Excerpts from the guidebook for new first-year students.

How to get more mana? A very common and useful way is to take in mana from the outside of yourself. Unfortunately, this mana is tainted by aspects and concepts many you do not know or have heard about. So, a filter of sorts has to be made, and to most casters that filter is their intellect. Using their understanding of aspects and concepts the caster may purge them over time (safeish) or pit them against each other (not safe). Anyway you do it the mana should become neutral, and you may take it into your core and grow your central mana node (or spring). Take heed that you do not go to fast for one who have consumed tainted mana may become tainted themselves. Mood swings, personality fragmentation or exploding into a million shards of bone, are just some of the most common symptoms of mana taint.

It is important to have a thorough grounding in the mana world around you, what aspect and concepts are, work and feel like. I recommend building a mental aspect and concept library, this will be a lot of work, but I promise you. When your next enemy throws a black ball that you think is death aspected, and you counter by making your shield of life and light only to find the black ball burst on your shield detonating in lightning and burning your eyes out. Then you will appreciate mana perception as we call this craft.

This is a place for wizards. Why wizards? Why not sorcerers? Why not warlocks? Why not shamans? There are many ways to manipulate mana. To grow strong in the way of the caster you must make mana a part of yourself. You can steal or make mana pathways growing in strength but narrowing your path. Unless specifically in the pathway fine control will be lost, you can make up for it with training, but the weakness will remain. You can hold concepts in your mind and siphon its essence to work for you, but concepts do not play well with each other. The dissonance of conflicting concepts will take up more and more of your brain or the extremes of your concept will do the same. Someone who has only one concept ossifies, everything becomes tainted by its one concept leading to weakness of the mind. You can use runes and sigils to force external mana to conform to your design, this is a strength. But runes need a place to be put and sigils need a place to start from, leading to static and brittle spellcraft.

A common way wizard use mana is by saturation and will imperialism. The wizard saturates the outside of their bodies with their own un-aspected inner mana then forcing the outside aspected mana to submit to their mana by will. Making the wizard temporarily his own concept and his mana a sort of magnet or sergeant forcing the outside mana into shapes and structures or formations of the wizards choosing. For the training wizards this is quite hard to do, exhausting, dangerous and mana draining. For strong wizards this is always on leading to a gravity well of weirdness wherever they walk, flame shifting rapidly through the colour spectrum and ending up transmogrified into ice. Corpses rising and juggling their own bones, cobblestones becoming marshmallows, politicians telling the truth.

In most of the Prime material plane we use circles to mean a spells power or complexity. This is because internal mana nodes or springs can passively gather aspected mana and neutralise it over time, adding the mana to itself. Now ****************************************************************************** of the ********simply*************************likened as to a monkey. ***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************. This is why we call it a circle, and if you can exhaust three of the circles without passing out or on, you’re a 3-circle mage. Now a warning the easiest way to go up a circle is not to get more mana but to get more control. The way of the mage or its corresponding magus is control, agile hopping from mana construct to spells, the way of the mage is powerful. But please remember Nersinia is a place where wizards are made. What is a wizard's foremost strength? Is it cognitive plasticity and flexibility? Is it fortitude of path and mastery of concepts? To be a wizard is to have the hubris and madness to WILL the word to be! This is what Nersinia is looking for, and should you stray from the path you might become a lesson. DO NOT BECOME A LESSON.

There are rules governing our prime and sub plains, a seemingly universal one is the colours and how to use them to shore up weaknesses when fighting other planes of existence. In a party of ten it is expected that you have 3 Reds to fight in front of the others, one Gray to warn of danger and stop perception attacks. One Pink to communicate and lead the group in understanding the situation. One Green to provide force wide or focused, one Silver to take resources into account. One Gold to use the elusive powers of God, gods, god or spirits one Blue to figure out ways to go or make ways to go. The last is a toss-up between a Yellow to heal, a White to plan and a Brown to know things. This is supposedly our Prime Planes strengths but over time we have diversified and taken up or learned other ways to incorporate the different colours. A summoner is denoted as Blue with some Green, a paladin as a Red with both Pink and Gold, and a healer as Yellow and both Blue and Gray. Most sentients can hold many different colours and roles, but some monochrome colours are incredibly powerful, and also addicting. When we say gone a colour, we mean gone, the likelihood of someone coming back are very, very small. Now it does happen, but the escapee often kill themselves or go back to their colour in the end. And should it happen to you during your school time you will end up in the Rainbow warrens.

