The Bones of Magic

All magic requires power, energy. Something cannot arise from nothing.
Invoking the name of something gives power over it. Once something has been named for the first time, that remains its true name forever.
All souls contain an essential vitality, energy, which can be used in the absence of any other power to fuel spells.
Magic must be directed by intent. Without intent, magic is just latent energy.

True names are a form of magic that supersedes all other magics.

Glimmer

Glimmer is the measure of a soul’s power. In theory, a single soul uninhibited by the limitations of a physical body could be used to cast 100 hitpoints worth of spells. It is only the frailties of a mortal body that prevent mages from casting spells much stronger and much more often than they already can.

Consuming another person’s soul will increase the maximum hitpoints of the cannibal by their victim’s Glimmer while reducing their Sanity by the same amount. Glimmer is simply the measure of how many souls worth of energy a given character has. So 1 Glimmer is equal to 1 soul, 2 Glimmer is equal to 2 souls, etcetera. Consuming a soul also immediately replenishes a character’s hitpoints back to full after eating it.

Glimmer is named such for the glow that a soul produces in the Unseen, with stronger souls being literally brighter. There are entities who can see this glow, and use it to stalk nascent mages like prey across both the Constellation of Dreams and the physical world.

When someone is alive or their soul is otherwise inhabiting a living body, their vitality will always restore to their capacity over the course of a full night's sleep. In the event that they are unable to enjoy a full night's sleep, their magic will not restore whatsoever. A character who is either projecting their soul outside of their body, or otherwise not inhabiting a living body, must find alternative means of restoring their soul

Final Death

When a character has had all the power of their soul consumed, when they are too weak to take power from others, they are essentially dead. Their souls may still be conjured, but they retain no memories past the point where they died, and they cannot take meaningful actions beyond what they are imbued with the power to do. The moment they are no longer being sustained by the power of something else, they are dead again and retain nothing of the time they were conjured.

Antimagic

Invocation

If one learns its true name, they have power over it. If one knows the true name of a source of magic, then they will be able to control the source of magic itself. That could mean simply canceling out spells they don't like, but could very well unravel the system of magic altogether.

Soulless

Characters with the soulless trait cannot use magic, unless the magic relies on a source other than their own soul to conjure or direct the energies involved.

Countering

The more common form of antimagic is countering one spell with either its inverse or block it with a spell of equal power. The only caveat is that the spells must be of equal power, and actually come into contact with one another. A clever mage can bypass a counterspell by just maneuvering around it, while a powerful mage could simply overpower it.

If a given spell deals 3d10 damage and is countered with a spell that also deals 3d10, the two spells cancel each other out. Should one of the spells deal 4d10 damage instead, that spell will be reduced to 1d10 damage and continue onto its target.

The Elements of Ayarian Magic

Ayarian Magic Lore

After the Hours created Ayaria and all its inhabitants, they desired to have Ayarians labor for them so that they could spend more time at leisure instead of maintaining the world. At first they resolved to make ageless creatures and carved up parts of the world for them to work in where time flowed far faster than the rest of Ayaria. In this way, the Hours could rest on their laurels and after a few weeks of waiting return that part of the world to the flow of time.

Sometimes, the quarantine on these work sites would be lifted and the work was not up to par, or worse, the workers were all dead or had totally forgotten their work. This method of putting their creations to work would be refined over several iterations and had a place in their civilization, notably Midasgard is reputed to have been built like this, but the Hours resolved it was not ideal for all work.

The most convenient course would also be the most perilous: just giving their creations the means of harnessing the Hours’ own magic. Even as their position as masters of the world came under challenge from the Artificers and they began to gradually drift into insanity, the Hours never gave their creations unbridled access to the magic of creation.

At the same time as this course came to debate, the first halfspawn of Hours and their creations were revealing themselves. No longer hidden by their divine parents, the realization that some of them had laid with their creations was controversial among the Hours. Still, these offspring had souls now. Weaker souls than the Hours, but souls all the same, and the Hours could use those souls to bring knowledge, technique, and fonts of power together in order to grant these nascent gods limited access to magic.

The Second Heart

The Hours granted their progeny an organ marked with the elements of power that they wanted them to be able to access. This gave them the ability to manipulate these elements and all the composite elements from which the most basic ones derived.

The Soul

Mages are limited by the power of their own souls. If the Hours had a means of accessing unlimited cosmic power, they did not grant this to their progeny.

