#Guess who just found out how to turn on the density option on brushes that don’t have it by default.

[raindropsyndrome]

Little Smoochums

[mazurah]

do you have any headcanons about alteration magic? i feel like due to game balancing limitations, it wasn't as powerful as it actually could have been in-universe. thoughts?

I’ve been sitting on this ask for more than a week trying to figure out how to answer. Yes I have Alteration magic headcanons, but a lot of them aren’t technically mine. 

First off, you’re absolutely right. Alteration is much more powerful in the lore than it is ingame. The Ayleids, who invented Alteration magic, could shapeshift.

There does, however, appear to be evidence that, just as the Psijics on the Isle of Artaeum developed Mysticism long before there was a name for it, the even more obscure Ayleids of southern Cyrodiil had developed what was to be known as the school of Alteration. It is not, after all, much of a stretch when one considers that other Ayleids at the time of Bravil’s conquering and even later were shapeshifters. The community of pre-Bravil could not turn into beasts and monsters, but they could alter their bodies to hide themselves away. 

⁠— Daughter of the Niben

The closest things we’ve ever seen to that kind of magic (not counting things which aren’t actually school-of-magic spells, such as the Wild Hunt, vampire transformations, and werewolves) are spells like oakflesh, which isn’t exactly what I would call shapeshifting. Shapeshifting implies that you’re actually changing your shape, not just changing the consistency of your skin, so I think it’s more likely that the Ayleids did things like make their limbs look like branches to blend in with forests. 

And then there’s that one NPC in Skyrim, the Face Sculptor, that will straight up let you open the character creation menu and change anything about your appearance except your race or sex. (What, no sex change option? Transphobic!) You can’t tell me there’s not Alteration magic involved in that somehow (although I would certainly listen to a case for Restoration.)

There’s also a spell (actually a greater power) that got cut from Skyrim called Polymorph Skeever which lets you turn yourself into a skeever. It was never implemented in the game, but it exists in the code, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s a valid piece of lore. Polymorph spells do exist! There’s even more of them in ESO.

So do I believe that a master Alterationist could potentially turn somebody into a chicken? It’s quite possible. Are we ever gonna be able to turn NPCs into chickens? Not without the Wabbajack. They gotta balance the game somehow.

To be honest, this is a limitation to magic in general, not just Alteration. If I was really a master healer, what’s to prevent me from healing somebody’s mouth closed? Or casting a spell that causes my enemy to have a heart attack? There’s all kinds of things I would love to be able to do with magic that I can’t because of game limitations, like casting a spell to send me to Oblivion so I can go exploring, or conjuring a Dremora or Winged Twilight to ask them about themselves (both of which exist in the lore.) Or using levitation in Skyrim. *sigh*

Back to Alteration though. If you want to know about Alteration in general, the lore book you should be reading is Reality and Other Falsehoods:

It is easy to confuse Illusion and Alteration. Both schools of magic attempt to create what is not there. The difference is in the rules of nature. Illusion is not bound by them, while Alteration is. This may seem to indicate that Alteration is the weaker of the two, but this is not true. Alteration creates a reality that is recognized by everyone. Illusion’s reality is only in the mind of the caster and the target.

To master Alteration, first accept that reality is a falsehood. There is no such thing. Our reality is a perception of greater forces impressed upon us for their amusement. Some say that these forces are the gods, other that they are something beyond the gods. For the wizard, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the appeal couched in a manner that cannot be denied. It must be insistent without being insulting.

To cast Alteration spells is to convince a greater power that it will be easier to change reality as requested than to leave it alone. Do not assume that these forces are sentient. Our best guess is that they are like wind and water. Persistent but not thoughtful. Just like directing the wind or water, diversions are easier than outright resistance. Express the spell as a subtle change and it is more likely to be successful.

⁠— Reality and Other Falsehoods

This is a great start, but it doesn’t help us understand what it would be like to use Alteration on a daily basis, and that’s where headcanon comes in. I headcanon that people have different ways of conceptualizing spells, and this can result in different teaching styles. Sometimes the differences are cultural. But ultimately, it comes down to how good you are at envisioning the changes you want, how much you believe the changes can/should/will happen, and how good you are at willing those changes into existence. How to Disappear Completely by @chameleonspell contains an excellent illustration of what it’s like to try to learn Alteration and navigate the cultural differences between teaching styles as a novice: 

Iriel had studied Alteration. Had, at one point, thought he might specialise in it. It had sounded so impressive, when he first attended lectures at the Crystal Tower: change the world! Bend the physical realm to your will - sorry - your Will! Then he had attended classes, and spent months learning about counter-aetheric force (the academic term for what ordinary people, who didn’t understand these things, called gravity) and formulas to calculate water pressure and wind resistance. Altmeri magical tradition demanded that students first master the theory. You had to learn the rules before you could break them. He might be allowed to actually alter things in a few years, if he studied hard and passed the exams.

Things were different when he transferred to Cyrodiil. There, the Professor of Alteration was a steely-eyed Imperial known to students as The Cliff, due to her threats to throw students off one, if their problems with levitation persisted. Necessity focused the mind, she said. Alteration was all about willpower and belief. She didn’t hold with teaching the physics of it. You are a mage, she would roar. You make your own physics! Your mind will do battle with the Aurbis, and if you are worthy, the Aurbis will bow before you!

