Magical Speculation

[Ichthus]

Soo, what are speculation on the various schools of magic we haven't seen yet? What do they do and such?

http://erfworld.com/wiki/index.php/Magic#Disciplines

• Hocus Pocus
  
  • Findamancy - Locating things as opposed to seeing things. Possibly summoning spells as well.
    
  • Predictamancy - Fortune Teller. Determine the fate of an object... maybe by reading the destiny on the character sheet or peeking in the DM notes.
    
  • Mathamancy - Using numbers to determine probable outcomes of events.
• Spookism
  
  • Turnamancy - Conversion of units. Cause traitors. Add loyalty. Recruit neutral allies.
    
  • Dollamancy - something related to voodoo dolls and cloth golems
    
  • Weirdomancy - The embodiment of wand of wonder?
• Stuffamancy
  
  • Dirtamancy - Digging, traps, and various dirt/rock/muck golems
    
  • Changemancy - make units or objects change to give advantages or disadvantages (i.e. make a unit grow wings to fly or the land grow trees to provide cover).
    
  • Dittomancy - make one unit copy another unit so that they can do things they normally couldn't on their own. Possibly just literally duplicate a unit, item, or bonus.
• Eyemancy
  
  • Lookamancy - Clairvoyance or far seeing.
    
  • Thinkamancy - Telepathic abilities, subliminal suggestions, mental disruption, psionics. (Arkendish)
    
  • Foolamancy - Cloaks and deceptions. Probably similar to a D&D illusionist.
• Hippiemancy
  
  • Flower Power- calm hostilities or possibly literal plant magic
    
  • Signamancy - Quieting battles through treaty and diplomacy
    
  • Date-a-mancy - make units take fewer turns to pop, change turn orders, end turns sooner than the enemy would like
• Naughtymancy
  
  • Shockmancy - Stunning and disorienting spells
    
  • Croakamancy - Deals with Undead (Arkenpliers)
    
  • Deletionism - negates bonuses, units, or stats. possibly disintegration.
• Stagemancy
  
  • Hat Magic - Creation of the magic hats. unknown what all you can create a magic hat to do. possibly creates 'wondrous items' like flying carpets.
    
  • Carnymancy - Feats of Strength, taming dangerous beasts, flying (Possibly what the Arkenhammer is based off of with taming vicious dwagons and turning walnuts into pidgeons)
    
  • Rhyme-o-mancy - incantations, possibly bardic magic "kill, kill, kill, the big ogre!"
• Clevermancy
  
  • Luckmancy - Roll adjustments, re-rolls, etc. Probably a very 'subtle' art.
    
  • Healomancy - Healing spells
    
  • Moneymancy - add to your treasury (by collecting interest), lower the cost of units

Updated as of whatever time I just bumped the thread...

[cloudbreaker]

Here are some speculations that I came up with. Some of them are pretty out there, but I decided to include them anyway.

Turnamancy - make units take fewer turns to pop, change turn orders, end turns sooner than the enemy would like
Dollamancy - something related to voodoo dolls

Changemancy - make units or terrain change to give advantages or disadvantages (i.e. make a unit grow wings to fly or the land grow trees to provide cover).
Dittomancy - make one unit copy another unit so that they can do things they normally couldn't on their own.

Flower Power - calm hostilities
Signamancy - used to make negotiations that turn out the way you want (by signing contracts).

Deletionism - unpop units, drain a treasury, remove weapons and armor

Hat Magic - pulling rabbits out of a hat, make things disappear and reappear, saw a woman in half
Carnymancy - use spells based on classic circus acts (sword swallowing, lion taming, tightrope walking, shooting out of a cannon)
Rhyme-o-mancy - incantations

Moneymancy - add to your treasury (by collecting interest), lower the cost of units

[Kreistor]

Dollamancy may turn out to be Voodoo dolls, since it's under "Spookism".

Turnamancy will likely affect Turns, but I'm not certain there's enough power in that to be useful. It needs more.

Signamancy is in the right place to be about reading signs in the stars, but that seems redundant with Predictamancy.

