How Ordinary People Talk About Magic

The towers, circles, and temples of Duskfall argue about Tapestry and Worldstream, Claimed and Gifted, Transcendent and Immanent.   Everyone else mostly just wants to know: “Will this person help us, or get us killed?”   For most folk, magic is not a philosophy. It is an occasion: the day the river rose too high and only a miracle kept the village from washing away; the night fire fell from the sky because someone in a tower mispronounced a word. Those who live close to such stories develop their own rough categories—imprecise, but good enough to decide who gets invited in for supper and who is politely directed to the road.

Folk Categories

If you asked a farmer, a dockhand, and an innkeeper to list “types of magic,” you would not hear the words Arcane, Primal, Divine, or Artifice. You would hear words like:

• Wizard Magic – anything with books, circles, strange tools, or people from the Order of Magi.
• Holy Magic – anything done near an altar, with a holy symbol, or by someone in well-scrubbed robes.
• Wild Magic – anything involving animals, storms, odd plants, or people who talk to rocks.
• Cursecraft – anything that goes wrong later, especially if done by someone your grandmother didn’t trust.
• Pact Magic – a phrase most refuse to say aloud, reserved for the truly frightening.

Under these, the Four Currents blur.   Arcane and Artifice are lumped together as Wizard magic.

• If it comes out of a tower, a college, a rune-etched gadget, or the hands of someone who calls themselves a “Magi,” it goes in that bucket.
• The fact that some of those “Magi” are actually Weave-workers binding the Worldstream instead of Pullers touching the Tapestry is irrelevant to anyone not holding a measuring rod.

Divine and Primal are bundled as holy or wild magic, depending on manners.

• If it’s accompanied by prayers, incense, and recognizable scripture, it’s “holy.”
• If it happens on a hilltop, in a grove, or from the hands of a person who smells of smoke and rain, it’s “wild” or “old ways,” even if the power being Gifted is not so different.

These categories are emotional rather than precise.   “Wizard magic” is respected and feared. You hire it to solve problems large enough to justify the risk—sieges, plagues, monsters—and otherwise hope it goes happen somewhere else. “Holy magic” is comforting, so long as it comes from your temple. “Wild magic” is tolerated when the harvest is good and burned when it is not.   And “pact magic”… that is the word people use when nothing else will do. When a caster does things no priest claims, no circle will endorse, and no tower wants to explain.

Superstitions of Rift and Stream

Even those who cannot name the Tapestry or the Worldstream can feel edges in the world. Over generations, these feelings harden into little rules—half-prayers, half-warnings.   About places where the Rift runs thin, people say:

• “Don’t sleep facing the crack in the sky; your dreams will fall out.”
• “If a Magus tells you not to look at a thing, don’t.”
• “If the birds stop singing all at once, get under a roof. If there’s no roof, get under someone braver than you.”

Old tales warn children not to trace strange symbols in the dust, not to repeat words they hear in their sleep, not to follow lights that move against the wind. Few mention the Tapestry by name, but they carry the knowledge that some patterns are hungry.   About the Worldstream, the sayings are quieter:

• “Never take the first fruit from a tree that’s never borne before; leave it for the land.”
• “Pour a little water back into the well; it remembers.”
• “If the forest falls silent, apologize. If the silence continues, leave.”

Farmers talk to their fields at dawn, half as habit, half as superstition. Sailors salute the sea before setting out and after returning, not because they can feel the Worldstream but because their grandfathers did, and the grandfathers who did not are mostly stories about storms.   In places where Primal circles are strong, these customs take on the weight of law. In cities, they become quaint habits that old people insist on and young people mock—until a year of bad harvests makes everyone suddenly devout.   As for pacts, there are fewer sayings and more silences.   Most folk will not speak of them openly. When they must, they avoid names and rely on oblique advice:

• “Never promise anything to a stranger who knows your true name.”
• “If you wake up stronger and can’t say why, go to a priest or a Magus before you go home.”
• “Some doors don’t swing shut once opened; better not to try them.”

Everyone knows someone who knows someone whose cousin made a deal and vanished, or came back wrong, or died very rich and very suddenly. The details change; the warning does not.

Regional Attitudes

Duskfall is not one place. It is a patchwork of kingdoms, city-states, wildernesses, and ruins, each with its own history of miracle and disaster. The same spell might earn applause in one town and a noose in the next.   A few broad patterns emerge.   Lands of the Towers – Regions where the Order of Magi holds chartered authority.

• Here, “Wizard magic” is part of governance. Magi serve as royal advisors, battlefield weapons, and occasionally judges.
• Artificers and tower-trained Bards are folded into the same institution, further blurring lines; if they wear an Order sigil, people call them “Magi” and assume their power comes from the Rift, whether or not it does.
• Laws require outside casters to register with the nearest tower. Unlicensed Pullers, Weave-workers, and suspected Warlocks are pressured to submit to “examination” or leave.
• Temples bristle but often compromise: better to have the Order as a known rival than to watch unsupervised spellcasters wander freely.

In such places, people clutch their ward-charms when they see a stranger in mage’s robes—but they also sleep easier knowing that if something truly monstrous climbs out of the Rift, someone, somewhere, is supposed to be watching.   Lands of the Temples – Realms dominated by one or more powerful Divine orders.

• Here, what matters is not how a wonder is worked, but who it glorifies.
• Arcane and Artifice are tolerated when they serve temple interests—building defenses, copying scriptures, crafting relics—but denounced as hubris when they draw too much awe away from the altars.
• Primal circles are courted as allies in some faiths (“the world is the gods’ first scripture”) and hunted as heretics in others (“the land is a test, not a god”).
• Warlocks are officially condemned… and unofficially courted, if their patrons can be framed as “lesser servants” of the dominant deity.

Common folk in such places tend to see all Gifted magic as proof that the gods are near, and all Claimed magic as suspicious at best. Yet when the temple’s healers are busy, they will still slip a coin to a hedge-witch in the alley and promise not to tell.   Lands of the Wild – Regions where Primal circles and old oaths outrun maps.

• Here, the Worldstream is not metaphor. The land’s moods are as real a concern as the weather.
• Shrines, where they exist, are as likely to be for rivers and groves as for gods. Priests who insist that their far-off Thrones supersede local spirits do not last long.
• Arcane and Artifice are viewed with deep distrust: each Pull on the Tapestry is one more alien strain on a world already scarred; each Weave-work is another net thrown over things that ought to run free.
• Divine casters who respect local pacts are welcomed. Those who treat the land as mere stage for their god’s glory are “accidents waiting to happen.”

In such places, a Warlock whose patron disturbs the Worldstream will find their footsteps dogged by watchful eyes, human and otherwise.   Crossroads and Ruins – Cities built on old battlefields, trade-hubs, and places where magic has already broken once.

• These are places of pragmatism. People have seen too much to believe simple stories.
• A city that stands because a Magus held a breach alone for three days has trouble outlawing Arcane practice, however much the temples grumble.
• A town rebuilt three times after “blessed crusades” may look very politely at paladins and quietly hide its hedge-priests in the cellars.
• Ruins where the Tapestry snarls or the Worldstream runs thin are ringed by both shrines and warning stones. Everyone agrees the place is dangerous; no one agrees on why.

In such regions, people tend to judge casters by their reputation more than their tradition. A kind Druid, a reliable priest, a careful Magus, and a discreet Warlock may all drink at the same inn table, watched closely but not driven out.   Across all these differences, one thread runs true:   Most folk in Duskfall do not care which box a scholar’s grid puts a spell in.   They care whether the person wielding it remembers that everyone else has to live here when they are done.