Magic System, Part 3: Spellcasting Techniques

Published: 2021-11-05

Tags: magic-system

Oh boy! I'm finally getting back to this!

In the last post, I explained how my magic system was language-agnostic and intent-based. In this post, I'll be explaining the two main camps of technique: hand-based and wand-based.

Hand-Based Magic

Picture: a warrior, roaming the plains, in search of their hidden opponent. They spot the enemy's encampment just over the hill; they put a hand to their face, and with a simple "falach", *hidden*, they become near-invisible, only spottable by those with aura magics, and definitely not from the distance they intend to spy from.

Hand-based magic tends to be less concentrated and more of a spread effect. Hiding from an enemy, creating an explosion; this class of magic (and languages that prefer it) is very much a spread, "area of effect" type magic. It developed, independently, in the Scottish highlands, Central and Southern America, parts of North America, parts of Africa, and in India; the languages that developed alongside those magic techniques prefer those techniques, such as Scots Gaelic, Indian, and several languages of African or Native American descent.

Hand-based casters tend to avoid high-focus spells for their own safety. For instance, the Greek "anemos" causes a blast of wind (the equivalent in Scots Gaelic is variably "gaoth" or "gaoithe", depending on who's teaching it). The hand-based casters tend to avoid this spell, because it leads to them getting blown off of their feet (although some casters take advantage of this, such as the at-times-divisive Sandra Field, who used "gaoth" at times to fly away from pursuers).

Wand-Based Magic

Picture: a refined young wizard, wearing their robe and clutching their wand. Today is the day of the Spells final, where they will attempt to defeat the teacher in a one-on-one duel. The duel begins: the wizard, avoiding their teacher's initial "ekrixi", flicks their wand at the teacher and utters "ex". In seconds, "exorisei opla" has delivered the teacher's wand to the student. Still, the teacher is not finished; he's wise beyond his years and has mastered hand-casting Greek. With another "ekrixi", he's knocked our poor student to the ground. Standing over them, he asks a simple "Do you yield?" Our student has already passed the final. Most students in their class don't even land a single spell on the teacher, usually hitting some poor other student who was waiting for their turn; the grading of the final is based on the fight you put up and the spells you demonstrate, not necessarily by actually defeating the teacher. Instead of yielding, however, they smile back and simply utter, "ek". With one syllable, they've flipped the whole battle on its head; the teacher is blown away, landing on the other side of the battle arena, but our student is not yet finished. They keep the pressure up, using more ekrixis and an occasional "travixte" (pull), they wail on the teacher until the teacher finally says the words any student in that course would love to hear. "I yield, I yield."

Wand-based magic is much more focused than hand-based magic. While it's less efficient at spread effect spells, this class of magic makes up for this deficiency by being extremely good at the focused spells. It developed, independently, in Europe and Asia. The European colonization of Africa initially threatened the hand-based magics of tribal languages, but those survived. Latin, the Romance languages, Chinese, and Russian are among the languages that favor wand-based magics.

Spread effect spells are much more difficult to perform with a wand, so many students are taught a minimal version of hand-casting to practice the intent of those spells for later wand casting. This teaching technique was created by the great Lance Alderon to teach his students in Greek, Latin, and Russian, and it quickly became the definitive way to teach spread effect spells to wand casters. Some wand-based casters go on to learn hand-casting in full, but many stick with the minimal version they were taught in school.

Conclusion

This post covered the two classes of magic. I hope you've enjoyed reading this so far. Maybe I'll keep it up and write some more, but for now, I'm out of ideas for stuff to write about.