Elysium's Multiverse

Totem making has long been used as a basic means of creating decorative monuments, household apparel, and things to keep evil spirits out as a focus of old wives’ tales, and it wasn’t originally such a lucrative or useful craft in the beginning. This is likely due to the disgust many mainstream mages hold for shamanistic practices despite its usefulness, and it is often referred to by great scholars across this land as “barbaric” for its affiliation with forbidden nature magics and the dark arts.

The key to understanding the basics of totem making is essentially understanding that it is an alternate path of enchanting. Enchanting requires a lock-and-key mechanism via runecraft and mana distribution through a conduit—the conduit being the person who is creating the totem, who must have the proper affiliated type of magic. The runecrafting is very similar to how one casts a spell with hand motions in Tier 2 and above spells. But the key differences between totem making and enchanting are twofold. First, that totem making requires an imbuement of a soul or soul shard, and second, different lock-and-key sets are utilized. To create a true totem with one step beyond an enchantment, it requires either death magic or specialized fae magic to do so. Fae’s Foundational Pillar has multiple specialized subpillars that represent the embodiment of life magic, most specifically in the realm of its major subpillar—the Forest subpillar, but it is not limited to that alone. With death being the opposite of life, both the Death subpillar and multiple Fae subpillars deal in the realm of souls.

Not only that, but totems require certain amounts of Willpower in order to control and utilize properly. Shamans, druids, necromancers, and warlocks therefore tend to use them more often than anyone else. Those affiliated with the Holy Foundational Pillar, Harmony Foundational Pillar, and Archaic Foundational Pillar along with their subpillars have tried creating totems in similar fashion, as told by the history books, but they have all failed to my knowledge.

Regardless, those who consider themselves totem artisans are often nothing more than that—artists who come up with fancy designs meant to scare children for the holidays. The true craft comes into play when we imbue these materials to create what are called influence fields.

Totem making is often used in conjunction with various runes or symbols of power, wards, and enchantments to create stable and consistent magical effects that we term influence fields. These influence fields are essentially a type of interactive enchantment that the soul shard imbued into the totem can control. It incorporates runes but is different from normal runecrafting, as influence fields use a different subset of locks and keys including the shapes and materials of the totem makeup. Why might this be, you may ask? What purpose is there to having different lock-and-key mechanisms in the sigils? The reason is that enchanting is a static thing, unmoving and unbending, while influence fields are ever moving and even become alive. It is also why influence fields that totems use are able to be controlled by souls you imbue the totems with, whereas an enchantment is not inherently able to be controlled by such an attached entity.

Totem making is thus the step between normal enchantments and awakened items—which are an entirely different type of category altogether. The three categories of magically enhanced equipment are therefore defined by the following:

Enchantments or enchanted items are rigid and unbending, and they lack the ability to be controlled by anything other than the direct user. This category also includes cursed or blessed items.

Influence fields or totems are fluid and are able to fluctuate or change under the influence of a soul.

Awakened items are entities that have their true consciousness bound to a physical item without any actual soul.

All three have different lock-and-key sets, or different runes or rules, that are bound by the system. All three have their own unique downsides or perks. They are three different parallel pathways to creating items of power, even comparable to how mana, divinity, and stamina differ from one another in their own abilities. But now we are getting off track. Back to totems and influence fields:

Influence fields can be anything from a pleasant smell to seduce the opposite sex to an electrified floor to a defensive barrier—the commonality between them being that they are bendable, fluctuating spell alignments and are contained within a physical object that we call totems. Specific combinations of the right materials, right ingredients, right incantations, the right soul shard, and right runes or symbols in just the right way can create truly potent effects. The important part about this is that the one who makes the totem must have the correct attribute in order to imbue the totem with a spell. If the mage creating the totem gets the symbols, materials, and shape right but fails to have the specialized Forest attribute—they will fail to imbue the totem with any forest magic regardless of how perfect the totem otherwise is. The same goes for Water, Blood, or any of the subpillars of Fae and Unholy. As Forest is a subpillar of Fae and Death is a subpillar of Unholy, you will only ever find totems enchanted with categorical magics underneath the Fae and Unholy pillars. Fae, Volcano, Storm, Ocean, Glacial, Swamp, Forest, Unholy, Blood, Shadow, Death, Infernal, Depravity, and Chaos will be the only types of totems you ever run across. Well, that and their more specialized pillar types that evolve from the major subpillars. Additionally, those affiliated with the Unholy pillar may never be able to wield totems affiliated with the Fae pillar and vice versa, as pillar orientation is needed to command the soul shards and totems after they’re imbued properly.

With the right knowledge and attributes, you may place the right runes or paintings in the right patterns to provide a magical webbing of sorts. Creating the right shape of the totem is also very important, as they act as a key to a lock in conjunction with the runes you place upon them. If the runes, shape, pictures, or patterns of the vase are incorrect, the key won’t fit the lock correctly, and the effect won’t take hold. Sometimes even the coloring matters. Sometimes if you do a half-assed job, you’ll get a half-assed effect. That’d still be better than no effect, though.

Moving on to examples of what such things I have seen as a master totem maker, you would likely be surprised. I have created vessels that burn with fae light, illuminating the darkest of places as beacons to the world. I have created vessels to seal away the greatest of demons, placing them in forbidden tombs to keep them at bay from the civilized world. I have created totems that poison enemies around them and heal those who are marked as friendly, totems that capture the sickness from those they touch and towering bastions that bless farmland for miles around them over decades to come.

Many once scoffed at me, laughed at me, told me I was a fool for pursuing this very abstract and often disregarded profession. In the end, though, it was I who laughed, and as I sit upon a mountain of treasure and bathe in the gifts that kings shower upon me, I often ask my many wives if they’d have another man, to which they of course say no.