Magic · Kzeroko's Workshop

Magic in Urdas is a resonance phenomenon: a living thing uses its own mana as a signature to make external mana rearrange itself according to an intention.

Almost anything alive can manage a faint amount of mana manipulation, in the way that almost anyone can hum a tune. Turning that into a spell that harms neither you nor anyone nearby takes a medium, training, and an understanding of what it costs.

How one spell happens

Definition — establish the boundary of the result inside yourself. “Cool the water within three paces of my palm”, not a vague wish for cold.
Resonance — use your own mana to reach environmental mana or a spirit, and request, trade for or force the same waveform.
Manifestation — release the resonance into reality through a medium, and absorb the heat, recoil, mental load or material cost.

Failure maps onto the same three stages. A failed definition sends the spell off target. A failed resonance usually just wastes mana. A failed manifestation is the dangerous one — it can burn out the medium, injure the caster, or leave localised mana contamination.

Internal mana is not blue fuel independent of your body. Sleep, nutrition, mood, injury and long training all change its capacity and recovery. Overdrawing it produces ringing ears, cold fingertips and colour-vision drift first; only casting through that damages the mana circuit.

Conductors and media

A medium moves high-precision control off the caster and into a repeatable material structure: staves, grimoires, engravings, instruments, weapon circuits and single-use talismans.

Natural conductors — magitech crystal, World Tree branches, spirit nodules, certain magical beast bones. Magitech crystal formed from ancient meteoric material reacting with local strata over long periods; it is not an unlimited resource. The deeper the seam, the purer the crystal — and the more common spatial anomalies and miner’s mana sickness become.

Artificial conductors — smiths tune an alloy lattice to guide, amplify or insulate specific waveforms. A mature workshop can produce a general conductor more stable than natural crystal, and still needs a little natural material to strike the oscillation. Dwarven forges, Clock Tower standards and imperial military specification use different formulae, and they must not be mixed during repair.

A medium is not a source of power. A mage without a staff can still cast; the precision and recoil simply return to the body. An ordinary person who finds a high-tier staff does not thereby acquire the knowledge that goes with it.

Incantation

Form	Principle	Strength	Cost
Petition	Call a spirit, state the scope, offer something in return	Stable, teachable, low talent requirement	Slow; depends on the environment and the spirit’s mood
Compact	A pre-agreed phrase triggers a fixed waveform	Fast; suits combat and public infrastructure	Inflexible; the compact or medium must be maintained
Command	The caster establishes the rule directly from their own understanding	Extremely fast, can be changed mid-cast	Heavy mental load, severe failure consequences
Pre-inscribed	The formula is written into a scroll, cartridge or device in advance	Usable by anyone, testable results	Expensive consumables, easily sealed or jammed

Casting without incantation does not mean casting without process. It may be body memory, a pre-inscribed medium, extraordinary control, or an incantation compressed into a mental action nobody outside can perceive. None of those are techniques you can teach a beginner.

The six elements and the higher disciplines

The continent calls forces reachable through direct natural spirit resonance the six elements, and fields requiring special subjects, abstract laws or compound formulae the higher disciplines. The game system uses twelve schools; nobody in-world would call healing a natural element.

School	Subject	Common misconception
Fire	Heat, combustion, expansion	Cannot produce a permanent heat source for free
Ice	Crystallisation, slowing, structural fixation	Shares a source with water, trains differently
Lightning	Charge, nerve impulse, magnetism	Metal changes the path; it is not just a damage tag
Water	Fluid, pressure, humidity	Healing here is washing and circulation, not life magic
Wind	Airflow, sound, pressure differential	Vacuum and asphyxiation work is tightly regulated
Earth	Minerals, soil, load-bearing structure	Cannot conjure usable ore out of nothing
Soul	Memory, will, the imprint of life	Proves nothing about a religious afterlife
Healing	Tissue repair, purification, vitality management	Cannot replace a lost organ or long convalescence
Light	Spectrum, revelation, ordering formulae	Not inherently just, and not the Church’s property
Dark	Shadow, decay, curses, local gravity	Not inherently evil; the danger is how hard it is to detect and undo
Arcane	Pure mana, space, and formulae themselves	An academic category, not “can do anything”
Astral	World boundaries, phase, macroscopic gravity	High load, long cooldown, closely monitored by the Star Towers

For in-game affinity relationships, see Elements.

Spirits

Micro-spirits are low-order patterns of will formed by natural mana over long periods. They have no common language and are not miniature people — fire spirits tend to repeat and spread, water spirits tend to seek a continuous path. Petition incantation works by matching that tendency with rhythm and an offering.

Higher spirits acquire names, preferences and territory. City heating furnaces, irrigation channels and mine ventilation are frequently maintained by standing spirit compacts. A broken compact is not only “the magic stopped” — it also means the responsible family loses its work, a district loses water, or people have to move.

Drawn from the KTM2 WorldDict. Only the public layer of each entry is published here.