I do probably want a more mysterious kind of magic. Something to do with malign spirits from beyond space & time, or at least, from a particularly weird dimension.
Basically, a good fantasy system should probably include undead, evil spirits, et cetera. Sure, there's plenty of room for villainous mortals (and we have the mortals-turned-into-monsters appearing as Fiends and Brutes), but it's kind of nice to support "formless horrors" and such.
Their existence would support monstrous undead (you summon one of these mindless, consuming spirits to animate the corpse). It would support terrible guardian spirits (although fleshweaving some sort of magically sustained critter would work, too). And plots about folks trying to unleash primal horrors into the realms.
A sort of magic that even the mad gods generally won't touch... they aren't stupid enough. It could be a simple art. It would cover animating corpses, statues, whatever... all by drawing spirits from beyond (or the "Outer Dark", as Conan would put it) and putting them in place.
The spell art could be called something like "The Black Art".
Trivial stuff calls up really minor spirits that can't do much except act as guards or make people nervous (trivial mental effects). Minor spirits can be used to animate corpses and make zombies and skeletons. Major spirits make superior ones... they can be slightly superior in every way or get a big boost to one area like super strength or ultra-speed.
Dramatic and Legendary spirits can create bodies for themselves out of shadow-stuff and are very dangerous to summon. Legendary ones are the sort that you have to negotiate with rather than command... like alien gods.
They do not use magic. They're incapable of it. But they can produce weird effects that are similar. Hm. Maybe they're manavores, like many magical creatures. That would make them automatic enemies of the gods, since they'd want to eat the gods. If a shadow eats a mana source, it probably becomes something strange and different and then fades out of our reality, taking the mana source with it.
In general, summoning, controlling and banishing them is all the same difficulty. They eat life-force and mana and aren't really intelligent so much as cunning. Even the most potent/intelligent of them have trouble communicating with living beings in any meaningful fashion.
Posted by Kiz at February 5, 2005 12:17 AMCommentsPost a comment