Don’t destroy your most prized possessions by channelling magic through them -- bonus snippet

Don’t destroy your most prized possessions by channelling magic through them.

by Dr. Jessica Phalange

This shouldn’t need to be said.

Fetishes serve a specific purpose – to help bear the straing of magic during spellcasting. Their main disadvantage, when compared to a familiar, is fragility; an inanimate object has no homeostasis to maintain and no way to ‘heal’ from the damage of channelled magic. Their main advantage, when compared to a familiar, is disposability; no lives, beyond that of the caster, are put at risk.

As such, it would be an act of monumental stupidity to create fetishes from important or sentimental objects on some misguided notion that the Power of Love can protect them.

Magical links to fetishes or familiars are inherently mechanical in nature. While a mage’s perception and will is an important part of spellcasting, one’s will does not override the laws of magic. If it did, fetishes and familiars would not be necessary in the first place. It is easy to see well-cared-for familiars or fetishes, note that they suffer less damage than their neglected counterparts, and draw the completely erroneous conclusion that there is some causal effect between sentimentality and the efficacy of the magical link, but this is simply an illusion. The correlation can be well explained by a mage’s increased caution, when something that they care for is at risk. Mages who take the incredibly irresponsible advice of extremely rash and overreaching researchers claiming that their mere love for their object will protect said objects from magical backlash, and said onjects are therefore good candidates for fetishisation, will find themselves extremely disappointed.

Don’t channel magic through objects that you are attached to. It is an extremely bad idea.

Cherished objects already have a place in magical practice; they make excellent homes for enchantments. Enchanted objects make wonderful heirlooms, and while enchanting is technically a lot more dangerous to an object than fetishisation, an experienced, credited anchanter is far safer for your sentimental objects than a run-of-the-mill caster channelling through a fetish. If one wishes to explain the popularity of sentimental objects as fetishes in the past, one does not need to invoke any fanciful notions of sentimental objects making better fetishes. One needs only to acknowledge that it is entirely practical to enchant heirlooms, and that the great expense and prestige of enchanted objects can lead to a desire for imitation by those who cannot afford or make them. A fetish link is a poor but logically consistent imitation of an enchantment; thus the practice of fetishising sentimental objects, by people who cannot afford enchanted objects, is a natural consequence.

Such a practice died out because it is a completely unnecessary risk to sentimental objects, not because of any cultural degradation caused by the modern use of Pit spell acquisition.

Not every emotionally satisfying story is a paradigm-shifting breakthrough.