[Ragn Charran]

I think dollamancy is tied in some way to Cloth Golem creation. Since Dirtamancers make "dirt" (crap, metal, stone, etc.) golems it makes sense that Dollamancers would make golems out of "doll" materials like cloth and plastic - GIJOE or BARBIE golems anyone?

[Fuzzypaws]

Weirdomancy could involve stuff that in Final Fantasy would be called "gray magic" or "green magic" - random status stuff that doesn't go anywhere else. Things like curses and blessings (if they don't directly manipulate rolls, since that's luckamancy), "ability score" or "statistic" manipulation (like increasing attack or leadership), and so on.

Flower power involves plant manipulation, and probably anything derived from plants - including the calming or focusing effects of weed or incense but possibly also poisons and the like as well.

Signamancy could be anything but most likely has something to do with astrological signs and zodiac stuff. If it only influences personalities in accordance with the stereotypes of a person's sign, or predicts horoscopes, then it's just a limited version of thinkamancy or predictamancy and would suck. If it went so far as calling zodiac-related summons, like in FFT, that would be awesome. There's also the possibility that signs might influence the battlefield by modifying effects and rolls of certain types or creatures, and that signamancy might change the signs in the heavens.

Hat magic is known to be used in communication. I would suggest it involves extradimensional spaces and teleportation, going along with the theme of pulling stuff out of hats and the demonstrated transposition of mail from one hat to another. These also cover all sorts of other stage magic tricks, like pulling coins out of ears.

Luckamancy probably also affects the rate of "special encounters" like in Fallout games.

Moneymancy can probably be used to do stuff like burn money to rush production on units and buildings, popping them immediately instead of waiting for them to come out of the queue. This would make moneymancy extremely useful to Gobwin Knob in its present state and it would not surprise me overmuch if Parson could do it with his gauntlet (making it a gauntlet of Economics, money + math). It likely can be used to "sell" a unit, disbanding it and getting money back instead of getting nothing.

More I could do but tired now, going to bed.

[R3u]

Signamancy: Could govern all contracts, in general - especially magically binding ones. Want to form an alliance? Get a good Signamancer involved. Want to hire some mercenaries that are -bound- to be loyal and honest? Signamancy-contract them. ....either that, or foretelling the future, as suggested above.

Dollamancy: I second the cloth-golem-creation thing. Also, it'd go well with the other disciplines that can create units -- Whoever creates the cloth golems may get a bonus when leading them from the same stack, just like croakamancers and dirtamancers do for their creations. And aren't they all Fate magic?

[Mikalyaran]

Signamancy is part of hippiemancy. I don't think its would have anything to do with contracts or anything legal. More likely is to do with the zodiac and those signs. Cancer, taurus, leo, et cetera. I'd be very interesed to find out what the erfworld zodiac is like. certainly based somewhat on the titans and perhaps on the eight major branchs of magic as well. For a magic subset to be devoted to it I would expects the zodiac to be pretty expansive.

[CourtJester]

Date-a-mancy, it seems to me, could be one of two things! Either it controls dates (Time and the like. Calendars fly for hippies, y'see) or it controls dates (Le Amour, ma cheri). Hippies need lovin'

As for Hat-a-mancy, well, the word summons images of a hat-themed shell game...

[Hobgobwin]

I always just assumed that hatamancers made magic hats.

[CourtJester]

I always just assumed that hatamancers made magic hats.

Hat golems , perhaps? Such monstrosities would surely cause even the most sane to turn as mad as a... well, you know

[Hobgobwin]

Hats like this.


The Orko parody from the Magic Kingdom is probably a hatamancer.

[Fuzzypaws]

I always just assumed that hatamancers made magic hats.

That would be a very limited field of magic in that case. For example, Sizemore can also "make stuff" (golems), but can also perform general "dirt"-manipulation magic.

[kreszantas]

The hats that Ansom and Jillian used could be very well made by Hatamancers, for the communication. Webinar indicated it to be a Jetstone item possibly an artifact in similar fashion as Parson's Calculator.

[Mikalyaran]

Pulling rabbits or armor and swords out of a hat anyone?

