#and not fae (sentient) (tricky to catch)

[saint-nevermore]

Monstertober day 24 - Fungi + Curious

some funny little Semi-Fae fellas. they use a material form like Dryad, manipulating the form of fruiting fungi into something very small and adorable. because the actual mushroom body is a temporary one to spread spores, these forms don't last very long, and once the mushroom begins to rot the Fae must leave it and go back to living in mycelium until it finds a young mushroom to adopt. they are very inquisitive and love watching the world go by.

in late fall, hundreds will come together into rings and celebrate in the night in an event where they will use their energy stores to create new fae. although usually leaving their mushroom forms in the ring formation until the fungi itself dies as normal, some villages near dense populations of these Fae instead have the creatures march in and abandon their forms there, allowing the people to make use of the mushrooms instead. this is most commonly seen in predominantly goblin villages.

#fraizer draws #fae #semifae #fairy #mushrooms #monstertober #monstertober 2020 #these guys are very passive and funny and cute #and no eating them would not hurt them since rhey can leave rheir material form anytime. it is just an inconvenience #though their fae form can be absorbed or eaten since they're made of magic but #most mortals dont have a reason to harvest magic like that and when they do its usually like. ores and plants #and not fae (sentient) (tricky to catch) #nevverse #lore post #somewhat inspired by uhhh i think it wss mossworm who did mushroom guys? but i wasnt looking at them it was #more of a subconscious thing i gope theyee not too similar eiieiee #fungyn #esteban #the fly agaric has brcome an oc rejoice

[churchyardgrim]

what I’ve got so far for the worldbuilding doc!!! no organization, just stream-of-consciousness stuff and notetaking. it’s good! it’s really good!

“live” spells, spells that mutate and interact with each other in passive ways, but build up changes over time

gotta renew that shit, magic pressed into shape wears out over time and use, it’s got a finite shelf life

travel is a tricky thing; it counts as a liminal space, it’s “slippery” to magic. travel is unstable, by definition travel spells don’t stay put or behave properly, and it seems to be tied to the very act of moving from one place to another. distance kinda matters, the route you take sometimes does (the road often traveled develops its own weird flavor) so teleporting is… problematic

so protecting or bespelling cars or other means of transport is a tricky thing. you can do it if you’re rich enough to hire powerful mages on retainer, but ordinary people’ve gotta make do. it doesn’t usually cause paranoia about commuting to work or going to a friends house, but some people get weird about it, the same way some people get weird about their food touching anyone else’s

fortunately if you’re going fast enough it’s hard for most shit to catch up with you even if you’re not protected by wards; no one’s going to try to precise-aim a spell at you going 60mph on the highway

magic wants to do something, it wants to act, its a very active force. passive magic is usually more dangerous, unknown, kept contained by something. spells that aren’t allowed to do what they’re built to do can backfire in unexpected ways.

no one really knows how many magicians are in the higher levels of world society and government

certainly the government doesn’t officially know, but there’s always conspiracy theories. area 51, the area 51 for magic, etc

spells leave little trace-ghosts when they’re used up or burn out, faint imprints that fade over time but can be used to tell what was done here. that’s about all they’re good for though

magic needs energy to work. magicians and enchanters can install a kind of battery into their spells, a magical fat reserve to fuel it until it’s done what it needed to or it uses the reserve up and burns out. it is very very hard and impractical to get this reserve back after it’s been set, so most average spells have a set lifespan, and the size of the battery is calculated to burn out at a certain time.

more short lived, immediate spells also take a drain on the user; technically anyone has the capacity to do huge flashy world-shaking magic, but the drain would kill them pretty damn fast. any idiot can move a mountain, that’s how idiots end up dead.

being precise and deliberate is harder, especially when affecting the physical world without the structure of a set spell. you can build a circle sigil onto a handkerchief to cause whatever you drape it over to levitate; making objects float without the structure of a spell like that is a lot harder, because you’re building the structure on the fly with your brain.

magic tattoos are A Thing, and very common. spells attached physically to living things with special ink as the medium and binder work a lil bit differently than spells that rely just on their internal workings to stick to someone. tat spells draw on the energy of the wearer, not the caster (who is usually an artist/sorcerer in one, or a two-person team) and can be modified with shutoff switches so they don't accidentally kill the wearer

tat spells are often used for medical purposes, altering the flesh below them; Harker’s HRT is delivered through one such means, though the spell has to be checked and refreshed on the regular by a medimage. the potential for illicit use of these spell tats is something the magic scientists worry about; if you can alter hormones with them, you can use them to deliver recreational drugs on a constant supply, or turn all the water in someone’s body into hydrogen gas

that’s another thing, conservation of matter; you can’t turn one element into another. well you can, but you can only do it by physically ripping atoms apart and putting them back together different, and 1) the strain it would take to do so would instantly kill you, and probably set off a nuke in your general vicinity, and 2) you could only do maybe a handful of atoms at a time, which is the opposite of efficient.

