Weather Witchery
Weather working draws from a few of the more interesting domains or aspects of mafic in Axioms. We could spend a lot of time talking about combat applications of those domains but I’ll save that for a much later post. Too basic for the Esoteric Arcana series. Instead we’ll look at using weather related domains for economic and strategic purposes.
So weather/climate magic can be employed for a variety of actions including brining rain for crops, blocking passes with snowstorms, making the seas dangerous with thunderstorms, slowly terraforming a province, and so forth.
For military strategic purposes you can interfere with land and sea travel. You can generate fog to get enemy armies lost. You can hide your armies or espionage units in fog. You can mimic the effects of the summer thaw to make travel difficult for those without proper mud transport. This mud effect was a critical plot point in Harry Turtledove’s fantasy WW2 depiction The Darkness Series. Unterland which represented Russia had specially shaped high wheel mud wagons for their logistics. There are a variety of other options as well.
For economic purposes, both negative and positive, you can provide strong winds to speed up your ships, swell a river to cause economic devastation, and call down a pretty snowstorm to boost the impact of a winter festival.
The domains of weather magic can be used to produce ice for industrial or argicultural purposes as well. You can create greenhouses or just modify the temperature of a whole province to grow key crops.
Similarly an early frost can cripple the agriculture of an enemy province. Provided you don’t get caught applying these effects you can drive an enemy state into a famine if you so choose. You can also ice over a river or lake to create a surprise assault on an unsuspecting enemy.
Magical Restrictions
If you read the more general blog posts on magic in Axioms you’ll know that not all options are available every game. There is an overall primal/raw magic level set on world generation that depletes as magical research “discovers” various domains and associated spells and rituals. The mechanics for discovering new kinds of magic vs learning already discovered magic through research are slightly different. Direct transfer of magic from existing practitioners is usually more resource effective than independently discovering it.
There are a couple purposes for this system from creating low magic worlds, to themed magic worlds, to creating thematic differences between societies similar to an Illwinter game with their famous well defined races.
Magical Knowledge Level
In the vast majority of cases magical practitioners are rare, usually they are characters although highly magical races can have non-named population levied magical units of various kinds. I made some effort to create a sort of fallen society style theming for the majority of generated worlds.
That is early on in the timestream magical power is higher and more accessible and later societies would often be unable to surpass the power of found artifacts or other repositories of ancient knowledge. Though this doesn’t apply to every world.
Most societies will only know magic from a single mid single digit number of domains. Although special cases and player intervention can obviously impact this. I’ll go into more detail in a special addendum post to the Estoeric Arcana series. However many entities will have access to at least a few options as far as weather magic.