Because we receive a lot of emails with questions.

I would like to ask a question.

Please email me with the words KATE QUESTION in the subject.

I would like to write an article about a character or aspect of worldbuilding.

Outstanding!  Please email your draft to me with words KATE ARTICLE in the subject.  If you use images, they must be either purchased by you or in the public domain.

Where is your blog?

Here, at the main site.

Divine: a deity or possibly a demigod.

Appearance of a true god is extremely rare.

Human Divine: someone who derives his power from faith.

Monks, priests, diviners, prophets.

Human: someone using purely human magic.

Elemental mages, psychics, telekinetics, empaths, etc.

Were-animals: shapeshifters, who derive their ability to change forms from Lyc-V.

Werewolves, werejaguars, bouda, etc.

Animal-weres: animals, who derive their ability to change forms from Lyc-V.

Occasionally shamans and druids will also register this color.

Animals.

The m-scanner registers their magic as very faint and often it does not show up at all.

The color of undeath. It’s rare to find pure red without addition of some other color into it. Usually only undead animals register as pure red and only because animal magic is too weak to significantly impact the color.

Human undead.

Vampires, reanimated corpses, ghasts, etc. The older is the undead, the weaker is the human influence and the darker and redder is its signature.

No, the whole world is affected.

What caused the magic to start flooding the world?

I’ll let Kate explain, since I already wrote it once and I’m lazy: “Theory said that magic and tech used to coexist in a balance. Like the pendulum of a grandfather clock that barely moved, if at all. But then came the age of Man, and men are made of progress. They overdeveloped magic, pushing the pendulum further and further to one side until it came crashing down and started swinging back and forth, bringing with it tech waves.

And then in its turn, the technology oversaturated the world, helped once again by pesky Man, and the pendulum swung again, into the side of magic this time. The previous Shift from magic to tech took place somewhere around the start of the Iron age. The current Shift officially dawned almost thirty years ago. It began with a flare, and with each subsequent flare, more of our world succumbed to magic.”

What’s a flare?

Flare is a magic tsunami, a wave of terrible magnitude. It starts as a series of shallow magic fluctuations. During those short waves, the magic never completely falls, coming back stronger and stronger until it finally drowns the world in an enormous surge. Weird things happen during the flare. The magic lasts for three days straight and some really nasty critters come out of the woodwork. The upside to this whole mess is that after the flare, the magic takes a while to return. Weeks if not months.