Voidal Opinions

[Baccaaa 490]

Im relatively new a player having started just a year and a half ago. Ever since when I applied I implied magic upon it, which is why I was rejected and had to rewrite. My first persona was a mundane holy human and I had a good few months with that persona, which is alive still.

 

But then I got the oppurtunity to fullfil what niche I liked myself on a 2nd persona and this was not pre planned or anything, that of being a mage. After following a series of events that make sense IRP and push the persona towards magic, I am able to find teachers due to family. Likewise to Mori's comment my persona developed overtime the thought regarding magic and different feats, one example is the frowning upon of voidstalkers after losing relatives that delved too much into it, then being affected by the eminent's refined control over it, following a philosophy that you should control, not be by the magic. I dont have any complaints, I havent solely focused on CRP with it, but rply did follow the combat path of eminence after being attacked several times during the lessons. I have been lucky with this persona and I have liked how RP has gone with such, voidal magic being utilized for all sorts of random things, mental effects roleplayed and disdain for other paths visible. I would say I have RP'd well considering I was a newbie when I first learnt.

 

Then comes my second voidal persona, which admitely I wasnt too sure about, but the mage niche tickles my brain. On this one I had no such family ties as the first one or even lived in communities with magic. Being a complete stranger makes seeking magic so hard, unlike how most people have the sentiment that its easy. It could be easy sure for people that play long enough to have ties everywhere as it is indeed quite widespread. This persona was pretty much a homeless wanderer, that had the oppurtunity to pick up translocation. Why did the persona do such? For the ability to stow things to the voidal pocket. Lacking a home and shelter and even a mount (yes I rp'd like that the first years) takes a big limit on what you can carry, granted people rarely RP this and I dont blame them. Thing is after a while voidal sickness set in and now the persona was on a crossroad, either abandon magic and its boon or make it worth, a mage with just translocation is very much inexistant anyway. So I rp'd it as a path of seeking scionism to return the strength of the past before the sickness. Alas in the future I might change such.

 

Overall I really like the void, Im a voidcel. Its undeniably more fun than being a mundane char, gives you mental effects to influence your roleplay, is not frowned upon like Dark Magics and Deifics (not speaking of Templars, which are great too imo but havent tried) are. I can see its widespread, but who am I to ask it is more limited? People like me wouldnt get to experience the niche if it was gatekept to me, being a white-tag and all.

 

On a note I do want to add this: Admitely seeking magic has been HARD and one thing it OOC affects me with is the more I know the less inclined Im to PK. Doing all that work finding eager teachers for MAs to PK without achieving much would be a bummer and I hope you can understand why. 

 

Just writing of my experience

[LoTC's Next Top Model 1626]

void magic is fun but the community is not good.

i think the pinnacle example is in void focuses. why does noone use these? they are PEAK flavour. wanna be an arcane archer? you can! want to be a hairmancer? you can! (that's the one i do : )), want to cast spells using your violin to play a specific series of notes as your means of concentrating o the correct formula or whatever? you can!

but noone does. most people in the void community i've experienced only use the magic for combat or for making items to sell. there's no fixing that without massive internal changes in like half the aspects of the server from moderation, player goodill, and economy, though.

 

20 hours ago, Deer__ said:

It's across every inch of the server now and it really is default, baby's first magic. For a lot of people it end up being the only magic they'll have. It's the fact that so many people have it that stops it from being anything really special. It has to be balanced around the masses having access to it.

i think this is the exact wrong way to look at lore on the server, and is in fact the reason that things are so bad right now. adjusting how powerful a magic is allowed to be based on how gatekpt it is leads to extreme elitism where the blessed few are allowed to be gods and everyone else needs to deal with them, which is the sort of cringe that we've largely moved away from, because it's obviously problematic.

because when you base a magic around only one specific clique being allowed to use it and make it nuts overpowered because these are "trusted players that won't do bad faith" or whatever, that just means that when it breaches containment (and it WILL breach containment), it leads to an apocalypse where the Worst People Ever now have a specifically stronger than average magic with which to terrify the server. see; every ******* incarnation of naztherak and why dark magics in general have to be rewritten twice a year while the void magic has remained more or less exactly the same for half a decade (barring outliers like translocation).

this isn't because of a failing of voidal magic, this is because voidal magic is the only magic balanced around players actually having access to it. it's the only magic balanced around actually being USED for anything other than lair clique rp and occasionally ambushing a new player walking the streets at night. that's what we should be striving for, not scoffing against.

