Tales of Ytherra

In the end, there can be only one.

While working of Tales of Might & Glory, I found myself working in Ytherrean concepts to such an extent that there seems to me to be little sense separating them. Silverlands had already merged, after a fashion, with TMG, and now I find myself merging the latter with Ytherra as well. This was probably my unplanned intention all along.

This’ll mean a redesign and repurposing of the ongoing Wiki project, of course, but little of the content will need to be rewritten, aside from the rules stuff that’ll need rewiting anyway (as the rules themselves arre in flux.)

Work on the system is trundling along, driving in the direction of greater simplicity.

 

Progress Report

Work continues on the Ytherra Wiki, although access (long story) is hindering my progress.

Right now I’m writing a fairly substantial article on the city of Thal, which will be one of the centerpieces of the material on the Selurean Kingdoms. I think it’s a great place to set an urban campaign; much better than Dravá, which is much less freebooter-friendly. The article on Dravá is in incomplete early draft. A rather rough draft on Arál Draván already exists, and I continue to work on it.

The much-revised Arashálinu Enáthaga is now in a state of partial completion. That is to say that it’s chronologically complete: fully populated with names and dates. The fuller history of 179 Emperors over 38 centuries will not be complete any time soon, although the first twenty or so and a scattered handful from the rest of Dravánu history might be considered more or less done.

A similar chronology of the Selurean Kings (2947-3523) is also in the works, but it’s in a much sketchier state; aside from a brief period, all of the Kings descend from the same line, or from branches of that line, which actually makes it more difficult to develop.

The Zeresi Reckoning is now the default calendar for all Ytherra material. The Dravánu aren’t happy about it, but aside from articles dealing with the specifics of the different dating systems all dates will be provided in ZR. The current year remains 9118 ZR.

 

Misplaced Nostalgia

A year ago yesterday Gary Gygax departed this world. Though some partisans have attempted to do so over the years, it would be difficult to overstate his accomplishments within our hobby. On top of that, as I myself was fortunate to learn, he was a heck of a great guy. A lot of people who have never heard his name owe their hobbies to him – not just tabletop gamers, but computer game players as well, and people who read fantasy novels.

At the same time, there’s been a movement which began even before Gary’s death but which seems even more pronounced today to try to somehow take the very earliest set of RPG rules, brown box D&D or OD&D, and try to derive some measure of Gary’s (and Dave Arneson’s, I suppose, although Arneson seems less in the minds of gamers,) original intent, and build campaigns (theoretical ones, at least) therefrom.

As an intellectual exercise, I think this is valuable, because it cuts at the very reasons RPGs are fun in the first place. It’s one of a couple of alternate ways floating around right now of answering the same questions that what would become Forge-style RPG theory was developed to try to answer – and if you ask me, the world of RPG Theory desperately needs approaches other than the Forge Big Model.

But at the same time, it seems to me that some of the proponents of this historicist approach are succumbing to a mindset wherein the practice of RPGs (that is, actual play,) was somehow superior to that to later eras. This has gone far enough now that the pre-AD&D period is being referred to as a “Golden Age,” implicitly indicting play in later years as somehow lessened in value against that of the early years. This is, of course, utter nonsense, a never-never land impossible to construct without plastering over a whole host of issues and problems with nostalgia. You remember the good times you had with friends, not beating your head against those impenetrable rulebooks or the incessant arguments they generated.

To try to dissect OD&D rules to divine Gary’s intent is of limited value in understanding the history of RPGs as they developed through play – i. e. the way they actually developed. Gary knew that no two groups would play D&D exactly the same way, and he wasn’t sitting at your table back in 1976 explaining the game and how it was supposed to be run to you. You played it as best you knew, took what was fun and did more of that, maybe added some Ardruin or Judges’ Guild stuff on top of it, and gradually something like a mean playstyle emerged from the chaotic sea of different groups doing their own thing. Expectations were gradually established, and gradually evolved from the point where D&D was a dungeon-based wargame into something where the character you played was as important as the numbers on the sheet.

Especially in the pre-internet era, when communication between groups was accomplished largely through conventions or in magazine letter columns, sharing of ideas between different groups was far more sporadic. There were clubs, of course, but those were local or at best regional, and those who met more than sporadically were the exception rather than the rule.

