Sorcery As Transgression

[alex_greene]

I always wondered about the stigma attached to sorcery in these games - Legend and its venerable predecessor - and the only thing I can think of is that it's not the sorcery itself that is evil, wicked and transgressive.

It's just politics.

To that end, in my setting there are two things which mark sorcery as a somewhat transgressive art. First of all, sorcery spells are capable of doing all of those things Divine magic is capable of. And more, besides, because - say - Divine magic is incapable of creating a permanent enchantment.

Second ... Divine Magic is sorcery.

All those worshippers making Pacts to the deity are reciting the words to some very ancient sorcery enchantments which funnel their dedicated POW into a vast astral bank, which can be tapped by the sorcerers operating at the highest levels of their cults. Their sorcery effects, which to all intents and purposes we call Divine spells, are set up in advance and cast over those who pray for them; later, when they are out in the field and casting their Divine spells, they activate the trigger words which launch the prepared sorcery effect.

Once activated, the spell is discharged - which is why the spell vanishes, requiring that the devoted adventurer come back to the Temple to "pray" (as in "pay") for a new one. A very profitable venture for the sorcerers running these little scams. And of course, these particular sorcery spells cannot be used with personal Magic Points, because they are dependent upon the astral Magic Points in the cloud, this astral Magic Points battery as it were, and their Magnitude and other parameters are preset by the sorcerers and optimised.

Over the years, perhaps, the descendants of the original sorcerers may well forget that these spells are a scam, and start truly believing that they are working the will of their god.

And then along come these freewheeling sorcerers with their Sorcery and Manipulation skills, their true Will a mark of independence from and defiance of the gods, their ability to Concert cast and pool their power together, and - of course - the same kinds of spells that the priests in their churches claimed as the purview of their gods alone. All of the gods. The Temple of Love priests see sorcerers casting Love Goddess spells, and almost immediately afterwards hurling down a War God spell, showing a total disrespect for the demarcation between deities.

The true believers, those deluded dupes, will bluster about blasphemy - and those who are in on their little godly scam will see themselves potentially being put out of business, as people flock to the sorcerers, glad to be able to gain their services for simple hard currency, without that awful price of having half their soul sucked out of them into a Pact.

Cue priestly bruxation, anger, outrage, denunciations, scheming, conflict.

Well, that works for me - and a godless setting suits me just fine as an atheist.

 

[alex_greene]

The large scale visible effects are what would rankle to the priests, especially if the sorcerers appear to be able to cast them so nonchalantly.

Specifically, I'm looking at area-effect or large-scale Divine spells such as Bless Crops, Call Winds, Clear Skies, Consecrate, Crash of Thunder, Ebb and Flow, Eclipse, Fog, Rain, Accursed Aura, Propitiate, Rain of Blood and River of Blood. In the spell descriptions of each, the Magnitude of the spell is listed, usually affecting the range of the spell in tens of metres or kilometres.

Cast as Sorcery spells, those spells would have a range set by the Range parameter instead - you could rule that, rather than use the Range column in the Sorcery Manipulation table on p. 192 of Legend Core Rulebook as is, these spells affect a radius of 1 kilometre per Manipulation factor put into the spell instead (in the case of Consecrate, use the Range column as is, but the Range is the radius of the Consecrated area).

Magnitude and Duration work as they do for sorcery spells. Area-effect spells do not need the Targets parameter.

If these spells have any kind of effect on, say, perceptions (e.g. Fog), then you can rule that any penalties to appropriate dice rolls (e.g. to Perception, Resilience, Survival) are +/- 10% per point of Intensity.

And for phenomena such as rain, cloud cover, wind speed and temperature, which can be graded up or down, you can rule that the sorcerer can set the grade of local weather up or down a number of levels equal to the Intensity. A sorcerer could disperse a raging hurricane, or turn a baking hot desert into a frozen Arctic tundra.

