A Second Chance at Martyrdom

30 Kythorn

The past tenday has truly been frustrating, if for understandable reasons. Bhaal’s resurrection has everyone on edge, and while most adults are returning to their daily lives, us kids are being constantly watched over.

One or more of the parents would be in the park if we were playing games there, and if we were running in the streets then there would be more watchful eyes than typical from the crowds. Where before there would be some suspicion cast on us for the possibility of being pickpockets or vandals, now they are filled with paranoia for dangers lurking that might prey upon us.

Admittedly, there’s a few of us who I could very much see following the suspicious man offering free candy into the white van.

It’s made my… activities with the lizardfolk impossible to handle personally, and so I’ve dedicated my time instead to scanning the local area for anywhere that could function as a workshop. Thus far, results have been disappointing.

In slightly more happy news, Yeena announced to the group today that she would be becoming an older sister soon, with her mother pregnant.

I’d like to think I acted convincingly in response, it was hard for me to miss what her parents were doing in their room when I made the mistake of scanning the area.

12 Flamerule

I had no idea it would be so difficult to find a cheap and available hole in the wall to set up in. I figured I’d have the place picked out a tenday ago.

These sorts of acquisitions tend to go the best during Sornyn, all sorts of businesses making new deals and agreements means that the market should be primed for that sort of thing.

Instead, I struggle to find something just right. I have no need for warehouses or larger building lots, let alone being able to afford them. I don’t want to try moving into some house either, and most of what’s around here is for rent, rather than purchase.

Today, I nearly fell for the temptation of just trying to make one available. There was a little hole in the wall two room business, I think some sort of importer for dried meats. It even had some termites infesting the building it was attached to. It would have been so easy to just give the command, make it unlivable to force them to sell it off.

Instead, I just forced the termites out of the place. There was already some damage, nothing I could do about that, but at least there wouldn’t be further damage to it.

I’d been doing that a lot for the docks, sacrificing the more destructive bugs to try and fatten up the other species in the area. Either the handful of wasp hives I’ve had burrowing underground or in less harmful places, or the colonies of ants I’ve located.

It’s not a great deal of them, the Dock Ward doesn’t actually have a ton of free green space, but if I were ever in danger it would help to be able to quickly build up a swarm of actually harmful bugs.

26 Flamerule

For as limiting as the increased supervision of us has been, it has incentivized me to spend more of my time with Orsik researching and learning more about Faerun. I don’t know how much the others actually noticed the change to how much we’re being watched over, maybe it’s because of my experience.

Anyway, as of late I’ve asked him to go over all the different sorts of magic with me. As exciting as the concept of magic actually is, I realized that I didn’t actually know a lot of the specifics about it. Sure, I knew there were illusions, and ways to slow down a fall, and a few other things, but on the day to day I actually wasn’t really interacting with it all that much.

So he’s been going through what he knew about it, which was quite a bit given he was a wizard himself. Magic often gets divided in two ways, the source in which the spell is derived, and a general “category” in which it fits into. There’s some other stuff going along with that, various cultural groups and linguistic scripts used can have different methodologies but arrive at similar enough end results for example.

The sources of magic are quite interesting though, broadly speaking there’s two branches to it. Arcane magic and divine magic. Arcane magic is the purview of wizards, people who dedicate their lives to unravelling and manipulating something called the “Weave”, which was some sort of underlying energy field to reality. At least, that’s what I could actually interpret from his description, since he used a lot of flowery language that seemed more metaphorical than anything.

Arcane magic is most commonly practiced by wizards, but there were a number of other means by which it could be learned. Some were born with an innate connection to it, often tied to some sort of magical bloodline, and were known as sorcerers. More brute force, less finesse and variety on average. Then there were warlocks, those who tie themselves to some sort of powerful otherworldly being to be taught or gifted their magic. Like that probably devil summoner I reported for example, though apparently there were many other sources as well and the stereotype of all warlocks being evil was an oversimplification.

For divine magic, it’s practiced by clerics and druids. What differentiates this from arcane magic is the level of understanding required to perform it, since divine magic is granted to the user rather than the user themselves manipulating the weave. It breaks down into a sort of secondary category in “Primal” magic, used by druids. The difference there is that a cleric is channelling their faith and prayers to their patron deity to cast their spells, while druids are tapping into their understanding and connection to nature.

Then for the spell schools, they somewhat remind me a little of the PRT classifications. There’s eight of them. Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation. Not actually as helpful as the old classifications, but they generally describe a broad category that all sorts of things fall into and there’s often outliers.

Abjuration tended to deal with magical protections and wards, or the disabling of other magical effects. Conjuration was about either the summoning or teleporting of things. Divination was about discovering information. Enchantment was mostly mind altering spells. Evocation had to do with direct energy or very offensive magic. Illusions were exactly what the namesake implied, though also included spoofing or displaying information. Necromancy was, rather than just being about raising undead, the manipulation of negative energies of the universe to also do things like spread diseases, as well as directly affecting the soul. Transmutation was transformative, lead into gold, a mouse into a dragon, and so on.

Orsik seemed entertained by my struggles to understand a lot of what he was saying. He loved to use a lot of metaphors and a lot of them flew over my head. Apparently that’s just how wizards were, and understanding the minutia was one of the largest hurdles to becoming a decent wizard.

I’m somewhat tempted to try and actually learn magic myself. Orsik has stated he doesn’t intend to teach me, partially due to inclination and partially due to how busy he actually is when not pursuing his research projects. That leaves either a private tutor or one of a handful academies. The former is far too expensive, and would raise far too many questions that wouldn’t be answerable. The latter could be justified though, but I don’t meet the typical minimum age they accept. Sometime in the coming years perhaps.