Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- tirades:2019-07-01 [2020/08/08 14:44] – shyriath
+++ tirades:2019-07-01 [2024/01/18 14:30] (current) – shyriath
@@ Line 7: / Line 7: @@
 There are some rules guiding the way Element magic works:
-  * While it is not understood why a child would become an elementalist at all (except that they're born to it), in the [[avishraa:community:citadel:|Citadel]] it has been observed that young elementalists appear to "latch on" to their specialty around the age of one cycle. The substance in question must be something they are being exposed to, and have the opportunity to "play" with using their magic, during this period of their lives. Children are somewhat more likely to attune to substances that surrounding adults treat as important, resulting in certain occupational and cultural slants; the child of a smith might be more likely to be able to control a kind of metal, [[avishraa:community:ǣdyihozh:start|Ǣdyihòzhis]] elementalists might be more likely to control air or water, etc. (That said, there are always some oddities - someone just happens to be exposed to something rare during childhood and winds up only being able to control that thing and never sees it again in their life. If someone in the Citadel has all the other hallmarks of a Chosen and yet can't seem to do anything magical, something like this is assumed to be behind it.)
+  * While it is not understood why a child would become an elementalist at all (except that they're born to it), in the [[geopolitical:Citadel:]] it has been observed that young elementalists appear to "latch on" to their specialty around the age of one cycle. The substance in question must be something they are being exposed to, and have the opportunity to "play" with using their magic, during this period of their lives. Children are somewhat more likely to attune to substances that surrounding adults treat as important, resulting in certain occupational and cultural slants; the child of a smith might be more likely to be able to control a kind of metal, [[ethnicity:abethine:Ǣdyihòzhis]] elementalists might be more likely to control air or water, etc. (That said, there are always some oddities - someone just happens to be exposed to something rare during childhood and winds up only being able to control that thing and never sees it again in their life. If someone in the Citadel has all the other hallmarks of a Chosen and yet can't seem to do anything magical, something like this is assumed to be behind it.)
   * Elementalists may only control matter: solids, liquids, or gases. (This does not //necessarily// exclude things like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)|plasma]] or [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutronium|neutronium]] or [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate|Bose-Einstein condensates]], but I'd like to think that the kinds of adults willing and able to expose their kids to things like that long enough to latch onto them, especially in a pre-modern society, are the kind of adults who wouldn't successfully pass on their genes anyway.)
   * The type of substance being controlled must be a "natural class": the kind of thing it is must be something that exists without sophont intervention. For example, there are no ceramics elementalists, though there are probably clay elementalists; an elementalist might be able to control a ceramic teapot, but if so it's because of what the components of the ceramic are, rather than the ceramic itself.
@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
   * Organic materials - not in the "carbon-based" sense but in the "belonging to a living or formerly-living thing" sense - are generally not subject to Element magic. This has a lot to do with their extreme complexity and heterogeneity; organisms are composed of so many little different types of things, mixed together so weirdly and all moving around, that there's nothing for an elementalist to grab onto. This applies not only to living bodies, but to things like textiles, wood, or soil, produced from organic parts or activities.
-The widely varying scope of elementalists' powers, and the fact that elementalists collectively are the most common type of Chosen, makes it hard to make broad statements about their place in the society of the Citadel. There are often mismatches between the frequency of a particular specialty and the demand for it. The Citadel has one, and only one, [[item:substance:voidstone|voidstone]] elementalist, who is not only the only inhabitant of the Citadel but possibly in the world who can easily collect and work the strange material, and who lives off the rare commissions paid to him for [[concept:empathic-sense|empathic]] shielding arrangements; by contrast, there are many gravel elementalists, who might sometimes have an opportunity to use their talents in maintaining roads and paths or drainage ditches but might well find it more profitable to take up some occupation that doesn't involve their magic at all.
+The widely varying scope of elementalists' powers, and the fact that elementalists collectively are the most common type of Chosen, makes it hard to make broad statements about their place in the society of the Citadel. There are often mismatches between the frequency of a particular specialty and the demand for it. The Citadel has one, and only one, [[item:substance:voidstone|voidstone]] elementalist, who is not only the only inhabitant of the Citadel but possibly in the world who can easily collect and work the strange material, and who lives off the rare commissions paid to him for [[concept:empathic_sense|empathic]] shielding arrangements; by contrast, there are many gravel elementalists, who might sometimes have an opportunity to use their talents in maintaining roads and paths or drainage ditches but might well find it more profitable to take up some occupation that doesn't involve their magic at all.