Awesome!!! Thanks for the update/mini Journal!  

Excellent! I wonder what a "perverted" ecology involves..... is this screenshot still a valid interperetation of the Mordor-y look?We've got what looks like a sea of blood, as well as spiny mountains and what appear to be (ghostly?) white trees..... for whatever reason I was invisioning trees covered in that spanish moss stuff, except that it moves and can strangle people who get too close.

More good news.

I forgot about something... So now we know for sure that we'll be able to mix and match life/death magic with whatever faction we want - will we be able to mix/match revived terrain type with life/death magic, too?

Because really, I'm one of those people that prefers lush environments over burned and decayed ones - even if just for aesthetic reasons. If playing with death magic means being forced to stare at a barren magma wasteland the whole game, I'm not going to play death magic. This is obviously a personal preference, but I think there are enough people like me that this would be worth addressing...

Interesting details provided here. I do wonder however was there any particular reason why life and death magic doesn't opperate like the other types of magic? Having life and death shards could have been very interesting for game-play and magic.

I have similar concerns, mostly because I had expected (hoped for) an alignment system that overlaid some sort of 'integrated metaphysics.' Prior to Brad's recent posts that make life and death magic seem mutually exclusive for any given sovereign, I'd imagined that Life was one of five elements, and whether you pursued magic like raising zombie slaves or healing wounded soldiers was a matter of ethical alignment. This OP leaves me seriously wondering why there are only five 'element' runes in the forum graphics background. If Life and Death are mutually exclusive, why aren't they represented by distinct runes?

Despite my fretting about life 'versus' death details, I really like the idea of individual channelers (sovereigns and appropriately imbued champions) being the mana sources for 'the Life element.' That sort of structure could support an Elemental analog to the Sorcery books in MoM, enabling all sovereigns to have access to some core common spells for communication, protection, and perhaps even countermagic.

Six technically. I would assume that the life rune is the symbol in question colored gold while the death rune is the symbol in question colored black. There isn't a standing definitive answer one way or the other but that is my current stance considering the information available.

Anyway an interesting possibility for life / death magic would be to have every living thing act as a "shard" for life / death. In this regard a Channeler could select his starting magic (fire, earth, air, water, death, or life) and then depending on the choice a Channeler would naturally generate that kind of mana. If I picked earth for example to get life mana I would require a certain amount of living creatures / land. Conversely for the same Channeler to get death mana a certain amount of living creatures / land would have to die.

This would only require a slight modification from the current system. In stead of the Channeler acting as the shard for life / death his entire kingdom would become the shard with decisions affecting what type of mana it produces.

I actually would rather not see lava as default terrein for Death factions: volcanic wastes are not suitable for much habitation (although the soil further away is good for farming), and the sort of creatures that live there are not what I would think of as belonging to a "perverted" ecology.

Have you seen the Black Rune done in gold somewhere? There's already a gold rune in 'the five' as seen on the draft box art and the forum graphical frame.

I'm definitely with you on the matter still not being quite clear. And the more I think about it, the less I like the idea that in a canon sandbox game you will never be able to wield both 'life' and 'death' magic. I can accept that you'll have an identification with one force or the other that defines how lands you imbue with essence will appear, but even there I'd probably be willing to pay for an expansion pack whose primary content was 'neutral ground' stuff that let players work with a life-death balance approach instead of a life-death conflict.

You said that rune was translated as Magic, if that is true then it may be the magic menu? Magic, Life/Death, Camera control... man, that rune surely means lots of things these days.

Here is the picture in question.

Note that the symbol from this old screen shot is not an exact replica of the black symbol. What I had assumed was similar to Wintersong. I thought this button would access the death / life magic spells. After all having a particular school of magic identified by its respective magic symbol isn't farfetched.  This data is the basis for my previous statement and I admit I could very well be wrong.

Here is some more evidence I've gathered from old screenshots on the media page. Given what we know about mana now I think one could make the assumption that the bars i've cut out from the old pictures are mana bars.

The mana bars seem to have their respective runes on the left hand side of the bar. If this is the case and with the knowledge that a Channeler will always have life or death mana even at the start of the game you could conclude that the runes shown here are indeed the "actual" life and death runes. This however doesn't take into account changes in artwork that may have occurred since these old screenshots were created.

I would also like to point out I created the "gold life rune" in my previous post for effect.

hmm,   in Darkodinplus's post there is another symbol with which I am not familar.  It is on what appears to be a  BLACK mana bar.   If it were not for the discovery of the gold version of the life symbol I would have assumed that black mana's symbol to be the death symbol.  That entire menu looks a bit more 'death magic' than the others.

Are Krax playable?  I don't remember them being listed in the list of the faction names a while back.

(I just now realized that Frogboy has a new avatar)