Of Spellcraft
11th Edition
Full Title: “Colham's Treatise on Spellcraft, Revised and Enlarged.”
For the complete prefare, read the Foreword.
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Fundamentals
lingua_mundi, at its core, encompasses the creation of enchantments based on the fundamental language of the World, captured through Glyphs. This chapter will make clear certain key concepts and considerations for students of lingua_mundi.
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Foreword
This revised edition of Colhams’ great treatise seeks to provide the student of the arcane arts with the necessary understanding to grasp the basics of the Art that is denominated lingua_mundi in the Modern Age. The Editor has taken the liberty to rearrange the content and include additional sections so as to make this work more accessible to the student of general magecraft.
While lingua_mundi may straddle the line between Magery and Artifice, it still promises immense value to the Mage. lingua_mundi is endowed with a functionality much more accessible to the general public. While Magery requires skill on part of the practitioner, the artifacts created by adherents of lingua_mundi are crucial for the dissemination of the Arcane among the general population.
The Editor thus urges students to strive to acquire at least basic knowledge of the Art treated in this text, in light of its important role in the development of the wider social environment surrounding the Arcane Arts in modern times.
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On Mana
While lingua_mundiing creates enchantments with stable effects, it is not a field of pure Artifice. Enchantments assembled from glyphs still rely on the practitioner’s accumulated mana. While all living creatures are, to some extent, capable of absorbing mana, the capacity of this reservoir determines the magics that practitioners are able to execute.
While mana capacity is largely determined at birth, it is known that certain decoctions imbued with pure mana can enhance this capacity, albeit to a limited extent. Furthermore, and for the benefit on non-collegiate students, breaking through the First Threshold does much to increase the capacity of storage and accumulation of practitioners’ reservoirs.
Lesser Mana Decoction
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On Casting Items
lingua_mundied enchantments must be applied to specialised items in order to function. It thus becomes clear that the item, with its inscribed enchantment, is the element that gives form to the practitioners’ mana. Unlike Magecraft, which requires Mages to shape their mana themselves, lingua_mundi accommodates practitioners inexperienced in the shaping of mana.
Of course, this is all dependent on the correct arrangement of the enchantment’s Glyphs, as well as the specific arcane qualities of the casting item. Hence, it becomes important to consider the materials and components of casting items, which provide their properties and limitations.
For further exploration on this topic, please refer to the section On Casting Items.
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On Spellforms
Spellforms refer to the specific particular pertaining to an enchantment. Spellforms are particular in the sense that each spellform possesses its own accidents. The two primary accidents of a spellform are as follows: the capsum, a container of species described in certain texts as the “stack”, and the cursorium, a queue of instructions provenient from the nchantment’s Glyphs.$
For further exploration on this topic, please refer to the section Concepts in Computation.
Casting Spellforms
When casting spellforms, it is important to take into account the time needed to cast the spell, as well as the time needed for the casting item to cool down. These two values are subject to the number of glyphs used in the enchantment, and the total complexity of these.Note, this does not take into account the complexity and number of the glyphs actually executed, rather the total values based on glyphs inscribed on the slate. Even if loops cause hundreds of glyphs to be executed, if only ten glyphs are inscribed on the slate, then only those ten glyphs will be considered.
Refer to the next page for specific formulae.
Staff Formulae
Let base casting time be $Ct$, base cooldown time be $Cd$, total complexity be $k$ and glyph count be $n$.
$Ct = 7.5 \cdot (k - 3)^{0.7} \cdot n^{0.3}$
$Cd = 5 \cdot k^{0.4} \cdot n^{0.6}$
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On Glyphs
Glyphs are a representation of the fundamental language of the World. If properly arranged, practitioners may create enchantments to elicit almost any effect imaginable, provided their casting instrument and mana reservoir can handle it. Each glyph can be related to a specific and stable action; thus, glyphs can always be relied upon to act in the same manner.
Glyphs come in two flavours, computation and effect. Computational Glyphs are glyphs that do not affect the environment, only the capsum and the species within. Meanwhile Effect Glyphs are those that interact with the capsum while also having a real effect in the world.
Beyond this, glyphs can be sorted into schools, which are as follows: Fire, Ice, Water, Lightning, Conjuration and Computation.
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Creating Enchantments
In order to create enchantments, glyphs must be properly arranged so as to feed the correct instructions, in the correct order, to spellforms’ cursoria. For this purpose, gold slates, receptive to arcane energies, are inscribed in devices commonly called drafting tables.
From these glyph-bearing slates, instructions are aggregated into the cursorium in the order they are encountered, moving left to right along each line before descending to the next line, once again scrying from left to right. Beyond the search order imposed by the aggregation process, practitioners are free to format their glyphs as they consider best.
Drafting tables are truly a marvel of the Modern Age. Slates may be inserted via ‘right-click’, and extracted via ‘shift-right-click’. Within the drafting table, practitioners may find a pallet from which to draw glyphs from on the left hand side, and their gold slate, upon which they will inscribe glyphs on the right hand side.
Glyphs may be dragged from the pallet or the slate, creating a copy at the targeted position. If glyphs on the slate are right-clicked or dragged off the drafting panel, they are deleted. Shift-clicking toggles selection, allowing glyphs to be moved rather than copied.
