How magic is practiced and policed. (Light on mechanics — see the docs in Sources/ for the Spheres of Power details.)
Source
Expanded 2026-08-15 from the GM’s Magic in the Fallen World player primer (
Sources/Magic_in_the_Fallen_World_Eastern_Hazadi_Player_Primer_v5.md), written as the background Farraj, Gnaeus, and Haroun grew up with; cited(GM).
A Gift Is an Obligation (GM)
The first thing an educated Hazadi learns about magic is what having it means: a true Gift falls under the Four Keys like rulership or war. A manifested Gift must be reported and examined — a family cannot privately decide a strange power is harmless, and concealment is not protection (Duty before Passion, Faith before Family). Examination starts with a local priest and escalates, for strange or dangerous cases, through Gifted examiners and diviners up to the Order of the Eagle and, in serious cases, the Eyes. Examiners can be wrong, and everyone educated knows it — but the ruling binds anyway: what an institution has ruled and what is ultimately true are not the same thing, which is the whole intellectual legacy of the Schism.
Class changes the experience: a noble house keeps its Gifted child home with tutors; a Gifted commoner depends on Church or state patronage; Gifted elves get the closest scrutiny of all.
Also ordinary knowledge (GM): casting is normally perceptible to people nearby — concealed casting is a specialized skill, not the default — and magic is real but not ordinary: most daily life runs without it, which is why visible casting draws a crowd and then a priest.
The Three Great Traditions
Logos Magic (“Wizardry”)
Mastering the Logos, the Word of the Maker used in the making of Creation. Requires long education; casting is slow, using spoken words and gestures sketching their written forms. Skilled masters can use writing (calligraphy) or speech alone. This is the scholarly tradition — the kind studied at Al-Hakim University.
The primer adds (GM): the learned forms only work atop an innate aptitude that is itself a Gift — a scholar can master Celestial and theory for years and still be unable to cast. A competent independent practitioner is ten-plus years in the making, and the failed students become the world’s physicians, archivists, and theologians.
Channeling Magic
The Gift of connecting to a greater being and calling on its power — the greatest of blessings when the source is the Divine Maker, the greatest curse when it is something lesser. This is priestly magic. House Balventia’s house gift is divine channeling.
The primer is blunt about the doctrine (GM): lawful Channeling is Channeling from the Maker — full stop. Power channeled from Iuz, an Infernal, or any other being is corrupt regardless of how benign the effects look. A relatively common divination can determine a Channeler’s source, so the Church rarely has to guess. And critically for the Schism: the East’s approved spirit dealings are a different category of practice, not Channeling — permitting examined summoning does not mean any spirit can be a lawful source of channeled power.
Sorcery
Drawing power out of oneself by will — the most personal art, intimately tied to bloodlines and therefore the nobility. Each bloodline is its own tradition, usually marked by drawbacks like magical signs or witchmarks. Gnaeus’s Dweller in the Angles tradition (House Aurunculeia) is a sorcery of Time and Warp whose true name and source are unknown.
Named lineages on record (GM):
- The al-Rabi lineage — broad and powerful: fire, earth, air, metal, and illusion, “in a manner reminiscent of the djinn of Hazadi legend.” Individual members express it differently; Farraj’s strongest affinity is lightning.
- The Aurunculeia inheritance — rarer and stranger: movement, distance, time, force. Education for it has to be private and bespoke.
- Families also speak of non-casting “family Gifts” — inherited excellences that never produce a spell. The famous western example is the de Tarrand Skill at Arms (Charles de Tarrand, Visenne de Tarrand) — which is why Visenne outfights everyone the party has ever seen without casting anything.
Heredity is probabilistic, not promised: Gifts skip, weaken, surface in bastard lines, and Praecursor genealogies mix real patterns with centuries of flattering myth. Magical inheritance moves marriage politics without anyone saying so aloud. (GM)
Practical Limits Worth Remembering (GM)
Compressed from the primer — the constraints the party should plan around:
- Rituals are specific, guarded pieces of knowledge — property that can be inherited, traded, stolen, or lost. Possessing a written ritual is not the ability to perform it; old manuscripts assume knowledge nobody remembers. Requirements can include rare materials, exact timing, several trained participants, or a particular place.
