Magic EXPLAINED! All The Types & Schools of Magic | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #24

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to fudge marpa this is the elder scrolls podcast i'm scott here with michael and drew as always and today we are discussing magic so magic in the broad sense we're going to talk about how it works all the basic sort of fundamentals and yeah we'll go through it all so who wants to start us off with what magic is well magnus tall magnus taught a huge hole in the sky and magic comes through it along with magna g as well yeah so basically they're making the world all the original spirits you know there's the ones that sit out the daedra the ones that join in and become part of it all and then the magnage who basically i don't know wig out and just leg it into the sky tearing holes in it creating the sun and the stars yeah from there from aetherius magic leaks through available for use because magic is very arbitrary and and ambiguous so it's like the the the gods are innately powerful in a magical way and they're using their power or magic to create this mortal realm and you know munda sorry mundus magnus is there drawing up the blueprints for for lorkhan's mortal realm and then he realizes that um all of the involved aedra are going to have to invest a huge amount of their their power in keeping this thing running and keeping it alive so he's just like oh i want no part of this and he just you know eats himself into the sky um all of his followers go with him which if you look at the night sky there's quite a few of them and they yeah they just tear rift straight through the sky box and oh yeah and that's how magicka flows in and that's where you get the source for all of your traditional magic because there are other sort of magical powery things that aren't like magic eccentric like the thumb or the she-hai or the key eye if you're in akaviri or uh tonal architecture and stuff that's more like uh universal principle bending kind of magic it's a little bit different so we're going to mainly focus on magicka derived magic so yeah so so basically you could almost describe magic as just like an energy that's in everything the type of magicka that you're talking about it's an energy comprising of you know it's in every living being and it can be kind of manipulated it's kind of just like medical florian's bro it's energy manipulation in the most basic sense right yeah so there's like a whole bunch of different ways you can play with this energy and they become the schools of magic as you know you categorize them and learn to do different things with them but really there are no schools of magic per se it's more just like a arbitrary classification that mortals like to put on it to make it easy to understand yeah it's all there for gameplay purposes so you can like up your skill and destruction as opposed to restoration or conjuration but like uh the way they're sort of described in the law is that that the schools were sort of made by the uh majors guild institution when they sort of focusing on teaching it so it so the importance of destruction and illusion versus alteration are all there for um their ability to teach so you can sort of narrow your focus on using magicka to do certain types of effects you know such as the elemental ones for destruction and then it just it as you know in the same way that you go to a normal school or university and you have codified sort of classes and like um you know different uh miniature subjects and stuff like that it's a similar principle to that and we've seen them sort of fluctuate and prior to majors guild and stuff there's a lot more like kind of whatever going on like yeah well they tend to overlap as well there's a lot of areas where you're like that could easily be um a spell in another school it's just kind of yeah as i've said before it's it's very arbitrary it's just as a means to make it easier to focus on yeah it's kind of like you were using that example scott of a normal school but you can see how topics in science and maths obviously overlap with each other and i guess from a law perspective as well in terms of you learning the skill it doesn't really add up between games but you can look at it like the way that you learn a skill is there's going to be similar spells right or similar kind of groupings so it's easier for you to do that so what i'm trying to explain is if you have 70 conjuration you're good at soul trapping because you've already been playing with souls and it's interesting though because even like soul trapping like that's an example of one spell that has moved from mysticism to to that that's what i mean it doesn't necessarily make sense when you look at it from a gameplay lens because back in the day you could be good at conjuration but bad at mysticism if you didn't invest anything into it so it's like it's like with all gameplay elements it's always good to just really view that as okay this is necessary for the gameplay structure and stuff like that rather than taking it as a super literal form of that's how the law is in the same way that there aren't people who are carrying like 50 health potions on them and popping them in four seconds mid-battle you know so yeah that's important to remember but i guess um some of the earliest records of magic in history and is you know some of the early elven stuff we have the aliens and their supposed creation of alteration now alteration isn't uh as we just got done saying it's all arbitrary so it's kind of like you know it's it's not necessarily even the school as we know it but i guess the idea of what the the law is trying to convey there is some of the fundamental principles so maybe somewhere like sort of the shielding the levitation type things or maybe some stuff like that um is some stuff that they sort of pioneered comparing by comparison it's like a way of simplifying uh how you can look at alteration is it's very much about just kind of like almost modifying the laws of physics and nature which you know when you say that you could probably apply it to every single school but that's the general gist so like you've got things like um levitation and water breathing which is a good example with when the alids were being tracked down by the elysians there were there were a group of them hiding in in in bravo right i think it was bravo and um you they're like when they go in a bunch of imperials get slaughtered um but they can't find the people doing it and that's because these these aliens are levitating up to the walls or hiding under the under the water and just water breathing and then whenever nightfall comes they'll come out and murder a load of imperials and disappear again and that's kind of like the the beginnings of their alteration spells yeah yeah it's a bit like a land grab in a way isn't it like you're the first person to think oh i can manipulate energy in this way it's very much discovery rather than invention i'd say yeah you know or just like a creative harnessing of the same energy everyone else is already using to do magic with and i guess some become more relevant as later like you can imagine schools like conjuration became more relevant as time went on because originally you have the daedric princess sort of just walking freely on nirn and stuff like that and you don't have this sort of firm barrier between um mundus and oblivion um as is then created by you know the deal with akatosh the pact with akatosh and the dragonborn emperors so maybe so later on you sort of need more uh powerful conjuration majors to make to summon them here through that barrier basically like you know or things like that uh imagining imagining the early days of discovering magic is is really fascinating to me because you know like when in the um more effective times when the the ayleids and the durani are two good examples are kind of dabbling in these in these arts there's so much mystery to them you just don't you don't realize how much danger can be involved you know you've got the durani kind of founding