I said I would describe a magic system in a daily megathread and forgot (well, lost all confidence in the idea). But maybe a thread would be better for this conversation.
I also don't wish to step on anyone's actual beliefs, though practitioners can comment if they have any ideas.
A couple of easy examples:
- Harry Potter: In this, magic is largely inherited by individuals, though it can be randomly brought in and removed from bloodlines. It does seem to give some level of fatigue when used, but honestly not that much. It does create a caste of "superior" humans by birth, humans who could never be poor and can arbitrarily exact violence on lesser beings. Even their emotions are more powerful than ordinary humans. The books don't really touch on this and our PoV character is almost a "rightful king", inheritor of vast wealth and magical artifacts.
- Star Wars: This magic is loosely based on buddhism, though the magic itself seems to be more related to living beings (e.g. a river doesn't necessarily have karmic value unless that's what the episode of The Clone Wars is about). Nonetheless, if you squint, you can still see some of the language of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things". It does, however, seem to have a severe hereditary component. Sometimes, you are just a poo person. In my head canon, the Dark Side is the extreme expression of self, at some point even considering one's own emotions as separate to one's self, and the light side is an acceptance of being a part of the universe. However, I feel like "grey jedi" is more popular amongst the fandom. idk. For some reason, being either very connected or very disconnected from the universe gives you phenomenal magic powers to enact your will, as long as you were born with the power.
Suggest your own short description and maybe an analysis.
I have posted about my magic system before, designed for a little dieselpunk British occupation of the Ottoman Empire, where various explorers are doing biblical archaeology. The players (this was for an RPG) are working for a British industrialist/oil guy who wants to find the tree of life and live forever. Over the course of their adventure, they find various echoes of magic that used to exist in the world but is slowly withering away. The history of magic, they find, reflects their current situation where capital is slowly strangling the world and every bit of will and life from it.
Notes on my magic:
- Magic comes from people and relationships between people.
- What it specifically does for most people is nebulous. Probably something like making your hearth a little warmer or a sense of which soil is more fertile? Or maybe something relational? Haven't thought about it much.
- Magic by the ruling class is stolen. They are born with their own, just like everyone else. However, through exploitation, violence, and trickery, they steal other people's magic (or souls). This gives them a lot more power to do mythological acts, live forever, and pass their stolen magic to their children.
- To pass magic on to one's children, you have to have some yourself, so it can be nurtured and grow. However, once it has been stolen, this no longer happens. The world's population now is entirely populated by such descendants. The ancient gods that the players encounter refer to the players (and all modern people) as "hollow ones". In the gods eyes, modern people are useless for their goals of achieving immortality.
- This is also an analogy of how many ancient cities are barely habitable now, as the over-farming has increased the salt in the land to the point where the cities collapsed. As once fertile land was over-exploited, so have people.
- The gods, having exhausted their populations of magical energy, eventually turn on each other in a scramble to stay alive and in power. This allows the common people to drive them out, causing some of the large migrations of antiquity as the gods and their lackeys flee in one direction or another.
- This history is eventually forgotten over thousands of years, but is still present in the surviving gods themselves sleeping to conserve energy, transforming themselves into stone or bronze statues or whatever, and some artifacts they've imbued with power and given to their lackeys.
- The last most active god is Yahweh, who ate his wife Asherah as they fled south into modern Arabia.
I'm not sure if I want magic to return to the world at the end of the story, or the British benefactor to find the tree of life withered and broken. If it does return, it should be able to spread (somewhat thinly) throughout the world through non-exploitative relationships.
It is also very soul-like, but seems unnecessary for life as we know it.
I hate the grey jedi trope. No, you can not use your magical powers to hurt people just a little bit, as a treat. Like obiwan destroyed the Death Star by lying, throwing a rock to distract some stormtroopers, and saying one sentence at the right time. If he can do that just by being a sneaky old bastard why does your edgelord ass need to use the dark side for some stupid bullshit?
Star Wars is the most basic black and white morality play and so many people trip over themselves to fail.
I mean, yeah, 95% of the Sith are cartoonishly evil, and the remaining 5% are still edgy assholes. So the Sith are obviously worse than the Jedi.