Control

In order to effectively harness the magic, one has to control it. They must learn techniques associated with their element, with techniques that are proven to work reliably becoming spells. Trying to harness the element in a novel or uncontrolled way is possible, inevitable even, but comes at great risk.

The Elements

This form of magic is based on elements. The original mages could cast a combination of Thought, Heat, Nurture, and Death magic. Mages had absolute control over their elements, limited only by the innate power of their souls.

Eventually, these mages had children of their own. These children were less powerful, holding mastery over only a specific combination of the two elements. In order for a spell to work, all of the elements must work in harmony. So a mage with a higher element will find it trivial to unmake the spells of a lesser mage whose spells incorporate their element.

Eventually it reaches a point where some mages are so weak that they possess but a faint glimmer of their ancestors and the children of the weakest mages are born without a Second Heart at all.

Cannibalism

One way for these lesser mages to gain power is by cannibalizing the Second Hearts of mages of a higher echelon. Their Second Heart becomes the same echelon as their cannibalized victim, if their victim was of a higher order.

It is also possible to steal their Second Heart outright and fuse it to their own heart. This must either be done magically, or by a skilled surgeon. This weakens their body, but allows them to access a wider variety of magic than they would have otherwise.

Spells

Through practicing their magic and experimentation, the nascent mage is able to learn new spells to use their element. Once a mage has learned three spells of a particular order, their Second Heart grows to encompass the higher order element. Remember that to learn a spell requires a number of lessons equal to the spell's echelon. Learning a Morbiditty takes one single lesson; learning a single Death spell takes six.

Artificer Magic

In collaboration with the Hours at various points, Artificers have made their own means of casting spells. These mostly exist in the form of artifacts, but they have made artificial alternatives to the much more fleshy and gruesome magic of the Hours.

Of particular interest are the various wands and reservoirs of power that they have made. These allow the casting of spells through an innate soul, and some even act as a battery for those with a very weak soul or no soul at all to cast magic.

Ayarian Magic Mechanics

In order to cast spells, you need three things:

A Second Heart.
A soul.
An ability in the form of a spell.

Your character can have ambient magic with just two of those things, a Second Heart and a soul. The rule on ambient magic is that it can never solve a problem for the character. It can create problems or be neutral, but ambient magic can never present a solution (if there are no stakes, such as igniting a candle in their room, that’s also fine to use ambient magic for).

Becoming A Mage

Characters are either born a mage, steal an existing mage’s power, or realize their latent magic unexpectedly. Unless a character is born from two existing mages, they begin as a first echelon mage.

Casting Spells

Most of the time, a character casts spells from their own hitpoints. Spells have a cost equal to the echelon of the spell. This represents the character draining the essential vitality of their soul, and in so doing, weakening themselves. There are alternatives to casting via their own hitpoints, such as finding an artifact with its own soul they may draw from to cast spells or coercing another entity into casting for them.

The Six Echelons

Mages are arranged into echelons depending on their mastery of the magical elements. A first echelon mage is barely more useful than a mundane character at the same tasks. The power of a sixth echelon mage is mystifying to behold.

Increasing Echelon

Once a character has learned three spells in a given echelon, they move onto the higher echelon and may start learning its spells. They may only increase their echelon along the line of their previously chosen element, i.e. a sixth echelon mage who has learned their first three Morbidities cannot become a Telepath.

Additional Hearts

A character’s Second Heart determines what element they are associated with and their echelon. As their magic grows, their Second Heart literally grows in size as well. If a character has two or more of these Hearts, this begans to impact their physical health. For each additional Heart, their maximum hitpoints are reduced by the echelon of the extra Hearts.

Spells by Element

Consider these examples, and the framework by which spells should be made and balanced against each other. Each spell will go into detail on their balance considerations, so that you know the logic behind why they function the way they do.

First Echelon

Second Echelon

Third Echelon

Fourth Echelon and Higher

From the fourth echelon and upward, the power scaling starts increasing exponentially. A fourth echelon mage learns all of the spells they know of existing within their specialization, and after a spell they did not previously know about is cast in their presence, they learn that spell too. They also gain a special ability based on their specialization.

Fifth Echelon

Choose one of the two fundamental elements of their magic (Energy & Undead in the case of a Maker). This character gains the ability to cast all spells of all specializations that incorporate this element.

Sixth Echelon

The character gains total mastery of all specializations within their element. They are teetering on the edge of being unplayably powerful at this point, and if they have any grand ambitions they wish to pursue they should do so.