Magic as Radiation: Enter the Spirit-World

 This series of posts has covered, exclusively, magic coming from lesser sources. What makes this final post so interesting to me is that the source isn’t necessarily lesser. It is stranger, darker, and more dangerous than the other methods. This is magic as radiation, or as we call it in this setting, Spirit-Calling.

Magic as Radiation: Enter the Spirit World

Magic as radiation is unique because one needs little to no formal training to call spirits. Spirits are willing to enter any human’s body. That being said, those with strong force of will and innate magical ability will be better hosts for spirits. 

The Mages of the Cyclica and the Church of the Human Font might be disconcerted by the questions about consciousness that Spirit-calling forces reconciliation with. Most would prefer to see the art eradicated than devote time answering such questions.

Setting Element: Spirits

Spirits are creatures that embody some kind of symbolic or elemental force. They live all around the world, but are rare and alien. Many communities build their homes around the liminal spaces spirits inhabit, that they might bargain with it for power.

Spirits have somewhere they live. Spirits rarely move around. Sometimes they do; if they do, they don’t tend to stay still. 

Spirits have a Personality. This should be immediately evident upon meeting them. Along these lines, they have wants and interests. When bargaining with a Spirit, if the bargainers satisfy some of their wants and interests, the spirit is very likely to cooperate.

Spirits have Power, and lots of it. They generally have the ability to do a very small number of things, but can do them many, many times, and often they’re very, very powerful. When tethered spirits cast spells, they may use their pool of MD, and only burn an MD on twin results of 5+ (i.e. two fives or two sixes).

Setting Element: Spirit Possession

All spirits know a spell: Enter Body. They know this spell like a human knows sight; it comes naturally to them. This spell allows them to enter the body of a human being. The human is then in a kind of motor dialogue with the spirit, with both the spirit and the human having potential for control over the body. Some spirits like to dominate humans, but that causes the body to waste away quite quickly, and some humans are able to fight back against possession. Some humans, the Shamans, also know this spell.

Because humans want immense untold magical power, and because spirits are sometimes willing to strike bargains, humans and spirits will often make possession pacts, allowing spirits to inhabit the body and submit (to some degree) to the human’s goals. The spirit can generally instantly destroy the human’s body if they wish, but that would probably result in them becoming untethered if they’re too far from home. Untethered spirits are extremely unhappy spirits. 

When mortals cast spells through spirits, they gain access to the spirit’s pool of MD and spells.

When they roll doubles, some of their soul or body burns away-- they permanently lose one point of  HP, or one mental/physical slot, or 1 MD, or 1 Sanity, whatever you have in your setting. When they roll triples, they do this three times.

Setting Element: Untetherance

Spirits are normally tethered to a location in the world. For many spirits, this is a liminal space. For some, like dryads, a specific tree is a tether. Some spirits, like Djinn, have magic items as tethers. The unicorn is tethered by its horn. Elementals have elemental hearts (see Howl’s Moving Castle for more details).

Untethered Spirits have ¼ their original MD, rounding up. If this would bring them to less than one (before rounding up) they instead have access to some cantrip or extremely minor version of their former magical prowess.

Setting Element: Exorcism

Exorcism is incredibly difficult to carry out. More often than not, people must bargain with a spirit to get it to leave a body. Rarely, someone will be able to, by sheer force of will, command a spirit to leave a body. 

Exorcise Spirit is a spell known by most would-be shamans. It rarely works, because the spirit can resist the exorcism and fucking murder you afterwards. But it’s worth knowing. 

Setting Element: The Spirit World

Some Shamans practice to be able to remove their consciousness from their body into the spirit world. In the spirit world, beings/places of great magical power, including spirits, as well as places of great symbolic significance, are limned and bright, though everything is wispy and blurred as though by a semi-liquid wind.

Setting Element: Titanic Spirits

Titanic spirits are spirits so huge and powerful that they alter the world around them. They either do not have tethers or are Untethered and would be gods if they were tethered.

GLoG Class: Shaman

A: Shaman’s Spells

B: Spirit Flight

C: Shamanic Mastery

D: 2 Shamanic Masteries

Shaman’s Spells: you know the spells Exorcise Spirit and Enter Body.

Enter Body: a ritual of varying length that allows a spirit to enter your body. The more powerful the spirit, the more lengthy the ritual. When done, a spirit may enter your body. Your consciousness 

Exorcise Spirit: roll some MD. The spirit rolls some of theirs. If you roll higher, the spirit is exorcised. If you don’t, it’s just really mad. You cannot cast Exorcise Spirit on spirits in your body.

Spirit Flight: you can, in an intense state of meditation which is as difficult as travel, move your consciousness into the spirit world. You learn the location and name of d3 nearby spirits or locations of spiritual significance. The GM rolls a random spirit encounter, which occurs before you learn your last piece of information:

1. An unfriendly spirit, aggressive
2. An unfriendly spirit, intimidating and coercive
3. A neutral spirit, disinterested
4. A neutral spirit, enigmatic
5. A neutral spirit, in need of assistance
6. A friendly spirit

It takes you an hour to return to your body, and an hour per piece of information to travel about. You cannot engage with your senses while flying. Your mind is entirely vulnerable while flying.

