SORCERY Breaks down into several disciplines:

• White: healing, protection, life
• Black: disease, decay, hate, death
• Illusion: mental effects and darkness
• Fire: also light
• Air:
• Water: also cold
• Earth:

Each discipline costs 1, 2 or 4 points, for 1/4, 1/2 or full power/psyche. Nobody can master everything. White and Black Sorcery are opposed, you learn one or the other. Fire and Water, Air and Earth are opposed. So you can learn two elements, White or Black and Illusion. Elementalists are the exception: they master all the elements, but nothing else.

Teleportation: is a 4-point elemental effect and works within that element -- air to air, earth to earth, one fire to another, water to water.

Sorcery and technology can produce similar results. Differences:

• Sorcery is personal, rarely involving more than a few people to produce it's effects. High tech may involve millions of people to acquire and refine the basic materials and to produce a device.
• Sorcerous effects, spells and workings (or constructs) are one-offs and can only be used by sorcerers. Tech devices can be mass-produced and used by ordinary people with mundane training, or no training at all, sometimes.
• Sorcery can produce effects that tech usually can't, like transformation and transmutation and teleportation. The opposite is also true: sorcery stinks at generating or gathering energy, sorcery is useless for mass communication, mass transportation, etc.

CONJURATION Cost: 5-10-15-20 points (1-point effects, 2-point effects, + 1 class of 4-point effects, all 4-point effects).

Conjuration is the art of detecting, summoning and bargaining with or binding spirits. Objects do not have magical powers. Magical objects are items with empowering spirits bound into them. I also use the terms 'enchantment' or 'enchanted' for conjury and items with spirits bound into them.

Spirit types include ghosts, animal spirits, elementals (fire, air, water, earth and some odder sorts like darkness and aether) and daemons. Spirits are made of psyche and primal magics. Psychic attacks don't, technically, kill spirits; instead they disperse spirits' magic, damage their intelligence and unravel their personalities.

Spirits are usually not too bright. Most have animal-level intelligence; ghosts (especially new ghosts) and daemons are normally the most intelligent and even they tend to be pretty dumb. Conjurors can enhance spirit intelligence and can develop 'programs' to give them simple skills. More complex skills must be learned from experience and communication; highly skilled spirits are extremely valuable. Some spirits retain their enhanced intelligence even if freed.

Elementals, like other spirits, do not have bodies but can 'wear' and manipulate their element.

POWER SOURCES AND HIGH MAGIC SHADOWS Sorcerers, conjurors and spirits manipulate ambient magic. They cannot generate magic and can manipulate its flow only with great difficulty. This explains the popularity of natural magical 'hot spots' like ley lines and ley nexuses. This also explains the temptation of animal and human sacrifice; living beings are minor sources of magical energy.

Pattern and Logrus can manipulate magical flows (ley lines, etc) over the short or long term. The Adept's Mountain drew in magic from most of the continent via Logrus workings; Fiona and Random replaced them with Pattern equivalents.

High ambient magic allows a mage to do operations of great complexity as well as great power. Each sub-operation (component spell, whatever) can be done with minimal effort and time. Time is a limiting factor in anything so wispy as a magical construct.

A big factor in the eventual desolation of high-magic worlds is the tendency of big curses to become self-sustaining -- alive. Large, energetic effects will affect areas containing many spirits. Such spirits, depending on their natures and the nature of the effect, may be destroyed, unaffected or empowered. If sufficiently empowered they may merge with the effect, becoming a nuclear fireblall elemental, for instance, or a magical plague spirit or a superhurricane sylph or a willful change-wind.

PATTERN- , LOGRUS-, ETC. MAGIC Does not exist. (If it did exist it would cost something like 60 points. At least.) The best anyone can do is protect his spell, construct or enchantment with Pattern or Logrus. Or maybe Trump, though that's a lot rarer.