Arcane Magic

Primal magic finds its power in nature, while divine magic tithes it from sacred acts. Arcane Magic uses that which exists in the world, but disconnected from nature. Unbounded, it pools and flows, much as Void energy does when it is in the World. Some time after the clerics established themselves in the towns and the druids in the country, groups of curious scholars began investigating the folk magics of Magecraft, but instead of experimenting just to find what worked, they asked why those things worked, and why others did not.   These curious souls soon divided between those whose main interest was understanding the practical mechanisms of magic and finding new applications for them, and those who sought to plumb the unseen interactions within the magic itself, and testing its ultimate limits. The scholars of the arcane were dubbed arcanists, but soon enough the first group came to be known as artificers (hard workers) and the second as wizards (the wise.)   All arcane magic is based on understanding. It uses formulae, language and mathematics to manipulate magical energy in imitation of folk practice, the ancient lectomantic magic of the Titans, Draconic Magic, and indeed the divine actions of the Gods themselves.   Modern arcanists are divided into three approximate groups, depending on their field and method of study.

• Artificers continue to push the field of practical magic, in particular the creation of magic items without the obsessive attention to detail in traditional crafting.
• Scholasts are wizards who focus on one of the eight schools of magic identified by early wizards: abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, and transmutation. While they are entirely capable of achieving many practical effects, their focus is largely theoretical.
• Practitioners are hardly ignorant of theory, but their focus is instead on the method of practice, and the use of specific tools and practices to enhance and complement their arcane studies.

  Although technically arcanists, bards are rejected by the bulk of that community - on an institutional, rather than an individual. level - for their lack of rigour. Bards are not scholars, but collectors; magpie magicians who gather up whatever bits and pieces catch their eye. The bardic traditions were born from wandering storytellers and musicians. In the course of their travels, these individuals would pick up bits and pieces of magic from many different traditions, along with stories, songs and history. At first, this only involved collecting tricks of folk magic, but as teacher taught apprentice and their collection of lore increased, the bards - as a loose community - began to add greater spells to their repertoires.   Traditionally, bards organise in cooperative networks called colleges, but these are not teaching organisations. Bards of the same college share their skills and the spells they have learned, but the education of young bards remains the preserve of a mentor-apprentice relationship. At the point where the bardic colleges began to be recognised, not just locally, but internationally, their arts could rival any magician in power, if not in theoretical understanding.   Because of their individualistic, dilettante nature, bards do not break down into categories as neatly as magicians from more structured traditions. There are, loosely, three approaches that bards take, but these are far more a matter of individual attitude than collegiate affiliation.

• Artists are in it for the art, whether their focus is on music, storytelling, magic or even weapon use. They take a greater interest in perfecting their own skills than in employing those skills to any particular end.
• Firebrands, on the other hand, are all about the cause, be that a particular cause or whatever cause happens along. They commit to the capacity for their abilities to affect social change.
• Preservers see their collections as history. They focus on oral histories, otherwise unrecorded music, and the discovery of novel or long-lost magics for the sake of keeping them from being lost to time.