The lesson here, and I think Gary would have recognized this, is that he might have been one of the people who set down the rules by which RPG were played, but that it was us that worked out the methods by which those rules were actually employed at the table. Gary set the broad paradigm, but we determined how that paradigm would work in practice.

AD&D, misorganized and baroque as it was, was a far more coherent example of an RPG than OD&D was, because by the time Gary wrote it, we had worked out exactly how the rules would be employed in practice. At the very least, we knew a whole lot more about it by 1977 than we did in 1974. My use of we here is intentional – Gary gave the rules to us, and we showed him the practical conventions by which those rules would be applied, at his own table, and by passed anecdote, at those of others. Once AD&D was complete it very quickly became the standard by which D&D was played. The people playing OD&D didn’t necessarily abandon it or switch to AD&D, but virtually everybody coming into the hobby after 1978 or 1979 – quickly the majority – saw D&D as the beginner’s version of the game and AD&D as the real thing. The “controversy surge,” when D&D grew by far the fastest, occurred well into the AD&D era.

Theoretical OD&D reconstructionism, while possibly interesting, seems to ignore the fact that the people doing it are seeing it through the lens of 30+ years of development within the hobby, a lens now tinted with the rosy hue of nostalgia. And again the question becomes whether play – you know, the thing you’re actually doing – was really better in the days when the rules were unintelligible (Ken St. Andre famously designed Tunnels & Trolls after recognizing the OD&D rules as gibberish.) Maybe you think it was, and if so, that’s totally fair, but why?

Because the rules were less structured? I have to call BS on that – there are a ton of unstructured RPGs released in the last decade that nobody is even playing, much less bothering to blog about. Some of them are so unstructured that they’re practically systemless, but there’s a whole spectrum running from the ultra-light to brain-crushers like D&D3.5. Because the experience was “purer”? If so, why are you trying to reconstruct that purity from the written rules, which were only one part (and possibly not the most important part) of the experience? RPGs are played by people, not by rules.

Gary was the father of our hobby, and we owe him a lot – and not just us. Maybe we didn’t recognize that before he died. Maybe the fact that his death was so widely reported (Forbes magazine ran a whole article on it,) clued us in to the impact on what gets cavalierly called “pop culture” by a guy we had always seen as one of us – part of our little niche hobby. But while Gary gave us the game, we – us and Gary together – built the hobby around it. It was a collaboration. That’s why trying to reconstruct “intent” by dissecting the text of OD&D is valueless – because those written rules were less than half of the picture. Even in the “Golden Age”.

 

The Visible Horizon

I’ve been getting rather a lot done behind the scenes, as it were; some work on Ytherra, some work on The Kingdoms of Seoland, some work on Silverlands and some work on A Long-Awaited Tale, the last of which has been effectively merged into an existing project called Tales of Might & Glory, which has been cooking in the pot for many years and which is now being rebuilt through the lens of what was once a couple of other projects.

See, part of my essential problem is that I have too many freaking projects. It’s no wonder I can’t seem to get a game going for anything but Ars Magica, which has been an ongoing project in its own right for some years now, to the point where I’m so prepared that I can run a new game with relatively little effort.

Some months ago, our groups started Mythic Europe, an Ars Magica Wiki, to organize and present the material which we’ve developed over the years, which we think would be valuable to anyone who wants to run Ars Magica, and as a place to host pages for our current campaign. Much of the content has come from me, to the point that I feel very comfortable working in Wikicode. So I got to thinking about replacing or supplementing this blog with something along the lines of a Wiki.

There are a couple of advantages to this; It allows me to keep things organized and to have a clear “primary” draft going – the one that’s posted at the time. It allows me to work modularly, on whatever it is I want to do at the time, without losing track of exactly where I am on other projects. And it’ll encourage me to pick a small number of projects as “main” projects and concentrate on those.

The Wiki concept as intended works to promote collaboration, which is not really a high priority at this stage of the game, although it will be desirable in the future. And there are some technical hurdles to overcome, and I’m not exactly Mr. Tech Expert. Exactly.

At any rate, I’ve decided to push forward with this new format, and a lot of work has gotten done on that, although the new site is not yet ready to be launched. I want to say, though, that this should happen within a month or so. Meanwhile I’ve been working on it and polishing it, developing policies for it, adapting existing content to the format, and writing new material. It’s a big job, and a lot yet remains to be done before I’m ready to unveil it.

