The definition of March Earth magic is the deliberate use of one's presence in planes beyond the Material Plane to access energies or communicate with extraplanar entities for the purpose of affecting the Material Plane in some way. Put less long-windedly: Magic is using parts of yourself in other planes to do stuff in this one.
Depending on a variety of factors, including sapience, any object or life form can have a minute presence in other planes. This is especially pronounced on March Earth, where the heightened energies of Shine, Dim, and Lore brought about by the Cataclysm have pushed this effect further. Wild animals, plants, and even inanimate objects are sometimes able to use this to create simple effects on their surroundings, but it's only when properly trained and studied that this ability becomes a skill, a skill known as magic.
Why it Works
A Shine or Dim magic user has a greater than average presence in other planes. They use this extraplanar "body" to influence the Material Plane, like having an arm in another world with different powers than your regular arms. The energy and power of the plane this "body part" functions in is what is drawn on to create magical effects on the Material Plane. A magic user can also use this extraplanar self to communicate with the denizens of other planes, or even provide these denizens an easy pathway to manifest on the Material Plane (known as Summoning). With enough skill and power Material Plane magic users can also manifest onto other planes in a similar fashion: Mainly this is done with the Spirit planes, since in deeper/higher planes this is a harrowing and dangerous experience.
Em
Although not really talked about much outside of magical and planar studies, this is all linked to the concept of Em: the force of existence itself. This Em is what gives these extraplanar "bodies" existence, and is the force of "presence" or "meaning". Lore is Em given form by the thoughts of sapient beings, Shine is the force that shapes Em in predictable ways, and Dim is the force that makes Em behave erratically. Although all entities and concepts in all planes possess Em, the Material Plane is the greatest manifestation of it. The opposite of Em is Void, which fortunately the March Earth universe does not have an abundance of.
Each magic user's methods are unique, with every person having their own style and techniques. The actual skills of magic are focus, understanding, precision, and power. The methods a person uses to achieve these things don't matter, except to the user themself. Activation of magic is based on will, with tools such as physical objects, gestures, or words assisting the user to express and focus that will onto a single moment. For these reasons, magic is often compared to art. Indeed, like art, magic is often learned by copying the examples of others, and many tutorials and style guides exist to help a beginner figure out what works best for them, or to help a more experienced magic user evolve their craft. Magic styles may be passed down in families, or form communities and miniature "schools" of like-minded magic users who find a particular set of styles works for them. Equally as common however are entirely self-taught magic users, who simply intuit and express themselves as feels best.
Activating magic is universally an act of will (the user simply "flexing" their self in other planes), but the ways to make magic actually do stuff are diverse. In particular, Shine and Dim magic behave very differently: Dim magic is an exercise in controlling a wild torrent and Shine magic is a precise and fiddly weaving of effects. Focus, understanding, precision, and power come into play here the most. To achieve these, it's often in a magic user's benefit to train themselves in other aspects of their lives too: A Dim user may practice meditation and discipline training, and a Shine user may familiarise themselves with mathematics and physics, for example. Witchcraft and other magic involving interaction with extraplanar beings (or the planes themselves) also require learning about those things in advance.
Magical power is something one is born with, however someone with a powerful extraplanar presence is strongly advised not to attempt magic without learning how to do so safely. Many gruesome tales are told of inexperienced but powerful magic users who attempted strong magic only to have it go terribly wrong. Sorcery in particular is notorious for this. It's by learning the nature of the planes and by training the self that great magic can be done safely, and even a person of small extraplanar presence can develop themselves into greatness with time and effort. Generally speaking, the skill of magic is a lifelong learning process, something that can be integral to a person's identity.
What It Looks Like
The historical sorcerer Gauliére using his Dim-based magic.
