Monday, December 28, 2009

Arcana Of Avion

Its been a while since I did much work on my Avion setting, but since I am now working on two stories and another project set there, it has slowly been getting more developed.

The most interesting developments have been about some of the fluff things for the arcane power source.

There are three ways to gain the ability to cast arcane magic: the wizard way, the sorcerer way, and the warlock way. Each method is different and comes with its own risks.


Wizards study old tomes, discover arcane secrets, and basically figure out how magic works in order to cast it. The Risk for this type of magic is that if you learn too many arcane secrets you might go insane, and that's the nicest of the risks. This method is severly lower than it once was due to the "quick and easy" nature of the other two methods.


Sorcerers find the blood of some magic creature, such as dragons, demons, etc., and inject it into themselves to mutate themselves to be magical conduits. The type of blood you inject into yourself determines what kind of sorcerer you become. The risk with this is that you can get an unwanted mutation, become magically addicted to magic blood, become controlled by the creature is it is powerful and still alive, or just simply die. This is the most common method, due to the increase of the availability of demon's blood, creating an abundance of chaos sorcerers.


Warlocks make deals with powerful entities, smart ones know what they are bargaining with. Great power is gained, but at great cost. Some lose their soul, some give the entity a chance to use their body at any time, and some may make a good deal, but their soul becomes corrupted by the entity's power. With the demon's blood method of sorcery becoming more popular, so does the trust of the demons themselves, this method is slowly gaining popularity in Avion.




Wizards risk their mind.
Sorcerers risk their body.
Warlocks risk their soul.




The other arcane classes can take one of these and roll with it, "I traded my soul to play this here guitar real good."



So, what do you think of that? I'm glad I finally got something that's unique to the setting, and I've decided to scrap some of the work I've already done.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or anything else to say, please leave a comment! I love to get feedback on my ideas!

2 comments:

Aaron said...

Interesting idea… The risk increases the quicker that you get power. What about inherited sorcerer powers, though? All of these assume the caster made a choice to risk their mind, body, soul. Is there risk in something you didn't ask for?

MacGuffen said...

That's a good point!
One that had not occurred to me...

If you are injecting yourself with magic blood that changes you physically, I suppose that there is a chance that it would pass on to your children.

So then if your parent experimented with magic blood to gain powers, perhaps you gained them as well, but also have some terrible mutation...

Or your parent was a warlock and promised their firstborn child.


Oh, I also forgot to mention that sorcerers sometimes develop the Avion equivalent of spellscars (from forgotten realms 4e players guide)