Arcana Vibes

[nobody]

Bear with me, because I'm going to talk about a dream I had and the general rule of thumb is that no one wants to hear what someone else dreamt about, and the dream and this post are kinda rambling and is mostly about vibes more than anything else.

In this dream, travel via occult circles was a thing. It was extremely bodily taxing - not injurious but draining of one's internal resources - like after you do this plan on quickly taking a glucose packet or three and then when you can walk again hitting an all-you-can-eat buffet and drinking a gallon of gatorade. It was also dangerous, like don't mess these up or you will die dangerous. Because of those two things, it replaced very little modern transportation. There were hubs that had the predetermined forms for traveling between known destinations, but they were generally all in larger cities. So one would drive from Madison to Milwaukee for 90 minutes and go to the glyph hub in Milwaukee to get the optimal tools and predetermined diagram to go from Milwaukee to New York, you'd be able to trace a diagram stencil even, so almost zero chance of messing it up. You wouldn't travel from Madison to Milwaukee by glyph circle because you'd spend more than 90 minutes recovering, so it's faster to drive that leg of it. And you wouldn't travel straight from Madison to New York because Madison is too small to have a proper hub and while it was possible to solve the occult puzzles to figure out the correct diagram to travel from anywhere to anywhere, that was difficult to do (and impossible for computers to even help), so that was only done by Arcanists, because they could solve those puzzles and save themselves the driving leg of a trip.

So, that's the dream. And (I guess literally now), this is kinda the vibe I dream of for Arcanists. Anyone can do Arcana, and given help they could do it relatively safely and easily, but the paths open to Arcanists were open to them because they could puzzle out the occult mysteries to make a diagram specific enough to say travel from my front yard here to the Ben & Jerries on 23rd Street over there without the easy button of someone having solved that puzzle for them. Arcanists are the ones who solve for the diagram they want and then make the stencil for others to use the predetermined diagram they figured out.
Unfortunately I have no idea how that vibe would translate into the game, no useful dream insights there unfortunately.