But that’s not too far off. This blog will not go away – but it’ll probably metamorphose into more of a news and general RPG commentary space, rather than as a place to post actual Ytherra et al. material.

There are three primary projects the Wiki is going to focus on: Ytherra, of course, along with Tales of Might & Glory and Silverlands. The Kingdoms of Seoland remain within the scope of the overall effort as a loose, generic setting usable with TMG or Silverlands, as an alternative to Ytherra. But all of these are really parts of the same project: TMG is designed around Ytherra’s metaphysics, and Silverlands can be viewed as an RPG in its own right or as an Adjunct to TMG. The Kingdoms of Seoland will likely see some development down the road, but for now it remains as I originally envisioned it: a loose framework much simpler than Ytherra usable as a loose setting in its own right or as a tstbed for Silverlands.

 

Love Half Price Books

Over the weekend I spotted the first five original Dragonlance modules at Half Price Books, all in reasonable (not stellar, mind, but reasonable,) shape and apparently complete, for $4.95 each. I snapped them up. While I was never a tremendous fan of Dragonlance as a vehicle for actual gaming, I did enjoy the novels back in the day, and retain a certain fondness for the material.

Aside from that, I’m pretty much decided to start accumulating ADX&D 1st Edition stuff again. I purged my collection a few years ago and got rid of a near-complete run of the original modules, which pains me. This time the stuff will only be pried from my cold, dead fingers, but I’ve got a long way to go. I do have most of the hardcovers already, thankfully. I’m also picking up select AD&D2 and 3.0/3.5 stuff, but there I don’t feel the need to collect everything, which would be more than a little impractical.

 

Work in Progress: The Kingdoms of Seoland

Here’s a snapshot of the map of one of my current projects, the Kingdoms of Seoland. It’s not all that close to being done, as you can see from the empty infoboxes at the edges of the map and the somewhat terra incognita look of parts of the map. But it’s getting there.

The map is a small section of a world map generated in Fractal Terrains Pro, and exported into Campaign Cartographer 2 Pro and modified from there. I wanted it to evoke the flavor of the old Greyhawk and Known World maps, but look more naturalistic. I think that’s working out so far.

The scale is 12 miles to the hex, optimal for Fields of Blood should I go that route with it.

 

Defending the Thief, My Old School, and Crypto-Rolemaster

I understand and completely sympathize with the desire to emulate the old school playstyle. But I have to say that certain persons who share this prediliction are pushing the School-O-Meter back a little too far. Case in point is James Maliszewski’s disdain for the Thief class, which seems to me to be based mostly on the fact that it didn’t appear in the original D&D brown/white box rules, instead being added in one of the supplements.

First of all, I need to say that James’ blog is a great place to go for ideas and insight on old-school play, regardless of where exactly one wants to set the bar. But I don’t feel that older automatically equates to purer, or better in any meaningful sense. In fact, I think that the original D&D rules are a big mess, filled with contradictions and presented in a manner that makes the rules almost unintelligible to a modern audience. This is why I much prefer using something like Castles & Crusades to emulate that kind of playstyle, or, failing that, why I’d rather use D&D 3.5, despite that ruleset not neccessarily being a particularly good match.

A big part of this is, of course, my own personal value for ‘Old School.’ I started with the Moldvay boxed Basic Set but moved swiftly into AD&D, which was, from my experience, a common approach back in 1981-82. The Thief class was a prominent feature in both, and I have an additional fondness for it because one of my own first and formative experienced with D&D was with the solo module Blizzard Pass, in which one plays a Thief. I therefore have a big soft spot for the class.

But that’s beside the point – which is that for me ‘Old School’ means the days of Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and Descent Into the Depths of the Earth. By 1981 or so AD&D had become the default platform for play, and only a comparatively few players stuck with the older rudimentary form of the game. It helped that AD&D first edition stayed relatively stable from a rules standpoint for as long as it did, the only significant rules addenda being the relatively mild (by modern standards,) ones in Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures and the two Survival Guides. Even those mostly introduced changes in the form of new classes, magic items and spells, with fundamental mechanical changes being fairly light except in the new emphasis on Non-Weapon Proficencies, the implementation of which I considered halfassed even at the time.

