The Way of the Many
One spellcaster cannot achieve very much, but many minds can. Like insects, spellcasters are at their most formidable when they are united.
In the land of Elohaloth and in most of the lands that are anywhere near it, magic tends to consume a lot of energy. It helps a lot if the mage of witch knows the true name of the object or person she or he wants to cast a spell on, but even so, most lone spellcasters can only cast cantrips or at most, a spell powerful enough to create a small fireball. It was the Archmage Harkon who discovered, by accident when he was just an apprentice and called on a fellow apprentice to help him, that spellcasters could pool their energy. That was a thousand years ago.
Spells were able to grow in power and in force, but it was when it was discovered that non-magic users could lend their support to a spell, that the Great Spells of Cloaking,Blocking, Revealing and Healing could be used to improve or protect whole regions. The smaller spells continued to be used of course, but were rarely used on a large scale.
To keep one of these Great Spells going, a large number of people need to want to keep it going in their hearts. So unpopular rulers are not going to be able to persuade enough people to lend their support. Also, such spells can be fragile-in one case, a kiss from an adventurer was enough to break a sleep spell upon a deeply evil sorceress and plunge a whole duchy back into a horrible magical war.
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? Responses (6)
Vote to be revised when this is worked on.
If you are going to post a mystical system, you need to give a bit more detail on how to inplement it. This is more of an idea posting than an actual submission. I assume that more will be added or that you will put a post up saying, asking for others to work on the idea. If not, it is another 'eh' sort of post.
Yes,I need to add stuff. I wanted to put this in the Idea Seeds but when I try and post an idea seed it won't let me.
Make it an 'In Work' post, and perhaps also post a request for help in the Town Crier. This looks interesting enough, and is more than a simple Idea Seed.
BUMP! Needs more work, but looks interesting.
Him finding this would have caused a revolution in the magical world. Suddenly those guilds that the wizards were only half-heartly being part of would become MUCH more importent, there would have been large bursts of spell research, and the kings would suddenly have these SUPER-MAGES at their door steps where they used to only have little kitten mages. This would provoke one of 2 responses. The 'kill them all' response, and the 'lets get as much outta this for myself' response.
So in one country you have mages being killed off left and right, and in the next one all the mages guilds are being centralized. Then the persecuted mages from country A would flee to country B, B being suddenly uber-powerful conquers A. Or the mages in country A manage to over throw the gov't and establish themselves as the new nobles, and the mages from B go to A because it is their idea of utopia. So this simple apprentice has suddenly sparked hundreds of revolutions accidentally.
Now, a thousand years later, the world has barely recovered form the large-scale magical warfare/loss of self employed mages.
I love the name Way of the Many, love the concept, and agree with Manfred. This one has a shot at greatness! Keep it up Cheka.
Pariah provides an interesting take as well!