# Scholomance # Overview So mages have mana. **Mana** is delicious to Maleficaria (**mals** for short). Mana also gets **used for magic**, naturally. It comes from "**effort**" on the part of the maker, and whatever that means depends on the maker. Whenever you do difficult tasks that requires Effort, that Effort becomes in some part mana. The whole magic system is a very consensus-driven "**if everybody believes** this is how something works, **it’s how something works**". A lot of magic in this setting is Because Narrative, not because Sense. Mundane people don’t believe monsters are real, not anymore. They have a tiny bit of mana in them anyway, and are technically edible, but every single monster trying to eat one would have to overcome the belief that they don’t exist, so mostly they don’t. Adult mages are similarly unappetizing; they can defend themselves with lots of power and bite. They are delicious but come with such an irritating wrapper that, ugh, it isn’t even worth it when there are better options available. And of course there are - wizards have **children**. Children are Meh when they’re little, approximately the same as mundanes. But when they hit **puberty** - delicious, delicious mana, with no idea how to use any of it, not really. So obviously most mage kids do not make it to adulthood. The typical ratio is **1 out of 20 survive**, statistically. That one is probably the one with a very protective family that can handle taking shifts, because the mals never, ever stop, and there are so many of them, and just one needs to get through. \[Everybody disliked that.\] Some mages tried to squirrel their kids away in a **self sustaining pocket dimension in the void**, that also serves as their **school**, during the really rough years of 14-18 (depending on the kids themselves), with only **one entrance**, that was open just long enough to drag its victims students through. That **entrance is also the only exit**. They started with some very idealistic views of how this would go! They did a lot of planning; they were very systematic and careful and had this twice a year system of cleansing the entire school with mana eating fire while the students hid in their rooms. Sparkles in their eyes about how maybe, their kids could have a decent puberty, not so much plagued by monsters as before. Safer. Which… it did. Sort of. See, they learned really quickly that **mals still got in**. And that they liked especially to wait by the exit for the students to ‘graduate’ and leave. And that in fact the best way for the kids of the wizards organizing this was to go with the school of fish theory of protection. In that they double the roster, and let the less well equipped and prepared students get eaten instead. But of course, it’s not ‘let,’ it just Happens, and the smart and strong and clever students sometimes make it out anyway! And it’s a better chance than outside the place, even for kids that only got in as fodder. They have to live through four years in a horrible place with no adults, lots of monsters picking their way through the wards to get at you (mostly the little ones), and then have enough good connections to be well organized enough to get past the exit horde. Much easier than before, comparatively. There's also practical stuff, like the **weight limit** for entry - **70kg**. The only way to get things in is when it gets new students, who have a weight limit, including themselves. There is a food and water system in place, and the freshmen arrive on the safest day of the year in their rooms which have just been cleansed and remade from scratch. With all of the monsters sated by the delicious "graduation feast". Anyone in the know knows you make that weight limit count - not too much because if you’re too starved you can’t fight at all, and food is a resource in there too. \[NOTE: The info given in this paragraph about weight limits is at least partially glowfic fanon, not canon.\] An **enclave** is to Scholomance as a pure-blood family is to Harry Potter. they're groups of wizards who have the wizardry resources to protect their children better because they have pooled them and have generational strategies and so on. They're also extradimensional locations where the enclave people live, in the same vein as the pocket dimension school but with more entrances that have human instead of automated defenses. Each enclave (group) has an enclave (place) If you **know a language, you get spells** in it! The more languages you know, the more variety of spells you have, which is useful for being able to trade them and also for having resources other people don't. But if you only know a little of a language, that's enough that the Scholomance decides you know it, and **it will give you spells and assignments in it**, to the point that it's dangerous to look too hard at sentences in languages you don't speak in case you pick up a little bit. So fluency in a language is an advantage but only knowing six words is actively a liability. There are kind of schools of magic **magic majors** you can take. **Artificing** is making magical items, **Alchemy** is making magical liquids (often consumable), **Invocation** is saying magical words. There are different ways to go with invocation: 'Understand and cast all spells that have been done in other languages and are tried and true' versus 'write your own'. You can do things that aren't on your track, and sometimes the school kind of makes you if it will in fact make you a Better Mage. From the school's far off perspective, it wants you to be very good at magic, and it is not picky