Carve

Magic exists in this universe, but it is rather expensive to perform: You need a special ink that you (typically) apply to your non-dominant arm’s skin with a special implement,¹⁾ drawing specific patterns (“runes”), which will carve a now-rigid piece of your own flesh out of your body (“fleshrunes”). You then need to arrange these pieces in a certain way (usually vertically, a bit like a Jenga tower) to make the spell happen, preferably before you bleed to death.

Notably, there’s no time limit to getting the spell right beyond your personal health. If you die, no one else can finish the spell for you – the pieces taken from your flesh become inert.

If you do this correctly, the spell will happen and you will also regain your flesh. If you do it incorrectly, you’re probably going to die, but you can usually try again until you do.

You can apply the runes to other parts of your body as well.²⁾ It’s best you pick something you can recover from if it fails and you can’t figure out how to make it succeed, though, so limbs are popular. Unsurprisingly, sorcerers may often end up somewhat crippled.

The underlying mechanism of magic is poorly understood in-character, but as players or story-tellers in Carve, you should know about the Aether.

Due to the nature of spellcasting in this universe, spellcasting doesn’t tend to happen in battles. That said, they can absolutely make battles obsolete. Spells can be powerful, hard-hitting monstrosities, depending on spell tier. There are some basic limitations to the art, typically due to the way the Aether enacts spells.

History

Magic is a rediscovered art. The setting’s equivalent of the Aztecs discovered it (in what later became Tamoanchan), making archeology a useful field of study for sorcerers, occasionally discovering new spells just by making sense of some old writing.

In-character, it’s still unclear how the Aztec-equivalents originally discovered it at all, but the answer is basically fucked up human sacrifice rituals letting them (coarsely) communicate with the Aether that underlies this universe.

¹⁾

These tools are not easy to discover and the main reason why it took decades after the theoretical rediscovery of spellcasting to actually spellcast – it’s one thing to have a description of these and another to make them happen in reality. That said, both are fairly easy once you’ve figured it out.

²⁾

You may even be able to use someone else’s flesh, if you can get them to hold still for it. That said, the runes are designed with a standard human biology in mind, and e.g. other animals would need different geometries, as would someone with deformities, cancers or a disruptive disease.