Structured spellcraft

Structured spells are the key element of the order school of magic.

The major advantage of structured spells is the ability to precisely control the effects of your magic, and theoretically have access to any element or effect one can understand.

The process of crafting a spell is divided into a series of steps.

1. Prepare your spirit to house the spell.

2. Generate a spiritual core to contain the spell.

3. Decide on the focus of the spell by which it will be cast.

4. Write the precise effects of the spell onto the spiritual core, including the function of the spell’s focus.

5. Supply mana to the spell in preparation for casting.

There are also two primary ways of building up spells of the order school. These two methods are entirely dependent on the 4th step in the process.

The first method is called the superficial method. In this method, you write the spell onto the surface of the spiritual core. These spells written only on the surface will be burned away when the spell is cast. However, the dispersed spirit energy will be re-absorbed by your spirit, which will speed the maturity of the spell-caster’s spirit to allow them to cast spells of the next rank more quickly.

With the superficial method, step 4 must be repeated between castings of the spell. In addition to the advantage of this speedint the maturity of one’s spirit, this also allows for a greater diversity of spells to be employed by preparing different spells on the same spiritual core.

This method is superior for human spellcasters. The greater advantage it provides in the rate of spiritual maturity is a necessity for any human to advance their spellcasting ability within their own lifetime.

The second method is called the permanant method. With this method, the spell is written deeper into the spiritual core, and with a larger density of spirit energy. This method is primarily favored by the fey who have longer life-spans and who consider spiritual energy to be at a premium. Spells cast with the permanent method do not disperse the spell from the spiritual core upon casting, which allows the spellcaster to save time each day needing only to re-supply the mana to the spell in order to ready it again.

Those who use the permanant method of spell preparation may even be able to use the same spell multiple times in a somewhat short span of time provided they can re-fill it with mana. Some fey with an abundance of mana can even cast the spell using the mana from their bodies without supplying it to the spell directly.

The superficial method is vastly more beneficial for humans as it makes up for a human’s natural weakness of a shorter life-span. Meanwhile, the permanant method is more beneficial for fey as it compliments their natural strengths. While it is recommended that humans always use the superficial method of spellcrafting, one may freely choose either option.

For now, this chapter will walk you through the details of each step on how to craft a spell.

Prepare the spirit.

The first step in the process. Before you can form a spiritual core for the spell, you must first strengthen and ready your spirit. The principle behind this is really quite simple. A weak spirit just does not have the ability to support a spell of any level of intensity.

For this reason, any potential mage who has yet to form their first spell must utilize a spirit-enforcing meditation in order to increase their spiritual power. This spirit-enforcing meditation is similar in nature to the body-strengthening meditations used by warriors.

Mages who opt to use the permanant method of spellcraft will need to continue to use this spirit-enforcing meditation in order to push their progress in spellcasting to higher levels. However, those using the superficial method will strengthen themselves naturally with every time they cast a spell and often their absorption rate of the spirit energy will be more efficient than that of the standard spirit-strengthening meditations as the energy will become more attuned during the spell-crafting process.

Generate the spirit core

The spirit core is the foundation upon which all spells of the order school are written.

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A spirit core is formed from pure spirit energy, and sits in the middle of the mage’s spirit. It must possess a certain amount of spirit energy in order to sustain a spell. However, the core is limited in it’s strength by the mage’s spirit as the core cannot be more powerful than the spirit that contains it.

Spirit cores are divided into 9 levels of power based on the complexity of spells that the core can contain.

Larger spirit cores are also able to contain more mana. However, a spell’s power is more likely to be limited by it’s complexity than it’s mana.

Decide on the focus

Before the spell can be written, it must first be planned. One of the most important aspects in planning a spell is deciding on the spell’s focus. The focus refers to the additional preperatory steps that must be taken before the spell can be put into effect.