But the Jedi are also stodgy authoritarians, who teach you extremist stoicism, in that Emotions are Bad. Like, their whole 'we know better, just do what we say' thing is so patriarchal and non-constructive. They really do a good job of digging their own grave, and then calling it 'inevitable fate' that the universe 'must swing the opposite way after the Jedi held sway for so long'. No, you all just did a terrible job 'ruling the galaxy'.
So, I think a lot of the appeal of Grey Jedi are that, no, feeling emotions is not bad, you stuck up assholes. (though yeah, a lot of people do just want to be grey jedi to be edgy.)
I agree about trying to have the power fantasy and flubbing the morality. think this would help if they had more depictions of cool light aligned powers. Healing was such a cool thing in Kotor, but it would have been cool to see it depicted and how morality questions could arise and how it could lend itself to the dark side if one is too controlling.
Also since the dark side is about domination, giving some offensive options through passivity would be cool. I don't know how that would work though. I'll edit if I come up with things.
One magic system I’ve never understood is the one in LotR. The wizards are literal angels, so maybe they’re just channeling the power of God and basically doing miracles? But then some are more powerful than others, and Gandalf “levels up”, what’s that about.
It's just so stressful looking after hobbits that it took what little colour remained in his hair and drained it. Wizard power is hampered by hair pigment so this final act of stress released him from the final bonds that controlled his powers.
If I understand it correctly after watching 1 video about it, the wizards all have designated roles and accompanying powers to fill those roles.
So the Grey Wizard is meant to travel and help the ordinary folk, sowing hope and shit. But the White Wizard is meant to directly wage war against Sauron, so he gets more direct power to do his role. The Brown Wizard is meant to help nature and animals etc, and the Blue Guys we know jack shit about but people like to think they are basically there to be saboteurs and guerrillas towards Sauron.
Gandalf gets promoted to General, basically, and thats why he gets stronger, but there isnt a Whiter Wizard for him to get promoted to after that.
I feel like the theological God butts up against the mythological God quite a lot. I think classically there is a hierarchy of angels, so hypothetically you could grant an angel a promotion. Why they're particularly limited and have to recruit armies and hobbies idk
Part of the reason the Valar sent the Wizards to help Middle Earth is that the Vala are so big, metaphysically, that when they go to war they inevitably cause a vast amount of destruction. They could just go over the sea and squish Sauron, but it would come at enormous "the mountains were shattered and the rivers ran backwards" cost.
The Wizards were a much more subtle instrument. Gandalf's main magical power is nurturing hope and a spirit of resistance. He keeps people going, builds connections, and makes sure the right people get the right knowledge at the right time. Saruman was supposed to take a leading role in opposing Sauron, but he lost faith and was seduced by the idea of taking power for himself. When Gandalf died fighting Durin's Bane he presumably ended up in the Halls of Mandos like all other immortal beings (maia and elves mostly) do. Technically I think any of the immortal beings can just walk out of the Halls of Mandos, and most do after a while, but Gandalf probably got VIP treatment and was moved to the front of the line. When he returns to Middle Earth as Gandalf the White he breaks Saruman's spell over King Theoden and undermine's him in several other important ways, culminating with the Ent's assault on Isengard. As near as I can tell, since the Wizard's greatest power was inspiring people, once Saruman was visibly humbled and his armies broken, much of his magical power was also broken and Gandalf was able to easily overthrow him. Saruman and Grima then go to the Shire to bother the hobbits, who iirc ultimately kill them. It's part of a theme about evil being self destructive and unable to create, and about the world becoming less magical overtime and the evil villains being commensurately less powerful and more pathetic. Melkor gives way to Sauron, Sauron is followed by Saruman, and when Sauron is ultimately destroyed by one of the most wretched creatures in Middle Earth Saruman is reduced to oppressing Hobbits before finally being done it.
I'm not 100% on if i'm just reading this in to the story, but i think a lot of the "magic" in lotr is the elves and wizards just having a vastly deeper and more complete understanding of the world than most edain. When the elves build things like Lothlorien or make their invisibility cloaks they're not breaking or bending the rules - they just understand the rules at a much deeper level than edain so what they do looks inexplicable. There's a fan theory that Legolas can see over the horizon because when the Valar made Arda round in the wake of Ar-Pharazon's disastrous attempt to invade the undying lands they only made it round for men - elves could still see the world as it truly was, hence not being effected by the curvature of the earth as men were.
