Project Spellstruck: A Guide to Magic
“When time was young, while the first people huddled in caves, great beings strode the world and bent it to their will. The Shapers were titans, gods, beings for whom reality itself was as soft and malleable as clay, as formless and fleeting as a dream. If the Shapers willed it, the sun could blaze cold as ice, the rivers could turn rigid as mountains, night could become day and day could stretch for centuries. And as the Shapers reigned, mankind trembled before them in terror and awe.
Some say The Shapers killed each other in a great and cataclysmic war. Others believe they transcended the very boundaries of our plane, becoming light and stardust. All we know is that they left the world, and in their absence, the era of man began. The earth cooled and settled. The sun hung fixed in place. The clay of the world turned to hard stone.
Yet there were still those among mankind who retained a touch of the Shapers, a droplet of their divine blood, a glimmer of the power they used to bend the world to their will. These are the arcanes, and like the Shapers, they carry within them both the power of divine creation and the seed of unfathomable destruction.”
When we began developing Project Spellstruck, we knew right away we wanted this to be a character-centric story that focused on the big emotions of young adulthood: falling in love, getting into trouble, making friends and enemies alike, and above all, discovering who you really are. As we brainstormed the magic system specifically, we wanted it to reflect those central themes, so we asked ourselves: what if magic is fueled by emotion?
“It is common among civilians to think of magic as a science, some deeply complicated scholarly pursuit that only the greatest minds can grasp. Nothing could be further from the truth. Magic does not come from the mind; it comes from the heart. In that respect, it is not a science at all, but an art.
Like artists, we arcanes envision in our minds a world that does not exist, a world where, perhaps, a flame blazes around our hand, or a stone floats as light as a feather. Like artists, we draw deep from our memories, from our lives, from our greatest triumphs and our most crushing sorrows. Like artists, we take that well of feeling and turn it into an act of creation and transformation, the world itself our canvas. And like artists, while within us burns a spark of powerful talent, we must also learn the delicate and intricate craft of making that spark burn precisely how we intend.”
Big Feelings, Bigger Danger
In this world, arcanes are the small percentage of the population gifted with the ability to turn their feelings into an act of change in reality, yet cursed with the ever-present risk of that power spiraling out of control.
The greatest danger to arcanes is burnup, when they’re overcome with intense feelings but are unable to properly channel them into magic. When this happens, the arcane is consumed in spellfire and erupts, killing not only themselves but everything around them. Not much is known about this process, except that it should be avoided at all costs.
Magical Affinities
There are six primary categories of magic, each associated with a different emotion. Arcanes are taught the basics of all six, but are only able to achieve advanced magic in one main type. Only the most powerful arcanes have ever been able to cast spells that combine different affinities, but this magic has been lost to time.
Early concept art for different types of magic. Can you guess which emotion they correspond to?