Magic in the Sphere is a force of ancient wonder, not a tool of everyday life. Though it flows through the lands in leylines, ancient relics, and bloodlines touched by the gods, its practical use remains rare, difficult, and jealously guarded by the powerful.
Magic in the Sphere traces its origins to the days of the League of Stars, when the greatest sages and artificers forged wonders that could shift mountains, heal armies, or raise cities into the clouds.
That golden age, however, died with the League, and while fragments of its knowledge endure, no living mortal truly understands the full secrets that once shaped the world.
Today’s magic is a decaying inheritance—maintained through fading traditions, painstaking scholarship, and stubborn bloodlines.
Everyday Life and Common Folk
In the day-to-day lives of peasants, merchants, and tradesfolk, magic is almost invisible:
Healing is herbal, alchemical, or handled through grueling mundane care.
Farming relies on hard labor, simple irrigation, and the luck of the seasons.
Craftsmanship is skilled and proud but largely mundane; enchanted arms and armors are luxuries reserved for the powerful.
Communication across great distances is limited to rare access to Astral Towers, and only for the elite.
Most commoners might live their entire lives without seeing a spell cast—or only hearing tales of it secondhand from travelers and soldiers.
Magic is a tool of the elite:
The Great Houses hoard what magical knowledge remains, either through hereditary bloodlines, prestigious academies, or secretive guilds.
The Order of the Astral Scribes controls magical communication and records, ensuring that spells of wide influence do not fall into unregulated hands.
Mercenary Companies (like those to be formed by the players) might employ rare spellcasters, but their presence is prized and costly.
Religious Orders and Mystic Sects preserve ancient rituals but wield only fragments of true arcane power.
Guilds of Alchemists, Artificers, and Lorekeepers exist, but they are few, expensive, and often politically entangled with the nobility.
- Cultural Attitudes Toward Magic
Reverence and Fear: Magic is revered as a divine or ancestral gift, but feared for its potential to destabilize power or wreak devastation.
Access Equals Authority: Nobles, commanders, and ruling Houses who control magic are seen as rightful lords not simply by blood, but by their mastery of these ancient forces.
Relics Over Wizards: Magic is more often tied to ancient artifacts, old places, and inherited items than to living spellcasters.
Skepticism in the Frontier: Common folk trust steel and wit before spells in rugged lands like the Redstone Expanse or the Daggercrag foothills.
Arcane Titans (great magical golems) still exist but are rare, ancient, and fiercely protected by those who own them.
Enchantments on weapons and armor are limited to elite forces—standard armies rely on traditional arms.
Battle magic—great destructive spells—are almost unheard of outside the battlefield elites of Great Houses or the darkest ruins of the League of Stars.
The average battlefield is still decided by steel, formation, cavalry, and courage, not by rains of fire or armies of summoned spirits.
“The stars may have fallen, but their echoes remain in our blood. We who wield magic are not its owners—we are its final stewards.”
— High Loremaster Veylin Aestra, Order of the Astral Scribes
