Magipunk:Magic

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Central to Magipunk is, of course, the magic. The characters of magipunk are immersed in it daily, as much or more than we modern humans are immersed in technology. It is vitally important that the players of the game understand the basic concepts behind how magic works in the Magipunk cosmology, in order to be able to succesfully interact with the game world.

Magical Power

The common availability of magical power has wrought immense changes on the world. Where one hundred years ago, priests prayed to their gods for magical power, and secular sorcerors concentrated on their own life field, today a busy urbanite can simply deposit a few Royals in the donations box of one of the Prayer-Mills, and receive in return a ring filled with divine energy, precisely regulated by the overseers of the Mill.

With magical power now an order of magnitude more prevalent than it was a few generations ago, and, most importantly, requiring nothing more than money to access, the field of sorcery has opened up remarkably, and startling advances are made on an almost daily basis.

Of course, not everyone can afford the prices of the Prayer Mills, even reduced as they are. In the poorer parts of town, the ancient practice of Blood Magic has grown common as more and more commoners learn something of magic, but lack the resources to buy the holy tokens which literally power the legitimate economy. A dram of blood can serve the same purpose as a church token, though its potency lasts not as long and its messier to work with, and each morning you can see a line of pale youngsters lining up at the barber-shop, being paid for their life essence.

Pseudo Game-rules: A "standard" power token bought from the church-mills would have 20 mana points in it. It's possible to buy 50 or 100 point tokens, too. Most people can generate 1 point of mana on their own, without using their blood or anything. This regenerates fully after a day. It's possible to raise this amount, but it's very difficult (read: costs a lot of XP, and on some kind of geometric scale). A vial of blood will generally have 5 to 15 mana points in it, depending on the quality of blood. One pint of blood (the amount that real-world blood donor programs take) gives two vials of blood. Giving more than that per month is likely to have health consequences.

Mana tokens from the church generally cost about the modern day equivalent of $2 per mana point (so a standard 20 point mana token costs the equivalent of $40, and a mondo 100 point mana token costs the equivalent of $200). Blood from the barbers usually costs more like $1 per mana point (though it fluctuates more, and getting the higher-efficiency vials causes the cost to creep up to more like $1.50 per mana point). In general, barbers do a 100% mark-up on the cost that they pay their donors. So if a pint of your blood generates two 10 point vials, the barbers will usually pay you roughly $10 for it.

Spells

Once you've got a source of power, casting a spell is a matter of speaking an arcane language in a very precise manner and making a few hand-gestures. That sounds trivial enough, and it is, for simple spells. But by the time you get to particularly powerful spells, it's actually a fairly complex operation, requiring excellent timing, the ability to speak very precisely, very quickly, and good manual dexterity. While almost everyone in the Magipunk setting can perform simple spells like creating enough light to read or walk by, many fewer could create a damaging bolt of sorcerous energy, scry a far-off place, or create a complex illusion.

However, for those not particularly talented in the sorcerous arts, it is possible to broker someone else's skills. A very competent sorceror can create an item or design which contains a spell – just hook it up to a source of magical power, speak a very simple activation spell that anyone can learn, and create the fixed effect. These spell-storage items may be traditional wizards' props like wands or staves, or they might be more functional or atraditional items. Among the poorer and more paranoid, there has recently been a growing tendancy to tattoo spells directly on the body – this prevents losing an expensive spell-storage item to thieves, and ensures that you'll always have it handy when you need it.

Obsolesence

The invention of new spells is a flourishing art in the Magipunk setting. The spells of today are far more elegant, compact, and efficient than spells of even a few years ago – the prevalence of spellcasters, competition, and openness of magic have driven a great deal of change in comparison to generations past, when sorcery was the provence of only a few dedicated but secretive individuals. This means that spell-storage items from more than a few years ago tend to be clunkier, larger, less mana-efficient, and otherwise inferior to today's products. This is one reason that not everyone is thrilled with the idea of indelibly tattooing themselves with spells that will one day become obsolete.