the school of conjuration and you just imagine that they they don't really know what they're doing but they're like peering into the the cavernous darkness of oblivion and the void and just like not knowing what's on the other end though i'll throw another like a another like idea there is that like we were sort of talking about in the calp episode as you kind of get further away from the divine as things become move from the mythic to the mundane there's lots of evidence to sort of support the idea that people back then while like on a maybe like a physical technology level they might not be as advanced in some cases they were though but they were in fact more magically advanced when you have some of the great feats of the dwemer the aylids and the early people things that they can't repeat now so maybe there was because they were closer to the time of gods and stuff they actually did have a more innate understanding of magic but it actually becomes more obscured as time has gone on and things are becoming more mundane i guess something else i was going to say very similar to that and kind of adds to it what if the classification and the almost boxing of magic into different schools actually limits the creativity and of of using and manipulating magic and that's why we don't have as many interesting and mysterious things anymore i mean if you get a person new to magic and the approach instead of this is energy you can use it in all these different ways and they're kind of playing around with it and being creative versus here's magic there's five schools this is what each school is you can get better at each of these abilities that are limited to this this this and this this this this and this you know the way that you think about it actually limits you well adding order yeah adding order is adding limitation isn't it like even even when you imagine the creation of the mortal realm you know they're drawing up the schematics of this from like raw creation energy and they're putting limits on it to make it the mortal realm you know the mortal realm is full of limitation talking about that actual idea it's kind of interesting that the sort of intuition intuition magic versus sort of the science academic kind of understanding of it and like you were saying well just that could like limit someone's under like it's there's reason to assume that some of the earlier people and so on being closer to the time of the gods and stuff like that understood magic more intuitively like just kind of things like here at nords and the clever men and it's just like it's just a very general sounding thing or they don't have like oh i am like the archmage over this this this and that of this school with proficiency in xyz it's kind of a less academic look at thing and if you actually this isn't it's not so much the magicka magic but like you know things like the thumb and and xii and all that they're very intuitive well to follow on from that um you could use that as a good example of why mysticism as a school isn't really commonplace anymore because when you look at how mysticism is described it's very much that intuitive experimentational thing like there's a a quote here that says mysticism seems to derive power from its conundrums and paradoxes the act of experimentation no matter how objectively implemented can influence magicka by its very existence therefore the mystic mage must consign himself to finding dependable patterns within a roiling imbroglio of energy so it's very experimentational and very you know just going with the flow and trying to find patterns from nothing well that's how because it's funny because like mysticism is like obviously you know the city quarter are renowned for that and that's their sort of like really obscure like crazy magic that doesn't really sort of fit into the more typical things but the other thing about mysticism being you know mystical um they actually a lot of its uh science originally was to do with um science magic was to do with soul manipulation and that's where mana marco splits off he starts using manipulation of the souls in a sort of dangerous way so it's a very powerful magic but you know necromancy now is very commonly associated with conjuration because of gameplay um functions but back in the day it was a real sort of mysticism kind of thing with soul trapping and the manipulation of of souls um but there's some crazy uh like i really love sort of the mysticism as a school and some of the potential behind it because it gets that really like crazy possibilities i'm trying all that i don't know what i'm thinking of is that is that meme i sent you guys ages ago with all the massive worries with spears and it's like intuition feelings and in the background magic's running in we should we should remake that except put sidgic faces on all the big guys and have them killing little imperial college mages but it it it is um it is true and i wonder do you guys know the cr i know it's where it's from but it's there's a sothosil quote i think in regards to mysticism i think or or understanding the world it's something along the lines of he's saying um first you need to like you know see one layer beyond and then there's another layer behind there or something i know the exact quote you're looking for um yeah which i'm not gonna be able to but yeah go on because obviously like so so this is so the sill even taught at the the citric order and stuff um as well and had his sort of you know he's got all his mystical ongoings and stuff but uh it is it is a shame that we don't see the mysticism spells like reflect damage anymore i really hope they bring more effects back into elder scrolls six along with spell casting uh sorry spell crafting yeah i think they they should have i reckon they should honestly bring mysticism back unlikely that they will but i think that they they should and you know flesh it out like was before but like we were saying in other examples of arbitrary kind of things is like how paralyzed has moved from illusion to alteration or you know i'm pretty sure in oblivion the fire shields and frost shields and stuff are an alteration school thing but then you know the similar equivalent would be like the cloaks but they're in the destruction school but you can see how they could kind of be in either you know yeah but i mean a cloak is way different to a shield because one's causing damage and one's protecting you from it yeah but even the idea that there's an element involved kind of falls a bit more into the start destruction school yeah you know as opposed to a normal shield but yeah but that's the thing like we said it's all arbitrage i i do like to kind of head canon in the law a bit as for some things you can't do it for everything but with paralyzed for example you could easily say that it's different methods of achieving the same thing so with alteration perhaps you're using magic to literally change the i don't know for lack of better words the cells in their body to be immobilized whereas with it or like a stasis or something yeah like a stasis spell but with illusion it's actually tricking the brain into thinking it can't move almost like sleep paralysis yeah like yeah that you know i i was just gonna say that's the exact distinction i try to make between alteration and illusion is that you know illusion even though the mind you could argue is part of nature and like the laws of physics and all that it's like illusion is specifically messing with the mind and it's making you think something has changed versus alteration where it literally has changed but you know you can do that with just about every school it's fine the connections and this is there is a book called proposals proposal schools of magic and this is sort of written in the the second area like elder scrolls online kind of time and it's a proposal to change the majors guild study program but it's an interesting distinction between alteration which is the distortion of local reality through direct imposition of the mages will to include spells like paralysis water breathing