What is the difference between sorcery, channeling and psionics?

Steps

1. Open the skill list and scroll to the middle. Two recordings read the whole list in the same order, and the three magic skills sit together between blocking and armour on one side and acrobatics on the other.
2. Read the tooltip rather than the name. Each of the three states what it does in one sentence, and those sentences are the only description of the schools that exists anywhere.
3. Pick by effect, not by flavour. Destructive elemental damage is sorcery; anything protective or regenerative is channeling; illusion and reality-alteration is psionics.
4. Check your origin before deciding you are not a caster. One of the five character origins starts with a bonus to psionics and a night-eye spell already known, according to two recordings of the origin screen.
5. Remember the school is a skill, not a class. Nothing in the sources cited here locks a character out of a school; the skills rise through use like the rest of the list.
6. Buy tomes to acquire the spells themselves. The schools are the skill that governs them; the spells come from tomes, which the town mage sells once you have done his errand.

What each tooltip says

Psionics is the best-evidenced line on this page. Three recordings on three channels read it, and their transcriptions agree apart from how their caption tracks spell one word: hone the power of the mind, cast spells with reality-altering and illusory effects. One of the three carries a second sentence the other two do not reach — psionic spells grow stronger with each level.

Sorcery and channeling are each read once, in the same pass by the same player. Sorcery is spells with destructive elemental effects. Channeling is casting spells with protective and regenerative effects. Both are marked single-source below and neither is contradicted by anything else in the sources cited here.

One player summarises the three as a trio of magical schools, which is the phrase this page borrows, and it is worth noticing what the trio is not: there is no separate summoning school, no separate enchanting school, and no school named for the saint. Summoning appears instead as a purchasable spell — one shop list read aloud includes a tome of summon skeleton — and alchemy sits in the skill list as its own non-magic entry.

One spell the game itself files under a school

Everything above is a description of a school. There is one recording of the other direction — the game putting a named spell into one of the three. A player opens Resist Fire and asks his chat whether the screen tells him what it is. It does: “Oh, it's channeling.”

That is a small thing that does a specific job. Channeling's tooltip promises protective and regenerative effects, and until now the only evidence for what that means in practice was the tooltip itself. A fire resistance spell filed under channeling is the game classifying its own content in a way that matches its own description. It is one spell on one recording, and it is not a rule about where every protective spell lives.

It also tells a reader how to answer this question without any guide: the spell screen names the school. Nobody needs to infer which school a spell belongs to.

The one number, and why it does not match the others

A player looking at the magic skills states that there is a 50% boost after level 100 for all three. That is the only progression figure anybody has recorded for magic, and taken alone it looks low, because the weapon tooltips on the same screen promise far more: one-handed damage rises 1% per level and doubles at 100, and unarmed damage rises 2% per level and triples at 100.

The mismatch is probably not a contradiction. Every skill tooltip anybody has read states an effect at level 100 and a different magnitude — blocking reaches half stamina cost there rather than a damage multiple — so 100 is a shared milestone with per-skill payoffs, not a shared bonus. His wording also says after level 100, not at it, which would make it a separate post-100 bonus rather than the school’s scaling curve.

This page does not resolve that, because the magic figure is one player’s reading and the weapon figures are a different player reading a different screen. What it does say is that the magic tooltips have not been read aloud with their numbers by anybody, and until they are, the schools’ scaling is unknown even though their descriptions are not.

Requirements / limits

• This is recorded play from four channels, not documentation. NerveLabs has published no description of the magic schools in any changelog cited here.
• Sorcery and channeling have one source each. Only one player reads those two tooltips, in a single pass, and no second recording covers them.
• The 50% figure has one source and is a spoken reading, not a quoted tooltip. Nobody has read a magic skill’s numeric tooltip aloud the way the one-handed and unarmed tooltips were read.
• The caption tracks disagree on the spelling of one word in the psionics line. Three channels render it three ways; this page uses standard English and does not treat any caption spelling as the game’s.
• Whether a school’s skill level affects the spells you cast from it is untested. One player wonders aloud whether his fire spell improves with sorcery points and never finds out.
• One spell has been matched to a school on camera. Resist Fire is read as channeling by one player on one recording. No second source covers it, and no recording reads a sorcery or psionics spell's school label the same way.
• All four recordings date from 17–19 August 2026. Update 7 landed on 21 August and says spellcrafting was refined and rebalanced; no cited source says the schools themselves changed, and none says they did not.

Common mistakes

• Reading psionics as a lesser sorcery. Its tooltip is the one that promises reality-alteration, and it is the only school whose description includes a second sentence about growing stronger with each level.
• Assuming a school gates the spells. The schools are skills in the same list as fishing and lockpicking; the spells come from tomes bought or found, and one player with self-described very low magic buys them anyway.
• Expecting the magic pool to be called mana. Players call it that, but the game’s own text does not — a fire spell’s cost is read off the screen as eighteen magic.
• Judging a spell by its first cast. One player casts the free levitation tome, announces flatly that it did not work, and only much later reads the effect and finds it lasts three seconds.
• Treating a perk as a substitute for a school. One player considers a perk instead of a resistance spell and then reads what it actually costs him — no fire damage taken, but all lightning damage doubled.
• Ignoring alchemy. One ingredient read off the screen restores fatigue and fortifies sorcery, so a school can be temporarily raised by something you chopped down.

Still unverified

• Do the magic tooltips state per-level rates like the weapon skills?Not verifiedThe one-handed, unarmed and blocking tooltips have all been read aloud with their numbers. No recording cited here reads a magic tooltip’s numbers.
• Does sorcery skill increase a fire spell’s damage?Not verifiedOne player asks this on camera about a spell doing twenty-five fire damage for eighteen magic, and the session never answers it.
• Is the 50% figure the schools’ scaling or a separate post-100 bonus?Single unconfirmed reportOne player states it while looking at the three skills. His wording says after level 100 rather than at it, and no second reading exists.
• Are there magic effects outside the three schools?Not verifiedA summon-skeleton tome appears in a shop list without any recording saying which school governs it.
• Did Update 7 change the schools?Not verifiedThe Update 7 notes mention spellcrafting but say nothing about sorcery, channeling or psionics. Every recording cited here predates them.