Grace and Graphimancy (RPG Notes)

 (originally published on the 29th of June, 2019)

On a facebook page for the Fate rpg, one of the posters was looking for ideas on how to build a school of Victorian/Edwardian sorcery. He had female player who wanted to build something around handwriting or calligraphy, so with that in mind, I set my branemeats astir and came up with this. (It’s hardly complete, but I thought I’d leave it here for future reference) Magic is divided into four basic axes. In the educated classes, magic is divided in two on the basis of gender. In the working classes, magic is divided in two on the basis of setting. For the first, ‘Castle Falkenstein’ a splendid steampunk rpg by Mike Pondsmith had a great approach to Victorian-era magic as it relates to upper-class male practicioners, who will be the closest to what we think of as wizards or magicians. In this setting, almost all magicians are members of clubs or societies. A mage could use their abilities for minor workings, but any substantial undertaking would require a great deal of effort and co-operation. Essentially, the way you'd do it in Fate is to start with an obscenely high difficulty level - you are, after all, attempting to re-write reality. What your circle of mages would be doing would be creating aspects that they can use to lower that difficulty level. - Have you checked the astrological charts and ensured that it's an auspicious day for this type of working? - Are you and eleven colleagues gathered together to achieve the working? - Have you a ritual workspace? - Has it been properly consecrated, with appropriate circles drawn and blessings invoked? Magic, as practised by upper-class men is largely based on High Ceremonial Magic. A lot of it is dependent on invoking outside higher powers to force change on the natural world and relies on a "scientific" veneer of book-reading and precision in terms of material components, magic circles, astronomical and astrological charts, alchemy and so on. As it is Victorian Europe, the goal of masculine magic is the bending and subjugation of the material world to the human will of the magician. Mmm... imperialism, colonialism, enlightenment philosophy and the white man’s burden. Delicious.

By contrast, magic, as practised by middle-to-upper-class or educated women would be almost entirely secret. This second type is the one the original poster would be most interested in, and which would incorporate calligraphomancy. This practice would be almost exclusively subtle magic. Because women are forbidden to practice magic, they have had to resort to camouflaging their rituals and studies as normal activities, in much the same way as slaves in Brazil trained themselves in martial arts that could be disguised as dancing, or Japanese peasants developed weapons that could be disguised as farming implements. So feminine subtle magic could incorporate things like the language of flowers, or the language of fans. Spells could be hidden in stitching or embroidery, in dance steps, in the movements of a fan, the way a house is decorated and arranged, basically any activity which women are engaged in. And one of those activities, as any Jane Austen fan will tell you, is in the writing of letters and the keeping of diaries. It could be a matter of secret punctuation, of meaningful flourishes designed to look decorative but which can have hidden meanings of effects. You could take influence from the use of magical writing or calligraphy in Taoist sorcery (but with the more Victorian European look).

For the working classes, magic would be chiefly based on where a practitioner is born or lives. Rural practitioners would favour hedge magic, or witch/wisecraft, which is secret knowledge passed down orally and is all about creating change by aligning the users will to the flows and rhythms of nature. This would be largely feminine, but would include an array of folk remedies and practices known to all. While the magic of the urban poor would include smatterings of everything - This could incorporate bits of rural folklore and scraps of other traditions, secret languages like hobo markings and thieves’ cant, and various mystic traditions brought in by sailors, immigrants and travellers from the far-flung regions of empire reworked for local use. A particularly good example of this process is the way the pirates in Tim Powers’ ‘On Stranger Tides’ incorporate voodoo into their sailing folklore (Maitre Carrefour, an aspect of Papa Legba, for example, becomes ‘Mate Care-For’). So you’ve got ‘High Magic’ which is about bending the material world to the will of the user, ‘Subtle Magic’ which is about using precision and guile to hide in plain sight, ‘Wisecraft’ which is about aligning the will to the rhythms and movements of nature, and ‘Street Magic’ which is about finding small things, keeping the ones that work and throwing away what doesn’t until you have a small bag of tricks you can pass on.

('Castle Falkenstein', Mike Pondsmith's wonderful Steampunk and Sorcery Tabletop RPG, and 'On Stranger Tides', Tim Powers' intoxicating gumbo of a novel featuring history, folklore, pirates & voodoo!)