Monks of Iowa; Lore heavy RPG

"As a citizen you love your anthem,

as a sorcerer you understand its lyrics."

WHAT IS IT?

'Monks of Iowa' is an experimental role-playing game about reading through obscure journals to learn magical spells.
You must try to live your everyday life, sometimes defending yourself in combat from territorial sorcerers using what you've managed to learn.

The game is set in modern day Des Moines, among a general populace that doesn't know, or care about magic and just wants to be left alone... until they don't.

"I'M A WIZARD?":

The spells you learn in Monks of Iowa come from 'the tomes', a set of rather cryptic journals from sorcerers living in the past. At the end of every in-game day, the players choose a tome to read and are rewarded with the disclosure of that chapter's spell and some text from the book.

There are currently eight authors, with three books each.

Each book contains five spells of increasing power, and vague progression of that author's life as a sorcerer given through the writing samples.
The authors are distinct characters, from different times and parts of the world and each have a specific flavour of magic.

NATURE OF DEVELOPMENT:

The main hook of the game is magical combat, mixing spells from different schools of sorcery for powerful and unexpected effect. Each spell needs to fit into the system with the others, interacting with some, or de-buffing others while standing on its own and not breaking the system.

I'm looking for people who can help me with the bulky amount of character-specific poetry that act as flavour-text when the players learn a new spell.
Experience with writing prose, managing character voice, and various poetic techniques will be very useful.
I also need technically minded people who can think up cool spells within a framework of RPG stats, object classes and so on for me to test in development.

I'm currently working on a simple version of the game for testing spells, but I'm unsure what the exact nature of the finished game will be. It might be local multiplayer with a Game Master, similar to a virtual-table-top,
or have some pre-coded campaigns, mostly depending on the complexity of NPC I can make to use the spells... wisely.

My main goal at the moment is to develop the spells required for testing, and lore associated with authors.