Darkweaving

Darkweaving: A forbidden branch of magic, focused on the usage of souls. Normally, magic involves sacrificing mana from your soul by offering it up to the Lifestream. With Darkweaving, you instead sacrifice the mana from harvested souls. Darkweaving is primarily used alongside Abyssal magic, as the backlash that comes with the spells is ignored due to the backlash normally being focused on the soul in the first place.

Unlike Sorcery, you do not grow frail for using Darkweaving. Normally, offering mana is pretty much offering pieces of your soul, thus weakening you. Darkweaving, however, uses pieces of someone else's soul.

When casting spells through Darkweaving, you may also wear armour like normal. Metal armour usually interferes with your connection to the Manastream, however, due to the fact you may manifest stored essence outside of your body/armour, you may therefore cast spells while wearing armour. (So long as you spend essence points, detailed below.)


You may absorb a soul of victims that you slay, gaining essence points to place into an essence pool. Spells normally have a limited amount of uses; requiring the mage to take ample time in using consumables or meditation to restore uses. However, Darkweaving allows you to use the mana of the souls you've devoured, granting you uses through essence points instead. Darkweavers cannot cast spells or gain any spell uses through any way other than devouring souls.

Tl;Dr, Essence points grant you spell uses, but you cannot gain spell uses through any other way. Every kill is a free mini-mana potion.


Your essence pool has a cap, however, this cap may grow as you use Darkweaving over time. (The DM Will tell you when you feel your pool grow in strength.)

Mortal souls(souls from a sapient, cultured creature) will grant you more essence points than lesser creatures. E.g animals.

You gain essence points as listed below:


1: Average sized creatures (Wolves)

3: Larger creatures (Grizzly bear)

5: Mortal soul

Some victims carry an iconic soul. (subject to the DM's discretion) You may attune yourself with these souls to grant you a special ability or power based around that soul. It takes a while to attune yourself to one soul, and you may only be attuned to one soul at any given time.

Likewise, the aforementioned iconic souls may be forged into equipment, albeit require great effort. The artifacts also contain the soul, thus making the object sentient.

Iconic souls may be consumed entirely to grant you a massive amount of essence.





Svala's Darkweaving:


Essence Pool: Maximum of 10 stored points

Attuned Soul: The Bone Cobbler (Grants Raise Dead & Breath of Undeath)



Spells:

Raise Dead: (2 EP) You may raise up to 2 medium sized undead minions, or 1 large undead minion.

Breath of Undeath: (3 EP) A disorienting breath weapon that sickens everything living caught within the aura. Undead victims are instead empowered.