[Deer__ 1558]

6 hours ago, LoTC's Next Top Model said:

i think this is the exact wrong way to look at lore on the server, and is in fact the reason that things are so bad right now. adjusting how powerful a magic is allowed to be based on how gatekpt it is leads to extreme elitism where the blessed few are allowed to be gods and everyone else needs to deal with them, which is the sort of cringe that we've largely moved away from, because it's obviously problematic.

I mean it's a problem in both directions.

Spread the magic wide and it gets it's use, maybe in ways unexpected - good and bad. Voidal magic being so common to would be strange if sudden it was given a power boost or something and suddenly we have a bunch of cracked out wizards running around

Circle jerk a magic and you get the things you described. 

I think void magic is oversaturated. I don't want MAs to be wiped or something though. Additionally I think Divination (Voidal lore submission at time of writing this) is a good idea towards giving void mages cool things that don't necessarily raise their power, makes them more interesting. Maybe if there were more things like that urging people to take them over the evocations for a pure combat boost.

[Suzzie 866]

I think voidal magic is super cool and has a lot of potential for stuff way beyond combat- I love using my MAs for flavor RP, CRP takes years off my life LOL

my favorite item is in fact my giant mage staff, which I use as an arcane focus and affection. really would like to see people get creative with their casting tells, because you can do so so much and get a cool theme going on

 

the world needs more zany wizards..

[MrMojoMordor 2413]

Not a voidal player.
Big hater of slick fireball mages & lover of janky weird mojo.

As many have said, voidal magic is too wide-spread. I remember before 2018/2019 - being a regular human McGuy, sitting & serving in a Tavern.
Magic was something you heard about from people, but something you witnessed.
Only magical character saw was a druid & it was BIG NEWS in our humble town of Belvitz. 

Now coming back to LotC at the start of Aveos after a 4-5 year break, one of the first people i met & interacted with was Haus(hello friend). From there, moved to Petra & met more & more mages every day. Even after the fall of Hohkmat - i feel like about 60% of players have a voidal-mage character.

While i'm not against people learning the said magic, (it's a game) A BIG issue that i don't think anyone pointed out is that people keep OOC agreeing to teach their friends voidal magic. STOP IT! >:*  
This i think is one of the biggest culprits of voidal magic widespreadness. It's not like shamanism, druidism, templarism or kani that are rare, but you generally know which groups teach & have accsess to that magic.

You can walk up to people & ask if they are a mage & it won't take you too long to find one probably who would lead you to a teacher if they aren't one themselves. 

[PrimnyaQuorum 3999]

On 3/13/2025 at 4:17 PM, PhilosopherBear said:

Like I mentioned above, I agree that power gaming and min-maxing magics is the biggest problem we face as a community, but there IS a voidal community, we are just not really united yet.

I could show the exact same WIP I haven't touched since late 2023 and go to each voidal clique on the server and get feedback so wildly different I may as well have not asked. ST die upon the hill that void is fine, despite atronachs having been in a sisyphusian cycle of "Earth Atronachs are as strong as Telekinetic Atronachs and Telekinetic Atronachs are as strong as Earth Atronach" for probably years, while being able to identify, internally discuss, and nerf klones within a pretty short timespan [definitely not YEARS], and player groups with either mimic this mindset [because the lore benefits them in a easily abused state] or call for total changes that everyone disagrees with. 

 

Point out any singular clique of mages and there's probably 2-3 other cliques that hate them on a OOC level or just flat out hold too different a OOC view on void magic to make any useful progress to addressing the inconsistencies and gaps in the lore. What you can't do is point to some group that is a void group - I can point to 3 Herald/Drazi groups, or Multiple Naz/Inferi sects, or the Frost Witch Coven [RIP] or the various Kani groups [Caurost, Krug-Fu, Nichi-Jin] whom revolve around and actively partake in the healthy usage and upkeep of their lore through a active playerbase and motivated ST- that just can't be done with void. No group exists that is Voidal; they're all Void second to something else, and that something else will always take the focus. It's the only real set of things that explains how someone let a 2 emote crank crossbow slide by in atronachs or 4 emote no tell wither survive or Eternal Damnation [trial of purity MArt] stay afloat for the years they did.

