The Occult World

Victorian occultism and magic has a lot of range, and you can add to that by wandering afield in historical time or geographical space. If you can come up with a good reason for it, such as having an extensive and complex background in Haiti, feel free to have a character who does magic through Voodoo (Voudun, etc.) rituals. Most Victorian magic is based on European roots, however, and we recommend this as a baseline.

In the WikiCyclopedia, there's a lot of detail about the history of magic up to the late nineteenth century. Before you make a decision on an occult interest, we strongly recommend that you read the relevant articles there.

In the present chapter, we’re just going to give some brief suggestions. There are essentially no mechanics here — all magic is done by Tarot cards. There are no spell lists, no required character flaws or advantages, nothing like that. If you already know a lot about Victorian magic, you can skip this chapter and go straight to your sources. Just be sure you can explain it to the Host.

Here are a few types of magic that you might think about, both as a Host and a player; for the tricky ones, we’ve included some advice on faking it, also discussed at the end. You can and should make up your own, of course. Since there aren’t any mechanics or powers associated with magic types as such, you can’t have a “too powerful” type of magic. There are a few things that ought to be avoided, and we’ll mention those at the end of the chapter.

If a player seems uncomfortable with the magic system and just doesn’t want to deal with it yet, your best bet is to have that character hold off on magic for a while. Another possibility is to come up with a Special Item (see Dangerous Kinds of Magic), which can be a leg up on getting started with the magic system.

{Opening Gambits <--> Kinds of Magic}

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004