She was rumoured to be working on a transmutation spell that would change lesser substances into gold. They said she spent her nights concentrating on a rock on her desk, glaring the resistance out of it, molecule by molecule. When she looked at him, Iriel could believe it. But, struggling to levitate a feather on his own desk, he hadn’t felt that engaging the universe in mental combat was ever going to be his forte. It was so much bigger, and more experienced than he was, so much more self-assured. There were thousands of years of inertia behind its processes, grinding like endless Dwemer machinery. His will, even capitalised, was too weak a spanner to jam into those works. A minor blip in the rhythm, at most, and it’d be crushed as the gears churned on.

He’d found himself returning to the equations he’d been forced to memorise at the Tower. He’d discovered, to his chagrin, that the Sapiarchs had been on to something, at least to his Altmeri-educated mind. If you wanted to change something, it helped to understand the thing you were trying to change. Staring at the feather, he had realised he didn’t need to do battle with the entire Aurbis, he only needed to fight the air immediately around the object he wanted to move, convince it that local relative masses were very slightly different. The Cliff had been right about one thing: it was about belief. And Iriel found it considerably easier to believe things if he could construct a veneer of logical process, however flimsy.

He’d balanced the feather on his finger. It barely weighed anything. Using the standard formula, it couldn’t be constrained by more than a quell of counter-aetheric force. He had repeated the incantation, but instead of trying to command physics as a whole, he’d merely suggested a minor adjustment to the relative densities of feathers and air, just within these few square inches.

The feather had shot upwards and lodged an inch into the plaster of the ceiling. He’d blinked, brushed the dust from his hair, and began recalculating the ratio. An hour later, he’d floated up to retrieve it himself.

⁠— How to Disappear Completely, Chapter 93: force by @chameleonspell ​

(That entire work is amazing and contains so many headcanons and extrapolations of lore I couldn’t possibly begin to summarize them if I tried. You should read it.)

The thing about Alteration, and to a lesser extent, all magic in general, is that to perform it, you must wrestle with the very nature of the universe. Alteration, at its essence, contains what could potentially be understood as the fundamental principle of magic: to perform it, you must impose your Will on the world around you. When you perform it, you change the world. 

This is not without consequences. I headcanon that the greater skill a mage has with Alteration, the more trouble they have with distinguishing what is real and what is not, and with maintaining control over the reality of their personal environment. This is a headcanon I garnered from reading the works of @troloputo2012, and to some extent, @chameleonspell.

The advanced alterationist starts with sensory issues, since they start being able to listen and see the mechanisms of this world (also the plane where spirits and magic roam, that occupies the same place as this Mundus, and being this over saturated with information can be overwhelming), and slowly, they start having trouble attaching to reality and they can’t go back to their normal life as before; many have grounding sensory “mechanisms” to wake up, but many don’t because sometimes nothing works … .

Many experts get tired of constantly wrestling with existing or fail because their will is not strong enough, just give up and vanish, or they get consumed into their own reality and are unable to follow the currents of the world and time … .

To be able to live correctly and master alteration, one must have considerable willpower, or it’ll consume you. You learned to use alteration to weaken reality for you, now you must use it to also reinforce reality (for you start to unconsciously exist in weakened reality you created for yourself) to live.

— Alteration is not as harmless as it seems. by @troloputo2012

So a master of Alteration who fails to have enough Willpower to maintain their own existence might even disappear completely (a concept very similar to the tenuously canonical concept of Zero Sum, wherein a person truly perceives the nature of the universe, sees that they are a figment of the Divine Dream, confronts the concept head on, and fails to assert that they still exist, thus ceasing to exist.) Sure, a master of Alteration can change reality to an amazing degree, but there is a danger; there is a price.

Finally, I have a headcanon (which I’m pretty sure isn’t actually my idea, but I’m not sure where I picked it up) that schools of magic are more like philosophical models for creating spells rather than rigid expressions of natural law. Ultimately, almost any spell could potentially be created using almost any school of magic, but depending on what the spell does, it may not be a very good spell. It might use too much magicka, or it might be insanely hard to cast, or it might take a really long time to conceptualize the spell in that school of magic so nobody bothered trying to make the spell in the first place.

This is an easier idea to apply to Alteration than it is to some other schools like Conjuration (like, what am I gonna do, conjure healthy body parts for a dying person?) but it can go a long way to explaining why some spells change schools between games. For example, there are a few Alteration spells (mostly resistance spells) that get moved to the Restoration school of magic between Morrowind and Oblivion. If you’re looking for an in-universe explanation for this, perhaps spell researchers developed more efficient spells using the philosophy of Restoration, and the magical community had come to accept them as the norm by the time Oblivion began.

So yeah, there’s a lot of overlap between schools. In fact, there are documented arguments between mages about the similarities and differences between schools:

The School of Alteration is a distinct and separate entity from the School of Destruction, and Bero’s argument that they should be merged into one is patently ludicrous. He insists — again, a man who knows nothing about the Schools of Alteration and Destruction, is the one insisting this — that “damage” is part of the changing of reality dealt with by the spells of Alteration. The implication is that Levitation, to list a spell of Alteration, is a close cousin of Shock Bolt, a spell of Destruction. It would make as much sense to say that the School of Alteration, being all about the actuality of change, should absorb the School of Illusion, being all about the appearance of change.

⁠— Response to Bero’s Speech

While I believe that Alteration is an insanely powerful school of magic in the right hands, it’s probably still easier to heal someone using the principles of Restoration than it is to do it using the principles of Alteration.

Feel free to add your own headcanons, I love having discussions like this!