Magic has a visible or otherwise detectable presence when in use. A magic user's magic is part of their extraplanar self, and is therefore unique to the individual. Shine magic is generally regular/mathematical in form and emits light and warmth, as energy from the upper planes bleeds though. Occasionally Shine magic has hard black lines or geometric forms. Dim magic is generally irregular in shape, black, grey, or very dark colours, and creates cold, as the lower planes drain energy. Occasionally Dim magic will have isolated spots of bright, highly saturated colour. Other than these traits, magic has a huge variety of individual appearances, every magic user having magic with an appearance as unique as they are. Magic is usually abstract in form but will sometimes take on vague symbolic representations of things central to the user's personality or life. Magic may sometimes be accompanied by distinct traits that affect other senses too, such as sounds, smells, magnetic currents, etc. The form an individual's magic takes mostly stays the same, but may subtly change over time, or sometimes suffer abrupt change when a life-altering event happens. Some parts of the shape and structure of magic may also be passed down a family line, in the same way physical traits or knowledge might be.
Magic can be hidden with a little effort, basically using the magic to change itself, but this gets more difficult the more traits of the magic you attempt to hide. Additionally, the greater the power of the magic the more noticable it is. Higher/deeper plane magic like wizardry is always obvious unless dampened, but lesser plane magic like witchcraft may appear as no more than a fleeting shimmer on the air.
At the simplest level, magic is categorised into three types: Shine, Dim, and Lore. Lore magic involves altering the universe itself through narrative logic. No Lore magic users are known to exist in the modern era and Lore magic mostly manifests as an innate function of all March Earth life itself. Shine and Dim magic function the same as each other but in "opposite directions" and are often mutually exclusive, since having a usable presence deep into both Dim and Shine planes is rare. The March Earth universe is Shine-heavy, like our own, making Dim magic generally much rarer and considerably more dangerous to life than Shine magic.
Magic Users
A magic user's category is based on the type of magic they use. A magic user may dabble in several different types of magic, or exclusively specialise in one. The english names used on March Earth for the different magic users etc. were given early in post-Cataclysm history and don't really reflect their use in pre-Cataclysm (our) times.
Witch
Two historical witches in traditional garb of a style common on the european sub-continent. Their clothes and appearances are influenced by the Spirits they connect to.
A witch is a practitioner of Witchcraft: The art of communicating with local Spirits and getting them to affect things for you. This can take the form of coercion, persuasion, or bargaining, and often involves creating situations or objects to please (or occasionally displease) them. Spirits embody the meanings/essence of things in the Material Plane, making Witchcraft an art of intuiting and understanding the nature of all things material (living or otherwise), as well as the strange thoughts and motivations of Spirits themselves. Shine-leaning witches are much more common, but Dim witches are also frequent, and of all magic users witches are the most likely to have a foothold in both ends of the planar spectrum. Generally no distinction is made between witchcraft involving Warm-type or Cool-type Spirits, but witches often find one or the other type to be more aligned with their personality and therefore easier to interact with.
People who can exclusively use Witchcraft are by far the most common type of magic user, making up 3/4 of all practitioners. It's fairly common to meet someone with a little witchcraft, especially those who traverse the dangerous Wilds, where being able to turn a hostile environment more favourable towards you is a survival advantage. Witchcraft is also the oldest in terms of established traditions and techniques. Witches historically took on traits of their favourite Spirits, dressing to honour and please them and strengthen their bonds. These days the practice is less common, but Witches often have things that reinforce the bonds to their closest Spirits, ranging from material objects to songs and daily rituals.
The summoner Effa yelling at their witchbladed Demon to get it back under control, as it tries to break through to the Material Plane.
