Editing The Dresden Files RPG (section)

===Types of Magic===

This is simultaneously the simplest and most complicated part of the Dresden Files universe. Magic is basically the ability to move around energy with your will.

There are basically two types of magic; evocation and thaumaturgy. Evocation is the directing and calling of forces at an instants notice, and Thaumaturgy is ritualistic magic that requires the caster to jump through hoops, taking anywhere from a minute to a day to cast. There's a crapton of overlap though. For example: you can use thaumaturgic links and rituals to supercharge evocation spells.

The problem being there is no one way to cast magic; as magic is an exercise of will, belief is important in its use. Don't misunderstand, you can't just Believe yourself into being a powerful wizard, but if you don't Believe in your ability to use magic, you can't use it. As such, how you learn magic will affect how you practice it, and it'll be hard to change once it's learned. For example, if you were taught that magic comes from the gods, you're going to have a hard time changing that belief, because you've spent years of your life deliberately reinforcing that belief within yourself and watching that Belief shape the world around you. However, magic is often practiced more as a science than an art (it's implied that this is becoming increasingly common in the post-enlightenment world), an exercise in using quantifiable inputs to get quantifiable outputs. If this seems confusing or contradictory, good. Magic is shaped by mortal will, and mortals are a fractious and contradictory lot. 

Every practitioner is unique in what they need to help them use magic. You don't really '''need''' anything, but again, Belief and Will and whatnot. There's also a certain practicality to using tools in magic, just as there is in any other endevour. If you prepare an item for casting by investing it with conduits and energy (such an item is called a focus, foci plural) can save you the effort of having to craft that part of the spell in your head. For example, Harry's blasting rod is designed to shape energy into contained blasts and lances, so that instead of carefully forming the energy and shape of a strike, he can just slam some energy through his blasting rod and it'll come out in roughly the right shape. Most wizards will have at least a few foci that they use for evocation (if they study evocation, most don't. After all, how many people do you know who learn martial arts or marksmanship? Most people just don't need combat skills in their day to day life), and potentially hundreds of various ritual items they'll use in thaumaturgy. Harry uses a staff, a rod, and his silver bracelet and necklace (kindly ignore biblical parallels). Carlos Ramirez uses a gauntlet and a staff(later a cane). An asian wizard might use the trappings of an Onmyogi. A rebelious or non-traditional caster might use things like a chain or a violin bow based on how they view their magic an the sort of things they cast. Foci aren't mandatory for the use of magic, after all, magic comes from you manipulating your environment, but a foci will always help. Think of it this way: it doesn't matter how strong you are, it's always going to be easier to pound in nails if you have a hammer. 

It's also been said that controlling magic is something that all humans can do; what determines your ability as a practitioner is how developed your magical "senses" are and how easy you find it to channel large amounts of energy. Harry once compared a mortal learning magic to a blind man learning to paint. The basics are well within their reach (any mortal can establish a magical circle, for example), but truly complex or masterful renderings are beyond the reach of most. There's also the factor of time: even though a wizard can manipulate energy around them, they're leaning to move things that they have no point of reference for. You know how little kids are constantly falling over and tripping until they're ten or so? That's because it took them that long to really master using their bodies. Now try to imagine how long it would take a person to master moving something that isn't connected to their brain or nerves. It takes a decade to learn how to run without falling over, now imagine how long it takes to control a cloud of white-hot plasma exploding outward from your hand at supersonic speeds. I'm just saying, there's a reason that young wardens tend to rely just as much on guns and swords as they do magic. 

It's also worthy of note that magic will still conform to the laws of physics; if you throw a fireball, you have to put energy into the spell to prevent the heat from expanding and the fireball from dissipating(which, ironically, may mean freezing your surroundings to get the needed thermal energy). Essentially, if you want the most bang for your buck, create an interpretation of magic that relies less on belief and more on physics to achieve the desired effect. You need a lot of energy to pull off most evocations, so of you're cut off from accessing energy in your environment, you're limited to the chemical energy output of your body, which means you won't be throwing around any fireballs or lightning blasts(technically you ''can'', but it requires some foresight and cleverness. Really, it's usually easier to just bring a flamethrower). This is why more experienced practitioners almost always beat less experienced ones in duels: the amount of energy in their environment is the same, but the more experienced practitioner knows how to control that energy more effectively and use less space in a smaller area to greater affect. God help us all if a wizard ever takes a physics course realizes he can manipulate relative time the same way you manipulate force and gravity. I think it's indicative of how magic works that the Sidhe, beings to whom magic is a fundamental part of their everyday lives, call mortal technology "ferromancy", or the manipulation of Iron. They see magical constructs as no different from physical items. Magic isn't some self aware mystical power, it's a quantifiable force you can study and map out; humans are what makes it complicated. 

