ON THE USAGE OF MAGIC: Note first that the five-colored Wizardly school of magic is only one means of manipulating the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash, or WSOGMM, that underlies all of reality. All sorts of other magical and pseudomagical disciplines exist, such as: Witches (which don't need spells, but whose magic comes directly from their stamina), Thaumaturgists (which attempt to adapt already-existing magical constructs to do their bidding), Che'tai (which can call on a mysterious "force" to perform amazing physical feats), Sorcerors (which use magical artifacts to manipulate the WSOGMM as a diver uses fins), Jordanites (which "weave" elemental "flows" to produce powerful effects, but have a tendency to go insane), Warlocks (whose powers all stem from an extremely flexible psychokinetic/ esperic mental ability), Psionicists, Illusionists, Herbalists, Charlatans, Necromancers, Artificers, et cetera. The only conspicuously absent group is that of the Demonologists: It's technically illegal to attempt contact with extraplanar entities, but that's not so much of a deterrent as the fact that it's just plain stupid. Clerics and Priests also work somewhat less traditionally than the average Amulet User may expect. (See THEOLOGY.TXT for details on both of these fields...) However, Wizardry has dominated all of these for simple reasons of economics. Becoming adept in most of these fields requires finding a master willing to saddle himself with an apprentice for ten to twenty years, receiving no pay, after which the apprentice sets up shop in the same village as his master and begins to compete with him for customers. Wizards, on the other hand, learn quickly, and more importantly, are entirely self-taught in most cases. Even master wizards have the strong incentive to create and sell spellbooks, thus propagating the trade; and books of magic are high-profit, low-bulk items, frequently carried by merchants to all corners of the globe. Thus Wizardry is the most popular by far of the magical disciplines. Wizardry was originally designed with simplicity in mind: all basic spells were elementary manipulations of the WSOGMM, and even advanced spells were merely combinations of simpler ones. Wizardry started out as a way to throw energy around: Red threw heat, Green threw life-energy, White fashioned protective fields, Blue threw various magical probes, and Black attacked the mind and body. No creating-matter-from-energy or telepathic connections were involved. As wizardry became popular, though, and more and more wizards started creating spells, the original meanings of the colors have distorted slightly, as wizards found ways to *twist* the elemental forces into duplicating effects from other disciplines. Thus wizardry today includes a little of almost every field, and its boundaries are still expanding. WHITE MAGIC: "The best offense is a really, really good defense." -"Fwiffo", white magician The "warm and fuzzy" practitioners of white magic are devoted to protection and healing, with a little undead-smiting thrown in on the side. White mages are the most popular sort in small villages, though green mages are also well-known. White offers comparatively cheap Healing, and it's the best way to remove magical curses and the like. Many frontier villages will pay a white mage to maintain a ward around the entire village for protection against the creatures of the wilderness. White magic is somewhat less useful in dungeon exploration, since a Green mage is a more capable healer of those that wear the Amulets, and adventurers greatly prefer to obliterate their foes with Red than to hold them at bay with White. White's saving grace is its Sealing spells, which can block lesser monsters from pursuing the party as it flees or prevent them from attacking it from behind. GREEN MAGIC: "I think chlorophyll green is a *perfectly* acceptable hair color!" -Hououji Foo, green magical knight Green mages are extremely popular in dungeons for their ability to quickly restore stamina. Many adventurers use some variant of the "Hitte Pointes" field the Amulets provide, meaning that attacks against them will directly drain their stamina and life-force but will not physically harm them. Green, the magic of life, growth, and energy, has the perfect spells to restore this stamina. Green mages have several other useful tricks; they can improve their comrades' strength or endurance with temporary charms, or they can grant life to minions of their own to fight for them. Outside of the dungeon, green mages are consulted for charms and trinkets of all sorts, and they frequently are paid to enchant a farmer's crops or livestock to grow more quickly or hardily. BLUE MAGIC: "It's not that we can't deal with gravity, it's just that there's so !@^# MUCH of it..." -Anonymous blue mage Blue mages deal with meta-magic, or, more properly, with meta-WSOGMM; they attempt to manipulate all the natural forces, including magic, gravity, magnetism, and planar forces. Blue mages occasionally toy with psionics, but without much success, as they keep trying to find a "psionic ether" to manipulate, a concept most Psionicists find laughable. Blue mages have also had little success with gravity; see "FLIGHT.TXT" for details on this tricky subject. More success has been had with magnetism, but it is in manipulating the planes that blue mages really shine. Teleportation is relatively easy for them (though, alas, something about the dynamic nature of the Dungeons makes teleporting within them unwise), and extraplanar excursions are fairly routine for them. The trick of creating extradimensional storage spaces was mastered long ago, and even many rich schoolchildren wear Backpacks of Holding. Colonies have not been started on other planes, but only, it is said, because people have enough to handle keeping their current lands under control. Blue mages are very useful in the Dungeon, as a surprising number of its inhabitants, and nearly all of its traps and hazards, are magical in some manner. Blue mages have access to all sorts of Identify, Trigger, and Dispel magics, and it is said that Blue is the only way to go in mage-to-mage combat. (Actually, this isn't entirely correct. A Blue mage can feed a Red mage on his own fire, and a Red mage can burn a Green one into ashes, but a meta-magician is helpless against the right sort of magical Green creature. Fortunately, it tends not to come to this, as no mage will venture deep into the dungeon without some warriors to protect him.) Blue mages have also made detailed study *of* the Dungeon; see DUNGEON.TXT for more information. RED MAGIC: "Violence may not be the only answer, but it usually negates the question." -Daigouji Gai, red mage Unlike many of the other schools of magic, Red mages have always had a very narrow focus: Destruction. Outside the dungeon, they are sometimes used in construction work or as guards or assassins, but, oddly enough, they are seldom employed in large battles. On the whole, strategists have found, it's far cheaper to employ counter-measures against magic than it is to employ magic itself. It's difficult for a Red mage to find a job, and due to the peculiar mindset which so many of them seem to possess, it's also not easy for them to keep one. Thus it is little surprise that so many pure Red mages are found adventuring or bounty-hunting, frequently in the Dungeon. And Red is a potent force indeed; even low-level Red mages can slay orcs and goblins from afar, and advanced ones can slay almost anything with a well-placed Doom Bolt or Blowtorch Hands. BLACK MAGIC: "Inside every living person is a dead person waiting to get out!" -DarkOne8888@evil.bad-is-good.rel Practitioners of Black magic are a secretive lot, so very little is known about their powers. "Evil" and "Good" are not well-defined forces, so Black magic isn't necessarily the same as evil magic (see MAGIC2.TXT for musings on the effect of magic on the practitioner), but there does seem to be a lot of death and decay associated with the art, and its practitioners do have an extraordinary tendency to go 'round the bend. Black seems to combine more easily with other colors than most, producing unique and usually very effective hybrid spells. (See FLIGHT.TXT for a particularly nasty example...) If you want to use Black magic, contact me privately. COMBINING MAGIC: "A White/Red wizard is a Pink Mage... But don't call him that to his face." Many magicians, especially dungeon adventurers, prefer to diversify among many schools rather than concentrate on one. The merging of different disciplines frequently creates new spells, though these spells are much rarer than mono-color spells due to the smaller pool of practitioners. A user of multiple magic types is able to put all of his strength into either type separately, but is usually not as powerful as one who concentrates on one type.