who can only cast one spell.  Adepts can actually access the magical spectrum, if only a small sliver of it, giving them one particular ‘trick’ that they can use.

The life of an adept can be hard.  They fit into mundane society even less well than sensitives do – sensitives can feel that there’s a wider world out there, but adepts can actually reach out and touch it, and that doesn’t make it easy to blend into normal life.  On the other hand, adepts don’t fit into mage society either.  Mages tend to look down on adepts, and even if they didn’t most adepts just aren’t equipped to handle the sorts of things mages can.  Caught between the two worlds, it’s difficult for an adept to find their place.

There’s a lot to be said about adepts, and the questions of exactly what they can do, their history with mages, and the difference between a mage and an adept will be the subject of a future Encyclopaedia Arcana entry.

Mages usually categorise each other in one of three ways.  The first is by affiliation – whether they’re Dark, Light, or independent.  The second is how trained and experienced they are – apprentice, master, or somewhere in between.  Finally they categorise other mages according to what their magic can do – a fire mage, an ice mage, and so on.  These categories of magic are referred to as types.

Magic Types

The simplest way to understand the types of magic that mages use is as little boxes with spells in them.  If you’re a fire mage you get sorted into the box marked ‘fire’, and you get to use fire spells.  This is how most new adepts and apprentices see things.

Over time they start to notice that this model doesn’t quite fit.  For a start, different mages can use different sets of spells:  one fire mage may be able to use a spell that another fire mage can’t.  Another issue is ‘hybrid’ mages.  In the elemental family there are air mages, and there are lightning mages.  But some air mages can use lightning, and some lightning mages can fly.  Some people deal with this by calling mages who have some traits of both ‘storm mages’ – but then storm mages have different abilities, too.

In fact every mage is different.  Since magic is personality, every mage’s abilities are unique, determined by their inner self.  No two mages have exactly the same abilities, any more than any two people have exactly the same natures.

Continuous, Not Discrete

In mathematics there’s a concept called discrete and continuous.  Discrete things are individual units that can be counted, like people or houses or trees.  Continuous things aren’t individual units and can’t be counted, like a distance or a time.  Discrete things can’t be divided any further – half a tree isn’t a tree, and half a person isn’t a person.  But a continuous thing can be divided any way you want.  The width of your computer screen is continuous – you could say that it’s 12 inches, or twelve 1-inch lengths, or one 11-inch length plus two 0.5-inch lengths, or 30.48 centimetres, and none of those is the ‘right’ way to measure it.

The types of magic are continuous, not discrete.  There’s no point at which someone stops being an air mage and starts being a lightning mage – there’s just a big fuzzy in-between area where they’re not exactly one or the other, a bit like the question of when it stops being ‘afternoon’ and starts being ‘evening’.

In practice it’s even more complicated than that, because mages differ in so many ways.  So an air mage might have the ability to use lightning, but only in stormy conditions;  on the other hand, they might be able to fly in clear weather just fine.  Then they might be poor at gate magic, only able to transport themselves, but unusually good at creating light;  however they can’t use hardened air although they can call up storms . . .

Trying to sum all that up would be a nightmare, even if mages were in the habit of telling each other exactly what their magic can do, which they’re not.  So the descriptions that get used are simple ones like ‘air mage’, ‘fire mage’, and so on.  The difference is that experienced mages know how vague these descriptions are and don’t make the mistake of assuming that two ‘fire mages’ will have the same abilities.

That said, the types of magic do have some traits in common.  Future Encyclopaedia entries will look at them in more detail, starting with divination magic.

Hybrid Mages

One of the questions in the FAQ of Entry #1 was whether there was such a thing as ‘hybrid’ mages, and now that you’ve read this you should be able to guess the answer.  It’s true that there are mages who have some of the abilities from two or more magic types, but it’s also true that they aren’t really ‘hybrids’.  A storm mage doesn’t see himself as being part air mage and part lightning mage:  to him, the ways in which he can use air and lightning are two aspects of the same thing.  From his point of view, it’s air and lightning mages who are the ‘hybrids’ – and from his point of view, he’s right.

Mages divide the types of magic into three broad families:  elemental, living, and universal.

Elemental Magic

Elemental magic is the magic of the physical world.  The most well-known types of elemental magic are air, fire, earth, and water, but lightning and ice mages are also common, as are types of magic which most people wouldn’t consider elements but which seem to fit better in the elemental category than any other, such as force.  Elemental mages are the most common kind of mage by a long way, maybe more common than both of the other families put together.

Out of all the families, elemental mages are the best at directly affecting physical reality – they’re the artisans, engineers, and soldiers of the magical world, and it’s rare for them to come up against a physical problem they can’t solve.  That said, their way of solving that problem is unlikely to be subtle.  Elemental magic is usually very obvious and attracts a lot of attention.  Keep getting straight flushes in a poker game and you’ll get some funny looks, but most people won’t think you’re using magic – they’ll think you’re cheating.  Go flying down the high street and you’ll get quite a different reaction.

