The flow of life through the fragments is a religious doctrine in some, and undeniable by the rest. Many is the shaman who takes credit for the easing of the pain of the sufferer of some terrible disease, or the revitalization of a Farmer's crops, all through entreating the spirits of the land. In other clans an agricultural reformer may think that gibberish and instead increase productivity using fertilizer, but that doesn't mean the ingredients of the fertilizer don't include the hair of a virgin cut at midnight. In other words, no matter your background you would have some form of lore about the circle of life and how to affect it in some way, even though your explanation for why it works might be wildly different.

When you create a character with the Shaman trait, depending on your character's background (scientific, shamistic, religious etc), you will know a set of appropriate rituals. Rituals can be learnt by anyone, regardless of whether or not they possess the Shaman quirk, but it is a prerequisite to cast a ritual (players without the quirk may assist in the casting, but may not initiate it themselves) and to teach rituals.

In this branch of magic you will be having effects on the natural world through application of careful rituals (your 'science'). The flavour of this magic will vary greatly from player to player, and will fit your character concept. For example, a shaman-type character may wave some crystals, smoke some herbs, and ask the spirits to make crops grow better, whereas a more technological type of character might spread a fertilizer over his crops, into which has been crushed the skull of a month-old badger.

Here are things you can expect to use Life Magic for:

• Make crops grow better
• Help the sick to heal
• Make someone more resistant to disease
• Liquefy ground to make it easier to remove
• Purify ore

More powerful spirit mages can expect to:

• Change existing creatures by reshaping their bodies
• Make plants flourish from barren soil
• Create entirely new alloys with hitherto unseen properties

Progress in the Magic of Life involves designing and casting new rituals, finding out why things happen the way they do and controlling the very stuff of life itself.

Life magic is broken down into three schools, each governing an aspect of life in the Broken World:

• Soil and Stone is the School of the earth, it focuses on fertility, mining, construction.
• Blood and Bone is the School of animals and humans, healing them, sickening them, helping them or hurting them, making them stronger, faster, bigger.
• Wood and Leaf is the School of control over trees and plants, the ecosystem of the wild areas, and the primal intelligence of the deep forest.

Your character will have different levels in each of these schools. The level symbolises how much control you have over that facet of living things, and the complexity and magnitude of actions you can perform. In order to increase your rank in a school you will have to spend 5 AP's worth of effort getting to understand that element of life better; this could be sitting in a woody glade every day for a long time, getting your hands dirty in a mine, reading books on the subject or getting someone to teach you.

Before learning a new level in any school, you must successfully cast a Ritual at your current level.

At game start, if you take the Shaman quirk, you may have level 1 in two of the 3 schools, knowing the bottom rank of the rituals for those two schools

Each school has its own rituals. As your knowledge of a school progresses you will be able to learn bigger and better rituals.

The length it takes to cast a ritual is directly related to the complexity of the Ritual: the simplest rituals might take a few moments or hours, while the more complex ones may take weeks, or months. Other players can assist in the act, provided they know the ritual (they do not need to have Shaman, but an amount of AP will have to be spent by both the teacher and student to learn a ritual. This number is equivalent to the level of the ritual). Casting a ritual properly will require an appropriate amount of AP going into the action (a good rule would be a number of AP equal to the level of the ritual). Cantrips can be performed as a housekeeping action.

If no ritual does what you want, feel free to email me with ideas/questions/suggestions/money.

Cantrips are rituals that anyone with Shaman knows how to perform. They do not belong to any one school in particular.

These include:

Delving allows you to find out the health of a living thing, such as a tree of a person, whether it is healthy, ill, dying, poisoned, etc…

Delving can also be used to detect the composition of inanimate objects. It can be used to find veins of mineable material out to a range of a few feet.

Tracing allows you to know the direction and general distance of a person you have met in the past, as long as they are within appropriate range.

Cauterise allows you to close minor wounds and prevent infection. The wound be very raw, but will stop bleeding, but will reopen if strained. Will not work on magical wounds and will not restore a severed limb.

Flowing allows you to alter the flow of a small amount of water. With it you can part streams, evaporate pools, dry yourself off…

The origins of this ritual are lost in time. All cultures seem to practise some form of it, and while the details vary wildly, the sacrifice remains the same throughout the Broken World. Union is carried out when two people elect to spend the rest of their lives together. Many cultures have different theories on what precisely is achieved by this. Some say that it sanctifies the union in the eyes of the gods, others say that the two people are now bound to each other heart and soul.

School of Blood and Bone

School of Wood and Leaf

School of Soil and Stone