D&D 5E Magic school tainting of land.

[Shades of Eternity]

I got a question. If an area is saturated with a school of magic, what effects would you expect to naturally occur. Necromancy is easy (spontaneous dead rising) how would you show a tainting from divination, abjuration, etc?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Abjuration: Unnatural hardiness, leading to a slight decline in biodiversity. When all the plants are tough and all the creatures have bony plates or chitinous carapaces, the land suffers a bit--everything is a dogged survivor, but there are fewer things surviving.
Conjuration: The world becomes physically unstable in various ways. Teleportation may become a natural ability of the creatures living there, and in places where the magic is particularly strong, desires may literally cause objects to be summoned from elsewhere or to spontaneously pop into existence. This is a mixed blessing for local fauna; accidental summonings/creations can be useful, but they can also be junk.
Divination: Seeing things--other places or the future--happens constantly. Every even slightly reflective surface will be a view to somewhere else on the plane. Some creatures might develop telepathy (though that's more Echantment), others preternatural senses. I could see this becoming a place where magic itself becomes a food, with Detect Magic being an instinctive ability predators use to hunt prey.
Enchantment: Beguiling and enthralling, enhancing and binding. Not so much a place where you can't trust your senses as one where you can't trust your thoughts--predators luring prey by controlling their emotions, prey defending itself by inflicting dread or literally putting a curse/beguilement on a predator so that it can't willingly harm the prey.
Evocation: This one's easy. FIRE! FIRE! FIRE EVERYWHERE! But no, seriously, an environment where the elements are screwy. Trees with clouds of smoke instead of leaves. Flowers made of frost or actually sprouting little flames. Creatures made of rock or flowing water. Just generally the classical elements being blended into living, breathing creatures.
Illusion: This one is also easy; exactly what it says on the tin. Illusions everywhere. I imagine lots of invisible creatures or creatures that can fake where they're located (think displacer beast), mating displays using minor illusion, mimicking the calls of your prey with ghost sound, etc. The inverse of Enchantment, you can't trust your senses to tell you what's real and what's not.
Necromancy: Yeah, I pretty much agree. I'd add some "the land sucks the life out of most things that try to live in it," but yeah. Swamps. Decay. Parasites. Generally nasty things.
Transmutation: The metamorph's paradise. Where Conjuration made location fluid, Transmutation makes material fluid. Creatures may literally transform themselves in order to hunt, or may transform their kills into more easily-stored forms to consume later. Prey creatures might be able to transform themselves to blend in, or might transform their environment to keep themselves hidden and protected.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I only have one note on @EzekielRaiden great post. I don't think of swamps as places without life. They got loads of life. They ooze with life. When I think of a place where life is struggling I think of a desert.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I only have one note on @EzekielRaiden great post. I don't think of swamps as places without life. They got loads of life. They ooze with life. When I think of a place where life is struggling I think of a desert.

This is my MtG casual association showing. Swamps are associated with Black because they are places of decay and parasitism, two key Black concepts. Necromancy is, in a very essential way, the perfect blend of Black's two drives, parasitism and amorality (which is not necessarily immorality...but it usually leads that way). Necromancy defies natural order and generally preys upon the living (e.g. vampires feed on living blood but produce nothing living themselves, zombies only reproduce by infection, etc.), giving it the parasitism angle handily, and it is associated with all sorts of perverse or corruptive acts done in the name of quick power (amorality), such as desecrating corpses, imprisoning souls, infecting yourself or others with transformative influences, etc.

Deserts, in general, are usually not associated with parasites. Every place HAS parasites, of course, but swamps offer a particularly effective place for them to grow and to jump from one host to another as seen in various actual species. Deserts strike me as less "draining" life and more "lacking" life. Consider for example what happens in many deserts when a rainstorm DOES occur: you will often see a profusion of incredibly beautiful flowers that linger just long enough to reproduce and then fade again in the desert heat. And survivor organisms like cacti can produce beautiful flowers and nutritious fruit. Swamps, on the other hand, may be full of life, but a lot of that life is poisonous, or toxic, or parasitic, or a major disease vector (all those insects incubating their young in stagnant water), and yet in a certain sense display a frailty that seems very in keeping with Necromancy: cut off a critical factor, e.g. by removing the water or making it flow swift and clear and suddenly the old life web collapses because the old exploits no longer find purchase. Whereas a desert that starts to get enough water will slowly change to something livable, like an expanding edge of an oasis.

 

[prabe]

I'm not inclined to quibble much--one's associations are what they are--but when I think of what necromancy-tainted land would look like, it'd be like a tailings pond or some other mining or industrial Superfund site. There is earth, and there is water, but there is no life; things might move there, or grow, or maybe thrive, but they're not alive.

 

[cbwjm]

A place tainted with necromancy might have less new life in it, even as life that is already established withers and dies. So dead trees, twisted and gnarled, desiccated plants, decaying animal life, and barren plains. For the humanoid communities in the region, perhaps there are more still births and miscarriages as the necromantic magic saps the life from the unborn child.

A place tainted, or perhaps blessed, by enchantment might have people that are friendlier and more outgoing than other regions. This effect affects even people new to the region as if under a charm spell cast by everyone. Everyone is friends with everyone else. A more darker bent might make everyone more suggestible, even a casual comment like "Ah, go jump of a bridge" might cause someone to run off and do exactly that. Finally, events like those in Euripides', The Bacchae might be common.

Conjuration is pretty much just summoning and teleporting. You could have people walking towards one location, only to end up in another. Worst of all though, this area might have extraplanar incursions as a constant issue. Demons & Devils fighting amongst themselves, with angels later joining the fray. Fey coming in and causing mischief, elementals causing upheaval. Quite the dangerous area which might be hard to leave due to random teleports.

Can't trust anything with illusion. I might take a queue from dragonlance and the mindspin spell. In the originals I believe wizards and warriors swapped roles, and thieves and priests swapped roles. So your bookish wizard becomes a mighty warrior and the local priest suddenly finds themselves bereft of contact with their god, but able to pick locks and sneak. You could just make players swap their character sheets between each other, don't give them any time to read through it, just swap and quickly move on and have people adapt as part of play. In this environment, if you die as a wizard, you die as a fighter.

 

[Yora]

I only have one note on @EzekielRaiden great post. I don't think of swamps as places without life. They got loads of life. They ooze with life. When I think of a place where life is struggling I think of a desert.

Though if you have an area with considerable water, and all the plants just died, it would look pretty swampy on first sight. Not an actual swamp ecosystem to anyone who knows swamp ecology, but you could have a waterlogged wasteland. Unlikely to happen in nature or persost for a long time unless you have some serious contamination, but a busy necromancy school could very well be such a contamination.