about the how. **Maleficers**? Totally cool, actually weirdly supported by the school because they are so good at staying alive. The mages of the school themselves hate them because maleficers **can drain other mages** and that makes them a threat, but the school itself is like, "HELL YEAH GET YOU SOME DARK MAGIC, YOU'D BE GOOD AT IT!" Dark magic, for the record, **drives you a little insane when you use it**, and if you drain mana too much from things that think, you're draining the, mm. Psychic energy of the thing that doesn't want to die and instead wants you to die into you. This rots the maleficer in the end from the inside out, literally. Mana you have an **innate store of and have to work for** to build up when you use it; Malia you can **just rob from other people** but it fucks with your head as mentioned. Mana is energy freely given/made by you, malia is actively taken, from anything, even microbes. It's okay to get mana from consenting people who mean it, and this is how a lot of maleficers get their in - they get a little start of consent and then keep pulling. So maleficers are often super hot and super appealing and the good ones tend to seem harmless and sociable and make you want to help them and then you start and they take that line and move it wherever is convenient for them. That is one of the scary maleficers, and why all of the other mages are like, "KILL IT, KILL IT NOW." Though in practice it's more "KILL IT, KILL IT NOW if and only if it is a threat to me in particular." # Setting details & lists # List of mals named mals: - agglo - amphisbaena (two-headed, snakelike, live in shower heads, not that hard to deal with) - anima-locusts - anoxienta - argonet (talons, nine eyes, armored plate, fist-sized teeth) - benibel (eats human corpses) - blood-clinger (tentacle) - castigator (slimy limbs dripping with acid) - chayenas (violet drool, from cheetah to hyena by way of water buffalo and rhinoceros, paralytic bite) - chimaera (fire-breathing tail) - clothworm - copper-gnawer - crawler - cribba - death wyrm - demon - digester - disembodied wight - djinn - drencher (sopping wet and perfectly capable of dissolving the flesh off his feet and legs if he touched it on his own) - eidolon (deep nightmare creature) - ekkini - eldritch-infested dingo - flinger (three-eyed) - gelidite (grows over things, killed by piercing core with enchanted fire arrow) - glinder (billowing violet-pink cloud) - glutinous maggot (can be found in rice pudding for instance; if you put a spoon in them they’ll go boiling up it and get half your fingers to the bone unless you fling it away quick enough, in which case usually they land on a dozen different students in the line and promptly start eating whatever flesh they land on and dividing into new swarms) - golem - gorger - grogler (jelly-like tentacles with thin pink cords, big red knot in the middle, not known for patience or long-term strategy) - grue - harpy - horka (slavers) - hissingale (size of a tree, pulsing snaky limbs) - hungerhowl - incarnated flame - isk (molten metal with exoskeleton, lays eggs in furnaces) - jangler mite - kaiden (deep nightmare creature) - kerberoi - kvenlik - leskit (has twelve feet, hunts in packs, sounds like an angry ostrich) - lockleeches (the adult spindly thing comes quietly down at night and pokes an ovipositor into any big clumps of hair, lays an egg inside, and creeps away. A little while later the leech hatches inside its comfy nest, attaches itself to your scalp almost unnoticeably, and starts very gently sucking up your blood and mana while infiltrating further. If you don’t get it out within a week or two, it usually manages to work its way inside the skull, and you’ve got a window of a few days after that before you stop being able to move) - lyefly - magma slug - mallow (lives in tear ducts) - manifestation - maw-mouth - miercels (these self-reproducing construct mals that look rather like wasps the size of my thumb. Their shells are made of a mana-infused metal) - mimic (can imitate chairs, for instance) - mindworm (infestation symptoms: mysterious and uncharacteristic foreign thoughts inserting themselves at unwanted and unpredictable times) - naga - nightcrawler - nightflyer (hangs on ceiling, glides) - numbing scorpion - ooze (a glistening black ooze, for instance) - pharmeth (deep nightmare creature) - pipesucker (drains mana) - polyphonic shrieker (tentacles, smells terrible) - polyvore - preycats - pythagoran - quattria (four animals squished together, reproduce by splitting in four) - radriga - rat-worm - razorwing - red speckled grelspiders - rhysolite (dissolves bones) - rilkes (their wings making the shrieking bird-noise, dripping blood beneath them like rain) - scratcher (knife-fingers, metal) - scuttler (round lemur eyes staring at me full of hungry longing, drooling from their mouths full of needle-teeth, gleaming stinger on rear) - scuvara (hideous leathery bat wings) - shrieker bloom - shrike - sirenspiders (sound like wind chimes, spin webs, freeze you into paralyzed horror with sirensong and suck your blood) - slipslider (sheds skin to escape) - soul-eater (a single one has taken out a dozen students in other years, and it’s an extremely bad way to go, complete with dramatic light show (from the soul-eater) and shrieking wails (from the victims)) - spikegrubs - striga - suckerworm (car-sized, lamprey-like) - treeks (small constructs) - vipersac (can stretch out skinny and long; “hovering already fully inflated over the fourth row of seats like a magenta balloon that someone had Jackson Pollocked with spatters of blue. The