“At the very edge of reason where all others see only madness is where true genius lies. To look upon the world as it is and accept it is the most abominable kind of weakness. The universe is what we make of it. To accept limitations is to shackle ourselves. To break the bonds of law and reality is our birthright.” 2025-02-10 17:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“To be limitless is the end goal of any mage. But to achieve that, most construct a cage around themselves. Dangers they will not face. Things that they will not do. Magic that they will not use. Counterproductive.”
—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar
Sylvas had to maintain a palm on ...
2025-02-07 17:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post“Emotion has no place on the battlefield, but a mage is no soldier, and it is their passions that ignite the magic within them. To separate the feeling part of the mage from the thinking part is to cripple both. Intuition is born of emotion. Decisions are made at the meeting point of the rational and irrational mind, an...
2025-02-05 17:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post“Necromantic constructs differ from mana constructs in many ways, but their physicality is not one of them. All manner of golems and servitors are constructed in an identical fashion to those made of the dead. It is only the way that death affinity mana interacts with the existing systems of the body to instantly conduc...
2025-02-03 17:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post“But with the freedoms granted to our soldiers we encounter the fringe elements. Choices made that in any other army would be considered a liability or worse. Not so in the Ardent. The universe is a vast and dangerous place, full of niche situations that regular naval or ground force incursions would simply have to brut...
2025-01-31 17:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post“The Standard Issue Empyrean Slate is, in spite of everything about it, an extremely advanced and complex piece of enchantment. Soulstone technology, bound to an individual and to a local network. The amount that it can do in the hands of a master is unbelievable, and even in the hands of a child it can prove to be the ...
2025-01-29 17:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post“Combat in space is always curtailed. At a distance from the most common sources of mana, conservation becomes even more vitally important than when fighting planet-side. In addition, you are dealing with an environment inherently hostile to your survival, greatly limiting the tactical value of any assault. Any space-cr...
2025-01-27 17:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post“When you serve, your time is not your own. It might seem like it belongs to you, but you handed it off to the Ardent the moment that you signed up. And one of the first and hardest lessons that many learn as they train is that their time, however long or short it might be, is entirely out of their control. And quite po...
2025-01-17 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“Death affinity magic, often called necromancy, is a dark mirror to life affinity magic and healing. And that perfect mirroring often surprises those who encounter it. A necromancer cannot only summon the powers of death to lay waste to their foes, they can create a false approximation of life from amidst the death. Rea...
2025-01-15 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone! It's me again!
As we get into this new year, I’m looking to get some feedback on my new website, store, content, and future planning, and as such I am looking for your help in answering some questions for me!
The first set of questions are fairly simple and available for everyone here at my web...
“There are some who argue that a true mage can have no friends, only competitors. But this is both reductive and psychologically damaging, particularly in an organization that relies upon the teamwork of various mages to maintain its optimal fighting form. The Ardent require every individual to excel, rising to their hi...
2025-01-13 17:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post“Herein lies the great irony, of course. For possessions are ultimately fleeting and temporal in comparison to the self. Yet still we look to enchantments and their longevity as the immortality of the mage.”
— Mageobolgus: Elvish Philosophy Primer, Komlaeth Havenspring
Tragically, th...
2025-01-10 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“The mage is nothing in solitude. Their powers mean nothing. Their learning means nothing. It is only when they are placed into contrast and competition with other mages that they come to realize the value of what they have and begin to push for more. Complacency and contentment are two sides of the same coin.” 2025-01-08 17:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Everyone, Happy 2025! It’s that time again and I am looking to replenish my ARC Team in preparation for all of the books slated to come out this year!
At its heart, an ARC Team is a group of individuals who do a read through of a pre-released version of a book, give general feedback to me (errors, missing words, et...
2025-01-08 16:59:04 +0000 UTC View Post“There is always a question, when discussing world-souls, of the source. From whence the springs of mana flow. There are tidal floes of mana between worlds, a natural interchange between the different planets to seek a state of harmony. Worlds possessed of too much fire mana project it into space and it seeks worlds tha...
