Visceral

Visceral is a Practitioner term for magic which is physical<ref name=":3">Visceral, meaning our material practices, tangible, rooted in our world, in solid things, in meat, in stone, soil, nature, and construction. Items, men, and things like men are visceral.  Bogeymen, goblins.  If it bleeds, it is often in this category.  You, student, are visceral. - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.4</ref><ref name=":4">When deciphering an Other that you can name or can’t name, it’s good to start at the fundamentals.  Material or immaterial make a fine starting point.  Do they have bodies?  Is that body solid and consistent in form?  I’m not speaking of shapeshifting, but of biology, or if the head remains a head.  If so, they’re material, visceral if you want to use correct terminology.  If they don’t touch ground, their forms are mutable, or they don’t exist primarily in this realm, they may be immaterial.  This can be deceptive.  Our temporary school librarian, for example, is an Anima, and Anima straddle the line in such a way that they can be bound by both the visceral and the immaterial. [...] Others, like us, need sustenance.  The nature of that sustenance varies wildly, ranging from food, sleep, and drink for the most visceral Others, to specific sentiment or faith for the immaterial. [...] Immaterial Others are most inclined to inhabit a hallow.  Spirits, echoes, and incarnations are diffuse enough that they could inhabit anything.  For many visceral others, such as your common goblin or bogeyman, they may require that you break the body first. - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.1</ref> and often especially brutal.<ref name=":0">The church, if the church was abandoned for two hundred years.  Wind blew through broken windows and carried choking dust.  Something lay dying and twitching on the broken glass of bodies.

“The visceral.  Physical power.  Brutal, unforgiving, often with a way of biting the hand that would use it… sometimes as an always thing, sometimes it waits for the chance.  The price is that it will take chunks out of you, or your lifeblood.  In goblin practice, it may poison you after it pricks your flesh.  In the Abyssal, it may cut you deeper, longer to heal.” - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.6 </ref> These more physical branches of magic have some overlap with each other.<ref>The Citation practice is the basic ritual for the Mien approach.  A paper is prepared and laid into the skin to meet the Self, then removed.  Color may be pulled from a lock of hair, pupils from eyes, or scars from flesh. [...] Removed scraps will take on physical form as papers, mementos and/or things with small power to them, useful in various Visceral practices.  - Quasi, quoted in Bonus Material: Bedtime Reading.</ref>

Visceral Practices

• Goblin Kings<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1">Visceral Practices
  –Material Fundamentals – Basics on Others and practices dealing in the physical.
  –Once Human – Peri-, periodic, and post-human Others, practices, diseases.
  –Dark Locales – Twisted and Othered locations on Earth, urban and rural.
  –Goblins – Goblin summoning, practice, tools, binding, and extermination.
  –The Warrens – Goblin realm, day trips, non-Goblin denizens of the Warrens.
  –Scourging – Horrors, Scratchings, Bogeymen, and related dark practices.
  –Self Defense – Offensive practices, dealing with hostile Others, practitioners.
  –Alchemy – Creating Visceral Others and Things through Material practice. - 4.1 Bonus Material: BHI Information Packet</ref>
• Scourgess<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />
• Alchemy<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":2">Schools: Halflight (Heartless var., Visceral) [...]
  
  A man dons an animal skin and stalks a forest trail.  Another drinks an alchemical admixture, and becomes a beast of another sort.
  
  A feral thing wears his victim’s skin and goes to the man’s home to eat a dinner, his family unnerved but unable to say exactly why.  A gossamer wisp of a creature dresses itself up as a babe using clay by the riverbed and the flesh from a dug-up corpse.  Then it wails, and a woman finds it.  The corpse it dug up was that of her baby, recently lost, and she is stunned to long silence by how it resembles her child.  She brings it into her home.
  
  Walls separate man and monster.  Artfully addressed, halflight practices aim to capture the best of both at once.  Once we begin the journey, however, the way back to normalcy is hard, if not impossible. - Quasi, quoted in Bonus Material: Bedtime Reading.</ref>
• Some ("Halflight") Heartless<ref name=":2" />
• Technomancy<ref>We can discuss over dinner, if you like, but I’m picturing three devices, each one something that can look into the past.  Then Eloise for connections, Zed for the visceral, and yourself, Jessica, for the immaterial. - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.2</ref>

In PactDice, the Material practices are Alchemy, Elementalism, Blood Mage, Collector, Technomancer, Item Crafting, Warding;<ref name=":12">Pact Dice</ref> and the Conflict practices are War Magic, Harbinger, Goblin King, Scourge, Oni Mage, Heroics, Ogre Mage.<ref name=":13">Pact Dice</ref>

Visceral Beings

• Bogeymen<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />
• Fleshmongler
• Goblins<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />
  • Gremlins
  • Todds
  • Redcaps
• Humans<ref name=":3" />
  • Crossed
  • Denizen
  • Oddfolk
  • People of the Valley
• Homunculi<ref name=":1" />
• Werewolves<ref name=":2" />
• Doppelgängers<ref name=":2" />

Visceral Others, unlike immaterial ones, generally can't be bound in a Hallow unless their body is destroyed first. Often they can be placed or transformed into a Hallow after their physical body is broken, however. More visceral Others may require food and/or sleep, much as a human or animal does.<ref name=":4" />

Visceral Realms

• The Warrens
• The Abyss
• Mundane reality

Trivia

To an extent, this term seems to be an in-universe version of the "Material" and "Conflict" columns in PactDice's Practices table:

References

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