The Magic of Magicbuilding: Elementary Magic, Finale

Welcome to the Magic of Magicbuilding, our little spinoff feature that focuses specifically on building a magical system for a fantasy setting.  This week, we're going to finish covering basic magic by discussing Lovecraftian entities from beyond the stars and why they would make great plastic surgeons.

What We Have So Far

For the non-elemental magics, we've used what we've established of the native users to guide how their magic works.  Undead, for example, grant both natural and unnatural life, and can take either away in equal measure.  Similarly, fae feed on emotions and thoughts, and their magic is devoted to provoking, evoking, manipulating, and controlling those same emotions and thoughts.

So what do the monsters of the Many Voids do?

Before we go any further, maybe we should look at our source material.  Of the three magical invaders, the many-tentacled ones are probably the least understood.

Safe Levels of Research

H.P. Lovecraft was a complicated fellow.  He wasn't the first to come up with the idea of true horror existing in the incomprehensible, but he was the author who popularized it.  No author before or since has done more for the concept of knowledge bringing madness and fear.

Of course, he was also just WILDLY racist and bigoted, and for all his reported love of science, a case can be made that what he was actually doing was waging a war against education and intellectualism- that, in other words, what he was saying was "being smart is scary."  He literally died because he was so scared of doctors that he didn't get what turned out to be terminal cancer checked until less than a month before it killed him.  Like we said, he's complicated.

Similarly, his mythos is also quite complicated.  For starters, he didn't write most of it.  Lovecraft was enamored with the idea of the shared mythos, the Depression-era version of cinematic universes.  He convinced like-minded authors that their works would carry greater verisimilitude if they all treated as fact certain aspects of their fictional universes.  The Necronomicon, for example, is an invention of Lovecraft's that has appeared in more stories than he ever wrote, combined.  The King in Yellow, an eldritch being in his mythos, is not a creation of his, but was absorbed into his works after the fact.  Cthulhu, Lovecraft's most famous monster, was a servant of unknown beings as much greater than him as he was of us in the stories Lovecraft wrote; it was only after his death that those specific beings gained names and features that could be described, if only haltingly, with language.

We say all that to explain that what we're about to describe as Lovecraftian monsters should be taken with a grain of salt, as liberties were had.  However, that grain can be pretty small.  Fan-based canon material is something that Lovecraft likely would have approved of.

What Does "Squamous" Mean, Anyway?

We here at Vagrant Dog Productions have, perhaps ironically, a pretty firm idea of what an Eldritch Being From Beyond the Universe should resemble.  These are beings for whom physics is a mere suggestion, and so they only need to take on a form that makes any kind of sense when they enter our setting.  Think of it this way:  these creatures are from out of town... way out of town.  They are distinctly foreign and used to doing things in a completely foreign way.  That's fine, they can do as they wish.  When they travel through our town, however, and especially when they attempt to step into one of our businesses, they first stop and observe a sign:  "No shirt, no shoes, no service."  They are unused to wearing shirts or shoes, but they begrudgingly do so, lest they be denied service.

Now take this metaphor and apply it to universes.  Once they enter our universe, they are subject to our laws of physics, whether they like it or not.  They must assume singular forms, even if they change those forms as they see fit through magic.  Should they wish to sense things, they must craft for themselves sensory organs.  Should they wish to interact, they must craft limbs to interact with.  This they do reluctantly, as the price for entry into our setting.  The result is perfunctory limbs and organs, created on demand and abandoned the moment they are no longer needed.

From our perspective, what would this look like?  Well, a mostly amorphous mass, extruding random tentacles, some with fingers and some without, some with eyes, ears, noses, mouths, all without seeming rhyme nor reason.  For tradition's sake, this amorphous mass would have a texture best described as squamous and rugose, though the entire creature would be transforming itself constantly, unused to confinement as a single shape.

Which brings us to a quick aside.  For those who don't wish to Google the words, we'll let you know now.  "Squamous" means "scaly," especially regarding things that don't actually have scales.  "Rugose" means "irregularly grooved."  The most disturbing way we've heard it described (and thus probably the most accurate) is to imagine if the surface was covered in the gills of a mushroom, which it constantly flexed to grasp things or move.

To return to our eldritch intruders, we've stated that they create perfunctory body parts, but this doesn't mean they can only make perfunctory body parts.  We imagine that they can make whatever they wish, and simply make the most basic options out of laziness.  Just as you don't put on your best shoes to go and order breakfast, these creatures aren't putting on their formal limbs just to poke around in our neck of the woods.  Their magic, it follows, would represent both aspects- creating perfunctory body parts, and also finely tailoring them.

The Last List of Spells

We now have enough to create a few spells based on the creation and alteration of body parts.  We haven't mentioned this in other lists, but it does stand to reason that if our people learned body alteration magic from Lovecraftian monsters, there's going to be a certain... aesthetic to the magic.  Expect it to look a little gross, in other words.  Bulging, wriggling, and writhing are all normal.  We'll say that the body magic of the eldritch horrors sustains those transformations that would not normally be physically possible. Thus, such transformations only last as long as the magic does- this prevents issues like wizards permanently shapeshifting into superhuman Adonis's.  

• Clairvoyance.  The classic version of this spell, found in various games, is the ability to sense things from a distance.  Some of them do so by creating a magical, extrasensory organ.  This spell works similarly, except the extrasensory organ is still attached to the caster via a thin pseudopod.  On the bright side, any kind of sensory organ could theoretically be attached, not just a regular eye.
• Enhance.  This is really a small suite of different spells that all work in roughly the same fashion- body magic is fed into a body part, given the task of strengthening said body part.  What exactly "strengthening" constitutes depends on the spell- stronger muscles, quicker reflexes, and sharper senses, for example, are all on the table.
  
• Distort.  You target someone else's body and intentionally alter it to make it less useful, rather than more useful.  "Let's see you run on stork legs, haha!"
• Stretch.  You briefly change the shape of a body part, usually an arm, to make it longer than normal.  You can now reach the remote from the couch, no matter where you placed it.
• Disguise.  Named for its more nefarious uses, this would actually be one of the most popular varieties of body magic.  Rather than enhancing the body or altering it unnaturally, you reshape it in relatively minor ways.  These alterations allow you (or the person you cast the spell on) to take on a specific form.  Such as, for example, "Me, but with my eyes two millimeters closer together, and you get rid of this gap between my teeth."
  

Conclusion

The creatures of the Many Voids are the least likely to set up shop in town, simply because they are so completely alien to normal life.  They don't need sustenance the way normal biological life does, and they don't need bodies like the undead do.  They can't be bargained with simply because our people have nothing to offer them.  This doesn't make them more dangerous than the others, for the same reason; if we have nothing they want, why would they bother trying to take from us?  What it makes them is unknowable, in classic Lovecraftian fashion.  This, in turn, makes body magic the least understood of the elementary magics.

Understood or not, though, we now have a firm grasp of what our basic casters can do before technology advances past the beginnings of civilization.  Next time, we'll start establishing in earnest what magic will do to advance basic technology.