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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tuxgeo" data-source="post: 5996003" data-attributes="member: 61026">What arcane magic users are to me.Arcane magic manipulates the underlying, essential nature behind everything. (There, I said it.) The differences between one type of arcane magic-user and another come from the differences between their approaches to it. The wizard approaches magic through intellect: They figure it out. They try to define it in terms of other concepts that they already understand. This leads them to elaborate, roundabout written circumlocutions that try to express basic magical essentials in terms that are utterly foreign to those essentials -- terms that are profane, worldly, and static. (Magic isn't static. It flows.) The sorcerer approaches magic through "the inner flow of that which flows inwardly": they use magic on its own terms, not as defined in terms of any other things they might have already understood. To some extent, this limits their choices of ways to use magic - sorcerers tend to do the same things over and over again because they have few ways to learn to apply magic in different directions. Regarding the transformations of sorcerers: this happens, if it happens at all, neither when they are depleted of power nor when they are *FULL*; rather, it happens as a consequence of the act of using the power, in this wise: when sorcerers are casting, it helps them to try to adopt a physical form and posture that is most closely compatible with the source of their power. Draconic bloodlines achieve better casting if they adopt a sinuous form; stormy bloodlines achieve better casting if they adopt a swirling or roiling or glowering form; and chaotic bloodlines achieve better casting if they adopt a fluctuating form, somewhat like a Changeling. With long practice, those adopted forms become more or less a habitual part of the sorcerers' beings; but that becoming is still subject to those sorcerers' own preferences. The sorcerer-kings of Dark Sun would be the ones who always sought to maximize their powers by permanently adopting draconic forms, because they cared most about their own powers and least about how their appearances might be pleasing or displeasing to onlookers -- who, in the opinions of each sorcerer-king, "should" be the sorcerer's subjects anyway. The warlock approaches magic through resolution: they make decisions and they form habits; and those decisions and habits flavor their capacities and their concepts and their behaviors forever thereafter. ("If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.") The power of a warlock isn't about breaking souls, because the essential fact of a soul is its unity. However, souls can become corrupted and damaged and weakened (they just cannot become "broken into parts"), and the resolute nature of warlock pacts reduce the freshness and flexibility of the warlock's soul, flavoring it with the nature of the being most closely aligned with the nature and content of the resolution that the warlock made. Thus, a warlock who is resolved to keep secrets, come death or high water, will find that his soul, to that extent, effectively belongs to Vecna; and a warlock who is resolved to remove fey artifacts from the normal world and return them to the Feywild will find that her soul, to that extent, effectively belongs to The Eochaid. The beings that grant power to warlocks on the occasion of the forming of a pact do so because they recognize a compatible soul who is making a resolution that, while it continues to be honored, will always serve to further the aims of the granting being. The granting being grants those powers partly in order to enable that warlock to further the granting being's aims more effectively; but it's a simultaneous thing, with the granting being offering powers to the warlock if the warlock will form such a resolution, and the warlock accepting the offer and forming that resolution in order to gain those powers -- because the warlock might have no other reason to form such a resolution without being offered the prospect of gaining those powers. The concluded agreement is their pact.</blockquote>

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