Draconic Shenanigans - Magic of Hestia

Hello my lovely darlings and to address the elephant in the room, yes I’m over a month late. All I can say is Easter Holidays and trying to catch up with other deadlines meant I’ve seriously slid on this project. The Infant come Child come Pre-teen Distraction has also been having a rough time and that, well I would say that it leaks out on to his surroundings but its more of a flood. Sundays are becoming hard ‘cause he knows that the next day is Monday and the masks have to go back on. He’s learning to mask, which is what our kind has to do to get by in this world, but he’s still learning how to carry the weight of that and some times it drops. It gets heavy and it is hard enough to keep it up as an adult, as a child? It gets exhausting. So once again a huge shout out to my patreons on patreon for keeping the lights on and the coffee pot full. Without you this fight would not be happening so let’s get stuck into the main event of this post – the magic of Hestia.

Here is where I need to explain some things about the tabletop roleplaying system that my co-writers and I used to play the game that was then written up as Draconic Shenanigans. A lot of tabletop roleplaying systems go in deep on the magic systems for the games. They are highly detailed and regimented with what spells your character can access dictated by what type of spellcaster you chose to be, so a wizard can only access only set of spells where as a druid can access another and say, a psychic, or psyonic, can access only yet another. This means the thickest part of the book tends to be the magic lists.

Savage Worlds is not like that. With Savage Worlds they do a base list of spells and then it is up to the players what trappings they put on them. Trappings are the visual description of the spell effects.

For example, the spell Bolt. This is a spell that does damage at range. For a wizard the trappings of this would be, say, a literal bolt of lightning that jumps from the wizard’s finger tips to give the target a most shocking time. For a cleric, this could be a ray of holy fire that delivers their god’s divine judgement and for a bard it could be a fist made of musical notes that smacks their enemy over the earhole. It is all the same spell, the rules are the same, the damage is the same but the look of it, the trappings, are different.

This is why the look of Jeremiah’s spells, or prayers as he calls them, change over the course of the story. The one that changed the most, because he used it the most, was the Fear spell. This started as a vague, dark cloud that befuddled the minds of his targets and caused them to panic. I then came across a description of the Umbrum, a mythological species of horse things said to look like regular horses from a distance but when you get close you realise they are not horses at all, only by then it’s far too late as these things are predatory and ruddy fast. Throw in on top of that the noises made by the ‘other ones’ from the film ‘Ghost’ and you have the ‘things’ from the uncanny valley that Jeremiah’s later use of the Fear spell called up from the shadows to freak out his own allies and absolutely terrify his enemies. Right by the end of the campaign Jeremiah’s Fear spell altered again and those that were smacked by its affect were granted the ‘gift’ of seeing a vision of Jeremiah’s god. Seeing as Klu’ga’nath is not a kindly or gentle god such visions have a detrimental effect on the minds of those that see them. That is the problem with clerics, the gods they pray to do not have to be kind, forgiving, loving gods. Klu’ga’nath is case in point. Klu’ga’nath, the false dragon god, is a zealot, a fanatic, a god who not only does not understand mortal weakness but outright despises it. He demands perfection, he demands purity and any who fall short of his demands are worthless, valueless, useless in his eyes, dross, scum, filth fit only to be destroyed both in mind and body, their souls shredded to ruin and cast out of existence. In short, he is a god that no sane man would pray to. Kind of says a lot about Jeremiah.

So, as discussed in my previous blog post, the gods of Hestia are born from the belief of their followers. Their clerics, people who have dedicated their lives to the service of their god, can tap into the power of their god to transform their prayers from regular prayers into words of power that change the world. In short the clerics of the gods of Hestia can perform miracles and it is in the gods interest to be some what generous with their answering of prayers as regular miracles mean that people will believe more fervently in them rather than just going through the motions of belief because they are afraid of the judgement of the religious power structure.

That then asks the question, where does other magics come from? All I can say to that is Hestia is a more geologically and therefore energy active world than our own. The wild energy of creation is still flowing more freely through the rocks and soil of Hestia. This means that people can be born whose bloodline is touched by the power of this wild energy and therefore tap into it.