[Fuzzypaws]

Oh it's certain that Hat Magic is used to create the hats, I just don't think that's the sole extent of the magic of this school. I think Hat Magic probably encompasses most of the tricky "sleight of hand" aspects of stage magic, except literally magical. Also, a "wand of wonder" effect like Orko or the wizard kid from the D&D cartoon would be great.

As for the hats themselves, they're clearly not artifacts or unique items since there are quite a lot of them.

[Fuzzypaws]

I can't help but think the magic table wasn't thought through completely before it was posted and might get an official revision in the published book. Nothing in Hocus Pocus seems to have anything to do with the fundament of life. Healomancy, the most quintessentially life-related thing I can think of short of creating life outright, is in a discipline that doesn't include life as a fundament and isn't related conceptually to the other two schools in its discipline in any conceivable way. Luckmancy should be Fate magic by rights.

There are other things, but it's what we have to work with, so... Here's some more school speculation in the given framework.

Date-a-mancy: This could be a punny way of saying data-mancy, but that seems out of place in Hippiemancy, and I think the Spookism discipline probably contains most of the stuff manipulating unit data. So let's go with time manipulation, since hippies have a notorious fluid perception of time - as affects Sizemore near the beginning of the comic. Date-a-mancy thus might encompass all the stuff like extending the duration of other magical effects, getting information from "object reading" and "past lives" and other new age bullboop, and so forth. This would seem to naturally include turn order manipulation and similar things as well but then that creates a problem with Turnamancy.

Turnamancy: If Date-a-mancy takes over turn manipulation, and we assume Changemancy covers transformation (turning one thing into another), that still leaves possibilities for Turnamancy, since turn is a very versatile word. Turning could be the abjuration of Erfworld... turning attacks aside or even back on the attacker, turning units out of your hex (anti-whatever shell), turning existing magical effects off or back on, and so on.

Dollmancy: This probably encompasses both voodoo effects and cloth golems, not just one or the other, since Sizemore's dirtamancy encompasses various magic effects plus erf golems as well. It might potentially encompass this world's variation of petrification, if that's not covered under changemancy.

Carnymancy: Gaudy flashy carnival stuff. Cheating the rules of the game world, feats of physical ability, beast taming (probably not limited to just Dwagons), flight (a logical thematic extension from trapezery and demonstrated as an ability of the Arkenhammer), et cetera.

[RebelWulf]

Personally, i'd think that Hat-o-Mancy covers things like Teleportation as was said earlier in the thread.

Deletionism, on the other hand... *cracks knuckles*. I think spells like Disintegrate might actually be Deletionism spells. You -Delete- things from existance or whatnot. I can see where your going with the idea that it deals in penalties, but maybe it covers direct damage spells or other incredibly nasty spell effects. As was mentioned in the Bogroll thread, he was disintegrated so he probably cant be Uncroaked or Decrypted... Making Deletionism very, very nasty if thats what was used.

[Mikalyaran]

I'm pretty sure Bogroll was just burned.

[RebelWulf]

Presumably burning works like Disintegration might?

[Ilari]

The various magic schools remind me of how classes and professions work in most MMO games. Each school is like a magical theme, with each of the three disciplines being a different interpretation of that theme.

Soo, what are speculation on the various schools of magic we haven't seen yet? What do they do and such?

http://erfworld.com/wiki/index.php/Magic#Disciplines

• Hocus Pocus
  
  • Findamancy - Locating things
    
  • Predictamancy - Fortune Teller
    
  • Mathamancy - Using numbers to determine probable outcomes

Hocus Pocus might be all about arcane knowledge, or an awareness of the natural laws of Erfworld.

Findamancy sounds obvious but appears to overlap with Lookamancy, so maybe it's not about finding objects, but finding out. Detecting a trick or knowing the true nature of something. Could involve dispelling veils, locating hidden objects, maybe seeing hidden terrain bonuses.

Mathamancy is basic number-crunching; you could call it knowledge manipulation or a kind of informational alchemy. Probably lets you calculate unit bonuses, army strengths, figure out why a stack has the stats it does, etc. We know it can calculate victory odds, but that's not really prediction so much as a measure of how close the battle is.