 

The worst part is likely the fact that since you have no community, you've got no self regulation - most of these issues people in this forum have raised about teachers spamming low effort students doesn't really happen in other communities I've noticed, either through higher standards of entry or the actual retaliation IRPly and OOCly against bad students and teachers. The last time mage v mage conflict happened it ended in a few metagaming reports, a borderline-OOC Couping of a realm and nothing actually mattering to anything at large. 

 

Idk this is a rant and a personal woe I have because its unaddressable save a total wipe of all MAs and FAs - which creates a when, not if situation when the problem re-emerges through the exact same venues. Void is basically doomed to the status quo of no changes, nerfs when someone abuses lore instead of infracting that abuser, and shadowamendments when the rare voidmage main joins ST. 

 

31 minutes ago, MrMojoMordor said:

Now coming back to LotC at the start of Aveos after a 4-5 year break, one of the first people i met & interacted with was Haus(hello friend)

 

:D

[Jentos 9422]

You mostly see this form of vviward, pointy hat, staff - when it comes to human players. Mostly, these are from very older times. Even when I began in 2015, it was at the tail-end of this voidal magic aesthetic. The aesthetic ties to ideas of gandalf and other fantasy depictions of a bearded magician. When it comes to elven culture however, the aesthetic is less prominent. Moreover, the elven counterpart makes the vast majority of magical players: it takes a considerable amount of time to reach the higher tiers of magic, meaning that human players can only have magic “for so long” - and because of the value of MA’s, people are not often willing to ditch these characters. 

I think relatively speaking there needs to be a concerted effort from the community to communicate more broadly and try and establish more of a culture, while dissuading “casual” voidal mages. Because of this, I think the magic should be made less accessible, and perhaps carry on more noticeable side effects (you are mantling a philosophical emptiness that spawns terrors out of time and space).

There is a considerable old RP post out there (I think from Sagwort?) that created a complex mathematical and linguistic system for voidal casting, structuring it somewhat akin to actual medieval occult practices. I always thought it was so neat, except effectively no one really uses it. I’m unsure if anyone remembers it or knows where to find it, but I think voidal mages would be way cooler if they used it. 

TLDR make this stuff serious and cool, ppl shouldn’t be just getting the magic for the power creep. You get magic, play a mage.

 

[Sham404 518]

5 hours ago, MrMojoMordor said:

Not a voidal player.
Big hater of slick fireball mages & lover of janky weird mojo.

As many have said, voidal magic is too wide-spread. I remember before 2018/2019 - being a regular human McGuy, sitting & serving in a Tavern.
Magic was something you heard about from people, but something you witnessed.
Only magical character saw was a druid & it was BIG NEWS in our humble town of Belvitz. 

Now coming back to LotC at the start of Aveos after a 4-5 year break, one of the first people i met & interacted with was Haus(hello friend). From there, moved to Petra & met more & more mages every day. Even after the fall of Hohkmat - i feel like about 60% of players have a voidal-mage character.

While i'm not against people learning the said magic, (it's a game) A BIG issue that i don't think anyone pointed out is that people keep OOC agreeing to teach their friends voidal magic. STOP IT! >:*  
This i think is one of the biggest culprits of voidal magic widespreadness. It's not like shamanism, druidism, templarism or kani that are rare, but you generally know which groups teach & have accsess to that magic.

You can walk up to people & ask if they are a mage & it won't take you too long to find one probably who would lead you to a teacher if they aren't one themselves. 

And people refuse to teach magics etc because of ooc reasons too, which means you're either 'in' the magic or you're 'out' of the magic. Makes it a clique

[sam33497 7356]

4 hours ago, Sham404 said:

And people refuse to teach magics etc because of ooc reasons too, which means you're either 'in' the magic or you're 'out' of the magic. Makes it a clique

If you approach my character on the street and ask to learn voidal magic he will say yes

[Sham404 518]

1 hour ago, sam33497 said:

If you approach my character on the street and ask to learn voidal magic he will say yes

Not everyone is so liberal!

[Minuvas 3193]

Ran an entire society of void mages that had a year long run in 2024. 

 

My general assessment is that void magic and mages offer some of the best RP on the server. 

