For millennia, wizards have been whipping up whatever dish they wished for with arcane ingredients without any concern for "execution order" or "metastructure", so feel free to bend the arcane to your brazen wills without wind to this guide. For the wizards of a nerdier bend, however, it may be useful to really know what's going on under the hood when you practice magic (it would also remove any need to pray to useless "moon Gods" who haven't even had any hand in weaving the arcane), so proceed with an unkempt excitement for whatever lies beneath the weave. On top of this, feel free to pick and choose what machinations of the arcane you seek to fully grasp; it's a free realm, after all.
- ulz. Scribe
In most of modern academia, spells are notated as some function S(a,b,c,...z), where each environmental input is a parameter of the function S, and the output is essentially a spell "object" (a term which we will get very familiar with down the line).
- ulz. Scribe
Furthermore, we attribute the work of certain wizards via notation written down twice already in this text. You use the first 3 letters of a wizard's name followed with their title (a conjunctive "the" can also be used but is left to discretion). If a wizard has multiple titles, simply list all of them (e.g. gan. Grey White or gan. the Grey the White, the former notation being much more popular and the utilized one in this text).
- fri. Textbinder
The following is a list of the wise and hardworking contributors to Ulzen's guide, feel free to search for their names in the history books that will reference this work long down the line:
- mag. Young
Contributors: ulz. Scribe, gal. Wildly-Prepared North-fighter, fri. Textbinder
Magic is a fairly mundane phenomenon: things fall, things die, things weave - we all know the saying. The Arcane, which is as we'll discover a wonderfully complex phenomenon, has been slammed into our heads over and over again by daily experience as a basic fact of life that one should not gawk at under the threat of being called a fool. This veneer of banality will not stop us from noting magic's beauty when the situation arises, however.
Magic is inherent to reality: we find it buzzing in the air, in fact. But most people are not magically inclined (a finding which is explained by both neurological capabilities and general disinterest in something so banal), and the magic that they cast doesn't go far beyond the simple torch or levitation. Any reader of this text, it is presumed, posesses a greater magical ability than most. Those who don't find themselves magically talented shouldn't fret, however: your ability to bend the arcane into your will depends most primarily on your knowledge of the world's inner workings, which can be acquired with a pinch of elbow grease. Those of a more magical bend, though, tend to conjure much more raw spells, and will create spells that rely more on pure magical energy.