Editing Dominions (section)

===The Paths===
====Fire====
What does it sound like? Mainly oriented around flinging hot stuff at enemies, it's one of the premier paths for battlemages. Heat nations like Abysia benefit from the battlefield wide spells like Heat from Hell and Fire Storm which fucks everyone without fire resistance. It is usually considered the worst path, since it isn't very flexible unless mixed with other paths. However, it has nice synergy with archer-focused nations at higher research levels, it turns even crappiest casters into living artillery platform, and it absolutely decimates even the largest human armies. If your enemy is Abysia though, well...fuck it.

Every level makes the wielder more powerful in leadership and fire resistance but also reduces the wielder's lifespan by a few years.

====Water====
Water is flexibility oriented rather than being straight up magic [[Dakka]]. Often called the weakest path due to the fact that many of its spells are only effective underwater or are completely uncastable unless beneath the waves. It does offer some pretty good ice based battle spells. When taken on your pretender god, it provides great buffs for sacreds, and make its wielder more able to block melee attacks. If you're playing a cold nation, then spells like Murdering Winter, Niefel Flames, and Living Water (water elementals become ice elementals in colder environments) can trash unprepared armies pretty well. You can also UNLEASH THE KRAKEN, or summon a Troll King and his bodyguards who can swim in oceans, which in turn can summon more Troll Kings, resulting in a swarm of amphibian coral spear wielding, regenerating trolls ''who don't need food'' that can take every oceanic territory and can pop up out of nowhere, so good luck landfags.

====Air====
Air focuses on zapping fools with lightning and breaking minds with illusions, resisting lightning and flying around like a jet. Air battle magic is extremely powerful largely do to 3 spells, storm, storm power, and thunder strike. Storm completely ruins projectile accuracy and allows the casting of storm power, a self-buff that boosts air magic by 1, allowing air 2 mages to spam the otherwise hard to cast air 3 thunder strike. Call of the Winds is an incredibly annoying spell that sends a flock of giant birds to harass provinces. Spamming it in an enemy empire's tender, undefended provinces can [[Troll|snag his entire lands in a single turn.]]

====Earth====
Flying boulders and sharp blades when it comes to battle. Most notably known for having the best when it comes to forging and construction. You can also summon tons of trolls, just like the Troll King of Water Path. It is a premier battle magic path with amazing buffs and is powerful when mixed with fire since they have devastating magma spells. Each level makes the wielder's skin tougher by one damage resistance, which is extra nice on XBOXHUEG pretender gods that can just stand there looking at enemy troops squirming around, trying to find a gap in the armour (and RNGesus tells us it will happen, because exploding dice and Magic Duel shenanigans). Also home for the most of armour increasing and decreasing spells out there, so if you want to see enemy army get naked, covered in rust, you go earth.

====Nature====
Revolves mainly around summoning big dudes (or many little dudes) that can take tons of damage, and then berserking and buffing the mofos. You can also summon tarrasques, and if you really want, [[Emprahsque|you can make them tarrasque wizards with magic items on their bodies]]. Best part is every level of nature magic makes your caster feed 10 human sized units by sheer existence. Moreover, forging magical limitless wineskins, soup cauldrons and magical food swords make you support entire armies without draining territory supplies, fuck logistics and march through lifeless deserts to fuck your enemy's territories who thought they were safe. A crowning achievment of trolling is The Kindly Ones, who are three supercombatant women from Greek Mythology. Anyone who sacrificed a girl or is a blood mage will have to roll for [[Anal Circumference]] per month until someone kills them in nightly duels or dispels the spell. For even more trolling, cast Wild Hunt, a spell that causes the master of the fucking Wild Hunt (ie. the Horned God) and his minions to appear out of thin air and start assasinating enemy priests world wide!