Of course, there is also the hilarious fun possibility that sorcery spells can duplicate Excommunicate - affecting a maximum of 3 POW per point of Intensity, and severing the Pact between a devotee and the Astral cloud battery where his Magic Points have been going. The following morning, the devotee would wake up with all their Magic Points ... but all their stored Divine spells would still be there, ready to be cast ... :twisted:

 

[Prime_Evil]

Conflict between religious authorities and practitioners of divine magic is a staple of fantasy fiction. Don't forget that many of the classics of the genre were written in the 1930s and 1940s when religious intolerance was far more commonplace than it is now. Also, the influence of Margaret Murray's Witch Cult in Western Europe and Frazer's Golden Bough on some genre authors is obvious - they often depicted sorcery as the last vestiges of ancient knowledge that survived underground despite religious persecution and viewed it as a kind of alternative science.

 

[alex_greene]

I could see the fun one could have with a sorcerer who discovers the true origins of Divine magic, learns that it has nothing to do with the gods at all ... and then comes up with a sorcery spell that cuts off the Divine spells from their astral Magic Points cloud.

A Divine magic off switch.

One morning, none of the Divine spells work any more. Anywhere. None of the prayers works. Devotees wake up with their Pact skills inaccessible, and all their Magic Points intact. Then the priests start sending for the adventurers ...

 

[Da Boss]

Interesting idea - its a theme in Warhammer FRP as well - where all magic comes from the Warp as do the Gods However say this to a presist of Sigmar or Ulric and you will be arrested as a heretic burned...... Sorcerers are only tollerated in Warhammer and whilst a Sorcerer may have powrrs that duplicate the divine - it depends on his or her standing in the world and the power of the Church, Temples etc if they will be allowed to flaunt this power?

 

[Prime_Evil]

To play the devil's advocate, I wonder if there's also a divine spell that can cut sorcerers off from the source of their magic -its easy to imagine an arms race where both sides have the power to strip rival spellcasters of their powers. You could easily end up with an uneasy truce where priests and sorcerers mistrust each other but avoid outright conflict because it would quickly spiral out of control. Of course, any individual spellcaster who steps too far out of line would be fair game - for example, priests might hunt down a heretical sorcerer who dabbles in the forbidden arts of demonology and a shadowy order of sorcerers might choose to avenge those hedge wizards persecuted by a particularly zealous witch-hunter. Such a cold war between arcane and divine approaches to magic would probably have many unspoken rules quietly understood by both parties - the kind of unspoken rules that blundering adventurers are prone to transgress accidentally....

 

[alex_greene]

To play the devil's advocate, I wonder if there's also a divine spell that can cut sorcerers off from the source of their magic -its easy to imagine an arms race where both sides have the power to strip rival spellcasters of their powers. You could easily end up with an uneasy truce where priests and sorcerers mistrust each other but avoid outright conflict because it would quickly spiral out of control. Of course, any individual spellcaster who steps too far out of line would be fair game - for example, priests might hunt down a heretical sorcerer who dabbles in the forbidden arts of demonology and a shadowy order of sorcerers might choose to avenge those hedge wizards persecuted by a particularly zealous witch-hunter. Such a cold war between arcane and divine approaches to magic would probably have many unspoken rules quietly understood by both parties - the kind of unspoken rules that blundering adventurers are prone to transgress accidentally....

I actually don't like that idea - as a Thelemite, the True Will always triumphs over surrender to the Other and subsumption of your will to suit another's purposes (something your Adventurers should hold dear, even if they are all mundanes). Just because magic is alive still doesn't mean that gods exist.

The only thing I'd do in such a setting would be to have some sort of device cast Accursed Aura from Arcania of Legend: Blood Magic over an area kilometres across. It's an area effect spell which suppresses magic of all kinds, reducing the spells' Magnitudes by an amount equal to its own Magnitude - a 2 Magnitude Accursed Aura would cause Magnitude 1 and 2 spells to cease functioning, and they could never be cast within the bounds of the spell. A Magnitude 3 spell would be reduced to Magnitude 1, and so on. Only, this one has a natural Magnitude (actually, Intensity, as in 1 point per 10% of Sorcery skill, round up) of 7.