These people are usually called sorcerers or sorceresses. In many ways they are some of the most powerful magic wielders as their abilities are limited only by what their minds can conceive. I took inspiration from David and Lee Edding’s Belgariad Series for the sorcerers in that I modelled their abilities on the Will and the Word. A sorcerer on Hestia concentrates on what he wants to manifest in the world and then speaks a word or phrase to act as the release valve of the power he carries in his connection to the raw stuff of creation. However, his concentration must be absolute on what he wants because a slip of thought can either warp the manifestation out of alignment or in the worse cases cause catastrophic back blow. There are stories of sorcerers who have blasted themselves and half a city out of existence in a moment of inattention.

Mages or wizards, both male and females, have a different method of creating magic and it varies by race. It is said that creation did not randomly spark into existence on the back of sheer chance, the learned people of Hestia speak of a director, a guide, who spoke the instructions of creation and laid down the rules of existence. Therefore, language itself has an innate power, descending as it does from the first words spoken by the author of creation. Every tongue, every word contains an echo, however, slight, of the first words uttered in reality. Mages, through long study, careful experimentation and some times sheer dumb luck have discovered over millennium of effort, the combinations and formulary that channel some of that first burst of creation. Passing their knowledge down, master to student, they have gradually built up a repertoire of spells that have reliable effects. These are not always spoken languages. Some Mages have found that certain combinations of finger movements result in controlled bursts of magic. These finger gestures maybe the echoes of a lost, non-verbal language.

This is a human centred understanding of Wizard kind. Among some races spells are performed by the inking or carving of a set of characters, also known as glyphs or runes and they have different explanations for why some people have the ability to become wizards and others don’t. Among the dwarfs and gnomes it is believed that a wizard’s power comes from within their minds and souls, that it is like a reservoir of power within themselves and that when a wizard shapes the glyphs they tap that power, that the glyph and the word acts as the doorway through which the wizard’s mind is made purely manifest upon the world. Dwarfs have a fair number of these wizards among their number while gnomes do not. Gnomes instead speak of the Current. They describe it as a flow of light through the world, a river of power that permeates all things both living and none living. Their magic wielders carve runes that channel and shape the flow, directing it to the shape they wish. It should be noted that there are many gnomes among the Children of Kronzyn and a fair number of them are powerful users of the runes of Kronzyn.

No matter what form they take mages, wizards or by whatever name they are known, require many years of study and careful experimentation to truly harness their powers, hence why there is a long standing rivalry between sorcerers and wizards. Wizards believe that sorcerers are rash, fool hardy amateurs who lack the ability to properly control themselves and risk both themselves and others. Sorcerers often see wizards as bigoted, stuck up snobs, who refuse to accept any nuisance or adaptability into their thinking. There have been stories of sorcerers who asked to be accepted into wizard colleges to prove they had what it took to be a wizard but even if they pass all the tests, even with flying colours, they are rarely accepted among their peers and are often held back, even denied graduation for ‘lacking form’ or ‘being a disgrace to the profession’.

