Xavion

As for enforcement, most places (even those that are morally unhappy about it) have to have a "kill if they resist arrest" policy for magic users.

It's too difficult, dangerous, and impractical to continually restrain them because there's no reliable way to shut someone's magic off.

And certain potions are treated very seriously because they're dangerous and serve little non-harmful purpose. (Particularly dangerous offensive concoctions and emotion-manipulating potions)

Aside from that, Flux, Spirit, and Light usually aren't *directly* regulated. Just using it to do harmful things.

There are some restrictions in big cities about firing potentially dangerous spells on the streets (no shooting fireballs into the air for fun).

Dark magic is illegal almost everywhere (at least in present day), though severity and consistency of enforcement varies. Some places it's an instant death penalty, others have more proportionate punishments.

Flux is illegal in "Maljin" and illegal for citizens (but not foreigners) in "Yashira".

Manual. I like being in control of stuff. And nobody to blame but myself if I forget.

Looking again at this, I decided to do a quick touch-up of the graphic - particularly Spirit. This is the new one.

-Most Gevan provinces enforce laws with local militia

-Lots of more rural areas and small villages have to locally enforce laws for minor offenses themselves with something like a sheriff

-Unity City has peacekeepers who serve as the police essentially, and doesn't really have a military (their security is provided by the U.A. , roughly equivalent to NATO or the U.N.)

-Karava mostly privatizes everything, even law enforcement, its very corrupt

For most nations, the military and police aren't distinct. As was the case in most pre-modern civilizations.

There are exceptions:

-The Malji enforce most laws communally, only calling in the "Protectors" (military equivalent) in extreme cases

-The U.R.C. and Adela do have separate police forces

Light: In rare cases, Light magic has been known to miraculously cure ailments normally impossible to cure magically.

*Such as brain damage, cancer, and certain viruses. (magic can usually easily deal with injuries if treated in time, and purifies bacterial/parasite stuff effortlessly).

Dark: Dark is particularly good at destroying stuff, but I'd still have to go with mind control. No other mana can really do it.

(Spirit can influence emotions, and Light can repair minds - that's about as close as you'll get.)

I'll do one from each:

Flux: "Chronomancy" - manipulating time to speed up, slow down, stop, rewind, or "split" time within a local bubble.

Spirit: "Lifeshaping" - essentially magic-based rapid evolution of an organism into a new, custom form

🙂

That's pretty much how expending too much of your core mana is in my setting too.

How do you envision the pain, like aches or burning or something else?

Fortunately, they do end up having an internal revolution eventually. Most of the people there aren't happy about the situation.

Their regime has only been around for about 80 years, and has only been *this* bad for the last few decades.

Unfortunately, nobody is really willing to.

Because they have a top-five level military, some devastating wmds, and lots of mineral resources to trade.

War with them would be very costly, both morally in terms of lives lost and pragmatically in terms of resources.

What does the physical toll look like exactly? Weakness, pain, age, etc?

Essentially, my goal was to have an extremely varied world.

For Unity City and the Domar Union - I intentionally wrote the best and worst (respectively) at least vaguely plausible systems I could come up with.

Unity City is borderline utopian and the Domar Union is very dystopian.

-The Domar Union is a dystopia, they don't have "laws" in the traditional sense. They operate on discretion and quotas (citizens obey officers or die, officers obey elites or die, elites obey nobility or die)

Functionally, everybody there except for the (couple hundred) nobles are literal slaves.

Some notable examples:

-Unity City operates on a sort of direct democracy for laws

-Yashira is a sort of Theocratic Republic Monarchy (it is flawed, but not as awful as you'd think)

-Gevana is an elective Monarchy overall, but provinces are extremely independent / de-centralized

There are fifteen nations - and a couple of them are so decentralized they have wildly different laws in different provinces/states/etc.

Some are democracies, some are republics, some are monarchies, etc.

Also some are much, much better/worse places to live than others.

And it's also worth noting that a lot of these (not just Kuzaran Sorcery) are not *purely* one of the primary four flavors of mana. There's lots of shades of mixing going on.

There are some exceptions, "Kuzaran Sorcery" you might notice occurs in *both* the Spirit and Flux lists - because they really use quite a blending of both.

The "Darkweavers" are...well technically they *are* a criminal organization - but their crime is vigilantism. They use dark magic for good.

For some clarification - despite being a much shorter list, Flux is the most common magic practiced. Its practice is just less fragmented in the "present" day.

While Spirit is often tied to specific, diverse cultures and beliefs.

And Dark is split mostly among a cults and criminal organizations.

Ummm...yes.

But almost nobody knows about them, they have less than a hundred members, and their leader is "Rolan" - who is an immortal*, 6300+ year old, slightly crazy but overall benevolent man who has:

-Divine knowledge
-Powerful artifact
-Millennia of practice and skill

Yes, but it's basically...eldritch-tier? magic. At least on a scale larger than, say - overwriting an apple with a version of itself split two minutes ago.

The only humans capable of it are the "Timeguard", a secret group that specifically works to keep time in check and basically nothing else.

For a time, she completely loses the ability to use magic at all, and has lots of physical health problems, even including temporary blindness.

The biggest use of it is the the protagonist "Lily" gets hit with one at one point, and (unprecedentedly) survives due to something...interesting about her magic, but only barely.

The connection between her body and soul is disrupted, and she has to go through a whole arc of repairing it.

It's a flux+spirit spell that is essentially an interference wave that severs the connection between body and soul. Instantly killing the opponent.

The particularly scary thing about it is that it can't be blocked by the barriers magi normally use, it just "rides" into the users soul.