[Xedra Evolved] Add the "XEDRA Operative, Department of Extra-Normal Capabilities, SATOR Division" profession

[Standing-Storm]

Summary

Mods "[Xedra Evolved] Add the "XEDRA Operative, Department of Extra-Normal Capabilities, SATOR Division" profession"

Purpose of change

Talking last night about how in XE, when XEDRA learned that magic was growing more possible they would have started training people in its use, and not everyone can be a Dreamer or a Mad Genius.

Describe the solution

Add the "XEDRA Operative, Department of Extra-Normal Capabilities, SATOR Division" profession, trained in hedge magic using magic squares. Most of their hedge magic requires significant preparation in advance but can be invoked later for a minimal time investment, so it's up to them to determine how much advance preparation they want to do.

Also add six new hedge magic spells that the operative knows, each of which takes multiple hours to create the magic square:

• To Walk Upon the Water (4 hours to write)
• To Operate Under the Water (6 hours to write)
• To Have the Spirits to Bring us Anything We May Wish to Eat or to Drink (8 hours to write)
• To Demolish Buildings and Strongholds (6 hours to write)
• To Cause Armed Men to Appear (8 hours to write)
• To Render Oneself Invisible to Any Person (12 hours to write)

The spells' names and effects are taken from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, which the operative starts with. The original has a bunch more spells, but this is a translated copy, leaving open the possibility of an original German copy out there somewhere with more magic ("To Fly in the Air and Travel Any Whither", "To Heal Divers Maladies", and "To cause the Spirits to perform with facility and promptitude all necessary Chemical labours and Operations, as regardeth Metals especially" are probably of interest to survivors)

You might think "summoning food?! What?!" but if you want to repeatedly spend eight hours writing a magic square to summon a single loaf of bread or a bottle of wine, well, it's your game time (also the name is somewhat deceptive--the options are meat, cheese, bread, fish, and wine)

Also add the first part of a system I want to extend to the current hedge magic books--deciphering. This is mostly (sometimes deliberately) occult knowledge, hidden from the uninitiated, and there's no standardized form of learning the charms like in Magiclysm. So, if you find a spell book, you'll have to decipher it, spending time and testing your deduction skill against the difficulty. If you don't do well enough, your work is lost and you'll have to start over, but if you figure it out, you'll unlock the book and can learn the charms. It becomes slightly easier (10%) if you have to start over since you've at least put time into it and aren't starting from first principles, but not too easy. This is occult knowledge, after all.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Testing

Armed Men have appeared:

Researching the book can succeed. Afterwards, it works like a normal Magiclysm-style spellbook. The charms are learnable and castable, and have the appropriate effects. When summoning a bottle of wine, the wine does not spill on the floor. The armed men are friendly and disappear after the charm's duration is done. Invisibility works. Water-walking works. The XEDRA Operative does not need to study the book and begins with all appropriate gear.

Additional context

You'd think "Oh, those magic squares look easy," but the book explicitly says that only real initiates can get any power out of them.

I didn't include any lore in this PR, but I like to think that hedge magic gradually got easier and easier in the decades leading up to XE's Cataclysm, so at the start you'd need to study for years to even light a candle without using a match, and then by Current Year +1 if you had the ritual materials you could learn to do it in a few weeks. And then after the Cataclysm, it's much easier than it was before thanks to the dimensional walls falling.

[github-actions]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

Click to expand

• BURNAHEU\nULORIPTE\nROMILAPH\nNRITILIA\nAILITIRN\nHPALIMOR\nETPIROLU\nUEHANRUB
• NAHARIAMA\nA Q\nH E\nA Q\nR\nI\nA Q\nM QA\nA
• SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS.
• TALAC\nA A\nL L\nA A\nCALAT
• The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
• The Real Actual Spell Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
• Translated from the French edition by Samuel L MacGregor Mathers, this tome compiles the journeys of a man named Abraham of Worms to Egypt, where he learned occult secrets from the wizard Abramelin who lived in a small town near the Nile. The magic contained within focuses mostly on the creation of magic squares which, when used in ceremonies by an initiate, provide magical effects.
• XEDRA Operative, Department of Extra-Normal Capabilities, SATOR Division
• You joined XEDRA during the years leading up to the Cataclysm, and they told you that you fit the profile of a SATOR agent. At the time you had no idea what they meant, and they gave you a couple days to process when you learned that magic was real, the enemies of the United States possessed it, and they wanted you to learn it too. When they sat you down and had you practice writing letters into patterns for days on end you wondered if you had made a mistake, but when one of those squares let you summon a loaf of bread out of thin air for lunch, you changed your tune pretty quickly.
• copies of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.

Hints for adding a new word to the dictionary

• If the word is normally in all lowercase, such as the noun word or the verb does, add it in its lower-case form; if the word is a proper noun, such as the surname George, add it in its initial-caps form; if the word is an acronym or has special letter case, such as the acronym CDDA or the unit mW, add it by preserving the case of all the letters. A word in the dictionary will also match its initial-caps form (if the word is in all lowercase) and all-uppercase form, so a word should be added to the dictionary in its normal letter case even if used in a different letter case in a sentence.
• For a word to be added to the dictionary, it should either be a real, properly-spelled modern American English word, a foreign loan word (including romanized foreign names), or a foreign or made-up word that is used consistently and commonly enough in the game. Intentional misspelling (including eye dialect) of a word should not be added unless it has become a common terminology in the game, because while someone may have a legitimate use for it, another person may spell it that way accidentally.