Magic schools, life, death, and attitude

C.S. Friedman's Black Sun Trilogy treated this concept very well.  Even "evil" necromantic magicians could heal, albeit with somewhat sinister means (e.g. little parasites that would eat diseased flesh, thus curing the victim).

Is the idea that the "Life" school should handle the more spiritual or mental aspects of magic in Elemental?  If this is inspired by The Silmarillion, then what do the various mental powers (mind's eye, and even allusions of reading thoughts) come in?

Swell question. Maybe there will be a subset of spells (or at least spell types) that are available in most or all schools, perhaps with differing special effects. Kind of similar to the way the different civ tech trees in Twilight of the Arnor all share basic functions like production and weapons. Or how all the D&D magic user classes needed to have the Read and Write Magic spells.

Maybe a spell in life and death would have different long term consequences.

For instance the heal spell : with life you heal and the unit gains a boost in morale (yep it's cool to feel alive again :P), but if you heal with death then you gain some disease immunity for some times, or a bonus in attack because you feel invulnerable.

I'm going for the classic.  In life magic, you heal.  In death magic, you steal health from the enemy to give to your guy.

Some stuff I've read since I made the OP makes me pretty sure that's how the game's going, and that works for me pretty much. But I'm still really hoping that the alignment system will be on a sliding scale and not a binary choice. Maybe trinary, if a scale is just no good for the other mechanics?

I definitely hope they steal a page from the Dominions book and make lots of spells dependent on more than one school.  That enhances replayability infinitely more than a "more or less single path" tech tree for magic.

Adding "alignment" as an axis to your spell research tree does sound cool--I'd love to have a difference between "needfire" (extra damage to demons & undead) and "balefire" (causes rotting burns to survivors), but if you aren't careful, you just end up slapping some fairly generic alignment modifications on a basic boilerplate of spells, which doesn't do much for the replayability.

"Needfire"?

Balefire. Now there's some seriously unbalancing magic, if you're talking Wheel of Time--that balefire actually burns backwards in time, destroying a person's recent actions as well as the person.

Balefire has shown up in other contexts than just WoT -- and the WoT version would be seriously difficult to impliment (because you can't just 'undo' the results of a unit / cities actions over the last several turns, without redoing the turns themselves)

On the other hand, it would definitely qualify for "most annoying spell ever." 

Oh man, and it increased with the power used.  Your badass channeler is the last man standing, you've lost.  BOOM!  I get to fix all the fuckups for the last 100 turns and he's now missing his core army!

Neither Life nor Death are inherently evil. Death is simply the absense of life. Not un-life.

Like Tamren said.

There is no "Death" magic in Elemental. Death is simply an aspect of the life element. For those of you that have played Arcanum, I think it'll be somewhat like the two different aspects of necromancy. Both are still necromancy, but usable in wildly different ways.

Draining the life out of someone is just another way to use life magic.

Isn't it more how it is used than the magic itself that is evil ? I mean some spells might inherently be bad, stuff like soul sucking.. and possibly raising the dead. But in the end, why limit one school of magic to one side ? A few spells, sure, but whole schools seems a bit dull and restrictive.

Magic is just a tool. The user is who decides what to do with it, so only the user can be good or evil and that will affect what he does with his magic.

Well some things will be inherently bad me thinks.. Stuff like sucking out souls to nourish yourself and stuff like that.. Otherwise kindly tell me how that can be good

How about sucking the souls out of the enemy to preserve the lives of your own soldiers and townsfolk? Only on paper can  ethics be divided into black and white.

If your enemy raises a titanic army of demons and undead in order to protect his people. Can he be truly labeled as evil if he only did so because you have been trying to kill him and his people by conjuring "good" things and sieging him with unicorns and angels?

Now that sounds weak actually, you are still sucking out the souls of some living creature and sending it into oblivion, not exactly a good thing, no matter the circumstances, and while undead could be argued depending on several circumstances, consorting with demons isn't exactly a terribly good thing and would probably come back to haunt your arse, on the other hands using angels and unicorns for evil wouldn't be good either, although on the other hand, would they do it if what they were doing was bad ? Probably not.

As it is, you don't really provide anything convincing to your arguments, just raise a bunch of situations that don't really prove anything.

I mean sure you can do something bad for good, but it's still going to be bad in a sense.

