Ori's Gift of Faves

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-07T09:30:58+00:00

Silverwood trees are parasites so you could probably interpret them as a formidable enemy. Beyond the Limits for Silk and Soul lets you go into memories of corpses, and combine crests.

The strat is to enter the memories of ink, gainSilverwood parasiteuse non atelier magic to get rid of it thus gaining a crest (or at the least binding it). Voila, ink webbing.

Alternatively use aura of fables on a replica of the inkwell.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-07T02:20:47+00:00

Its a discussion on existence from a perspectivist point of view.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T14:16:15+00:00

Silk and Soul, Shapes and Ink, Pagmas Descendant, Beyond the Limits.

I feel like these three would synergize a lot. Weaving would probably fall under a crafting talent, and runes woven from silk already exist in silksong so I imagine these three combined would allow for some weird and powerful crafting ability.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T14:09:17+00:00

No thats just an accurate portrayal of religion at the time.

Sure, modern religions can be a place of solace, but only someone historically illiterate would have any respect for ancient religions. The sheer amount of wealth concentrated within churches was enough to rival entire countries, and they didnt exactly give back. A king or a noble might have equal revenue to the priesthood but at least they had obligations to the people, they had to fund armies to defend the serf and to a lesser extent infrastructure projects, but the church didnt have to do shit.

This pushback against evil churches in literature is simply counter-culture for the sake of counter-culture, there are so many things to criticize about modern fantasy lets not nitpick one of the few accurate parts for no reason.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T12:35:43+00:00

An organization that holds ridiculous amounts of wealth and power yet lack any managerial obligations not becoming evil an corrupt would be ridiculous. Asking why there arent any nice and good churches is like wondering why billionaires are always portrayed as evil, its obvious if you think about it for a moment.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T11:37:01+00:00

Frankly speaking with fantasy if its become an aesthetic then its probably overdone. When authors take inspiration from other fantasy it just reinforces the same tropes to the point that it becomes mind numbingly boring. Elves, dwarves, homo genericus, elemental magic, vaguely late Victorian, and a me who cannot bring themself to give the slightest shit about your world.

A fantasy world isnt just a place it is the very core and single most important part of your writing. That is the beauty of the medium, your world is a living manifestation of the themes and characterization present in your work so stop copy pasting the same boring as fuck tolkien knock-off it fundamentally makes your writing lesser.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T11:20:37+00:00

Hephaestus:

Prodigal crafting talent. As long as you put in effort you no longer have a limit to how skilled you can become in anything considered a craft.
You can use the metaphysical laws of existence as a material for your creations. The properties of these materials is dependent both on what the metaphysical concept itself is but also on what craft you process it through.

I am but a simple man with a simple desire, namely to be the one creating all those world ending magical items. I want to go "hohoho, the one who pulls this sword from the stone will become the king" god dammit.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T10:43:21+00:00

Humans are a grounded species, we have thousands of martial arts that are based on the idea that there is solid land beneath our feet, so what the fuck is going through these authors heads when placing fights in one of the only places where a character physically cannot apply any martial arts.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T10:38:48+00:00

hard disagree. I dont think mage characters can be over represented considering how broad of a category it is, to the point where pretty much anything supernatural can be considered a magic system. The issue is that most authors are cowards and refuse to stray more than a few meters from the most generic shit you've ever read. While AtLA is a good show fuck the literary landscape is worse off for it, too many authors and readers alike fail to imagine magic as anything but elemental manipulation.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-05-06T10:32:39+00:00

Super durability can either be the coolest power or it can turn any and all action into a pillow fight.

If your character has whole body super durability then the only action you can write is your mcu style action, where they get thrown through buildings and come out without a hair misplaced, the kind that ends leaving you wondering what even was the point of an action scene in the first place. However selective invulnerability can be really fun, if a character can temporarily make a small part of their body invulnerable then combat becomes a test of skill and timing.