Witches are another branch of magic looked down upon by wizards and clerics alike. These magic users walk the line between wizard and druid. They pull their power from the natural world with years of study and many hours of service. Whereas wizards are often gazing at the stars, trying to understand the cosmos, or involved with the mighty currents of history and politics, witches are down at street level, discovering the herbs that grant healing and bandaging the wounded. Witches study the natural world until they can gain the power to manipulate it, though many witches say they are granted permission to use it. Who grants this permission? The world, the land, Hestia herself, the witches say, the world grants the permission on the understanding that the power will be paid for. There are of course ugly rumours circulating to discredit witches, rumours that speak of child theft, cannibalism and transformation spells used to punish those that defy the witch’s power. Who started these rumours are unclear but they are grotesqueries of the truth. Yes witches are intimidating – they do not give help to cowards. Yes witches are harsh – they lend no power to the weak. Yes witches stand in isolation – they will not bow to following the thoughtless herd. However, none who come to their door in honest need are turned away. They will push, they will test, they will put those that come to them to the trial but that is to test their quality. Witches see more with their gimlet eyes in a second than many will see in a life time and none are beyond their judgement or their questioning. A witch will judge a king as pathetic and a peasant as powerful, she will question a priest and dismiss a judge and she questions herself just as much. The reason most witches live in isolation is because they are avoiding the temptations of power and the annoyance of people. Witches are intelligent, clever and full of thought, therefore talking to stupid, petty people is a trial that grates on the nerves and wears on the soul. Witches know that too much exposure to the small minds of grubby, selfish souls may tempt them to punish the stupid and if the stupid are punished for being stupid, small minded, bigoted, arrogant and ignorant then there would be no end to the punishing and the world still would not change. Witches know that you cannot force people to change, they will only change when they want to change and they will not want to change until you force them. Witches have better things to do than waste their energy playing stupid games where you only win stupid prizes and so they limit their contact with others so that they are not tempted to make all the stupids in the world believe that they are nothing but small, white rabbits. This is what proves, more than anything, that the tales are nothing but propaganda. A witch would not spend the power on turning someone into a small white rabbit, if nothing else the gassing off of excess mass would be a total energy drain. Instead, if a witch was going to be bothered about dealing with someone that petty, they would instead make the person believe that they have been turned into a small, white rabbit, when physically they have not been altered one iota, though the stupid are more likely to be bewitched into believing that they have been turned into pigs so that everyone would be confronted with the truth of what they really are. Witches stand at the edges of society, guarding the boarders of life and death, truth and lies, holding up the mirror so that society has to take a good long look at itself and truly see what it is. They are always feared and never really thanked because who speaks kindly to the one who does the messy, stinking work of saving humanity from itself? Witches do not allow a wrong to stand, they confront the self righteous and those who value performance over the real work and if they meet a mind that has been twisted out of shape by trying to fit itself to a standard that was never healthy then they will untwist it, forcibly if necessary. A witch will not allow someone to sit in comfort if that comfort will bring evil into the world. ‘If the work hurts then get on and do it and it will stop hurting sooner’, is the attitude of a witch. Approach with care, caution and profound respect. And if a witch approaches you? Brace yourself!

Druids tend to be confined to communities on the edge of civilization, moving and shifting with the breath of wind and weather, their minds filled with the beauty and terror of forces that barely care for ‘higher’ races at best and outright dismiss them at worse. Nature is gentle and punishing by turns, both ruthless and nurturing. Druids, or shamans, as they are sometimes known, learn Nature’s capricious moods and guide their communities to move with her rather than fight against her because in the battle between Nature and those who would build walls to contain her Nature with always win. It may take years, centuries even, but steel and stone will always break before root and water in the end. If you move to a new area and the original people point to the valley you want to settle and say ‘it turns to water’ you had better believe that they are talking literally and not figuratively. Such a warning was gained the hard way over generations and sometimes they have come with death toils that will have pushed communities to the edge of extinction.

A druid’s roots go deep into the flesh and bones of Hestia, they feel her rhythm as a change in their own heartbeat. Much of their powers are used in the seeing of things as they are, as they were and possibly as they will come to pass. They read weather and water and stone. They can predict the weather and predict animal movements through the world and as they grow in power they gain the ability to influence the motions of the world. Young druids can cause explosions of plant growth and form bonds with domestic animals that are beyond the normal levels. Those growing in power can bend water to their will and calm wild beasts, forming powerful bonds with those untamed. The very strongest can take on the form of animals themselves and call down the thunder of storms. An extreme few are bonded to the very rocks and can trigger earthquakes that can level whole cities and break the backs of civilizations.

In many ways druids are the most terrifying when they go wrong, for not only can they call on the power of flood, fire, volcano and earthquake, they can also call on the power of the microscopic. There are legends of druids, who having watched their people be pushed back to the edge of existence, have broken, going mad at the sight of ancestral lands desecrated for the sake of mines and drilling and foundries, the cries of mortal suffering under the lash and chain blending and echoing with Nature’s distress until their minds shattered under the weight of pain and they reached for the darkest, the most foul, the most unclean. Often there is no sign of what is to come to begin with and then the first headaches begin.

The pain comes on savagely, often to the point that the touch of the pillow is enough to make the infected scream. High fever follows, hard enough to make the heart gallop and stutter. The racking cough splits the throat and can cause bleeding in the lungs. If there are other diseases in the community then the two will run hand in heart, a unholy matrimony with death as its child. For those that some how survive there is often a lassitude so deep they cannot chew and often struggle to even drink. Careful nursing is required but that risks the lives of the nurses and the possibility of transmission.