Magic comes from people and relationships between people.
The Commonweal might interest you, it got interesting magic systems.
You write:
Magic by the ruling class is stolen. They are born with their own, just like everyone else. However, through exploitation, violence, and trickery, they steal other people’s magic (or souls). This gives them a lot more power to do mythological acts, live forever, and pass their stolen magic to their children.
This means that magic can be stolen from them, too. It also opens up the question if stealing it is a 1-1 relationship or if stealing reduces the magic they can wield? Maybe that factor diminishes the more (people or so) you steal from? That to "double" your magic potentially yourself and wield it directly you would have to control:
- 6 people for example, to double your magic
- 36 people to quadruple it (which would be quadratic, meaning you would need 50% more people)
- 216 to get eight times the amount
- and then you get into the thousands of people.
Which would mean that people could always over throw the ruling classes, if they organize. This means that strong liches are actually relatively weak.
It would also mean that evil people would have to delegate and have hordes of minions to profit from.
Then questions of consent, will and coercion could pop up. Is stealing magic easier if people align with your views? Is manufacturing consent needed to give you magic efficiently and keep your life extension spells alive?
If the magic is stolen can you give it in a 1-1 relation or is that diminishing, too?
Is there a set upper limit of total magic in the world that gets split up or is every being a source of new magic (which would lead to industrial magic farming for the people who still carry magic).
It does read as if magic is like a viral infection that gets transmitted through birth and that gets cured / vaccinated by being stolen.
Questions:
- do only humans or also animals have it?
- the closer they are to humans or do shrooms also have magic?
- what about the other hominids a couple of hundred thousand years ago?
- if a statue can contain magic can I spread the magic by grinding it and having people sniffing it?
Fundamentally, I wanted it to be an allegory for political power. A lot of it was written while I was dropping acid and reading Debt.
I guess that probably excludes a lot of animals, orcas excluded. But hypothetically "the people" could always have taken it back. They just haven't, and a lot of the productive force and resources have been squandered by the gods. I don't know about snorting, but artefacts can return magic to the world, though the players won't really know that until the end. What they specifically do remains to be decided; the labour imbued in a sword is less productive than the labour imbued in a plough.
I'd tie other properties of magic into that theme.
and reading Debt.
Yeah I can relate to that.
Wish you good luck and fun with the players :)
I will always be fond of Magicka, where magic is extraordinarily easy to use, extraordinarily powerful, and therefore extraordinarily dangerous to everyone including the caster. Twitch your finger wrong and that defibrillation spell becomes a thunderbolt that turns you into marinara. As a consequence it's mostly used by morons and hiring a wizard is kind of like hiring some frat bros to landscape your yard using explosives and power tools they built in a basement.
Casting magic is almost an entirely individual action in the vast majority of fiction, which is entirely at odds with real life where most human endeavors at shaping reality (engineering) is entirely collective. In other words, you'll have some paladin cast turn evil on some lich to save a village, but you'll never have the residents of the village pool their mana to cast a exorcism spell to destroy the lich. And I don't mean the paladin siphoning the villagers' mana to cast their spell, which is what some fictional works do, but I mean the villagers themselves gathering together to collectively performing the spell rituals so that there's isn't a single caster.
The closest thing is the fantasy trope of cultists performing some dark ritual to summon a demon, and even then, they tend to focus on the head cultist, who's usually already possessed or is a demon in human form, doing almost all of the magic heavy lifting while all the other cultists are just scenery to make the scene look scary. My idea is what if this is true for every single school of magic? You need 200 pyromages assembled and coordinated enough to cast a single spell that bombards a city with meteors. You need 1000 clerics assembled and coordinated to resurrect people. Most fantastical and powerful spells like time travel doesn't require the spellcaster to be powerful but is nigh impossible to cast because they require millions of people to be completely coordinated and perfectly in sync.