Pseudo-game rules: Obsolesence is measured in an abstract number-set, starting at 0 (meaning a spell which is not at all obsolete -- totally up-to-date/cutting edge), and trailing off down to 10 or more (meaning a spell which is incredibly backwards by modern standards). Obsolesence has been accelerating in recent years, so while a spell that was up-to-date five years ago is somewhat obsolete today, one that was up-to-date ten years ago isn't that much worse. A rough table of obsolesence values to time:

Obsolesence	Meaning
0	Cutting edge -- probably creatd no more than 6 months ago.
1	Modern -- still very nice, created probably 6-18 months ago.
2	No longer new -- created probably 18-30 months ago.
3	Getting somewhat old -- created probably 3-4 years ago.
4	Obsolete -- created probably 4-5 years ago.
5	Very obsolete -- created probably 5-7 years ago.
6	Almost unusable -- created probably 7-10 years ago.
7	Pathetic -- created probably 10-15 years ago.
8	Ancient -- created probably 15-20 years ago.
9	Generations behind -- created probably 20-30 years ago.
10	Of a different era -- created probably 30-40 years ago.

In some rare cases, a spell may actually have negative obsolesence -- this represents a major breakthrough in spell construction that hasn't really "hit the streets" yet.

Obsolesence ratings are primarily used for spells that have been engraved onto items or tattooed onto people. Any sorcerer in Atathorn who cares at all about his craft will stay up-to-date on the latest breakthroughs, and so any spell cast dynamically will usually be Obsolesence 0. Sorcerers from less advanced areas (out in the country side, or from kingdoms less advanced than Branmir) may still be casting "behind the times," at Obsolence 1 or even 2 or 3, until they catch up with the state of the art.

Obsolesence affects both a spell's power and its ability to affect other magic. In general, Obsolesence 0 spells cost "what they should." Higher Obsolesence spells cost 10% more mana per point of Obsolesence than would a Obsolesence 0 spell (so if you have a tattoo that gives you some amount of personal armor, and it's Obsolesence 3, and that spell cast by a sorcerer today would cost 10 mana, activating your tattoo would cost 13 mana). In addition, if two spells with different Obsolesence ratings come into direct opposition (like an attack spell against an armor spell, or a dispell targeting any kind of standing spell), the lower-obsolesence spell should get some kind of bonus (dependent on game system).

Capabilities

Despite the ever-increasing capabilities of magic, there are a few things that it doesn't seem to be able to do – or maybe it's just that it can't do them yet. The first and most important on this list is that there is no known way to truly raise the dead. Undead of various sorts may be created, but they are inevitably twisted shadows (at best) of the living individual. Secondly, no spell has ever created true organic material, even something as simple as wood. Because of this limitation, magical healing is somewhat limited in its abilities – a talented sorceror may knit flesh and bones back together, but not regenerate lost tissue or blood. If you lose enough blood, no sorceror will be able to save your life. A severed limb or the like may possibly be reattached, but if it is lost or spoiled, no new limb may be regenerated. There are various other limitations to magic, but those two have perhaps the most profound effect on general life in these modern days.

So what can magic do?

Day-to-day Life

Not to be underestimated is the simple ability to create light. A simple spell produces colored light in sufficient quantity to illuminate a small room, but not be blinding. The whiter the light, the more complex the spell and the more mana it takes. The difference isn't huge, but it's enough that the cheaper employers often get by on very yellow light, and colored lighting is generally used when there's any "atmospheric" reason to do so in a bar or the like.

Magic can power a wagon or chariot, instead of a horse. However, this is a relatively inefficient use of power, and is beyond the means of most common people: animal transportation is still the default mode of transit. The rich may have personal carriages that are horseless, and particularly powerful sorcerers may simply fly (or, if they are capable of it, teleport), but doing so is ostentatious and moderately rare. Magic is, however, sometimes used to keep animals placid, or to otherwise supplement animal transportation.

Magic can capture an image in a mirror or other reflective surface, or inside a crystal. This is an important means of making semi-permenant records for a population with a low literacy rate! Putting an image in a mirror is temporary, generally lasting a few weeks (depending on the amount of mana expended), while capturing an image in a crystal is permenant (the actual physical crystal is altered). Since crystals are non-organic, they can be created by magic, and several Alliances are increasingly finding demand for selling standardized crystals for long-term image storage. At the moment, however, mirrors remain a bit cheaper, and give a higher-quality image.