The name of Ulrich Seaport is remembered with dread. A settlement of sixteen hundred regular residences and a transient population of about five hundred sailors, it hosted a yearly social event that attracted a further thousand visitors to the festival the very night the bells of quarantine rang out and the gates were shut, the ships cast a drift or burned in their docks to prevent the plague spreading further.

Two weeks later a relief ship discovered twenty six survivors, all under the age of twelve. The ship stayed in port for a month as a precaution, the sailors busying themselves with the funeral pyre they built in the main square for the whole time, the flames never extinguished, the fallen becoming the fuel that kept it burning until the stench of it lingered for a year and a day. The kingdom fell into decline afterwards, its major trade route broken, agriculture disrupted across a whole region and the terror of further out breaks leading to witch hunts, hysteria, riots, civil disruption, moral degradation, unsettling cults and dancing fever. Whether enough of the land’s original people had survived the years of occupation to take repossession of what once was theirs remains to be seen but the total and utter smash of the kingdom has led some to speculate that it was orchestrated by a Tomb Dragon to claim another kingdom for its horde. Certainly the capital appears to not be crumbling in the way one would expect for an abandoned settlement.

In the land of Sumwesi there appears to be a system of magic and energy control unlike anything encountered else where. The animal people of the scattered islands have perfected a system of magic that relies on the motion of the body to cast. This is not the small finger motions of wizards, this is motion that flows with power, soars with grace and strikes with force. Witnessing it is said to witness something between a battle and a dance, a poetry written in motion in which the elements of the world become the dance partner in the rhythm and melody of power. There are said to be five distinct styles, each focusing and channelling one of the five elements – fire, water, metal, air and wood. Each system takes decades of study and practise to master and is unusual in that someone who lacks the proper connection with the element can learn them. Indeed, each and every element system can be learnt by someone who has no ability to control the element. These ‘unconnected’ students often train in separate dojos after the second kata is mastered for their own protection and to not give the ‘connected’ students an unfair advantage, but the systems all teach balance, coordination, grace and control. Most of the people of Sumwesi will learn at least three katas as part of their education to encourage restraint, ability and confidence, whilst those who are connected are encouraged to go further to have a better mastery of their abilities. Most can only learn one system and connect to the accompanying element. If they try and learn other systems they will do so as an Unconnected. This however, does not mean that learning the other systems is without worth. Indeed the sages who are willing to spend the time learning other systems as an Unconnected are often the most powerful in their own system, learning to blend and adapt the techniques of both systems into a sum greater than is parts.

It is said that Ching Song, the Black Shoulder Kite who was queen of the pirates of the Eastern Sea, the Hou who was pardoned and honoured by the Emperor of Tiansin, was an Air Connected who had studied both Fire and Water systems before she took to the life of a pirate and raider. It would certainly explain why her vast armada was never scattered by storms and often moved further and faster than expected and would lend credence to the reports of her ships out manoeuvring pursers by sailing directly against the wind. If true it would mean that she was an Air Connected that out ranked just about every other Connected of any system that has ever lived.

Maybe once in three generations or so someone will be born or hatched who can master more than one system. Rare to the edge of legendary, these exceptional Connected often find their lives burdened with the expectations of those around them. They are often seen as prophets, leaders,missionaries or worse of the worse, ‘chosen ones’ sent to fix the world. Many try to hide their abilities or even leave the islands all together to force the rest of their society to accept responsibility for their own actions, their own problems and their own salvation. Others accept their position of leadership, often becoming the lords of the defensive castles or the founders of one of the Abbey communities. If they are forced to go to war they are literal forces of nature that can hold the centre of a battle line on their own.

Due to their singular magic system the people of Sumwesi distrust other magic users and rarely allow any to land on their shores. This maybe because, rightly or wrongly, magic users of other disciplines are often blamed for the Sundering events that have marred their history and their islands, leaving some islands stripped to the bare rock and others collapsed into the sea. The Badgers and Hares of the larger Islands speak of dark areas of forest and jungle where things not quite right by the laws of Hestia skulk and lair, their ever hungry eyes roving, trying to discover any unfortunate who has wandered into their reach. Some communities whisper of things that fly on dragon like wings and yet are not dragons and have unnatural hungers, leeching off their victims for weeks or even months before the victims’ health reaches a tipping point and they collapse, sickening rapidly and often perishing. The peoples of Sumwesi believe these things to be creatures spawned by the dark work of magic users not from the islands and is another reason why they look at the ‘fur and featherless’ with distrust and suspicion.

