"How do you map between paradigms and get the same ritual?"

"What can be achieved is limited by the Realms and the fundamental laws of magic; a ritual text is essentially a very precise description of an effect that definitely can be achieved by putting a certain amount of power in and aligning with a certain realm.

The way that you actually achieve the effect, how you keep control of the magic and point it in the right direction, is up to the individual ritual team, and what the paradigms are for.

Basically they're there to keep you focused and give you a language to use, and avoid accidentally grounding the magical energy through yourself with unpleasant side effects instead of making it do what you wanted."

"Ah. What kind of side effects?"

"The most memorable I have experienced was the one where they had to drive metal stakes through my feet to discharge the stray power, otherwise I would cause pain to anyone I touched and also eventually my heart would have stopped; I believe everything from your blood turning into bees to your internal organs becoming alphabetised has been recorded."

"Wow. Is there a simple ritual you can walk me through how it's constructed as a worked example?"

"Sure. Let's do, hmm, Ascetic Star of Atun.

It's a Day ritual. It uses the Day resonance of purity, cleansing, simplification.

The fundamental concept is: flooding Day magic into something scours it clean. But if you entirely clean a person, you end up with a really clean corpse, which isn't much use - you can't usefully use this offensively because generally a person can resist direct ritual effects unless you've got them really throughly tied down and ideally beaten unconscious, at which point you could just kill them in a much less complicated fashion.

So the ritual text for this ritual extremely carefully specifies the difference between a person, leaning heavily on the law of essence to avoid having to become a complete anatomy textbook, and foreign substances in that person, which the ritual is designed to remove.

This is quite an old ritual so it has had a lot of refinement, like it won't destroy your clothes, your tattoos, or even displace shrapnel that you might actually want to keep because you like not bleeding to death.

The text of the ritual has its own magic about it, we use trace quantities of illium in the ink, which makes it easier to remember all this. You still have to study it in detail if you want to be as efficient as possible, but as long as one of the casters has read it once, you can instead expend some of the mana crystal's power to cast it 'unmastered', letting the extra power enhance recall and let you follow the lead ritualist if necessary.

From what I've described, what do you think the ritual actually does?"

"Well, you said you can't make something out of nothing but it sounds like you might be able to do the other way around, so perhaps it just annihilates dirt and sweat and grease and anything else that isn't on a list of tissues you want to keep. It sounds like you could also use it to empty internal organs of waste but I don't know if it in fact does."

"Almost. It actually doesn't do much for surface dirt because it was too hard to distinguish that from things people wanted to keep on the surface, like the protective layer of dead skin. 

Its intent is to remove poisons and infection. It also helps with some disease symptoms, although I think that's just by removing the existing toxins, most diseases are more subtle and can't be distinguished from the body in such a broad ritual - we do have at least one specific ritual along the same lines for a particular disease."

"Do... you have germ theory."

"I am absolutely not a physick, and actually I should probably note at this point that I have never so much as attempted an arcane projection - that's the first draft ritual thing - myself..."

"I would expect the concept to be pretty common knowledge if you have it at all but I should perhaps talk to a physick."

"Maybe not by that name? Theory of diseases tends to be something the Vines or the Hospital look at, then just tell other people what to do about it."

"It matters a lot for individual hygiene and for things like plumbing and farming."

"We do know not to shit where we eat, you'll have seen the outhouses, they've all got soap and they run off far enough into the forest to not get back to the stream or into the herb beds.

I've done more rigorous sanitation protocols before, my old Spire had an entire light flooded chamber for making sure we didn't track anything nasty in, but usually a bit of Bladeroot or Roseweald will sort out anything you might pick up round here, Miaren is very safe for that sort of thing."

"Okay, but do you know why you mustn't shit where you eat, what it is about excrement that can make you sick?"

"Not personally, if we don't find a portal at the end of the path, you should probably chat to Dafyd about it, he'll know.

We're generally not that bad at disease, even the Reikos Flux only killed people for a couple of seasons until they figured it out."

"I believe you that you're very good at magically curing disease. Germ theory is useful for that but also for preventing it in the first place."

"Okay, give me the outline in case we find the portal, but I am still pretty convinced the Vines know what they're doing here."

"Infectious disease, the kind you catch instead of developing over time or in a wound or something, are largely caused by tiny, too-small-to-see creatures. You can see them with a microscope, or maybe a seeing-small-things spell if they go far enough. They will generally die to alcohol and bleach and some other chemicals, boiling or high heat, and certain drugs that are toxic but much more so to tiny creatures than to large ones."

"Magic isn't all that good at giving information on the workings of the body, that tends to be the place of Physick - although I don't know if we've tried very hard in Day, it might work and nobody's bothered.

We use boiling and alcohol to sterilise tools and things that'll stand it, lye when it's more serious, bleach sounds like an apothecary term I don't know.

And toxic but not so much to us as the bad stuff sounds a lot like Bladeroot and Roseweald, they aren't the nicest things to take but better than what they're the cures for.

So it's not widespread that we know why, but it seems like we know how at least, and I'd bet at least some physicks have the theory. Only the League really make microscopes, outside of a few Urizeni spires that insist on custom work."

There are some faint sounds on the breeze, only really audible to close attention, of people practicing the kind of musical instruments where the sound carries a fair way off.

"It does seem to me to be useful to know what's going on even if you already use most of the obvious practices, but I guess that makes it less urgent, at least."

"Once upon a time I pretty much did try to know everything about everything, but I stopped pursuing healing after I knew enough to make someone not bleed to death, it seems incredibly complicated.

Anything else you wanted to impart about your own world? We'll be at First Voice soon, either you'll be going home or we'll need to decide how much more wandering about you want to commit to."

"Printing presses?"

"Yup, we've got those, Foundhome's a bit small for one but First Voice have a specialised one for printing sheet music, Seren's got a couple of big ones and the League is lousy with them."

"I'd ask where you're at on the laws of physics but presumably the answer is 'we're not, because magic'...."