[Book cover]
The right weapon at the right circumstance
by JoĂŁo Viola
[Page 854 of 1004]
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-Wood is the best conduit
Magic is essentially extra-dimensional energy shaped through mental processes and output by whatever you have available to channel it through. You can channel magic bare-handed but you will eventually have your hands burned and fall off. While the physics of magic arenât quite known it does have definite damaging effects on living cells that channel it.
You can focus it through pretty much anything you can touch. You can send it out through your hat but hats are not very good as a focus object. You can send it out through a sword but metal is not a very good conduit and the magic comes through weak.
Through experimentation, the best conduit was found to be wood. Longer wood is better. Dead, dry wood is best and safest. The staff is simply the best magic conduit while still being easily portable.
We can play with the properties of wood to come up with effects on spell usage. Maybe a hardness test. The harder the wood, the higher the impedance and the weaker the magic.
The best staff a mage can have is one made from balsa. The physics of magic has something to do with benefiting from a length of dead plant material as a focus, but circumference, density and rigidity all come into play.
This explains why metal doesnât work well, itâs too dense. You also donât do well with a giant sock stuffed full of cotton strands, you lack rigidity. Balsa wood is the perfect combination of rigid and dense and you can get the shape you want. Thinner lets you focus the magic tighter but channels less power. Thicker lets you channel more total power but with exponentially less focus. Most wizards settle for something in the 2-4 inch circumference range for versatility and typically settle for something like chestnut because itâs hard to get a good balsa staff (and the balsa staffs are hard to maintain â if you put a protective coating around it it just becomes part of the equation and ruins the point of using balsa).
Adventuring wizards sometimes use hard wood because on a long trip, the durability of your staff is more important than itâs power level.
In conclusion, soft wood as a conduit has a âreasonableâ explanation and makes for some interesting decisions for the wizards: softer wood is better for magic but much easier to damage through routine wear and tear (and useless as anything other than a conduit for magic). Harder wood is less powerful but the durability is handy (and in a pinch you can whack things with it).
So with this soft wood idea, there is no âbestâ staff. There are tradeoffs.
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[Page 907 of 1004]
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If something goes wrong, itâs your staff that breaks, not your mental health, so you can put more energy into your attack, and hit your targets harder.
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A staff may also store power. So the magic user creates or gathers power either intentionally or automatically and puts that power in the staff, intentionally, automatically, or through action by the staff.
Spells that takes a little bit of kinetic energy from walking are put in the staff over a course of time. Then when in combat, it can release all the stored energy at once. So you are intentionally casting a spell that automatically stores power in an object. A staff is the best object to help with collection, storage, or both.
It would essentially be a battery in this view. Of course, it could still be a focus object as well, at the same time as it was a battery. It doesnât necessarily have to do just one thing.