The Iceberg of Magic · in development
An Authority is not a spell. It is ownership of one of the world's rules, and each of the seven is built on a different shape - a domain, a bond, a deck, a sandpile, a graph, a belief held mind by mind, a beat. So each has its own chapter, and each chapter has a small working version of it to try, right here.
The map
Pick a layer
Tier 1 · above the water
Spells you compose yourself.
Runes, shapes and modifiers put together into a spell of your own. It has its own data, its own screen and its own casting, apart from every school below it - the one part of the mod where the spell is yours before it is anybody else's.
Tiers 0-4 · above the water
Fire, water, light, space, void and arcane.
The skills anyone can find: five tiers across six schools, four keys to cast them from. Every skill takes a budget of points you divide between damage, speed, size, duration and efficiency - and damage points above zero compound, so a spell you specialise hits like a weapon. The Spell Creator fuses two you own into a third.
Classes · above the water
Sixteen, in a tree.
Blacksmith to Divinesmith, Warrior to Berserker and Warden, Mystic, Spell Creator to Magic Originator. Class XP buys the next rung. A few chains are in no menu at all - the Sword Summoner is found by offering four swords under a night sky.
Layer -1 · below the water
Paid for in hearts.
Seven actives billed to a Vessel first and to your own health after it - as true damage, which no armour or barrier takes anything off. Kills and bites spill pools you can pull back into the Vessel, or leave on the ground to spend.
Layer -2 · below the water
Shadow and corruption.
The second layer down: shadow, the void and corruption that builds the more the school is used.
Layer -3 · below the water
Steel you can see orbiting your head.
Four rungs, found by a rite, not a menu. The whole kit counts in swords - four, seven, ten, twelve - racked from real weapons, standing in one of six stances, each hitting for the weapon it is.
Layer -4 · below the water
Catastrophes that read the land.
Cyclone, Fault Line, Skyfall, Caldera, Tsunami, Upheaval. Each measures the ground where it breaks - open sky, stone, heat, water, mass - and is stronger or weaker for it. Where you stand is the build. The ground it borrows comes back.
Layer -5 · below the water
Paid for in being noticed.
Six calls to things in the deep, paid in mana and in Notice. At 50 Notice nearby hostiles turn on you; at 100 something grasps at you every ten seconds. The more you are noticed, the stronger each call.
Layer -6 · below the water
Rules, not spells.
The bottom of the iceberg. An Authority does not cast something into the world; it owns one of the world's rules. One holder a world each, and each works by a different shape - which is why every one of them has its own chapter below, and its own thing to try.
The seven
Each one has something to try
Authority of
The right to define a local space and rewrite the rules within it.
You raise a sphere around yourself and write physics into it. Inside, gravity is what you say it is, and so are motion, time, friction and what the walls do.
Raise a subspace
Hold Create Subspace to grow its radius and release to set it down. Sneak as you release and it follows you instead of staying put. Cast it again to dismiss it.
Write a law
Stand inside and hold Manipulate Space. Three lists appear: a category, what happens to it, and who it happens to. The three chosen rows read as one sentence, and releasing the key writes it.
One law per category
There are twelve categories - gravity, velocity, acceleration, air, pressure, mass, time, a vector field, entropy, friction, the boundary and collision - and each holds one law at a time. Twelve laws can be in force at once.
Aim it
Every law has a target: everything except you, everything, living things, projectiles, or players. Reverse gravity for everything except you, and you are the only thing in your dome still standing on the floor.
Read the wall
The dome is a vault of twelve ribs, one per category. A law makes its rib heavier and hangs a sign on it, and the more laws are in force the tighter the ribs wind - you can read how much law is written from the silhouette alone.
Leave and it ends
A subspace belongs to its caster. Step out of it and it is gone, laws and all.
Define a transparent sphere. Hold to grow it, sneak on release to wear it, cast again to dismiss it.
Three lists - category, operation, target. Scroll turns a list, the mouse walks between them, 1-9 keep presets, release writes the law.
Fold into a private chamber. Sneak-use leaves a portal so others can follow; the door inside returns you to where you cast it.
A wheel of direct spatial attacks that need no subspace at all.
Authority of
The right to bind, preserve, fracture, and restore the essence of living beings.
You tie your soul to one other living thing. Death at either end brings that soul back beside the other - and the bond is also a road you can travel along.
Bind a soul
Open the Soul Vow wheel and choose Soul Valley while looking at something living that is not hostile to you - a wolf, a villager, a friend. It reaches 18 blocks, further with points in size.
Death brings it back
When either soul dies, it is resurrected beside the other, and a collapse window opens: seventy seconds.
