Sign Up/Discussion Luminous: An RP With A Convoluted DM-Ran Magic System

Welcome to Juayang! This is a realm of humans that have mastered the art of magic using light and willpower as a focus.
Your characters can either be completely new to the world (isekai'd if you will) or someone who grew up native to the island country of Juayang. However, either way, you find yourself on the path to join the Jinguang Guild. And just your luck - rumors of a great reward for the best performing party of the guild are starting to surface. And this is no ordinary great reward. After all, it is given out by Lady Olympia Kura, the mysterious Master of the Guild, with power beyond any ordinary caster - meaning the reward could be just as mighty.
But in this cycle of the competition, far behind the scenes, not all is well...

Info Dumps Below! (Warning: Long)

Spoiler: The Convoluted DM-Ran Magic System:

The magic of Juayang is cast via creating a focus called a Luminous (also the name of the magic overall), which often appears as a small ball of light when starting out, which is where the name came from. More powerful casters can make their Luminous take different shapes or infuse it into items.

Once you've created your focus, you can fire and cast spells out of it, so long as it is stable. However, the focus can be damaged by other spells, high pressure and the like, and will destabilize once it has taken too much damage. When that happens, you're basically stunned, and require a period of rest to recover.

Within Luminous casters, there are eight schools of casters. There is a lot of overlap, and combinations of certain magic types can be used at once. Most casters prefer to focus on 1-2, though some may take on more at the cost of being a "jack of all trades" rather than mastering specific schools.

The eight schools are as such:
Alchemist: Focuses the Luminous into glyphs, runes and potions that can be stored and then blasted later.
Bard: The master of tricking the senses, as well as spoken-word spells that require more willpower.
Battlemage: Luminous cast via weaponry - a half-physical half-magic caster if you will.
Duelist: This is advanced wizardry. More powerful spells.
Summoning: The creation of magical constructs that fight for and by casters.
Terraforming: Uses the Luminous to twist and shape the land around oneself.
Transmutation: Integrates the Luminous to transform one's body into other things.
Vitality: Channels the energy of organisms for both healing and buffing.

Each school of magic has a Master affiliated with it, who serve not only as role models and guides for adventurers in Jinguang, but also advisors to the Guild itself - though some are more active in that duty than others, who prefer to focus on their own research.

Spoiler: Some Bits of World Info

- Yangto is the biggest and capital city, located at the center of the region. You will start off at the Lutze Forest, just south of it, journeying northwards until you reach the city. Outside of the city exists mostly smaller villages and towns.
(If you want your character to be native to Yangto, they will likely have a lot of information about the Jinguang Guild, the Eight Masters, et cetera. If you want any extra details, like for example something about a specific Master, or specifics of the job benefits, just ask.)

- The Jinguang Guild is the most well-known organizations in Juayang, having run for decades on end. Olympia Kura is the 27th known Guild Master to date - and being the Guild Master is a lifetime commitment.

- Being part of the Jinguang Guild requires taking on job requests sent in by anyone needing a workforce of magical assistants and the like. Higher-ups in the Guild may even make their own requests for their own research.

- Olympia is technically Juayang's head of state, a duty that is given to the Guild Master. Though the continent of Juayang has very little contact with the outside world, given that the seas go further than any known expedition.

- Members of the Guild are known as Gilded. It's more of a colloquial term, though.

Spoiler: Character Form

Name: (A lot of characters in here have Chinese or generally East Asian names, but you don't have to follow suit. Anything goes!)

Age:

Gender/Pronouns:

Appearance: (If your character is native, tunics and robes tend to be more popular. Stay away from gold or mikado yellow, as those are the colors of the Guild. If your character is not native, just go with whatever.)

Personality: (You can write paragraphs or a few select traits, but I just want to be able to get a good feel for who your character is.)

Background: (If you're struggling a lot with this and need more worldbuilding, just let me know, or go with the isekai background. I don't mind.)

Strengths and Weaknesses: (Strengths and weaknesses should be somewhat balanced, with one major strength or two minor strengths over weaknesses in total. The specificity of strengths and weaknesses should also be balanced - for example, you can say "great charisma/poor memory", but "great charisma/bad at underwater basket weaving" is a bit OP. Personal traits can also factor into this, such as "compassionate but naive", for example. This also won't be used for stats because I am not going to use stats but will give advantages/disadvantages where it fits.)

