Common Systems of Magic
While some control magic completely empathically, most need to rely on some kind of system. In the early day of magic, the systems were adapted from Old world magic rituals. Those with a strong enough soul to influence a large area around them can simply, with enough authentic belief, create their own.
Eventually though, mages realized that by creating collaborative systems, studied by many many practitioners, a magic system could be more robust, reliable, and more importantly, shareable. A lone mage, with their own magic system, can work fast, but they have to invent every concept from scratch. Meanwhile more academic souls of magic can build up libraries of spells pieces that can be readily customized and fit together.
This also matters of issues of enchanting. An enchantment without a well known system behind it can only be recharged by the person who made it. Meanwhile, an enchantment using an established system can be recharged by almost anyone magically active.
As a general rule, more individualistic methods of magic tend to be more rawly powerful but lack sophistication, while collaborative systems can create more complex and precise effects, but at the cost of bigger overheads and less flexibility. Problems must be solved within the standards set out by others, and while many magic society revise their standards periodically, one can be left waiting years for a feature or concept to be added. Even when a new standard is accepted, it will taken even more years of people study and reinforcing the concept before it becomes reliable.
(If this in any way reminds you of programming, dependencies, deprecations and library updates, well... Yeah.)
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Witchcraft and Natural Magic
The most common types of magic don't fit into a clean system. They come from a grab bag of Old World witchcraft, folk belief, and ritual, mixed with the personal beliefs of the caster. Casters creating spells and potions will naturally, through experimentation, find methods that work for them and while they may be able to teach their methods to others, without a large base of fellow believers, they are limited in their scope and flexibility. Often a student and teacher pair will eventually grow so apart in practice that they can no longer share spells or techniques reliably.
While any individual system of natural magic is weaker than a well developed one, people who find success with natural magic tend to have a naturally higher baseline or talent, who can often overcome disadvantages by brute force.
Witch can both refer to the use of Old World spells and grimoires, or as a catchall for for ritualistic magic that is independent of any larger system.
Aistorian Academic Hermeticism
Aistorian Academic Magic is an old and well established system of magic, prevalent through, Aistoria, Simeria, and parts of Akanis, used for general spell casting. It focuses is on inscribed magic spells, cast from spell books, enchanted trinkets, or even arrays of light. Aistorian Hermeticism is a written system that does not contain any somatic or verbal components (though spells can be designed to respond to gestures and verbal commands), but it's complicated, closed-circuit flow-chart like spell inscriptions can produce incredibly sophisticated effects.
At it's basic level, Aistorian Hermeticism allows users to perfectly reproduce spells out of spellbooks within their abilities. Even an unskilled mage can collect an impressive library of useful spells.
More advanced levels Aistorian Hermeticism focuses on spell components, bits of spells that do not do much on their own, but whose functionality can be strung together to produce new spells quickly on the spot. At it's highest levels, practitioners open use a single 'base' spell to create magical inscriptions in the air, made out of magical light. From there they can physically touch and manipulate the light array to quickly create and adapt new spells without the need of an open spellbook.
Due to its age, Aistorian Academic Hermeticism a large system, which requires many years of study to get started in. Atop that, Magic spells are engraved, often on thin metal pages, which are then inlaid with expensive "mageleaf", or magically active gold or copper alloys. These inlays and engravings are skill intensive and expensive, making this form of magic mostly an upper class pursuit. Hermetic runes take inspiration from shorthand scripts, designed to both be easy to engrave and cheap to inlay.
In Aistoria, many poorer people use Aistorian Theurgic magic, a much less sophisticated, inscriptionless system created by the church, which is ideal for fighters and healers. It doesn't have much spread outside of Aistoria, as it's a very crude system, often derogatorily called "pauper magic"... at least while it's not being used to Church members.
Aistorian Academic Hermeticism trades cost, ease of use, and immediate flexibility for sophistication, consistency and raw power.
Unnamed Speculative Akanis Magic System
The Aistorian implies the need of a verbal, sematic system and it makes sense for that to come from Akanis. A contrasting system, that is low cost, unincumbered by spell books, and more adaptable on the fly. This Akanis system of magic would trade the raw mechanical complexities of Aistorian Hermeticism for something that is genuinely more useful to lower level practitioners and travelers.
While this would overlap with the Aistorian Theurgy system, it would be FAR more developed. In fact, due to proximity and cultural exchange, the Aistorian system is probably just a stripped down version of the Akanis system.
Acro-388
On the most extreme end of things, is Acro-388, a magic system created in the most unlikely place: Shiv. While Shiv is devoid of magic, many of its frontier territories are magically active, as are its nearby mountains. As such, mages are still trained and employed. While a proper wage mage will learn a serious magic system like Aistorian Hermeticism, for many their magical talents amount to being little more than a battery to magic based industrial processes.
Acro-388 and its predecessors is a magic system designed for industrial use, by unskilled magic laborers, while being simple and plain language enough to be written by non-magic users. Acro-388 focuses on describing steps of a linear process, with focus being on things like material and chemical separation, or more magically controlling temperatures and mixing during ore smelting and alloying. It is dead simple to learn, and very limited, designed to do exactly what it's meant to do.
Adoption of earlier versions of Acro was slow. The early experiments to create an industrial magic system largely failed, as the practitioners couldn't muster genuine believe in such a mechanical and unproven system. Ultimately the belief in it didn't come from the mages using it, but the profit driven spell writers trying to create spells and further commodify workers. A magic system that exists purely through capitalistic greed.
Despite this, Acro-388 and its predecessors has found uses in parts of Aistoria, especially in remote mining towns.
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