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.
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.