Conceiving of magic as a collective activity instead of an individual one has two major ramifications. One is that it moves away magic from being some shitty power fantasy with the chosen spellcaster lording over the unwashed masses and two is that it becomes an expression of class struggle, serving as a check against the ruling class. A feudal lord who treats his serfs like shit runs the risk of getting cursed by his serfs. A despised king that's despised by enough people opens himself to be banished from this plane of existence. The socialist equivalent in this fantasy setting would be someone who teaches the peasantry spells that kill their feudal lord, make them resource self-sufficient, and telepathically communicate with other liberated zones. With enough liberated zones, it completely snowballs until feudalism has been overthrown and socialism with agrarian characteristics has been established.
This sounds a bit similar to the initial chapters on the primitive development of religion as described in The Origins of Christianity By Archibald Robertson. At least in regard to how the deification of ancient humans likely occured.
I really like it, whenever I've half seriously thought up magic/god systems in my head I tend to come to similar ideas.
I think I prefer the idea of magic returning to the world in some fashion, if its meant to reflect capital and the history of the world.
I also don’t wish to step on anyone’s actual beliefs, though practitioners
i have feet, one can't practice something that doesn't exist!
I know a lot of witchy leftists. I don't mind stepping on, like, evangelical Christian or scientologists toes
The magic system in my setting has direct roots in a worker revolt. Aristocratic mages used fancy dnd style spells to subjugate the people and left workers to use basic servant oriented spells to do their work. But the workers realize the potential in practicing them, kinda like how farmer tools developed into weapon styles.
It allowed a shift in understanding about magic, especially when the aristocrats were so out of practice compared to workers who spent hours a day casting.
Personally, I hate magic where it's tied to genetics or some inborn quality. Even media like the Avatar the Last Airbender has it. I like the idea about being a bender or spellcaster or wizard or whatever, but being a mundane child, it's hard to see the fantasy and not feel a sense of cosmic rejection.
I hate secret society wizards like in Nasuverse because it's easy to see how one could be collateral damage and have no way to defend yourself. I think the hereditary nature bolstered by pseudonobility really bothers me, but it's realistic in that regard. Old wealthy families using their consolidated power to fuck with each other and refusing to make the world a better place with their knowledge of the world.
I also just hate the trope of people not being able to handle the truth. It serves to maintain the status quo in urban fantasy settings and I'm done with it.
I love the idea of bringing magic back into the world by destroying false idols. RPing changing personalities or relationships due to the presence of magic sounds neat. What does magic do exactly? You can steal large quantities of it to perform great rituals. But what of individuals and communities?
I have been developing a fantasy world, mostly in my head, not much is written down. Its definetly an attempt to resolve my issues with traditional fantasy and DnD. Basically magic comes from the environment. Vibrant ecology leads to more magical places. Fantasy races are really just the effect of evolving to suit an environment. Elves are of forests, Dwarves of mountains, Orcs are of steppes and grasslands, and humans are of developed areas. Traditional magic is mostly just using the fruits magical land. Great seams of crystal or impossibly beautiful flowers can be processed into useful magical items. Basically consumables/1 use items in RPG terms.
Magical ability is passed down almost entirely randomly, though being conceived or born in a sacred place has a small impact. 1% chance of magical ability rather than 0.5%
Urbanization led to new magic. All life radiates certain amounts of magic, typically the more conscious the more magic. Without a natural environment to sink into magic just sorta hung in the air like cotton in the triangle factory. This is where arcane magic comes from.
The central story is that one of the powerful arcane mages ascended to godhood in secret. They became able to bless their followers with a type of destructive magic that is more powerful the less ambient magic there is. They used this power to enslave the arcane mages and start a faith largely based around hating and subjugating them. They force the mages to create magical weapons and armor for an army to conqueror more territory. Themes of extraction, community, ecology, urban rural divide, and faith.
First act is defending a region from being conquered, but its obvious it will fall to the empire in time. Second act is trying to start a mage revolt only for the empire to bribe them with status and comfort. Third act is uncovering false godhood and destroying the empire from within.
The story is fine but I mostly just wanted to solve certain mechanical issues with magic that I see. Like, how are warriors as powerful as mages? Its dumb. The only way to balance it is to handicap mages. My solution of having their power come from their armaments solves that. Having races come from evolution rather than them being essential categories or things created in a gods image feels nice. Having magic based around the environment makes it easy to create material/grounded stories.
I also like the idea of magic being semi-conscious and resistant to control.
