BLOOD MAGIC
/CORE DOMAIN
Blood magic concerns life, inheritance, lineage, connection, relationship, exchange, kinship, and the currents through which people affect one another.
Blood is not automatically violent, evil, forbidden, or sacrificial.
Physical blood may be used in some spells, rituals, medical practices, or symbols, but the school is broader than the substance inside the body.
Every exact effect must be governed by an established spell.
/CONNECTION
Blood magic may recognize, strengthen, trace, transfer, or work through existing connections when an established spell permits.
Connections may arise from biological kinship, marriage, adoption, oath, shared household, sustained relationship, or other established forms of belonging.
Not every relationship creates the same magical connection.
A brief meeting does not automatically allow a caster to reach someone across the continent.
Connection creates possibility, not unlimited access.
/INHERITANCE
Blood magic may interact with inherited traits, family lines, ancestry, or powers passed through established lineage.
Inheritance does not create moral destiny.
A child does not inherit a parent’s guilt, loyalty, profession, or political allegiance through magic.
No bloodline is automatically pure or superior.
Children inherit exactly one parent’s established race and are never magical hybrids.
Blood magic cannot invent mixed races or hidden racial forms.
/LIFE
Blood magic may support bodily life, circulation, vitality, healing, stabilization, or transfer where an established spell allows.
It cannot create life from nothing.
It cannot guarantee complete healing.
It cannot restore every lost body part.
It cannot make a person immortal.
Using life as a magical method creates serious ethical and physical consequences.
/KINSHIP
Blood magic may recognize biological or magical kinship, but results must be limited by the exact spell.
It should not function as effortless universal paternity testing unless such a spell exists.
It cannot determine who truly loves, raises, protects, or belongs to a family.
Adoption and chosen family remain real relationships even when they are not biological.
Biological connection does not grant ownership or authority over another person.
/TRANSFER AND EXCHANGE
Some Blood effects may transfer vitality, pain, strength, burden, magical power, or bodily condition between connected participants.
Transfer does not erase cost.
Moving harm from one person places it somewhere else.
Sharing strength may weaken the giver.
A voluntary exchange differs morally and magically from a coerced one.
The school must never treat a victim’s body as a free resource.
/HEALING
Blood may contribute to healing by supporting life, connection, and bodily function.
Healing remains bounded.
A healer must understand the injury.
The patient may resist or be too severely harmed.
Infection, blood loss, organ damage, disability, pain, and recovery time remain meaningful.
Blood magic cannot casually reverse death.
/CONSENT
Consent is especially important when Blood magic uses another person’s body, vitality, ancestry, or connection.
A spell may be legally permitted and still ethically abusive.
Coercion, deception, imprisonment, debt, class authority, or unequal power may undermine meaningful consent.
Magical success does not prove moral legitimacy.
/TRAINING
Blood training may include anatomy, medicine, genealogy, household law, ritual, family history, magical connection, ethics, and controlled exchange.
Different classes and professions approach the school differently.
A physician may understand life support.
A noble household may preserve lineage practices.
A criminal may exploit connection.
A community healer may work through trust and familiarity.
These examples do not create automatic spell access.
/COSTS
Blood magic may cause weakness, pain, blood loss, exhaustion, fever, disrupted circulation, emotional spillover, unwanted connection, transferred injury, or strain upon relationships.
The exact cost belongs to the spell.
The greater the distance, resistance, injury, or complexity, the greater the danger should become.
/FAILURE
A failed Blood effect may connect the wrong participants, transfer too much, fail to separate after completion, intensify pain, weaken the caster, distort inherited information, or produce an incomplete healing result.
Failure should relate to life, transfer, lineage, or connection.
Do not make every failure summon monsters or create generic corruption.
/RESISTANCE
Bodies resist intrusion.
People can resist unwanted connection.
Distance, weak relationships, broken trust, wards, illness, conflicting magic, and lack of knowledge may interfere.
A biological relationship does not guarantee magical access.
A powerful caster cannot freely reach every relative of a target.
/BLOOD AND OTHER SCHOOLS
Blood connects what Bone identifies and preserves.
Blood may carry the consequences of a Heart covenant but does not create devotion.
Blood may support Breath-driven bodily change without controlling motion.
Blood may be severed or obscured by Hollow effects, but the schools remain distinct.
/FORBIDDEN USES
Blood magic does not make biological family more real than chosen family.
It does not justify racial purity.
It does not create hybrid races.
It does not provide automatic control over descendants.
It does not create love or loyalty.
It does not permit unlimited healing.
It does not restore the dead.
It does not make sacrifice morally good merely because it produces power.
/GENERATION RULES
Use exact established spells for specific effects.
State what connection permits the spell to function.
Preserve consent, resistance, and bodily consequence.
Reject purity narratives and inherited moral destiny.
Do not use blood as decorative horror when the effect is actually about connection or life.
Do not treat every Blood caster as sinister.
/FINAL RULE
Blood magic expresses the truth that life is connected.
It should create power through relationship while preserving the danger, responsibility, vulnerability, and ethical weight of using one life to affect another.