The characters could investigate, only to discover that the "Accursed Aura" was actually caused a sorcery enchantment, perhaps an obsidian statue about the size of a carriage clock: and the Accursed Aura effect was a concert cast sorcery spell with an Intensity of 7 and its own Magnitude of 1, set to 20 kilometres radius, and a duration of one lunar month.

That's what makes sorcery so transgressive - they keep calling out the priests' scams, and the priests are disgruntled because they know that they're running a scam.

 

[Ultor]

That's what makes sorcery so transgressive - they keep calling out the priests' scams, and the priests are disgruntled because they know that they're running a scam.

This isn't too far off the Malkioni belief in Glorantha - which is where the different treatment of sorcery began in RQ.

 

[JP42]

You can have a middle ground as well, where yes, the sorcerers are doing the same sort of thing as the theists, and the theists hold that all power comes from the gods and anathematize the sorcerers for deigning to arrogate to themselves the power of the gods... but where they don't know that the gods aren't really necessary to the equation. Less "we're running a con" than "this is how we were taught it, so it's the right way..."

 

[alex_greene]

I'd laugh if it was the few people with Common Magic who are the only ones with the real magic, and the priests and sorcerers are just deluding themselves.

 

[JP42]

I'd laugh if it was the few people with Common Magic who are the only ones with the real magic, and the priests and sorcerers are just deluding themselves.

You really should come on over to the RQ6 camp a bit, too. Five distinct magic systems there - allows for even more charges of heresy than just the three views.

 

[dreamer_prophet]

I dunno. when sorcery is portrayed as ersatz science, it kinda loses it's magic if you see what I mean. In a settings where fervent belief can result in actual miracles the relationship between sorcery and theism can remain ambiguous but equally tense. It may seem a bit hackneyed, but the distinction between wizards (or mages, or thaumaturges if you prefer) and sorcerers (or warlocks, or necromancers) works well when framed in theistic terms.

Wizardry, or example, is the pursuit of magical power through intellectual means. Its practitioners study disciplines such as astrology, alchemy, cabalism and numerology and use magical paraphernalia (“bell, book and candle”) to gain access to extraordinary powers. They believe their enquiries to be aligned towards an intrinsic moral order, leaving their souls safeguarded from the taint of evil. Or at least this is what they tell themselves…

The basic approach of Wizardry is to construct a representation of reality using utterances, designs, symbols, substances, gestures and so forth in strict accordance with the traditions of their craft. Then, by exploiting the inherent sympathetic connections between the representation and reality, effect changes upon the real world.

The techniques employed by Wizards are often complex, obscure, unintuitive and rigidly formulaic. Nevertheless, the rituals must be performed with scrupulous attention to detail. A slip or omission could imperil the wizard’s soul. This does not mean that wizards are necessarily good. They may cheerfully jeopardize the souls of others in their experiments while jealously guarding their own.

Importantly, wizards concern themselves with the mysteries of the natural order. Wizards seek to understand and manipulate the sympathetic connections between the celestial and the mundane. They are principally motivated by the desire for knowledge not of power. They seek to use magic to put nature to the test, to aid understanding of the created world.

A great description of the nature of sorcery features in Blade of the Iron Throne (p154-5) by Philip Jones & Michael Heider (Iron Throne Publishing). I don't apologise for quoting it at length as I think really evocative:

Sorcery is not an academic, scholarly pursuit.

Its practitioners do not theorize, do not engage in complicated convoluted experiments, do not conduct research into sorcery’s underlying principles, or how to apply them to novel uses.
The actual inner workings of sorcery are unknowable, and even the greatest sorcerers can no more than dimly guess at just why and how their invocations work.