Shamanic Mastery: to take the second profile of one of these masteries, you must have the first one.

1. You can cast Exorcise Spirit on spirits in your body.
1. Upgrade your MD’s when casting Exorcise Spirit on your body. Spirits fear your power over them and may be reluctant to bargain with you.
2. Each phase of a Spirit Flight takes half as much time.
1. You can return to your body immediately during Spirit Flights.
3. You learn the spell Ward Spirit. For every hour you spend casting it before flying, you negate one attack a spirit does on you during your journey. Spirits can see your ward and may lose interest in you either way.
1. You learn the spell Spirit Smite. You spend d6 HP to roll one MD (as many times as you are able and would like to). You deal that much damage to a spirit, losing the MD on a 4+ (and the HP assigned to it with it). It is cast instantaneously while flying, but requires an hour of prep beforehand.
4. When you cast Enter Body, you can spend an additional hour to make the possession pact between you two a contract. Penalties for breaking the contract are death and untetherance, respectively. Spirits know you are doing this and may not agree to a contract. 
1. You may choose to state alternate penalties. Exorcism cannot be a penalty for either of your violations. You two are in this together until the contract is complete.
5. You know something useful about every spirit you meet.
1. You also know the general region (the hex or group of hexes) where a spirit might live. The usefulness of this varies (it’s not very useful with, say, a dryad forest).
6. You may choose to automatically succeed in a check for Exorcise Spirit. If you do, that spirit may enter your body if they choose to.
1. You get +1MD when casting Exorcise Spirit to remove a spirit from someone else’s body.

Some Spirits!

Red Raakesh

Appearance: an enormous fiery snake.

Lives: in a hilltop cave. Within the cave, a huge bed of sticks and kindling burns with a mild flame. An old woman with ash falling off of her skin, smoldering, soot-stained rags, and eyes like roaring fires tends the flame. When he has an audience, Red Raakesh emerges from the now-roaring pyre, and the woman sits on her stool obediently. 

Personality: capricious, greedy, and hungry. Wants more servants to feed off of. His fire tender is growing old; he wants a new one. Admires ambition, especially blind or short-sighted ambition, and those seeking power.

Power: 9MD. 

• Flame Wake: Red Raakesh paints a 10ft winding path of flame (sum) x5 feet long, and emerges at the end of it. Anyone in it takes (dice) damage. Red Raakesh can fly this way
• Firestruck: Red Raakesh spends a turn biding and building up flame. At the end of the turn, he channels a (sum) radius cone of flame for up to (dice) rounds, dealing (dice) damage to anyone in it. Probably burns away the tongue and inner mouth of any person who tries to channel this ability. He can only move 5 feet per turn while doing this.
• Chomp: Red Raakesh just fuckin eats you. Dex save to avoid. You take damage equal to twice his remaining MD. Red Raakesh must physically emerge from a host body’s mouth to do this action on another target.

Deer Boy

Appearance: a young, young boy with a deer head attached at the neck. Blood trickles down from the stump neck of the deer onto the torso of the boy.

Lives: probably suffers from Untetherance. Appears at random around the forest.

Personality: terrified and cowering. Will whimper and flee from your sight if possible. Unclear if it's possible to befriend Deer Boy. Deer Boy is terrified of thunder.

Power: ?MD.

• Deer Boy can disappear at will into the spirit world, but only if out of sight of creatures.
• Deer Boy only appears when there is rain and mist. It is unclear if he follows the rain or if the rain follows him.

Spirit of the Steppe

A strange titanic spirit.

On the Steppe, the spirits are as few and far between as the gnarled and windswept trees that dot the landscape. These spirits are accustomed to and comfortable in their solitude; travelers will find that their temperaments range from lonely to sage-like to downright hostile. But this loneliness which manifests so deeply in the landscape and the immortal energies that inhabit it have done something unique to the steppe, for something like a meta-spirit inhabits the land.

None know (or perhaps those who know refuse to share) whether the Great Spirit of the Steppe is older than all things or a newborn creation of the blasted landscape. It shows up on still evenings, when the forlorn grasses sway in night-kiss breezes. It rises out of the ground, a million fiery lights in the distance, which diffuse in the air and lazily drift upward into the sky until they vanish through the clouds which dust the gentle-glowing firmament. And it is the infinite heights through which they travel, and the infinitude of that twilight expanse, and the breeze that ruffles the sawgrass suddenly to break the traveler’s rapture in the face of that great beauty, which reminds each man who travels the step after dusk that he, too, is alone, and always will be. Time, after all, though just as limitlessly huge as the distance those brilliant motes travel to reach their astral brethren, passes just as suddenly and disappears just as quickly into the dark.