Who Am I?
Are you familiar with Sanderson's Three Laws of Magic"?
- It's really three principles for using magic in fiction.
I didn't know that one. Thanks, I'll give it a read.
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
Quick summary for the people who come by this thread and are too lazy to look it up, Sanderson's Laws of Magic are:
- An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
- Limitations [are more important than] Powers.
- Expand what you already have before you add something new.
edited 14th Jun '15 3:16:04 PM by AwSamWeston
Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.
Anyway, I'll try to answer your original questions based on what I've at least concretely established about my system. (Your questions #4 and #8 sound quite similar to each other, so I'm going to assume that the former is quite specifically about society and the latter is more about nature and physics, i.e. things more or less independent of society. Also, questions #2 and #7 are so similar that I'm just going to omit #7.)
- Where does magic come from? That depends what you mean. In some sense it's a natural property of the Universe, like physics. However, it doesn't affect anything until made to do so by conscious beings (generally speaking, mages who have learned the art of wielding it). Its connection to the physical world is exclusively through conscious minds, at least at some point. However, once invoked, enchantments can be made to persist across time and space to an extent limited only by the power of the mage casting them, and do not require constant mental concentration to be maintained.
- How can people use it? Someone who has access to it need only formulate a spell correctly in their mind (easier said than done, especially for spells with highly complex behavior) and consign the necessary amount of mana to casting it. However, both these mental 'acts' must be done with adequate comprehension and conviction; being asleep prevents spellcasting entirely, and being insane also makes it much more difficult and unreliable. Moreover, it is possible to create enchantments with a sort of magical interface that allows other mages to activate them, without having to reformulate the entire spell. It is also possible to create enchantments that react to physical events and thus can be 'used' even by people who have no magical ability of their own, through the appropriate physical interface.
- What are the limitations of magic? Although pretty much any sane, conscious person can theoretically learn magic, it is not easy, and most people never get access to it. Those who do are further limited by their level of mana. A given quantity of mana roughly corresponds to a proportional amount of physical energy, and a mage's maximum mana increases roughly by the cube of the time since they first learned magic multiplied by their 'mana talent' which varies somewhat between individuals, while their available mana increases roughly linearly in proportion to their maximum mana.
- How does the existence of magic affect the society? That depends on the society. Magic has a colossal variety of possible applications, but generally there aren't enough powerful mages around to use it for widespread mundane purposes, so it tends to be mostly used for tasks to which it can be applied very efficiently. These include healing, long-distance communication, rapid transport, military usage, and scientific investigation. However, the last of these also implies that it can contribute greatly to a given culture's scientific understanding of the world, which can be quite important in itself. Also, the nature of magic as understood by mages supposedly provides metaphysical reasons for believing in something like quantum immortality (for everyone, not just mages), which eliminates a major basis for religion, causing religion to be relegated almost exclusively to small, primitive societies where magic is absent or poorly understood. Finally, magic provides the only means of communicating or traveling between worlds, so in general the only societies that are even aware of the existence of multiple worlds (much less extending between them) are those where magic has been highly developed.
- Is magic replenishable? Magic itself is more of a principle, and can't be 'depleted' any more than gravity can be 'depleted'. Mana is most certainly replenishable, so in the long run there is no particular limit on how much magic can be used, cumulatively.
- Would the existence of magic prevent certain inventions from ever being created? Not per se. Magic doesn't inherently interfere with any particular kind of technology. However, it does tend to displace some technologies (especially, as mentioned above, in medicine, science and communication, as well as the equivalent of 'computers') by achieving equivalent or better results for less effort.
- How does magic influence the world? Not much, it seems, in the long term. Large-scale natural phenomena are just too powerful for most mages to even think about trying to control, and extremely powerful mages are rare enough that their achievements, however impressive, still tend to be pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
The following terminology is subject to change, but the actual rules themselves have been very consistent.
Magic is produced by Time, a metaphysical river that encircles the natural world of Order, separating it from the supernatural realm of Chaos; it carries the sun and moon but not the nebula or the stars.
Men and ghosts can’t use magic directly due to the curse of mortification; spirits and beasts lack the will to use it, though not the intelligence (as they are no less intelligent than men and ghosts); monsters can use magic to embody their bestial natures and in these forms command mortal beasts; demons and women can use magic as monsters do, but they can also embody their spiritual natures and command mortal spirits in these forms.
Magic is a finite but renewable resource; once a quantity of magic is used up, it becomes “dead” for centuries if not millennia. Demons and women can only channel magic in specific ways in accordance with their bestial, spiritual, and personal natures.
