Magic in your stories

With my RPG group, one of our settings is superhero-based (essentially, a slightly Darker and Edgier Astro City). There aren't a great deal of magic-based characters, but the ones that do exist usually share the following traits:

• Low-level precognition, and the ability to "sense" supernatural energy (sorta like a living PKE meter).
• The ability to communicate with deceased mages (remember the Garden of Ancestral Memory that The Doctor from The Authority would occasionally travel to? No? Go ahead, look it up; I'll wait). grabs a soda while waiting OK, you're back? Good. The same idea.
• A majority of them don't wave wands or yell badly-mangled Latin; several of them are more of the "inscribe symbols, light candles, smear myself in goat saliva, etc." ritual/shamanistic style of magic, or rely more on their knowledge of the paranormal than spells.
• To paraphrase Warren Ellis in Planetary, many mages simply think of spells as "universal cheat codes". As a side-effect of casting magic (in this universe), it's physically (and sometimes mentally) exhausting; the more you try to do, the more you're drained.

Force magic. In-universe it's an evolved form of chaos magic, and so there are no set rules for what rituals a person has to do to perform magic. Chaos magicians thus tend to formulate their own practices and style. However, the use of sigils (based on the sigil magic theory of Austin Osman Spare) is the most common practice due to how simplistic it is.

Spells are mostly powered by will, visualization and belief. As such, magic is often mostly done on a subconscious level. The reason for this is that all thinking creatures give off an innate psychic force, and "magic" is simply the process of getting around one's own mental blockades to access and control this force.

As for what magic can actually do, the answer is, potentially, anything within the realm of physical possibility. You could use magic to try and affect the outcome of a situation, or you could use it for psychokinesis and physical transmutations. However, most people can only perform very minor spells because attempting something that you don't have the vision for will literally shatter your soul. This is especially true of people who are unable to get past their mental blocks and believe in themselves. So the majority of chaos magicians wouldn't attempt a spell to, say, shoot energy blasts from their hands at will.

Am I the only person who doesn't rewrite magic from the ground up and come up with elaborate magical systems?

edited 1st Jul '11 6:07:32 PM by annebeeche

Doesn't AB!Beowulf take place in in an Alternate History version of Scandinavia?

I rebuilt magic from the ground up not because it's the common thing to do with magic, but because I'm working with a totally different world that doesn't have Earthen lore to fall back on. Earthen deities have no jurisdiction in Aetherion, which is also how I managed to work with All Myths Are True.

Yeah that's true, but personally I think of it like this:

AB!Beowulf is to 6th century Scandinavia as Harry Potter is to 20th century Britain. Basically, the fantasy elements are tacked onto what would be a realistic setting otherwise.

The difference is that even JK Rowling constructs a magical system that is very different from real life magical rituals, even though Harry Potter takes place in the real world.

edited 1st Jul '11 6:25:33 PM by annebeeche

I don't think mine is different enough from actual chaos magic to qualify as building it from the ground up but I do feel I should simplify it a bit.

When you get right down to it, Rowling (like most writers) doesn't have a magic system. She has a few rules, but it's often left uncertain what is and what isn't possible. (This, in conjunction with Deus ex Machina, is why my mother hates fantasy stories.)

edited 1st Jul '11 8:49:57 PM by feotakahari

There is a lot of deus ex machina going on in fantasy. But in other books the magic is treated like technology (do X and Y happens). I'm trying to think of some good examples. Elantris?

While I'm writing a story which is basically set in the fantasy-genre with human-like animals as main characters, I'm not putting any magic in it. I've thought of something different in order to explain something like Werewolves, Vampires and how one of the main characters will later be able to harness the power of fire. Even the whole origin-story of how the world of the humanlike animals builds upon this idea.

edited 2nd Jul '11 7:43:44 AM by Jaryl

I have two main magic systems, both heavily influenced by Nen from Hunter X Hunter.

Imagery: An Imager is able to conjure an ability with the power of the mind. Most people develop Imagery without even being aware of it. The animal trainer who's so good it's almost like they understand him, for example.

It's not strictly intended as 90% of Your Brain, but it does play a part. The primary limiting factor is how much mental activity a person can handle at one time. A person can only multi-task so much for example. It can be a balancing act, and the most powerful abilities sometimes require the user to reduce another capability. One character's ability is a Morph Weapon, able to take on any weapon she's personally familiar with. But the weapons themselves have no special qualities so she can't magically change her sword's length, but can change over to a longer sword.

