Magic Systems
Overview¶
Magic in Tir Hathar is closer to Krynn than Eberron in terms of restriction and structure, while remaining pervasive enough to support the magitech economy. Access is limited by school affiliation, bloodline, or divine domain — but within those limits, practitioners gain meaningful bonuses that make specialization genuinely powerful.
Three magical traditions exist: Arcane (school-based), Primal (Elven/druidic), and Divine (priestly, domain-locked).
Magical terminology across all nations derives from Scholar Nation language — Arabic-influenced naming conventions, because the Scholar Nation codified magical theory and wrote the textbooks everyone else learned from. A Crimson battle-mage born in the Imperium uses Scholar Nation terminology because that's what the academy taught, the same way Western science uses Latin and Greek regardless of the practitioner's nationality.
Arcane Magic — The School System¶
Three major traditions answer to the three moons: Crimson, Mirage, and Primal. Crimson and Mirage are formal academies with physical locations, hierarchies, and political power. Primal is the Elven tradition, run through a few informal schools rather than academies (see Primal Magic below). Beneath them sit the minor constellation-schools, which exist as traditions rather than institutions, and one forbidden school.
How Schools Work¶
Wizards join a school, train within it, and gain access to every spell their school has catalogued — which after centuries of operation is nearly everything within that domain. Wizards receive bonus spell slots when casting within their school's domain, making them significantly more productive than generalists on their home turf. Schools also provide unique Focus spells unavailable outside the tradition.
Sorcerers are a partial school with no academy. Their magic is innate, drawn from Sigil heritage rather than studied discipline — see Sorcerer Bloodlines below. They pull from across school lines, matched to their bloodline's Sigil, occasionally doing something no school wizard can. They know few spells and gain them slowly, but cast as many per day as a full Mage. Each Sorcerer's spells and Arts are worked out by player and GM together — see Spells and Arts, Sorcerer. The academies view them with mild suspicion.
Sorcerers are not weaker than wizards — they're different in ways that matter situationally. A sorcerer's flexibility occasionally produces combinations no school wizard can replicate. But on their home turf, a school wizard is significantly more powerful.
Gun Mages draw from existing schools — primarily Crimson and the General list — rather than constituting their own school. They are new enough that no formal school exists; they function more like sorcerers in working outside formal school structure while using recognized magic in a novel way.
The Schools as Diminished Institutions¶
The schools that exist today are shadows of what they were before the Long War. They survived — some barely — with incomplete catalogues, fragmentary spell formulae, and gaps in theoretical understanding that the 54 years since the Treaty of Tallas haven't fully filled. The moon-schools in particular were military institutions during the war, which meant they were targets. The Crimson school lost more than it admits. The Mirage school's pre-war catalogue is believed to have been twice its current size.
Practitioners work from what survived. Most don't know what they're missing. The oldest Elves probably do.
How the schools teach. Old-fashioned, everywhere. There is no scientific method and no systematic experiment. The schools teach the way classical Greece did: master and pupil, dialogue and disputation, memorization of authoritative texts, commentary on the ancients, and reasoning from first principles. A new idea gets argued, not tested. Since the god of Teachers and Sages died, nobody has found better ways — and divination, the one shortcut to an answer, is slow.
Schools and Sigils¶
The schools feel coherent alongside the House Sigils rather than parallel and unrelated. The schools study and systematize what the Sigils do naturally. The Artisan Sigil grants innate crafting gifts — the Forge school is what happens when academics spent centuries trying to understand and replicate those gifts without the bloodline. The schools are historically derivative of the Sigils. The Sigil houses predate the academies.
Some Sigils map naturally to more than one school. That overlap is intentional.
The Three Moons¶
Tir Hathar has three moons, and each presides over one of the three great moon traditions. Each has a common name or two, and the Imperium uses its own Latinate one.
Zarshki — The Crimson Moon¶
Unmistakably crimson — zarshki is Persian for the color. It is large but dim, a big red disc that sheds relatively little light. Many call it the Blood Moon, and in the Imperium it is sometimes called Sanguinari. It is the patron of the Crimson school.
