[Thaumatology] Divination as the Core of Magic

[Prince Charon]

Something that annoys me for pretty pedantic reasons is the use of '-mancy' in fiction (Dresden Files is a notable offender) as a generic 'this category of magic' suffix, when '-mancy' is from the Greek word 'manteia,' which specifically means divination. I do understand why it happens - Necromancy, being 'divination though talking to ghosts/the dead,' became associated with Death Magic in general, and the usage expanded from there - but that doesn't make it much less irritating. However, the source of the problem inspired a potentially-interesting solution: As you study a branch of divination, you learn to affect things related to it (and to hide from or disrupt the perceptions of other soothsayers, which is important for gameist and storytelling reasons). This is also pretty consistent with the trope of wizards just knowing stuff that they shouldn't, and not giving a clear explanation of how.

Example: As a young necromancer, Jozef would seek out ghosts to talk to, at the places they haunted. Later, he learned to summon them, and then to convince them to perform various tasks, to bind hostile wraiths, or to help a spectre move one to what lies beyond. Eventually, he learned to manipulate existing undead, and then to animate the dead for himself.

Doing this as spell-based magic would probably involve rearranging at least the first few spells in each College (perhaps using a different name, to fit the mood of the system better), or making each Manteia a Magical Style. Either way, the Divination spell at the core of the College/Style/whatever would be the only one with no other spells as prerequisites, though especially with Magical Styles, the spell might have skills or other qualities as prerequisites (though making any level of Magery a prerequisite for that first spell would be much more limiting than it is in the standard system).

On the other hand, this works pretty well with Divination as Contacts: You start out just getting information from your spiritual Contacts, then as you learn more about them, you learn how to phrase requests for small favors, and as your relationship improves or you meet more or more powerful spirits (increasing the cost of the advantage in various ways, or adding new advantages or Alternate Abilities), greater favors are seen as 'small enough, if it's for you.' A similar progression fluffwise works for Divination as Spirit Allies or Spirit Patrons (or a given Contact might change over time to an Ally, or if powerful enough, a Patron).

Magic as Powers in general would depend a lot (mostly mechanically, but in some cases also fluffwise) on what advantage or meta-trait is being use as the core ability.

For Path/Book Magic, I see two main options: Firstly, the core skill is the divination skill - e.g. 'Ritual Magic (Tarot)' or 'Fortune-Telling (Numerology).' IMHO, this works better for Book Magic styles. For Path styles, I suggest that the Path (or Manteia) is arranged so that the 'skill-0/lowest energy cost' ritual is the Divination ritual for that Path (so for example, the Path of Fire starts with the ritual for Pyromancy; the other rituals would probably contain some things only conceptually-related to fire, like Passion or some form of Creation). Some types of divination work better conceptually as a core skill, and some as a ritual.

Adapting Symbol Drawing for this concept could also be mostly fluff: You start with just the core skill, and do Symbol-Casting (or e.g. Cartomancy or perhaps Astrology); I suggest that for this concept, you would need to learn the individual Symbol skills in a particular order, probably either Verbs first or Divination-related symbols first.

There are of course other systems and other ways of using the systems suggested above, but this seem like a good start.


Thoughts?