All this said, here are a couple of breakdowns of each "discipline" of magic. These schools are not set in stone; depending on the interpretation there may be a significant amount of overlap. For example, Harry views Ice and Fire magic as basically the same, it's just moving around heat energy. Due to the ongoing changes in lore/Harry's understanding of magic, and the occasional retcon, there's a ''ton'' of overlap here. We've seen mental magic associated with Air, Water, Fire, and Spirit at various times throughout the series. We've seen change associated with all elements except earth. Also worthy of note is that kinetomancy may or may not directly equate to Will. Increasingly as the series moves on we see many beings and even Harry himself exerting their will as pure kinetic force, with no spell casting involved. This is fitting, as all other schools follow the classic greek elements and prefixes, so ot makes sense for kinetomancy to have an aspect as the fifth greek classical element, the spirit.

====Evocation====

Evocation, or quick and dirty Ka-Boom magic, is the most commonly found battle magic, and most practitioners in the books follow the ancient Greek philosophy of the classical elements when working such spells. It's not all that complex in what you can do with it, which is the province of Thaumaturgy and its infinitely variable rituals and complexities. A simple definition is: you willed it, it became true. The "schools" below are just the most common and they encompass far more than manipulating the specific "element", the elements are just symbolic placeholder names for the overall systems. As you can see, there's a lot of overlap. It's simultaneously easier to grasp than thaumaturgy, but more dangerous to practice. Throwing out a big explosion of heat and energy isn't hard; it's one of the simpler things you can do with magic. Doing it ''without'' blowing your own hand off, or setting everything around you on fire, or killing yourself from the concussive force of the spell's heat displacing air? Yeah, that's a bit harder.

*Aeromancy (Air): Speed, cold, mind, lack of physical substance, electricity, weather, mutability, life, spring.

*Geomancy (Earth): Stability, gravity, magnetism, nullification, power, immutability, stasis, death, autumn.

*Hydromancy (Water): Probability, entropy, mutability, healing, nullification, cleansing, dissipation, darkness,  winter.

*Pyromancy (Fire): Thermodynamics, change, cleansing, creating or removing heat, light, death rays, warmth, the sun, explosions, summer.

*Kinetomancy (Kinetic energy): Pure kinetic force, speed, strength, pure energy, barriers, nullification, telekinesis, movement

====Thaumaturgy====
Thaumaturgy is mostly ritual based, you can use it to create links between things and use those links to transfer energy. A lot of thaumaturgy can be accomplished without rituals though, rituals just help by providing symbolic form to the connections you are making, a "dotted line" for you to trace the flow of the energy. You can do some of the below on the fly, but it generally requires more mental effort on the part of the caster, you have to substitute rituals and their required materials by mentally making the connections and links.

*Summoning: Calling living beings, be they natural or supernatural)

*Conjuration: Different from summoning as it is about the object rather than an entity. SEMANTICS HO!

*Necromancy: Using magic to directly manipulate life, death, and the soul. Naturally has a ton of overlap with biomancy, healing, and ectomancy. Can do everything from raising the dead to saving lives by binding their souls to their body so they ''can't'' die. Can become '''crazy overpowered''' in the right hands (read: Kemmler).

*Ectomancy: the council-approved version of Necromancy, more about communicating with or binding ghosts than controlling them. Can also pull ghosts into yourself to see their memories and use their skills.

