I’d like some feedback on this lore, the magic of Luminari MUD:

Ossirian, the world of Luminari, is permeated with magical energy that manifests as a thaumaturgic field surrounding the planet. This field controls the movement of magical energies, causing them to naturally ebb and flow. All living things affect this field, twisting and shaping these forces with the movement of their bodies, the sounds they produce and the patterns of their thoughts. In this way, all magic users manipulate these energies in order to cast spells, although the many approaches to the art are quite different in both theory and practice.

The Arcane school of thought sees these energies as a tool that can be harnessed, accumulated and then released. Arcanists use patterns of thought to pool magical energy inside of themselves, unleashing this stored energy with a trigger of some kind, either verbal, somatic or material. This release can be violent or controlled, and the amount of energy that it is possible for an arcanist to store is directly related to their experience with the manipulation of the thaumaturgic fields. Truely experienced arcanists can store incredible power, unleashing it with great violence. In order to build these reservoirs of power, the learned arcanist studies spells that they have inscribed. These studies create thought patterns that trap the magical energies, locking it inside the magic user until the proper trigger is provided. The arcanists call these studies ‘memorization’ although that is misleading to the layman.

Some individuals have the ability to innately manipulate the magical fields of Ossirian, possibly due to extra planar or magical ancestry. These natural arcanists are called Sorcerers. They have an innate ability to affect the thaumaturgical field nearly instantaneously and so do not need to prepare their spells.

Arcane magic is considered an internal type of magic.

The Divine school of thought focuses instead on guiding the magical fields, using subtle changes in the fields surrounding their being to manipulate the flow of magic without forcing it. Practicioners of this type of magic consider it to be a more natural method of manipulating magical energies. <> While Arcane magic is considered to be an internal art, where the power comins from inside the caster, Divine magic is an external art, where the caster does not internalize the energy but rather guides it from an external source to create the desired effect. Similarly to the arcanist, the divine caster becomes more able to guide larger quantites of magical energies as their experience grows. The source of the energy is, for all intents and purposes, near infinite (due to the recycling of the energies in ways that this treatise is not concerned with) but the manipulation of the fields used to bend and mold this energy requires considerable effort. Because of this, divine casters, like arcane casters, are limited in the muber of spells that they may cast each day. In addition, the divine caster must undergo a similar process to the arcane memorization – This process prepares the caster to manipulate the energy, creating resonance in the thaumaturgic field that can be unleashed using a process much like the arcane trigger discussed above.

[Submitted by Ornir]