water walking yada yada oh and flame cloaks as personal elemental shields such as flame clerks but then there's also mysticism the class of spells used to alter the nature of magic itself to include effects that dispel or absorb spell or absorb both spells telekinesis stuff like that but that's interesting that it's actually changing magic itself as opposed to alteration changing the the like physicality of the world kind of well and while you're on mysticism i found that exact quote you were talking about was so facile it is it's interesting but it almost raises more questions than than any answers but it says there are layers to understanding all things said sofa sil the common man looks at an object and fits it into a place in his way of thinking those skilled in the old ways in the way of the psijic in mysticism can see an object and identify it by its proper role but one more layer is needed to be peeled back to achieve understanding you must identify the object by its role and its truth and interpret that meaning so okay cool i'm i'm even worse at mysticism now than when we started but that is really cool like mysticism i think and you know it's probably just because it's so mystical but it's one of the coolest schools and because the city quarter are super powerful and they're proficient in it so you're sort of like assuming i can see why they took it out though i can definitely see it like for example when i used to play oblivion i've played when i say when i used to play when i first started playing oblivion i didn't really use it much and in the builds that i did use it it felt like there wasn't enough to the school like you could end up doing some really cool things with it but there definitely wasn't enough there i guess the difference is it's a lazier choice to just move that into other things as opposed to hang on there's not enough here let's add more to mysticism so the use is actually incentivized versus being just like no let's get rid of it because we didn't do it well enough yeah yeah i know what you mean yeah i wish they did uh flesh it out but um you can see how it kind of can get a bit bloated like back in the days of daggerfall there was the thormaturgy as well yeah which is magic that affects the will and personal state of mind to include spells as calm and or charm and stuff like that basically levitation illusion yeah it was weird which involves the personal rejection of gravity i can see that going like but so that's the magic that affects the will and personal state of the mind but that's differing to sort of illusion it sounds like a mini kim it's like i choose to believe gravity doesn't exist so i'm gonna float so that's the way i see former turji it's kind of like even though it's a it's magic in the same way all the others are it's very much like performing miracles which you know most magic is in a way you could say it's performing miracles but it's kind of almost got that um you know that that mythical um sense to it of just performing a miracle out of nothing is is kind of what formation is like teleportation i mean had water walking etherealness so like the become ethereal shout you can imagine someone using thormaturgy based magic to just become kind of you know untouchable yeah for a brief moment of time at least and then we have also so illusion altering the perception in oneself or others so spells like light invisibility fear frenzy silence this is also just one stage of the school's evolutions like we know that the spells have sort of ebbed and flowed in between different schools but as a general rule you can sort of kind of summarize it that illusion is is altering perception of people or your or yourself then there's sort of alteration the sort of physical reality mysticism crazy and mysterious and like manipulating the nature of magic itself then we have some of the other ones so uh yeah conjuration which is the summoning and binding of spirits from oblivion or aetherius actually it says even a theorist but to include soul trapping as well in this one it didn't before and i honestly think that's a point for me i think from a law perspective soul trapping and necromancy is much better through a mysticism lens because it's about the manipulation of the soul whereas like conjuration has been very related to conjuring from another plane like it's in the name like taking a data from another plane rather than but i mean you ca i guess you can maybe try and rationalize that by explaining like taking a taking a soul from aetherius and bringing it back to its body or something like that but yeah you know it get it gets tricky a lot of magic this is airy fairy floaty stuff all around one thing i was thinking with um talking about illusion again and invisibility i i don't think it is but you could almost see that as in other people can't see you but you are there yeah like a representation of that you're tricking other minds that you're invisible but really you're not because you could make the argument that like that sort of like chameleon like active camo looking thing from halo is more of a feeling of alteration like physically making you like that versus with what invisibility it you know is trying to convey is that you're making people not able to perceive you potentially you're entering their mind when it's in the illusion school i think when it's yeah it hasn't always been in the illusion school has it invisibility i think for some for some reason i think it has invisibility or maybe maybe in early early ones but i'm pretty sure it was in oblivion at least if i type in invisibility let me have a look i just remember something i could swear it was in the alteration school in one of the games did they move it around well while you're getting onto that like we can also mention things like you know destruction which is elemental thing using force to destroy things and restoration is obviously the sort of opposite of that using it to you know heal i think the most interesting thing about destruction and restoration is finding the similarities between them so for example with destruction you know you've got all your typical damage dealing um spells but then you've got people like a mage called vexus velarwan who became addicted to the purification process of using destruction to like cause pain to just like to deal with so say for example because i'm gonna word this poorly is um like say you need to cauterize a wound you know that feels like restoration but if you if you you know put fire magic destruction spell on a wound that needs cauterizing you're using it to heal which is kind of what this mage was delving into and then with restoration you have the kind of sun based spells which um which deal damage but because because you're dealing with the undead it's almost like you're restoring them from this undead from this cursed corrupted state yeah to like a proper dead yeah kind of thing like i live a living dead sounds weird but like a you know as it should be not undead you're almost reversing under yeah it's like imbuing them with mortal life so they go from undead to just dead you just pulling back a stage i found the invisibility thing it seems to have always been an illusion thing but in my head like if you put it in alteration you can easily see it as in like light bending like you know how you have spells like mage light and things like that just a bunch of reflecting of the light around you so that you don't seem to be there anymore like a magician would do with mirrors and things on a stage also um as with destruction we also we you know about the the shock frost and flame stuff we hear all the time but um there's other parts to it as well like i guess you would simply like as you see like people doing water magic or dealing with other elements you can assume they're all sort of any elemental kind of attacks are generally going to be destruction but some cool parts that they got rid of like disintegration was really cool just it's just like raw destruction but i unders understandably you kind of need armor with a repair rating