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Next: Divination Subschools and Selected Spells
Previous: Introduction
The first recorded
acts of formalized magic were divinatory, granting the ability of mortals to
extend their perceptions beyond their purely physical senses. While I hope,
some day, to discover the origins of these abilities I suspect that, initially,
they were much like the limited arts of the sorcerer or warlock; instinctual or
granted through outside influence rather than learning, research, or practice.
They initially provided little in the way of increased awareness. However, the
exertions of those who dedicated themselves to learning about these gifts, and
turning these gifts to learn about the universe around them, proved these
abilities sufficient for their recipients to make the fundamental discoveries
necessary to set us on the path to our modern understanding of the art. Two of
those discoveries stand out among the rest.
The first, and most key, being the most basic methods of manipulating
magic without an innate sense of it. It is this discovery above all others that
allows the wide practice of the art we enjoy and without which individuals such
as I would lack even the basic capabilities we enjoy. Natural ability has
always remained a key discriminator between the average practitioner and those
who fall to the ends of the spectrum in terms capacity. However, without this
understanding, only those few with the greatest natural capacity who were
stumbled upon through glad happenstance by those already trained might ever
have been capable of initiation.
Through this first discovery, and the inevitable desire of mortals ever
towards expanding their capabilities, these early mages arrived at the second
discovery; a new understanding of the energy sources from which their abilities
were derived. These early pioneers knew that they had been drawing on forces
beyond their mortal senses to power their abilities, but had little framework
from which to conceptualize what they were or how they worked. They would come
to separate these energy sources into too schools, referenced as the “inner
path” and “outer path.” While initiation is the foundation on which all further
magical learning is built, study of these sources of energy represented the
first forking of the study of magic as some would focus more of their time on
seeking to understand, and better harness, these sources of energy.
Those early diviners who continued to advance their specific arts
experienced an ongoing expansion of their revelatory senses. As they
accumulated greater experience and power they began to open their awareness to
the fabric of space and time. By learning how to subtly manipulate this fabric
they unlocked the ability to “cast” their senses across distances and away from
themselves by creating pathways through higher dimensions terminating in small
portals, the “sensors” with which we are so familiar. These pathways are
insufficient to pass matter, or even significant amounts of energy. However, they
are obviously more than sufficient for enough information to pass for a mind to
interpret sensations such as sight or sound. As they continued experimenting
with these extradimensional links, always pushing their potential reach through
space, they also attempted to reach through time. The results of these
experiments were erratic, to say the least. This being a result of the massive
variation in potential even the shortest link through time might find, and thus
overwhelming the human mind. Even as these would-be seers codified methods of
sorting and reducing the possibilities they were presented with, they became
aware of “pockets” and “flows” of information in the larger tapestry. By
tapping these sources diviners have been able to gain knowledge and information
about widely disparate places and times.
Ironically, it would be the search for information on these sources of
knowledge that would lead to the next significant developments in the art. With
the appearance of new power calculations used in the pursuit creation magic
diviners sought to wedge open their extradimensional links. While these efforts
have persistently failed, they have done so in interesting ways; creating
eddies outside of conventional time and space. The refinement of these
“failures” led to the development of a number of spells of striking and
directly applicable power. For a time it appeared that these practices would
form into another school or be adopted by other traditions. However, while
these results might seem at first blush to be a break from the traditions of
earlier diviners, this temporal subschool is a relatively minor evolution of
the larger school’s underlying practices. It simply seemed that the effects were
out of place compared to those traditionally associated with divination.
Following the development of the temporal sub-school, there was a movement to
rename the tradition, a few associated with the tradition even going so far as
to begin referring to the practice as emersion and calling themselves
emersionists. This term means to the process or state of emerging from or being
out of water after being submerged or, in astronomy, the reappearance of a
celestial body after its eclipse or occultation. A recognition of the
traditions’ history, while breaking with the baggage of the historical term. It
seems, however, that traditionalists won out and simply redefined what
divination effects are considered, recognizing their manipulations of time and
space over the previously accepted conception of simply producing knowledge.
~~*~~
I worry that I’ve done a thing here that will cause readers
to immediately reject everything I’m writing without consideration. The fact
that it’s done up front, without much in the way of earned trust, is somewhat
awful but it evolved naturally out of the larger progression of work. One of
the things I encountered the deeper into this process I got was that there was
a clear class of spell that didn’t actually
fit into the schools as designed. They were far more “general magic” than
“magic related to x,” and, often, had once been Universal spells back in the
halcyon days of AD&D. I’ll talk more
later about how I came to carve these things away from the schools where they
had come to rest in cannon later. For the moment, I want to talk about how they
came to be here. There’s a clear case that divination has long needed some
beefing up, and I’ll talk more about that with the subschools and selected
spells, but that’s not the main reason why it came to rest in divination.
I could have made a justification for these spells to move into
a number of places which would have made more sense than where they had been,
or even to simply leave them alone, as I developed coherent theories behind the
schools. As the larger schools narrowed and squeezed things out I had to be careful
to make sure that they didn’t just land helter skelter, recreating the problem
I started this process to address. The final decision though, was one I should
have come to much sooner and had resisted because divination has such a clear
image of what it produces, rather
than what it does. Even though the
history for divination was one of the first things I wrote, and it included a
discussion about the extraplanar pipelines that produce both scrying and
knowledge effects, I still resisted the idea that divination was, at its core,
actually running on manifestations of ability over space and time. As I talked
through this friends pointed out clairvoyance and forethought. Another friend
talked about how a worldbuilder they know had collapsed the entirety of
divination down into a single low level spell in a space and time school. It
still felt weird. Still feels weird. One result of that was a very serious
consideration of renaming the school. Separating the baggage of “diviner.” The entire discussion of emersion is actually
that playing itself out in my head.
Obviously, I finally decided to stick with the cannon name-
in no small part because I figure that I’d lose what few people I might
convince if I not only changed the center of power in this school but anyone
who stopped by to look at what I was making found an entirely different list of
school names. But, there’s also a case that D&D is pretty casual about the
relationship of magical terms to their usage. Necromancy is manipulation of the
dead, but mythologically and historically it’s purely a type of divination;
raising of the dead in search of knowledge. Granted, the use of “necromancer”
as a general “evil” or “manipulator of the dead” has a broader and older
fictional precedent than D&D. But then you have enchantment is similarly
off-branded; even in the same game we refer to enchanted items constantly with
an entirely different meaning. Meanwhile evocation, once known as invocation,
by its name should be all divine magic and all warlock magic because that’s what they do; evoke or invoke
greater powers. But, through the evolution of editions, evocation has essentially become
elemental combat. So, redefining magic that goes by the name of divination may be a bigger
step, but it is by no means a unique one. If D&D were to rename the school
to something more inclusive I’d be pretty happy. But, meanwhile… Sometimes you keep the sacred cows because they’re what eat
the sacred grass.
Anyway, I started the history of magic with divination
because it was the only one of the schools that seemed to provide a natural entry
to the practical study of magic in the same way we approach science. In the
real world advances in applied science literally have to follow after advances
in ways to see what you’re doing. Without such perceptions, even if someone
stumbled across a mystical rite by which anyone can light a fire, or even a
candle, the odds of them improving or modifying that rather than injuring
themselves with it are, at best 50%. And then you have to understand enough of
what changed to make it reproducible. Science, magic, things…
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