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A form of magic exists in this universe, but it is very 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 (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. 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.
To some degree, you can also use someone else’s flesh, if you can get them to hold still for it! It adds a bit of an additional level of risk – the caster and donor should be comparably shaped, since the spells “assume” the caster’s biology in the spell pieces and incompatibility in this space guarantees that a spell will be unsuccessful, but the important parts are mostly geometrical, and a bit of error on the sub-millimetre scale is allowed. The same caveat about death applies, though.
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.