Please Turn On Your Magic Beam

THE MOON

It's a magical factory-satellite the size of a death star, all pearlescent mirrors and inscrutable mechanisms and miraculous alchemy. Trembling and glimmering in the sky like a drop of melted bismuth. A hive-mind AI of ancestor ghosts tends lovingly to the machines, the honored dead of the First Folk, slow and austere and alien but lonely, too, for it has lost a part of itself—a piece of the moon fell to Earth a long, long time ago, then a major extinction event, now a thin band of glittering mirror-dust in the geologic record.

Source

(At the impact site a reef-ringed mountain still looms above the waves. Clockwork cogs of whitest ivory still turn deep beneath the rocky carapace. Fallen moon-ghosts roam its slopes, driven quite mad by the separation from their lunar comrades; also gnomes).

Its purpose is to transmute sunlight into moonlight (witchlight, polterlight) and beam it to the surface. Its silver rays seem dim to us because our waking minds can only grasp them partly. Sleeping, we see the truth. Sapient minds, as they interact with each other and the physical world, inevitably construct grand works of a different kind and on a different plane, cityscapes of political ideology, mountain ranges of customs and social norms, monuments to faith, ziggurats of accumulated knowledge. This psychic landscape is what the light of the moon reveals, and when we sleep we walk its paths.

DREAM

When you sleep, your loosened consciousness falls out of your skull and lands here. It is the collective, intersubjective zeitgeist-product of the thoughts and beliefs of the minds around you, but also separate from them, a force in its own right, invisible, nigh-incomprehensible in scope and yet also instinctively known to each individual contributor. You're immersed in it all the time, it's just that when you dream, you can see it, a synesthesia-collage of story tropes, art-seeds, cultural flotsam.

Travel to some far-off place, immerse yourself in the culture, and your dreams will take on new, unfamiliar shapes. Sleep amongst the mountain-peoples and your nights will be plagued by images of frightening fungal growth, sporulation, patterns of rough stone in the dark, exuberant geometry. A caravan making camp in the wilderness weeks away from anything resembling civilization still carry with them whole lifetimes of acculturation, but without the psychic presence of a living society to explore their dreams will tend towards the introspective and deeply personal. (There's something else thrumming behind these hermit-dreams, big-slow-indifferent, green-and-blue. The forest dreams, too).

A normal, well-adjusted person navigates the oneiric realm clumsily and unthinkingly and forgets their experiences within minutes of awakening. It takes a real weirdo to willingly undertake the complex brain-sculpting rituals of hypnagogic meditation and self-delusion required to dream lucidly.

GREAT BUT WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MAGIC

Okay

Spells (as we all know) are the numerous distant inbred descendants of a Noumenal idea accidentally brought into Phenomenon by an ancient species of beleaguered chimps. As alien memes largely incompatible with the simple geometries of our brains, they spend most of their time floating around
in the deep, quiet places beneath the collective subconsciousness, where the conceptual space is flexible enough to accommodate them. That's called your dreams baby.

This is how wizards get magic into their heads. They venture into Dream every night to hunt for the ammunition they need to fire their mind-rifles in the real world, diving into misty ravines of mostly-forgotten cultural influences. Actually casting a spell involves first holding one somewhere in your mind without going bananas and then, through utterance, gesture, and the occasional elaborate prop, performing the complicated task of semiosis, of encoding and externalizing the magic, producing meaning via the relating of sign to eldritch sign in a half-understood one-sided conversation with the universe.

Wizards are anti-social and creepy because they have dedicated an ever-expanding plot of mental real estate to containing and comprehending unstable Noumenal concepts. Optional Rule: Every time a magic-user attains a new level of power, be that access to spell slots of a higher level or whatever, there is a 50% chance that you must either lose 1 point of Charisma, which is boring but represents your wizard sacrificing some essential piece of his psychology in the name of mastering unknowable cosmic forces; or, alternatively, you can choose to roll to gain an Aspect of the Unheimlich as the magic erodes your ability to function in normal society.

d20	Aspects of the Unhiemlich
1	The corners of your mouth tug insistently upwards into a distant fae smile. It now takes constant concentration to maintain a neutral expression.
2	Eye contact causes you great emotional distress. Force yourself to meet the gaze of another and feel the adrenaline crackle in your limbs, the sweat bead on your forehead.
3	A dozen nervous ticks claim your fingers and arms and legs and face, twitching tapping clicking grinding.
4	Compulsive documentation. Everything you learn must be written down, lest you forget, lest the information slip from your memory, the sooner the better.
5	The antics of children are troubling and perplexing to you. You will flinch at their approach and react with bewildered hostility at their continued presence.
6	Your thoughts become difficult to hold without verbal reinforcement. Creepy-ass mumbling all the time.
7	Intermittent episodes of trembling, painless, whole-body seizures, like a struck tuning fork.
8	The intonation of your speech smooths and dulls. Any attempts at emphasis sound disruptive and artificial, like a shitty text-to-speech program from the 80s.
9	Unhealthy, morbid fascination with 1: Bones. 2: Fungus, mushrooms, rotten things. 3: Fire. Careful now. 4: Bugs! Bugsbugsbugs. 5: Plague. 6: The stars.
10	You can never seem to remember the right amount of personal space to give people. Three inches? Four?
11	You move in jerking bursts between small moments of strange stillness, like a nervous songbird.
12	Your personal hygiene begins to degrade. The dirt caking under your fingernails and the grease in your hair comforts you, icons of your struggles and experiences the importance of which your foolish comrades simply do not understand. To wash them away would be to lose something of yourself to the water.
13	Synesthesia.
14	You are burdened with a great deal too many secrets. Pick a small personal item from your inventory to be your trusted confidant; tell it everything you dare not speak of to another, every hidden truth, alone and in hushed whispers.
15	Frequent sleepwalking episodes. You don’t do anything destructive—you simply rise from your bed and walk, silently, to the sleeping form of another, where you stand for hours, watching them breathe through half-lidded unseeing eyes.
16	In moments of distraction, your hands move of their own accord. They seek to carve swimming symbols into tables and walls, to fashion them out of twigs. Look at what you have drawn and feel the shapes tickle at your brain. You almost recognize them, but from where?
17	Everything must have an assigned place, every day a detailed itinerary. Your organizational scheme grows wildly out of control and tends to also apply to other people’s possessions.
18	The vast halls of scent are suddenly open to you! You don’t understand why you haven’t realized it before, that everything has its own peculiar bouquet, that odors should be sampled and relished like the finest wines, the most beautiful music. You constantly accost your compatriots with your latest discoveries.
19	Nothing obvious. The magic must have colonized some vestigial part of your psychology with absolutely no ill effects whatsoever. You will go stark raving mad in 2d6 years.
20	Solipsism creeps into your mind like black frostbite, just as deadening. It is there chanting in the background of every conversation and every quiet moment, a nagging, gnawing suspicion that your supposed fellows are nothing but empty soulless objects, animated by some vast conspirator, or that they are illusions somehow perfectly crafted to simulate intelligence, but even as you look you think you see the flaws, tiny almost to the point of imperceptibility, and try as you might to convince yourself otherwise the signs are there, they’re always there as if they want you to know exactly how alone you really are, how little the so-called “lives” of others really matter.