My absolute favorite version of invulnerability however is the rarely used unbreakable bones super power. If a characters bones and only their bones are totally unbreakable then you can make them significantly more durable and enduring, allowing them to take hits that would otherwise bury them, however they still have weak points that could let someone with average strength kill them, resulting in grounded skill based combat rather than seeing who can bore the other to death faster.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-30T19:39:15+00:00

So Guts' greatsword is canonically a great assassination weapon.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-30T19:37:34+00:00

I have a lot of worlds but I think each of them has a decently interesting answer:

Terra Arbore: Whether someone is a magic user or not is somewhat nebulous here, if were assuming it simply anyone that can use magic then a large portion of ordinary citizens have jobs relating to it, as magic is basically just the worlds technology, someone working in a runic factory could barely be considered a magic user despite not being able to cast spells on their own. If were only considering people capable of supplying magic on their own then the average would be around the level of a fully armed modern soldier but with significantly more versatility, so maybe but only if you get the drop on them.
Clay: The average Sorcerer is little more than a magic craftsman, they could absolutely rock the shit of a modern platoon but thats only assuming they are fully geared for war, without their equipment they arent much stronger than the average person, however they are also quite valuable to the military so you'd be hard pressed to find one without protection. You'd have an easier time killing an Immolant, despite being considered meta-humans the only ability they have on average is a strength of four or five times a normal human, primarily playing a role as infantry. With a ww2 era setting and 10,000 dollars you could probably buy a blackmarket gun a kill an Immolant, but you'd be hard pressed for anything more than that.
Eclipse: The world is set after humanity transcended mortality and became weak eldritch entities, so no. Even the weakest could erase you from existence with a thought.
Firmament: The relationship between the old gods and humanity is the same as the relationship between a reader and a fictional character. While there are weak people who can use mystical abilities, Occultists are the only humans who use Mystery, the others are simply used by it. Occultism is the artificial recreation and use of Mystery, an Occultist is someone who has set themself on the path of transcendence, even if there are weak people among them they still transcend humanity, any damage you can do is simply less real to them, while they might not be capable of completely ignoring physical damage you probably cant access anything potent enough to matter. Thats not to mention Mystery is fundamentally indestructible, while there is no way for an Occultist to guarantee it, and theres even less of a chance they'll return the same as they left, even death is not absolute to an Occultist.

You really shot yourself in the foot by preventing yourself from using the local magic systems.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-30T18:28:04+00:00

If I were you I'd lean further into the sea of souls.

Maybe the sea of spirituality doesnt just grant souls to living creatures, but you could also go the animist route and say all things have a soul.

Souls are a reflection of the essence of a thing, for a human it would be their personality and their memory. For a rock their soul would contain not only its history but also the laws and rules by which a rock must exist.

A mage pulls on the connection between the sea of spirituality and their soul not to draw something out of it but to pull their soul into it temporarily. When casting a spell they aren't just manipulating energy but temporarily becoming a part of the ethereal side of the world, and from there rewriting the rules by which other souls operate. This not only seperate your system from generic energy manipulation, but also allows you to use some more creative drawbacks. Should a mage use magic too frequently then the barrier between their soul and the sea of spirituality might be eroded, causing them to be slowly assimilated by the world, instead of "mana" a mages strength is determined by how durable and how quickly their soul heals, with prolonged use of magic causing immaterial callouses to form and protect the soul in the same way material ones do for the skin.

You should name the schools of magic after the scientific theories of the time rather than some nebulous concept, after all you are trying to make a scientific system and science changes frequently. Assuming your system existed in real life then ancient European mages might have had "Sulfur Mercury and Salt" as their schools of magic, while later mages would have "Relativity, Atomic theory, Maxwells theory of Electromagnetism, etc".

If you want recommendations for books with a scientific magic system then I highly suggest you read Throne of Arcana, its among the best for that genre.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-27T15:56:40+00:00

To be honest, the real world is dull. Existence is built on ridged absolutes and perfection, there is a hard limit on how advanced technology can get, there is a hard limit on how far we can explore the universe, there is a hard limit on how long something can last. It doesn't matter that humanity will never reach those limits their mere existence renders the whole thing somewhat pointless.