for that to function in game so there's no point of having it in skyrim yeah unless they had and i and to be honest as cool as it was i'm kind of happy not to have to use repair hammers it was kind of just a i'm happy to just keep it as it as it is it was it was pretty cool though i mean this sounds kind of strange and i guess it wouldn't really work but if you had a system where you could still destroy the enemy's armor somehow i just i just really liked the idea of being able to smack someone with a disintegration sword until their armor just broke to bits or their weapon or their weapon broke to bits and they had nothing to attack you with anymore but i guess now that just gets replaced with things like disarm disarm shout or well yeah maybe that's maybe that's a spell that they could like i'm sure if if i'm sure all scroll six will sort of like make some of the shouts and stuff into cool unique spells instead because they don't they could have they really could have anyway yeah so i can definitely see that like things like ice form for sure as a destruction spell yeah and just because you haven't seen a spell before like obviously there's things like oh the televania said to use magic to grow their towers like what spell is that or what do you want to mean it's very loosey-goosey because all it really is is you using your will to reform magical energy into some desired effect so it's not like you know it's all gameplay systems to go this costs 32 magikarp and this one costs 100 whereas like even when you think about it in in terms of elves that have like magicka boosts and stuff like that they're it's like you just sort of imagine in from a law sense it's like oh they just you know are able to harness magicka easier they just have a more natural inclination towards it versus like they have exactly 100 extra magical points yeah it's just like an increased affinity for a certain skill which is the manipulation of this energy leaking through i also like how destruction has the the draining attribute type spells or the you know like you can um take down someone's ability to use their weapon or take down their ability to use a certain type of magic see that's the biggest problem that getting rid of attributes did is because through manipulation of attributes and spells and enchantments and stuff you could make yourself really cool and powerful but not only that like you know if you cast some like uh drain speed or something on someone all of a sudden they're they're like super slow or things like that or maybe you know their their endurance and it just like takes their health bar down heaps like all of these cool applications of magic kind of disappear because they got rid of attributes i think attributes even if you just had attributes in general and didn't even change sort of like um you didn't have to like add any more than there was in oblivion you could still like mix it around or like rebalance things to be honest there's no excuse really because they could have had drain and absorb skill based things still in skyrim and they could also have had it with the stats like they did with enchanting like you know how you can make a sword that absorbs stamina why can't i have a spell that does that you know yeah you should there's no reason it's not op or anything you just have to balance it right yeah i can understand like if they wanted to clean off anything keep attributes but they could have even the drain skill thing like destin like it's kind of like i feel like if you use it it's not even worthwhile like the magical it costs to just drain their like you know sword skill by 20. it'd be a better thing to instead like i just think the attributes have a more cool like functional effect and and like even like silent spells where did they go you know stuff like that being able to just stop majors for a moment like because then you could make this really cool build like a specific mage killer that basically specializes in silence type spells and stuff like that and and tools to kill mages and and um or what do you call um not paralyzed but uh there's another word for it anyway i'm trying to like put them out of action so they can't have access to the magic and you fight them and there's just a lot of cool applications there that we don't um see and also consider that the limited amount of spells like they reduced it in skyrim actually does limit enchanting which was made to be a really cool thing in skyrim so you can imagine a character for example you could enchant a bow with a silencing enchantment so you can kind of shoot a witch from afar with your bow then like you know as a way to turn off their ability to use magic or things of that nature become really cool when you put enchanting into the mix on that topic i also miss enchanted arrows i know i know the idea that like an enchanted bow kind of does it all but having an arrow that you just find on a bandit that has like a damage health effect or even there was arrows that put light on the enemy as well so you could see where they went i don't know why they couldn't do it because it's people go oh you know why would you waste a soul gem on an arrow if you just do a bow but like if you could maybe if the magnitude was changed around a bit like common soul gems were more effective or also it could be like batch done in like a group of 20 arrows that's what i was getting 20. yeah that's what i was thinking so that'd be really cool for any sort of witch hunter kind of i wouldn't be surprised if that was like a ui thing in game play was just to stop you cycling through different types of arrows so they just wanted it to basically mean you you equip this bow you're going to get that effect versus like oh you know i want to shoot these arrows here and now i need to go into the menus equip this one a lot of it i think does come down to gameplay which i mean like and continuing on from that you know it's kind of like it's everybody knows that the especially magic has been kind of dumbed down as the games have progressed but do you think now that it's got huge mainstream appeal you know skyrim compared to morrowind they can start adding a lot of stuff back without the risk of just being a niche game i think they were just trying to like yeah i don't know if they were i mean i don't know i don't know if they're actually worried about mainstream appeal as much as they were just trying to like simplify things because they had to spend more time on on all of the other elements that they wanted to do but um i wonder if uh they should i've just forgotten what i was gonna say well i was gonna say that um it helps with balance as well you know they don't have to think like uh bose should have a less potency for enchanting because people are going to double them up with an enchanted arrow which is going to be like super powerful it's just easier for them to make at least but it would be cool if they somehow did a system where it all worked together and you could have enchanted arrows and stuff you know yeah i wonder if they will add back what do you think if they will or not add stuff back uh it really depends on what oh that that's what i was going to talk about here's the idea this is what i remembered what i was going to say i was talking about how in oblivion you had the whole quick cast system which was which adds a lot of build like variety and so if you're playing a paladin character charging in with a great sword and then you can just quit cast to sort of spell or things like that or if you're playing a battle mage it adds a lot of it really does make a lot of builds really cool and making magic easier to use rather than the hand system and the dual car stuff but on the flip side it really does emphasize um every character should kind of have magic or you're kind of under using your potential um whereas in the reverse you know i because i kind of like like the visual of the hands and the holding it and stuff like that i also like the touch magic as well they need to bring back touch magic so you can just palm someone with a frost spell