God's cursed war/Mark II

Immortality in this verse is soft immortality. You live until you're killed.
Immortality techniques are not illegal nor restricted, but they're not taught in school and books containing them are marginally controlled. This is a way to prevent people who aren't good at studying, or skillful enough at something to attract a mentor, from becoming immortal.

A (presumably non-exhaustive) list of methods of gaining immortality are:
1. Contract with a powerful spirit.
2. Animate your body like a meat puppet with pure sorcerious power
3. Health potions. Lots and lots of very powerful health potions, ingested regularly.

#2 is presumably the standard mage approach to magic. Every type of mage magic has its own approach toward 'immortality'.

Physiomancy has the easiest route. This might be the result of physiomancy having a direct connection with the body.
Sorcery, being a general specialty, might be the next easiest.
Followed by elementalism, which has an emphasis on manipulating nature (and thus perhaps the bones, flesh, etc.).
Psychomancy which focuses strictly on the mind, comes in last. Though perhaps this would make transmitting controls to the body or retaining consciousness with a faulty mind easier.

The older you are the more mana-intensive staying alive is. I.e., the cost of immortality increases in mana, potions, labor by the contracted spirit, etc. While the cost always rises the rate and point at which it becomes unsustainable is simply hard to predict.

It is possible to stack multiple methods of immortality. When young, this is mana intensive and not very helpful (other than the non-overlapping ancillary benefits). Using multiple methods can reduce the amount of mana it takes overall. This makes it useful as one grows older.

There are secret methods of immortality to get around this rising cost, but these methods, unlike the standard ones, are secret. They are, furthermore, kept by people unwilling to share them. Because they're secret. Despite this, the broad strokes of the methods are "pretty famous though."

One of them is well known to scholars, but how to do it is completely unknown: Get yourself reincarnated with all of your memories intact.

Reincarnation:
Reincarnation is a thing. What's worse is that it's a thing that multiple people alive at the same time can be the reincarnation of the same person. The soul gets ripped to shreds, and different shreds go to different places. The older the soul, the tinier the fragments it's in usually. But souls with a lot of personality tend to be able to assert themselves, at least a little, for longer than souls with less personality. So great leaders are overrepresented in the 'reincarnated with enough memories that you can tell they're reincarnated.' Supposedly worshipers of The One True God have a somewhat higher success rate at that than anyone else.

Tithed_Verse said:

1. Yes
2. Everyone has their own style, some are better than others
4. In their area of expertise, yes, but there are many stories of mages besting even great gods simply by working outside that god's area of expertise.
5. Yes
6. For ghosts: Mana. For Elementals, they say that they eat 'elemental energies'. For generic spirits that are not ghosts and not elementals: Mostly mana, but a few say they feed on 'starlight' or 'Baby's sighs' or 'sadness' or what have you. Mages don't know how to tap those alternative energy sources, and Gods have a hard time digesting anything that's not a soul.
7. No more so than mages.

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Souls:
Souls just... exist. They're made out of mana, and produce mana. Almost anything that produces mana possesses some form of soul. Demons don't produce mana. Some rare humans or animals don't produce mana, and they don't leave ghosts after they die. That's all anyone really knows. Some mages have experimented with making souls out of pure mana. The results of those experiments were not recorded anywhere in your studies.

The souls break down over time. Eventually they're destroyed, never to reincarnate. Most gods are not very efficient eaters, so some mana leaks out of them while they're digesting the souls. A particularly inefficient god in a cage can be a great mana source.

Yes, but it brings the difficulties of being a god. Some mages have become gods in the past. Most of them are now dead. Gods don't play very nice with other gods, and going from being a very powerful mage to a very weak god is a jarring transition. There's a few still active gods that were once people. They weren't even necessarily mages: Witches can do it too, and even once or twice someone who was neither has managed. They tend to not talk much about what they did to do it though.

Also, some mages manage to remain active after death as ghosts. That... doesn't usually turn out with a happy ending for them though.

Having worshipers already is an ok way to ease the transition. Having a huge amount of souls trapped in cages ready to feast on once you're a god helps a bit more.