Desired Schools of Magic: (Note: YOU WILL START WITH NO MAGIC. It will be a little while before you get to learn more specific spells, so don't worry, this isn't set in stone and you can always change later.)

Bonus: (Optional!)

Spoiler: Rules for Characters:

1. Everyone should feel comfortable with everyone else's character. If you're uncomfortable with the way some other people play their characters, or you want to check in if everything you have is okay, we can try to work it out and ask.

2. Your character should be able to work with the party. I can't force all of you to team up, but I can't make the adventure keep going if you don't. Very Big Impacting Decisions should be talked out with the party at least, though minor things you guys are free to clash on. Also no murderhobos or "He stares at you with his dark, doll-like eyes, and says nothing" for 24 posts, please.

3. Your character must be human. However I will let you have any color of hair and eyes, even gradients or multiple colors, as well as slight augmentations like sharp ears or fangs. If you want to play a character with a disability, please keep it in mind as there will be a lot of adventuring and moving around, and you will not begin with magic.

4. I don't care too much about originality. Just make sure it's not like a 1:1 rip of a character. For example if you wanna play Shadow the Hedgehog but a human, you can change his name to Owshad and reimagine his moveset as a Duelist with teleportation or whatever. I'll accept anything if it's interesting enough.

5. Please don't make a joke character. No Barry B Bensons or Shreks or you know... HAGRIDS.

I will let you know if you are accepted or not, but if you need to refine anything, just ask! I'll also add a player-personal form for some further guidelines once there are a few players starting out (for tone, what we're comfortable with, balancing things out, etc.)

 

Willingly isekaid? Sounds like a cool concept. Now on to those questions:

1. Instruments are generally not favored until one reaches a high level of Bard magic, but once one does reach that level, lutes, pipa, the occasional violin for those who hate their fingers, woodwinds (both reed/wooden and the occasional metallic), and so on are the kind of instruments one will find. Rarely will anyone bring anything bigger, however - just imagine toting an entire harp around. The spoken word or musical format is mostly to help with the focusing aspect of casting these spells, so instruments aren't hugely favored - though of course there are mute Bards who will use the instrument rather than speaking for obvious reasons. During casting, the Luminous focus is still present, often just floating around the caster - though some with instruments and some Battlemage training can infuse the Luminous into their forged instrument instead. (Their instrument must be ready to take beatings the way a weapon does, as the enemy will destabilize the Luminous by attacking the instrument.)

2. Bard covers not only the traditional musical/poetic magic, but also illusions. (Early forms of the magic were piloted when storytellers activated their Luminous while performing, enhancing the audience's experience as they spoke their tales.) The current Bard master is known to prefer the illusionist aspect, however there are previous ones who preferred to study spoken-word spells like curses or blessings (adjacent to Vitality magic). Musical magic can often be seen when people augment their voice with Luminous, like soundwave blasts or the like, or cast said spoken-word spells.

3. A battlemage can wield any weapon, and in the case of a bow user, infuse spells into their arrows - though it's more common that Alchemists do so, tying potions and glyphs to their arrows to shoot them (otherwise the arrowheads will have to be retrieved continuously). It's uncommon for Bard casters to have a weapon in the Battlemage sense, though some may use their instrument as a weapon given the right training, like an axe-pipa hybrid or flute-glaive or something. Generally Battlemages are also seen as enchanters, and most are inseparable from their weapon.

Hope the word vomit clears some stuff up!

 

@WavePearl You're good on the dizi if your character would like that as a focus.
As for the arrows, you certainly can use them, though you'll probably start off without magical arrows.
Also, to clarify -the way magic works doesn't just have to be elemental - magic contains loads of variety and strangeness, kind of more like epithets from Epithet Erased. Elemental magic does exist, but it's more a Terraforming aligned thing, so it sounds like you're might have a jack-of-all-trades type character rather than someone aligned with a specific school? This will give you access to a higher variety of spells, but they will generally be less powerful.