only a few people have tried to do this, and it ended well for none of them. it’s Forbidden Research, which is not normally a thing that happens in the magic world. only things that are completely pointless and pointlessly destructive are Forbidden Research.

energy transference is waaaay easier, temperature is the first thing babby mages learn to regulate. mages would never get cold but doing constant temperature regulation via magic gets draining over time, and for most people it’s just easier to put on a damn sweater. there are a lot of charms to do it for you, but they tend to burn out fast and be kinda disposable.

light is a lil bit trickier but still entry-level; most adult mages of most stripes can make light happen, or dampen existing light. again, you’d think mages would have built-in sunglasses, but again, constantly doing the thing takes its toll and physical sunglasses are just easier.

life is… a difficult thing to alter. obviously there’s medical magicians, but it’s a very exact science and it’s very easy for things to go wrong. magic does weird things to life forces over time.

“soul” isn’t quite the right word, it’s more like momentum? the energy a living thing has that keeps it alive, the inertia of a beating heart and working organs. almost a perpetual motion machine. except that energy’s gotta run dry sometime. most spells won’t literally take years off your life, usually the effect is a lil tiredness like low blood-sugar, or a few days of lethargy after a magical workout. sometimes a very strong bit of spellwork will mimic bad illness and put someone out of commission for a month or three, but most people aren’t that reckless. it’s very much a matter of control; if you can’t control your magic well enough to keep it from killing you, you don’t have a very long life.

there’s very much the attitude of “well yes we could use magic for this, but honestly it’s more trouble than it’s worth so we’re not gonna bother” very practical-minded people.

magic affects living things whether they’re acted upon or not; even being in proximity to magic has its effects over time. so most people are comfortable with minor medical spells, it’s only a few weirdos that freak out over magical radiation effects. most life-mages specialize in humans, because it’s humans that most often need magical medical care. some specialize in plants, but it’s much harder because plants play by different rules. you have to have a knack for it, and a looooot of patience.

magic is also used by nonhuman things; some animals have rudimentary magical defense systems, or hunting methods. some plants use primitive spells to sting or make themselves poisonous. it’s not very sophisticated stuff, but it does the job and that’s all a plant cares about.

undead typically have very shit magical radars. most mages have some means of detecting magic being used around them, and can feel their own spells more keenly, but these senses are still easy to bamboozle and often aren’t more precise than “there’s magic eehhh nearish”

some types of nonhuman that are closer to fae have more refined magical senses, and can sometimes physically see spells in action, instead of just noticing the effects of what they’re doing.

fae themselves are Not To Be Trusted but aren’t exactly Kill On Sight either

very few things are classified as Kill On Sight tbh, and very few magic denominations are geared towards combat

magic militaries are a thing that teenagers dream up and are then quickly squashed because what the fuck johnny, who do you hate so much that you need firebomb spells? no, grounded, none of that here.

How Vampires Work: there’s an old old old Old spellthing that’s somehow still trucking along, and that’s very very tied into the element of blood. it’s transmitted through blood, uses blood as a host, and as a food/energy source. this is vampirism. it “infects” through transfer of blood (significant amounts, when the turnee is at the very edge of death) and unmoors the “soul” from the body and physical world, only to moor it right back in, tying the “soul” to itself and itself to the flesh body it’s inside. this is what keeps vamps “alive” and walking around even though they only exhibit two out of like five life signs. each spellthing inside each vamp is distinct from the others, and uses the individual vamp as a means to feed it; kind of a symbiosis? spellthing keeps vamp alive, vamp feeds spellthing, make a romcom about it? except the spellthing isn't really “alive”, it’s not sentient, it’s just there. it pulls some strings to altar the new vamp’s brain chemistry a wee bit, causes physical changes, and it’s the spellthing itself that’s weak to sunlight and heart-stabbing and all that jazz. burn out the spellthing, the vamp goes with it. there is no cure or treatment. the spellthing needs human blood bc human blood carries traces of “soul” in it, and to compensate for the sheer volume needed, the vamp’s innards are specialized to process with a lot of liquid very fast, so they don’t really get bloated up like ticks very often. it’s a very short digestive tract with lots of room, and it works very very quickly. spellthings do have regional variations and minor mutations, but they’re unexpectedly minor; it seems reluctant to change too much. powers and assets are more variable than weaknesses, vulnerabilities are often the same across groups. vamps really can’t use magic themselves, except what powers their spellthing gives them. no one knows where they came from or who made the first one, and some magical historians are very keen to find out; there’s evidence of vamps or vamp-like creatures going back way further than good ole vlad tepes, so he clearly wasn’t the first.

demons are also A Thing, but pacts are discouraged because they usually blow up explosively and have large fallouts. demons play dirty, you see. sometimes people get possessed without a pact, and that can be by a demon or a particularly strong ghost; results vary.

Harker technically counts as possessed.

#oc talk #I explain how my vampires work in here! #also the basics of how magic operates and a bit on what magic people are like as a generalized group