Sarab — The Mirage Moon¶
Sarab has no consistent color. It is brighter than the other two and looks more like a gas or a liquid than a stone, and its apparent distance shifts, so that it seems to come closer and draw away with the season or the phase. Sarab is Arabic for "mirage." It is called the Mirror or the Eye, and in the Imperium it is often Illussitari. It is the patron of the Mirage school.
Calenamendil — The Primal Moon¶
Calenamendil has a green sheen, marked with a few streaks of red, blue, and white that run horizontally across the disc like tiger stripes. Most people call it Stripe, and in the Imperium it is often Primari. The name is Elvish (Sindarin) for "Green Priest." It is the patron of Primal magic, the Elven tradition, which has no academies of the Crimson or Mirage kind.
The Moons and the Kindred¶
The Kindred hold that Theiane keeps all three moons, but Myreans say each is lent to one of her children: Zarshki to Apollo, Sarab to Hecate, and Calenamendil to Poseidon. See The Kindred.
The Three Moon Traditions¶
Crimson and Mirage are formal academies with physical locations, established hierarchies, ranks, and significant political influence. They have been operating for centuries and their spell catalogues are extensive. The third moon tradition, Primal, works differently; see Primal Magic, below.
Crimson¶
Battle magic, evocation, battlefield control
The school most in demand by armies and most politically entangled with military command. Their "combat engineer" identity is more accurate than "battle mage" — doctrine, logistics, and institutional structure matter as much as individual power. Crimson practitioners don't just throw fireballs; they manage artillery lines, fortify positions, and coordinate magical support across a battlefield. Cannons and mortars serve as foci for their larger workings.
Wall spells, area denial, and battlefield shaping are as central to the Crimson curriculum as direct damage. A Crimson mage who only knows how to blow things up is considered half-educated.
Political footprint: Deep institutional relationships with the Imperium's military. Every nation wants Crimson-trained practitioners; every nation is slightly afraid of what a fully committed Crimson corps looks like.
Mirage¶
Illusion, phantasm, misdirection
Illusion has enough breadth to sustain a full moon-school without borrowing from other traditions. Mirage covers both large-scale illusions affecting multiple targets and phantasms affecting a single mind — the latter functioning similarly to enchantments in effect while remaining purely illusory in nature. A Mirage practitioner doesn't change how you feel; they change what you perceive, and the results are often indistinguishable.
Political footprint: Valued by intelligence services, diplomats, and theater commanders. Because Mirage covers both what you perceive and what you decide, the line between the two is one that governments prefer to keep blurry.
The Minor Constellation Traditions¶
Minor schools exist as traditions rather than institutions — a lineage of masters and apprentices, a secretive lodge, a wandering order. Smaller, less politically organized, more varied in character.
Haras¶
Protective magic
A minor school with influence disproportionate to its size. Haras teaches wards, barriers, counterspells, and magical preservation. Every government wants Haras practitioners protecting their important people and buildings, which gives the school political leverage it has no right to have based on raw power alone.
Forge¶
Mechanik arts, artifice, magitech theory
Where the theoretical underpinning of magitech items is developed and refined. The Forge school is what happens when academics spent centuries trying to understand and replicate what the Artisan Sigil does naturally. Economically as powerful as any moon-school despite minor status — they understand how the magitech economy actually works at a fundamental level. Strong relationship with the House of Artisan.
The Mechanik trade draws from Forge school theory the way a carpenter draws from geometry — you don't need to have studied it formally to use it, but the ones who did are better at it.
Extli¶
Blood-tempered warriors: fighters who use magic to strengthen themselves
Extli (ESH-tlee) has no spells, only Arts. Its practitioners are warriors first. They wear armor, carry weapons, and stand in the line, and their magic makes their own bodies stronger, faster, and harder to kill. See Arts, Extli.
Origin. The art began with the Catfolk in Azlotl, before the Diaspora, as Eztli, "blood." The name has worn down over the centuries since. Extli is one of the few traditions whose terms come from the Catfolk rather than the Scholar Nation. The Diaspora carried it abroad, but its oldest and fullest forms were left behind in the ruins of Azlotl, and practitioners still go looking for them.
Who learns it. Anyone a teacher will accept. Extli passes from master to student, with no academy and no entrance exam, only a teacher willing to take you on. Every student gives their teacher one plate of their armor, a pledge that they won't go rogue. Since the plate holds their blood, it's also how they're found if they do.