The window is the danger
The same side can die again and again and keep coming back. The vow only collapses if the other soul dies while the window is open - or if either side breaks the bond.
Travel the bond
While bound, the wheel moves you along it: Swap trades places with your bound soul, Call brings it to you, Step takes you to it. Sever ends the bond, and so does sneaking as you choose an action.
The wheel of binding laws. Everything the Authority does is chosen from it.
Bind your soul to a non-hostile living being. Death on one side resurrects that soul near the other and opens a collapse window.
Trade places with your bound soul.
18 mana
Bring your bound soul to you.
12 mana
Go to your bound soul.
10 mana
Break the bond.
Free
Authority of
The right to compose magic from nothing. Not to cast a spell someone else finished, but to write one, verse by verse, and have the world read it back.
You do not learn spells. You learn verses - a needle, an orb, a trident, a fuse - write them into incantations, and the game reads back exactly what you wrote.
Learn verses
There are 115 of them in eight kinds: projectiles, statics that stand where they land, modifiers, multicasts, materials that change the ground, controls, utilities and passives.
Write an incantation
Open the Grimoire. Each of your four incantations is a row of up to twenty verses in an order, with a breath from 1 to 8 - how many verses one press reads.
Press to recite
Incantation I to IV each recite one row. A press reads the next verses and fires them as one shot; the next press carries on where that one stopped, and a finished row starts over.
Verses change each other
A multicast gathers the verses after it into one volley - a Trident is three at once, in a fan. A modifier is stamped onto the bodies after it in the same shot, and reads another verse so it never costs a breath.
Every body ends one way
A body that hits something releases its Latch; one on a timer, its Fuse; one that simply runs out, its Epitaph. Each can carry more verses inside it, released when it ends.
The price is what you read
Mana is the sum of the verses a press read, and the beat before the next press is theirs too. A cheap row fires fast; a heavy one hits hard and slowly.
Recite one incantation of your Grimoire: read the next verses, bill the mana they name, fire them as one shot.
Write the four incantations by drag and drop, with a reading of what a press would cast before you save it.
Authority of
The right to decide which way a thing gives. Not to break it - to author the shape of its collapse, and then to load the ground until it arrives on its own.
Think of a sandpile you add one grain to at a time. Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then one grain too many starts an avalanche. Chaos is that, played with the ground under your enemies - and you decide how the avalanche behaves.
Everything holds some stress
Every block and every living body carries stress up to a capacity: stone 4; dirt, sand and wood 2; glass and leaves 1; a mob 2 plus its armour; a player 3; another Authority's construct only 1.
Load it with Burden
Burden puts one unit of stress on whatever your crosshair is on, for 2 mana, and it is meant to be pressed dozens of times. Stress shows as purple motes everybody can see, and the action bar reads 3/4 for the spot you aim at.
Over capacity, it gives way
A site holding more than its capacity breaks and pushes everything it held into its neighbours. A neighbour that was already full breaks in turn. That is the cascade, and it rolls out over a second or two.
The Fracture decides how
Five faults in a row: the first wave of breaking follows fault one, the second wave fault two, and so on. Slump rolls downhill, Heap gathers into the fullest spot, Bloom spreads evenly, Hunt goes only into living things, Recoil throws it back, Shed detonates where it stands and Root swallows it.
Pull the trigger
The Last Grain adds one unit from nowhere - a click on ground below capacity, the avalanche on ground at it. Criticality lowers every capacity by one for ten seconds, so everything you loaded goes at once.
The ground remembers
A spot that has given way is dead for thirty seconds and takes no more stress, so the same ground cannot be used twice. You are a site too, and nothing is saved: stress is forgotten when you log out or change dimension.
One unit of stress on what you look at. Sneak to burden yourself.
2 mana
Author your five faults. Scroll turns a gate, the mouse walks between them, release commits the row.
5 s cooldown
One more unit, from nowhere. On ground at capacity it is the avalanche.
4 mana
Every capacity in your Pile drops by one for ten seconds, and everything standing lets go.
72 mana, 60 s
Authority of
Cause and effect answer to you. Nothing here is a spell: you write rules on a board and the world keeps them.
The one nobody presses. You pin rules on a board before the fight - when I am hit, bank it; when the bank reaches 20, spend it on the nearest thing - and in the fight the world keeps them for you.
Pin a cause
A cause is something that happens: you are hurt, you strike, you slay, you are mended, a block breaks, the ledger brims, you speak a Decree. Thirteen of them.
Ask a question
Conditions filter it: only melee, only fire, only while crouched, only when the ledger is over some amount, only once in a while. Fifteen, and optional.