and it does more damage than if it was ranged for the same cost yeah but we've speculated before anyway that you could um use both you we they could implement basically a quick slot system of magic so if you do want to be the battle mage and you can quit cast but that becomes at like a lower magnitude or lower effectiveness of the spell so maybe you take like i don't know just 30 percent cut to the or more or something to what the spell would be if you had it equipped so the advantage so it kind of mitigates the advantage of um you know so there's a point to equipping them in your hands yeah yeah i mean you could also think of it the opposite way instead of making the spell worse is that if you choose to prioritize both of your bare hands for magic is that it makes it more powerful yeah you know it makes it stronger and then you could even have a system if you wanted to knock out the other issue where if you're a warrior see it works the same way instead of oh okay fine there's incentive for pure mages but you've still got that issue of if you're a warrior you still may as well have a spell there to quit cast instead have a system where if you choose or elect to have no spell in the quick cast area that you'll be more effective with your sword just a little bit you know what i mean so you don't have that ability to just tap c and cast off a fireball fireball while you're holding a claymore here's another thing you could even use it like potentially as like a if you have nothing equipped with a say a sword or something it can almost be like a like a quick strike or something or you could even have it as almost essentially that it's like a magic slash grenade button not for grenades but imagine bringing back things like throwing darts and knives and stars and stuff like that just throwables so it's quick things so you can be if you want to make some ninja kind of character and you're going around like you know assassinating and you just want to press you know rb or something on a controller instead of a spell quick ass spell you just quickly throw uh a star or something like or or whatever things yeah you've got and then and if you choose to just hold these throwing stars in your hands then they would be better yeah somewhere you'll fire them quicker or something like you can because you can or same but you could also do that for like uh like banner lord style with like you can have throwable weapons like throwing axes or like javelins and stuff and i think that's something that people would really enjoy anyway um just bringing those back in germany it can feel a little bit complicated but let's be real we've all been waiting a long time for the oldest scroll six so they've the combat system will not be like i just can't see it as being how it is in skyrim like it has to be enhanced beyond look don't get me wrong i love the hack and slash kind of feel i hate it but i feel like i i hate um like the combat gameplay of elder scrolls games it's like the one thing i would never play it for if you know what i mean it's just i i hope they really revamp it completely from the ground up you know i mean i like it it'll be interesting to see how they do it with the first person stuff like what are some examples of things because i mean that's the thing i don't want for honor that's what i'm worried about i don't want them to ever go with some like really complicated like hyper realistic way of doing combat yeah because you kind of negate stats in a way when you have like a the tactical dance of fighting so i understand that it's like your stats don't come into play if there's so many you know if it comes down to reactions a lot of the time then but then again if they did have attributes in there properly there are things like you can prioritize like you know if speed affected how quick you can like do you know i mean the the skill element of it versus something that's being like a if you want to be a big tank that just kind of don't care about it as much or girl running an attack anymore but yeah it gets a little how do you feel about the potential of you know in games like skyrim the the reality is it doesn't matter what build you want to be but at the end of the day you're going to be incredible at everything like did i i kind of think it would be a better experience if you were forced to decide between skills you know we were just talking about it with a quick cast i feel like you can i you should either be able to be a very good mage or be able to be a very good warrior i i think that's better for me to play a bit i think a better a good way to do it is instead of limiting via skills or perks if they had proper attributes there and limited in terms of attributes so you can only be so if if to be a maxed out mage is dependent on your intelligence you can only you can't max out your intelligence as well as your strength and stuff so so there just at least one layer of limiting a factor but that end that gives more racial diversity but it's not the be-all and end-all like you still have a good amount of flexibility i wouldn't i wouldn't want to limit freedom too much as much as i do like imposing some restrictions and like you kind of touched on you could do it with perks like if you look at some of the perk mods for example what they do is they just make each skill tree way more fleshed out so it's kind of like you have to invest a lot of your perk points into a certain tree if you want to be the master of that tree and have everything that tree has to offer if you want to spread your perk points more thinly and be you know kind of good at everything you can but you'll never be the master at everything in the sense of different perks that potentially unlock new abilities or different powers and and stuff like that so there's a lot of ways to do it it's just walking that fine line of not giving too much restriction but at the same time not having a thing where everyone's just this big flowy you know wheezy wazzy like nothing has any kind of um classification or drawback or advancement because i i'm a big fan of i mean we should get back to magic to be honest but i am a big fan of uh you know strong um drawbacks and bonuses for races like we talked about argonians how their poison and and disease resistance was watered down as the games went on and things like that yeah just the last thing on that is the problem with the not the problem with but like the perks thing to do it right they've got to make sure that it does actually require a worthwhile like a solid investment to actually get good at because for example you can just get you say you want to get all your skills to 100 but you're not going to get all the perks but you can just drop five perks into one-handed and you might not have the sprint attack or something but slash slash is just as powerful you know what i mean and strength and if they had a strength attribute it would be a bit different for sure yeah for sure i don't really mind that much especially being a single player game but i do like the idea that attributes would add a little bit more complexity into things or or even a class system you know like kind of with tag skills almost yeah anyway let's let's get back to magic yeah we'll dive back into the magic we'll start talking about some of the uh outliers i guess and i i i'll quickly bring up there is soul magic the obscure magic based around souls and vestiges but that to me just sounds like mysticism i may as well grope that and group that in with mysticism like manipulation of magic itself or souls like it's been known in the law so it's not really that interesting of a magic but let's get to obviously like one that everyone really really likes which is necromancy while we're on the topic of manipulating souls and and stuff like that so necromancy is is kind of like one of the more evil schools you could call it depending on your code of ethics and morals but in a lot of the descriptions you hear about it you are really just toying with the soul of someone who's trying to go to the afterlife you know like that there is a