2025-01-06 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“If knowledge is power, then why are idiots so effective? Simple. Knowledge isn’t power. The application of knowledge is power, and more often than not, those possessed of too much knowledge end up tripping over it in their pursuit of application. Sometimes the correct response to a situation is exactly what the idiot...
2025-01-03 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“There are some that say the only constant in life is death. That inevitability is the most potent force at work in all of the universe. As potent as gravity but pulling us towards our end through time rather than to the dirt through weight. To those people I point to the undead. As prevalent as societal collapse due to...
2025-01-01 17:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post“Consider the Relic world of Castigation. From it, and the Eidolon of Knowledge that consumed it, we assume that there was a vast interconnected empire based on the planet, extending out to encompass the local star systems. An empire built exclusively on the trade of knowledge. Their currency was known as the Secret. Th...
2024-12-30 17:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post“It is no coincidence that spellforms are comprised of interlinking fragments of arches, that the language of the aions is one of circularity and ceaseless repetition that we must introduce false ends into so that their pronunciation can be achieved or that mana can be bound in a simple circle. The circle and its deriva...
2024-12-20 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post“The measure of a king is not taken in war, when all rally around him, but in peace, when old allies become enemies, and every soft word masks a knife. Luck is all that is required to survive war, but to survive peace takes an entirely different animal.”
—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar
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2024-12-18 17:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post“The study of alchemy, the extraction of arcane power from the combination of naturally occurring ingredients and their derivatives. It is rarely taught in modern curriculums, looked on as quaint and archaic. But in some places the art is still alive. Often in the most unexpected of places.”
—Potionom...
2024-12-16 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“Forging a weapon does not only require time with the hammer and flame, but also periods of cooling. Time in which the metal rests and recovers from the changes made to it. So to must it go with mages. The more that things change, the longer stabilization requires. The greater the change, the longer the delay. It is for...
2024-12-13 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“A recruit’s combat aptitude cannot be assessed solely in measurable statistics. The number of spells that they have memorized, the mana they have at their disposal, the number of circles they have ascended, the scores and rankings by which we scry their physical and mental attributes are all data points which can be ...
2024-12-11 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“Power is all that matters. Others will argue for strategy, or cunning, or even logistics, but all of these things can be overcome with sufficient power. Any spell can be borne down and crushed if you have enough mana at your disposal and the wherewithal to use it. Any enemy can be broken on the rack of your raw might i...
2024-12-09 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“There are some who question the freedom that the Ardent are granted to choose their own course for advancement. These people argue that while choosing one’s own progression is a fundamental right of everyone else in the Empyrean, the soldiers who die to protect that right should be exempted from it. The most prevalen...
2024-12-06 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post“Enchantment is the only kind of magic that matters in the end. Everything else fades. The fireball that burns so bright burns out. The teleportation spell makes the journey pass in an instant. But that journey is everything, and you missed it.”
—Mageobolgus: Elvish Philosophy Primer, Komlaeth Havensp...
2024-12-04 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostBelief is formative to magic but even as all of reality opens itself like a book to you, and everything becomes possible, so too do limitations become apparent. Without limitations, each mage to ascend would become unto a god, remaking all of creation to their whims. There are fundamental rules of magic which can be bent,...
2024-12-02 17:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post“Relic worlds are a warning. They are what could have happened to us if our path had strayed just a little. Yet few see the warning, few go to the places of the dead and witness the destruction wrought there. Few delve into the wreckage of civilizations just as advanced as ours and recognize that like us, the dead were ...
2024-11-22 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Allow the mana to come to you. To flow through you. It is everywhere. It is as much a part of the universe as you are. It wants to be with you. It wants to be inside you. All that you need do is let it in. Release your inhibitions. Open yourself up to the cosmos and all the wonders it can offer.”
—Ba...
2024-11-20 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post“Desire is at the root of all things. It is what guides us to our greatest triumphs and our lowest defeats. Some argue that to be free of desire is to be enlightened. Those who argue that, are wrong. Without desire, without hunger, we would stagnate. If our ancestors had never looked with avarice upon the stars, we neve...
2024-11-18 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
