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As I near completion of converting Curse of the Lady's Light to a remastered narrative framework, I have decided that the easiest way to handle many aspects of the Runelords: from their schools of magic contain every spell to the way they tried to define and take power from sins...is that, as brilliant and powerful as many of them were as wizards, their conceptualization of arcane magic is more like the stuff of weird conspiracy theory cult esoterica, than actual useful or true information.
Like, the idea that each of their schools of magic actually contained all of the possible spells that fit into one of eight categories of magic is a pretty fantastically bold claim to have been able to make...but it could have just been the case that the Runelords spell books were particularly impressive, but their disciples mostly just had 2 or 3 spells at any given level that each of them thought were the defining spells of their school, and which spells actually belonged in the school was something that got fought over and changed frequently. So historically, it might look like there were dozens of spells that were in each Runelord's school, but in reality it was more like there were dozens of schools in each Runelord's empire, and that the Runelords were so jealous and secretive about their magic that they didn't really share their knowledge as rigorously or freely as would have been necessary for the schools to exist with set rules across an entire empire.
This seems likely when you look at how terrible the Runelords were as nation builders. The only thing really holding their empires together was how ridiculously powerful each leader was. In all the ruins of Thassilon, all the imagery is centered upon Runelords themselves and never competent generals or administrators...unless a story is being told about those underlings being controlled or abused, or revolting and overthrowing a past Runelord. Each Nation existed almost exclusively to serve the needs and desires of one person only, and none of them really seemed to care much about their school of magic being their legacy. They all just seemed to use their school to accomplish their own ambitions.
This allows for opposite schools of magic that wizards "just couldn't cast" or could only cast with more difficulty to be cultural and social constructs instead of actual magical realities. And when a wizard who can turn you into an undying expression of pure rage tells you that a certain spell is impossible to cast...well, you can argue that case at your own peril.
This also makes everything about the 7 sins social constructs instead of inherent, metaphysical realities in Golarion, which I think is going to be pretty essential to Runelord stuff ever getting much more play time in the future. Like, no game today really wants to be running with "lust is mortal sin" on a metaphysical level, but having an ancient civilization that spouted that to control a population and give a leader the ability to use people's fears and shame about their own sexuality and sexual desires to maintain authority there is a much easier history to reconcile and use in a game setting.
It is very easy for very smart people to end up holding beliefs and ideals that are messy, contradictory and wrong...especially when the underlying purpose of these systems is not exploring truths and revealing knowledge, but controlling others and keeping oneself in power. I think taking that approach to Runelords schools of magic really works best for squaring all the past lore into the more open-ended and pluralistic Golarion of pathfinder's remastered future.
What do you think? For me, this is the easiest, and maybe only way I can feel really comfortable having the Runelords take up so much of the narrative space of a Campaign that I am going to run. The players can learn the lore and have fun thinking about how that lore affected how each individual Runelord ran their empire and designed their twisted dungeons, but can also feel free to point out hypocrisy or find fault in even their mechanical logic without it being a sign of some weakness of the game itself or the campaign. Fundamentally, these Runelords were very powerful people who were completely self-absorbed and willing to burn the resources of entire nations to stroke their own egos and preserve their own power. They completely corrupted the ideals and principles of the school of magic that created all of them to this self-serving end, and these incredible flaws in otherwise brilliant intellects makes them all more interesting and compelling as villains.
That works pretty well, especially since the Runelords only recognized seven schools of magic, and divination was just tossed into a universal "other" category.
For arcane magic, it's got a very religious bent to it with the categorization by sins/virtues, and it can probably be viewed in a similar way to how a lot of early scientific and mathematical understanding was tied to religion and weird cults like whatever Pythagoras and Co. had going on. Arcane magic was lost for a pretty long time, so it makes sense that there would be a long period where the influence of religion and occultism would be felt strongly in the arcane tradition. (Primal, too, but it turns out those actually can be reconciled more formally.)
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Interestingly, the page of Pathfinderwiki about Xin mentions "Xin announced a new method of mastering magic that built upon the Azlanti virtues of rule to organise magical specialisations, which he devised from the combination of Azlanti and foreign magic".
So IMO actually very close to the Remastered vision of Wizard's schools, of theories, models and methods trying to impose some grid to make sense of magic rather than universal principles inherent to the nature of magic.
And before Xin, the 8 schools (or rather the 7) might as well not have existed.
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Xin is a huge part of the Shattered Star AP, and so I have been reading all about him, which is part of why I think it works so well for the underlying magical structure of the Runelords to be such hocus-pocus as it were. Mageocracies fundamentally end up being extremely authoritarian, if only because so few members of society will ever achieve the highest levels of magical power, and I love the "one good-intentioned wizard ended up creating a system of magic that just ended up a disaster" theme. I think that works very well with "and at the heart of it all was just nothing but the self-manifestations of people with the power to bend reality to their will."
