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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 9795461" data-attributes="member: 72555">I might be tempted to start with rubber meets road and work out how power sources interact after that.  What do I want class X to feel like, regardless of its lore?How do I want Warlocks to feel?  That should tie to their power source.And what are the Fey?The Arcane/Divine/Primal/Psionic/Martial divide doesn't handle Fey and Shadow very well.  In 4e, the Shadow power source was an extra hybrid one; what if the same is true of Fey?  And we could even extend this.  It also misses Elemental, which feels like it should be a thing?I like doing combinatorics, especially with broken symmetry.  Can we handle that via combinatorics?  Split the "secondary" stuff off somehow?  Fuel vs Method?Like, maybe Fey/Shadow/Elemental are fuel?...Another thought is cosmology.  In at least one game, they did some fun stuff with souls.  Souls where something you could interact with, and they had basically magical energy in them.  The various power sources could intertact with this soul-energy differently.Psionic would harness, strengthen, consume and focus your own soul energy.  How do we distinguish this from Martial?  I guess the big difference is if you project your soul energy outside your body?  Or maybe it is if you learn how to move your soul energy around.  A Martial "simply" strengthens their soul-body connection to make themselves superhuman; a Psionic learns how to manipulate their own soul energy through direct practice focusing on it.  Like, Psionic disciplines involve projecting your soul into the Ethereal, forming the will, then imposing it on reality; Martial techniques keep the soul and body moving as one.Primal would interact with free spirits and make bargains with them.  These spirits are everywhere.  Sometimes they might require a bit of your soul, but often they just require tokens of respect and consideration in exchange for a favour.  As your reputation grows as a wise guide of what needs to be done, it is more likely a spirit will help you at larger tasks "on credit".Divine might use the soul energies of the dead believers/heavenly chorus?  Or maybe divine beings have an insane amount of this energy, and you borrow some of it?  The idea of using the heavenly chorus is neat; every believer adds to the sum total of what can be done.  This separates the divine power source from the divinities themselves, which opens up the "replace a god" storyline if need be, and makes it so that gods can exist without worshippers; while the divine magic of followers of gods comes from other followers, the divine magic of a god is closer to Psionic (except on an insane scale).That leads me to the idea of grand unification; at a high enough scale, all power sources are the same thing.  Only at limited mortal scales do they differ.Arcane... I sort of like the idea that Arcane interacts with a bunch of "magical macros" imposed upon reality.  Like, in a past age, someone build a system for controlling soul energy and imprinted it on reality; Arcane is finding these commands and using them (possibly for different purposes than their original design).  Hackers in a simulated reality who have worked out a limited number of console commands?Both Shadow and Fey are attached to various kinds of tricksters and illusions.  Instead of illusions being projections of light and noise, what if all illusions where phantasms?  They are messages sent directly to your soul, not your eyes or ears.Fey are known to steal names and the like (a kind of soul theft), while Shadow tears souls out of bodies.  Maybe the body/soul dichotomy of Psionic can be here as well?  The Shadow treats the body as a piece to cut off.And what about things without Souls that are still Animate?  ... How about 2 fundamental forces, not one?  That could help: Anima and Soul.Anima is attached to the Flesh, and distinguishes living matter from non-living matter.  Soul is the stuff that survives death, and is rewoven back into a new life (usually).A creature of Anima who "truly dies" cannot be resurrected; they are patterns of matter and flesh.  They could be reconstructed, and if done perfectly it would even remember.  But you could also duplicate their bodies and you'd have 2 of them.Duplicating the body of a Soul doesn't give it a duplicate Soul.You can animate objects without providing a soul.  A Zombie would harness both the Anima and Soul of the dead, puppeting them.  A Ghost is a Soul without flesh.Then Martial is about strengthening the Anima, making the flesh superhuman.Psionic is about strengthening your Soul, manipulating it to change reality.Divine magic harnesses the Chorus of Souls of the faithful.Primal magic still makes deals with nature spirits.  Are nature spirits Anima or Soul?  I think some are one, some are the other.  Animals have a distributed Soul and individual Anima; so you can speak with Bear by talking to any Bear.  Mortals are "strange" to Animals in that their species-soul is fragmented into individuals.  A river spirit might be pure Anima, and be the river itself.Arcane remains manipulating the magical craftwork of the Dawn age, imprinted upon reality.  Much of it is destructive, as the Dawn war was destructive.  The Gods rewrote reality to let them use reality itself as a weapon against the Primordials.  Say the right thing, make the right gesture, and reality follows the script of the craftwork imposed on it.  These tools are part of the very fabric of existence, and changing them would undermine its foundations.  This makes Wizards into a kind of Archeologist, which feels great to me.The Fey and Shadow deny the dichotomy of Anima and Soul in different ways.  The Fey use Anima as Souls and Souls as Anima in their magics; thoughts that are flesh, flesh that is spirit, and play with both.  The Shadow tear them apart; souls without bodies, bodies without souls.  When a soul rides a body in the Shadow it does so like a jockey rides a horse, free to dismount, at most considering it a valued object, not part of the self.Elemental is the parts of reality the Primordials built before the Gods got all uppity and created life and souls.  In theory you could use such magic without Souls or Anima to ride it, but it would be corrosive to mortals and gods alike.  So we get things like Elemental creatures, which are Anima controlling Elemental bodies.Invoking Elemental effects via any power source is possible, because the Primordial magic and reality is the foundation of everything....Radiant/Necrotic is Soul "+" and "-" energiesForce/Acid is Anima "+" and "-" energiesFire+/Cold-/Lightning+/Thunder- are Elemental energiesPoison is ... not sure how it fits.</blockquote>

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