 

Their RP is caged from reaching it's full enjoyment potential by a few factors, some player controlled but mostly by server mechanics. 

 

On the player side, the dominant human factions have made magic culturally evil or bad. It's ingrained in Canonism. This is one contributing factor that very few above ground magic societies can exist, even more so as humans. Until human groups generally tolerate magic lore, void magic will largely remain an elven affair. Normal tropes like court mages are almost never tolerated, and we've robbed the server of this element of fantasy RP. For those of you who say magic should be exclusive, why? Being a Knight, Being a Duke or a Count, or an elite archer/swordsmen require no staff applications and more widespread on the server. There are good RPers in any clique, promote those ones to interact with your people just as you would your "Duma Leader" or "Chancellor" or whatever. 

 

Second, players collect their magic like pokemon cards and are highly defensive about it. At Hohkmat I made a concerted effort to expand access, and we were largely successful in getting magic into more people's hands. I am no stranger to the fact that this upset some hardcore's who play 10,000 year old elves and horde magics and lore pieces. Players should take on more students, and teaching students should be an obligation in order to keep ones MA - my opinion. 

 

Third, the story team has a compounding advantage in playing magics. Not their fault but they know the lore the best, they can get their artifacts and lore approved faster and have access to decision makers. CRPing against story team members, and you will undoubtedly find the are likely to be leagues better than their non staff peers. Recommendation should be that ST members get a portfolio and should not interact in RP with that portfolio at all other than as an observer. 

 

On the mechanics side, the magic lore is super complex. Doing CRP void mage is amazingly fun on the server, but requires gentlemen agreements and a great deal of maturity to pull off to not take hours of your time or spiral in bad faith. Simplified CRP magic mechanics are long overdue. . 

 

There are other lacking mechanics. Employing magic in RP contlict scenarios  towards cities is heavily restricted. For example, one can use vandalism mechanics to set a market stall on fire with a torch. However , the rules do not allow players to set this same market at all on fire with a fireball. By requiring both story team and moderator approval, magic players go through extra redundancy for even mundane uses of conflict magic. 

 

Even using ritual magic to summon awesomely disruptive magica, which can be raided  and disrupted, which could kill all the mages, cannot impose affects on another PROs territory without permission. Even in a state of war. Unless you perform a normal raid - something the mage CRP community doesn't shine at.  Mechanics for a "ritual raid" of some kind should be introduced. Get the desired affects approved by story, get the time and raid details approved by mod team, and then go. People would want and fear mages more if they could actually affect the world. 

 

Magic is not reflected in war mechanics at all. Would be nice if for every 10x void mages you rallied, a trebuchet was spawned. Otherwise, writing stories about how an entire city of mages marched on an enemy is never felt by players. Just another peasant levyman.  

 

Lastly for mechanics, due to the length of time it takes to learn magic there's very little reason for players to play a human mage. In order to account for shorter lifespans and their supposed less stagnant lifestyles - humans should advance through tiers faster. Come up with whatever RP reason you need to, but it might incentive more human players to take up magic if their learning rate was doubled faster, and elven magic learning was doubled slower. If you think that's unfair, consider the functional immortality of Elves. Whatever they learn is on the server forever until they PK. Every human player gets more or less 180 weeks of RP if they choose to go all the way until their bones are dust. 

 

On the plus side, for non combat creative roleplay: void magic is fantastic, it vastly improves LOTC beyond a political simulator. Watching magic duels, watching a whole city of mages go about their business was tremendous fun and I feel gladenned by the experience (Even during the magic duel to my characters death). 

 

My two cents! 

[Minuvas 3193]

On 3/13/2025 at 1:17 PM, PhilosopherBear said:

Like I mentioned above, I agree that power gaming and min-maxing magics is the biggest problem we face as a community, but there IS a voidal community, we are just not really united yet. It was good for a while but the last people fumbled the job in many ways and hopeful that can be avoided in the future but I truly believe uniting as a community will do wonders.

Lastly, I do believe that a lot of people merely trade magics, however, there is a good amount of TA holders who make learning magic a wonder even if you are a veteran and one of those is @nepirI had a blast learning Illusion from him and even now he still BLOWS MY MIND with some ideas he suggests and in earnest, that is the point of us uniting together! To inspire, create and teach newer people who might be interested.