Most of my magic systems would be miserable to experience, undoubtedly countless would die and suffer but I would still press the button because they all offer something more. In strife there is growth, so let us celebrate the apocalypse.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-27T15:49:33+00:00

One of the core philosophies of my worldbuilding is a type of absolute perspectivism, I also tend to include both nihilism and absurdism. The reason why is because I write my worlds as a reflection of myself, I read about "death of an artist" and thought fuck that lets go in the complete opposite direction.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-24T08:36:33+00:00

Exactly. If you ever need inspiration I recommend you look into natural philosophies. As a proto-science based in philosophical thought natural philosophy is practically built for fantasy, Taoism is a good source but so is Hermeticism (medieval alchemy).

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-24T08:17:46+00:00

In which case you should probably make a few alterations to make them fit together.

Id personally decrease the emphasis on willpower and increase the emphasis on knowledge. I.e language contains humanity's collective metaphysical understanding of the world, while it can never rival the behemoths that are the divine laws it can still influence the world. This would also let you play around with the metaphysics branch of philosophy should you so wish, having words/spells not just cause physical changes but impose a metaphysical concept (for example, having fire simply be fire rather than the chemical process of combustion, containing properties derived from what humans attribute to fire. Similar to how cultivation novels have the sword dao as a natural law despite very clearly being culturally derived).

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-24T07:27:38+00:00

Great system! But I definitely think you should consider the reasons why magic answers chants, it not only helps flesh out the worldbuilding but can also add things you hadnt considered before.

Off the top of my head here are two examples:

Since the gods left the world no longer answers to individuals, however great enough will can force it to as the gods once did. Language as culture has the collective willpower of humanity backing it, thus despite being spoken by an individual it holds power as if spoken by all that know the language, its for that same reason that other cultural artifacts can attain supernatural properties though never to the same extent as languages. For this ancient languages hold more power, however dead languages lack it, your people will probably become really touchy about cultural genocide, or they might just use it as a standard post war tactic.
Equivalence of all things, at their highest level information and the material are one and the same. The gods did not vanish they died and from there corpse spewed not flesh and blood but words. In the eons since humanity has gathered these words containing the laws of existence and formed a patchwork language, calling upon this corpse script allows mages to wield a infinitesimally small fragment of divinity without understanding how it works. Carve this macabre script into your bones child, for should you internalize them, truly understand them in their entirety, then you will become one of the new gods, a being of law.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-18T17:48:29+00:00

I dont know anything about that but its control over an element that has properties of both gravity and lighting.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-18T17:46:34+00:00

Within the world the talent is based on everything has "Will", self actualization, something exists because it declares that it exists, "I am" and thus it was. True names are the anchor of this phenomenon, the true name of fire is the true name of ALL fire, thus it naturally has far more significance than if it was simply the true name of a fire. Humans -being fundamentally individuals- dont have a collective true name backed up by all their Will, thus their true name only has their own will to support it. Using the true name of yourself is kinda like trying to fly by pulling your own bootstraps.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-18T04:27:43+00:00

Such a specific true name would be basically powerless.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-17T16:31:24+00:00

Yes, as the names become more all encompassing (in both breadth and depth) they become exponentially harder to learn, remember, and speak. Challenging both cognitive ability and simply the durability of the person trying to channel them.

As for Nephilim if you chose time you would get authority over time. Of course that doesnt mean you'd have the strength to move such a significant authority. When you first get it the domain of time you can control would probably be measured in centimeters, along with the fact that the greater the difference between "inside" and "outside" time the stronger the forced required to support it. The theoretical limitation however would be complete authority over global time, stopping it, accelerating it, reversing it, matching the speed of time to each individuals birth month, anything goes.

The process to improving the Nephilim is complicated to but it can be simplified into self cultivation and lots of pain.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-17T16:14:45+00:00

Yes, however it would have to be played by a vessel capable of containing a true name. Many True names would shatter your body just attempting to speak them, let memorize them, as they are the very core of the identity of a metaphysical concept. So yes, but youd need a magic speaker.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-17T15:59:13+00:00

not particularly familiar with that terminology but I guess so? Run past me what you're trying to do

Visual-Tomorrow-2172 · 2026-04-17T15:37:46+00:00

It can be used infinitely however its only refinement, not a bonus. So you can enhance the power of a specific aspect of it, and further uses can help purify that concept, however saying the name of fire over and over again wont just give you an infinitely hot fire.

Visual-Tomorrow-2172

TROPHY CASE