After a little tinkering, I have a somewhat redesigned magia system.
The twelve gemstones are divided in two groups of six primaries and six secondaries.
Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Light. and Darkness are the six primaries. The secondaries, meanwhile, is where I'm having trouble:
Earth could be split into rocks/crystals and plants and animals (nature), with nature being Earth's secondary
Fire's secondary is unknown at this time
Water's secondary is ice
Wind's secondary is lightning
Light's secondary is holy
Darkness' secondary is possibly Spirit.
The distinction between 'Holy' and 'Spirit' are particularly dubious. What is 'holy'? Is it the materialized force of 'good'?
ReplyDeleteBecause that opens up a whole can of worms I bet you haven't thought of. If 'good' exists as an actual force of nature that can be gathered and used as material or energy, you automatically relegate 'good' to an objective ideal. After all, there's not much more objective than 'iron' or 'magnesium' or 'hydrogen'-- those are our elements, in the real world.
Similarly, the dichotomy between certain elements and their secondaries are particularly spurious. 'Earth' goes to 'nature' despite no particularly connection between the concept of inanimate material and organic life, while 'water' goes to 'ice'-- which is simply a solid form of water. Clearly the connection between water and ice is much more intimate than the connection between earth and nature.
The idea that wind could connect to lightning is also a curious decision. In my opinion, lightning has far more to do with fire, and earth has far more to do with darkness than 'spirit'. Earth is, after all, solid. It exists whether you can see it or not, it doesn't need light, and the denser it gets, the darker.
I'm stil ironing out the kinks in the reshuffling, especially.
ReplyDeleteI may change Holy to something else and rearrange some of the derivatives. This is just one idea I had to try and salvage a twelve elemental system--but I am prepared to delete elementals if the need arises. If I do have to delete anything, what should be deleted?