Summoner
A summoner describes a magic user who, similarly to a witch, deals with entities beyond the Material Plane. Unlike a witch, summoners deal with every type of extraplanar entity except Spirits, most commonly Demons. A summoner must have a planar presence that reaches beyond the Spirit planes in order to do this. Demons are predictable but intensely manic manifestations of wills and drives, obsessive and single-minded. To summon a Demon into the Material Plane is to invite an explosion of whatever that drive is, both from the Demon itself and the things around it affected by it. These wild and powerful traits make Demons much harder to engage with than Spirits, and summoners may deal exclusively with one Demon their entire lives, or a small number of them. Simply opening an unprepared dialogue with any Demon who happens to be around-- the way witches can with Spirits-- is very risky, and finding exactly the right individual who is willing to bargain with or even listen to a summoner in exchange for the chance to manifest on the Material Plane is one of the most challenging aspects of the craft. Summoners very often make use of Witchblades to avoid the consequences of summoning a full entity, which has various levels of risk depending on the entity involved.
The sorcerer Annat is one of the few (successful) living practitioners of deep sorcery.
When people say "summoner" they usually mean a demon summoner, who are overwhelmingly in the majority, but only those with presence in the Shine planes can contact Demons. A summoner who specialises in Darkbeasts, the polar opposite entities in the Dim planes, is sometimes called a "dark summoner". Darkbeasts are all fairly similar to each other and all cause intense lethargy, deformation, and nullification. By nature they are generally less useful than Demons for specific tasks, and dark summoners have a reputation for causing indiscriminate damage.
A summoner is usually exclusively either Shine or Dim-leaning, with people capable of contacting both Demons and Darkbeasts very rare and very unlikely to split their skills in such a way.
The summoning and use of Angels and Cold Ones is theoretically possible, but almost always ends in either failure or disaster. Even in cases of success, a phenomenon known as "balancing"-- where an entity of similar but opposite planar energy manifests-- is very likely to occur. A summoner of Cold Ones is known as a Deep Sorcerer, and a summoner of Angels is known as an Emissary.
Wizard
If a magic user's planar presence extends all the way to the Angel planes, they gain access to wizardry. Wizardry is the Shine-based skill of using your extraplanar self to tweak the laws of the universe directly, or if you like; "physics magic". Wizardry is the art of trying to nudge the universe into non-standard states, the more mathematical and likely these states are the easier they are to achieve. Making an apple as heavy as gold is easy, a simple rewriting of one number, but changing it into a pear not so much. Wizards are uncommon and much sought after in society, as their consistent, predictable magic makes the construction of magical devices like Raybenders possible.
Potential wizard talent is hard to ignore, with people whose planar presence goes that high often finding themselves accidentally influencing their surroundings. Whether or not they develop it is their own choice, but most at least learn basic control techniques to help avoid accidents. Wizards are stereotypically rather wealthy and have a high position in society, though obviously that's in no way representative of all wizards. Most wizards have a strong knowledge of hard sciences or more technical skills, as knowing things like that makes wizardry much easier to understand. Wizards also have a reputation as trustworthy "good guys", a backbone of society, which might be true for some but certainly not all.
Sorcerer
A sorcerer's planar presence extends all the way to the Cold One planes, and grants them access to the reconstructive, nullifying force of Dim. In a Shine-heavy universe, Dim is a disruptive force that undoes physical matter and destabilises the order of things. As a result, Sorcerers are somewhat feared and have an unwarranted reputation for being dangerous and malevolent. In truth, most sorcerers just want to be left alone to practice their craft. Sorcery is an exercise in carefully directing and controlling the force of Dim, which naturally attempts to affect everything in any conceivable way possible. The more likely and regular an effect, the harder it is to achieve. Making an apple as heavy as gold is very difficult, but making it turn into gold is much easier. The hard part comes in making sure the apple does not also become 17 apples, 3.7km in the air, and stopping any additional effects on the apple's surroundings. The easiest things to do with sorcery are destructive, a trait that has contributed to sorcerers' bad reputation thanks to a few notorious and terrible individuals.
The sorcerer Annat using her magic to travel rapidly from one place to another.
