Esoteric Ebb - About Spellcasting

Remove all ads!

Learn more about spellcasting in Esoteric Ebb:

​

An Esoteric Campaign - Spellcasting

You ever hear about the soft magic/hard magic system categorization? If you haven't, I'll summarize it here: some people like to depict awe-inspiring everlasting wonders and mysteries of the universe. Some other people like numbers.

Personally, I'm somewhere in-between.

Esoteric Ebb is based on the 5e ruleset. This system is built on layers of fantasy tropes and decades of common understanding among players and DMs. But one of the core pillars of my homebrew setting (working title: The Esoteric Coast) is to look at this generic fantasyland aesthetic through the eyes of modernist ideologies and realism. Or at least what I would consider 'realism' to be.

How would a nation be affected if every law-enforcer came equipped with Charm Person? A spell that is, ostensibly, mind control? Or what about Restoration? All diseases and ailments, suddenly gone. And how would the economy be affected by the simple existence of Plant Growth? You know, the spell that could easily allow a medieval farm to compete with genetic engineering of the 21st century? None of this even touches upon the reality-shattering change of removing mortality with resurrection spells, that all have component costs, of course. Suddenly life has a price on it, even more so than in our own reality.

Some of my players often joke about starting up a business, using Create Food and Water, which creates bland-tasting, but nourishing and good-looking food, and then using Prestidigitation to make it tasty as hell. With just a few third level spell slots and a quick cantrip, you can make yourself a food truck with near zero expenditure. If there were any practical ways of 'learning' magic, wouldn't every single political or economic force in the world scramble to exploit them? You could argue that a world with these fairly basic and low-tier magics should (if the spells aren't limited by gods or physical laws or angry DMs) fundamentally change from a fantasyland to... something very different.

I like to call it Arcanapunk. Primarily because it's a very silly title (all 'punk'-titles are). It's a world where the hard magic system of something like 5e has allowed its people to actually just go wild, and rush through an era not too dissimilar to our own industrial revolution. Except powered not only by technology (which is inevitable) but also by incredibly world-breaking magics. On the Esoteric Coast, folk call it the Arcane Era - a couple hundred years where magic suddenly became a commodity. When nations grew powerful beyond their wisdom and men wielded mago-industrial forces into a fiery and destructive climax.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Esoteric Ebb is all about putting a lens to these 5e mechanics and asking, 'Uh... what if that actually happened?'

[...]