Due to the many glyphs that have been discovered since the dawn of the Modern Age, most drafting tables are equipped with filtering mechanisms which allow for users to limit the scope of their pallet to glyphs of a certain type.
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On Species
Species is a general term used to describe the references spells keep to different objects. Common species are numbers, vectors, entities, block positions, booleans and lists.
Other, more specific species include quotations, strings, quaternions, frames, planes and results.
For more detailed discussion on this topic, refer to the section Specifics in Computation.
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On Errors
Practitioners in lingua_mundi are mandated to strive to achieve perfection in their enchantments as a matter of principle, but also of public safety. Thus, it is necessary to discuss the consequences errors in their enchantments may lead to.
Type Mismatch: Occurs when an instruction in the cursorium expects a species of one type, but receives one of a different type. Causes strong nausea.
Null input: Occurs when the capsum receives a null species. Causes temporary blindness.
Empty Capsum: Occurs when an instruction tries to retrieve a species from the capsum, but finds the latter to be empty. Causes the practitioner to drop their entire inventory.
Hubris: Occurs when an instruction consumes more mana than could be held by the caster’s reservoir. Deals 10 damage to the caster.
Impotency: Occurs when an instruction finds the mana currently in the caster’s reservoir to be insufficient for its requirements. Abruptly stops the spell.
Computation Overflow: Occurs when the number of instructions processed by a spellform exceeds the casting item’s capacity to process them. Deals 8 damage to the caster and damages the casting item. Also causes purple smoke.
Capacity Overflow: Occurs when the mana expended by a spellform exceeds the casting item’s capacity to control it. Deals 8 damage to the caster and damages the casting item. Also causes blue smoke.
Logic Errors: Stem from errors encountered in certain glyphs, usually specific to a certain glyph (eg. dividing by 0). Deals 8 damage to the caster and damages the casting item. Also causes green smoke.
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On Materials
Although Practitioners in lingua_mundi need not be as familiar with the material sciences as some students of other disciplines are, there are some substances with which they are expected to handle proficiently
Mana Stones are the impure form of the Mana Gems found deep underground. They are uncommonly found in the upper strata of the underground.
These stones can be refined into a powder if heated in a furnace. In this form, the refined stone becomes a powder of fairly pure crystallised mana, useful in a series of applications.
Infused Iron has a number of useful properties as a mana-infused metal. Of course, it can also be shaped in a number of ways.
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Concepts in Computation
Computation is the foundation of all enchantments. It is the mechanism through which a practitioner may define the effects of a spell. At its base level, computation is the aspect of lingua_mundi through which species are manipulated and used in spells. The following chapters will each focus on a facet of this functionality.
On the Cursorium
The cursorium is a list of instructions held by each spellform, aggregated from a slate’s inscribed glyphs. These instructions are executed according to the order of aggregation, that is, starting from the top-left and moving rightward, wrapping downwards at the end of each line.
These instructions run instantaneously, unless a delay glyph is used. The cursorium can also be added to through operations involving quotations.
For further detail please refer to the entry On Quotations, in the section Specifics of Computation.
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On the Capsum
The capsum is a container of species held by each spellform, sometimes denoted as a stack. The capsum stores species in the order in which they are inserted, keeping a ‘head’ corresponding to the last species inserted into the capsum. This is important as all reading and writing operates on the head.
As such, practitioners may think of the capsum as a deck of cards, where spells may stack cards up, but can only interact with the very top of the deck. Much of the correct functioning of spellforms depends on practitioners arranging for the order of species in the capsum to provide the correct species for each instruction in the cursorium.
All modifications to that capsum are driven by the demands of instructions, which may execute either ‘push’ or ‘pop’ operations. Species may be stored through ‘pushing’, where a pushed species is made into the head of the capsum. Conversely, species may be retrieved by ‘popping’, where the head of the capsum is removed and fed into the instruction that popped it.
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On Computation Glyphs
Computation glyphs are those which only interact with the capsum and its species. They may be simple, popping to number species, adding them together, and returning the output to the stack. They may also be more complex, reordering the species on the capsum, or creating a list species based on the species already stored in the stack.
These glyphs exist in a diverse variety, for more detailed discussion of this topic refer to the section Specifics in Computation.
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On Effect Glyphs
Effect glyphs are those which interact with both the capsum and reality. They do pop species from the capsum, but use these to define real world effects. An example would be a Firebolt, which pops a number species to define its potency and two vector species to define its direction and origin. Many such glyphs also push species onto the capsum.
In most cases, effect spells return a species denominated as a ‘result’, a container capable of holding both an entity and a vector species. This way, effect glyphs such as Firebolt are able to provide practitioners with access to both the impact position and any entity that was potentially impacted by the spell. Typically, it is these glyphs that consume mana, as computations tend to be trivial in cost.
On the Magazine
For spells able to hit multiple times, there is a container auxiliary to the capsum, called the magazine. The magazine serves as a kind of buffer for results, preventing them from clogging the capsum and releasing them on demand. It is important to note that the magazine does not hold the very first result generated by a spell, thus having no relevance on spellforms that only include one impact.
For further detailed discussion on this topic, refer to the Tagging entry in the section Specifics in Computation.
For further discussion on the topic of effect glyphs in general, refer to the section Specifics in Effects.
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Specifics in Computation
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Concepts in Computation
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On Casting Items
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Tutorials
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