There’s another variable at play in my case, however, which is that a great deal of my formative experience didn’t come from D&D, but from Rolemaster, which I owned in the 80s but which I didn’t play until the early 90s – but when I did play, I played it extensively and exclusively, for a number of years. Therefore, any attempt at emulating my old-school ideal means incorporating some of the aspects and/or flavor of Rolemaster.

The current default version of that game, the Rolemaster Standard System, is somewhat bloated in a similar way that D&D 3.0/3.5 was inflated from its previous editions; the rules are detailed enough to feel confining rather than liberating. And while a version of the older system is now available, RMSS addressed some of the issues I had with those rules, and the so-called Rolemaster Classic represents a step too far back, much like James’ dislike for the Thief class strikes me as a step too far in the direction of intentional archaism for archaism’s sake in the case of D&D. That step eliminates a lot of clutter that I don’t like, but it also eliminates some features that I do like and would prefer to retain.

Of course I could houserule together an amalgam of RMSS and the older rules, but I hate doing stuff like that – I would rather build from scratch, or at least from a well-understood and freely publishable base (i. e. and Open Source system,) since I could then share it freely, or even publish it. I’ve gone through the mental excercise more than once of taking the basics of d20 and shaping them into something Rolemaster-esque while clearing away a lot of D&D chaff. In principle this is easy to do, at least by the standards of RPG design.

One tenet I’d start with would be that there are classes and levels, but that the former would not completely block you from picking up any particular in-game ability. I think that both elements could easily be exciused from the d20 rules, and I’m disappointed that some efforts (notably Traveller d20,) chose not to do so. But for something like this, I’d keep them. The Rolemaster approach is to base everything on the skill system, and that’s what I’d do here. Spells, combat bonuses and the like would all be based on skill ranks.

Combat would be a blend of D&D and Rolemaster; it’d work basically like D&D 3.x, but there’d be no feats and you’d be able to elect to put some of your combat bonus into defense. Armor and protection would work just liike it does in D&D 3.x. And of course, you’d have to develop critical tables, although I’d leave out the attack tables and just have an array of damage types, with a single percentile critical damage table covering all of them, with maybe another one for exotic damage types such as those dealt out by magic.

I’d want to keep the Rolemaster convention of making rolls generally open-ended; I always found that this added a dynamism to combat that was lacking in games like D&D, whose battles appeared to have more tactical options enumerated in the rules but which never felt as alive to me. Magic is trickier, but I’d keep the general level of spell utility about what it is in D&D, but adding the Realms and pure/hybrid distinction of Rolemaster.

So there, mostly fully imagined but not actually designed, is a sort of Crypto-Rolemaster built on the bones of D&D. It’s something I’ve love to play some day. As for designing it… well, I’ll let you know when I make some progress, but don’t turn blue waiting for it.

 

Thoughts on The Kingdoms of Seoland

It occurs to me that the Kingdoms of Seoland would make a fine setting for D&D.

Now, that’s so self-evident that it sounds kind of dumb, given that it’s supposed to be an ‘old-school’ setting and all. But what I mean by it is that I’m not interested in D&D – at all. If I wanted an old-school game I have a number of alternatives but would likely settle on Castles & Crusades, which while very like D&D, is not D&D per se. I am not interested in playing or running D&D out of the box, or in making the kind of sweeping changes to it that would be needed to make me happy with it.

But there is one kind of D&D that I would consider playing – Birthright. Not Birthright exactly, either; that was a wonderful setting but the D&D rules of the time (AD&D 2nd Edition, a system I passionately hated,) were very inadequate for the style of game that it was shooting for, and it ended up being a weird synthesis of styles where the PCs were kings, rulers and archpriests that would go dungeon-crawling together. But try we did, back in the day, and we had a wonderful time with it, despite the many issues. I’d be happy to play that type of strategic-level game again, if I had a better rules foundation for doing it.

D&D 3.5 had just such a system available, in Fields of Blood from Eden Studios. It gives you mechanics for ruling and building fantasy kingdoms, and the interactions between them, diplomatic and otherwise. Around the time of its release, there were several D20 products from various publishers that tried to do similar things, but FoB is the best of the bunch, in my opinion.

