Now, dear reader, we have reached the second half of this compendium of my years of tired study. Conjuration, in essence, is the act of condensing mana into a desired form and holding it there. Be that permanently or temporarily, both are considered ‘pure’ conjuration. To begin with, if you already have the Minor Conjuration skill, this will be of little use to you. Please advance to page 137, where I will explain how to refine your constructs further. Now, for those of you without the skill, read on from here.
The most basic tenet at the core of all conjuration is external mana manipulation. First, draw mana to your hand or manipulation appendage of choice. Envision that mana as a ball of wet clay, formless and malleable, and condense it until it appears as a faint glow in your palm. Then, shape it. As simple as that may sound, it is anything but. You must concentrate all of your willpower and practice into shaping the mana into your desired shape. Try sothing simple to begin with, such as a hemisphere or cube, and once you are capable of forming that you should earn the skill Minor Conjuration. This will allow the system to do the heavy lifting, so to speak, in forming the construct itself. The exercise can also be used to earn elental manipulation skills, which are significantly easier than creating a solid construct from pure mana. However, all skills you acquire will influence your offered classes when you reach the requisite level, so be wary of what you earn. If you wish for an Apprentice Elentalist, focus on unlocking the four basic elental manipulations. If you wish for an Apprentice Conjurer class, focus on refining your mana constructs. For Apprentice Runesmith or Runemage, see the prior entries in this to for advice and the basics of runecraft. Perhaps you may even discover a rare combination of the various disciplines, such as my own Runepriest class? Ah, but I'm getting off topic here!
Now, for refining your constructs, there are three simple ways to do so. The first is to add an elental affinity, such as water, earth, fire, shadow, or wind, to na a few. This is similar to before; simply conjure the sa construct, but apply a small amount of a specific type of mana. Not entirely from aspected mana, mind you, or you will simply end up with a spell that creates a small amount of that elent. No, it must take on the aspect without becoming that aspect. It is the difference between embroidery and weaving- one adds to the original, the other creates the original. The second is condensing it further, to form permanent mage quartz constructs. This takes an extre amount of mana to perform, but will allow you to quite literally forge relatively strong gear with sheer willpower and mana, nothing more. The third is infusion. This is the most difficult and possibly the least understood of the three thods I will list here in the Prir, but it is fairly well-known even if the exact chanics behind it are elusive compared to the others.
Infusion, in simple terms, is granting true autonomy to your constructs. Not the facsimile of it that is normally possible with preset orders or simple commands, but a true will of their own. This mind will disperse with your construct, and reform once more should the exact sa or almost identical construct be reford. The most famous application of this was the Naless Legion, a group of 200,000 soldier-like constructs ford entirely from crystal-aspected mana by Lord Az'Tereth the Mad around 14,000 years ago. Following the assassination of his ‘Crystal Court’ and collapse of the Topaz Empire, he vanished for 76 years before returning with the Legion and razing the Deri'Ktan Kingdom before being slain by the God of War's Champion in a system-sanctioned duel that prevented his Legion from interfering. Moving on from the short history lesson, this technique is the most difficult to accomplish simply because when it has been accomplished, none of those capable of it can agree as to how it was done. So claim to simply will it to work, others claim it happened when they treated the construct like a sentient creature, others still a plethora of unconfird theories that all contradict one another. As for the benefits of this, the construct will retain its magical properties should it be converted into mage quartz, naly independent control and self-locomotion.
All of the thods of improvent ntioned prior can be combined, and there are several more advanced techniques that no one without the main Conjuration skill should even attempt to accomplish, such as runic or transmutational conjuration, but those are topics for the Advanced manual on this subject.
There is one other possible avenue to improving constructs that is technically possible to accomplish with the basic variant of the skill, but is still incredibly difficult. Possibly even more so than infusion, I dare say. I myself can only manage a 4/10 success rate, but perhaps others may have more luck. This is an undocunted thodology that I stumbled upon myself, and thus have labeled it as ‘corruptive conjuration’. Despite the rather grim na, there is nothing to fear from this variant. It is accomplished through a very, very difficult combination of elental imbuent, condensation, and sheer willpower. In essence, what it does is allow oneself to form a ‘corruptive’ construct that will ‘infect’ spells and other mana-based constructs that it cos into contact with, pulling them under your own control. The corrupting construct will degrade slightly with each successful infection, using an amount of mana proportional to what it is infecting. The difficulty lies in precisely balancing the elents infused into the construct and how much mana is condensed, as if it becos mage quartz it will lose the corruptive properties but if it has too little it will collapse the instant another spell touches it. The required combination of elents is listed below.
-53% pure mana
-10% earth (any variety)
-15% water (PURE)
-4% divine (any patron)
-13% dark (any works, abyssal preferred)
-5% air (any works, storm preferred)
The ratios must be kept precise, or the construct will detonate in a violent implosion. Do not attempt without proper precautions and wards. I repeat: do not attempt this without taking every precaution.
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