Elyandarin

*Ahem*, wall of text incoming.

These are the eight Schools of High Magic* in the setting of my comic:

*HARMONY deals with shields, voodoo, and communal magic. They’re not a very offensively oriented school, and in combat, they’ll mostly stay protected by shields while using ranged weaponry, or try to get at your hair/blood, so they can link your body temperature directly to that block of stone they carved a rune on in the arctic a while ago. Elves have a preference for this school, and have developed several communal spells, like a way to talk to people at a distance if both are touching the same species of tree, or a spell rune to make any stone into a cooking surface by linking it to a boulder in a volcano. (These spells are licensed on a decennial basis, and your specifically assigned rune will stop working if you don’t keep up your payments.)

*FINESSE works much like programming; a decent finesse mage can make up a new spell in half an hour. The drawbacks are that these spells take a minute or so to recite, usually from a spellscript scroll (you’re basically reading your source code aloud), and that you need to include all kinds of shortcuts and trade-offs to make it work, so you usually end up with, say, a [scorching ray] that can only be used when the sun is at its peak (because it basically just creates a giant magnifying glass), or a [death touch] spell that works on 34-year-old male half-orcs.
The school is very useful if you know exactly what you’re going to be doing, and when - and a properly polished Finesse spell can take practically no mana, letting it be cast over and over again - but practitioners are vulnerable to surprises.   

This school can emulate all major magical effects, but its most developed and cost-effective spellscript library deals with fine-tuned telekinesis effects, and consequently most of its spells utilize that effect if possible.

*MIND mages usually try to structure their spells as instinctual abilities. Consequently, they’re not very powerful, but they are silent, non-somatic, and don’t require much focus. Mind mages generally don’t look like mages; they’re the sword fighter whose opponents always seem to get distracted at precisely the wrong time.
There are three branches; single-target abilities (mind reading, illusions, control), mass-target abilities (astral travel, Jungian archetypes, weaponized memes), and self control (mind resistance, mental discipline, magic-support). Arch-mages frequently dabble in the self-control branch, since while it has no offensive capabilities in itself, it’s very useful for casting spells faster, getting better sleep, getting better memory, AND keeping one’s sanity when facing demons and spell backlash.

SOUL Magic is the oldest magic school, from when people just threw mana and sheer willpower at their problems. By pouring your own soul into something, you can temporarily animate it, with mana as fuel. This works better with organic materials, and best with recently vacated flesh. Animating your *own* flesh is possible, though, and lets you temporarily change shape, or gain incredible strength for a brief moment.

There are a few sub-schools: By collecting the souls of others, and imbuing them into (usually organic) things, necromancers make semi-permanent servants, while witchdoctors gain power by calling down spirits into themselves and other living beings, and shamans just use the spirits themselves to accomplish effects.

Talented Soul Mages have a good chance of spontaneously rising from the dead themselves, if killed.
Necromancers used to be the scourge of the continent, until the Dwarves grew annoyed with the erosion of their customer base and started selling silver-plated weapons cheaply, in bulk.

CHAOS mages exemplify freedom. It is the school of transport - teleportation, summoning, gravity manipulation, time travel, bags of holding, dimensional travel. Thus, it’s named less for opposition to Order than for what a PC wielding it will do to a typical RPG campaign.

This is the most mentally-straining school, and its mages tends to range between quirky and barely-functional.

Chaos mages are very good at picking their battles, and less good at fighting them. That said, the battle spells that they do have are pretty darn effective. Mages can generally resist being teleported 20 meters up in the air - or at least mitigate the falling damage - but the only efficient counters to gravity pulses are found in the Chaos school itself. And for all that Chaos mages talk about the sanctity of the timeline, that doesn’t seem to stop them from going back in time to plant traps they can trigger in the present. (These spells are all very mana-draining, though.)
Notably, the school allows you to summon devils and monsters, but doesn’t actually contain any spells to control them.

FORCE magic is the archetypal combat magic. It’s high-speed, high-damage, high-mana. Spells are fairly general, (“summon fire in the direction I’m pointing”, “lightning, hit that thing”)

The School has three official elemental branches: [Frostfire] manipulates heat and cold, [Lightningrod] utilizes electricity, magnetism and light, and [Thunderwave] uses impulses, sounds and explosions.

Force magic is the most energetic School of the eight, but the particulars of magic don’t allow energy to be created nor destroyed, just moved around or converted. Consequently, practitioners tend to carry around energy storage devices, usually in the forms of staffs, to fuel their most extravagant spells.

Note: Some magic users bind elemental spirits from Air, Water or Fire to enhance their insights and energy-gathering. Earth Elementals, however, are verboten; they have diameters measured in miles, and a failed summoning can wipe out cities. (There has never been a successful summoning.)

MATTER magic taking hours to cast, Matter Mages would be nigh-useless in battle - if not for their cool armor, weaponry and other toys. They have a penchant for fortifications, traps and guns the size of houses.

Most students of Matter Magic are only dabblers who want to make tools for their main magic school. A fully dedicated Matter Mage can get pretty scary though, accumulating quite an arsenal over the years.

The crux of Matter Magic is control over Mana itself. To draw it, store it, analyze it, break it, weave it into matter, exclude it from locations, polarize it to be suitable for only certain uses… The most well-known trick is, though, to take a spell and incorporate it into an object, resulting in a magic item.

BODY magic deals primarily with healing; the school focuses on spells with a range of one or two meters, a minute-long casting time, long duration and good mana efficiency. This limits Body mages somewhat in combat, but there are many of them who just charge into battle with a sword, buffed by half a dozen different spells to make them a formidable warrior.

While Soul Magic can temporarily transform people, more permanent transformation is the domain of this school, whose practitioners are often healthy, fit and lacking in blemishes.

(It’s an open secret that the rise of Body Magic sparked the Mage Wars that set civilization back by centuries, and is the direct origin of many of the monsters and demihumans now roaming the world. The rebuilt school distances itself from eugenics and gene assimilation, but the spells are pretty much inherent to the school, and are available with a bit of research.)

Body magic users often dabble in poisons and chemistry, because they have an easy time making themselves immune to their own products. Breeding diseases is discouraged nowadays, though. 


*Apart from High Magic, there is also Low Magic, Wild Magic, Deep Magic and Theurgy. However, those generally don't get taught at fancy universities, being overly localized, unteachable, bloody dangerous, and unfriendly to mages, respectively.