Click here to play the Mancer Visual Novel on itch.io!

This will be a basic rundown of Mancer to those interested in its concept, world or story! If you want to learn more about how Mancer itself was created, you can read the previous blog post covering it!

The Basics

Mancer is my own take at the classic magic school concept: A group of youths learning magic at a fantasy academy and fighting monsters. It has a bunch of tropes I like and wanted to see combined in a single story:

An archetypal “anime battle academy” premise
Female protagonist and majority female cast
A magic system and lore based on mythology & the occult: everything from biblical apocrypha to alchemy, flood myths and advanced ancient civilisations.
Skintight bodysuits like you would see in the superhero or scifi/mecha genre, but with a fantasy/magic flavour.
The concept of dead gods and their relation to mortals.

The World

Mancer is set in the world of Vestige. Here, magic defines everything, from its history of arcane wars to its technology. Vestige’s society is similarly modern to ours, but based on magic — latent magical energy called aether runs most of modern life, from aetherics allowing the creation of phonelike devices called Slates, to the creation of the aethernet allowing the archival and sharing of data.

BACKSTORY

Vestige is also a post-apocalypse world. An event called the Great Flood happened years ago where the Firmament, a barrier protecting the world from the chaos of the cosmos beyond, broke apart and drowned most of the world in a deluge of dark water. This water, made of primordial chaos, corrupts everything it touches, transforming the landscape into strange forms and even warping the dead, raising them into monsters called Fel.

Very few civilisations were left in the wake of this disaster - the peaks of mountains becoming shores of black tide and everything below becoming lost ruins. Only Mancers, professionally-trained mages, can endure the effects of the Flood. They do this by wearing skinsuits: arcane raiment that is a combination of a diving suit and super-suit, enhancing the wearer’s strength and reflexes and allowing them to breathe in the Flood and ignore its effects long enough to make it in and out.

A Mancer’s job is varied, but almost always dangerous: Some delve into the Flood to recover relics and technology of the drowned world, others hunt Fel to prevent their spread, while others still operate within the realms, rooting out cults and rogue Mancers that would threaten the last vestiges of mortalkind.

IMMORTALS

Vestige’s history is defined by magic, and all magic originates from immortals, divine beings of all kinds, from gods to dragons and fallen demons. The first Mancers were simply normal, frail mortals who learned magic at the feet of these immortals through any means available: Some gained the trust of these immortals and apprenticed under them; some claimed it by force or deception; some even bore children, passing an immortal’s blood and therefore their magic onto mortalkind.

Mortalkind

There are three mortal races on Vestige: the first were humans, created from the soil of the earth and ensouled with the divine breath of life, having traits of both the divine and profane and therefore the capacity to reach the heights and depths of both.

Through human unions with immortals over the eras, two more races emerged. Elves come from human unions with various members of the fey, whose presence is so veiled on the earth that it’s hard to say if they’re in hiding or altogether extinct. The other are daemons, children sired from dragons and demons, bearing physical traits like sharp teeth or serpentine tails.

Besides the three birthed mortal races, there are also artificially-created beings: homunculi, alchemical constructs with pale marblelike skin, and wights, mortal souls preserved in metal skeletons through arcane augmentics.

The Initiates

Mancer’s story involves a group of new initiates enrolling at the Travelling Tower: an ancient citadel converted to a hub for worldwide Mancer operations, a fortress the size of a small city able to teleport itself and all its occupants via leyline bases built throughout Vestige.

The protagonist is Alexis, a rookie self-taught mage. Formerly a horny shut-in nerd who learned all her magic skills through reading and watching tutorials on the aethernet, she now enrols at the Tower in hopes of becoming a fully-fledged Mancer and prove to herself all her Mancer merch and hyperfixative learning have not all been a waste of time.

Along the way, she’ll meet a colourful cast of other initiates: Clary and Sage, an elf brother-sister duo enrolling together in hopes of a better life; May, a flashy and lackadaisical aethernet streamer; and Selene, a pompous and competitive elven Trueblood. More characters will enter the scene as the visual novel gets updated!

The Faculty

The Tower is also the primary base of operations for the surviving remnants of Mancerkind after the Flood. These are also home to the surviving Truebloods: the oldest and most powerful Mancer bloodlines.

Some of the pro Mancers Alexis meets are Sensei, a kind and outgoing teacher of magic at the Travelling Tower’s Academy District, Ofanizad al-Shirdal, a famous Mancer and Lord of one of the surviving Trueblood Houses, and Phlegias, a stately wight and Head Navigator who oversees the Tower’s operations and logistics whenever it travels between leyline bases.

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And that’s the main breakdown of Mancer’s world and cast so far! More will be covered as we advance the visual novel’s development and as me and D flesh out the world of Vestige! Thank you for reading and for your support.

What is Mancer? An Initiate’s Guide