Many of the day-to-day chores that require heat (from cooking to warming your residence to cleaning) are done using magical heat sources instead of mundane ones. Creating a precise degree of flameless heat is relatively easy with magic, though the poorer folks will find it a bit wasteful when mundane flame could do the job. Because it's possible to heat a room without any infrastructure other than a power token, most of the middle-class to poor residential areas make no provision for heating their own rooms -- that's the responsibility of the tenant.

Long-distance communication has become radically eased by magic. There are several different methods of magical communication, but the two most common are direct "sendings" (telepathic communication directly between two minds) or image casting through linked mirrors. Sendings are useful because two individuals can directly contact each other without requiring that either know where the other is, nor interrupting anyone else. However, the individuals must either know each other reasonably well, or have something of each other, like blood or hair. Otherwise, given two linked mirrors (made together), it is possible to cast one's image and voice through one to the other. However, this elicits the possibility of being heard by bystanders, and is inconveniant if the intended recipient of the message is not around the opposite mirror.

Medicine

As has been previously noted, magic can not create tissue or blood, nor bring a person back to life. However, despite this, magic is very useful for healthcare! Magic can knit tissue back together, support life in the absense of the normal necessities thereof, prevent decay, and destroy disease.

Medical magic is a very specialized subfield or sorcery, and an intellectually demanding one. Most people, even most sorcerers, are not competent to perform even the simplest medical magical tasks, and specialist doctor-sorcerers are in high demand, and can command excellent prices. Because of this, high-quality healthcare is mostly the province of the rich. Still, a lower-class family may be able to work up the price of a single good disease-cure or the like, given time and prudence, and the life expectancy of the general populace has been inching slowly upwards in recent years.

Only the Elves have mastered the process of truly stopping aging, through a complex set of interrelated systems involving having modified their own race on a permenant level, and creating symbiotic plants whose fruits they must eat regularly. Human medical magic still can not hold off death indefinitely. Most medical magic puts a certain general strain onto the systems of the patient, strain that a young person's body can bear without any problems but which tends to cause future health problems in the old. Still, the very rich can reasonably expect to see well past their 80th year, and, with some luck, past their 100th.

Note that anti-agathic medical magic is very different from necromancy. Necromancers allow tissue to die, then prevent it from rotting and reanimate it. True anti-agathic magic prevents death in the first place. The techniques and spells used for each discipline are totally different.

Combat

Life being what it is, there've been many, many different approaches towards putting magic into the practice of war, murder, or the like. Combat uses of magic can be divided into two basic categories: defensive and offensive.

Defensive magic is usually either the creation of a stand-alone magical barrier of some kind, or the enhancement of a physical object to be tougher than usual. The stand-alone barrier approach tends to be more effective at repelling energy-based attacks, the enhancement of a physical object approach better for stopping kinetic attacks like a sword-strike (even a magically-enhanced sword-strike). It is possible to enhance someone's skin to be tougher, and that has become the most common defensive-enhancement magic in recent years, as it's basically all-covering and doesn't restrict mobility.

Offensive magic might be the creation of a blast of pure thaumaturgic energy, a more "mundane" energy like fire or electricity, a necromantic or medical attack directly on the life-force of the target, or simply an enhancement of a physical blow, adding sharpness to a sword or kinetic energy to a mace.

Weapon enhancement is the most common form of offensive magic – it is relatively easy to obtain a dagger or club that has fixed on it a spell able to enhance its effects. Since combat is a difficult situation for the precise speaking of complex spells, even relatively accomplished sorcerers often like to have their spells be largely pre-cast. Further, if you run out of mana, a sword can still hurt your enemy, even un-empowered. For ranged effects, those who can manage it generally like to use pure spellcasting, as enchanting arrows or bolts for a crossbow is overly expensive, and enchanting the bow or crossbow means that you waste mana if you miss. Spells are generally far more accurate than physical weapons at range.

Divination

There is no reliable form of precognition or prescience in Magipunk. Prophecies are usually the provence of divine hermits or other stuff that's on the edge of myth, rather than the reasonably well-understood workings of commonplace magic. However, using magic for the purposes of spying is a long-respected tradition.

