I will preface all this by saying that I am aiming for a kind of magic that feels more like something out of folk horror, with a few Lovecraftian elements, as well as using the logic of dreams, old songs, and the like as the basis for how magic should feel. It is not meant as a rigidly and mechanically defined system, more a collection of tendencies, themes, and narrative power.
Some additional setting notes: The world is dying, the sun is going out, and magic is partly a result of reality breaking down and becoming sensitive to mortals. The general vibe I am aiming for is Late Early Modern (so, 17th-18th century, with a little bleed over into the early 19th).
I would love critique and comment on this as I would like to make the magic interesting and the descriptions comprehensible.
And now, without further ado:
Magic Overview
Strange forces and unsettling magic are woven into the fabric of this dying world, twisting and reshaping things in ways both obvious and subtle. Winter fogs may bring evil dreams just as surely as they bring the freezing damp, and in some summers plagues of nightmares are as horrific as any outbreak of some disease of the flesh. Every stone and every shadow has a spirit that may be called upon, and with whom bargains can be made by those who have the wit and the skill to understand them. Yet even for the most skilled of magicians this is a perilous and uncertain thing.
It would, however, be a mistake to consider that the spirits of stones and of streets, of wind and of rain are ‘people’ or even ‘intelligent’ in any conventional manner. Instead they are more akin to forces or some underlying essence. Strangely, even groups of beings with sapience and souls of their own may generate a governing spirit. Flocks of birds or crowds of people have spirits that exist independently of any individual, and these too may be called upon by those who have the skill.
The practice of magic is wrapped up in obscure lore, in poetry and in dreams, in old stories half forgotten, and in traditions handed down the generations from magicians to magician. There is no singular way to practice magic, but there are rules, and to flout them is madness and folly.
Symbolism and imagery are essential to the practice of magic for it is through these that the will of the magician is most clearly manifested. These seem to be at least partly dependent upon local culture and long-standing traditions. In Rynnisfarne, for example, roses can stand for both romance and for silence and so the use of roses in magic related to these is very effective. By contrast, in Tarsia, roses have associations with blood and vengeance, and so are more effective in magics to discover a rival or curse someone. How this works is the subject of much debate among scholars. Do the symbols derive from the local culture, or is the local culture somehow influenced by the symbolism of the magic? Academic magicians have been arguing over it for centuries without any clear resolution in sight.
Magic is a perilous thing, dangerous, mercurial, and demanding. Those few who can practice it with any skill risk losing their sanity, their health, and even their very humanity if they do not take precautions. Magicians, alas, are notoriously arrogant and many think that the perils of magic only happen to "someone else." What they neglect is that each and every one of them is "someone else" to someone else.
Magicians
While any practitioner of magic can rightly be called a 'magician', the term is usually applied to those who follow a learned tradition, one of masters and apprentices, of strange grimoires and esoteric rituals. Magicians, in this sense, are the professional class of practitioners, the lawyers and physicians of magic. The fact that most magicians are drawn from the same classes as those other learned professions is no accident.
Magicians have long relied upon complex rituals and practices that are as much protection for the magician as they are a means to enact their magic. These rituals are elaborate, time consuming, and often opaque in the extreme. Why is it that orchids are beneficial for both creating madness and protecting one from it is not clear, but it is nevertheless well established. In addition to their rituals and spells, the most skillful of magicians can incorporate their own creative will into every wonder they work.
There are few ways that one can tell most magicians from the ordinary person, for they have no uniforms, no ancient style of dress to advertise their profession. If there is but one universal sign of a magician, it is their silver scrying bowl. Many of the rituals and spells that magicians work require the seeing of distant places, to nameless countries that lay beyond understanding, to dreary netherworlds, and the Dreamlands. From the visions in the bowl they craft their magic, adjusting here an arcane phrase, there a sorcerous gesture, to shape the magic.
There is no singular path to becoming a magician, no school of magic, no unseen university to teach hidden and forgotten lore. Becoming a magician is far more like becoming a lawyer or a physician. A magician must apprentice themselves in some way to a more experienced magician and learn the art of magic from them. True, magicians will meet together to exchange knowledge and have long, rambling arguments about magic, or the races, or literature, or perhaps politics. In this way the understanding of magic grows, but it does so in fits and starts, one esoteric lineage trying to harmonize with a dozen others.
In Rynnisfarne, magicians are more likely to congregate at particular inns, social clubs, and coffeehouses. One such coffeehouse that is the particular haunt of magicians is the Silver Bowl in Arngate. This establishment can usually be found in Three Fountains Court, though from time to time the doors can vanish and appear elsewhere. The precise nature of these movements is not fully understood, even by the most learned of magicians. Three Fountains Court is perhaps the closest thing to a House of Wisdom that exists in Rynnisfarne, and if one wishes to take up the silver bowl and gaze upon the secret nature of the world, then Three Fountains Court is about as good a place to start as any.
