Magic Foci and Enchanted Objects
Plenty of mages fit the bill for the old stereotype “starry hat, long robe, wand in one hand and staff in the other”. There are reasons for those stereotypes to exist, after all. Many types of foci are in use to aid or store magic, not just those books or beads mentioned above.
Specialized enchanters, elementalists, and even non-magic craftsmen work on wands or tools to sell to mages. Finding the right kind of wood to make a wand can be a difficult process, and requires not just the ability to set out into the woods and chop down a tree or snip a twig off: a strong measure of psychology goes in to making a focus for any given young user.
Typically it is a young Spell-mage looking for such a focus. Not all cultures insist that their mages make their own wands or other foci, and those that do also have a huge support network to facilitate them doing so. Groves of varied trees, locations where ores and stones are deposited, even ‘magical petting zoos’ to find a familiar are reasonably common around the entire world.
Some cultures believe that reliance upon a single focus item is dangerous; after all there have been civilizations in the past that have all but wiped themselves out because they killed off all their wand-producing trees. Individuals might also go through several distinct phases of magical focus use – a wand in youth, a more impressive staff or even a sword during maturity, and a selection of rings or token jewelry when wand-waving and staff-swinging are too much effort.
Many foci are purely batteries storing a measure of the mage’s personal energy. Whether that energy has been built up over days, weeks, or even decades, it is most often something that they have had with them for their entire magical career. Some are even passed down through generations of use. A good number of the devices and items left over from the Domain’s era are still in use today by the Lumin as well as plunderers who discovered caches of goods. (Mostly, the Lumin have taken them from raiders who have gone to those dangerous ruins where their ancestors left all that crap behind. No one better than their descendants to use those things. Who else can be trusted to do so?)
Most foci can be used by different people; a wand with stored power used by talented hands will still work regardless of who ‘owns’ it. Spell beads and markers, items which one mage might jot down an idea or reminder, would be unlikely to work properly – ever tried reading a foreign language or code without any background? The Jewel Witches diadems are tuned primarily to their specific user, but often since Psionics run in family lines it is possible to have one tiara with a number of different gems occasionally replaced for someone else to use. The Lumin diadems and cybernetic implants, on the other hand, are exclusively used by one person and never passed along. Embedded technology would have to be fine tuned to suit another nervous system, and at that point they should just make their own.
In that regard too, some magical items are not actually stored energy, but triggers that work to a specific end when powered up by a mage. Knowing the difference between a goblet that adds a protective anti-venom to a drink when it’s picked up, and a horn that suddenly sucks all the energy from a mage and spills out half a lake worth of water… That’s kind of important. First-year stuff. Which many first-year students blow off and learn just enough to pass their exam. And then, drown in a prank their more studious fellows arranged just to prove the point.
Weapons of all kinds have been the favored focus of warrior mages, from staves and clubs that deal massive added magical damage, to shields with extra protection, to arrows which return to their quiver if they miss their target. On Dragondeep, mages are not excluded in any way from being highly competitive or get into non-magical fights. People should know better than to pick on the skinny mage kid, obviously, but plenty don’t. There are no known sets of magic that don’t work with, say, sharp weapons or metal armor. So you’re as likely to see a starry-hat wearing staff wielder as you are a mage whose armor can melt wooden items and spark wildfires as she cuts her way through enemies on a battlefield.
Familiars are rarely in use but follow the same kind of traditional function that one would expect: a mage locates a particular animal which then they can sense through, consult if it’s intelligent, or rely on to convey messages or travel. Generally speaking, a magical animal found among the dangerous Fey dominated lands can support a strong mage’s needs more readily than a plain old animal from a farm or forest.
Because of their inherent magical use, familiars often live much longer than normal versions of their species. There have been cases of bonding between young, high-powered Psionics or Mages, and Griffs, Dragons or even other people. These pairs are extremely rare, perhaps one happens in a century or longer. Obviously Dragons don’t take too kindly to being told what to do by some other being, but there are Griff colonies who have tales of great adventures of magically bonded friends.
Necromancers pets are not necessarily also familiars, but there are plenty of them known to be shambling around half-skeletally in the same family mansion for several hundred years. Learning the difference between reanimating and merely zombifying a pet, is often the Necromancer’s earliest lesson.