But there’s one problem with it. It’s a pretty detailed set of systems, all tightly interlinked, for military operations, diplomacy and regional development. The scale is set up such that one 12-mile (I think I’m remembering that number correctly) is a single ‘province’, which you as the ruler can then go ahead and develop, pillage or whatever. Movement rates of troops are tied to the 12-mile province. A small kingdom might have two or three provinces, while a big one might have five to eight. Massive and vastly powerful states have 12-15. Each province adds significantly to the bookkeeping involved in running a state; nations of a few provinces are no problem, but actually running big empires at the table is likely to eat whole sessions, especially if the players actually talk about what they’re doing.

The problem should now be apparent, if you’re thinking about the numbers here. Medieval Wales, by this yardstick, is a vast and powerful empire. Late Medieval France, not the largest country in Europe at the time, is made up of thousands of FoB provinces, making it unplayable under those rules. It thus becomes very difficult to plug FoB into any existing setting, virtually all of which presuppose the existence of states which are of reasonable (or at least vaguely believable,) size by historical standards but totally unmanagable under the FoB rules. Nor does FoB supply a setting to use.

There are a couple of ways around this; setting up a single large kingdom wherein the players take the roles of Barons of the realm, ruling over smallish areas, rather than as the rulers of the realm. But FoB provides few mechanics for the interactions of internal political factions, which is what such a game would naturally center around. Nor can you just change the size of the provinces, because the movement systems are tied into them very tightly, and you’d have to retool the rules substantially to make it work. Rules design is not something I want to put effort into when envisioning potential D&D campaigns. This leaves me back at the starting point of not wanting to do anything with D&D proper.

But it happens that the map I am using for the Kingdoms of Seoland is one I’ve had around for a while. And it happens to be of a scale appropriate to a ‘world’ (which you should read as ‘campaign area’,) of 12 miles to the hex. It occurred to me just yesterday that this could be made to work with Fields of Blood, and that my overall picture of the place, of a decent-sized island containing several small kingdoms, as well as areas dominated by barbarians and humanoids, would complement it as well. A world designed with FoB in mind alleviates the scaling problem entirely.

This doesn’t really change the development of the Kingdoms at all, and running a game using Fields of Blood remains a hypothetical option. The notion of getting up to speed on the D&D (3.5, probably) rules holds no particular appeal. But there’s also nothing that says you can’t do old-school gaming under D&D 3.5. The strategic-play thing is definitely not old-school, but you could set up a campaign in phases, with a series of dungeon crawls in the early levels concurrent with building the PCs reputations as heroes, or at least competent folks who get things done. Such a campaign could then (around levels 5-6, I’m guessing,) move into a mission-oriented phase, where the PCs are working for some important personage or other, before moving into a final, political phase where the PCs are movers and shakers themselves. Run the way I’d prefer, this would let me dig into what is, after all, a fairly complicated rules system pretty gradually.

 

Megadungeons and Ytherra

One of the banner elements of old-school play is the ‘megadungeon’. Essentially, this is a dungeon massive enough that by itself it could serve as the setting for an entire campaign. It’s a common feature in old-school settings like Greyhawk, and even the Forgotten Realms, where Undermountain fills the post admirably. The outstanding Grognardia blog has me thinking on this subject a little bit.

I’m working on an old-school setting alongside Ytherra, called the Kingdoms of Seoland. This will be very thinly developed, as befits that kind of setting, essentially complete in a map and maybe 4 pages of gazetteer-style information and a list of suggested character names. And lots of dungeon sites. Verisimilitude is not a major priority, although I’m not a believer in the idea that it’s not important at all.

Now, Seoland has the traditional mix of old-school races that you’d expect. So along with the myriad Orc lairs and Undead-riddled ruined temples, there’s an abandoned Dwarven fortess called the Sparburg, inhabited first by the Dwarves, then by the Orcs, and currently by the Eleven, the chief lieutenants of some Lovecraftian Horror or other.

I don’t have a system for this yet (although I’m leaning toward using Castles & Crusades rather than ALAT or developing something specifically for it,) or a concrete plan to actually run it. It’s on the list of ’some day’ projects that I hope to get to.

