MAGIC AS CONTROL

If the magical arts represent a field defined by difficult compromise and negotiation between humanity and supernatural powers, it’s just a matter of time before someone tries to overstep these “limitations” and gain full control over these forces.

In natural fantasy worlds, magic is an allegory of life itself: the insidious desire to reject or eliminate its most complex and mysterious aspects – so that it operates “on a human scale”, following cold, predictable and standardized rules – sparked some of the most terrible atrocities during ancient times.

Disciplines Focused on Control

Even in this case, some character options lend themselves more to this kind of magic, unconcerned with the balance of the ecosystem, focused on reaching a result without any regard for the consequences:

• Entropism. A complex discipline with unlimited potential, capable of manipulating time and space, Entropism is perfect as the legacy of a distant epoch, when extremely advanced civilizations made reckless mistakes for which the world is still paying the price. More often than not, the protagonists that wield Entropism are androids or experimental beings, awoken after millennia of stasis. It’s a kind of magic dramatically out of place, a relic of a different time that brings with it a warning about a calamity that might strike the world again.
• Ritualism. Precisely because of its relatively basic and approachable nature, this discipline is often assimilated with an academic or rationalist mindset, divorced from the spiritual implications and, in the end, reduced to a mere tool. If used in conjunction with technological sciences it can reactivate ancient machinery to take full control over the forces of nature or be used to unleash indiscriminate preemptive destruction against any threat, be it real or perceived.
• Classes. It might be interesting to employ Classes such as Tinkerer, Merchant (see page 158), Loremaster and Symbolist (see High Fantasy Atlas, page 146) to create a character with a cold, utilitarian view of magic at first – over the course of the campaign they will develop a more complex and nuanced perspective, recognizing and confronting the idea that magic is a living force that they have to coexist with.

Conclusionary Concepts

Finally, we have to spend a few words on the most common variations of these concepts: deicide and fear of death.