Sorcerers are much rarer than wizards, in part due to their reputation in society causing many who have the talent for sorcery to refuse to accept or refine it. The deconstructive and unpredictable nature of Dim also makes sorcery a more dangerous magic to begin learning, with many beginner sorcerers suffering injury or death from their own powers. Innate talent for sorcery affects a person's surroundings, however, and can be hard to ignore, leading to many potential sorcerers seeking refuge in Dim-friendly settlements or societies that are less likely to treat them as a ticking time bomb. Places like this often know techniques for helping such people to control their abilities. An accomplished, well-trained sorcerer is often a world-weary individual who has mastered the art of self-control, who knows and accepts themself despite what others may think.
A skill available to many who have only a small presence in other planes, Witch Sight is the ability to see a fraction of another being's extraplanar presence, their "body" on other planes. Typically this appears as a hard to describe layering of shapes and forms around the individual, often in motion. The shapes neither obscure nor pass through things, being not technically vision but another sense entirely. Witch Sight shapes may also be visible through obstacles, depending how strongly they appear and how acute the observer's sense is. Viewing extraplanar entities with Witch Sight can be an overwhelming experience; vast and complex forms best not focused on too hard. Generally the greater an entity's presence in other planes the more intense they are when viewed with Witch Sight. Wizards, sorcerers, and Shine/Dim-tinted individuals are also easily identified this way, unless they are actively hiding themselves. How a magic user appears in Witch Sight is often similar in some way to how their magic looks.
Angelomancy is the name for the extremely inadvisable practice of witchblading angels for their power.
Witchblades
A witchblade or summoner's knife is an object used by witches and summoners to partition off a piece of an extraplanar entity. Essentially, a witchblade creates a narrow, controlled pathway that only summons part of them, for weaker but safer results. This can injure weaker Spirits if done carelessly but entities such as Demons are so vast that they suffer no ill effects. Witchblading is best done with permission, but it is possible (though risky) to do it without the entity noticing, especially when it comes to particularly powerful entities. It's even possible that the entity notices, but simply does not care. A witchblade is always bound to a specific entity, and cannot be used to summon others. Any magic user can use the witchblade, however it may not be safe to do so without being familiar to the entity it summons. Witchblades were originally knives, as the name suggests, but in modern times a witchblade can be anything. Creating one is a difficult and dangerous process (see enchanting), and a magic user rarely has more than one. Witchblading can also in theory be done without any object at all, but has a huge risk of summoning the entire entity, for better or for worse.
Enchanting
Icarus Plock, CTO and lead enchanter of a magic item company.
Enchanting is the art of creating objects that can perform magic of their own; "magical items", if you like. An enchanted object needs to do the same thing reliably over and over again. Because of this, only wizardry is really suited for enchanting. To enchant, a wizard attaches a tiny piece of their extraplanar self to the object. This piece gives the object the power to "do magic" in a very limited sense, continually performing the same action or changing the same properties until told to stop. An enchanted object is literally a piece of the magic user who made it. The number and strength of enchantments a wizard is able to maintain is finite, and when they die all of their enchantments usually cease to function.
Enchantment is a very valuable skill in modern March Earth society, with many devices such as raybenders unable to exist without enchantment (and the wizards powering them). A wizard will always find work doing this, and magic devices are in high demand. Most wizards will also enchant one or two items for themselves as well, to use as personal tools or even accessories. Modern witchblades are usually made by wizards, but unless the wizard also uses other types of magic they are gifted or sold to summoners and witches.
Planar Visitation
A magic user from the Material Plane intentionally crossing over to another plane is known as planar visiting. Visiting is mostly done with the mind; which reveals only a subtle impression of the plane and is used by witches and summoners to contact their respective extraplanar entities. When visiting is done with one's entire awareness, the physical body disappears and one is "really there". Fully visiting another plane is very dangerous, as beings from the Material Plane aren't suited for those planes and often find the experience overwhelming to the senses and mind. A careless magic user can easily find themselves scattered like smoke in another plane, their body there a ghost of a thing compared to the native denizens. Full planar visitation in this way is rarely done, since it's not necessary and very dangerous, but it has a lot of academic value: Books and papers written by the rare few to wander other planes are precious in scientific circles. Planar visitation is also sometimes considered of spiritual value, to those who find meaning in the other planes.
