Animal Star Magic Introduction (Patreon)

Hello! It's me again with some more Animal Star preview art and an explanation of how magic works in the story!

Previous worldbuilding posts: [Overview], [Backstory], [Characters] 

Magic in the world of Animal Star comes from the Son, a brilliant white and rainbow star at the center of the story's setting. While you're in its light, you can split its power into different colors, focus it, and wield it as your own. 

The intensity of your life force, your will and desire, gives your spells strength; strong emotion can unleash great bursts of magic that defy control, and apathy and doubt can stunt your power. In the dark, out of direct starlight, you can't cast spells at all and even the most resilient enchantments fall dormant.

This means that the interplay of light and shadow are of great strategic significance when magic is used for war and violence: a ship's design might factor in shade for use as armor against starlight spells; a skilled swordsman could block their opponent from getting the light they need for casting with a flourish of their cape.

Each color of magic is essentially a verb, one that you can push and stretch to its conceptual limit. For example...

Green magic moves. You could use it to teleport, make a weapon float into your hand, fly at incredible speeds, or seize your wounds and hurl them at an enemy, transferring them to their body.

Blue magic grows. You could use it to become twenty feet tall, create extra limbs, heal wounds with new flesh, increase a cannon's range, or intensify the pain of a light blow until it is excruciating.

...and so on and so forth!

However, power like that comes at a price. The more you put into a spell, the more your body assumes animal features. You might sprout feathers, antennae, or a lizard's tail while trying to work starlight to your will. Push further, and the changes could end up permanent, leaving you forever closer to the threshold all mages fear: the moment they burn through their last drop of humanity and become a senseless beast.

Just as each color of magic has an associated verb and a flavor of desire that can fuel it, they all have an associated type of animal as well. Red magic gives you reptile features, blue magic, fish features. Green magic is tied to predator mammals, orange, mammalian prey. Yellow magic, light magic, is related to birds. Dark, purple magic, is related to insects. Casting a hybrid spell can give you features of an animal that shares both colors' characteristics. For example, working red and blue magic together might turn you into something amphibian; blue and dark magic could leave you with crab claws.

Despite this, animals in the world of Animal Star are, for the most part, a distant memory, lingering as imagery in religious texts long after the extinction of all life besides humanity.

And then there's dolls, who can't cast spells at all...

~

I hope you found that info interesting! For me, just like (or even more than) Paranatural's clicky colorful spirit power rules, this system is a huge narrative, visual and thematic palette for me to pull from... I'm really excited to show this stuff in action! Until I can, thank you for your support! :V