Blood Magic

This article is about the type of Practice. For general magical uses of blood, see Blood.

Blood magic is the practice of sacrificing bodily matter to perform esoteric effects. There are many things that can be sacrificed, including blood, death, sex, lives, and other material things that were earned through sweat or tears. Most often, these sacrifices are used to develop powerful items reminiscent of Implements <ref name="blood">Pact Dice: Blood Magic</ref> Of course, using blood comes with risks; using one's own leaves them weakened, while using others' may bring lots of bad karma. Those who primarily utilize blood magic are known as Blood Mages.

Methodology

Blood magic is a price and material oriented school, meaning there is a lot of sacrificing oneself and storing it for later use. Typically it is used to aid in the maturation of a tool, or to empower other types of magic. <ref>Pact Dice: The Practice - Wbow Version</ref>

Beginner blood magic will often start with a favored tool and branch out from there. The earliest practices one learns will focus on these tools, moving power between self and the main tool and between tools. Where the first creation is often done with help or with preparations and special materials gathered to streamline the process, subsequent ones are left for the new practitioner to figure out.

Intermediate practices will involve using gathered power to affect less material things. Prices paid for power, the power is then used to affect and strengthen practices, self, or spirits. Mishandling of this technique is often dangerous or involves a price, including a quick and steady degradation of the self, as they may more easily give something away that will never be replenished. Physical trophies are intermediate-ish in that they tend to require some skill and effort to collect, though they are simple; hair, bones, teeth, and other collections can impart a great deal of natural power, raising the floor of one’s own power and ability to operate with practices and spirit.

Advanced blood magics often focus on very high payments or prices. On one end, you can have physical prices paid in permanent markings. The permanence of the price can result in permanent, meaningful effects.<ref name="blood"></ref>

Blood magic Familiars tend to be either the result of investment and sacrifice or the result of taking X from things. If you make a habit of taking every last drop of someone's vitality from their body, and doing this on a regular basis, then spirits flow in to fill the void and spirits start to get accustomed to going to X place at Y time to get in on the action. Then you have pale Others moved by spirits and by some combination of spiritual energy and their own, old motivations, feral and craving what they had taken from them- closer to being ghouls than anything else. You can get tongueless, eyeless things that creep around blindly, seeing with their own version of the Sight, and things without skin.
Flipping things around, if you're using blood to empower items, then that blood has a character to it. The type of blood matters. Ditto for Deaths, ditto for lives. Somewhere along the line, if your own personality doesn't assert itself over this degree of power with its own personality, then the power wins, and you have a box that's taken over its host or develops enough of a form to have an associated human-ish shape that manifests around it or carries it around. <ref>You may be focusing too much on 'blood' as the central component of this.
1. Can i drink the blood of an Other and gain a ability related to the other,like,drinking an goblin's blood,can i grow claws?
This is more of a Host thing.

2) can i enhance other kind of magics with blood,for instance elementalists and ogre mages can throw fireballs,can i create a spell that enchance my fireball with blood magic?
Blood Mages aren't really fireball types. If you did have fireballs, you could use blood magic to empower what you're doing, as you could with any practice.
Blood Mages are practitioners of the material and of sacrifice. Blood is the most common currency they work with, but it's not the only currency or focus. You could make Death or deaths be the currency, or sex, or life/lives.
Being practitioners of the material, they tend to like working with items. Think of them as being the guys who think "There are powerful items in the world, how do we make more?" - a sword wielded by an ancient hero who kills a thousand enemies ends up becoming powerful in its own right. But if they have a sword and use it to ritually kill a thousand people, can they get a similar kind of power? Implements are really potent things, but what if we gamed the system and used rituals and large amounts of power to try and brute force the system and have multiple implements or pseudo-implements, that we can then transfer power between, on a necessary basis? Part of the reason for items is that they tend to make better vessels for the kind of power we're talking about than the practitioner themselves.
And yes, because they work with this power as a currency, they can spend it on making their fireball more intense. More likely, however, they're playing a Dauntless sort of game.

3. Can i control people and Others by using their blood like marionettes?
Not so much. You could use blood to empower practices that did, however.

4. what kind of familiars and implements would be good for blood mage?
Depends on the blood mage. Blood magic familiars tend to be either the result of investment and sacrifice or the result of taking X from things. If you make a habit of taking every last drop of someone's vitality from their body, and doing this on a regular basis, then spirits flow in to fill the void and spirits start to get accustomed to going to X place at Y time to get in on the action. Then you have pale Others moved by spirits and by some combination of spiritual energy and their own, old motivations, feral and craving what they had taken from them- closer to being ghouls than anything else. You can get tongueless, eyeless things that creep around blindly, seeing with their own version of the Sight, and things without skin.
Flipping things around, if you're using blood to empower items, then that blood has a character to it. The type of blood matters. Ditto for Deaths, ditto for lives. Somewhere along the line, if your own personality doesn't assert itself over this degree of power with its own personality, then the power wins, and you have a box that's taken over its host or develops enough of a form to have an associated human-ish shape that manifests around it or carries it around.

5)are there such a thing as spirits of blood? if so,what can i do if i let one of them possess me?
There are, but again, I think you're thinking of 'blood' as too much of a focus or central component here. In this case it'd be a sanguine spirit. Letting this spirit possess you would be more of a Host thing than a Blood magic thing.

6)can i enhance mundane items with Blood? a knife that is sharper or a gun hit with more accuracy?
Yes. This would be a blood magic thing, as it's material and the blood would come as the result of sacrifice. Like Dauntless from Worm, you could even put in more blood over long periods of time to keep improving the item.

7)Can i make someone my hypnotized slave by having them drink my blood? Not a blood magic thing. - A Few questions about Blood Magic in Pact.</ref>

When harvesting blood from others, the practitioner must create and follow strict conditions on who, how, and why that other's blood may be harvested. Failure to do so will yield a karmic backlash. Examples include harvesting only from monsters, only from those who willingly offers their blood, or only from those who attacked them first.

Notable Blood Mages

• Mara Angnakak - combined with Heartless practices, making her a Blood Hag.

References

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