darkgod wrote:Mostly yes, although the threads stuff is more interpretation than anything.
The universe is not constitued of elements like fire & such; it's made just like our own of atoms, molecules, quarks, .. with a little bit more in the form of arcane force which allows to alter the rest.
"Sadly", arcane forces are not evenly spread in the universe. There are kind of wells from which it sprouts from, known to the sher'tuls as Manastars.
The closer you are to one the more power to tap on (Eyal's system is close to one).
The Sher'tuls didnt like that because they rely on it thus they made the farportals, whose primary function is NOT transportation of people or stuff but of arcane itself. (They do have shisp that can go FTL after all anyway).
That's why they channel so much power and when the mages tempered with them it didnt go well at all.
They have built structures around manastars that channel the energies into the farportal network which then redistributes them equaly over the places they've been to.
Do you want to have mana being truly fundamental? My general interpretation of the class systems is that their theories are overencompassing and to some degree incompatible. OF COURSE archmages think they've reached a fundamental understanding of the universe with their discovery of a controlling element called aether, but I'd say that they are wrong. The aether is an abundant element on M'E, but I'd put it on par with the other 'cosmic' elements, blight, positive, and negative. Blight and arcane have a bit of a dual relationship in the same way that positive and negative do. Meanwhile, solipsists are sure that everything is mental and that with enough training, their mind could sustainably 'summon' the entire universe into a state that accords with their desires. They look at magic users and are pretty confident that magic is an odd specialty within their system, working with some fundamental patterns that they haven't bothered to analyze because their methods are 'higher' and 'better'. The mages, on the other hand, are fairly certain that psi manipulates an unknown element, perhaps something emergent from aether as it animates the souls of living things. Necromancy, in dealing with souls very closely, might have come close to penetrating the truth about the relationship between mind and soul, thus discovering psionics on its own, except that the social processes underlying necromancy are not amenable to the transmission of knowledge, open debate, and basic research.
Meanwhile, wilders generally think that Nature is the fundamental animus of everything, but are wrong, since Nature is an emergent aspect of the ecology. More advanced wilders sometimes understand this and despite their passion for Nature have been able to confirm through their bond with Nature that Nature is mortal. Destroy the biosphere, and Nature would no longer exist on M'E. However, the truly wise wilders that understand this about Nature will often equivocate between the idea that Nature is all-powerful and the idea that Nature Needs Our Help, because they are leaders among wilders and the equivocation serves a political purpose that serves their Nature-aligned ends.
There's a deeper way in which all of these things connect, but the deepest aspect of this view of the universe is dominated by
unknown forces which actually are the source of everything.