 

 

Also, I encourage you to unite and build a community. There was a Huge interest during Hohkmat and I would argue that in the absence of both Lurin and Hohkmat a HUGE interest remains. All I did was harness what I saw was a very and very obviously unfulfilled niche on the server. And I maintain a mage society remains the only opportunity for mages to sort of enjoy a central place to refine their RP and then go out and interact with the rest of the map. A vision that I wasn't able to fulfill with the full construction of our academy due to the player politics - but I bet you can!

[MarquisAlex 369]

I wasn't planning on entering into this discussion, since there are players here (such as Samler, Minuvas and Lord_of_losers) who have far more experience than I. But, my last character was a Voidal Wizard, so I'll put my two-penneth in.

 

I played a human wizard called Albus Amador (reference to Dumbledore), who I played throughout last year and still mourn. He went from curious bookworm who ran from home to a Voidal Wizard.

 

Here is my only problem with Voidal magics from an RP perspective:

What if you just want to be a good person?

RPly, we're incentivised to be antagonistic.

I decided to do good things by doing bad things with Albus.

 

The overarching goal of the character was to Study Demons and Battle them, so to keep Descendent-kind safe, after reading about what demons did to his family in an ancestral book.

 

But dabbling into Voidal magics meant the man was an utter eccentric, eccentricity which was inspired from Book Dumbledore/Gandalf/First Doctor(Doctor Who). He would have a tick and go "HM?" Judgmentally and harshly, then turn on a dime and chuckle musically. Voidal magic inherently makes you a bit insane. It saps your strength mentally and physically, whilst also corrupting your soul. You find most magics do this, and I personally dislike the implication that your soul is blackened by using magics, unless you're a druid or an Aengul.

 

But it means that there is a cost that must be paid in the end.

 

As an example of the void magic corrupting morality: Albus helped raise a girl who was the Scion of a Vampire, interfered with the Church by stealing her away from being a nun and had her raised by Paladins, forged her into a weapon against demons that he could use in the future and removed her RP-sense of agency. He acted morally grey, taking care of patients in a hospital by day, then using the workspace to experiment.

 

And you know what?

Actions like this, working around the systems of states and being morally grey whilst others go either extremes...

It worked wonders for me.

 

I was able to spend the time training my CRP skills to go to ST events. Albus was recognised in every active city at the time and had the opportunity to meet with Kings, Lords, Pontiffs and other races. He was able to assist the Xannite Paladins against the Arch-Drakkar. He killed a Greater Inferi (Armoured Cerberus) by summoning a tornado around it. RPly, I felt Awesome. Powerful. Respected.

 

His story ended when he travelled to the Aegis (The Abyss) with the Paladins of Xan. He was eventually slain by Diante the Cometstruck, an Eidolon of the Wastes, and had his soul consumed by the phylactery of Sol Invicta. All whilst trying to do everything he could to save the Descendants from what he perceived to be the greatest threat to them at the time.

 

I still mourn Albus. 

I don't think I'll get over him easily.

 

But I don't regret telling his story.

 

TLDR: Everyone should play a Voidal mage once in their lives in this server.

 

Albus Amador Wiki Page

 

Albus Amador PK post

[Samler 1564]

1 hour ago, MarquisAlex said:

 

 

 

I miss you still bro <3 Atronach family keeps going!

[StingyParrot 1595]

I've always loved the 'wizard' in games and books and movies - perhaps because the idea of harnessing actual magic had always appealed to me. My favourite type of spellcaster, however, had always been the more scholarly type - learning for years and years to understand the world in order to circumvent its laws safely. 

 

One example is the book series The Magicians by Lev Grossman, detailing the education and subsequent midlife crisis of a depressed but brilliant man named Quentin Coldwater. I like how old and refined magic feels in this book - it's a craft, like metalworking or engineering. 

 

Quentin dives into magic, though not faster or better than anyone else. He has his adventure, achieves his goals - then realises how unhappy he still is. 

 

To quote the book:

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?

 

Put simply, I tend to approach magic in my character similarly. They persue it in order to achieve some goal, but will eventually and inevitably realise that they've wasted their lives trying to alleviate a problem rather than stop it at the source. 

 

idk about CRP though man that stuff is complicated as hell god DAMN