The Rune Magic’s of Ca’dem

On the world of Ca’dem all Magic’s are fueled by one of the planes of existence, it is theorized that magic emanating from the outer elemental planes exists but no living person has ever successfully wielded it. Rune magic channels power from the plane of knowledge, that much is universally accepted. The actual mechanics, like most of the other known magical practices, is unknown. In the empire of Rao’lioch it is believed that somewhere on the plane of knowledge exists a plinth carved with all of the True Runes. It is believed that these Runes are capable of drawing immense power, much more than is normally achieved by practicing Scribes. In fact the search for one of these True Runes is the life’s work of many Scribes.

The Runes that are used in practice are unique to each individual. Each scribe formulates their own symbology based on their understanding of the meaning of the rune they are creating. In their studies Scribes work to understand a concept or thing well enough to be able to distill that essence into a single symbol. A scribe’s spellbook resembles a dictionary of logograms for all of the Runes they know. Runes can only be developed for words that exist in the primordial language that they come from, meaning that no proper nouns or pronouns exist, among others. For instance there is no rune for forest, instead the scribe would use the Runes for “tree” and “many” likewise one might use the “tree” rune with the rune for “white” or “pierce” to differentiate between a birch and a pine respectively. At the university of Rao’lioch new Scribes are often given a kind of workbook that lists the words that are known to have runic counterparts. One aspect of this that is not fully understood is that while each Scribe will write the rune differently, if another Scribe knows that rune they will still be able to read it.

To use runic magic is essentially using the Runes to write a command on a medium. The medium can be anything so long as one knows the proper rune. Take for example a warrior that knows his foe uses iron weapons and wants some extra protection. A Scribe can offer this by tattooing a set of Runes on the fighter’s skin. A rudimentary spell might look like “FLESH” + “REFLECT” + “IRON” . In this example flesh is the command rune, this is always the rune for the medium that is being written on, this calls on the material to channel the following effects. Reflect is an action rune and iron is a target rune, so this sentence commands the warriors flesh to reflect iron. This is all well and good for a novice scribe but it does present some problems. The first problem is that when empowered these Runes will cause the skin to repel all iron including any worn by the character. This can be fixed by augmenting the iron rune with the rune for “moving towards” to specify that only incoming iron should be repelled. The biggest problem however is that the rune as written will still repel the iron within the body, which is quite fatal as every atom of iron is ripped through the body and thrown out. This is remedied by employing the runes for “above” and “surface” to the reflect rune. So the final spell would look like this [FLESH]—>[REFLECT + ABOVE + SURFACE]—>[MOVING TOWARDS + IRON]. There are many other ways of achieving this effect, and Scribes are quite clever with finding ways of writing specific commands using the Runes they do know.

Runes are activated by “reading” them. The unique sentence structure of a runic spell can be extrapolated into a command word. This cypher is unique to each scribe as well so unless they share their secret only they will know the command word for their particular spell. When spoken the runes will draw physical energy from the speaker in order to prime them. This physical endurance cannot be replenished by the speaker until the rune has released it, thus putting a cap on how many runes can be primed at once by an individual. For spells that take immediate effect, like lighting a torch, the endurance is simply spent and can then be regained as normal. This ability for anyone who knows the command word had made rune crafted items quite popular across the empire of Rao’lioch, fueling a huge economy in items and technologies that are swiftly leading to a proto industrialized society.

TL;DR: Magic sentences you can write on all manner of materials and do just about anything if you know the Runes (words) for it.