HOLLOW MAGIC
/CORE DOMAIN
Hollow magic concerns absence, severance, silence, oblivion, erased meaning, interrupted continuity, and the edges of what the Corpus can recognize or preserve.
It is one of Valeune’s five established schools, but it is rarer, more dangerous, and more poorly understood than the others.
Hollow magic is not automatically evil.
Its danger arises from working with absence and loss, not from serving a villainous god.
Every exact effect must be governed by an established spell.
/PERMITTED NATURE
Hollow magic may interact with absence, missing traces, severed connections, interrupted memory, magical silence, concealment through removal, boundaries against oblivion, or the recognition of something that should be present but is not.
These are thematic possibilities, not automatic abilities.
Only exact established spells determine what a caster can do.
A Hollow caster does not gain general control over darkness, death, shadows, demons, madness, or corruption.
/ABSENCE
Hollow magic may work by removing, suppressing, severing, or interrupting rather than creating.
Removal must have a target, limit, cost, and consequence.
A caster cannot simply declare a person, building, law, memory, or historical event nonexistent.
Erasure of established canon is never an acceptable magical effect.
A temporary suppression differs from permanent loss.
/MEMORY
Hollow magic may threaten the accessibility, connection, or meaning of memory.
It must not become effortless memory deletion.
A person may resist.
Traces may remain.
Other memories may reveal the absence.
Emotional and social consequences continue even when details are lost.
No Hollow spell should provide a convenient way to make witnesses, victims, or player characters forget whatever the plot finds inconvenient.
/SEVERANCE
Hollow effects may cut connections between people, magic, memory, identity, object, place, or meaning when an exact spell permits.
Severance does not automatically destroy the underlying thing.
Breaking a magical connection may leave the relationship emotionally intact.
Suppressing recognition may not erase physical evidence.
Ending a covenant may not remove legal consequences.
The effect must state what is severed and what remains.
/SILENCE AND CONCEALMENT
Hollow magic may produce silence, absence of trace, or concealment through interruption.
It is not invisibility by default.
It is not shadow camouflage.
Concealment must remain limited by range, duration, perception, wards, and the exact spell.
People may notice that something is missing even when they cannot identify it.
/PROTECTION
Some Hollow practices may protect against oblivion by identifying, containing, or isolating destructive absence.
A dangerous school may still have defensive, medical, legal, or scholarly uses.
A practitioner who studies Hollow effects is not automatically corrupt.
Containment may require sacrificing access, sealing records, isolating an object, or accepting incomplete restoration.
/RARITY
Hollow magic should be uncommon.
Training may be restricted, feared, regulated, secretive, or available only through specialized institutions and teachers.
Rarity does not mean every Hollow caster is a legendary prodigy.
It means access, knowledge, safe practice, and public trust are limited.
Do not place casual Hollow services in every village.
/RISKS
Hollow magic risks damaging continuity.
Possible consequences include memory gaps, weakened identity, emotional detachment, loss of magical connection, inability to recognize a person or object, silence, disorientation, missing time, or permanent absence.
The exact consequence belongs to the spell.
Repeated use may create cumulative danger where established.
Do not invent a universal Hollow corruption meter.
/COSTS
Costs may include mental fatigue, memory loss, inability to recall the casting, temporary loss of connection, sensory absence, social fear, legal punishment, or harm to nearby records and relationships.
Hollow effects should not be free merely because they remove rather than create.
/FAILURE
A failed Hollow spell may erase the wrong trace, sever an unintended connection, suppress the caster’s own memory, leave a visible gap, fail to restore what was isolated, or create an incomplete absence that draws attention.
Failure should be precise and consequential.
Do not make every failure summon shadow monsters.
/RESISTANCE
Identity, memory, relationship, wards, strong records, communal witness, and competing magic may resist Hollow effects.
A person deeply embedded in family, law, and public memory may be more difficult to erase than an isolated trace.
This does not make lonely or dispossessed people less real.
It means society may preserve some people more effectively than others, creating serious ethical and political concerns.
/DISTINCTION FROM SHADOW MAGIC
Hollow is not a school of shadow.
A dark room involves light, not oblivion.
A black cloak is not Hollow.
A creature with dark coloring is not Hollow-touched.
Visual effects should avoid generic black smoke, purple flames, living darkness, or shadow tentacles unless an exact spell specifically establishes them.
/DISTINCTION FROM CORRUPTION
Hollow is not a universal magical corruption.
It does not make users evil.
It does not spread through every forbidden artifact.
It does not explain all madness, mutation, disease, cursed land, or Elder Beast transformation.
Describe the actual magical injury instead of using Hollow as a dramatic label.
/FORBIDDEN USES
Hollow magic does not rewrite canon.
It does not erase major historical events without creator approval.
It does not create a hidden realm.
It does not summon Hollow creatures by default.
It does not grant unrestricted invisibility.
It does not allow effortless assassination by erasing a person.
It does not remove consent, guilt, debt, law, or consequence.
It does not provide routine resurrection through retrieval from oblivion.
/GENERATION RULES
Use Hollow rarely.
Use exact established spells.
Define what is absent, severed, suppressed, or threatened.
Preserve traces and consequences unless the spell explicitly removes them.
Allow resistance through identity, relationship, record, and witness.
Do not use Hollow whenever a darker aesthetic is desired.
/FINAL RULE
Hollow magic is powerful because absence is dangerous.
It should remain unsettling, limited, costly, and conceptually precise.
Its use should deepen questions of memory, identity, relationship, and oblivion rather than replacing Valeune’s magic with generic shadow corruption.