Blood. Extli works through the practitioner's blood. It changes them from within, and it changes whatever their blood is worked into:
- The armor is lamellar or scale made of plates that should never stop a blade: obsidian, amber, or jade, depending on the sect. Each plate is bound with the wearer's blood, and it's the blood that makes it armor. As the practitioner grows stronger, the plates are remade smaller, lighter, and tougher.
- The weapon is the extihuitl (esh-TEE-weetl), a short glaive crossed with a macuahuitl. A hardwood or iron haft carries stones of the sect's material set along one edge and at the tip, blooded to its owner. The back edge is left bare, often drilled through with holes to soften the blow, for bludgeoning and subduing. The standard length is about four feet, but they run from two to six. A practitioner chokes up or slides back along the haft to fight close or at a distance, though that's style rather than anything the rules track. In use it's closer to an axe than a sword. A student's first extihuitl is ordinary. It strikes as magic only once the student fits it with a haft of Bloodwood (ezcuahuitl, ez-KWAH-weetl), a carnivorous tree of Azlotl's jungles, and the student has to go and get that wood themselves. The old Catfolk grew Bloodwood in their temple groves, which are now wild and overgrown around the ruins. The name extihuitl may itself be a worn-down ezcuahuitl, "blood-wood."
The sects. Three sects teach Extli, each named for the stone its plates are made of:
| Sect | Pronunciation | Meaning | Street name | Calling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Itztli | EETS-tlee | obsidian | Blackglass | breakers: shock fighters who crash through walls and battle lines |
| Apozonalli | ah-po-so-NAHL-lee | amber (literally "water-foam") | Honeycoats | seers: seekers of what is known and hidden, readers of objects |
| Chalchihuitl | chahl-CHEE-weetl | jade | Greenscales | stalkers: hunters and infiltrators |
Outsiders call practitioners of every sect Stonecoats.
The code. Every practitioner keeps one code, the Binding, and each sect adds a few tenets of its own. Breaking it weakens their Arts until they atone to their teacher.
Compact¶
Summoning, binding, spirit relations
Named for the contractual nature of proper summoning. A Compact practitioner doesn't conjure cannon fodder — they study the specific capabilities of entities and negotiate for specific services. The Scholar Nation's academic approach to summoning is the most developed expression of Compact philosophy: catalogue the capabilities, understand the terms, never summon something you haven't researched. Jinn-touched practitioners approach Compact work differently than others — Jinn treat them as distant cousins, and negotiations go differently for them.
Note: Compact will be styled mainly on 7th Sea's Sarmatian sorcery. The idea isn't "you have a devil that does the cool stuff" but "you summon a particular creature that does the cool stuff," because that kind of creature is known to do it. That means adding the creatures themselves to the setting. See Spells and Arts, Compact.
The Forbidden School¶
The Unbound¶
Necromancy, binding, soul manipulation
No official name that practitioners use publicly. The Unbound is what everyone else calls it. Deals with magic the other schools agree shouldn't be systematized: manipulation of the dead, soul binding, Geas-level compulsion, and the territory that edges closest to what the Chain Cult seeks. Outlawed in at least two nations. Practitioners operate in hiding.
The binding aspect — Geas, oaths enforced by magic, soul-level compulsion — is why the school has never been fully eradicated. Someone always wants that capability, and someone is always willing to provide it quietly. The necromancy is the part that gets them burned. The binding is the part that keeps them funded.
Overlap with Chain Cult theology is significant and uncomfortable for both parties.
Primal Magic — The Elven Tradition¶
The third moon tradition, but outside the academy system. The moon-school academies have no jurisdiction over Primal magic and cannot fully study it.
Primal does have schools of its own, a few of them, and they are informal. They are almost always led and run by Elves, they feel very different from the other schools of magic, and they accept far fewer students.
Druids are Elves. Elves are Druids. Non-Elf druids exist but answer to Elven authority. Governments don't know how to classify them. The Azure Flame doesn't trust them.
The Thorns — Elven eco-activists operating outside official Elven political sanction — are the most visible expression of Primal magic in the wider world. They are repairing what the war damaged, and they don't ask permission.
