In December, someone suggested deleting supernatural nature, who since deleted their character and thus their comments. The idea came up to have magical interests, then lo and behold, a full page's worth appeared in Feedback. 14 have been endorsed, some are still in auto feedback (on page 3 at time of writing). This is something we haven't done before in Interests and it'll take some experimentation to get right.
I believe we should unblock Magic Use for endorsement and roll some of those magic interests, which I'll list, into it - i.e. delete or reject them, and just handle them as part of that.
My rationale for selection is this:
- People care how your magic works, but the how isn't important to divide up taxonomically. Specifying how is what context are for. (I like breath play, but I'm not going to suggest an interest for each specific method for doing it.)
- What results the magic achieves is worth distinguishing, but several interests either (a) are just "do something vaguely magical" without any specific results, or (b) the results achieved are already covered by another interest, so it's just "do that thing, but with very specific magic". (A lot of magic is just a wild way to achieve something otherwise more ordinary, we likely don't need "but with magic" interests - that can be a context too.)
- Having a number of very specific magical interests isn't helpful. There's hundreds of kinds; people are very creative.
Here's the interests to delete or reject:
- Sigilism, Enchanting, Spellcrafting: "Do magic, but like this." Instead, take Magic Use, and specify the flavour of your magic in its context. Sigilism sounds like a Ritual anyway.
- Magical Binding: Mind Control, but with magic. Take that and Magic Use instead, specify contexts, maybe use Ownership and Body Puppeting if appropriate.
- Effigy magic: Mind Control, Body Puppeting, Torture, Sacrifice, and others. Use those and Magic Use.
- Cleromancy: just use Divination and specify in context you read tea leaves or bones or whatever.
- Transmutation: this is what Alchemy is about, so it's redundant. Lead to gold, and all that. I've made a request to make the Alchemy interest's description more accurate.
- (Maybe) Cursing, Blessing, which are both "do magic in vaguely unhelpful/helpful ways", except with very specific dark or divine overtones. This makes them both very vague in what they achieve, while very specific about how they accomplish it, to the point that many kinds of harmful/helpful magic can't be described using these. Both of these also have no direct obvious impact on what will actually happen in the story as a result of using them, other than vague sweeping hints. Instead take Magic Use and interests that indicate what you want to do with this vague magic: Torture, Melee Combat, Tending, etc.
For completeness, the ones not singled out here for deletion are: Telepathy, Teleportation, Summoning, Illusion, Ritual, Telekinesis, Necromancy, Mediumship, Alchemy, and (still in feedback) Divination. These all have unique and distinct functions, they're not just unnecessarily specific varieties of "do magic", and they're not replications of existing interests but with magic. That's not to say they don't have other problems, mind, which they might do. I'm also open to hearing if any of those might be unnecessary as well.