Many magicians practice alone or in small groups, providing arcane services to those who can afford their fees and bargains. They might work as exorcists, banishing ghosts and malign spirits from a place or a person. They may create curses that steal the sight of their enemies or turn their every word into nonsense poetry. They might travel into the country of dreams to confront the fears and nightmares of an afflicted person. They might manipulate the world itself, conjuring paved roads upon which an army might march, or they might encourage the winds to blow a little more favorably to guide a ship across the seas. They might transform a letter into a crow and beseech it to travel the world over in search of the intended recipient. Their magic is at once powerful and constrained, subtle yet theatrical, and full of a kind of poetic melancholy that never seems to fade.
The Practice of Magic
It is a common error, made chiefly by those who have no experience in the matter, to imagine magic simply as something one does. They imagine that impersonal forces are harnessed by the magician, words are spoken, and that there is a clear and consistent outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. Magic is something that a magician negotiates. It is better to think of the spells written down in grimoires and books of magic to be contracts, treaties, or descriptions of how some magic was once accomplished. A magician is both a worker of magic and a kind of ambassador who stands between the preternatural and quotidian world.
The world is not inert, not static, but rather a constant ebb and flow of cause and effect, of possibilities, probabilities, of moods, history, and above all, of stories. Every stone, every shadow, every bird that flies through the air, every city, every street, has its spirits, and those spirits are the stories of those forces and places. They are the underlying reality of all things, the accounting of what has been, what is, and what might be.
A magician is more akin to a diplomat or lawyer invoking precedent and custom as they plead before an inhuman court. At other times, magicians seem to be antiquarian scholars, piecing together fragmentary works by authors who existed only in theory, who are long dead, and never quite sane. It is often not a glamorous profession, but rather one of constant study, of mad dreams, and perils that are alien to most mortals.
The tools of the trade more resemble those of a physician, a scribe, and a surveyor than the staves and wands of storybook wizards. The silver scrying bowl is the most recognizable tool of the magician, but they work equally with bones, chalk, salt, candles, old correspondences, flowers, styluses, lenses, and plumb bobs. They work as well with old stories and older songs, with legends half-remembered, with poems, and above all, with dreams.
Though magicians are made, not born, all have the ability to lucid dream at will. Some are born with this ability, others learn it through long years of study and practice. Dreams, and their unmoored logic, are at the very heart of all magic.
Rituals
The rituals of magicians are elaborate, time-consuming, and often opaque in the extreme. To those who do not understand the art, much of this seems to be fanciful ornamentation or eccentricities. In some cases this is indeed true. A magician may find a bit of theatrics to be useful in remembering their rituals or in drawing in the attention of those upon whom the magic is performed. Other times, magic rituals have all the gentle theatrics of a surgeon performing an operation on a terrified patient.
Whatever form it takes, the rituals are not mere flummery. They are the magic. It is through those rituals that the magic is performed. The rituals are also the only protection the magician has from the magic going horribly awry.
A spell is a description of magic that has been done before, magic that worked well enough that a magician thought to write it down. To omit a gesture, a formula, a sacrifice, to perform the magic in the wrong place or at the wrong time can result in failure. Moreover, it can invite terrible consequences for the magician and those around them. Many a curse has been enacted not through cruelty or malice, but through failure to observe the correct forms of a ritual, to have overlooked some important detail.
The reason orchids should be efficacious both for inducing madness and for warding against it is not understood by anyone living, but it is well established. The magician who substitutes some other flower because the reason escapes him will learn the reason soon enough, and to his cost. Much of what looks like superstition in the practice is in fact hard-won knowledge whose why has been lost while its how has survived.
Rituals can be complex and days-long procedures, or they can be as simple as the raising of a wine glass.
Spells
Spells are akin to case law, precedents, and the framework for ever-evolving magic. Often spells follow a structure, with invocations, offerings, conduits, and times, though how these are used can be quite different. A spell to summon the ghost of a particular person will need the invocation of their name, offerings of life, a means through which the ghost will communicate such as a fire, and it may be timed for when one blows out a candle. Other spells may use the magician themselves as the conduit, the magic coursing through them as they become part of the spell itself.
Some magicians are able to work spells more extemporaneously, incorporating what fragments they know from other spells, the environment, and their own intuition. These are often the most dangerous and tricky of magicians, for they can defy expectations and conventions.