The focus of the spell will lessen the spirit and mana burden needed to cast the spell depending on how well it resonate’s in the spell caster’s mind with the intended effect of the spell. In some cases, the focus may even conform to forces within the world itself, which can further amplify the spell’s effects beyond what the mage could have accomplished on their own.

There are also cases where a mage may wish to transcribe a spell previously written down by another mage. In this case, the trust that the mage has for the results that the other had managed to get will suplement the mage’s own need to associate the effect and the focus. In the modern day, it is often the case that this shortcut is used as it greatly reduces the time a mage needs to spend studying the phenomena before designing the spell.

A focus can take many forms, but there are five that are the most popular among them.

The most famous is the spell chant, which is a series of words often poetic in nature which the mage will give like instructions to the spell itself in order to activate it’s effects. Shorter chants have a definite advantage of speed, while longer chants that use powerful words that resonate with the caster’s heart can empower the spell further. However, a chant beyond a certain length can occasionally actually weaken a spell.

Chants are the most popular focus, but another rather common one is the use of physical gestures, ranging from the simple end where the caster simply points or holds their hand in a certain way, to more complex and precise movements like a dance. These have a similar trade-off of benefits and detriments to chants. They have the advantage of being quieter than chants, but require the caster to have the physical dexterity to perform the spell and to be unencumbered in order to cast it effectively.

Material components are also commonly used as a focus, and can be divided into two primary types. There are either sacrificial materials, or medium materials. Sacraficial materials are consumed by the casting of the spell, while medium materials are not. There are some mages who like to design all their spells to use some form of wand as a medium. This provides a convenience of universally empowering all of their spells, but it is at the cost of being unable to cast the spell should they not have access to the wand.

Another common focus is graphed casting. A graphed focus can take the form of a script or a sigil. Script casting involves writing the words of the spell down on some surface in a language known to the caster. This is also occasionally combined with the chanting focus as the caster reads off the written words. Sigil-based focuses are often more powerful than other focuses, but are far more demanding as they involve graphing large and complex geometric shapes into some medium.

The final common focus is the ritual. Technically, all the focuses can qualify as some form of ritual. However, a true ritual focus involves a timing or an alignment with the elements. A ritual focus has a great deal of versatility to it as it can even involve the participation of multiple mages and is very well suited to methods of incorporating natural mana and spiritual flows. Expending the mana from multiple spells is also possible within a ritual focussed spell. Nearly anything can be possible with a ritual, and it allows for the casting of spells far beyond what is typically possible for a mage of a given level.

Write the spell

Once all aspects of the spell have been planned, it is time to write down the precise effects of the spell.

This phase also requires a lot of knowledge on the part of the mage. Knowing how the physical world and the laws of magic interact will allow the mage to write their spells more efficiently, demanding less spirit energy in the writing process. Lacking that knowledge will often require the mage to use more unneeded words to describe the effects they want, which will cut into the spell’s power and effectiveness.

After deciding the formula for the spell, the mage describes how the spell utilizes it’s focus and scrawls all these descriptions onto the spirit core. The spirit energy put into the design of the spell cannot exceed the spirit energy contained in the core. This means that higher level spirit cores can contain larger and more complex spells with more detailed effects.

It is also at this phase where the mage decides whether they wish to write the spell using the superficial or permanent methods.

Supply mana

The final step in the spell preparation is to fill a certain amount of mana into the spirit core.

Ultimately, the spell can get it’s mana from any source that may be available, and it is not uncommon to add instructions for the spell to gather additional mana from the surroundings. However, even in such cases the spell will need some initial mana in order to get it started.

The spiritual core that forms the spell is capable of containing a certain amount of mana depending on it’s size, and short and there are also instructions that can be added to the design of a spell that will further increase the amount of mana that can be safely contained in the spirit core. This is often what is done with spells that are short and simple for the level of the core they are written on, allowing for efficiently written spells to be far more powerful as the extra space is taken up by mana containment instructions.

(First year textbook for students of the Academy of Stone)