A History of Magic:Introduction (D&D)

Contents

I have long since come to accept that my limited magical ability will prevent my name from ever joining those of the great archmagi of the ages. However, I hope that in bending the intellect and will which once earned me a place as your apprentice to learning all I might about the structures and development of the arcane art, rather than the fruitless endeavor of trying to assail through raw stubbornness that which I am metaphysically ill equipped for, I have not wasted my energies. It has been said that, aside from my disability, I have one of the greatest minds of our age, as proved by the theoretical works which remain the only truly advanced dweomercraft I am capable of. However, I hope that it is this text which will be my legacy to our society. In pursuit of the knowledge contained here I have willingly placed life and mind in danger. Seeking neither new spells nor ancient spells of great power, but instead those small but controlling changes to formulae which underpin them.

Tracing the historical development of the great art is difficult, not least because of the interference and influence of various immortal meddlers and the persistent background noise of other types of magic which require neither the codification nor study of our art. However, for various reasons, these forces largely constrain themselves to instruction in individual practical applications of the art rather than advancement in underlying theory. So, by tracing these developments I have sought to unweave the current conception of the schools of magic and to trace the threads of their development back through time. To say this undertaking has been fraught with challenges would be a monumental understatement. These paths have suffered under the weight of history and a rain of the debris from falling empires. Many times I risked losing these fragile threads as they lead me across the great gulfs of time and space in which our art has been discovered, grown, lost, rediscovered, atrophied, and through it all; evolved. To say that the current art owes debts to countless societies on disparate worlds is to understate the scope of its influences.

I had hoped, at the outset of this project, to be able to contextualize this history against the growth of various societies. Some developments I could do that with, though others are as stripped of context as only the discoveries of the most dedicated hermits and sages might be; entering wide knowledge third, fifth, or seventh hand. To provide context would require an entire dissertation unto itself to put the relevant places and times into their own context. Thus, I have limited myself to an abstract, technical discussion regarding the history of each school in hopes that will serve until such time as I can produce more complete thesis.

However, while it might be easy to take from this that these schools branched and never returned during their development, it is important to note that these pioneers were not strict adherents to specialties any more than the modern mage. Just as today, where a student’s tradition will shape the spells they have and use and the direction of their research, they are likely to have a number of spells from other specialties as well. In fact, some of the most intriguing and powerful developments in magical theory have come from exactly these sorts of reach back. Thus, I thought it important at the outset to present this unified picture of the schools and their development.

       ~Nadan Haesh, Historian and former Apprentice to the Archmagos Noan, King of Telaim, GK 5347

Next: The History of Divination

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I obviously took the opportunity to engage in a bit of creative writing here, and throughout this entire exercise. Probably to the detriment of actual readability. I didn't go into the depths of discussing you might with, say, a technical history of mathematics (working my way back from modern history name-checking people like Newton and Pythagoras, talking about the advances of the Chinese, Babylonians, and Egyptians in ancient times, explaining why the number system we use are Arabic numerals when we use Latin characters for our alphabet...). But, hopefully, I caught some of that feeling and it has information that serves to expand the actual sense of what these schools do.

And, hopefully, it’s not too awful on the reading.