There are two types of zombies in folklore

During my research into zombies and zombie folklore (research links provided below), I discovered that there are actually two types of zombies in folklore. The process for creating a zombie splits the body and soul into two linked entities, the zombie cadaver and the zombie astral. The zombie cadaver is the stereotypical zombie slave, whereas the zombie astral is the captured soul of the zombie. It is kept in a vessel called a "zombie bottle," which will release the zombie astral if broken. The zombie astral may be compelled to perform tasks for the bokor who captured it. The zombie bottle may also be sold as a good luck charm.

The more you know!

Whatevermancy and suffixes

In this post, I wanted to discuss what would be possible ways to refer to practitioners of different kinds of magic as proscribed by the typical rules of the English language. I wanted to discuss how fantasy gaming bucks the English language, too.

We are all familiar with necromancers, right? Evil dudes dressed in goth fashion who raise zombies and stuff? Well, according to the Oxford dictionary necromancy is "the supposed practice of communicating with the dead, especially in order to predict the future."

How did that happen? I'm guessing thru the principle of "by extension," but I can't be sure.

Anyway, the -mancy suffix relates to divinations rather than all-purpose magical manipulation. Its derived suffixes include -mance (verb), -mancer (agent noun), and -mantic (adjective). Therefore a necromancer is someone who necromances, that is, practices the necromantic arts of necromancy or communing with the dead.

I don't expect anybody to pay attention to the dictionary meaning. But if you ever want to... a possible alternative to describe fantasy-style "necromancy" might use the suffix -kinesis ("movement"), -sophy ("wisdom"), or -urgy ("working") instead. As in necrokinesis, necrosophy, necroturgy, necrourgy, necrurgy or thanaturgy (I have seen all these forms mentioned online before). By extension, a practitioner would be a necrokineticist, necrosophist, necroturgist, or thanaturgist. The use of the necro- versus thanato- prefix is a subtle one: necro- relates to death and dead tissue, whereas thanato- relates to the concept of death in general.

Other suffixes are available, too. I have seen necronaut, necropathy, necroscope, and necrovoyance all used before.

• According to Wikipedia, a necronaut (from necro- + -naut) is someone who travels thru the afterlife.
• In the 1990 Nightlife roleplaying game, necropathy (from necro- + -pathy) is the power to speak with the dead; presumably patterned after necromancy, empathy, and technopathy.
• In the Necroscope novels by Brian Lumley, a necroscope (from necro- + -scope) is someone who speaks with the dead; as opposed the novels' version of a necromancer, who forcibly extracts information from corpses by dissecting them (which the dead feel due to the necromancy).
• Though strictly grammatically speaking, a necroscope would be an instrument used to examine the dead. Such an instrument appears in Netflix's The Order, here called a "necrophone" (from necro- + -phone). As the name implies, it is a magical telephone that lets you speak with the dead.
• The word necrovoyance (from necro- + voyance) is listed on The Free Dictionary as a synonym for necromancy. It is presumably patterned after clairvoyance.

The -kinesis suffix relates to movement, the -mancy suffix to divination, the -naut suffix to traveling, the -path suffix to feeling, the -scope suffix to examining, the -sophy suffix to wisdom, the -urgy suffix to working, and the -voyance suffix to remote viewing. These may have further derivative suffixes.

For example:

• A telekineticist is telekinetic. S/he practices telekinesis and studies telekinetics, the movement of faraway objects with the mind.
• A necromancer is someone who necromances or necromanticizes. S/he practices the necromantic arts of necromancy, communing with the dead.
• A psychonaut practices psychonautics, the art of navigating travels through the mind. S/he studies psychonautical charts.
• A telempath has telempathic senses and practices telempathy, experiencing the feelings of others at a distance.
• A necroscope has necroscopic senses. S/he practices necroscopy, observation of the dead.
• A philosopher is a student of philosophy.
• A theurgist is some who theurges or engages in theurgic acts. S/he practices theurgy, the evocation of spirits.
• A clairvoyant has clairvoyance, the power of remote viewing.

Feel free to do your own independent research too. This post is not exhaustive in the least.

Categorizing magic systems is an exercise in madness

There are countless ways of classifying magic systems, and all of them are arbitrary because magic doesn't exist. The Net Wizard's Handbook offers spectrums of controllability and prevalence. The Templin Institute offers spectrums of hardness and learnability. John H. Kim offers a comparison between magic in game systems and magic in folklore beliefs. There are countless other articles that I could link.

In a way, I'm wistful for the old days when writers didn't put ridiculous amounts of effort and emphasis into designing magic systems. On the other hand, we did get Ars Magica and that's possibly one of the best magic systems ever designed.

