Mythic Philosophy - The Paths to Magic

Runequest was firmly rooted in a particular style of magic. This is an area for messing about with different approaches (mechanical or otherwise)

Cosmology of magic.

• Innate: Magic inherent to being.
• Basic/petty/hedge/community/battle/hearth/spirit magic: Common magic makes use of the innate magic of reality.
• Inner and outer magic based on spirits: Shaman/witches and warlocks, wyter types. Might include elementalists, summoners, necromancers and such.
• Divine Favour: Magic granted to you for some reason by a divine being. Gods are at this level.
• Agency: For some reason, you are connected to a higher Power. This could be a pantheon of gods, a philosophy tied to a primal magical source, or one of the multitude of cults or orders that try to understand the remote and uncommunicative higher powers.
• Magical Knowing: From herb magic to Grand alchemy and sorcery, it is the magic of unlocking power through understanding.

Assume the recurring figures that appear in the stories of the Gods [folk heroes?] are divine agencies not particularly attached to humanity/Dwarfanity/etc. They represent things that make up why the world is. Inspirations for this are the primal god archetypes (horned Man, etc), things that represent forces even gods obey [life and death cycles, higher laws or honour, etc] and people/figures like the Endless , or the three fates, or the world serpent - things that move only in divine realms but have little to do with worshippers and such.

The gloranthan runes are a very good collection of primal symbols, but the method in which they stnergise can be radically altered to bring out a differeng mythic landscape still connected to runes. The easist way of doing this is to consider everything in opposition amongst the Gloranthan runes as part of a larger cycle or pattern.

Death and Fertility are linked, not primal opposites, but as part of a primal cycle that meets in both opposition and in synthesis. Related runes might be forms and spirit - corrupt synthesis might be undeath, whilst natural synthesis might result in the form runes. In opposition, they may meet as disorder.

Rather than replicating a mythic landscape that Glorantha has already covered, I'm aiming at an anthropologically evolving setting that takes the various forms of magic into account in daily life, the evolution of culture, etc.