Like, I have really struggled with personally understanding the boundaries of arcane magic in a world with occult magic and primal magic as well as divine magic, but adding in the context that the nebulousness around arcane magic is, in part because people say it is regulated and constrained by observable and repeatable processes and rules...but also sometimes people just come along and change all the rules, because they can, keeps it a pretty fun and interesting mystery. Every other magical tradition has a source (even if the occult tradition's source should often remain unknowable), but Arcane magic is kind of the magic that is just magic without a dependency on "one true source," which makes it more fun for at least some of the big wizards of the setting to have truly just kind of invented some weird (and often gross) stuff about it, that doesn't actually need to connect back to anything in the rules or some greater metaphysical reality.
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For the record, I totally love this idea. People are always trying to categorize phenomenons that can't always be categorized--species, fairy tale, intelligence, sex, gender--and it totally makes sense that they would attempt the same thankless exercise in self-humiliation with magic.
"Hey, look! I've categorized every string of magic! Every form of magic humanity can wield fits into this framework. Look how elegant and beautiful this graphic looks!"
"Oh, cool! Wait, what about divination?"
"... it. doesn't count. it's actually, um, um, Quasi-Magic, a thing I didn't just make up which, according to this very fancy chart I'm about to draw up, means it totally doesn't ruin my beautiful model."
"What if someone creates a spell that controls elements and protects people at the same time? Is stoneskin Wrath or Envy?"
"It's. Envy. Obviously."
"Wait, why is cause fear a necromancy spell? Is the Gluttony spell list just any spell you think is spooky?"
"... nnno? it's, um, complicated. Very advanced math."
"What about thaumaturgy?"
"GO AWAY"
I sincerely hope this is how it gets canonically resolved, so we can get more rulelord lore stuff that kind of exposes them in a way that makes them more dangerous because “WHY IS NOBODY LISTENING TO ME! THAT’S NOT HOW MAGIC WORKS!!!”
Because the alternative feels like either not telling stories with them anymore, or trying to create a bunch of mechanical stuff that dives too deep into the sin stuff to get away from the D&D magic system.
"Wait, why is cause fear a necromancy spell? Is the Gluttony spell list just any spell you think is spooky?"
"... nnno? it's, um, complicated. Very advanced math."
That issue came from attempting to "balance" the spells available in each of the magic-user/mage/wizard schools during multiple edition changes. IIRC, in 1st Ed AD&D fear and related spells (such as phantasmal killer) were illusions on the illusionist (a "sub-class" of magic-user) spell list. Just like cure...wounds and cause...wounds were necromancy spells on the cleric list (instead of conjuration).
Yeah, and AD&D had its own bizarre school choices. Categorization is just always going to be a mess when the categories derive from the material, rather than the other way around.
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This allows for opposite schools of magic that wizards "just couldn't cast" or could only cast with more difficulty to be cultural and social constructs instead of actual magical realities. And when a wizard who can turn you into an undying expression of pure rage tells you that a certain spell is impossible to cast...well, you can argue that case at your own peril.
I was musing on how the Runelord archetype might be Remastered and I just realized that it having an Anathema is the perfect way to translate the opposition schools in Remastered PF2 parlance.
"You should not cast this kind of spells and, if you ever do, you lose all your special Wizard powers forever." sounds like a pretty good incentive.
And then self-rationalizing that you cannot cast them because it is an inherent limitation due to the nature of magic itself. With centuries-long lifespans, you might even come to believe it wholeheartedly.
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Honestly, it seems perfectly logical to me. The Runelords were incredibly powerful and knowledgable wizards. That doesn't mean they were omniscient or that the structures by which they understood magic were inherently Correct or Objective. Going by the Principles of Elementary Thaumaturgy excerpt in Secrets of Magic, the lack of consensus on what arcane magic physically represents is diegetic and the subject of much debate, with at least three competing theories forwarded. I would expect no less for the state of classification of all spells.
I understand that Xin discovered 7 he decided were the most powerful and decided to assign them retroactively to the schools of magic, except as QuidEst and KC have already hit on, he flat left out Divination. If even either of the seven runes or the schools of magic were based on something objective in the world, they already didn't even agree with one another in Xin's time--to say nothing of 'universal' spells that belong to no category.
