HEART MAGIC
/CORE DOMAIN
Heart magic concerns faith, devotion, covenant, loyalty, communal promise, chosen belonging, trust, and the power created when people freely commit themselves to a person, community, purpose, tradition, or responsibility.
Heart is not merely emotion magic.
It does not grant unrestricted control over love, desire, fear, or personality.
Every exact effect must be governed by an established spell.
/FAITH
Faith may be religious, personal, civic, familial, or philosophical.
Heart magic can work through sincere commitment without proving that the object of faith is objectively correct.
A devoted person may be mistaken.
A community may believe deeply in an unjust cause.
Magical strength does not determine moral truth.
/DEVOTION
Devotion is sustained commitment expressed through action.
It may involve care, duty, worship, service, loyalty, sacrifice, discipline, or protection.
Heart magic cannot manufacture genuine devotion in an unwilling person.
It may strengthen an existing commitment through an established spell.
It cannot create love where none exists or convert coercion into faith.
/COVENANT
A covenant is a meaningful promise accepted by those who enter it.
Covenants may concern marriage, family, service, political alliance, religious belonging, mutual defense, apprenticeship, civic responsibility, or shared work.
Not every legal contract is a Heart covenant.
A contract may be valid through law while lacking sincere devotion.
A covenant may possess emotional or sacred meaning without being legally recognized.
Exact spells determine whether a covenant has magical force.
/COMMUNAL VOWS
Heart magic may draw power from groups committed to a shared purpose.
A community defending its home, a household protecting one another, soldiers accepting mutual duty, or healers promising care may create conditions for Heart magic.
The group does not become a single mind.
Participants retain individuality, doubt, disagreement, and the ability to withdraw when the spell permits.
Collective strength must not erase personal agency.
/LOYALTY
Loyalty can be freely chosen, inherited, expected, purchased, coerced, or manipulated.
Heart magic should distinguish these forms.
A freely accepted promise may produce greater stability than obedience created through fear.
A spell cannot prove that a ruler deserves loyalty.
It may reveal or strengthen an existing bond without declaring the bond just.
/PROTECTION AND SUPPORT
Heart magic may protect, encourage, coordinate, strengthen resolve, share burden, preserve morale, or reinforce a covenant when an established spell allows.
Protection does not guarantee safety.
Resolve does not eliminate fear.
Shared burden does not make injury disappear.
A group supported by Heart magic can still lose, disagree, retreat, or suffer consequences.
/ROMANCE
Romantic love may be one expression of Heart, but the school is not defined by romance.
Marriage magic must preserve consent.
A bond does not prove that two people are destined partners.
Heart magic cannot force attraction, sexual desire, forgiveness, fidelity, pregnancy, reconciliation, or permanent love.
Relationships remain dependent on choice, behavior, trust, and time.
/RELIGION
Heart magic may appear within worship, communal ritual, pilgrimage, sacred service, and religious vows.
A Heart spell does not prove the existence or approval of a god.
Priests are not automatically Heart casters.
Heart casters are not automatically priests.
Faith can be magically significant without becoming universal theology.
/TRAINING
Heart training may involve meditation, ritual, ethics, leadership, communal practice, emotional discipline, negotiation, service, oath language, and understanding of consent.
Training varies by class, culture, faction, household, and profession.
A ruler may learn ceremonial covenant.
A healer may learn supportive devotion.
A soldier may learn mutual defense.
A community organizer may learn shared resolve.
These examples do not invent spells.
/COSTS
Heart magic may create emotional exhaustion, grief, shared pain, weakened boundaries, overcommitment, loss of confidence, broken trust, or strain when participants disagree.
A caster may carry the emotional weight of those connected to a spell.
A broken covenant may produce magical and social consequences according to the exact effect.
Heart magic does not provide limitless morale.
/FAILURE
A failed Heart effect may expose hidden disagreement, weaken trust, collapse coordination, transfer burden unfairly, bind an incomplete vow, or fail because commitment was never genuine.
Failure should relate to covenant, trust, devotion, or communal purpose.
Do not make every failure create mind control or Hollow corruption.
/RESISTANCE
An unwilling person can resist imposed Heart magic.
Conflicting loyalties, fear, resentment, deception, broken trust, and unequal power may weaken an effect.
A public oath does not guarantee private belief.
A powerful caster cannot force a community to become sincere.
/HEART AND OTHER SCHOOLS
Heart gives chosen purpose to connections that Blood may recognize.
Bone may preserve the terms of a covenant.
Breath may carry a group into action.
Hollow may sever or empty a promise of meaning.
The schools may interact without becoming interchangeable.
/FORBIDDEN USES
Heart magic does not create consent.
It does not force love.
It does not prove destiny.
It does not make political loyalty morally correct.
It does not erase trauma or disagreement.
It does not turn a group into a hive mind.
It does not guarantee that a marriage, family, army, church, or faction will remain united.
It does not punish every broken promise automatically.
/GENERATION RULES
Use exact established spells for specific effects.
Identify the commitment supporting the magic.
Distinguish legal obligation from sincere covenant.
Preserve individual agency within communal effects.
Allow doubt, withdrawal, conflict, and broken trust to matter.
Do not use Heart as a generic category for all emotions.
/FINAL RULE
Heart magic is the power of meaningful commitment.
It becomes strongest through freely chosen devotion and shared responsibility, not domination.
It should make promises consequential without making them impossible to question, leave, break, or mourn.