Men and ghosts generally live in fear of monsters and demons, who use magic to oppress them; women don’t protect men or ghosts in general, but they won’t allow monsters or demons to harm their fathers, sons, or brothers; demons and women control society in almost every way, using magic to control monsters as well as mortal beings.
Magic doesn’t serve monsters as readily as demons and women, and it doesn’t serve men and ghosts at all, so there is still room for technology.
Demons, women, and monsters use magic by pulling it into their bodies and pushing it out of their minds through specific patterns of thought. Magic essentially rearranges the energies, materials, and substances of Reality, whether momentarily or indefinitely.
Most of the mechanics of magic are known only to demons and women, who aren’t too keen on sharing that information. Monsters can use magic but don’t really understand how it works or why it works the way it does. Men and ghosts have no more understanding of magic than spirits and beasts, which regard it as the omnipresence of Creator Itself.
edited 15th Jun '15 1:21:13 AM by nekomoon14
Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.
Zu The Skunk, your initial thinking appears to be that the presence of a trope is more important that its application - that is, allowing it to interact with other tropes in the formation of a narrative. You have to blend them, and consider how they would interact with each other.
Besides that, you have a limited understanding of what "magic" is and how it can be used to affect a story - it is a plot device that is subject to rules like anything else, nothing more. "Really overpowered and hard to control" is a problem with the writer, not the story or plot element.
With that in mind, this is how I try to implement it...
1: It does not come from anywhere any more than air comes from somewhere. I don't mean "air" as in oxygen as produced through photosynthesis or other means, but the combination of that and other gases which we breathe without having to do anything special, either. That is, it is naturally present in the world and setting, and has been subject to the same scrutiny as air has been. You can create it, but not from "nothing".
2: I tend towards pragmatic, modern uses of magic. More often than not, my worlds use magic like we use petroleum products - you can live without plastics and gasoline somehow, but it's unnecessarily difficult in a modern world. The use or uselessness of magic defines it, and everything else we humans bother to invent a word for.
3: "More limitations = good" isn't so handy a rule as "it's only useful/usable in specific ways", I find. The people using it should have limitations on how they use their magic; Omnidisciplinary Scientist is right out, but Renaissance Man is still an option (and note that Heinlein's example would really only apply to a ranking military officer - a good human being should be good at things, but very good at their actual job). The idea is to consider magic as a resource first, rather than a weapon or strategic force.
4: Unless the story is about the discovery or introduction of magic to a setting, this isn't a question you need to consider - the setting has to be built around the fact that magic exists, much like modern cities don't have hitching posts for horses everywhere.
If the story is about magic being new, you have to look at cultural changes as well rather than just "society". If you remember what life was like 10 years ago, recall how everyone had desktop computers and landline telephones. The mobility of information and the ability to process it, as well as the assumption of easy communication, is now becoming a given. As much as this changes, say, the mechanics of finding a job or hooking up with friends/lovers, it also changes peoples' idea of how things should be, which carries over into how they communicate or create ideas and art (visual, audio, tactile, and we're not far from taste and smell, either!). Pictures and movies being posted to the Internet almost immediately after being created (that is, for possible widespread consumption, not just as a backup), is a relatively recent idea, but one that is quickly taking a central spot in culture.
5: Whether something is replenishable or not is the crux of any resource. This isn't its own topic; it's part and parcel with "where does magic come from".
6: Magic replacing future inventions, is kind of a given as well. It depends more on the utility of magic and the magical system in the setting than anything else.
7: Forcing a resource into logical order is also a part of using a resource - it might as well not exist or be a weather formation without some means of using it. (That is, why bother including it at all as "magic" if you can't use it? Why add a story element that is one more thing for the reader to decipher, if there's a real-world analogue that works as well or better?)
8: See #4 and #7. Why would a reader care about what magic does where the characters can't see it and aren't affected by it? (That's not rhetorical - you do have to answer it if it works this way.)
This is basically the question that popped up in my head today. And as I attempted to answer it, I realized that the mere concept of magic causes many questions to pop up the moment you try to determine how it works:
Just by trying to answer these questions, I ended up outlining a universe where:
This basically made me realize that as a storytelling device, magic is really overpowered and really hard to control, making it very easy to break your world/story if it's undefined enough to allow for the "Why couldn't they use magic to solve this problem?" argument to pop up.
What are your thoughts? How do you handle magic in your own universe?