The more uncommon users of magic are the Relic Makers. Most often coming from the Rune Weavers of gnome kind or the glyph smiths of the Dwarfs there have been those from other magic systems who have learnt this trade, though sometimes it has been a group of magic users from several different disciplines who have pooled their power, their expertises and their abilities to create projects between them. Either way the relic makers create an item and then imbibe a particular spell or effect into the item. This a long and weighty process, often demanding many strange, rare or dangerous ingredients to complete and only rarely can these items be reused, most often they are consumed by the creation of the relic, either directly incorporated into the relic or spent as catalysts to ‘set’ the magic into the item.

Though there are legends of certain locations or complete buildings that are relics, most are small enough to make them easy to carry by the owner or they are self mobile. Many are musical instruments or pieces of clothing or even items of jewellery. Many bards who channel their power through their music use such relic instruments to either increase their power or as the source of their power, while other bards have been instrumental in making these instruments, either by themselves or as part of a team of relic makers.

Most relics will have an activation system. In an item of clothing for example, this maybe putting the hood up or doing up a certain button. In jewellery it is often twisting a portion of the item.

There does appear to be passive relics of power as well. One of the most unusual are the paintings that move, the characters in them carrying on lives within the confines of the canvas. There are stories of these being cursed items. In one tale a little girl vanished from the village, only for her image to appear in a painting in the manor house. The image of the little girl would change position and activity in the painting though no one ever saw her change her place. She also aged as a living human would, eventually disappearing from the canvas after about seven decades. A younger daughter of the manor family left the residence ten years after the girl first appeared in the picture and never returned, moving to one of the port cities and then across the sea. While in the city it is said that she was the patreon of an extremely talented painter, commissioning him to paint not the rich and famous but to hirer the poorest and most destitute to sit for his paintings, often bringing him the models herself and paying both him and them handsomely for the results. These paintings were said to have an extremely life like quality to them, the eyes seeming to track the people who looked at them and their skin having a life like texture beyond what is usually possible with an artist’s brush. Unfortunately none of the original works remain, though a few were copied by art students practising their techniques. The originals all degraded a little over roughly seventy years after they were painted and no efforts of restoration seemed able to save them.

Other magic paintings are made with the full consent of the subject. These painting appear as ordinary paintings until the subject has died. Then the wizard can perform a ritual to imprint the canvas with a copy of the subject’s personality. These paintings can move under observation and even speak with the observer, they seem to be a perfect copy of the original subject’s personality. It appears that where there are a collection of these paintings the subjects, including animals depicted, can visit each others canvases and host visitations. How vulnerable the canvases are to damage is debatable and unsettled as, for obvious reasons, none of the magic canvases are volunteering for destruction tests. The other question asked is how much distance the transfer between canvases can take place over. There are rumours of at least one government experimenting with using the canvases as a method of fast communication across the width of the kingdom. If it is true that the transfer between canvases have the ability to cover a deal of distance then it occurs to the scholar that the kingdom that possesses a fair collection of these magic paintings will have the ability to spread information and knowledge faster and more accurately than any other, enabling them to respond in a more timely manner to changing circumstances than many other authorities.

As mentioned there are some bards who’s music is more than just music. Often these bards are using an instrument that provides the power to create the effects of the spells the bards want to cast. However, it would be a mistake to believe that these bards are totally without skill as most Instrument Relics require their owners to attune to the instrument, a process that if it fails means that the instrument will not unleash its full power for the user, acting as a high quality, well tuned instrument but nothing more than that. If however, attunement is achieved, then the bard gains an ally that will increase the effect of their art and take it to a whole new level. Music is a language that speaks across all cultural boarders and all differences in tongues. A mother’s lullaby requires no translation and a marching beat stirs the soul no matter which clan you call home. A skilled bard can move hardened hearts to tears and inspire courage in the hearts of cowards. With a Instrument Relic in their hands, a bard with skill can move whole armies to the attack and convince a dragon to lay down in peaceful rest.

