Living With Magic

So, you have phenomenal power at your fingertips. But being a conduit of magic isn’t just about blasting architecture or finding lost dogs with a tuft of hair and a bit of string. Magic changes you, gets inside you, opens you up to seeing the world in a new way, and increases the impact you have on the world around you.

### **Wizard Biology**

Wizards—and perhaps other types of spellcasters and magical folk—tend to have unusually long lifespans, lasting several centuries (and a few wizards are rumored to be even older than that). Why is this? Well, no one’s certain— wizardry and scientific study don’t often mix— but some of the Council think it’s an effect of channeling magical energies through a physical body. As to whether strong magic comes from a strong life force, or a strong life force comes from strong magic, well…that’s the sort of chicken and egg thing that the Council doesn’t often have time for. However you slice it, magic and life force are inextricably linked within the body of a wizard. The big benefits here are that wizards heal a little faster than non-magical folks, and their bodies continue to heal until the injuries are gone—meaning wizards can eventually recover from injuries that would permanently cripple a mortal.

### **Wizard Senses**

Humans have a “third eye” which can be opened to behold the world in a different, mystical light. That ability is called **the Sight,** and we’ll talk about it shortly—usually only wizards and **other** spellcasters can access it consciously. Those with the Sight also have the ability to instigate a **Soulgaze**. Also, wizards and other practitioners have some secondary senses that they’ve learned to use. Almost everyone has some degree of awareness of the supernatural, whether or not you realize that’s what is at work. Chills down your spine, a subtle feeling that something is simply wrong about a place, the hairs on your arm standing up for no apparent reason, something tickling at the edges of your vision—these are your primal awareness of something nasty and supernatural treading nearby.
Magical practitioners have sharpened this heightened awareness, due to their arcane studies and natural aptitudes. While spellcrafters’ secondary senses may not offer a lot of information to go on, they can make the half-second difference between a narrow escape and ending up spiked on a vampire’s fangs.

### **Thresholds**

Commonly, the word threshold is used to describe the barrier that is formed around a home by the simple act of people living in it and regarding it as a place of safety, shelter, and family. The stronger the sense of “home,” the greater the threshold. (Unfortunately, inviting someone in dispels its protective benefits.) Building a strong threshold is difficult. Spellcasters can (and often need to) build theirs up with a series of wards, but there’s no real substitute for “organically” grown ones that come naturally from the ideas of shelter, privacy, family, sanctity, and so on. In short, without a strong sense of home, thresholds are pretty flimsy. Bachelors have a hard time making strong thresholds (it’s a pity certain wizards aren’t very good at long-term relationships), and public spaces—even those with private compartments, like corporate offices or hotel rooms—simply cannot naturally grow thresholds.

But other things serve as thresholds as well. In the broadest sense, the term “threshold” may be given to any metaphysical barrier that impedes or blocks supernatural power from passing from point A to point B. A significant source of running water is a prime example, as it “shorts out” magical energies that try to cross over or through it. Thresholds can even be conceptual: the transition from night to day has a weakening effect on magic precisely because it is a sort of threshold.

Some beings—especially those of pure spirit—cannot cross a threshold, since they’re usually using their magical power to hold their material world body together. If they cross a threshold without counteracting it, they just… melt. Some powerful creatures (such as demons) manage to get around this with a physical manifestation that they aren’t personally maintaining. Even so, when an entity crosses a threshold in a mystically manufactured body, most of the entity’s power goes toward holding it all together, limiting it to what its body can physically do. Spellcasters, by dint of having supernatural powers, are affected by thresholds to some degree. Being fleshy sorts that have a place in our reality, they lack many weaknesses of pure spirit beings (i.e., crossing a threshold doesn’t make the wizard melt back into the Nevernever). All the same, a wizard crossing a threshold uninvited leaves a large amount of his supernatural power at the door—not all of it, but certainly enough to make him think twice. Even a spell that tries to cross a threshold may be diminished.

### **The Laws of Magic**

All mortal practioners (wielders of magic) must adhere to the **Seven Laws of Magic**, lest the White Council hunt them down and execute them.