We don't know much about Predictamancy but it's probably rather limited. You may have to ask very specific questions, or you might get answers without any context. I'm thinking of the kobold oracle guy from Order of the Stick here; phrase your question poorly and you may get a misleading answer.

• Spookism
  
  • Turnamancy - make units take fewer turns to pop, change turn orders, end turns sooner than the enemy would like
    
  • Dollamancy - something related to voodoo dolls
    
  • Weirdomancy

Maybe Turnamancy is about "turning" a unit to your side. Not mind control, as that's Thinkamancy, but maybe a direct manipulation of loyalty. It could convert or temporarily "charm" enemy units, or tame neutral monsters, or something similar.

I agree with Dollamancy being cloth golems + voodoo. The golems themselves aren't very spooky.

Together, those two suggestions give Spookism a nice theme of "making things do what they're not supposed to", so maybe Weirdomancy alters or randomizes spell effects and unit abilities. Shockmancers summoning cute puppy dogs, thinkagrams going to the wrong address, Mathamancers finding that the answer to every other calculation is "a suffusion of yellow", etc. Fun times.

• Stuffamancy
  
  • Dirtamancy - Digging, traps, and various dirt/rock/muck golems
    
  • Changemancy - make units or terrain change to give advantages or disadvantages (i.e. make a unit grow wings to fly or the land grow trees to provide cover).
    
  • Dittomancy - make one unit copy another unit so that they can do things they normally couldn't on their own

Seems pretty straightforward. I'm guessing Changemancy doesn't alter terrain, as when Sizemore talked to Parson after the volcano thing, he said he "actually modified the terrain type, like a Titan." That would seem to rule out terrain changes via normal magic. Changemancy is probably more about transforming objects or units themselves, especially since it's Fate magic. Dittomancy probably just duplicates things.

• Eyemancy
  
  • Lookamancy - Clairvoyance
    
  • Thinkamancy - Telepathic abilities (Arkendish)
    
  • Foolamancy - Cloaks and deceptions

Lookamancy = Remote viewing, seeing at a distance, seeing through another unit's eyes
Thinkamancy = Telepathy and psionics. Suggestion, persuasion, mental disruption, general mind-boop stuff.
Foolamancy = Illusions and disguises. Optical trickery.

When the eyemancers linked up, I'm guessing Misty was able to see through the eyes of every one of Stanley's units, and Maggie filtered the information into the form of a map that Jack could output as an illusory image on the table.

• Hippiemancy
  
  • Flower Power- calm hostilities or possibly literal plant magic
    
  • Signamancy
    
  • Date-a-mancy

We know Flower Power can be used to "quiet" battles, but we don't know how. I like the idea of it being plant magic. Signamancy could involve making or reading signs, but I like the "signature" idea better. Quieting battles through treaty and diplomacy.

No idea on Date-a-mancy, though. Could be time, could be romance, could be fair-trade organic fruit.

• Naughtymancy
  
  • Shockmancy - Stunning and disorienting spells
    
  • Croakamancy - Deals with Undead (Arkenpliers)
    
  • Deletionism - negates bonuses, units, or stats

Well, we know Shockmancy ain't lightning. Less like thunderstorms and more like Jerry Springer. I agree on Deletionism being debuffs.

• Stagemancy
  
  • Hat Magic
    
  • Carnymancy - (Possibly what the Arkenhammer is based off of with taming vicious dwagons and turning walnuts into pidgeons)
    
  • Rhyme-o-mancy - incantations

We've seen Hat Magic. I expect it can be used to teleport items as well as notes, and maybe store objects in small spaces as well. Carnymancy could be lots of things, but I can't come up with anything specific that doesn't conflict with something else. Rhyme-o-mancy might be bard stuff, or something organizational.

• Clevermancy
  
  • Luckmancy - Roll adjustments
    
  • Healomancy - Healing spells
    
  • Moneymancy - add to your treasury (by collecting interest), lower the cost of units

Healomancy does seem a bit out of place here. I don't think it's without reason, however.