Now, it occurs to me that a megadungeon serves a purpose even if it’s not going to be a primary arena of play – or even if the players will never set foot in the place – as an admirable source of legends and rumors. This got me to thinking about megadunegons on Ytherra, which is not at all an old-school setting, but which is very strong (I think) in color and history. So I ran down a short list of existing (i. e. with something written about them already,) sites that could serve in some kind of corresponding role.

The Antháve is a Dravánu fortress hewn into a massive chunk of glacially-deposited rock in the general vicinity of Dravá. It hasn’t yet been placed on the new map, although I have a fair idea where it’s going to be. It holds the Imperial Armories, is always manned by a full legion, and is honeycombed with tunnels housing weapons mundane and mighty. The fortress has never fallen, and in the War of the Circle of Ghámeron it was the last redoubt of the legendary Emperor Ánsesh I, when Dravá itself fell to a coalition of enemy nations.

Morú Váreneth is a major holy site of the faith of Deshéng, the Goddess of Death. There’s a major temple on the site, which is the destination of pilgrims from across the Imperium, and beyond. There’s also a labyrinthine series of underground levels, themselves among the most closely-held secrets of the Deshéngu, and at the bottom of these lies their deepest secret, one which would shake the foundations of both faith and Imperium were it revealed. Deep beneath the earth lives the Parliament in Gray.

There exists the remnant of an ancient installation atop Mount Gútha, in Arál Draván. The mountain is a climb formidable enough that only one man has reached the summit, and that tale has passed into legend. Such folktales speak of the place as a City of the Gods, now abandoned, but the learned priests of both Deshéng and Zerém know it to be a relic of a prehuman civilization. Who knows what may be found there?

The city of Thal, in the Selurean Kingdoms, was inhabited even in deep antiquity – possibly before the arrival of humanity on Ytherra. It was a stronghold of the Sorcerer-Kings called the Coercers, and was razed upon their demise, but it’s highly probable that extensive old warrens lie beneath the modern city, which is an independent state ruled by the Captains of Thal, a council of merchant princes. Sewer workers in Thal have an unusually high mortality rate…

Then there’s the so-called Tower of Jet in the Southern Ocean. It’s rather far off the beaten track from the explored world, but tales of it made their way as far north as Mánthezar and a famed Dravánu loremaster once tried to plumb its secrets. It was never built as an inhabitable structure, but rather as a locus of magical power by beings whose presence on Ytherra predates even the old races. The legends tell of unimaginable horrors that dwell within, monstrous things beyond mortal comprehension. And even the Gods – even the Five – won’t go near the place.

Most of these weren’t intended for dungeon-delving per se, but all could be employed in that capacity with only a light repurposing, if that. I don’t know that I would use them for that, but… Thal was intended as an adventuring hub in the first place; it’s a major trade port, a rival in that regard even to Dravá, and more open to foreigners from a hundred lands than any Dravánu city. The Selureans consider it more a city of outlanders than of their own culture, and there’s a modicum of truth in that. Although the catacombs beneath it weren’t envisioned as a ‘megadunegon’ exactly, they were intended as the primary venue for dungeon-crawling on Ytherra, if such a thing should be desired. So while I hadn’t though about the place that way, that’s really what it is.

 

Magic on Ytherra

There are two broad classifications of magic present on Ytherra, both of which utilize the ambient power of the essence, that force which pervades the world, and which is called Ilésh Asú in Draványa and Ihénza in Old Manthezárin. So-called “Low Magic” uses the power present in objects and symbols, or energy that can be easily coaxed from such. Practices such as alchemy and herbalism, the use of runes and augury are examples of Low Magic. “High Magic” is the direct manipulation of the essence.

This latter was chiefly a Manthezárin development, although its methodology has been widely adopted, even in Arál Draván, where practitioners utilize essentially identical methods, although there are many superficial differences. Early in the history of Arál Draván a distinct magical tradition developed, chiefly due to Dravánu feelings of cultural superiority, culminating in the development of a “dialect” of Archaic Draványa called Nashanáya, a complex artificial language invented with High Magical practice specifically in mind, as a counterpoint to the predominant use of Manthezárin by spellweavers across Suratha.

