I’ve been chipping away at the Aorlis magic system, and it’s a huge project, but the end is in sight. It’s based on the magic used in Name of the Shadow and some as yet unpublished prose, which in turn is based on historic medieval magic.
I’ve made it a point, over the years, to study a mass of janky old medieval and Renaissance grimoires and academic studies on period magic. I’ve also been careful to strip away all the 19th and 20th century terminology that got added by the Theosophists, Golden Dawn, and Rosicrucians. That stuff is all great, and still very much present in all the modern discussions of magic technology, but it wasn’t present in older history.
Basically, I’ve done magic from Paracelsus on back, with a little John Dee thrown in for good nature. Mostly, though, it’s medieval. I may have been a little fast and loose with chronological applications, but then Aorlis is not Earth, and things have moved at a different pace there.
Anyway, and this is the interesting point, when you look at what magic was actually used for, and why, you get a much different picture than what modern role playing games present. Instead, you get far more interesting uses, like spells to win court cases, spells to give speech to statues, spells to animate sephulchral ashes, spells to detach one’s shadow and send it spying for you, and so much more.
It doesn’t end there, of course, because Aorlis has a long magic history of its own, and I’ve elaborated a lot of existing magic to make new and novel uses of it. For example, the spell for a wizard to take over a victim and use him as a puppet? Terrible magic. But, how about using the same spell so that if you allies need you, and you cannot be there, for you to “ride” one of them and, when they need your expertise, you pop in, use your magic and wisdom to the party’s benefit, then you sign off. It’s brilliant if you think of it. It’s that kind of weirdness that makes it all come alive for me.
More to come.