reason that in the elder scrolls universe there are so many anti-necromancer groups that are set up you know to stop them from playing with the the corpses of the dead and their souls and interfering with that natural process and the cycles of life and death and the afterlife and in history it's been outlawed and then legalized and then outlawed again and and stuff like that and like in the time of skyrim it's not uh you know the locals don't like it as phineas says um phineas guest store but but you can understandably so like mo it's possible i guess to be an ethical necromancer like only the corpses of the deceased perhaps and it but it depends on how the like naturally deceased but it depends on how the whole soul works with that particular thing of necromancy like for example you could make the argument if you're just inhabiting a body with like a uh like a placeholder soul like you're kind of puppeteering a corpse that's not really bad but if you are like you know painfully drawing someone's soul back from you know in some ways i think it's always unethical i don't think you can like it depends on on your set of beliefs obviously if you're like tormenting a soul that's way worse but remember unless it's some you know base animal that no one really cares about like some deer just died in the forest but the second it's a mortal person that's somebody's family member that you're playing with you almost need consent like kind of like organ donor situation because yeah yeah that that's because i think a fundamental thing for mortals just you know real world and elder scrolls you can see it in a bunch of cultures is their burial rights it's so important you know you've got rk in some situations and the way the dunmer do it is very you know it's it's following it's almost ritualistic you know and if you kind of deprive a mortal of that that path you know the the the closure of their existence then yeah people find it disgusting in the same way that people find cannibalism disgusting yeah and i guess as well like it doesn't really matter whether or not the afterlife is involved at all i mean otherwise you could have a situation here on earth where it's like oh i'm an atheist and i don't believe in the afterlife so i'm allowed to play with dead people it's like no it's like even if that's the case let's just pretend to say okay there's no afterlife let's say that's 100 confirmed it's still not okay yeah even if souls weren't involved i think people would still be be against it because it's the it's the visual the visceral sense of raising the the vet the physical vessel for this soul up from the dead even though you know if you say that the soul's not involved then it's completely you know it's technically completely fine and nobody's being harmed in the process you don't want to see it you know you don't want to see it i guess like but like it it just depends it's literally only just because i guess it's a cultural thing around the burial stuff because 100 but that's what that's what effect that's what morals are yeah sure sure but that's what i'm saying but through a wood elf lens or an argonian lens you could make the case it's quite moral in the same way that they're prepared to eat a corpse they're like oh let's just use it it's actually getting a function still as opposed to not that this is necessarily the most widow thing but you could have a cultural preset of a wood elf and then sort of come to that conclusion or same as the argonian who are like really they're kind of into the recycling of life and they're using it rather than this sort of enshrining and in turn yeah oh i mean you look at what the dark elves do and all their ancestor worship and and kind of calling up a ghost you know getting well yeah we need some advice well they kind of keep them around yeah yeah then that's different but so i guess like anything i mean we don't want to get into a whole moral discussion but if it's a group of people who probably don't want their body to be touched after death then you know don't do it but it's the kind of thing when you get to it's like oh what if it's a bunch of um criminals you know a whole bunch of bandit criminals and stuff using it then you know what i mean that have slaughtered a whole village it's the kind of thing where and you know obviously you can get into like moral relations that's what i mean yeah and so on but what i'm saying is you can kind of see how like i mentioned phineas guest or rise as a a bunch of bandits or something i wouldn't necessarily go oh you immoral crazy disgusting person straight away you know i probably would yeah but i feel like it's different when you're in the game you don't care but like right now if someone just went up and and dug up a whole bunch of like but he's not digging criminals killing no like killing bandits yeah yeah raising them it depends what the use is anyway you know if you're if you're raising them to like whoever raises a a corpse to do something good i don't know to fight just other bandits yeah i mean yes it's cheap yeah they've always i don't know i feel like they're always involved in bad things yeah well look i mean places use them like cheap it's not i don't i just don't know what i was saying my point was that they're not always i feel like there are like most the time they do but there's there are like outliers and stuff where it's it's possible i feel i feel like it's like that with anything though you can always go here's one exception to the rule no but what i'm saying is like i'm it's not like falling to the dark side in star wars and you get corrupted by using necromancy and you're like your eyes turn yellow and you get vain stuff it's just it really is just like a you know it's a type of magic and you can use it and it's it's just often the ways that it's going it can lead to a you know darker moral i think messing with the cycle of life and death in the older scrolls is is always going to be taboo and it even is with you know the path to lichten like um even if you're only messing with yourself you know if you harmed no others in the process it would still be despicable to most people because you're you're you know you're interrupting the natural way of things you know mortality yeah but you know they couldn't they use that argument to sort of be like well you shouldn't use like you know healing productions and stuff i mean they're interrupting them it's a lot about perception i mean people do do that yeah yeah that's not that's not really my argument although with lich's they're known to have this ritual where they have to extract all these souls as painfully as possible like it on purpose in a malicious way to like power them and to collect to clarify like the the without consent part of it the the body part like if it's just the body it changes it a bit i mean this is the problem with the necromancy law it kind of like ups and downs i think sometimes we're gonna kind of go into flesh magic then because because there's this idea that okay the the well it's necromancy the idea that i was just gonna say the fresher the corpse is yeah the more the soul is kind of still there yeah yeah and well i guess that's like kind of like a physical tethering to it i guess with that idea but like i think the for the most part the the the big problem is the defilement of the souls and stuff like that and and to be honest necromancy if it is to deal with a soul that's a completely different scenario so like we're trying to say but i i think the laws just kind of contrived and they wanted to add in necromancy and skyrim to be like a bit more chill so that you can do it and not feel heaps evil and it's like no but the idea is you're bringing back this you know what i mean you're playing with a mortal soul and then i guess we'll talk about there's this one text that i hate with a passion in the elder scrolls online because it added this one little sentence which just messed with everything but of course you can just go kind of unreliable narrator and that this scholar is wrong but they're basically talking about