The Serpent
The Serpent is not a god, nor a demon, nor a being in any sense of our worldly measures. The Serpent is more akin to a force of reality, which gives shape and solidity to all things, especially those living.
The Serpent encoils the elements alike, and even those immaterial masses that give our thinkings, achings, and hungers.
The Serpent cannot be called upon, for remember it is not a god nor other ivocable power. But yes it can be manipulated if its ways are understood.
Known Practitioners
The Gods: Surely used to create the first life.
Vgreth in the Deep: Twisting new demonic forms for her captor-patrons.
The Solar Harvest Temple: Suspected to account for the physical paragons that enforce their faith.
High Craftsman Abigoris: His mechanical servitors were channeled into life through this power.
Ybrine Yvexius: A humble scholar experimenting with these boundless arts.
Methods
The methods described herein are non-exhaustive, restricted by the scope of this single volume.
Serpentine Manipulations
Small changes can be manifested onto a body with a near instant effect. A ritual of one hour is performed in a warm, damp, exterior environment. Fresh bone marrow and dust of activated-lead are required. The latter is used in more progressive schools of alchemy.
Of the Scales: The skin and bone bends into a familiar form as dictated by the manipulator.
Of the Muscle: Their strength is doubled, to near an athletic peak, but the face is often buckled to an uncanny visage and foul hungers may rise.
Of the Blood: Their bloodline is cut, severing all ancestral links, and splicing onto another. Of little use beyond vanity and obscure lineal curses.
Serpentine Splintering
A body can be commanded to change itself into something anew.
Scarify the Urunic commands into the flesh of the being. The effect is slow at first, taking a week for there to be any perceived change. After a month, the effect fully takes hold.
Envenomed: Their bodily fluids are at first poisonous, then venomous, then purely toxic and corrosive. The subject rarely outlives a few months under this splintering.
Empowered: An amplification of everything about the being, both their vices and virtues. Often leads to a critical mass of sorts.
Disassociated: The form warps to that of an entirely different being. Extreme changes may cause collapse into raw organoplasm of some material use.
Serpentine Manifestations
These methods require Etheric motions that cannot be transcribed easily into a written text. My experimentations with accessing these powers through Urunic carvings have yielded only abominations.
If performed in the correct manner, a caller can manifest their own living being to their specific preferences, dependent on their expertise and raw materials at hand.
No matter is created here, only redistributed, and freshly cut wood appears to create beings both sturdy and pliable. Dead flesh carries residue of its previous soul, and so has not performed well in my manifestations. Stone and metal form to rigid, uncreative beings incapable of bypassing anything but the most unambiguous obstacles.
The idea in Known Practicioners of the gods and these sects using the same pool of magic is quite interesting. In a world suffused with magic, why shouldn’t there be paragons and beasts who channel or embody the same magic that the player characters swim in?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of the idea of a campaign in which all people possess at least level 0 casting power, to the point that close combat between professionals is a desperate last resort? Say the entire backlog of arcane, divine, natural and psionic magic from TSR, WotC and Paizo is known somewhere in the world (Ignoring ones feelings about those companies; I just want to illustrate the breadth of fleshed out Vancian spells available to sentient creatures). In other words, everyone’s a wizard but is differentiated by his or her repertoire, of which there is a sea of spellcraft to tap from. This is something I’ve never tried; I don’t know if I ever will because the absolute, 100% minimization of martials would turn a lot of players off (perhaps some would remain in the world as an Ars Magica defense against unscryed assassins etc, but I picture the age of pitched melee battles ending with the proliferation of magic). Nonetheless it is barely trodden territory (whole post-scarcity civilizations based on magic, but comprehensible magic; the magic of the backlog, and no more).
Maybe in a world where magic suffuses everything, all characters would be sorcerers, not wizards