I've had a modern urban fantasy setting cooking in my mind for a while - it's what I do since I don't truly have the worldbuilder's constitution, I keep a couple pots simmering constantly adding and removing parts. Here's one attempt at a magic system (ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh), with pieces graverobbed from the charnel depths of the lovely darkness.
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| Source Unknown |
Perception and Reality
The soul is the sum total of what a person is, fluorescing within the breast. It animates the clay, sharpens the dull razor of instinct, processes and exudes what one might call "higher thought". But the soul is incapable of interacting with reality directly. Reality, flowing fractal chaos, must be filtered through sensory organs and manipulated with heavy limbs. It's necessary, of course. Top thanatologists don't agree on much, but they do know that a soul can't survive cut off from a physical medium for very long - reality qua reality is too harsh, it dissipates like gas. Why is all this important? A Magician is someone who extrudes a piece of their soul into a separate being that can sense and interact with a part of reality directly, without a physical intermediary. The process isn't as complicated as you'd expect.
How to Become a Magician
In order to split your soul apart, you need to make a soul gem to hold the severed piece in. This is the generic parlance, for this device has almost as many names as there are magicians. Construction is very simple. First, take a piece of precious stone or metal. This is what the soul will actually soak into and be held in. Obviously, the larger the piece the more soul it can hold. Surround it in a shell of orichalc, the more elaborately textured the better. This is what wicks a piece of the soul out of the flesh and into the gem's core.
Take something sharp and open yourself up. Slip the gem inside, nestle it softly against your organs. Close the gap. Endure twenty-four to seventy-two hours of relentless shaking, shivering, pains, fever, vomiting, insomnia, hallucinations as your being is split apart at the most fundamental level. Rise from your sweat-soaked sheets with a second shape in the room with you.
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| Francis Bacon |
Spirits
The soul gem is a lens through which the soul-chunk is projected directly into reality without the need for a physical intermediary. The resulting apparition is a spirit. A separate soul made to interlace with a spectrum of the chaos of reality, an independently-thinking entity yet bound inexorably to their creator, a ghost at the edge of vision.
The core material which the soul gem is made of is vitally important, because it determines what aspects of reality the spirit interacts with - or, in more prosaic terms, its form, function, and personality. A Bismuth spirit will have very different traits than a Obsidian spirit, and so on and so forth.
There are many, many side effects. Opening your soul up widens perception, so that you can see ghostly and invisible things, including the spirits of other magicians. Of course, that means they can see yours as well - you can try to hide it, stuff it inside the contours of your body, and it'll work well enough so long as you don't mind some tremors and tics and words out of your mouth not being your own. Then there are the emotional fluctuations, some deadened and others exaggerated, that come from being hyperfocused on a specific aspect of reality. Then there are the physical health issues that come from having your soul split, and a foreign object lodged in your chest cavity. And these effects are all drastic enough with just one soul gem - because of course many wizards choose to eventually give themselves multiple, and become sickly weeping messes as their many souls flare and make the world around them putty.
Soul Types,
because there are many. Too many to list here, but here is a guide to what is most common, well known, proven.
Bismuth
The Haunting
is the color of delirium, passion, and self-indulgence. The madness of extreme youth and old age, drool pouring down the chest, a gentle hand wiping it away. The lowest places of the spine, innerzone pool of amniotic fluid watched by hungry lizards. Four straight right angles which nevertheless form into alien shapes, wretched and wrong. Hollow things, and holes, and what whistles through holes. Opening and closing them, passing through, soothing their pains.
Obsidian
Richard Müller
is the color of honor, duty, and self-reliance. Wind-up obedience, the deaf blank face. Unstoppable forces and immovable objects, plated armor as heavy again as you are, the screech of rotors across road, tunnel, sky. Chunky tarantula legs and shiny beetle carapace, nice ox-leather gloves still steaming with breath and sweat. Insulation within and without, smooth and free of gaps.
Pearl
Source Unknown
is the color of yearning, detachment, and fear. Boring a hole in the wall to watch your neighbor undress. Buzzing wires and the sickly glow of screens in a dark room, sweat all over. The unheimlich, imperfect doppelgangers, folding yourself up into a cabinet full of mirrors, everything draining out of you thin and drizzly. An aquarium overflowing with coral clinging desperately to itself. Doors left unlocked out of carelessness.
Silver
Paolo Soleri
is the color of scrupulosity, austerity, and authoritarianism. Crisp bedsheets and white noise so loud it shakes the plaque off your teeth. The patient etherized upon the table, razor scalpel needle talons, a high-quality wooden desk with an expensive pen laying on it. Files, vials, labels in a sorting system only its writer understands. Glass walls and never never any privacy.
Ruby
Gustave Moreau
is the color of grief, ambition, and ruin. It's history in all its torrid wreckage and glory. Glorious and terrible, ten-thousand angels descending with swords in hand, Kleio's sweeping sickle. Hot irons, purring engines, transmuting base matter into things and tools. Steaming vats of dye, rugs that take years to make, holding a lighter to it and tearing at it with your nails and teeth.
Emerald
This Person
is the color of passion, imagination, and dependency. Filigree, twisted wrought iron and lace doilies. Dollhouses and childish crafts, and slim fingers plucking the legs off a fly. Dappled sunlight through thick glass casting broken shapes of thick golden light on the floor. Shearing apart taxidermied fur, revealing the stuffing and wooden skeleton underneath, and stitching it back together in new shapes. Frightened stone statues by a manicured pond.
Sapphire
Imre Reiner
is the color of resentment, appetite, and vainglory. The burn of alcohol sliding down the throat and inflamed red faces, orgies all through the night and firing squads at dawn. The reek of tobacco and sulfur, a dozen legs tramping down a hallway at once with a sound like thunder. Dogs and horses, chuffing, inured to the roar of artillery, an octopus crushing its prey to death, malformed and painful horns.
Gold
Elagabalus
is the color of security, wisdom, and self-loathing. Heavenly black iron cutting apart the earth and caressed like a lover, still cooling. Dirt that you can't get out from under your fingernails, ancient boughs groaning under their own weight. A tightly-held fist putting back down what it called up with no small amount of pride. Poisoned flesh melting into pristine bone, heavy chains and a heavier keyring.
Practical Matters
Well, how are you supposed to use this in play?
The idea, at least, is to blend FKR-ish/"storygamey" methods of magical expression with ultra-simulationist lethal violence and wound/hit tables. I find the frission that those rules express side-by-side to each other, at least in theory, to be quite compelling. I don't have those written up yet because I'd most likely stitch together extant rulesets rather than creating something from scratch. Nothing is original and everything in plagiarism, and I very much enjoy making disparate pieces fit together.
If you're wondering about the imagery of the colors of the soul, I wrote up a whole extensive table to clarify the vibes. I ended up deciding to write impressionistically around it because it seemed to me that simply droning on about longwinded lists of associations and spell effects would kill the magic, so to speak.
This post has gone on long enough, but I like the many implications having soul gems opens up. What happens when a wizard dies? when you stick one into an animal, or object? when you make one out of multiple materials? These questions, God willing, I'll have the time and will to expand upon in the future.
