The price of using magic in a conworld

[Yng]

While I'm at it: Yng, your 'can you read?' comment was maybe a bit too harsh. Normally I'd find it unacceptable except that... well, in this case it was a literal thing, since it was a matter of (elementary) reading comprehension that was under discussion.

I felt like in the context it was a legitimate question

It's not like I hadn't explained (quite politely) already how he was misreading, is it

[Drydic]

Even without the H, it's still his opinion, and he's perfectly entitled to it as you (pl) are to yours (pl).

Yes, I was just attempting to head off a situation where it made him seem holier-than-thou. Note: I am not suggesting this is that situation in the slightest.

[WeepingElf]

Even without the H, it's still his opinion, and he's perfectly entitled to it as you (pl) are to yours (pl).

Yes, I was just attempting to head off a situation where it made him seem holier-than-thou. Note: I am not suggesting this is that situation in the slightest.

I know that such tags are often used by strongly opinionated people in most insincere ways, but that doesn't mean that they are always insincere.

But let's get back to the topic.

[Tanni]

If a fantasy world is inclined to use magic and treat it as a sort of tool (much like Harry Potter or most video games I can think of), then it would probably make more sense to put some sort of limitations on what can be done with magic and how magic ultimately affects the user and the world around them. One of the ideas outlined in the PCK is the notion that the use of magic comes at a price, implying that excessive and repeated use of magic could have potentially devastating consequences for either the individual user alone, for society as a whole, or even for the entire conworld itself. As a noob, I can't and don't claim to know anything about anything, but something about this notion strikes me as both sinister and intriguing. Part of me wants to integrate a magic system that comes at a rather hefty toll to the user into a fantasy world, primarily out of curiosity. In fact, I've actually got a sketch of a related idea that I'm willing to share.

In my magic system, there would only be a handful of mages in the general populace of any given nation. Magic would have certain vulnerabilities and the effects of certain spells would be more localized and temporary than others. Mages would generally be identified as exceptional individuals, but here's the catch: The casting of spells will slowly chip away at the mage's mental health, ultimately rendering them insane if they continue to use magic. There are warning signs that a mage could go over the edge of insanity, such as bizarre dreams, hallucinations and behavioral changes. There are also methods to prolong the onset of insanity and the aforementioned warning signs, but aside from meditation and/or prayer, I haven't really thought those out just yet.

I know that my ideas are far from perfect. Like I said before, I don't know anything about anything. Of course, it's just a rough idea at this point and I may not even take it further if I can't find a good enough reason to. That being said, feel free to tell me what's wrong with this idea and whatnot.

Of course, I don't want this thread to be all about me. If any of you guys have put a "price" on the use of magic in your conworld, I'd love to hear about it.

Have you ever seen a sane mage? Dumbledore?

What I feel is wrong is that your price of magic is just becoming insane. Insanity highly depends on definition, what is considered insane by one individual may not by another. You need not be a mage or insane to have bizzare dreams or hallucinations or behavioural changes. Yust using the right drugs will do. Or lots of other things.

[Drydic]

If a fantasy world is inclined to use magic and treat it as a sort of tool (much like Harry Potter or most video games I can think of), then it would probably make more sense to put some sort of limitations on what can be done with magic and how magic ultimately affects the user and the world around them. One of the ideas outlined in the PCK is the notion that the use of magic comes at a price, implying that excessive and repeated use of magic could have potentially devastating consequences for either the individual user alone, for society as a whole, or even for the entire conworld itself. As a noob, I can't and don't claim to know anything about anything, but something about this notion strikes me as both sinister and intriguing. Part of me wants to integrate a magic system that comes at a rather hefty toll to the user into a fantasy world, primarily out of curiosity. In fact, I've actually got a sketch of a related idea that I'm willing to share.

In my magic system, there would only be a handful of mages in the general populace of any given nation. Magic would have certain vulnerabilities and the effects of certain spells would be more localized and temporary than others. Mages would generally be identified as exceptional individuals, but here's the catch: The casting of spells will slowly chip away at the mage's mental health, ultimately rendering them insane if they continue to use magic. There are warning signs that a mage could go over the edge of insanity, such as bizarre dreams, hallucinations and behavioral changes. There are also methods to prolong the onset of insanity and the aforementioned warning signs, but aside from meditation and/or prayer, I haven't really thought those out just yet.

I know that my ideas are far from perfect. Like I said before, I don't know anything about anything. Of course, it's just a rough idea at this point and I may not even take it further if I can't find a good enough reason to. That being said, feel free to tell me what's wrong with this idea and whatnot.

Of course, I don't want this thread to be all about me. If any of you guys have put a "price" on the use of magic in your conworld, I'd love to hear about it.

Have you ever seen a sane mage? Dumbledore?

What I feel is wrong is that your price of magic is just becoming insane. Insanity highly depends on definition, what is considered insane by one individual may not by another. You need not be a mage or insane to have bizzare dreams or hallucinations or behavioural changes. Yust using the right drugs will do. Or lots of other things.

I don't see anyplace they said that using magic was the only way you could go insane. And relativism really doesn't cut it well in the insanity world, beyond a tiny tiny bit.

[Particles the Greek]

Here's a possible approach: magic works at the level of atoms or molecules (or maybe something a bit higher), so to do anything of any value requires a lot of effort and concentration, like building a very big house of cards and hoping it doesn't fall down, or writing an entire operating system at the machine code level, or even creating an entire conlang complete with a convincingly large number of peculiar idioms. Naturally, very few people are able to concentrate at the level necessary for this.

