Human person @RedNoBlue
Also in 4th, who discovered the new way to manipulate magic? Did the Arcane users realise you could still pour an encounter’s worth of power into an effective yet weaker version of the Vancian magic, or did the Gods have to tell them?— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 29, 2020
1)
So here we are at the last of that batch of your questions (not last posed, but last for me to get to answering).
Arcane magic, aside from the direct guidance of tutors and the indirect guidance of watching others successfully 2)
…cast spells, and following the spellbooks and scrolls written by dead and gone predecessor wielders of the Art, has always been a matter of experimentation.
Working from the ‘bones’ (structure, relevant verbal, somatic, and…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 29, 2020
3)
…material components) of what has gone before, a spellcaster experiments to try to cause a different effect. Even many wizards who never deliberately experiment, or set out to create a spell, do so when they substitute, like a… 4)
…cook in a kitchen who lacks basil but tries to make do with oregano, one material component for another.
So what happened after the Spellplague hit was that arcane spellcasters discovered their magic didn’t work, or did things…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 29, 2020
5)
…they didn’t anticipate it doing (so when they cast a Fireball, what happened was instead a random Wand of Wonder effect). Moreover, other mortals, now terrified at what these out-of-control arcane spellcasters might do, or 6)
…wanting to settle earlier scores, slew or maimed a lot of wizards. If an arcane spellcaster survived this tumult, they may well hide their Gift to wield magic, and just not try to work any magic at all, forever or for a long… #Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 29, 2020
7)
…time.
Eventually, in private, they might dare to try casting something—and discover that the casting worked. If they did it again and got a reliable result, they’d discovered on their own that magic worked again.
That’s who8)
…discovered magic “had returned” or, when it was still unstable, new ways to cast that were more or less reliable for them. So there was no grand discoverer whose name should be written into the history books, there were…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 29, 2020
9)
…many wielders of the Art all over Toril discovering what worked and didn’t work, and daring to use magic again.
The Gods were in the same boat: when the Spellplague hit, as I described in my previous reply, the Weave 10)
…suddenly didn’t work as they were used to it working. Some of them kept trying, until eventually the Weave started working again (poorly). So the gods couldn’t tell mortal arcane spellcasters what to do, because they didn’t…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 29, 2020
11)
…know what to tell them. The deities of Toril aren’t infallible and all-knowing; far from it. Many of them aren’t even expert on their own portfolios. Having a lot of brute-force power contributes to that; most of the time, 12)
…they don’t need to be experts, they can batter down and overwhelm problems and situations, rather than deftly dealing with them.#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 29, 2020