Sorcerers may or may not be erudite, bookish types, they are therefore no scientists. Sorcery is, after all, not science, but a strange, unknowable force of uncertain origin, an origin that is usually somehow transmundane; it is never just another natural force like gravity or magnetism. Instead, a degree of “outsideness” is always inherent to it.

Sorcerers certainly have ideas where the sorcerous power they are manipulating derives from, but they can never be certain.

In one setting, it may be a dark power out of the void between the stars, in another, power channelled from some eldritch and alien deity, or many other things. It is however never a beneficent or wholesome power, and it is never entirely impersonal.

Those beings that impart and grant sorcerous power, always have an agenda of their own; an agenda that will often be unfathomable, especially if such eldritch power is not derived from contact with supernatural, godlike beings.

This agenda is at best totally alien and entirely indifferent to human beings and their plight, and at worst inimical to humanity. The former might be true in cases where sorcery is perceived as just a strange power from beyond the limits of this universe, the latter in cases where it is channelled from some sinister deity.

In the very common instances where a given setting’s sorcery is derived from dealings with demonic gods, sorcerers are usually to some degree worshippers or cultists of such deities or have formed pacts with them. This does not mean that such sorcerers do actually have to be devout – for many, it will be like a deal, where they further a demonic being’s agenda in return for receiving occult powers.

This brings us to the topic of whence sorcery is learned.

The fantasy trope of the apprenticeship to a sorcerer is alive, but it is not the sole, and in some settings perhaps not the most common, way of acquiring sorcerous knowledge.

Alongside it always exists the possibility of approaching a sorcerous deity – provided such exists in the setting – and forging a pact with it to receive sorcerous knowledge in return for whatever such an unfathomable, but never wholesome, being may require of a mere human.

As only the most driven and determined of men will head down such a path, it is usually strength of will and intensity of personality that characterise a sorcerer in Blade, not intelligence and erudition.
Ultimately, sorcery means always dealing with strange, alien, and inimical powers, whether personal, or detached. As it is no science, it hardly attracts practitioners who are in it for the intellectual challenge or insight offered, though it sometimes attracts curious practitioners of a philosophical bent.

Overwhelmingly, it attracts practitioners who are in it for sheer power.

Much more often than scientists, sorcerers will be priests, fanatical, sacrificial dagger wielding cultists of a god of darkness, or coolly calculating schemers trying to get the maximum out of their sinister patron for a minimum of their own involvement, perhaps even playing the dangerous game of playing one patron against another.

But whatever they are, they are never detached, ivory-tower scholars in pointy hats.

Sorcery is therefore the manipulation of ultramundane powers that are at best alien and at worst downright hostile towards humanity. In working sorcery, one exposes one’s body and soul to these inimical powers. The wise sorcerer will refrain from overreaching himself and take good care not to open his soul’s portals too far to the influences from beyond, lest he become tainted with them.

 

[alex_greene]

Nah, sorcery's about the manipulation of forces and structures of the universe which are known to the mages, and which those mages know how to manipulate.

Stripping the theism out of the sorcery doesn't strip out any of the mystery. Science is still an eternal mystery to those who lack sufficient education, but the mystery is no less diminished once a scientist develops to the PhD level.

Same deal with sorcery - the master sorcerer can wield immense powers, but moreover is aware of immensity in the universe beyond his capacity to possibly comprehend.

Far bigger than any gods the mundanes can come up with.

 

[dreamer_prophet]

I think were at cross purposes here. I'm only talking about the potential for dramatic effect generated by leaving room for some ambiguity. I have nothing to bring to a debate on religion vs. science.

 

[RangerDan]

I've always liked this take on the Theism vs. Sorcery thing:

The creation and manipulation of "Reality" is a power usually reserved to the divine. Gods shaped the world in ages past, and are - in general terms - happy with the result.

When priests cast their "miracles" they are basically asking (begging) the gods to make minute changes to Reality on their behalf. In some settings it may be more business-like (buying miracles through sacrifices/expenditure of manna) but the principle is the same - the god has the actual power.

