Glyphs: The Specifics

For those who play mage characters, or just want to know:

Glyphs and Glyphic Grammar

• There are seven basic glyphs: earth, water, fire, air, light, life, and time. These are among the simplest symbols in their raw, most fundamental forms. Most other glyphs are derived from these seven, with the addition of new strokes or adjustments to extant ones. (But only 'most'.)

• Using these glyphs, anything that can be framed in words may be written as a spell. Possible spells range from calling up fire (the traditional first spell) to sculpting a figurine from stone; from calling down storms to inflicting a disease upon an enemy. In short, virtually anything is possible… the trick is making it work how you wanted.

• Glyphs are sensitive to intent, up to a point. If you draw a symbol without any intent or purpose, it will (usually) remain just a symbol. For lower-level mages, many glyphs will remain inert unless a sigil of activation is added; high level mages have to be careful not to empower a glyph they don't mean to cast, even without that sigil. Additionally, the more you focus on the goal you want to achieve, the better and more consistent your results will be. Often, students fail in focus, and so have no results or unpredictable ones. But if you attempt a spell complex beyond your means, intent won't suffice to make it work — and having intent as the sole control, without some sort of check in the script of the spell itself, isn't a good idea, especially for complex spells.

• More delicate spells, and more complex glyphs, are also sensitive to the location of the sun. They work better in equatorial latitudes than northern ones, under the noon sky than the dawn, and — in some extreme cases — may not work at all at night. The basic spells which are the mainstay of most mages are not noticeably affected by time of day.

• Just as there are glyphs for different things, symbols incomprehensible to the layman, there are also glyphs for verbs and other basic parts of speech. More specifically, you can amend most symbols to turn them into verbs. Glyphic grammar is extremely crude, lacking much beyond verbs and nouns, but it doesn't often get used for interpersonal communication. The difficulty of turning a complete statement into a partial one without losing one's intent, and of remembering the right curlicues to add to which glyph so that they will string together and not execute individually, make it pretty much impossible for low-level mages to perform multi-part spells.

• Additionally, glyphs have no tenses, so incorporating any sense of time (such as when creating a spell with delayed activation) requires some ingenuity. Most spells activate immediately and do not linger, though they may have lasting effects; casting a spell with delayed activation, or that endures for some length of time, requires quite a bit of skill and expertise.

Glyphs and Writing Media

• As a rule, media that work well for casting a basic glyph (e.g. tar is excellent for earth, blood for life, etc.) will also be effective for any glyphs derived from that one. At least enough so to get some reaction, even for a low-level mage. Most of the time, however, lower levels need to know which media and substrates are optimal for a given glyph in order to cast a truly effective spell.

• Higher levels (3 and 4) are better able to work with less than perfect materials, at least in single-glyph or other minor spells. The more complex a spell, the more specific its requirements. With some profoundly intricate castings, each glyph must be written in a different medium and possibly on a different sort of surface in order to work — and yet they must all be connected. With most, fortunately, that isn't necessary, and there is some medium/substrate pair that will suffice for the entire spell.

Glyphs and Crystals

• Just as each glyph has an ideal medium/substrate pair, so does each glyph have an ideal crystal. Some only require a crystal of a certain color; others, any color, but it must be of a particular kind; and some glyphs are more specific still. For those which accept variation, the variant used can affect the end result, especially in more delicate or complex castings. (e.g. a red garnet is better for fire spells than a green one, although the spell might still work with green.)

• Flawless crystals are not strictly necessary, but they are a good idea if available; a badly flawed one might explode under the strain of a spell's activation. Crystal size has relatively little bearing on the success of a spell, although more complex spells work better when embedded in a larger crystal.

• Glyphs embedded in a crystal are microscopic, unless the spell is positively huge; even then, it's just a speck, a faint flaw. A high-level mage is capable of detecting the presence of a spell within a crystal they hold, and if they wrote it or are very familiar with the spell, they might be able to tell what it is. A glyph-reader is able to make the symbols visible to all by creating a projection in light above the crystal, but unless they have the proper training, they can't decipher the glyphs.

• Level 4 mages are able to erase a glyph from a crystal, provided the symbol is either inert (e.g. an official emblem that has no power in it) or the spell has already run its course. Erasing a glyph restores the crystal to its original state, reinstating the original matrix. This ability cannot be used to remove a flaw.

Examples of Derived Glyphs

This list is intended to demonstrate glyphic relationships, not to be an exhaustive catalog of all available glyphs. Far from it.

• Earth: stone, soil, mountains, plains, various plants and animals (in conjunction with life), to be sturdy, to be solid, to be stationary

• Water: river, ocean, ice, cold, various fish (in conjunction with life), to move, to flow

• Fire: warmth, energy, to ignite, to consume, to transform or change, to feel

• Air: wind, weather, various birds (in conjunction with life), to hear, to know, to breathe

• Light: dark, shadow, sun, moon, magic, to illuminate, to hide

• Life: death, disease, hope, good and evil (in conjunction with light/dark)

Time rarely comes into play in less-advanced spellcasting; its derivatives are mostly used for controlling the progress of a spell, from delaying activation to extending effects to coordinating multiple spells.