blowdart tubes were starting to puff out”; three little eyestalks; goes pale pink before shooting; filled with highly flammable gases) - voracitor (all creaking wood and antique bloodstained cast-iron machinery held together with bundles of intestine-like flesh, with long spindly arms and fingers, dozen eyes) - wauria (slithering up out of the drain to latch on to our ankles) - willanirga - yarnbogle - zjevarras (deep nightmare creature) unnamed mals: - reading assignments that dissolve away your eyeballs - mal that disguises itself as raisins - the faint blue slick over the surface of the cream - a six-armed thing vaguely like the offspring of an octopus and an iguana - a horde of little squeaking fleshy things like naked mole rats that appear from under the bed apparently hoping to nibble you to death - nameless shadow - a shadow-thing that didn't even have a chance to take enough form for you to recognize which variety it was - tiny scuttling mals revealed up on the ceiling (probably agglos? but maybe scuttlers) - some slithering mess that drops on your head from the ceiling tiles - cursed artifacts - something that makes a high-pitched shrilling, vaguely birdlike noise - something that makes a lower snarling - ridiculous cross-breeds in the bestial or hybrid category created when some excessively clever alchemist stuck together two incompatible creatures for fun and profit - an eyestalk that comes up from the drains under the table, with a big watery green blob of an eye - a handful of small scuttling things that make raspy clicking noises against the floor (definitely not agglos, maybe scuttlers but would be weird not to just call them that then?) - ones with glowing eyes - ones with drooling jaws - ones with glinting metal - scavengers that scoot away happily with the remains of dead mals - tiny mals that squeak and squirm and hop - mysterious cocoon tucked very carefully inside one of your bedsprings, waiting to become an unpleasant surprise - vermin-class maleficaria on the shelves among my textbooks by the handful - construct mal that can draw spell inscriptions - drippy ectoplasmic cloud - a vaguely Doberman-sized body with dachshund legs, covered with narrow cone-like spikes that had tiny holes at the tips, which put out some kind of gas - mana-eating insects classes of mals: - hybrid - bestial - vermin - hydra - construct - eldritch - psychic - gaseous - amorphous *it was the kind of maleficaria that can animate wizard possessions, and it was also the kind of maleficaria that had a corporeal flesh-digesting body of its own—each of which is a significant branching on everyone’s favorite cladogram from Maleficaria Studies* # List of enclaves # List of spells - \[el\] summon an army of scuvara - \[el\] enslave an entire mob of people to do your bidding - floor-washing charm - \[el\] unravel souls - start fire - protective charm against poison - make-and-mend - dissolve small mal - \[el\] supervolcano - mind-tugging spell - water calling - trip wire - water-spout - dust-devil spell - \[el\] raise a dozen incarnate flames - incineration spell - inner eye lullabye - aegis ward - sliding-scale spell to conjure magical fire - spell for distilling clean water from dirty - pulls in a bunch of spare electrons from the environment around you to deliver a good heavy electrical shock - a few grooming cantrips—hair-plaiting, a bit of glamour, and a deodorant spell - \[el\] crushing an entire pit’s worth of living victims into pulp - mirror enchantment - quick cleaning charm - basic blunt-force spell we all learn in the second month of Maleficaria Studies - animation spell on some rags and a mop - timespear - slickshield (only useful against oozes) - communications spell - à la mort - simple gifts hymn - gwen's meditation - bread into cake - phase-control - enclave-building - copying curse - throat-soothing charm (on honey) - restoring papyrus - tanning leather - \[el\] binding a cursed grimoire that would siphon off a bit of mana from every wizard every time they cast one of the spells inside - mana amplifier - malia-siphon - unbreaking sleep spell - hypno spell - Allumez (flaming weapon) - freezing spell - binding spell - infuse carbon into iron - \[el\] disintegration curse - yanker spell - Revelatory Light spell - refreshment of the spirit - perimeter spell (dripped with clay jug) - finding spell - transport spells (like pneumatic tubes) - \[el\] shrivel up significant parts of a boy’s anatomy into a single agonizingly painful lump - fire blast - \[el\] razing an entire city to the ground - \[el\] flaying-and-sorting spell - \[el\] an imperial Roman spell meant to eradicate a host of annoyances that are trying to get at you but are temporarily held back - sniffer spell - malia-sucking hex - dividing earth from stone - gwen’s circle healing - this fantastic spell she’d got in her languages seminar that allowed you to get behind someone else’s spell and *push* - migraine inducer - immobilizing spell - scrying - artificer’s testing charm - *trip the next person who comes along* hex - healing charm (cast on water) - levitation - contraceptive spells (very unreliable) - \[el\] moat of lava - \[el\] putrefying rot - withering spells - \[el\] hurricane - \[el\] orange-purple balefire spheres - \[el\] seventh spell of binding from The Fruitful Vine - \[el\] mummification spell - a ward on the back door that zapped us if we tried to go through it alone - telekinesis spell - tone-keeper spell - sweeping spell - net spell - evocation of refusal (translucent dome roughly seven feet across) - honeypot spell - amplification spell - mindphone