Today, these two traditions continue to co-exist. In Arál Draván, the so-called Asangáru Tradition is overwhelmingly dominant, and it holds a great deal of sway in Angháza, which lies within the Dravánu cultural sphere. Even there, however, it contends with the Manthezárin Tradition, which is dominant everywhere else. This is true even in Selurean lands, in which a third tradition is being developed in the Gray College. This approach is fundamentally different from the older methods, regarding the essence as a single unified force rather than six different varieties of energy. Some preliminary breakthroughs have already been made.

The essence is comprised of six different types of energy, each of which corresponds to one of the six Empyreal Realms. These “flavors” of power are called Correspondences; each affects different parts or components of the physical and immaterial worlds. In all of its forms, the essence can be manipulated; indirectly as by the process of alchemy, or directly by application of both the intellect and the will, a practice requiring long study and careful instruction, and also a particular gift or talent. Those so gifted, when they are identified at an early age, can be trained to mastery of this ability.

The Asangáru hold that each individual gift is attuned to one of the types of power, more or less exclusively, with talent in the others regarded as rudimentary or residual. Practitioners of that tradition thus focus training in one of the six Asangáru paths, each a subgroup within the Asangáru Concord and each corresponding to an Empyreal Realm and its associated Correspondence, and trained solely in that path, with a few legendary spellweavers mastering multiple paths. In the Manthezárin Tradition, while it is realized that most individuals are more gifted in one Correspondence than in the others, value is seen in mastering as wide an array of magics as one is capable of. Magi of the Manthezáin tradition tend thus to be less specialized than their Asangáru counterparts.

A comparatively young tradition has arisen in the Selurean Kingdoms, born only two centuries ago with the establishment of the Gray College near Enthierre. Adherents to this philosophy hold that magical energies exist in only one form, which while seen as differing by Magi of older traditions, are fundamentally the same. This approach has led to some breakthroughs long considered impossible by Asangáru and Manthezárin Magi, combinations of the power of the multiple realms rather than effects utilizing only one. The Selurean Tradition is still young, and its Magi have not yet approached the levels of power seen in Magi of the elder traditions; many of its techniques, while revolutionary to the student of the schools of magical thought, are of a lesser magnitude than long-perfected techniques. The manipulation of the weather is an exceptional case; this was thought impossible for centuries except in very limited scenarios, but Selurean Magi have managed to create spectacular and potent effects in the last three decades. The Gray College guards these arts carefully, but it is not clear that such feats are even possible in the older Traditions.

Too, in the Selurean Tradition the talent for High Magical practice is not seen as an absolute; any sentient being is in principle capable of the practice of High Magic according to this doctrine, at least on a rudimentary level, and presuming that the individual has sufficient gifts of determination, willpower and intellect, such that they are capable of grasping the essentials of the techniques involved.

There is another source of esoteric power which some choose to pursue; the aid of powerful entities of various origins. The Gods are the most obvious of these, and their powers are often invoked, not only by priests but by common people. As a rule, divine blessings are subtle, unlike the savage power wielded by Magi, but it can be effective nonetheless. The Gods and their servants are a part of Ytherra, even dwelling as they do in the Empyreal Realms; other entities, many of them malign or alien in nature, can be contacted in the Well of Worlds, a cluster of adjacent dimensions separated from Ytherra by stronger barriers than divides it from the Empyreal Realms.

The structure of the Well of Worlds is largely conjectural, but it seems to be arranged in a series of tiers or layers; some layers are comparatively easy to contact, but the beings dwelling therein are of roughly the same order as mankind (or perhaps of the old races,) and concern themselves chiefly with their own inscrutable agendas. Entities from the more distant layers are progressively more powerful, more concerned with Ytherrean events, and more dangerous. Such beings are collectively called Azakárin, demons, and the practice of contacting and dealing with them is called diabolism. Not all of those from the nearer layers of the Well of Worlds are inimical in principle, but they have outlooks and ethical codes different enough from mankind’s to make them treacherous to exhort aid from.

Entities from the Deeper Void are inimical indeed, and greatly desirous of influence on Ytherra, for reasons which are not fully understood by mortal practitioners. Bargaining with such entities is extraordinarily hazardous, as they consider mortals to be lesser beings on the order of gnats, and do not hesitate to subvert or even devour such arrogant mortals who anger them, and seem not to have any semblance of an ethical or honor code as such are thought of by Ytherreans. Such practices are proscribed almost everywhere on Ytherra, though exceptions exist.