*Probability magic: Using magic to influence probability. Duh.
**Entropomancy/Fortunamancy: The of mucking about with probability to influence luck. Can cause anything from slipping on a crack to finding a 20 on the sidewalk to suddenly having an improbable number of electrons flying free from the  atoms that make up your body, turning you into a cloud of radioactive dust. Theoretically this should be '''absolutely, horrifyingly, incomprehensibly complicated''', because there's really no way to quantify as a force what is good or bad for you. Entropy is easy, stasis is easy, but reversing entropy or trying to quantify good and bad outcomes relative to probability? How the fuck do you write an equation for good or bad outcomes? We never see it used in a beneficial manner in the series, and I'd guess that's because the second law of thermodynamics is a hard thing to argue with.
**Hexing: Mortal practitioners have an effect on the world around them which has changed throughout the ages, in the current day Wizard's have a deletrious effect on nearby technology. Hexing is the magic of specifically using this tech-bane to a much greater degree. Can quite literally make computers explode or cause cars to tear themselves apart. This magic isn't so much straight up entropomancy as it is a natural ability of all wizards rather than a particular style of magic. There are plenty of theories about why it happens in universe, but none of them have proof. Oh, and wizards are always doing this to a certain extent. They can ramp it up if they want, or target a specific thing, but machines will always fail faster around a wizard. 

*Divination: Using magic to attempt looking at the future, past, or some other location in the present. Comes in many flavors.
**Anthropomancy: The art of divining the future in the entrails of a corpse, often fresh. Unsurprisingly illegal as it involves murder.
**Sympathetic Tracking: Using a piece of somebody (fresh hair, blood, toe nail clippings) or something (Paint chips, metal shards, a paired ring) to track them. One of the most common methods of divination, and easy enough that even non-practitioners can do it with a lot of patience and a good teacher.
**Resonant Divination: Much more like a magical telephone than anything else, this is the magical version of Quantum Entanglement, which allows for simple, long distance communication.

*Holomancy: Manipulating light to create 'solid' illusions. Distinguished from veils in that they are a physical effect on the environment, not just an image projected into your mind. Presumably you could take a picture of a holomancy imagine, but not a veil. 

*Biomancy: Healing and shapeshifting, can also be used to supercharge the physical body, but doing so comes with great risk. Just because you pump enough energy into your muscles to throw your fridge through a wall doesn't mean your ligaments or bones can take that weight, so people who do this without '''extensive''' practice and preparation tend to tear their bodies apart to a greater or lesser degree.

*Mind Magic
**Neuromancy: Magic that directly interacts with the brain or nervous system. This is the sort of magic that allows you to overclock your brain to amp up reaction speeds or thinking processes, but the backlash is unbelievable. You can also activate people's pain receptors in combat, making them feel like you did when you broke you leg.
**Psychomancy: Magic that interacts with the mind, soul, psyche, or memories. Very illegal, do not do this at home, or in public, or anywhere. As a note it is not illegal to use psychomancy on non-humans, but because of the way that non-human entities minds work enjoy your never-ending acid trip from the comfort of your new padded room with the fancy white jacket. Psychomancy differs from other types of mind magic in that you're altering the psyche on a long term basis. Removing/creating memories, turning people into thralls, reading unwilling minds. There's a healthy amount of leeway when it comes to healing psychic trauma though, especially if it was inflicted by magic, so ironically there are actually plenty competent psychomancers in the White Council, including the Gatekeeper and Listens to Wind.
***Thralls: humans who have had their Free Will subverted by psychomancy
****Fine Thralls: think "manchurian candidate", a fine thrall's mind has been tampered with in such a way that the thrall is left unaware of the tampering. Either their behavior is altered without them knowing it, or they perform certain actions when triggers activate their programming. The condition is curable.
****Rough Thralls: Rough Thralls just stand around awaiting orders. They can perform basic tasks and follow orders, but they have no initiative or true awareness of their situation. A Rough Thrall will carry out orders and think of absolutely nothing else, that means that it can't think creatively or critically when faced with an unexpected problem. The condition is curable in some cases but can be permanently damaging.
****Renfields: Black Court's special thralls created through overpowering mortal minds with sheer power and torture. Basically dead men walking. They're not good for anything other than excessive violence or very simple tasks. Incurable without exceptions, a Renfield will commit suicide after a few months of being created.
**Veils/Illusions: Making it so that people receive false sensory input or suggestions, so they either see nothing or don't notice you. Typically doesn't break the Laws.
**Oneiromancy: Dream Magic, this breed of magic blends with Psychomancy to a rather uncomfortable degree, when used to implant nightmares, or other subliminal commands, however it is also used for communication. Arguably Harry himself uses it subconsciously himself when talking to Id-Harry as he only talks to Id-Harry when asleep..

