(UA) The Problem With Magick

[Stacy Stroud]

>Markleford Friedman writes:
>> But what about other schools?  Without a "videotape grail", or a patron
>> Ascendant to follow, other schools would see a mindboggling variance between
>> practitioners.  One reason for my problem here is that there is no
>> cosmological support behind these schools: there's no "patron god" or
>> "primal element/force" behind them.
>
>That's an interesting contention.  I'd actually been thinking that
>every magick school is defined by one of the archetypes.  Pornomancers
>are the obvious one, but I can easily imagine The Sot, The Historian,
>The Daredevil, and so on.  And if this is the case, things start to
>suddenly make a lot more sense...

Indeed.  But we don't have the full story yet.

Dirk Allen's street-level city description does state that "old-school"
magic went away and the new stuff came along just because the Clergy wanted
it that way.  But that's just Dirk's opinion, and has been contradicted by
theories presented by the authors themselves on this list (e.g., that the
old schools are like dead languages with no more "native" speakers, and
(post)modern folk have too much trouble wrapping their minds around ancient
or medieval viewpoints to bother trying to study those "languages" when
there's hot new slang available as well).  Also, the section on creating
new schools of magick implies that anyone can latch onto a new pathway to
power just by being weird and obsessive enough, with no founding archetype
required.  (Though maybe the first person to do that *becomes* the founding
archetype rather than a mere magician.  Who knows?)

>> I believe that the 7 provided schools should have presented merely as
>> examples, rather than "this is the state of magick in the world today".

[snip]

>This is certainly how I thought of them -- examples.


Me too, but again there's information supporting contradictory viewpoints
on this one.  The ease of creating new schools implies that the given
schools should just be seven out of many.  But the description of clueless
cabals, for example, indicates that they do not practice "any of the known
schools of magic."  If any weirdo can found his very own school of magic,
why would the underground even bother talking about "known" schools?  There
would be just as much chance that the next duke you meet is a cinemancer or
a velomancer or even a funny-feathered-hats-mancer as there is that he's an
adept of one of the rulebook's seven schools.

So there is some indication that the given seven are *the* dominant schools
at present.  Again, that's something that could stand to be clarified.


Stacy Stroud
sstroud at uky.campuscwix.net