Taught by the Fae, powered by the world. The Elves learned Primal magic from the Fae, but the power comes from the world itself, not from beyond it — which is why the planar scars never touched it, and why it keeps working as the Fae realm is cut off. See Elves document.
Primal magic in a city pushes back. Cast where the land is covered over, Primal magic sets off natural reclamation around it: vines growing up walls, grass and moss in odd spots, roots cracking paving. Harmless to the caster, and rarely welcome to whoever owns the street.
Divine Magic — Priestly Tradition¶
All priestly magic is domain-locked. A cleric's access is determined entirely by their patron deity or order. This restriction is offset by meaningful bonuses within their domain.
See the Religion document for details on specific faiths and their clerical traditions.
Sorcerer Bloodlines and Sigils¶
Sorcery in Tir Hathar doesn't come from dragon, fey, or demon ancestry. Sorcerer bloodlines are tied to Sigil heritage instead. See Spells and Arts, Sorcerer for how a Sorcerer is built.
A Sigil bloodline in a sorcerer manifests differently than in a properly Sigil-marked individual — the power is present but unstructured, coming out sideways as sorcery rather than as the clean focused ability of a Sigil-bearer. A sorcerer with Artisan-adjacent powers who doesn't carry the Artisan Sigil is viewed very differently by the House of Artisan than a properly marked member.
The Aberrant Sigil bloodline as a sorcerer option is a natural fit — unpredictable, unstructured, and feared for exactly those reasons.
Healing Magic — Restricted¶
- Wizards do not teach Heal spells. It is not a classroom subject in any school.
- The Heal skill works as written for everyone.
- Serious magical healing requires the Healer Sigil, borne only by mothers, of any people but Warforged. Many bearers serve the Azure Flame's healing arm — high-rank priestesses, politically powerful and not casually available — and some follow The Kindred. Every use costs the patient System Strain, and it can't speed recovery from Frailty. See The Sigil Houses document.
Accessing real healing is a story beat, not a resource management decision.
Summoning¶
Summoning moves away from combat bodies toward the AD&D model: knowing which entities have specific abilities suited to specific problems. The Compact school is the formal expression of this philosophy. Compact is styled on 7th Sea's Sarmatian sorcery: you summon the creature known for what you need. Mechanics are pending a dedicated session.
The Spell Ceiling¶
No wizard or sorcerer in Tir Hathar has reliable access to spells above 5th level through normal means, and clergy top out lower still: 3rd level in ordinary circumstances, 4th in a religious place, and 5th only near a god's avatar or in contact with a religious relic — this is not a rule anyone made, it is a fact of the world that nobody fully understands.
The schools teach up to 5th level spells because that is what survived in their catalogues after the Long War. Some 6th level formulae exist in fragments — partial texts, corrupted records, accounts of effects without the mechanics behind them. A complete 6th level spell is a discovery, not a curriculum item. Anything above that isn't a thing at all, for arcane or divine casters alike — no 7th level spell exists in this setting, full stop.
Divine magic sits lower than arcane, and for a different reason. Arcane's ceiling is a knowledge problem — the theory survived only up to 5th level, with 6th existing in fragments to be rediscovered. Divine's ceiling is a connection problem: the planar scars damaged the link between Tir Hathar and the planes beyond it, and what a god can transmit to clergy who aren't standing in front of it has a harder cap than what a mortal archmage can in principle still recover from a library. That's why clergy cap at 3rd in ordinary circumstances, and reach arcane's 5th only near a god's avatar or with a relic — see the Religion document for the full breakdown.
Exceptions: - The two gods who walk the world can grant 5th level spells to followers within about 60 feet of them, and are personally capable of the same 6th-level, effectively-legendary tier no mortal institution can systematically produce. See Religion document. - Pre-war artifacts occasionally function above this ceiling. They are extraordinarily valuable, politically dangerous, and not well understood. - The Scholar Nation's locked archives contain partial texts for spells above 5th level. None have been successfully reconstructed yet.