 

@SAF
Absolutely! You just won't be starting with any good weapons per se - you'll pick em up once you join the Guild. Of course, if you're gonna start off really good with a weapon, you're gonna need a hefty setback to balance that out, though. I don't want a war veteran standing there with a bunch of kids. That just seems unfair. To the war vetaran because I will be throwing stuff at em.

 

@WavePearl
Looks alright to me. Characters of any nationality are allowed, I think I clarified that earlier?
Accepted!

 

Ok so there is one major problem with this: I don't have a set in stone skill tree lmao I do not have the balancing for that. Through the campaign I will be helping you guys make your own spells and work through them and their levels (you'll get examples early on on the types of magic as seen through other users). So you can see how your character idea can get out of hand very quick because the sky's the limit with the skill tree and I will die very fast.

I can, however, see the idea you have working as a spell? Luminous as a campaign originally has a lot of puzzle-solving elements and that sort of thing, so if you were to create a spell that could "mimic" different spells your character saw other people do, or randomly tap into abilities, I would allow that.

One thing about "living magic" as a concept is that I'm gonna have to say that's right out, for major plot reasons. Closest you can get is Summoner constructs can sometimes form their own animalistic sentience, but there hasn't been a case of a construct being fully sentient. Of course there are moral reasons for that one too in-universe.

That being said, for the magic idea you have, I would honestly call it entirely Alchemist - Summoning constructs are like... Owl House abominations, engineer gaming magic turrets, that sort of thing where you build a thing and it will fight for you, rather than just creating the glyphs you mentioned.

As for subclasses, that's why most people don't have a cut-and-dry difference. You may notice that some of the schools dictate more a casting style rather than a specific magic type, and that's entirely on purpose to allow mix and matching. Bard Terraformers, Summoning Alchemists - in fact literally anything "without" a second type is technically a Duelist second type. So feel free to combo as much as you want!

Sorry if this wasn't quite the answer you were hopin for, but TLDR, living magic has plot issues and stuff will get weird. Also I don't have a set skill tree so it will be hell to randomly create a bunch of spells all the time

 

@SAF
Here are my thoughts. This is gonna be a long RP so I do heavily suggest you play a character you will love playing for a long time!
1. Always put your own enjoyment of the RP first and foremost. Which one of these characters do you think you want to play? Keep in mind the tone of the RP (though it's not set in stone, I'm going to send all you potential players a bit of a hefty "player check-in" to settle on that sort of thing. It will, of course, be long, because I am not concise, I'm sorry but only a little bit. Don't worry about it for now, though.)

2. If that doesn't work out, check the current team composition. Though right now there is only Kanaru, you can wait until more people sign up and see what roles they might be missing that you could fill.
- Do keep in mind this RP was designed with a lot of inter-character interaction and talking in mind, and the other times I've ran it we have had problems with too many introverts/characters who couldn't communicate, so keep that in mind if that helps narrow it down.

3. Narrow it down via story background. Unless you're going for an isekai'd background, in which case, anyone could legally fit in, so. If you have ideas for backgrounds or backstories and start talkin with me to narrow it down, you could maybe find the character that could be right for you.

4. Try to just feel out the concepts for each character and how they might fit into the world based on magic alone, how you can imagine them fighting. Go with whoever gives you the strongest or most fun images in your head, or the ones you feel you can really get creative with spells for.

5. If after that process none of them still really fit the vibe or feel right, you can even try your hand at making a brand-new character or spoofing off a canon character for this RP (as per Original Character Do Not Steal Owshad example)

I hope this helps a little? Worst comes to worst, just sleep on it for a while and hopefully someone will come to you, be it someone from the list or something you haven't even considered.

 

@Jupjami Nice to see ya back around. And the McDonalds exchange too.
Accepted! Is this the same color as Wave's accepted? Whatever that's a problem for not now ok cool

 

@122 Generation
Well, this is limited to one character at a time. Take your time to make a decision! I'll follow up with everyone soon once people have started claiming spots.

 

@SAF
Okay, I think I get what you're going for, but before I accept I kind of want to see more of Elio's personality. What you've put there is a good set of personal quirks, however I'm having some trouble kind of feeling out his personality? I'd like you to expand a little there if you can - it doesn't have to be listing out traits, you can just write a few lines of dialogue that he would say or something. After that you'll be accepted.