The science of eye-beams and the basilisk's stare

It may come as a surprise that the ancients devised scientific explanations of how seemingly magical creatures operated. Their magical powers had logical basis behind them, rather than being purely inexplicable. For example, the philosophers believed that the eyes saw by sending out beams that touched the environment and relayed its qualities back to the viewer.

This played in the deadly gaze of the basilisk. In medieval bestiaries the basilisk was highly venomous, not necessarily petrifying. The basilisk's stare was harmful because its eye-beams carried its characteristic venom, which would travel through the eyes to the brain and from there be circulated to the heart and the rest of the body. This is why mirrors were effective, as the basilisk would envenom itself when the eye-beams were reflected back at it.

The 3pp Lost Lore: Ecology of the Basilisk posits that the basilisk's eyes release a form of radiation, which is basically the same idea.

Oddly enough, these kinds of eye-beams did exist at one point in the D&D lore. According to the AD&D article "Infravision & Your Fantasy Hero," the 90' and 120' forms of infravision worked by sending out infrared beams.

This concept of eye-beams could be speculated as the basis of gaze attacks, like those of the catoblepas, gorgon, medusa, vampire, etc. Do all creatures have eye-beams of sorts, or only some, or only during certain instances? This seems like a fertile field of study.

Infravision links

• https://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~leirbakk/rpg/adnd/society/adnd_society_infravision.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20161009085709/https://www.frontiernet.net/~jamesstarlight/Infravision.html
• http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/rants/infravision.html

My beef with magic in fantasy tabletop games

The magic system in D&D and its derivatives has problems. What follows are some of my rationales for why I don't like D&D magic systems. The articulation may be questionable, but I hope my readers find it understandable.

Distinguishing clerics, druids, and warlocks?

What is the difference between a druid and a cleric devoted to a god of nature or a warlock who made a pact with a god of nature? Aside from their game mechanics. What is the fluff and world building distinction?

The official D&D settings do not have satisfactory explanations. The world building of D&D settings in general falls apart upon inspection. So it falls to homebrew and 3pp to impose a sense of logic to the often bizarre rules of D&D and its derivatives.

Clerics, druids and warlocks are based on fantasy archetypes that predate the game itself. Clerics are originally based on vampire hunters. Druids are loosely based on the druids of the lost Celtic faith. Warlocks are originally based on witches as described in the Malleus Maleficarum. When they became classes in the game, their backstories and capabilities expanded and evolved over time.

Although their mechanics are distinct, their fluff overlaps. Perhaps the easiest way to solve this is to remove the overlap. Do not allow them to worship or make pacts with the same deity/patron (although fallen deities might be suitable as patrons). Instead of their being evil gods worshiped by clerics, there are not strictly speaking evil "gods" but archfiends and so forth. They are represented by warlocks, not clerics. (Although this requires actively defying the D&D convention of evil gods, which I don't have a problem with since I find the concept as it appears in fantasy gaming rather silly. Golarion, for example, has entire nation-states that openly worship evil gods and based their morality around being evil like the villain in a children's cartoon.)

Several campaign settings offer the explanation that clerics and druids worship the new and old gods, respectively. These settings include Scarred Lands, Kingdoms of Legend, and Points of Light. In these settings, there was an ancient war between gods loosely based on the Greek titanomachy. The druids venerate the primordial gods/spirits of the natural world, whereas the clerics venerate the new/orderly gods of mortal affairs.

As warlocks were not OGL until fifth edition, they are not integrated into most campaign settings. So no help can be found there. The existence of warlocks requires drawing a line between deities and patrons. What exactly is the cutoff point? What makes a god? The answer depends on the predilections of the world builder, so you can't simply use the one-size-fits-all approach of the rules.

An idea I had was to bring back the whole evil warlock shtick from medieval times. Gods, primal spirits, etc can freely hand out power for whatever reason. But fiends, fairies, or what have you are limited to pacts with warlocks for whatever reason. Perhaps they simply lack sufficient power, the freedom to channel power, whatever. (I suppose this sort of approach would fit better with a Eberron-esque agnostic approach to deities, which would better distinguish clerics and druids from warlocks. The logic being that deities are questionably definable whereas patrons are observably real entities, so their application as power sources would be different.)

Since demons/devils/fiends/whatever wouldn't have all that much power in the world because it has built-in defenses (you know, whatever prevents demons from just opening portals willy-nilly and invading the world), they need to rely on warlocks. They make pacts, buy the warlock's soul, grant bits of knowledge or power to allow the warlock to operate without wasting time on becoming a wizard. (There's conceptual overlap between the warlock and sorcerer due to their use of Charisma, but I'll ignore that for now.)