Then, of course, there are the bards who have a magic of their own without a Magic Relic to create it. These bards are most likely a variety of the sorcerers, people who have been touched by the wild, raw magic of creation who, instead of channelling their power through a spoken word, channel the power within through the music they create. Very often the only sign that these bards are any different from their fellows is that they do not need their instrument in their hands to cast their spells. Instead their song carries a power and an authority that few kings can match. The fame of these Bards can become legendary and Lords and Kings compete to house them in their castles and manors. These bards can elevate a feast to a festival, they can make enemies who vowed eternal hatred break down in tears together, they have even been known to turn armies against their commanders.

The most famous of the Bards, one who’s fame has crossed oceans and survived time, was one Michael Azrael.

Native to the land further east than east, the land that became the Burning Continent, Michael’s work had already started spreading across the sea to Tiansin and Jamhodan by the trade routes. Indeed the night before the Day of Disaster, a performance of a new work by Michael Azrael was hosted in the Grand Theatre of The Etucan, the capitol of the lands under the Domilii’s control, a performance that filled every seat and had the audience clamouring for more. No less than three encores were demanded before the curtain finally closed and critics and audience alike waxed lyrical in restaurant and coffee houses for hours afterwards. The following morning the Theatre company announced a whole month of performances of Michael Azrael’s magnum opus. By noon half of the performances were fully booked. By evening everyone on the Burning Continent was dead, the sky torn open by ravening energies that rewrote reality and the streets crawling with things that might once have been furniture. Once. The world lost a great talent and a great joy, only fleeting fragments of Michael’s work remaining, scattered across the lands where the trade routes had carried them.

Last and least understood of the magics used by the people Hestia, are the psyonics. Needing neither speech nor gesture nor rune nor formula, psyonics simply hit with the sheer force of their minds. They cannot alter the terrain or do physical damage to inanimate objects but in away that makes them worse as they can decimate a community and leave little to no trace of their attack. Mind to mind they are one of the most terrifying foes to face. They cannot teleport but they can make their foes believe they have. They cannot physically break bones with their powers, but they can make their foes feel as if they have. They can overwhelm the mind with visions of terror, they can destroy the psych with voices of loved ones whispering hatred and disgust, they can drown the soul in despair until it fractures. They attack where you are the most vulnerable and the scars of a battle with a psyonic are invisible so many do not understand or even believe what the victim faces. This leads to further damage as belittling, dismissal, ridicule, chastisement and blame are used to try and modify the person back to what they ‘should’ be. Some manage to mentally bandage themselves back together, others shatter completely. Madness often follows while others leave society all together, taking themselves off into the wilds to live alone without the standards of others forcing them into a mould they can no longer fit. Many die out there in the wilds beyond the edges, some become creatures with no empathy and no remembrance of fellowship to others, attacking lone travellers for the clothes on their backs and the food in their packs. A few manage to turn their private pain, carried in isolation and fear, into a serenity that can save whole landscapes, salvation growing with each acorn planted, one at a time until ten thousand young trees appear as just a drop in the ocean and the change, flowing from the hands and heart and mind of someone so broken that some days they can barely function, comes so slowly as to be thought of as some natural caprice of Hestia herself. How many forests of the world are the gifts of those so crushed with suffering that they could no longer bare their own kind and yet it flowed back to the world as a generosity that speaks of a strength that could rival the gods? And yet the question remains – does this amazing generosity out weigh the suffering that caused it? Does the marvel of these gifts given with no want of recognition undo the suffering of the hundreds of those who shatter completely under the force of the psyonic’s attacks and the after shocks that come from survival? It occurs to the author that perhaps the real question should be why are survivors pressed to the edges for holding a pain that is invisible to others?

And there you have it, the magics of Hestia, including a few the main four have met as well as some they haven’t managed to run into yet. I hope my lovely darlings enjoyed despite this one being a month late. All I can do is apologise for that and I will try my best to get the next on out on time. The only problem is that I do have a clue what to write about next. If you have any suggestions please drop me a suggestion on my social medias, which will all be linked below.

Thank you for reading to the end my lovely darlings, be safe and be kind.