The simplest method of scrying is to look at a particular location from a distance. Many wizards use a mirror or crystal to hold the image of the distant location, though this is not strictly necessary. However, if one does use a crystal or mirror, it becomes trivial to save an image of what is going on in the scryed location.

More difficult is to scry on a person, whereever that person is, rather than a static location. This is a complexity of magic which demands a certain amount of specialization to master, but it's a useful enough bit of magic that a fairly large number of people study it. It is particularly difficult to scry on individuals who can teleport – their identity is somehow hard to get a fix on. In addition, the more intuitive or sensitive subjects of scrying can sometimes sense that they're being watched – usually a sort of "hair on the back of the neck" thing rather than anything concrete.

Most difficult of all the scrying methods is actually spying on someone's thoughts. This is a significant level of complexity more difficult than scrying on someone's body, and is much more likely to be noticed.

There are relatively simple wards that can be used on either a location or a person to prevent scrying, and, at the present state of the art, at least, the wards are essentially impregnable – that is, no spellcaster, no matter how sophisticated, has much of a chance of working through such a ward. The problem with the wards is that few people can afford to constantly ward themselves against scrying. The wealthy, and institutions like Alliances, Church-Mills, or the government, will often have a few small rooms which are continuously warded, but only the most paranoid individuals will habitually ward themselves. However, the option exists for times when clandestine activities are planned.

Meta-Magic

Magic which affects other magical constructs is mostly the domain of theoreticians and academics. However, there are a few such spells that have practical use.

Most serious sorcerors learn spells designed to sense the presence of magic in a variety of ways. The simple spells of this sort give relatively little indication of what kind of magic might be in place – essentially, one can learn that there is magical power being used in the vicinity, and how much of it there is. More complex versions of these spells can cause the structure of a spell to become visible to the sorceror, which a knowledgeable individual can use to sense the purpose of the spell. Like most spells which affect visible images, mirrors or crystals are often used for such purposes.

Countermagic is also the province of meta-Magic – the ability to undo a standing spell is within the province of a serious sorceror, but it is not easy, and almost inevitably, the counter-spell must be customized for use against the exact standing spell, which prevents counter-magic items from coming into common use.

Finally, most people with any amount of magical training learn to harmlessly discharge a power token of any amount of power. For the most part, this is simply a building step towards the casting of real spells, but saboteurs and the like have been known to waste their enemy's money or cripple their abilities by draining their power tokens of all mana. At present, there is no known method to discharge a power token from a distance – you must be in possession of it to drain it.

Necromancy

A forbidden and outlawed art, Necromancy none-the-less flourishes in Atathorn. The first and perhaps most pernicious art of Necromancy is the ability to sacrifice another person for power, which can fill a power token (and is indistinguishable from a "normal" token) or be immediately used to power some other spell. This is, in fact, a variation on the legal arts used to create power from blood, but it is far more efficient.

Later arts of Necromancy allow the necromancer to kill a person's body, but tie the soul to its preserved flesh. When creating the undead, the freshness of the body determines the amount of sentience brought back to it – if the person has been dead for more than a few hours, nearly mindless zombies are the best that can be managed. Even if the binding rituals are performed at the moment of death, however, the process is twisting to the intelligence inside. Loss of some intelligence and some memories is inevitable, and dark urges lurk constantly at the minds of the undead. Some are more able to restrain these impulses than other, but the urges grow worse as time draws on.

Undead require a constant supply of mana to maintain their state. If the spells maintaining them are allowed to go too long unrefreshed, permenant losses of both the physical state of the body and the acuity of the mind take place, and, eventually a rapid decomposition and release of the soul occurs.

The undead are considered abominations with no rights in Atathorn – anyone may destroy an undead and suffer no legal consequences of any kind. None the less, there are persistant rumors that some of the most important citizens in Atathorn are secretly undead.

On a side note, individuals who are exposed to a great deal of magical energy during their lives may sometimes spontaneously rise as undead after death. Increasingly, this is a problem with Prayer-Mill workers and others in occupations which deal with large amounts of raw magic. The undead formed in such ways are very primitive, extremely stupid, and generally very short-lived. It is possible for a Necromancer to control such an undead.

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