- Persistent enchantments need a physical anchor (object, inscription, building, corpse) and everything degrades. A centuries-old working that still functions preserves lost technique no living practitioner can reproduce — do not poke it before a specialist looks. (The Kraus’s Folly circle and whatever held The Abbot both live in this category.)
- Healing is specialist and bounded: fresh wounds yes; the right specialist can beat almost any poison or infection in time; nobody regrows limbs, reverses aging, or heals years-old injuries. Magic does not scale to epidemics — which is why the plague is a civilization problem, not a cleric shortage. Resurrection: see The Faith of the Maker.
- In war, the constraint-breaker beats the fireball: the strategically important Gifts bypass walls, distance, or logistics. A revealed capability gets planned around — and its bearer becomes a target worth killing rather than ransoming in existential wars. (Gnaeus is the worked example, and the primer says so.)
- Most divination is local and specific; truly long-range divination is extraordinarily rare and its owners hide its limits. Weather Gifts are local; the battlefield-wide workings of legend are not modern capabilities.
- Magical communication is effectively unavailable — theory and stories, with no publicly known reliable practitioner; courts and armies plan around riders, ships, and the occasional pigeon. Whether anyone secretly has it is unanswerable at the educated-public level. (Knowledge & Technology primer)
- Alchemy splits in two: ordinary alchemy is a craft requiring no Gift; True Alchemy requires a Gift and its practitioners are almost universally Logos casters. See Knowledge and Technology — and note nobody has said which kind Ari’s is.
Ritual Magic (S6)
A distinct kind of working, named for the party by Ismad:
- Ritual Magic comes in two flavors: Divine and Logos.
- There is no sorcerous version. Sorcery is drawn out of the self and tied to bloodlines; ritual is not something a bloodline can do.
- The teleportation circle at Kraus’s Folly is almost certainly a manifestation of it — and Ismad rates that circle “a huge deal.” It matches: Warp sphere, Logos, strong, runes in Celestial (S4).
Why this matters. It narrows the suspect list enormously. Anyone who built that circle is a trained Logos scholar or a Blessed channeler — not a hedge-wizard, not a noble with a family gift. Uncle’s Men named a candidate: Amalricht von-Haup, court magician to House Bethlen and later to Matthias Melnich. See The Lord of Kraus’s Folly.
Speculation
Benedicto Malipiero “mastered both the divine and the logos arts.” (S6) That is precisely the pair Ritual Magic comes in, and no more. A man who commands both is a man who can write rituals no single-tradition practitioner could — which is a fair description of a book that promises Celestials and delivers demons. Nothing links him to the Folly. It is worth noting that his skill set is the exact shape of the hole.
Forbidden Magic
Under the Faith of the Maker, certain spheres of magic are considered Gifts of the Deceiver: Alteration, Blood, Dark, and Death — plus many corrupted talents within Illusion, Mind, Nature, and Weather.
Key political nuance: the Eastern Church permits certain magic the Western Church calls inherently Corrupted (e.g. summoning), so long as clergy have examined it and found no taint. This doctrinal split is one of the two irreconcilable differences between the churches.
A worked example (S6): Isabel d’Allais’s gift of beasts is considered heretical in the West and not heretical by the Eastern Church — confirmed to the party by Sister Alia (GM). Her father, the Order of the Owl’s last commander, spent his order’s final mission moving her across the Circle Sea on exactly that calculation. The schism is not an abstraction; people arrange their children’s lives around it.
Priests of the Maker cannot use magic relating to the “natural world,” though it isn’t inherently corrupt for others.
For the party
Gnaeus’s spheres include Time, Warp, and access to Dark — the last is a Deceiver sphere. And Ari’s blood alchemy skirts very dangerous territory. Discretion is survival.