kind of flesh magic kind of necromancy and and they're saying that sometimes you know a skeleton or or a flesh atronach it's imbued with a minor daedric essence is the quote and i think it said often a minor daedric essence and then it talked about it wasn't just flesh atronach though it was talking about other things like skeletons and stuff and it's kind of like well maybe you can rationalize it and say if it's a really fresh corpse you're still playing with the mortal soul that's trying to leave the body but if it's full on just skull and bones then the way that you reanimate it isn't with a mortal soul and it is with whatever this minor daedric essences but gosh i just hate that text because it goes against what everything on necromancy throughout all the other law books and stuff is meant to be you know when you're buried you're not you're far departed but there's all these groups that would you know protect the body and orders that would have you know the rights to rk to make sure that can't be tampered with and yeah they kind of they kind of made it a little convoluted for a really poor reason just so they could just add in some like enemies that you don't i guess or summons and stuff that you don't have to feel bad about or like so you don't feel like it's just you know what the safest thing is to just assume necromancy that's the safest side of the pillar um to just go necromancy is evil like it's always like a bad thing more or less on a stats basis as well you could kind of just assess the situation and be like even if you don't know for sure whether or not it's evil that's probably why you shouldn't do it because you don't know like and if you have to go oh is this evil or not and it like kind of a lot of the evidence says probably is and you do it then you've taken a chance on probably is evil which to me is kind of like a bad thing yeah you know yeah it's a bit of a it's a bit of a mix-up but yeah did you want to continue about i guess flash match flash magic flash magic's really complicated um because because in the elder scrolls online they kind of confused it by having abnathan say it's so simple a child of five could do it you know and you go and get these fleshy parts and put them in this um what to me looks like a necromancy circle because it's themed the color of all the necromancy magic and elder scrolls online that bluey aqua color and then you go over to a ritual book and raise your hands above it and a flesh astronaut comes out of the ground and he says ha we'll make a necromancer of you yet and it's like okay and then you go to the shivering isles and you've got romina verenam saying i have discovered the sixth element flesh you know hidden by virtue of its own self-awareness and all this stuff and what she does is very similar but it looks way more complicated and that's meant to be the soul of a daedra and she's stitched together all these different body parts but there's also carvings on them that may have some kind of protective purpose we don't know but there's carvings all over them they have the armor which may be to kind of bind it all together because it's not an effective armor you know it's around the neck the ankles the wrists a bit on the torso probably just because it looks cool but um you know they have all of that and then that's imbued with like the soul of a daedra and as we see with the gatekeeper that's a super powerful flesh magic entity that's really hard to kill and has a really complicated ritual needing ingredients from cher gorath's realm you know blood liqueur osseous osseous marrow and all this stuff it's kind of i think they just it's as simple as they got it confused in elder scrolls line or not confused they just sort of took the law in a direction that's kind of contradictory or just the easiest way to separate it is that there is such thing as oh this is like a frankenstein necromancy flesh outrank and then there's the really powerful daedric flesh atronachs that remain the shivering aisles but like that's just you know that's a cope to try and like deal with the design decisions but it can also just be like we were talking about at the start of the podcast a difference in classification it could be a flesh magic a very simple one because it is quite similar to necromancy in ways you know you're getting dead things and putting it together and bringing it to life or animating it in a way it's just one of it classically is done with a mortal soul and one is imbued with a dangerous soul the other thing about the ones in the aisles which is different is they have this item called void essence on their body which no one knows what void essence is perhaps it is from the void you know as the name kind of hints at but when you see the failed experiments the flesh atronachs in her i guess torture chamber ruins in zarcelm they don't have void essence so it seems to be like a crucial element of making the flesh astronauts that she makes and she also calls them true flesh so perhaps it is like a more advanced version than what has gone on in the past but we know in elder scrolls online mana marco made the first flesh colossus which is like a just a really big elder scrolls online flesh atronach um but it gets all confusing because then they summon flesh atronachs in even in oblivion so you don't know if are you just pulling them from cher gorath's realm or or what there's also the thing with elder scrolls online magic is you can't take it all as canon because a lot of them are just abilities that are like oh that's cool you know you made a flesh astronaut come out of the ground and pound the floor and then disappear you know it's kind of just like a power yeah it's the same as it's just that classic separating the gamified looking elements from same reasons like you know we don't take every mountain and you know cosmetics seriously you know um but yeah definitely you guys should really check out the flesh magic video um yeah i go super super deep on it and we also talk about gala phil's flesh magic which almost seems like a perhaps a combination of alteration and restoration stuff how she carves up your face with the flesh sculptor's knife she mentions that there's a blade involved and then unless she's being metaphorical and then kind of heals it to look different and however you want and also changes your body i know it's just a gameplay mechanic like you can change your muscle but you could see that as like a almost like a bodybuilder process of breaking down the muscles rapidly and then regrowing them bigger but with magic if you want if you wanted to rationalize it all those heaps of different things but definitely check out the flash magic video because we don't have 20 minutes just for flesh magic here yeah well i guess since we're kind of in a similar realm we can start talking about blood magic so blood magic most commonly has been talked about in regards to vampires and if you were to talk about like uh blood magic in in real life um that's real but but people believed itself it all comes from the central idea that blood is like you know it is the water that that gives life it's it's the essence it's it's the stuff that flows through your whole body and in that a lot of cultures believe that there is an innate power to that and so using that blood in blood magic is essentially uh it's kind of like any other magic really um except it's kind of like using blood as its source so you get the vampires you know a lot of this is added by the vampire lord form and stuff but there are other and you can as you can sort of think about there are like the bloodlines of vampires which all have their own unique traits so there's these specific powers that is contained within the blood but there are also uh blood magic rituals and stuff that that differ and like blood sacrifices amongst different cultures and so on and i mean there's also the example of in um skyrim you make a little blood sacrifice to open the door um yeah so there's like a magic yeah so i think a lot of it comes from some like some magical device or something detecting