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Spells can be powerful, hard-hitting monstrosities, like high-tier spells:
- Blacken the sun for three consecutive days.
- Cleave a continent.
- Power an impenetrable magical shield around a city for several days.2)
Certain high-tier spells can theoretically ‘break’ the whole system, e.g. someone might successfully uplift themselves into perfect spellcasting, erasing the downsides of spellcasting (well, minus the pain, at least initially, until they alter themselves not to feel pain) and possibly even speeding up the process (e.g. increasing their own speed and dexterity to superhuman levels). The only real guards against this are that high-tier spellcasting is really fucking hard to begin with and, much like nukes on Earth, there are cultural norms against proliferating the associated knowledge and capabilities.
Which doesn’t mean everyone adheres to those norms, of course. Insert the setting-equivalent of the Hzataalar Kaea here, basically.
Medium-tier spells exist and are the majority of spellcasting, generally considered as having a sweet-spot between risk and pay-off. This is usually where you handsomely pay a professional sorcerer to do something that e.g. would take your culture maybe a decade of menial work to achieve (maybe significantly diverting a river to a more convenient spot), or e.g. does useful alchemical things such as “make lots of fuel for this space ship we have from this lake of water”.
Low-tier spells exist, but are usually not considered worth the risk of botching them. But in theory you can e.g. light a fire with spellcasting, or carry around an orb of artificial light, or commune with an animal (although it sure will be a very weird mental experience, since animals do not think like you at all).
As a general rule, the more powerful a spell, the more fleshrunes you’ll need to cast it. In theory this limits the amount of power a spell can have. In practise, if you have sufficiently compatible pawns… or clones…