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Rainbow warrens: where those who have gone Blue/Red/Pink/Green/Black/Silver/Gold/are kept for study and barter.

Blue: To go blue is to be obsessed with all aspects of the mind. You start of benignly “I need to study so I will take an intelligent enhancer and study faster.” “Last time I took an intelligent enhancer, and I did study faster, what happens if I take 2 enhancers.” “So, if I take 2 enhancers by lunch I can go to triple speed with a wisdom spell, hum.... I NEED to write this down; it needs to be more efficient.” “All shall come to me so I might change them to be more efficient, give me more brain to help you get more brain..................” To go Blue is also very hard to deal with because the blues link up and form literal mountains of people helping each other get smarter and more efficient at getting smarter. We call this a gestalt. When it comes to about 500 blues, they usually attack to get more brains for their gestalt, but luckily at around 900 brains they stop attacking and start trading instead. The gestalts will help you with anything, spells, secrets, ruling, policy, politics, juggling, surviving. All sentient endeavours they can help you with for money or slaves or whatever you have. The largest gestalts are millions of brains large and unless attacked will not hurt a single sentient. The leading theory of why is: the gestalts are waiting for sentients to kill themselves off before taking over.

Red: to “go red” is to kill or cut the other until it stops gushing fluid and/or stops moving. To my knowledge no caster has ever gone red without outside interference.

Silver: to “go silver” is to need wealth, wealth you have, wealth others have. I will not trade this thing for 20 times the wealth I got it for. But that’s more wealth, and how trading is done. No give wealth, only take. Kill all for wealth. Precius precious wealth.

Black: to “go black” is to crack at the pillars of your soul, tainting you with all colours at once.

Pink: to “go pink” is to go to the edge of excess of whatever. You could probably argue that to go red is quite similar to pink but, pink for some reason survives on average 200 times longer than the ones that go red. Perhaps it is the fact that older pinks oftentimes incorporate yellow well.

Green: to “go green” invokes the idea of constant growth of plant and trees. But this is far from the case, most mages who go green are actually evokers. The pure passion of a wildfire, the shear vastness of a tsunami, the groaning devastation of the earthquake and the sadistic capriciousness of a lightning storm. Rarely but it does happen a necromancer will “go green” and fill the local area with death aspected mana.

Gray: it is very hard to “go grey” as the idea is constant observation of all, so-called Omniscience is their stated goal, and most do not have that ability. They almost always go blue to see more effectively.

White: What is the future? It is white! Not begun, endless possibilities, the chains of unending choiceless indifferent fate. The ones who can really go white are the silver: trough equipment. Gold: trough god or God or Gods or spirits. Blue: trough arcanonumbermacy we think? Brown: Trough knowledge of the past one may predict the future.

Brown: Going brown is practically unheard of. Brown is the knowledge of the mundane, history, genealogy, math, geography, architecture, and some more other stuff. It is all very useful, and all very week.

Gold: Gold is god or God or Gods or spirits. Will ask for money and/or organs/fluid, avoid if possible.

Yellow: Is empathy and or sympathy run amok “going yellow” is rare but one gone yellow will cut everyone and themselves to feel the near (to them) addicting healing magic.

Now having this system of colours for so long as we have had them seems stupid, there must be hundreds of ways to denote Somone's role in a party without the archaic colours. The answer to this question is immortality or as close as we come. The oldest and most powerful forces in the Prime Plane learned it as colours and as we all know, old people do not change. Just learn this system and thank the gods it's not more convoluted. A final warning if you delve into books of what colours Nersinia is expecting you to come out as, you will find a small, clipped note attributed to the third headmaster. In the note you will find him reminiscing over a time he in turn overheard what his master the first headmaster thought Nersinia wanted the colour of its wizards to be. In this conversation between the founders and fell creatures of Nersinian myth and legends to us. In that conversation of the hypothetical Nersinian wizards' colour, the one favoured by the first headmaster. It was black.