Shades of Grey: Mages

Mages are ordinary, mundane muggles who've had their eyes opened to the rest of the world. Often times it happens because they almost die--or actually die--and Awaken to the abilities they have. While most people see their lives flash before their eyes, Mages experience a sort of spiritual journey where they look deep into themselves and find the ability to do what they need to do.

In addition to not dying when killed, Mages are gifted with magic. They can call forth spirits and summon up fire and all that jazz. When they awaken they are usually (and often quickly) found by the Mages' Association and they are either learned in the ways of magic (generally made to understand the rules of magic and then dumped on an apprenticeship). Some find that their modest or miniscule talents aren't worth it, and they don't bother practicing the Ars Arcana. They see it as too difficult to become skilled, too dangerous. Others do, and are the ones who go on to become Mages.

Their greatest task is to make a Pact with a Phantom and protect society at large.

I'll deal with the laws of magic later. For now, the Mage's relationship with Phantoms.

Mages are human beings who can tap into spiritual energy, the same energy that powers and makes up spirits. They can use their willpower and emotions to manipulate that energy, allowing them to perform magic. Now, there are many different forms of magic, from tracking to just plain old shooting fireballs, but one of the most important things that mages do is making a Pact with a Phantom.

The Pact isn't really so much an agreement as a binding process. The Mage enables themselves to channel mana into their Phantom, allowing the Phantom to use more power. They also embody the Phantom. Embodiment will be covered later as well, but the short version is that they give the Phantom a physical form.

Together, the mage and the phantom form a fighting team. Of course, it's perfectly possible for them to talk out any differences that they have. Possible, but not likely. The life of a mage is never a simple one, and there's a reason most of them live in seclusion.

While the Minister and Magister are likely in their partnership to take on any number of supernatural baddies to keep the place safe, the original Pacts were formed to deal with Shades. More on those later as well. The short story: Evil spirits.

That's about it for now. Later I'll get into how magic works, why bad magic is bad, and of course Phantoms and Shades.

Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey is a sort of setting/game that I've been working on with the help of my gaming group. The basic premise is taken from the Fate/Stay Night canon: Magical powered Masters working with exceptionally powerful Spirits. There isn't a Grail War or anything to pit the characters against each other, and there are no (as of yet) 'Classes' like Rider and Saber and Berserker. There's also a bit of Negima, in the form of "Pact Partners", and because of the unwanted connotations of Master and Servant, I've decided to take the terms Magister/Magistra Magi and Minister/Ministra Magi from Negima (which mean Master Magi and Servant Magi, but details details). Surprising to me, there's also quite a bit of Bleach. It was unintended, but it really is a surprisingly good feel for the game. People going around in the dead of night slaying giant, out of control ghosts.

Each player plays one half of the Pact Partners, either the Magister or the Minister, the Magister being a Mage and the Minister being a Phantom. The two groups need each other, and have a symbiotic relationship, working together to fight against Shades (corrupted spirits), and other nasties out there. Since each player is playing either a Mage or a Phantom, the idea is that there will be two player teams working together. That would generally mean two or three such Pact groups, depending on the amount of players.


The next few posts will deal with a bit of the fluff involved in the game.

Beginnings

Well, once more into the unknown.

I plan to use this blog for a few reasons, so let's call this my mission statement.
First, I plan to use this as a notebook, a place to store the notes I make for the worldbuilding and for my stories. I've got quite a bit of information on the world, which I call Vindae, and I have a habit of scattering it about multiple notebooks. And then losing them. There's also Ashcroft, the modern horror setting (which has it's own barely updated wiki at http://www.wikidot.ashcroft.com).

Second, I plan to use it for planning and indulging my relatively new hobby of roleplaying games. In fact, one of the first things I plan to do is make notes for a game involving spirits and magic users fighting together. Beyond that, I could always do other game related things, such as making characters. Which brings me to the last thing I have planned for the near future.

A character blog. After every session that I play in, I'll make a blog entry from that character's perspective (even if the character wouldn't be able to use a computer). An interesting idea, if I do say so myself. Might be a good means of writing practice.

And of course there's other things, such as working in 3ds Max and all the other things I do for classes.

Well, to anyone who cares to read, hope you enjoy.