====Death====
[[Zombie]]s, [[skeleton]]s, disease, rot, spooky scary faggotry. Pretty much what you think [[necromancer]]s are, sans the obligatory evil flavor. Some of the wielders are actually "good" like C'tis necromancers or enchantments that drain all the pain in the world, make everyone happy and give you free death gems, or practical like Late Age Agartha's necromancers which use them for domestic labor. It sees most use in hands of middle age Ermor and late age Lemuria, who use it omnicidally against the living. Spells mainly revolve around summoning undead creatures, manipulating the "corpse" resources in a territory, and if you feel evil, making the living die in mass numbers or draining life out of enemies... Is probably the second most powerful path after blood, especially in the late game, due to its ability to summon immortal Not!Ringwraiths and liches, and as endgame units, *bugfuck insane* imprisoned Titans that will make enemies bite the pillow. 

For every level in Death Magic for a commander, chances to get sickness and afflictions in old age is reduced, making the character a wizened old man who still looks spry and maliciously strong. Pass level 5 and the wielder scares approaching enemies into running away.

Speaking of neutral morality regarding death magic, it has a mundane spell to handle the dead like sending crows to eat dead bodies, turning the crows into death gems when fattened and keeping the territory plague free. Nifty, huh?

====Astral====
The "first" magic, and where you get all the smart technical spells like communions and luck, and artifacts that simply make specific actions more efficient. Mainly based around mind control and debuffs/buffs. Astral magic most often directly attacks the enemies magic resistance, ignoring armor entirely. Spells like Soul Slay and Magic Duel can be instant death to a single target. The true power comes from the super strong rituals like Wish, Acashic Knowledge (reveals all magic sites in a province), Gateway (mass teleport) Arcane Nexus (you get a fraction of all gems used to cast all spells), and Mind Hunt (assassination spell) are the big game changers. Best part is, however that Astral masters can easily forge magic crowns and sticks to supplement leadership and inspiration value of commanders, turning your shy, asocial platoon leader into a reincarnation of [[Creed]] that can lead magical beings by sheer force of will. Or forge a sacred linen that grants the wearer blessings of your god's powers even if he wasn't sacred to begin with. Yes, it works on giants, have fun speeding up ettins. While astral is reasonably powerful on its own, where it really shines is when combined with another path, since even one level of astral enables the mage to use the Communion spell to combine their power. Even a weak earth/astral mage, for example, when backed up by a large enough communion, can start dropping comets from the sky on enemy armies mid-battle.

====Blood====
Unusual as you don't require gems, but rather female virgins. Virgins can be found anywhere (more above 5000 population territories) as long as you got guys hunting for them. Since your people don't really see eye to eye with their daughters getting rounded up and sacrificed to infernal forces, you have to know how to juggle unrest and hunting, so your income doesn't go down the drain. Blood spells are all in the Blood school, so you don't have to split up your research for it, which is useful considering it's a massive investment. Blood can do a bit of everything. It can heal and it can hurt. But its speciality is summoning demons, which are pretty beefy and cheap. Rain of Toads is also a good spell to completely fuck someone's income and recruitment in their most productive provinces. Claws of Kokytos/Infernal Prison will send someone straight to hell, where they have a 99% chance of not surviving. And that's without mentioning you can poison the arcana with horrors from [[Shadowrun|Earthdawn]] setting, or summon gigantic demon lords that can [[Khorne|steamroll entire armies]], [[Slaanesh|seduce people to give their virgin daughters for free]], [[Tzeentch|cast unspeakable spells from a flail]] or [[Nurgle|kill thousands per night with diseases]]. Widely agreed to be the most powerful path in the game, especially in the late game, thanks to the fact that you can gather blood slaves everywhere with good population while other paths rely on non-growing specific areas on the map. When combined with death, it gets especially powerful, thanks to the ability to summon endlessly respawning vampire lords. An attempt at balance is made: artificially increasing blood magic skill, a gimmick known as "blood bootstrapping" now damns your spell casters who go through sacrificial girls like popcorn and will very likely attract Horrors every turn. This "feature" is not mentioned in game, so [[FAIL|if you empower your God with virgin blood...]]