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figuring out important things about my novel characters' needs and wants and personalities always makes me feel like the most elite genius ever to do writing stuff. I am a mozart of words.

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I hate work I should be at the (remembers I don't want to go to the club) the imagination

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WRITE IT!!! WRITE THAT SELF INDULGENT SHIT!!!

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On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lyndon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!

#reblogging because I need a proper taxonomy in #necromancer in love #we have like four kinds of magic and they don’t cover enough ground

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for the second night in a row, I have slept five hours and then woken wide awake. man, am I going to feel it tonight.

insomnia is a crime God does to nerf me, personally.

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it’s so funny how much I dread going out and then the second I go out, it’s like, wow I should do this more often! this is delightful!

a lesson I do not learn for next time

okay. let’s put on our little shoes and run from the devil. once we get out there, we will be grateful we did.

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okay. let’s put on our little shoes and run from the devil. once we get out there, we will be grateful we did.

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okay. I am just simply not going to watch this movie with my current brain. straightforwardly not happening. it can happen tomorrow after Zooms.

things I could perhaps stand to do

find my colored pencils and color

go for a walk with my headphones on.

try and work on a fanfiction or perhaps a fun writing project that is not the novel.

read maybe

podcast but probably not.

take a roll down to the ice cream place, if it's still open.

watch a youtube television.

watch qi.

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update: cleaning achieved. now I am meant to be watching a movie but still got the Don’t Wannas.

(Honor Among Thieves opinions thus far: Chris Pine is killing it, why did they have to fridge his wife in the opening sequence, and Hugh Grant is king of asshole mountain).

trying to will myself to either get up and clean my bathroom or do some more writing, but neither has been happening and probably I should find a thing I actually want to do (I do want to write, for a change, but I'm at almost 4k words in 24 hours and we're done for now)

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no contest, Dessa's version of Balance by The Mountain Goats.

Holly Miranda's version of I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen. fits beautifully with the novel I'm writing.

Brandi Carlile has a lot of good covers (shoutout to Folsom Prison Blues) but it's gotta be her version of Creep for the win. I'm a sucker for lady versions of Creep.

sorry to bring both Christmas and discourse to the party, but Nathaniel Rateliff has a gender-flipped version of Baby it's Cold Outside that, like the Holly Miranda song above, is perfect for the novel I'm writing, so here we are.

Laura Jane Grace has a lot of exceptional Mountain Goat's covers but for my money the best one is Going to Georgia.

Honorable mention to Melissa Etheridge's Refugee, which is, you guessed it, on the Necromancer in Love playlist

Top five cover songs?

This was really fun to think through!

NOT IN ORDER:

1: Jolene (Miley Cyrus). The context and aesthetics and timing of this specific cover were just designed to jump up and down on some childhood stuff of mine, and it took me out at the knees the first time I saw it.

2: Wildflowers (The Wailin' Jennys). Strong feelings about this song, picky about covers of it, this one is so gorgeous that I might almost prefer it to the original.

3: Fast Car (Luke Combs & Tracy Chapman). Jesus. And such a good illustration of a cover designed to love and honor the original artist.

4: Friend Like Me (NE-YO). I don't remember how/when/why I came across this cover, but I have a TRULY EXCELLENT Leverage vid idea for it.

5: Shake It Out (Capital Children's Choir). Just gorgeous and haunting.

#necromancer in love #for a few of these #music

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ok what’s your florence + the machine song. mine is rabbit heart (raise it up)<3

#not a lot of love for #my boy builds coffins #in the notes #but it's hugely relevant to the novel I'm writing so here we are #necromancer in love

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Wrote 2.8k words today (about 5.5 pages, maybe four and a bit hours of work) and I don’t even hate most of them! Good day overall!

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(inspired by this one for the sake of full transparency)

#spilling was a close second #but clothes that fit! lifechanging!

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that dnd quiz going around looked like a lot of fun but also it was sixty questions and I fully am not making sixty decisions just to look at a neat graph. godspeed to everyone else.

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Stress having physical effects is so stupid your body's just like "you've been having a real shit time and I'm about to make it worse" I hope you die I hope we both die

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the best blogs are the ones where 1 girl talks to herself constantly