Who's to say that sucking the soul out of someone and sending it into the flames of oblivion isn't the good thing to do, in a case such as that? I think the question, rather than a question of good or evil, would be one of "Does the ends justify the means?". There's nothing inherently good or evil in any action. Since we can't define it, it becomes a matter of opinion, where the judgement lies in the eye of the beholder.

Is it "evil" to shoot someone, for example? Some would adamantly argue "yes!", while others would shrug with a casual "of course not". Magic is a weapon, just like a gun, and for that I can only say; 1) "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." and 2) "Good. Bad. I'm the Guy with the gun.".

Imagine if some guy was walking down the street with his wife. Suddenly a magic portal opens and a some guy with a sword pops out and tries to stab her. He pulls out a gun and shoots the swordsman in the face. By the word of law he is now guilty of murder. To save the life of a member of his family he has commited an evil act by taking the life of another. There is no way you can sugar coat the situation. How then do you define this man's alignment on a moral scale? If he simply let his wife die then he would be considered an evil person. But only by comitting an evil act can he protect her.

That the killing was done in self defense is irrelevant. If you were walking down the street and were about to be hit by an out of control car, does that give you the right to incinerate the car and everyone inside it with a fireball just to preserve your own life?

In Elemental you are the leader of a whole civilization. Every life in that civilization is dependant on you for survival. Can a good leader commit mass murder to ensure the safety of his people? How is that any different from an evil leader harnessing every resource under his power to preserve the lives of HIS people?

Morality simply can't be measured on a scale of good and evil. We can only do what we think is right and let others be the judge.

I dont' know what twisted laws you live under, but defending yourself -- or another -- from imminent harm (i. e. getting stabbed) pretty much negates any chance of it being called murder.  Homicide, yes, but while all murders are homicides, not all homicides are murders.

Edit:

Oh, and I'm very much on the side of "people kill people" -- while the tools you use can sometimes be an indicator of good or evil, you have to take the entire situation into consideration, first.

If I use a poison that causes extreme agony to the victim to kill someone, of course that's 'evil', especially if I apply it by slipping it into the soup that he's serving at a banquet for several hundred people.

Oh, but wait, that's the only way I can hope to kill this guy -- I don't have any other poisons that will slip past his food tasters, or any way to deliver it just to him.  And by killing him, I save thousands of friendly lives because he's a mass-murdering maniac who murdered his way to the throne.

Killing is not inherintly evil, or wrong, despite all the complete and utter morons who think so.

Yes well, not all of us a defence attorneys, its just an example. Anyway maybe I should have explained better. In the example above the swordsman popping out of the portal represents a threat to the mans wife from his perspective. He doesn't know who the swordsman is or what his motive is, or even if he is actually targetting his wife. The moment before he pulls the trigger is spent making a conscious descision. "do I or do I not pull the trigger on this gun and end the life of another?"

It is possible that the swordsman is completetly innocent. He could be attacking an invisible enemy partially concealed behind the wife in an attempt to save them both. He could have been in a distant battle and the portal opened up in front of him right as he was in the act of striking an enemy.

My point is, during that moment before he makes his descision that man is by no definition good or evil.  None of the  possible outcomes can lead to an entirely good or evil result. So no matter what the extended circumstances are, the results of his descision are the measure by which we decide his character.

We have to decide for ourselves what we consider good and evil. What we choose is what will define us as people, and how we measure in the eyes of others. And either way, arguing about morality is like arguing on the number of colours you can't make with the spectrum of light.

There's just a need for someone to accept damnation to hell for the sake of the heavens, at times. It's just important to me that the person knows why he's going there, and makes the choice consciously. But I forget myself, and I babble, so I'm going to stop writing now.

Well that quickly became interesting, although it seems some people might have missed the point, i am not saying killing is inherently bad or anything like that, i was just trying to get some discussion going on the whole Moral Relatavism bit which many of you seem to subscribe to rather heavily.

In the end it all comes down to how you actually view the world and such, and as long as that is there.. you will have people killing people Because opposing ideas will conflict even when both sides could be considered "good"

Excuse me, I need to go take a shower.  And you know, I thought there were rules about insults like that... calling me a lawyer... I think I'm gonna throw up. 

Alas, true.

Eh, hit one of my pet peeves.