At this point, you'd need to world build your demons and other patrons. Again, I don't like the game's one-size-fits-all approach. For example, a lot of demons in mythology don't live in the underworld or hell; indeed, the mythological definition of demons is far less rigid than D&D's. I'd have to reserve that for another post, though.

Ability scores and magical traditions

D&D has traditionally assigned spell-casters reliance on different ability scores, typically lining up with their power source. Intelligence measures reasoning and memory. Wizards cast from Intelligence. Wisdom measures perception and insight. Clerics, Druids, and Rangers cast from Wisdom. Charisma measures force of personality. Bards, Paladins, Sorcerers, and Warlocks cast from Charisma.

Why these ability scores in particular? I don't (entirely) care if the ability scores are highly questionable mechanics in and of themselves, I just care what the internal logic is behind them being assigned in this way. D&D itself provides no reasoning for the assignments, so I have to devise my own. My working rationale is that spell-casting ability determines how a caster casts their magic regardless of its power source: Intelligence indicates the study of magical theory, Charisma indicates forcing the magic to obey your will, and Wisdom indicates passively attuning to and channeling universal power like a Jedi knight. But these rationales don't seem to hold universally true in the class mechanics and fluff.

Wizards cast from Intelligence because wizardry studies and manipulates magic like a science. When you cast a spell, you are arranging the spell using your knowledge and understanding of magical theory. That makes perfect sense.

Paladins and sorcerers cast from Charisma because they shape magic through sheer force of personality. They don't understand magical theory like the wizard, they just brute force their way to the desired outcome. This makes sense, although it requires imagining Charisma as the spiritual equivalent of Strength and Dexterity, I guess?

Bards cast from Charisma because Charisma is used for the Performance skill. Since bards cast spells by performing magical music, it therefore follows that they would use the same ability score. This makes sense from a game mechanics perspective, but Charisma being used for Performance is questionable in reality. Just because someone can play an instrument doesn't mean they are a social butterfly. In fact, playing music is heavily linked to "verbal memory, spatial reasoning and literacy skills," so it makes just as much if not more sense for Performance (and by extension bard spells) to rely on Intelligence and/or Wisdom.

Wisdom is where I hit a brick wall. As it stands, Wisdom is a weird grab bag of perception, intuition, and bits stolen from Intelligence. For the life of me I cannot reason why Wisdom would determine the efficacy of divine spells, as opposed to a Jedi's Force powers. The caster is just channeling the power of their deity to cast the spell on the caster's behalf, so their own ability score should not matter. This would make sense if Wisdom was supposed to measure how "attuned" the caster is to their deity, like a Jedi is attuned to the Force, but the fluff for divine casters is diametrically opposed to that of Jedi. Jedi are vaguely pantheistic, whereas divine casters are generally henotheistic.

Warlocks are the second brick wall. The use of Charisma would suggest they brute force their way through magic like the paladin and sorcerer, but the fluff explains they rely on study of magic like wizards. The patron mechanic confuses things further by drawing a parallel with the divine casters. What exactly is the difference between a warlock patron and whatever empowers a cleric or druid? According to anecdotes, the Warlock cast from Intelligence during playtesting but players complained that it didn't cast from Charisma like it did in third edition. (A lot of the questionable class design decisions apparently resulted from players complaining that it didn't work like third edition, even when the proposed mechanics were clearly better balanced or more logical than third edition. Druid wild shape is another example.)

As it stands, I think the key flaw of the spell-casting ability mechanic (beyond the questionable definitions of the ability scores themselves) is that it shoehorns ability scores regardless of whether it makes sense from a fluff perspective. In addition, the mechanic forces every class to rely on a fixed spell-casting ability even if it would make sense to let players choose another to customize their character. For example: maybe there could be a divine wizard counterpart who studies divine lore and casts divine spells recorded in a prayer book (e.g. Heroes of Horror's archivist class), or a divine caster who casts from Charisma to indicate that they rely on divine power from within rather than attuning themselves to a deity (e.g. Pathfinder's oracle class).

Occult magic as wisdom-based arcane magic?

While reading the comparison between psionics and occult magic in Psionics Augmented: Occult, something occurred to me. Occult magic, at least as depicted by Pathfinder: Occult Adventures, feels a lot like what I would imagine a Wisdom-based arcane spell-caster would work. It simply doesn't feel different enough in theme to qualify as a third power source for magic equivalent to arcane and divine.

The occult magic system is based on the 19th century occult revival. This involved a lot of Victorian Age pseudo-science and secular magic like orgones, mesmerism, spiritualism, etc. This wasn't based on what d20 labels Intelligence ("how well your character learns and reasons"), but more on what it labels Wisdom ("willpower, common sense, awareness, and intuition"). Occultists developed their craft through intuition, not respectable science. The new rules like thought and emotion components and sentimental substitution rely on qualities ascribed to Wisdom, not the qualities ascribed to Intelligence.

