Magic and spheres

Magic is organized around spheres, talents, and the resources and targets that make an effect legal.

A sphere is a field of magic#

Spheres organize capabilities by theme: changing forms, restoring life, manipulating darkness, creating things, moving objects, or influencing weather. Talents extend what a character can do inside those fields. A visual effect is the presentation of a spell; it does not prove the full rules implementation.

Know what an action costs#

Supported effects can consume spell points and encounter actions. Ownership, prerequisites, target legality, and effect duration matter. Current project adaptations are not a complete conversion of their tabletop source systems, and costs should be read from the active game rather than assumed from a different rules edition.

Communication is a capability#

Speak with Wildlife and base Gravetongue illustrate the distinction between communication and omniscience. Their tested implementations require their sphere and talent, cost one spell point and two encounter actions, and run for one minute per caster level up to twenty. Animal communication grants neither automatic friendship nor human knowledge. Base Gravetongue does not recover a corpse's memories of life.

Undead companies, necromancy, and mind-thrall hosts#

Magic also opens darker routes into military command and rulership. In the Death, Dark, and Blood spheres, the permanent undead talents—Undying Legion (Death), Sepulchral Thralldom (Dark), and Crimson Ossuary (Blood)—allow you to raise NPCs and enemies killed in dungeons or towns into permanent skeletal followers. Once five or more permanent skeletons are raised, they consolidate into an active Undead Company on the world map, and slaughtering an entire town allows a twenty-four-hour ritual to raise every resident as a skeleton army and claim the settlement as a fog-shrouded necropolis. In the Mind sphere, reaching Level 10 with the Mind Control talent unlocks a dialogue action against lower-level NPCs (Will save against your Mind sphere DC); binding five or more thralls forms an active field army under your command.

Read the sphere reference#

The sphere articles in this wiki describe each field's authored visual vocabulary. They explain how the game distinguishes magic on screen. Their presentation label is deliberate: it avoids treating an art specification as proof that every talent and target combination is complete.