Nameseeking
Witches and summoners of all types often reach out to their chosen entities by means of calling on their "name". These names can be words, but are often collections of symbolic items or themes. Witches can intuit the "name" of a Spirit by simply sensing what it represents in the Material Plane, but other entities are more complicated. A Nameseeker is a person who focuses entirely on discovering and recording these names, via such things as talking to magic users, trial and error, interacting with extraplanar entities directly, or even planar visitation. A Nameseeker needn't be a magic user, they simply need to have a passion for uncovering the hidden and collecting the known. Every summoner dabbles in nameseeking, technically, but a true Nameseeker has devoted their life to the skill. They are rare and highly prized individuals.
When performing magic, it's quite possible that unintentional side effects may occur. These vary from being totally harmless, to having centuries-long consequences.
Haloes
Dim halo of the sorcerer Shuchak.
A halo is a portion of a being's extraplanar self that is visible/perceptible to everyone, not just those who can use Witch Sight. They are usually a sign of a powerful magic user, a Dim/Shine-tinted individual, or an extraplanar entity itself. Although "halo" implies around the head (and they will very often appear there, or around the seat of consciousness), a halo can be anywhere and look like anything. Haloes are intangible and follow the same odd rules of visibility as things seen in Witch Sight. Haloes may manifest or intensify when a magic user does magic.
Spontaneous Generation
On March Earth, with its warped landscape of energies, massively powerful magic can sometimes have the same effects as planar hotspots or incursions. In rare cases, a magic user may even unintentionally create life. A bountiful surplus of Dim or Shine energy, either from the magic user or an entity they commune with, can trigger spontaneous generation. Usually this is lower life forms and creatures such as plant or invertebrate analogs, but exceptionally strong magic can even bring forth large and intelligent creatures. Sapient life is even possible, though requires incredible power and comes with weighty ethical consequences.
Historically some have been able to control spontaneous generation for their own ends, such as Niet the parasite king. In modern Infraflux this practice is illegal.
Hotspot Formation
Overwhelmingly powerful magic may sometimes reshape the layering of the planes themselves. A wizard or sorcerer's act of great power, an uncontrolled summoning, or an enchanting gone spectacularly wrong are all known ways for planar hotspots to be created. A hotspot usually lingers for at least a decade, usually more, and there are magically-created hotspots known to have been made centuries ago that still linger today. A magically-created hotspot is weaker but has all of the same traits as "naturally" generated hotspots: Heightened energy (usually Dim or Shine), influenced terrain and fauna/flora, increased chance of planar incursions, and spontaneous generation. Some magic hotspots are named and known to history, such as Half-Moon Crater in March Scotland where the sorcerer Splitter mutually annihilated his spontaneously generated double.
Balancing
Balancing is a phenomenon that can happen when an extraplanar entity appears on the Material Plane. The more powerful the entity, the greater the chance that a balancing event will occur. Balancing is when an entity of opposite (Dim/Shine) but roughly equal power manifests in proximity to the first entity. For summoners this can be incredibly dangerous, as this new, unknown entity may have no intentions of cooperating and may even start a conflict with the first entity. Contact between the two balanced entities results in huge, devastating releases of energy and may "unsummon" them both. Balancing occurs without a magic user's influence, it's purely an effect of the entity's presence on the Material Plane. Spirits generally do not cause balancing, and it is a very rare effect even for Demons and Darkbeasts. When it comes to Cold Ones and Angels, however, the chance is a significant 5% that increases with the entity's level of origin. It's not known exactly what causes balancing to happen, but it's theorised that part of the earliest events of the Cataclysm involved a runaway balancing effect, as more and more extraplanar entities visited Earth and riddled it with planar instability and hotspots.