That is to say, I feel like I take for granted these days that the schools of magic were arbitrarily assigned by ancient wizards powerful and knowledgable enough that their influence on scholarship for millennia after their time continues to cast a long shadow over modern magic (at least, modern magic in Inner Sea, in nations whose magical tradition we've already seen--after all, scholars at the Magaambya don't even necessarily believe you can 'discover' arcane magic so much as will it into existence like beating a trail in the dirt). The idea that there are exactly 7 or 8 schools of magic feels to me a lot like declaring there are exactly 7 colours in the rainbow, or 4 elements, and wedging everything into that rubric whether it fits or not.
"You should not cast this kind of spells and, if you ever do, you lose all your special Wizard powers forever." sounds like a pretty good incentive.
I think the idea of giving Thassilonian mages an anathema against casting certain types of magic is an interesting and inspired idea for representing their particular idiosyncrasies, but I don't think it makes sense for them to 'lose wizard powers' for violating this tenet. It's not very strongly in the theme of Arcane magic to be based on belief. At most I would say that the specific benefits of being a sin mage are founded on the mindsets/virtues, and so breaking from that schema doesn't cost you any wizardly powers, but might spoil your bonus sin-enhanced powers until you can rededicate yourself... although given currently rune mages simply can't learn spells from the wrong lists, the point is kind of moot what happens should they cast one.
Even more of a problem, the categories would still have to be redrawn, unless we were to get a master list of what all spells in the game belong to which Thasillonian runes, and therefore which are anathema to which. No matter which way you slice it, the biggest problem facing remastering Thassilonian runes is finding a way to categorize spells according to each sin.
Simplest to me seems to be using existing traits and simply ignoring the issues this inevitably causes with certain traits being overly encompassing, and of the same spell appearing in multiple lists, but that may not be the most satisfying depending what one wants. It's one thing to give all Illusion spells to Pride, and all Mental to Lust, but it's very much another to figure out which elemental traits all belong to Wrath, or even finding any way to assign spells to Envy from the old abjuration list...
I think it is a lot easier than that. I don’t think the schools for the 7 sins need to be exactly fixed (like maybe both gluttony and lust claim fear, and claim the other school can’t cast it). But if in the place where some version of the schools get published, part of having a sin school of magic is that you have 2 opposite schools, then you can just have a “specialist in one school unable to learn the spells in those opposite schools,” and acknowledge that there will be some potential variations from that based on GM fiat or adventure writing call.
We have some runelords back in Golarion so it could be one of their versions of things that is the currently understood version of sin magic, but I’d personally be wary of letting Sorshen be the decider of much player facing game options.
Remember too that the archetype only delivers on the myth of specialization of a school by giving you a more spells to cast, not more powerful ones. You get 1 more focus spell, and one more school spell slot. The only other feats to maybe need to address are the counterspell ones, but I think they are probably still fine with remastered schools that make sure to have a good 4 or maybe 5 rank 1 slots, and then 2 or 3 at every level afterwards. There were already old pre-remastered schools that didn’t cover much more than that, especially at higher levels.
Also, it makes a ton of sense that newer spells wouldn’t really fit these classifications (they weren’t around back then), so the categories don’t need to expand. If every sin school has a couple of really classic spells that most wizards want to cast, then giving up the ability to ever turn invisible, fly, or cast fireball or lightning bolt(not to mention never dispel them) is going to be enough of a set back to not make these schools inherently better, especially for the additional cost of only being able to refocus in specific, “sinful” ways.
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Honestly, it seems perfectly logical to me. The Runelords were incredibly powerful and knowledgable wizards. That doesn't mean they were omniscient or that the structures by which they understood magic were inherently Correct or Objective. Going by the Principles of Elementary Thaumaturgy excerpt in Secrets of Magic, the lack of consensus on what arcane magic physically represents is diegetic and the subject of much debate, with at least three competing theories forwarded. I would expect no less for the state of classification of all spells.
I understand that Xin discovered 7 he decided were the most powerful and decided to assign them retroactively to the schools of magic, except as QuidEst and KC have already hit on, he flat left out Divination. If even either of the seven runes or the schools of magic were based on something objective in the world, they already didn't even agree with one another in Xin's time--to say nothing of 'universal' spells that belong to no category.
That is to say, I feel like I take for granted these days that the schools of magic were arbitrarily assigned by ancient wizards powerful and knowledgable enough that their influence on scholarship for millennia after their time continues to cast a long shadow over modern magic (at least, modern magic in Inner Sea, in nations whose magical tradition we've already seen--after all, scholars at the Magaambya don't even necessarily believe you can 'discover' arcane magic so much as will it into existence like beating a trail in the dirt). The idea that there are exactly 7 or 8 schools of magic feels to me a lot like declaring there are exactly 7 colours in the rainbow, or 4 elements, and wedging everything into that rubric whether it fits or not.