The death of the god of Teachers and Sages is widely understood to be connected to this ceiling. The complete theoretical framework for constructing high-level spells was passed down partly through divine tradition — and with that god gone, teaching fell to Knowledge, a Child of the Kindred who governs what is known rather than how it is taught (see The Kindred document). Whether this is recoverable is the defining magical question of the current age.
Practical Access, Below the Ceiling¶
The ceiling numbers above are the theoretical maximum. What a given character can actually get their hands on is a tighter, deliberately tiered thing:
Arcane (Wizards): 1st through 3rd level spells are readily available to any wizard through the normal course of leveling and preparation, school affiliation or not. 4th level is where school affiliation starts to matter for real — a schooled wizard can access it as part of their catalogue; an unschooled or independent caster generally has to get there through dedicated self-research instead, which is slow, effortful, and not a given. 5th level is narrower still: each school has only one or two 5th-level spells catalogued at all, not a broad list to pick from — and the causality runs the opposite direction from what it might look like. It's not that the tier is thin and therefore 5th-level casters are rare; it's that so few casters ever get far enough to reach 5th level in the first place (most spellcasters never approach the character level it takes) that there's almost nobody with both the capability and the spare capacity to research new 5th-level spells at all. The thin catalogue is the symptom, not the cause. Each school's one or two 5th-level entries exist because, across its whole history, that's roughly how many of its own members ever got far enough to add to the list — and that scarcity then compounds: even a caster who does reach 5th level has to hope their school is one of the ones that already has something there to learn, or personally do the vanishingly rare work of adding to it. This is intentional, not a bug to patch: a non-schooled caster should have a genuinely hard time reaching 4th or 5th level spells. Not impossible — a GM can and should offer alternate routes (a mentor's private notes, a desperate one-off ritual, a recovered fragment, an artifact) — but those are exceptions a table earns through play, not a standing option on the character sheet.
Sorcerers work differently, and aren't subject to the research requirement at all. Their magic is innate rather than studied, so there's nothing to research — a Sorcerer doesn't "learn" a spell the way a Wizard does. The tradeoff is that Sorcerers simply know far fewer spells overall (see Spells and Arts, Sorcerer). If a Sorcerer invests in a Focus that happens to grant a 4th or 5th level spell, they simply have it — no research arc required, because the power was never mediated by a catalogue to begin with. That makes a Focus-granted high-level spell a real, earned build choice for a Sorcerer in a way it structurally can't be for an unschooled Wizard.
Divine (Priests): the same 1st-3rd/4th/5th tiering applies, but the gates are about place and presence rather than schooling. 1st through 3rd are freely available to ordinary clergy anywhere. 4th level requires being in a religious place — a temple, a shrine, or a historically significant holy site. It's a situational unlock, not a permanent one, which means an adventuring priest's "big" spells are usually not available in the field, only when the story brings them home or somewhere holy. 5th level requires being within about 60 feet of a god's avatar, or in contact with an appropriate religious relic. See Religion document.
Priests are the intentionally weaker spellcasting chassis, on purpose — an AD&D 2nd-edition-style asymmetry, not an oversight. A priest shouldn't match a wizard spell-for-spell; what they get instead (domain-locked reliability, the Religion document's per-faith mechanical texture, sturdier non-spell class features) is meant to carry their effectiveness rather than raw access to high-level spells doing it.
Patron-bound and oral traditions sit entirely outside this whole framework. Lizardfolk shamans, Goblin volcano-patron practitioners, the Rephaim's oracle tradition, and the Northern Reaches' Witches and Hags (bonded to the White Widow) don't answer to a school, a temple, or a catalogue at all — their power runs through a direct relationship with a patron and gets passed down as lived, oral tradition rather than written formulae. Because none of that infrastructure exists for them, the Long War's specific damage — burned libraries, severed planar connections — never touched them the same way it touched the schools and the organized faiths. A GM shouldn't feel obligated to justify a dangerous shaman or hag NPC's high-tier abilities in terms of school access or temple proximity; they were never plugged into that system to begin with, and their power scales on their patron's terms, not the Sigil-house world's.
Design Notes¶
- Schools and alignment — schools are tied to the concept of their magic, not to alignment.
- Compact/summoning rules — styled on 7th Sea's Sarmatian sorcery; mechanics pending a dedicated session, and they'll add creatures to the setting.