Sorcerers scoff at this. Through whatever means they have/learn/steal some of the divine "spark" and set about changing Reality at their own whim. Gods are somewhat miffed by mortals infringing on their divine powers, and so set their earthly agents (priests/followers) against them. On the flip-side, sorcerers are disdainful of close-minded 'god-slaves' who seek to limit what Man should or should not do.

In some settings, a sorceror's defiance of the natural order can leave him cut off from the gods - quite literally "damned" depending on how the afterlife works - which is why they so often seek out forbidden immortality magics and other nefarious means of extending their lifespans. It's not so much fear of death but fear of what awaits them afterwards. But these black magics make them even more hated by common folk.

 

[alex_greene]

That's how theists see it.

And then there's the truth - that the gods are ascended sorcerers from centuries before, and that Divine magic is nothing more than the offcuts and crumbs from their table, badly-mangled recital of words from long-forgotten grimoires which once held the most subtle and powerful, and aldo godless, secrets to the universe's hidden mechanical workings.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

In my setting, I have combined SPIRIT magic with DIVINE magic, such that the "GODS" are just the most powerful of Spirits.

Since the strength of the God is directly related to how many people pray to them, there is a lot of in-fighting amongst the Gods and Ascended Humans for believers. Divine Cults are VERY important to the Gods.

 

[alex_greene]

Except it isn't the gods who are doing all the fighting and delving in dungeons. It's the ordinary people who become Adventurers and, ultimately, legends.

And to the average Adventurer, gods are just beings they hear of, and grab spells from if they mumble the right words and spend enough money in temple, but never actually meet.

 

[JP42]

Except it isn't the gods who are doing all the fighting and delving in dungeons. It's the ordinary people who become Adventurers and, ultimately, legends.

And to the average Adventurer, gods are just beings they hear of, and grab spells from if they mumble the right words and spend enough money in temple, but never actually meet.

It's funny, Alex. You and I appear to share the same view of religion and faith in real life, but approach it totally differently in games. Where you want to pull back the curtain and show the small man lurking behind, I find fantasy games to be the only place where actual, working miracles and personal relationships with deities make sense.

 

[alex_greene]

It's funny, Alex. You and I appear to share the same view of religion and faith in real life, but approach it totally differently in games. Where you want to pull back the curtain and show the small man lurking behind, I find fantasy games to be the only place where actual, working miracles and personal relationships with deities make sense.

I kind of take the longer view of where gods come from - they originate in things like animism, where they used to take on forms such as Father Sky and Mother Sea, and for a time if anyone wanted a disease cured, they'd go to the only man in the village who could talk to those big spirits. Which would keep that man in hot dinners, as long as he delivered on his promises of curing the sick - and when he failed, he'd be fed to the pigs and a new shaman take his place.

And part of me is thinking of Ancient Rome and Egypt, where any ranting goose-stepper with ambition could slaughter his political foes, put on a shiny hat and proclaim himself a living, walking god - and a thousand people would Pact their souls to him regardless of the fact that he bleeds and has to eat, along with some very ungodly behaviour.

I find things so much more fascinating if the gods do not exist, even in a fantastic world. It makes the priests much more like really skilled actors and charlatans, it humanises them, it doesn't detract from actual good deeds such as healings and exorcisms that the honest "good" priests do, it doesn't feel like a shill if that money you spend in buying Divine spells actually does go to line the temple roof and feed orphans, and characters can still dress up in their Saturday best and go to temple and rub shoulders with sorcerers in common prayer and come out and feel good about themselves.

And if the curtains should part and a real deity briefly walks the earth, the world would know - and again, it'd be the characters who are ideally placed to deal with it. It'd be a real first contact with a real god and not just some host with glowing eyes and a snake in his head, and it'd somehow matter, like nothing the characters ever experienced before. You couldn't say that about a fantasy where the gods are as common as biscuits. Think of it as like that episode of Scooby-Doo where, for once, the zombies and ghosts were actually real.