the blood it's using the magic within blood as almost like a i don't know like an identifier that door kind of thing you know you have to have dragon blood yeah it's skyhaven but i mean obviously that's some kind of magic recognition of the blood it's yeah i don't think it's some kind of scientific dwemer machine you know it feels very arcane but then there's all of the yes all of the vampire stuff and their their blood magic and blood use it's one of those very vague things to be honest do you know what makes blood magic it involves blood the red liquid yeah like that that's pretty much it like there's nothing um because you know in a vampire lord form when you use blood magic you're still using magicka to do it so i i think it's more great like creative or or interesting to think about it as blood magic being the actual magic that's contained within bloodlines and stuff like that so for example the dragonborn and their dragon blood or the vampires and their bloodlines and you could even argue it's in different things like i'd be interested to see what what else they could do with it in the law like what other mystical bloodlines or something there are with power like if you were to take if you would extrapolate that further you could even look at how uh different races have different innate abilities because of like you could say oh because they're blood you know bretons have elven blood in their veins and that is why they've got you know greater magical affinity um even despite looking more human-like so i think that that's pretty much all of blood magic i don't know how much yeah uh there's different powers and stuff again but it kind of comes into that powers category you know where it's like what is this well we can quickly address uh those as well so like as we've been talking about we've been talking about everything that deals with magicka sourced and the manipulation of magicka to get whatever effect you want but there are some things like the thumb of the um of the nords the the the shihai spirit sword stuff of the ance and um the yokuda and yokuda the ki is is offhand mentioned about the akaviri doing something similar but um and then also tonal architecture but they these are all sort of like the way that you'd think about it it's less of a not less academic but it's a very introspective sort of meditative thing that you get at these powers through enlightenment you know because the graybeads they sit there and study on the thumb or they meditate about it rather than kind of like reading about the technicality of it in books and stuff it's all very introspective intuitive enlightenment it comes back to mysticism when we were talking about it in defining it it's like it's very much the the magic is there to be a to be you know found it's it's it's all about looking looking inside and trying to find these patterns so that you can channel them which is when you think of the she hire the uh the sword singers is is once they once they master this art well enough um purely by by focusing their minds they're conjuring these these spirit swords that are immensely powerful you know so it kind of all draws back at the end and it's like michael said at the very beginning it's like if you take away the the rigid um you know the rules associated with casting spells then it's actually pretty incredible what you can discover by by simply understanding that the limit of looking into magic can be more than learning a fireball spell yeah absolutely i actually really favor like i like my magic mythical i like mythical magic that's why i like the thumb and cheeha and stuff way more or i like mysticism even but the more sort of like codified like you know fireball coming i mean like more of that kind of stuff i get a little bit like it's still cool but it just becomes a little dry yeah it's like how many points of magicka will it cost to use this it's like this is all stuff that is understandably needed for game mechanics but takes the magic out of magic yeah a little bit i will say there is another magic type we haven't talked about and that's shadow magic oh yes so shadow imagine so as renite wielder discovered that shadow was not simply an absence of light but a reflection of possible worlds created by forces in conflict so that's all really interesting and like in the we kind of touched on it in the nocturnal podcast a bit like the idea of shadows and and her having shadow magic but it kind of comes down to two besides like there's that nice poetic bit but then it kind of comes to like oh what shadow magic it involves shadow and dark dark kind of like purpley and black cloudy stuff but yeah um yeah it's it's supposed to be super powerful i mean there's this there's this thing that says shadow magic rivals even the power of the elder scrolls themselves having the power to potentially change the past present and future through the manipulation of shadow it has the capabilities of reaching into and affecting the multiverse it's kind of like you know when we talk about shadows with nocturnal and the the um conflicting forces of anu and padamay it's very much like finding pockets of chaos is that's that's kind of what shadows shadows are when you have the ineffable light and the great darkness and they're they're interplaying and and these shadows are you know it's it's the kind of it's like it's almost like you know raw raw energy to be to be channeled and it it can only really be philosophical when you look at something as as basic as shadow magic without any it's information mentioned it was also mentioned in the sea slowed um kind of stuff as well that was used there but again like you said it is kind of just seems aesthetic at this point like we don't know a whole bunch about it yeah yeah i uh i don't know did you guys have anything else to say on it because wait by the way guys just to preface this for you all at the end post face yeah to post face it i don't know if that's a word but uh this is uh we just wanted to what i wanted to touch on like magic in a general explanation and so you guys will have a firm idea of what the different kind of schools are and how it is actually arbitrary and how you know basically how things it's just magic really a lot of the time it's like because you know yeah but yeah but we will do other podcasts on magic more magic topics specifically like there are things that we touched on this podcast that we could have entire podcasts about you know like we did the lesser known beast races or beast folk we can have the lesser known magic types and do a whole podcast on it but this one's kind of like a big primer podcast yeah for someone who has no idea and then like mysticism like i kind of think of that mysticism necromancy as one big podcast could be a pretty cool discussion like because we'll go if we were to do those we'll we'll go a bit more into the actual like history of their creation so we'd be bringing up the psijic order a lot more and stuff like that yeah otherwise if we tried to do everything in one we'd have a four-hour podcast i reckon or more but yeah so i guess thanks everyone for watching we really appreciate it that you're all giving us support for these podcasts and leaving your comments liking the video following us on twitter it's all it's all a lot of fun to be honest like it's um it's a good way as well to learn more about the universe for for ourselves yeah it gives us more ideas because because when you have to when you have to explain it to someone else it kind of allows you to reflect on it in a different way versus if you're just reading it yeah something like that yeah yeah all right well thanks for watching everyone it's been fun it's michael scott and drew and we look forward to nerding out with you all again very soon

Channel: FudgeMuppet

Views: 74,125

Rating: 4.9610467 out of 5

Keywords: skyrim, elder scrolls, elder scrolls lore, skyrim lore, elder scrolls podcast, fudgemuppet, elder scrolls lore podcast, elder scrolls 6

Id: hSHjoF6oA70

Length: 61min 39sec (3699 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020