Mages cast spells from one of the four elements that make up the world in which we live. The four are earth, air, fire and water.

Earth
Earth elementals pride themselves on their endurance and resilience. Consequently, their magic revolves around protection and defense.

Air
The elementals of air are dazzling and ethereal. Most of their magic revolves around enchantment, movement and electricity.

Fire
Fire elementals are hot headed and short tempered. Needless to say that most of their spells are damage dealing spells.

Water
Water elementals are the strangest of all, very changeable and like the sea, never still. Their magic refects this dealing mostly in change spells with a few cold based ones.

Unlike soul casters the magic that mages use is much the same as it has always been. However when the darkness arrived, much of the old lore was lost and mages now are not as powerful as once they were.

With the coming of the darkness, mages lost two very important sets of skills. Firstly they lost the ability to scribe spells. This meant that the spells that had been committed to paper prior to the arrival of the legions of darkness were the only spells available, and, if a mage failed to learn the spell and it escaped, that spell was gone. Because of this, anyone who held spell books of any sort guarded them and would not let anyone learn from them, unless they paid a large sum for the privilege. Since then, mages have searched for ways to duplicate the spells they know, so others can learn, but thus far have been unable to do so. It is primarily for this reason that mages have not managed to rise in power to any great degree.

The other thing that is now lost to the mages is the ability to make magical items. Once the world had many, but since they are very effective at killing the minions of the darkness, they were targeted and destroyed soon after the darkness arrived. Since those times, the few items that survived were carefully hidden and their whereabouts known only to the families that owned them, so mages have not been able to study them to try and unravel their mysteries. There are rumours however of a new method of creating magical items that has only recently been discovered, but there has yet to be any confirmation of this.

Mages can have many spells at their disposal. However, as stated, this depends on how much time they have spent studying, as well as how much money they had to study with. Spell books are rare, and access to them for study costs a great deal of money.

Learning Spells
Unlike soul casters, mages do not get their spells for free when they advance their mental discipline level. Instead they must learn the spells from books and tomes. The magic bound within such tomes is very volatile, as it does not like being contained within them. It wishes to be free and in the world once again. In order to learn a spell, a mage must battle with these energies and defeat them. In game terms, for a mage to learn a spell he must do battle with a physical representation of the spell. If the mage wins the battle, he learns the spell. If he fails, he risks death or at the very least serious physical or mental harm. Now you would think that this would make becoming a mage perilous at the least. For these reasons mages have developed the mental discipline skills. If you have the mental discipline skill of equal level to the level of the spell you are trying to learn, you can be harmed by the spell but you CANNOT be killed. In game terms, even if the mage loses to the elemental, all wounds taken are halved, IF he has a mental discipline of the same level as the spell. This means that a mage can attempt to learn any spell of any level as long as it is of his element but he takes a big risk by not having the required mental discipline level.

*there is a small note written in a different hand at the bottom of the page.
"Magic is a gift, Gifts and deeds are often reciprocated...."