Run string to a consequence
Store banks a hit in the ledger, Spend pays it back out as damage, Mend heals, Ward shields, Return sends the hit back to its source, Echo repeats it, Erase unmakes it. String only runs forward - cause, then question, then consequence - and never in a loop.
The ledger is how a board talks to itself
Store and Spend only move a number between the world and your ledger. That is conservation, and conservation is free.
Paradox is the price
You pay only for breaking conservation: Return 0.08 a point, Echo 0.5, Sever 0.6, Erase 0.9, charged on the amount after Greater or Lesser. At 40 every action costs double mana; at 70 any chain longer than three pins is cut and the rest is halved; at 100 the board shuts for twenty seconds and the ledger is paid out of your own hide.
Reach outside yourself
Causal Anchor Marks one body for 45 seconds. The marked causes and conditions weigh three times as much and do nothing without one.
Open the board: pin causes and consequences and run string between them.
Free
Every body in reach gets a ring; walk the focus and release to Mark one. 28 blocks.
The one cause you fire by hand, so a board can have a trigger of its own.
Spend the whole ledger at once on what you look at. It costs no paradox at all.
Every rule off, or every rule on again. Paradox cools three times as fast while the board is quiet.
Authority of
Reality is what enough minds agree on. Study the world, write a scene, and let everyone who sees it decide whether it is there.
You build lies out of what you have studied and set them down in the world. Each mind that sees one decides for itself how real it is - and when enough of them agree, it stops being a lie.
Study
Hold still and look at a block for two seconds or a creature for three, and you learn it. Look again and again and you learn it better: fidelity rises at 1, 5 and 20 looks. You can only lie in what you have seen.
Daydream a scene
Daydream turns your hotbar into a belt of the lies you know. Draw a wall, a pit, a cat - blocks and figments - and it is kept as a reverie.
Unveil it
Set the reverie down where you look. Nothing is placed: every mind that sees it starts to believe it, faster the more plausible it is - stone on stone in a quarry, not a diamond wall in a desert.
Belief rises and breaks
Seen, belief climbs; unseen, it slowly fades. Contradiction is the fast way down: touching it costs 0.60, a projectile through it 0.35, watching somebody else touch it 0.20. Below 0.1 it shatters for that mind for good. Mobs path around a wall they believe at 0.3.
Enough agreement makes it real
A mind at 0.5 or more is convinced and votes its belief: a mob counts once, a player three times, a boss five. A wall weighs half a point a block. When the votes reach its weight the wall is there - real stone - and it stays real until they fall below half of it.
Put the sure to sleep
Lull a mind that is sure, at 0.8: a creature sleeps where it stands; a player falls into your Dreamscape and wakes only by finding its Flaw.
Draw a reverie into the air out of what you have studied. The inventory key opens the Lexicon.
Set your reverie down where you look. It is exactly as real as the minds around it believe.
Everyone who half-believes a piece of your scene believes it more; everyone who doubts it doubts harder.
3 mana a tick
A sure creature sleeps; a sure player falls into your Dreamscape. Sneak to dream yourself.
60 mana, 60 s
Authority of
The right to be heard. Write a Song and play it where you stand - crouch or swing on its notes and everything in earshot answers - or hold a Riff and let the notes fly.
Every other Authority acts on a place, a body or a rule. This one acts on time: you write music, play it, and hit on the beat.
Write a Song
Open the Score: four bars of sixteenth notes across a three-row kit, five rows of bass and five of melody, at one of three tempos and four scales. Three presets ship, and songs share as plain JSON you can paste.
Play it
Song loops it where you stand - 12 mana to start, 4 a bar to keep going. Everybody in earshot hears it.
Crouch or swing on the notes
Land a crouch or a swing within two ticks of a note and it counts. Each track sounding on that step gives its effect: a crouch keeps it (kit Bulwark, bass Rooted, melody Mend) and a swing throws it at every hostile in earshot (Stagger, Weight, Dissonance).
Keep the streak
Four in a row and every effect steps up. Eight in a row and everything hostile in earshot dances. A miss breaks it.
Hold a Riff
Up to eight notes, each one of sixteen instruments at a pitch, all at one amplitude. Drums blast a cone, low notes roll through walls and slow, keys pierce two bodies, bells ring straight through armour, strings seek. Loud is dear: a note costs 0.4 times the amplitude squared.
The sequencer: write the Song on four bars of kit, bass and melody, and the Riff note by note.
Plays your Song where you stand. Crouch or swing on its notes; eight in a row and everything dances.
12 mana, 4 a bar
Plays your Riff round and round, a note every four ticks, each doing what its instrument does.
0.4 × amplitude² a note
Magical is still in development. Everything on this page is read off the mod's own source, and the toys are small, faithful versions of the real rules - but numbers can still move before release.