*Worldwalking: Opening portals to the Nevernever. The Nevernever sits under/above/around/inside our world, and you can enter it at any point in our world by tearing a hole or a portal between the material world and the Nevernever. It's incredibly difficult to create a portal directly to your desired destination but it can be done if you're a real badass (note that the only people we see do this are an Archangel, a Faery Queen, and a god). Theoretically, because it be done, you could also create such a portal just barely inside another portal, thus creating a portal that connects two places within the mortal world, or two places within the Nevernever, but we've yet to see this done. Most of the time, people just open a hole to the Nevernever in a specific location in the real world, take a trip through a relatively stable part of it (usually through Faerie), open up a portal to the material world, and end up at a specific location. Think "Webway"

*Wards: A blanket term for all defensive magics, which can be anything from straight up walls of kinetic energy to evocation-in-a-box style landmines to crazy psychomancy "I'm now terrified of that door I was about to kick down" stuff. 

*Item Crafting: The making of Foci, Enchanted Items, Charms, that kind of thing. Every wizard knows how to do this to some extent.
**Brewing(?): Making potions. Thaumaturgy in a bottle. Usually involves cooking (metaphorically or literally) ritual or symbolic items with an investment of energy to activate them. Every potion made has to have eight ingredients. A Base, one ingredient for each physical sense (sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste), and an ingredient for the mind and soul. An additional fact is that potions do not have to be fluid, Ghost Dust and "Sunshine in a Handkerchief" are both technically examples of non-fluid potions according to the RPG books.
**Alchemy: Altering substances based on their psychic/metaphysical properties. Has a ton of overlap with chemistry.

*The True Magic: Kemmler's magic system/discipline. Never completely defined, but denies the distinction between Black and White magic, and seems to lean heavily on necromancy, psychomancy, entropomancy, and the removal of energy from things. Kemmler's students also tend to use direct will and kinetic force as evocation, and Kemmler himself didn't concern himself much over being alive or dead, so it's likely the discipline focused on the mastery of Will over life and death.

A Note: The game handles the way a player may handle their Thaumaturgy focus in one of two ways. They can either choose to specialise really heavily in one particular type of thaumaturgy (such as divination) or they may choose a thematic specialization (such as Photomancy where they can do Holomancy, divination, viels, teleportation, or anything else so long as there is a LIGHT aspect to what they're trying to do). Thaumaturgy is an inherently flexible and complex style of magic use and trying to lock it down the way other games might would be damaging to the DFRPG games narrative. Play fast and loose with it when you can.

====Magical Items and You (WIP)====
=====Focus Items=====
To any sort of practitioner focus items are the tools of their trade. A White CouncilWizard has his staff, a True Believer has his symbol, a Renegade Warlock has dagger carved out of volcanic obsidian he bought at some sort of mexican tourist trap.

The fact is that all practitioners, regardless of source or power level, have at least one focus item, and those that don't are often considered to be headstrong idiots who insist on doing everything by hand, regardless of its complexity.

;In Setting
In the setting of the Dresden Files Focus Items are, as above, considered multi-purpose tools that aid practitioners in their spell-slinging. As vocal invocations are Oven-Gloves to help the caster avoid frying their brains with the power they're manipulating; a Focus Item acts like a Crowbar or a piece of rope and a pulley or a knife, it aids the caster by taking out the amount of effort they need to put in, or by focusing the power they're slinging about.

The more multi-purpose a Focus is, the longer it takes to make, and the more effort it carries over from the caster the larger it is. Examples of this in motion would be Harry's Staff, Blasting rod, and Little Chicago.

Harry often doesn't even try to cast anything overly complex without his Staff, he's got the power in spades, but the Staff allows him to weave it more completely and in a wide variety of patterns, as a tool it could be compared to a firefighter's Halligan Bar that took him several months to make the first time around, and he is very cagey about potentially losing it. Compare/contrast to his Blasting Rod which doesn't help with the complexity of his spells, but instead helps him focus the power he does throw around, but only in Fire, Air, and Force evocation. His staff can help with those spells but the Rod is designed to help with those spells, and only those spells making it more of a magical Combat Knife, a weapon with some utility outside of stabbing things, that can be replaced rather quickly, compared to his more versatile staff Harry has replaced his Blasting rod several times over, each time only taking a couple of weeks worth of work.

