A History of Magic: Table of Contents (D&D)

Introduction

The Dawn of Magic

• The History of Divination
• Divination Subschools and Selected Spells
• Eddies in Time and Space

Sources of Power

• The History of Necromancy
• Necromancy Subschools and Selected Spells
• The History of Evocation
• Evocation Subschools and Selected Spells

First Flowering of Magic

• The History of Abjuration
• Abjuration Subschools and Selected Spells

Children of the Elements

• The History of Conjuration
• Conjuration Subschools and Selected Spells
• The History of Transmutation
• Transmutation Subschools and Selected Spells

Scions of Light and Darkness

• The History of Enchantment
• Enchantment Subschools and Selected Spells
• The History of Illusion
• Illusion Subschools and Selected Spells

~~*~~

Any sufficiently codified magic is indistinguishable from science.

Like many players I regularly stumble across things in the magic system that simply baffle me.  My oft referenced 3e disintegrate v destruction comparison, the migration of healing around the schools, or the inclusion of time magic in the transmutation school. One of my new favorites is that Wish has become a conjuration spell with no discernable logic. 

Much time and ink have been spent on explaining and justifying the vancian magic system, even as the influence of that concept on the game has withered. Less energy has been focused on clearly defining the schools of magic in a coherent manner. 5e has, arguably, ended Vancian magic even among its great stronghold of the Wizard class. What it didn't do, and I feel no edition has ever really done, is take a hard look at what the schools of magic actually mean. This has led to some fundamental assumptions that have become "traditional" but hamper balance and interest without a solid benefit and other things just drifting aimlessly. Even 3e, which provided perhaps the best detailed descriptions of the schools and some subschools as part of the tendency towards "tagging" everything for easy classification and interaction, feels like it did so with only a modicum of consideration with regards to why a given spell belonged with a given school. Case in point; the movement of teleportation spells from transmutation to conjuration with the shift from 3.0 to 3.5.

So, guess what I decided to do. I set myself such trivial tasks.

We all know the D&D schools of magic came from the mind of a group of geeks looking across history, mythology, and fiction, gathering up the abilities they thought would be interesting, and then categorizing them. Even in the context of the game they're approached as delivered knowledge. Divinely granted, bargained for from powers infernal or worse, or discovered from ancient civilizations that have since fallen... but, what would that history look like if it weren't manufactured knowledge delivered wholesale? What look at the knowledge of arcane magic, as understood by the first groups that wrested these unearthly abilities from the unknown, societies such as the Netherese and the giants of Xen’drik. Even with the glut of other types of magic, the naturals like sorcerers and those who have it bestowed like clerics and warlocks, spellcraft as experienced by wizards still has to be discovered (either through adventure or research), examined, and learned; knowledge earned rather than being delivered on a silver platter. Just because every bard who can "feel" the magic of song or otherwise requires little actual understanding, the first wizards, and later researchers, had to decide to make a deliberate study of the practice. They had to break the workings of wonder down to equations and formula and treat it with some semblance of the scientific method to get results as reliable and repeatable as the spells in the player's handbook...

There are two main ways this could happen. The first is what seems to be accepted; a proliferation of small disparate discoveries that just happen to being able to be fit together virtually seamlessly when found. This has the ease of looking like exactly what happened in reality to make the magic system and, if you don't look at it to hard (because it's magic, which makes it inexplicable after all!), it works just fine. The second is what I went with; a scientific-style development which split into subfields through its ongoing development.

http://www.xkcd.com/435/

Mechanically, the things I'm writing here, carried to their natural end, change very little. Even the most radical changes do little aside from a few choices in terms of wizard specialist slot allocation and new options in play styles and viable concepts.

But, mostly, it hacks away at much of the confusion that has grown around the schools of magic, and gives a much clearer sense of what an individual schools can do. My goal is to set aside previous choices that may have been made, whether for perfectly good or entirely questionable reasons, but don’t seem to have been reexamined or treated holistically. The result should be a set of core definitions that, while they retain some overlap in effects, also give each school a concrete flavor. It would be nice to be able to look at a spell's effect and know reflexively what school it comes from rather than compare the two and go "I guess I can see that." In fairness, I'm no system will create that clean a dividing line any more than that line exists between physics, chemistry, and biology at their most fundamental levels. Instead, I'll settle for getting rid of "that should really be something else" and "how does that even fit in that school?"

Meanwhile, if you want a way to tip your host, I've started posting some of my work on the DM's Guild. There you can find a compilation of A History of Magic with a number of other related posts, or some other posts on their own, paying what you want for all of it.