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PS I am pretty sure Paizo have said that the other two are never going to officially exist, but that doesn't mean we cannot speculate, right?
They didn't say never, but they said they have no plans for it and they don't want to make more spell lists just for the sake of filling in all the combinations.
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-Rainbow
-Friendship
I thought this would be obvious...
PS I am pretty sure Paizo have said that the other two are never going to officially exist, but that doesn't mean we cannot speculate, right?They didn't say never, but they said they have no plans for it and they don't want to make more spell lists just for the sake of filling in all the combinations.
That's how I read it, too.
I did ask Mark on an early playtest thread if they were going to "fill the grid" for the other two combinations of essences. He said "no", but I don't recall if it was just for the playtest or for longer than that. This maybe PF2, but it is still Pathfinder, so I would be surprised if by 2 years in, the grid hadn't been filled at least once.This was actually something that came to us first from the world team, specifically mostly from discussions with James Jacobs along with some with Mark Moreland, so we grabbed the essences and lists that made sense for what they were looking for in terms of explaining the metaphysics of magic. As per those discussions, they weren't looking at combining opposing essences with orthogonal metaphysics into traditions, and we have no plans to do that either, but no plans doesn't mean never. I guess if something brand new came into being that juxtaposed two incompatible concepts in one, it's always possible. And if that does happen, it's added a new story we can only tell thanks to the richer lore of the essences (that said, I'm a big essence/tradition fan and the one who started asking weird questions after we had the essences and traditions like "Could we have the sorcerer vary traditions based on bloodline?" and "Isn't the bard actually occult based on this framework?" so I'm biased).
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Psionic and Technology
:p
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Based on Mark's comments about opposing essences versus orthogonal essences I've been visualizing the essences and traditions like this. Each side of the square represents an essence and each tradition is basically a pair of intersecting sides. In this representation you can see why the Matter/Spirit and Mind/Life combinations are treated differently than the other four pairs. Those opposing essences are not connected and so are metaphysically parallel to each other. The other pairs do share a point of connection so can he thought of as metaphysically perpendicular (orthogonal).
Topologically you could connect the opposing sides by using the third dimension. Roll the square into a tube by joining the Mind and a Spirit sides and the bottom ring might be a representation of Halcyon casting where those two opposing essences are brought together through the Material Essence. Bend that tube into a torus (donut) and you can join the Spirit and Matter sides as well. In that form there would be a point where all four essences, and hence all four traditions, meet. That might represent Old-Mage Jatembe's vision of merging all of the essences and traditions.
But even in those 3-D shapes, those opposing pairs of essences would have a qualitatively different relationship than that between the other pairs. The 'parallel' essences would have to completely merge into a single 'line' and hence become indistinguishable. The orthogonal essence pairs would still be separate except for the single point of merger. Perhaps that would explain the somewhat unusual mechanics of Halcyon magic and the difficulty of bringing all magic into a single tradition.
I looked at that image and I have to say that yes using that construction it would result in the opposite faces meeting at a corner.
However, that is a matter of the construction used. If instead each spirit was represented by a triangular face. Than we would get a tetrahedron in which each side is a different tradition.
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No faces of a tetrahedron are on opposite sides of the shape. Also no faces are orthogonal to each other. I don't think a tetrahedron works.
PS I am pretty sure Paizo have said that the other two are never going to officially exist, but that doesn't mean we cannot speculate, right?They didn't say never, but they said they have no plans for it and they don't want to make more spell lists just for the sake of filling in all the combinations.Fair point, I couldn't remember exactly what they said. But with every class that they add that does not use a new tradition it becomes less likely IMO.
There is also the issue that they would either have to come up two new skills (in which case what else would they do) or shoehorn it into the extant skills. Which might be easy for difficult depending on what the new traditions actually are, but it is another piece that would have to be lined up.
Mind/Life is easy enough to attach to a skill: Society is the only knowledge skill that doesn’t correspond to a magical tradition. As agreement to the point that Mind Life fits the bardic theme even better than Mind Spirit, I would propose a tradition called “Schema” (Diegesis was my original thought, but I think it’s too close to Divine). Stories are real; legends have a power in the telling. A Schema mage can invoke the power of belief similar to a Divine caster, but in her case the story she’s telling itself fuels magic, without deriving from some distant source on a different plane.
Edit: Heal could work, but given that Mind covers so many buffs and illusion spells, I think a casting tradition literally based on Traditions fits this pairing better.
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One thought is that those opposing or 'parallel' (to borrow from upthread) essences may not actually be types of magic represented by spell casting but instead have to do with the way certain aspects of the universe work.
Matter/Spirit could have to do with how the soul is held together and bound to physical objects (like bodies.)
Life/Mind could be how life force intersects with someone's will, e.g. when someone loses the will to live.
In this scheme a Summoner's God Calling could actually be Matter/Spirit in nature (calling a soul into existence and manifesting it a physical body.) I think that works, though I'm not sure what I would call it. Life/Mind is harder, I almost wish it had been Ki, because that would fit in perfectly with real world lore about ki/chi and so forth as being an energy generated by the body and directed by physical and mental discipline.
Psychometabolism for Mind/Life- it's a "mind over matter, and matter over mind" discipline that unlocks the potential within the self.
Some sort of animist "communicating, or motivating the spirits of things" for Matter/Spirit.
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I think we just cannot have the two other kinds of magic because the 4 essences are actually 2 groups of 2.
One deals with what is affected by the magic : Material, which is the Inner Planes and all things tangibles, and Spiritual, which is the Outer Planes and all things intangibles.
The other deals with how you affect, the nature of your access to magic : Mental, which is the rational approach, and Vital, which is the instinctual approach.
You need one of both to do magic : an object and an approach.
With Material and Spiritual, you would cover all objects but you have nothing to affect them.
With Mental and Vital, it is the opposite : you have both approaches but nothing on which to apply them.
What I find more fruitful is mergings of traditions that have an aspect in common. Like Primal and Arcane, or Occult and Divine. Those cover 3 of the 4 essences and can open interesting synergies.
I hope we see a class that breaks the mold a bit with spell lists and is like "you can prepare two spells per level from this list, and one spell per level from this list". Something like a Shaman could use that with Primal and Occult.
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Occult and Primal sounds strange to me. Such a caster would use reason to deal with the unseen and instinct to deal with the material.
I truly believe we will see casters mixing traditions that have an essence in common, such as the Halcyon Speaker archetype who focuses on the material through both Primal and Arcane. Indeed, I think archetypes rather than classes best fill this slot. Else we need to deal with the prepared vs spontaneous for each of the blending of traditions.
So, that would make for 4 mixes :
- Focus on Material = Arcane + Primal (Halcyon Speaker)
- Focus on Spiritual = Occult + Divine
- Focus on Reason = Arcane + Occult
- Focus on Instinct = Primal + Divine
Matter/Spirit seems like it would flow well with the concept of Animism.
Indeed. I think that the Occultist (which will probably need to be renamed) would be a good caster for this combination.
Indeed. I think that the Occultist (which will probably need to be renamed) would be a good caster for this combination.Matter/Spirit seems like it would flow well with the concept of Animism.
The antiquarian(which is the best name for the class), focuses fairly heavily not on souls or spirits, but the echos of thoughts and emotions lingering within objects themselves, which is so decidedly arcane in essence theming that anything else is a disservice, meanwhile nature spirits and the like have been referenced in other material as being somewhat different than a traditional soul(see discussion and questions answered about leshy), meaning that it and similar concepts like kami falling under primal for the purposes of magic isfairly sensible.