;In Game
In game Focus Items are a little more limited, but also better defined.

Every Practitioner who takes either Channeling ([-2 REFRESH] 2FP) or Ritual ([-2 REFRESH] 2FP), or their more powerful variants Evocation ([-3 REFRESH] 2FP) and Thaumaturgy ([-3 REFRESH] 2FP) gets at least 2 Focus item slots to a maximum of 4 (you can't stack the slots from Channeling to Evocation, or Ritual to Thaumaturgy). You can however gain more Focus Item slots by grabbing the Refinement power [-1 REFRESH], which is stackable, and can give 2 extra Item slots each time it is taken.

So a Practitioner who has only taken Channeling has two Focus Item slots. How do they use them?

By investing Slots into a single item the Player can gain a boost to either the power or control of their spells of a certain type, so a Wizard who puts 1 slot into an Evocation focus would gain something that looks like this '''+1 Power, (Air)''' or '''+1 Control, (Air)''', whereas if he put in 2 slots he could have an item that boosted both power and control by +1 at the same time '''+1 Power/+1 Control, (Air)''', or something that boosted the power of two seperate elements such as '''+1 Power, (Air, Earth)'''. However if a player wants to do something like this '''+1 Power, (Air), +1 Control (Fire)''' it costs '''4''' slots, because the number of slots used is equal to Number of Elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Spirit) multiplied by the number of Types (Offensive Control/Power, Defensive Control/Power).

This means in game, it's usually better to make a wide variety of specialised Focus Items until you have the Refresh to blow on Refinement, because trying to stack everything into one item means it is going to cost a lot more for a single item, which can, and most likely will, get busted at some point even if your DM is a nice guy. It just happens to everyone. I would recommend haggling for FATE points slightly less than the number of slots that item cost when it does get broken, though.

It's also possible to gain an extra Slot for a single item by tying the item to a single specific spell, but if you're going to do that, then make sure it's a spell you are going to use ALL THE GODDAMNED TIME.

=====Enchanted Items=====

;In Setting
Where Focus items are tools that aid in Spellcasting, their uses infinite and complex, Enchanted Items are spells stored in physical items.

An enchanted item is more akin to a magical battery than any thing else, it stores a single spell's worth of energy until it is triggered, and once triggered it is depleted, until more energy can be put in.

The primary examples of this would be Harry's Force Rings. These are essentially just a set of rings, each enchanted to save up and store little bits of Kinetic Energy whenever Harry moves his arms, releasing all that energy as a coherent blast of raw kinetic energy when he triggers them. However once they have been triggered, they need to be recharged again. The blast of force released always acts in the same way (A single coherent beam of force), and in fact cannot be charged beyond a certain point as the spell has a maximum power limit (to avoid shattering the rings on Harry's hand).

The secondary, but more common example of this would be Harry's duster, which has been enchanted to be constantly tougher than regular leather, protecting against bullets and blades (up to .50 caliber rifle rounds) but not as much against blunt force. Unlike his force rings, Harry's duster does not need to be actively charged for the spell to work, however the enchantments need to be repaired and maintained once every year to keep them operating at full effectiveness.

'''For Players: an A-Z List of potential "prefix"mancies that don't really fit in any particular column and can be used to make a character'''

*Agromancy (Farm Magic, or the magic of growth)
*Brontomancy (Thunder/Lightning Magic)
*Chloromancy (Plant Magic, also see Floramancy)
*Chronomancy (Time Magic, MUHUHAHAHAHA)
*Cryomancy (Ice Magic)
*Eromancy (<s>Love</s> Sex magic, it makes you horny, Love Hurts)
*Faunamancy (Animal Magic, whether this is shapeshifting or a Disney Princess singsong with the birdies is up to you)
*Ferromancy (Iron Magic / Technology)
*Floramancy (Flower Magic specifically, opium poppies anyone?)
*Meteoromancy (Weather magic, Make it rain!)
*Pathomancy (The magic of making diseases and contagions, Nurgle approves)
*Photomancy (Light Magic, lasers ahoy)
*Radiomancy (Radiation magic, Dr Banner, pelted by Gamma radiation, turns into a cancerous husk)
*Sonosmancy (Sound Magic, put your hands up and shout)
*Volcanomancy (Lava/Magma Magic, for when you want to bring Vesuvius to you)