Elemental magic tends to be well-suited to combat.  All elemental mages have at least some natural ability to hurt people and break things, even if it’s not what they specialise in.  More importantly they can use shields, which give them a good natural defence against magic (and against most other things too).  As a result, most battle-mages are elemental mages.

Living Magic

Living magic is the magic of living creatures and covers life and death, thought and emotion, and shapeshifting.  While most mages can affect living creatures one way or another, living magic can alter them directly.

Living magic is completely unable to affect inanimate objects in any way, which means mages of the living family are much more limited than elemental mages in what they can do.  An air mage is always surrounded by his chosen element – no matter where he goes, there’s air.  (If there’s not, he probably has bigger problems to worry about.)  A mind mage, on the other hand, can only affect creatures that have minds.  If he’s on his own, he’s kind of stuck.  Living mages also can’t directly protect themselves from physical harm in the way that elemental mages can.

That said, living mages have a few things going for them.  When it comes down to it most important things in the modern world tend to involve dealing with other people one way or another, and that’s what living mages specialise in.  Living magic also tends to be harder to detect than elemental magic, and living mages can blend in with ordinary people more easily than mages from the other families (although part of that is probably because living mages tend to be more social).  Finally, while living magic can only affect living creatures, it’s very good at affecting living creatures and within their field living mages outshine everyone else by a long way.

Universal Magic

Universal magic is the rarest, the strangest, and the most poorly-understood of the three families.  It covers abstract concepts like divination, time, space, and chance.

More than any other family, universal mages of different types don’t have much in common with each other.  A fire mage and a water mage and an ice mage might use different elements, but in a lot of ways they’re very similar – they can all shield, they can all gate, and they can all hit things with their magic until it breaks.  On the other hand a time mage, a space mage, and a diviner have wildly different abilities.  Some types of universal magic such as space can actually affect the physical world even better than elemental magic can (at least in specific areas) whereas other types like divination can’t affect the physical world at all.

If there’s one thing universal mages have in common it’s that they can do things no-one else can.  A fire mage can put out a fire, but so can a water mage, or an air mage, or a guy with a fire extinguisher.  But no-one except a diviner can look into the future, and no-one except a time mage can speed up or slow down the flow of time.  Unfortunately this comes with a drawback:  universal magic is the weirdest and most alien of the three families, and integrating it with a human mind isn’t easy.  One of the reasons universal mages are rare is that a lot of universal novices never make it out of apprenticeship, whether for voluntary reasons (they give up their talents out of sheer exhaustion and go off to live a normal life) or for involuntary ones.

Beginning apprentices and other newcomers to the magical world tend to have two big questions about magic.  The first is the why – what it is, where it comes from, and why some people can use it when others can’t.  The second is the how – what works and what doesn’t, and what you can expect when dealing with a mage.

The first question is harder but also much shorter to answer, so we’ll deal with it first.

What Magic Is

The traditional answer is that magic is connection.  A mage is a person who has an attunement to one particular aspect of the world around them: they perceive that aspect more clearly and directly than other people and over time they can learn to control it.  The aspect can be something elemental like air or heat, something connected to living beings like life or thought, or an abstract concept such as chance or time.

The type of magic a mage is connected to is based on their inner nature – their personality, character, and soul.  You could say that someone’s magic is an expression of their inner self, but it’s just as true to say that someone’s magic is their inner self – certainly mages can’t survive without their magic and in the rare cases where it’s separated from them they don’t live long.  The mage’s nature determines the kind of magic they can use, not vice versa – there’s no way to use fire magic without having the personality of a fire mage.  This doesn’t mean that mages of a certain type are all the same, but the type of magic that someone can use always reflects a profound truth about the kind of person they are.

Magic Types

The best way to think of the magic types is as a spectrum, like this:

Each point on the spectrum is a particular way to use magic.  Normal people can’t see the spectrum at all.  Sensitives can see it, but aren’t on it.  Adepts are a point on the spectrum: they can use magic in one and only one way.

Mages are a little circle on the spectrum.  They have access to all the ways of using magic within that circle.  That circle might overlap with the circles of other mages, in which case they can use some of the same spells, but usually the circles don’t overlap at all.  Some mages have slightly wider circles, some have slightly narrower ones, but one thing that’s always the same is that a mage’s circle is always very, very small compared to how big the whole spectrum is.  Even the most multitalented mage can never learn to use more than the tiniest fraction of all the spells out there.

FAQ

Here are a few of the most common questions that new apprentices usually ask.

Q. Can I learn to use a different kind of magic?

A. Yes, you just have to change your entire personality.

Q. Which type of magic is the strongest?

A. Which tool in a toolbox is the best?

Q. Are any of the magic types inherently evil?

A. No. Some are inherently dangerous and make it very easy to do unpleasant things to people, but there are good and bad mages of every type.

Q. Is it possible to have ‘hybrid’ mages who are a mix of two types?

A. Yes and no – see Entry #3.