Thursday 4 February 2021

Mystic magics of the church of Varchic

 Lately I've been toying around with the idea of getting rid of all these gamified magic-user and cleric spells from my games and rather going through actual grimoires and spellbooks for lists of spells to give my players, the idea being to try grounding the magic down just a bit more and making it feel more mystical than simply Gendolf The Green-ish running around animating plants and speaking with animals. 
I know that it's part of the fantasy of playing a magic-user, and a lot of the spells present in OSR games are already leaning more towards requiring clever usages to gain a lot of mileage from them so they are not in a bad place currently.

So far it's been an interesting delve into mostly Goetic stuff as far as my research about finding spells is concerned, but when I learned about The Magus which in contrast to the 72 demons of the Lesser Key of Solomon contains 72 angels which to invoke for the spells I almost immediately knew that this was how my clerics would be doing their magic.
Unfortunately I had already written the divinity of the church of Varchic for my world, which was very much just the god-giant himself so I can't exactly just shove 72 angels in there especially since the believers of the church venerate earth instead of heavens, so certain adaptations had to be made.

That all being said, what I'm currently sitting on and contemplating is a system where as clerics "prepare their spells" for the day they actually pray for very specific kind of small miracles and then later when "casting the spell" they plea for the miracle they had prayed for earlier to be performed.

In such system there would -very much like in the Solomonian magic- be only certain things one can/should pray for during certain days, and the miracles one may pray for on each day are dictated by what different saints or Varchic himself had done on those days of the week as well as some specific dates during which even stronger miracles may be brought forth.

So far for my list I've tried to purposefully keep everything vague and evocative so that each motif could be invoked in several different ways.
The cool thing about most of the miracles coming from invoking past saints is that I can add more and more saints in there as I feel needed and can even have whole sects based around single saints as they invoke miracles out of the entire life of their chosen saint. Also if my players want to be part of some specific smaller sects or dedicate their miracles to those coming from the life of specific saints there's room for them to create their own ones.

All of that explaining now out of the way, here's my current list of miracles to invoke and when to do so:

Sunday
Varchic crawled out of the pit:
- to create path, stabilise, unite men, lead to success
Mihel the Teacher passed away:
- to impart or gain knowledge, bind or loose spirits


Monday
Samen the patron saint of Pilgrims was found passed away in prayer within one of the caverns of the Foundation:
- to lead towards objective, light the dark
Ailen of Herbs cured his first patient, beginning his path to sainthood:
-to expel ailments, cause bad health, draw blood, excorcise poison, create remedies


Tuesday
Varchic fishing up the infinite whale Leviathan:
- to give nourishment, bring the unknown to light, give warmth and comfort
Fall of the great ruler Veirin who was said to be directly related to Varchic:
- to sow disorder, cause conflict, combustion, war, death, new perspective


Wednesday
Mienin attained sainthood of those who are cast away due to redeeming herself after her exile:
-to reveal thruths, obscure facts, find shelter, return


Thursday
Varchic cast the remains of the infinte whale Leviathan back to the sea and laid down to rest:
- to lay dead to rest, push away, create favourable winds


Friday
Varchic laid down to rest:
- to lead towards peaceful resolution, incite vice, incline to luxury
Elias carried out his penance:
- to excorcise self, repent, suffer, perservere, judge


Saturday
Varchic was no longer present to guide his people:
- to let evil-doer walk free, not be noticed, cause abandon
Glein the Preacher set out to carry the word about Varchic and his children towards far lands:
- to incite courage, swiften travel, lighten step, shy away harm



Unlike the church of Varchic, the cult of the Deep rather seeks to summon vestiges of the infinite whale Leviathan or those parts of it that are reduced to finite forms in order to form contracts and negotiate pacts and thus have more specific times and rituals for invoking those aspects of Leviathan, with each governing over specific domains of the Deep and coming from different parts of the infinity that is Leviathan the great infinite whale.

So far this is all just a sketch for a different system of handling magic that borrows a bit from Maze Rats style of magic that has no actual descriptions for the spells and in which spells are formed by interpreting random words, but we shall see which way this ends up evolving or if I'll simply stick with this idea and just expand it further with some tales of saints for players to use pieces of as invocations for their clerical spells.
For clarity, what I'm thinking of with invoking spells out of the tales about saints is the spell being a prayer along the lines of "Please grant me the passage home, like Varchic once granted us passage out of the Pit and lead us to this stable land to strive and make him proud" when trying to cas a spell to find your way if you are lost.

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