The Nen influence is in that every power is created individually, and can be heavily influenced by a person's beliefs and knowledge. One guy creates a Winged Humanoid power but makes a point of studying how to make it work and creates a power with a large number of small wings or big wings as needed. A child can create summon creatures with her imagination that can fly because in her young mind wings = flight.

The other is a more traditional Elemental Powers setup with Magical Girls. The main elements of Fire, Water, Wind and Earth. A person is born with a natural alignment towards one element, cannot effectively learn its opposite, and possess a "leaning" towards one of the other two. For instance, my main character is an earth mage, and leans towards Fire. So she has better control of those two, but lacks fine control with water and wind magic. There's a bit of Magic Versus Science, with the catch between the two being that Magic is better on a one-on-one basis, a water mage is capable of healing the worst illnesses we have, but there's only as much healing as there are healers. Science can't cure as much, but their ability to mass produce for lesser illnesses makes them more potentially effective. In Starcraft terms, magic users are the Protoss, scientists the Zerg.

Wow. Until you mentioned it, I didn't fully realize that I'm now writing something with no magic in it whatsoever. That's new for me.

@sgamer: I really like the sound of your system. It's quite cool and creative. :D

The short version goes thus:

In the beginning, there was God and Void. Neither bothered each other. God had a split personality and the sides were always fighting, so he brought forth the two sides from his mind (Good and Evil). A third, the desire to exist (DTE for short, because he doesn't have a proper name yet), escaped as well.

So Good and Evil prepared to fight to determined who would rule Gods mind, while DTE discovers physical existence. But the Void eats it up before he can do anything with it, so he hatches a plan- he gives half a universe to Good and Evil, claiming it's a secret weapon he's only sharing with them. So they fight, and end up smashing the two halves together, dumping a bunch of energy into the universe.

But all the spaces between particles is still Void, and the universe starts to look like swiss cheese. God steps in and commands the Void back, so all the empty spaces are just that- empty spaces. This exertion consumes God, and he dies.

What does this have to do with the magic system? Well, later DTE takes a portion of that command that drove back the void, and makes magic out of it. Magic is the opposite of the void, continuously self-perpetuating and regenerating. It's also the basis of all life, which is also self-perpetuating- everyone has magic, Mages just have extra.

This also makes it really, really hard to permanently kill powerful mages. Burning them and scattering the ashes is the only thing close to a surefire method, and even then if another powerful mage managed to gather all the ashes...

But not all magic is bound up in life, sometimes it ends up in objects as well. Objects that have something close to life themselves.

As for what Magic can do? Anything life can do, but in a matter of seconds. Thus far most of the magic has just been low end mundane utility stuff, though. Nobody really skilled...yet.

Mine is a bit of a cheat, it's science that's indistinguishable from magic. A nanobot utility cloud survived the collapse of civilization, developed sentience, and pretty much discarded sentience after a lot of internal warfare. Current inhabitants of the world use a cross between Rules/Device magic and alchemy as "passcodes" to get the utility fog to do something for them. The use of elaborate rituals ensures the doesn't get triggered accidentally.

@Viergacht, I like it!

@Deathjavu: That's actually pretty clever. (I remember seeing references to a story somewhere or other that functioned on a similar system—at one point, a mages' guild climbed out of bankruptcy with the discovery that magic, despite taking the same amount of energy, was much faster than weaving at creating fine undergarments.)

Heh, thanks.

I think I really liked the idea the Black Company had about mages being really hard to kill (and all the mundane utility they get out of clever use of some pretty weak magic), and then I thought, "why are they so hard to kill?" So I knew magic and life were tied together.

The rest sort of coalesced around the idea that DTE made magic, and that it was self-replicating.

@deathjavu When I read desire to exist(DTE), the word 'Being' came to mind. IDK why. But I really like your idea.

OT, mine is a little hair-brained, and still very preliminary. But it's based on a mutagenic substance made from photons(it totally buries modern science alive) that bonded with certain elemental forces. Apart from turning humans in to a technically different species, it also grants a buttload of super powers(which I really don't feel like listing due to the sheer number). I guess I'd have to classify it under Force Magic-Minovsky Physics.