Scribal magic - A take on classless magic system

EDIT: I have now compiled this into a quickstart ruleset that has been developed a bit further than is presented here, along with slowly thinking of adding more detailed rules to that.
Available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AvgZfMsPPJEluZM9ascuGShb0c21i4U3MjKvhh63W-k/edit?usp=sharing

In an earlier post I talked about having been inspired to go through actual grimoires and spellbooks to find some less gamified spells. Now, you should also know that my attention span is close to that of a goldfish with me bouncing between ideas and staying and exploring each of them pretty much only for as long as I can keep myself focused on them and do little else.
Thus, I found another really interesting magic system in a cute little manga called Witch Hat Atelier, in which all magic is drawn by making arrangements of glyphs and other shapes that focus and shape where the magic goes and I of course instantly thought "Yeah, this would have no spell levels and could just have the players drawing the symbols and describing a bit what they wish to achieve and then letting the GM interpret the drawing of magic to see what happens". The system also means that everyone can do magic as long as they have the correct tools and knowledge of glyphs. There were some other intricacies involved with the system presented in the manga, like having the magic happen as soon as you complete the drawing and very clever exploitations of that fact that I also would just love to see players innovating on.
I was very excited to take the idea and mess around with it to try and figure how I could fit it into a game.

And that's how we get to yet another blogpost of me sharing completely un-tested ideas for semi-modular system that one would be able to just tack on their system of choice either as additional school of magic or by swapping out the magic system for the one proposed here.

From Illustrations of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Artist: Edmund J. Sullivan

Scribing magic

Pure academical magic that is invoked by writing it down and giving it conditions under which it should activate. Scribal magic does not perform miracles and thus it cannot create something out of nothing. Everything you do with your magic takes from something to produce the desired effects and the magic is the art of taking those pre-existing elements and prescirbing a condition for them under which they should morph and change to execute the spell's effect.

To perform magic through writing, one only requires special parchment made for the sole purpose of being used in scribal magic and little else. Ink for writing the spell matters little in terms of being able to write magic, although the more pure the ink the more clauses one might be able to include in their spells without them becoming undone.
Some highly learned individuals also speak of glyphs and runes, which act as shorthands for words or even entire clauses which can end up saving a lot of space on the parchement as well as drastically shorten the time required to write the spell, but such shorthands also contain a danger. When encountering a rune or glyph that one does not know the meaning of, it can be extremely dangerous to include it in your spell as withut understanding the rune it is impossible to know what it's used as a shorthand for esecially since runes and sigils can even be shorthands for triggering conditions.

The scribing of magic itself is a very simple task yet somewhat slow to do reactively to situations that may arise and for that reason scribal magic users often carry collections of their written spells with them with very specific triggering conditions written into their magic. That way they can appear to be casting magic with simple gestures as long as they are in posession of the written magic, but also have to be cautios about accidentally triggering the execution of their spells through casual interactions.

Here's a rundown of how writing down magic works.

• First, you must declare or address the source that will carry out your magic, which must be something that already exists around you. This can be something as simple as earth or light, or more specific like moisture in the air or the leaves of nearby trees, as long as there are any such things nearby.
• Secondly, you set a condition under which the spell should execute. This can be just about anything from "when I point I hand forwards" to "at every dawn".
• Thirdly, you can assign changes to the source of your magic. For example, if your spell adresses water you could assing it a change of "condense into ice", "vaporise into mist" or even "form into a globe".
• Lastly, you must declare some sort of target for your magic. This again can range from "the person standing in front of me", "my immediate surroundings" to even "Jack, that bastard who still owes me money".

Here is the template that all scribal magic uses as it's base:

<Adress the source of the core function>

<Declare conditions>

<Assign any changes to the source>

<Declare target(s) for output>

Essentially what you're doing is taking an element of your surrounding and re-programming reality. You can affect a wide range of things but you cannot create something out of nothing as all magic must have a source to execute their function with. This is why scribal magic is also referred to as academical magic.

Jewish Scribe by Jozef Israels

TL;DR

• Purely written magic
• Activates when written condition is fulfilled
• If you carry around written magic, you are considered the caster by the triggers
• Spells often written in advance and carried around as collections, from which one triggers suitable spells as they see necessary
• Requires special parchement
• Purer inks can enable writing of more elaborate spells
• Runes and glyphs exist as shorthands for words, sentences and maybe even full spells
• Runes and glyphs can be dangerous if you don't know what they are a shorthand for
• Sribal magic users need to be careful if they carry around spells during their daily life as to not accidentally trigger them
• Essentially re-programming reality. Assign something in your surroundings as source of spell and manipulate it to do weird things

Afterword

Like I mentioned earlier, this is yet anther entry to the pile of completely un-tested ideas and as such there likely are lots of clever ways to completely break this system, which might not even be a bad thing as I really wanted this to be a system where creating offensive magic would be very dangerous and if you wrote such a spell you would probably want to destroy it after using it, which would lead to spells being created cautiously and used mostly to solve problems rather than fight people.

With this kind of system, just about everyone should be able to use magic, but it would also place limitations on them at the same time.
Want to have a huge repertuare of spells? Well now magic-users actually need to carry their spells around and prepare them beforehand as well as dedicate resources to either finding the specific tools for writing magic or making them themself.
Combined with my idea for clerical miracles through praying which can be found here, I think these would make for atleast a decent base for classless way to do both religious and academical magic, which I think is a good start if I wish to at some point use these for a classless system. We shall see if I ever get that far, but it's something that could prove interesting to try and do.