Xin based his classification of schools on the 7 Azlanti virtues of rule.
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I think it is a lot easier than that. I don’t think the schools for the 7 sins need to be exactly fixed (like maybe both gluttony and lust claim fear, and claim the other school can’t cast it). But if in the place where some version of the schools get published, part of having a sin school of magic is that you have 2 opposite schools, then you can just have a “specialist in one school unable to learn the spells in those opposite schools,” and acknowledge that there will be some potential variations from that based on GM fiat or adventure writing call.
We have some runelords back in Golarion so it could be one of their versions of things that is the currently understood version of sin magic, but I’d personally be wary of letting Sorshen be the decider of much player facing game options.
Remember too that the archetype only delivers on the myth of specialization of a school by giving you a more spells to cast, not more powerful ones. You get 1 more focus spell, and one more school spell slot. The only other feats to maybe need to address are the counterspell ones, but I think they are probably still fine with remastered schools that make sure to have a good 4 or maybe 5 rank 1 slots, and then 2 or 3 at every level afterwards. There were already old pre-remastered schools that didn’t cover much more than that, especially at higher levels.
Also, it makes a ton of sense that newer spells wouldn’t really fit these classifications (they weren’t around back then), so the categories don’t need to expand. If every sin school has a couple of really classic spells that most wizards want to cast, then giving up the ability to ever turn invisible, fly, or cast fireball or lightning bolt(not to mention never dispel them) is going to be enough of a set back to not make these schools inherently better, especially for the additional cost of only being able to refocus in specific, “sinful” ways.
I think the easiest way is to focus on what a spell does.
Like, if you follow the school of Lust, you have a knack for spells manipulating others’ minds, emotions, and wills (aka pre-Remaster Enchantment) but it is anathema to you to cast spells that deal with life, death and undeath (aka pre-Remaster Necromancy), which belong to the school of Gluttony, and spells transforming things and enhancing the physical self (aka pre-Remaster Transmutation) that are the domain of the school of Greed.
You get the drift.
I think that can be a fine house rule for a table that wants to embrace some kind of universal-ness to the old schools, but is way more work than is necessary for “the old sin schools that defined all magic were never real in the first place.” The rune lords got around these restrictions all the time in practice. If it is just the case that you can’t learn a handful of iconic spells from the opposing school, and your methods of refocusing become restricted by your sin, that is enough of a trade off for the modest boons that the archetype (which also eats up feats).
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Blocking fairly narrow spell traits could be the way to go. Illusion is a trait, Emotion is a trait, Polymorph is a trait, Death/Void are traits, Summon is a trait... the only tricky ones are Abjuration and Evocation, really, but you could probably figure them out.
I actually like this, too, because it kind of emphasizes what the oppositions really mean. If you're good at polymorph stuff, you're bad at emotion and illusion spells, because you only understand how to work with tangible, physical matter. It's more about the mindset you choose to excessively wallow in.
Karzoug's all like, "ugh, I don't believe in the soft sciences, my rusting Cyberdragon is the future, facts don't care about your feelings" right before he gets decapitated by a runeforged scimitar.
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Blocking fairly narrow spell traits could be the way to go. Illusion is a trait, Emotion is a trait, Polymorph is a trait, Death/Void are traits, Summon is a trait... the only tricky ones are Abjuration and Evocation, really, but you could probably figure them out.
I actually like this, too, because it kind of emphasizes what the oppositions really mean. If you're good at polymorph stuff, you're bad at emotion and illusion spells, because you only understand how to work with tangible, physical matter. It's more about the mindset you choose to excessively wallow in.
Karzoug's all like, "ugh, I don't believe in the soft sciences, my rusting Cyberdragon is the future, facts don't care about your feelings" right before he gets decapitated by a runeforged scimitar.
I like all of this very much.
Abjuration could be any spell that grants either resistance or a bonus to AC.
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I just stumbled upon this thread this morning, and this is delightful.
The reason I am not going to try to touch inherent traits as part of counter schools for my campaign, and why I am going with just “specific runelord schools just have specific spells the identify as belonging to their opposition schools is because it is just way too restrictive in some cases and is pretty far removed from even how the old schools worked. Like conjuration spells offered tons of ways to do damage that probably could have overlapped evocation, but gave those players options. Plus conjuration included teleporting spells and summoning spells and thus either you try to replicate all of it and get really restrictive, or you are getting essentially as arbitrary as just choosing a couple of representative spells that are particularly common, which is a lot easier to manage. After all the whole idea here is that those old ways of dividing up spells were off to begin with and mostly enforced through fear from above, rather than with truly sound logic.
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Autocorrect is an annoying tool to override.