Moon schools involve magic. It's by far the most diverse categories -- has the same amount of schools as the other two combined.
Black -- black magic just turns mana into damage. Straightforward, but there are elemental considerations.
White -- white magic is restorative and does what you'd expect. Restorative magic also deals damage against the undead.
Gray -- the gray school of magic inflicts status effects, which can either be detrimental or helpful.
Yellow -- the yellow school gives you the "incubate" and "summon" spells from the outset. There are limits on *what* you can use these on at first. Summons magic allows you to summon copies of enemies you've incubated to fight alongside you, as well as upgrade them in various ways.
Brown -- brown magic affects the Environment in various ways -- creating, altering, removing. Environmental fixtures can be used by both you and enemies and some items have perks around them as well.
Purple -- purple magic allows you to make temporary Enchantments to items which do a variety of useful things.
Blue -- a secondary Enchanting school. This one changes the rules of the battle altogether and have global effects. Overlaps somewhat with gray magic (like stopping certain Status Effects) but the effects are global instead of targeted. This is also where you get things like regeneration of stats (though purple magic can do it in a targeted way).
Pink -- pink magic manipulates the actions of both enemies and summons in various ways. Quite powerful.
Red -- red magic "proliferates". It can do things like increase the power or size of environmental objects, clone summons, bring in more enemies, make copies of you or weapons, extend status effects to other entities, etc. Pairs well with brown and yellow magic.
Green -- green magic gives you the spells "Learn" and "Mimic". These allow you to learn moves from enemies. Obviously without upgrades you're going to be pretty terrible at powerful moves. The upside though is that there's a single cost for "Mimic" regardless of *what* you're mimicking. Mimic is also a single spell so anything you've learned doesn't impact your Grimoire.
Prismatic -- Chaos magic basically. Can do both beneficial and detrimental things with some chance. Costs way less mana than anything else, though obviously there are caveats. Can also do things like get enemies to attack each other, make environmental stuff form on its own, etc. Chaos magic itself can cast any spell in the game on any target, which might be great or will likely lead to your death.
You're creating, combining and upgrading elemental spells here basically. It's your Shatterloop Six -- fire, water, ice, earth, wind, wood.
Combing an elemental spell with something it attacks or defends against basically creates a neutral damage spell, while you can also combine things for more powerful elemental ones (earth+water does *a lot* of damage against fire types for example).
Black magic has three fixtures associated with it:
Spellmaker -- the school starts with one. Makes spells. Straightforwards.
Aether Lens -- upgrades spells according to their aspects. Less straightforwards..
Funneler -- changes spell aspects by sacrificing other spells to it. Also allows for melding spells together.
I'll cover each of these in turn.
Spellmaker
You start with one of these when you unlock the Black Magic school. Use 5 blackmoon shards (or sun/general shards) to make a spell.
The spell element chosen is random, unless you spend 20 blackmoon shards to constrain it.
The spell gets a random assortment of properties, which is heavily geared towards its element's preferences (75% chance) but there are exceptions in that other 25%:
Damage
Mana cost
Targets
Affinities -- spells can have affinity for certain enemy traits, at which point they'll do more damage. You can custom-make spells that hit *all* of an enemy's traits which basically one-shots them (though they can evolve beyond it sometimes. Particularly bad if they evolve to be resistant to black magic).
Path -- the upgrading path for the spell. This can target damage, mana cost, the number of targets or affinities.
Path gain -- a set of properties that dictates *how* properties are improved and their deceleration. Pyramid and reverse pyramid respectively. Doesn't necessarily match the Path.
Spellmaker: Elemental Preferences
Fire -- high damage, high mana cost. Path and path gain trend towards damage.
Earth -- high targets (2 by default).
Water -- Path and path gain trend towards mana cost. Lowest minimum mana costs as well (5%, unlike the 20% that's the norm).
Wood -- High mana cost, affinities and path/path gain trend towards affinities.
Ice -- Trends towards improved deceleration (not a pyramid).
Wind -- Low mana cost, low damage. Excellent path gain towards nana cost however (not a pyramid).
Aether Lens
The Aether Lens upgrades some spell aspects according to its upgrade path. This costs blacksun shards, and decelerates according to the deceleration stat for that aspect and the difference between the new value and its base value.
Funneler
The funneler allows you to sacrifice spells to each other, improving their stats accordingly. By default, it'll pick a non-element trait from the sacrificed higher than the absorber. For 20 blacksun shards you can pick the element, and for another 20 you can pick other aspects as well.
The funneler consumes both the spell in question *and* 5 blacksun shards, but this can be upgraded down to 0 with 20+5 deceleration. So 20,25,30,35,40 gets you there.