Furthermore, the playtest for the second edition of Pathfinder changed the bard to an occult caster as part of its reorganization of the spell lists into arcane (sorcerer/wizard), divine (cleric), occult  and primal (druid). Yet, oddly enough, the occult bard still uses standard material, somatic, and verbal components and still relies on their charisma for casting spells.

Therefore, the occult magic seems like it would work just as well if not better as a Wisdom-based form of arcane magic. IMO, the psychic makes perfect sense as a new arcanist class existing somewhere between sorcerer and wizard but beholden to neither. But if I am honest, all of this is essentially arbitrary to begin with.

The problems with psionics

Dungeons & Dragons has traditionally divided magic into three types: arcane magic, divine magic, and psionics. The third has always been something of a red-headed stepchild.

Critique of D&D's schools of magic

Dungeons & Dragons traditionally divides magic into eight "schools." While seemingly well-defined, across editions spells have often changed schools. This reveals that the definitions of the schools are too often unclear and, ultimately, arbitrary.

Why can’t the physical elements have mental and spiritual counterparts?

The title of this post comes from "Limyaael's Rant #323: Elemental Magic". This is a very good question to ask. All too often elemental magic systems feel the need to introduce a fifth element for "spirit" or something along those lines. A number of writers for tabletop games have wondered this question and provided their own answers to it.

The Nephilim roleplaying game published by Chaosium, as well as the derivative sourcebook Enlightened Magic, posits a system of several elements including air, earth, fire, moon, sun, and water. These are explained as possessing both physical and spiritual aspects within both the environment and living things, to the degree that each directly corresponds to a gaming attribute: air to intelligence, earth to constitution, fire to strength, moon to charisma, sun to wisdom, and water to dexterity. Elemental magic uses any element to create effects on the environment and living things; the alchemy rules from the latter book specifically divide into three circles of physical, mental and spiritual effects that rely on any of the elements.

S. John Ross wrote "Elemental Magic for GURPS" which posited five elements of earth, water, air, fire and aether, each of which were divided into living and non-living aspects. As in the historical theory of the four humors, this system posits that living things are composed of a mixture of all the elements. Each of the elements manifests differently in living things: earth as flesh, water as soul, air as intellect, and fire as passion. Aether corresponds to the space and time in which living things exist, making it simultaneously physical and non-physical. This is both clever and simple, so I am surprised "space-time" is not used as an element by more writers.

The "Five Cities World" by Garblag Games uses an... interesting elemental magic system. I cannot make heads or tails of it.

Antimagic in a setting made of magic

My campaign setting and associated cosmology, which I have not yet given a name to, operates on the conceit that magic and nature are one and the same. More specifically, nature is a subset of magic as I outlined in a previous post on the "winds of magic." This means that antimagic effects and spells like detect magic cannot work the same way, since there are no magical effects separate from non-magical effects.

Colours of Magic for 5e

It recently came to my attention that the Colours of Magic series that I use to inform my world building was revised for 5e. The colors underwent a number of changes, in some cases being completely redefined. Details below the break.

Magic and technology, or why I dislike Starfinder

Starfinder is a spin-off of Pathfinder which takes place in outer space. As with typical modernist fantasy, like its predecessor Dragonstar, it treats magic and technology as separate. In Starfinder specially, the use of magic is on the decline as its role is being taken over by the convenience of technology.

I consider this convention, in a word, stupid.

The physics behind martial arts (aka weeaboo fightan magic)

In my campaign setting, really more of a cosmology at this time, martial classes have "martials arts" or less charitably "weeaboo fightan magic." The reason? Having Conan the Barbarian adventuring alongside Naruto is stupid. Since my cosmology does not make an arbitrary distinction between magic and non-magic, but defines nature and technology as types of magic, it is natural for martials to develop wuxia and other capabilities that would be considered supernatural in real life. In fantasy land, this is par for the course.

5e has not fixed the martial/caster disparity, because it was about utility not damage

I often hear 5th edition being commended for solving the martial/caster disparity. This patently false and misunderstands the disparity argument in the first place. Here's why...

The Winds of Magic

As modern humans we take it for granted that the fantasy world operates according to real world physics with magic added to let us cheat. Unifying magic and nature requires detailed explanations about how physics in the fantasy world is fundamentally different from our own reality.

Magic versus mundane: why the distinction?

A while ago I read an essay titled "Breaking out of Scientific Magic Systems" which discussed, among other things, the tendency for tabletop role playing games to segregate magic from mundane physics and offered alternatives to doing so.