Gods are soul eating predators. This is well known by mages, but they keep it from the common folk as part of their agreement with the Priests. For a long time, this fueled the worship of The One True God among mages, back when mages and priests were at war, and the church of the One True God wasn't considered a bunch of loonies by the common folk. You'd know about that, because your learning is so high, and because of your contact with The Silver Lady. Mage souls are especially delicious to gods, and if a god can eat another god... wowie.

Gods

Tithed_Verse said:

You even find a nascent god, Zoroaster the Eternal Flame, a god of secrets, of magic, and of flickering fire. He hibernates on your lands, unworshipped and unlamented, sleeping out his last few centuries with a belly full of souls, and no worshippers out in the world. You could wake him, and revive his power, your own personal god on a leash. Or you could steal the souls from him, using them to improve your own ability to control mana. That would take a Blinder who could staple souls together, or a lot of experimentation. Riya stays far away from the ancient shrine, on the lookout for cultists or worse

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Gods are soul-eating predators. They live off of the mana trapped in and generated by souls.

Ancient treaties prevent the gods from bypassing the middleman and killing people to eat their souls themselves. More specifically, Gods are forbidden to eat the souls of people that they have directly killed. Some unscrupulous gods, or gods who've been sleeping since before the law was put in place, will still kill people directly to get at the nice little soul nougat inside.

Worshippers are people who've basically voluntarily agreed to give their souls to the God after thy die.
Priests are basically the con-men who convince people to become worshippers, and also the people who sacrifice the unwilling to gods, in exchange for the god helping the Priest.

Priests are very similar to witches (i.e. makes a contract with an external power), but you need witch sight to become a witch, and anyone can become a Priest.

Tithed_Verse said:

Yeah. The reason it COULD do that to you is because you're a witch, and thus, not only can you affect spirits and elementals more than a normal mage, but they can affect you too much more than they can a normal mage.

I put that possible result on the rolling list because of an idle 'well, that's something I guess could happen' but I didn't really think about the possibility of rolling it. Then I kinda freaked out and nearly rerolled. Then I decided not to. But I'm super nervous about it. I mean, fuck, I wrote it, and I find it incredibly disturbing.

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Tithed_Verse said:

1. The Blood Dragon is an earth spirit that has been corrupted somehow with demonic blood magic. It can use blood magic, as well as the elemental magic that elementals normally use. He's also got a lot of toxic metals inside him, if you weren't an elementalist/alchemist, and thus capable of neutralizing heavy metals prior to ingestion, that tea would have been pretty deadly. As it was, you just dealt with it so as to not insult him.

Dragons are VERY powerful elemental spirits.

2. Old myths and legends say that half-spirit children were the original sources of magic: A half elemental child was the first witch, and the first mage was half god. Or so say the old, not necessarily true, legends. The witch communities know more about them, but don't talk about it to outsiders, and certainly not to you as you're very much a wildcard outsider and not a part of their complex structure of clans. Whatever they know, the Academy does not, and nor do any of the scholars that you've read the works of.

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Tithed_Verse said:

Oh, @Umi-san wanted to mention: Emerald Monkey is an import, doesn't really know much about the local biome. He's a 'Japanese macaque' fused to a nature elemental, and he was brought here from another biome by another witch and left here for some reason. So he doesn't really mesh well with the local biome, and doesn't know much about the local biome. Also, like most nature elements, he's very emotional and not super smart.

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Tithed_Verse said:

Quite likely, yes. Nature Elements are very common, and even if there aren't any noticeable ones, you can pump a few full of mana, feed other nature elements to them, and grow them into an important one. They're one of the more common forms of elemental.

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Tithed_Verse said:

She was the Abbyess of an Abby to The One True God, the religion that says all other gods are false soul eating abominations, and that the soul was intended to be immortal, and she played her role in the politics of the day. Back then priests and mages were not on as good terms as they are now, the two groups viewed each other with suspicion and distrust, and the Church of the One True God exploited that to drive a wedge between them, converting many Mage Lords to their way of thinking.

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