[Rhetorica]

Ooh, I started off using that! I figured that people would invent machines as soon as possible to do it for them... and once you built a good enough machine, people would forget about how to do it by hand. (This makes for a good subplot where exceptional prodigies go above and beyond and learn how to write new primitive functions.)

[WeepingElf]

What I feel is wrong is that your price of magic is just becoming insane. Insanity highly depends on definition, what is considered insane by one individual may not by another. You need not be a mage or insane to have bizzare dreams or hallucinations or behavioural changes. Yust using the right drugs will do. Or lots of other things.

I don't see anyplace they said that using magic was the only way you could go insane. And relativism really doesn't cut it well in the insanity world, beyond a tiny tiny bit.

I haven't seen anyone claim here that magic was the only road to insanity in his conworld, either. In Rosæ Crux, people go crazy for the same reasons they go crazy here - but magic is another way to go crazy, and many wizards eventually lose their marbles. Burnout, schizophrenia, depressions, whatever. Also, insanity is not the only snafu that can happen to a wizard. Spells often backfire, and powerful spells may backfire nastily. For example, a wizard who tries to make a lightning bolt hit a particularly target may be struck by a lightning bolt himself as the result of him goofing the spell.

[Sansato]

Just gonna chime in and say that I never actually suggested that magic was the only way to go insane. It's obviously more plausible (and more interesting) if insanity can be caused by other things as well.

In my magic system, there would only be a handful of mages in the general populace of any given nation. Magic would have certain vulnerabilities and the effects of certain spells would be more localized and temporary than others. Mages would generally be identified as exceptional individuals, but here's the catch: The casting of spells will slowly chip away at the mage's mental health, ultimately rendering them insane if they continue to use magic. There are warning signs that a mage could go over the edge of insanity, such as bizarre dreams, hallucinations and behavioral changes. There are also methods to prolong the onset of insanity and the aforementioned warning signs, but aside from meditation and/or prayer, I haven't really thought those out just yet.

I think that the larger implications of this particular system is that once the mage goes insane, they will no longer be the same person they used to be and that everything they ever cared about could possibly begin to disappear before them, maybe without them even realizing it. This is subjective and there are many ways to skin the insanity cat, but the larger implication of a mage inevitably losing the very essence of who they are as a person could certainly be very frightening for any practitioner of magic to think about (assuming they still have their wits about them, of course).

Edit: perhaps a better way to put it is that the Mage "eventually loses their ability to think rationally". This sounds like it's more in line with what I had in mind when I said "go insane".

[Drydic]

Ooh, I started off using that! I figured that people would invent machines as soon as possible to do it for them... and once you built a good enough machine, people would forget about how to do it by hand. (This makes for a good subplot where exceptional prodigies go above and beyond and learn how to write new primitive functions.)

!
I think you may have just written (or inspired, who knows yet) magic's creation story for Šaol...without even knowing that that's how its magic fields are generated (gigantic geothermal-powered machinery buried deep in various areas across the planet, put there by the creator deity - who was really the sole survivor of a Kardashev type II or III civilization. I hadn't elaborated on exactly how the machinery created the necessary fields, instead relying on Clarke's Third Law.

[احمکي ارش-ھجن]

I'd have my conworld magic eplained by extremely dense radioactive metals.
there are these god-like beings (called Psynecerions, in English) that have immense power and immense life-spans, and when they die their corpses become metals that can grant "magical power", this metal is called Agmatas.

They can also create dimensions (alternate universes like ours with different laws of physics, or just different versions of Earth) and create life.
As such all creations are emotionally and "spiritually" connected to these beings. this enables the creations to use the Agmatas, but because the creations eventually die their sould become absorbed into the Psynecerions to sustain the creatures.

So this becomes a cycle.
and that's the rough idea of it.

what you think so far?

[Sevly]

I don't like the idea of magic having a "cost," when it pops up in fantasy literature. It implies (like the example of Harry Potter, above) that magic is an extra thing laid over top of an already plausible world.

Couldn't agree more. There's this random blogger who has written about magic systems, and in her post on the cost of magic she makes the distinction that really captures the problem for me, namely that between internal and external costs. Internal costs are things intrinsic to the magic itself, such as draining life force, sacrificing small children, blah blah blah. As you said, the problem with these is that they seem to just be overlaid on top of the rest of the world and they make magic feel like something separate and different. Now, for many people that's exactly what they want magic to be—mysterious and different—and if that's their preference, then all the power to them. But I prefer magic systems where the magic comes across as a natural part of the character's world. It's magic to us, because it breaks the pesky laws that are killing me in my thermodynamics course right now, but to the characters the "magic" is the pesky laws that they fail courses over, the physics of their universe, so to speak, although I like to avoid the term "alternate physics" because it suggests realism and deep analysis which is more than necessary. To use TVTropes terminology, I find something appealing in functional magic: it doesn't matter how plausible the rules are—you can build me an enjoyable story over "clap your hands and time will stop, allowing you to move even though the frozen air molecules have nowhere to be displaced to and should hold you in place, and what's more how are you breathing anyways?—no, it doesn't matter to me, as long as your magic is consistent and fits in with the other elements of the story, and with the storyworld as a whole.

This is where those external costs come in. Internal costs make it difficult for the magic to fit in because the consequences seem so arbitrary. Why does the magic require you to sacrifice that small child? Why do you need the blood of the fourth son of the fifth house of Doo-Wap? Sure, all magic rules are arbitrary, but some of them just seem to be arbitrary chosen to cause the protagonist pain. Well, of course the protagonists have to face consequences for their actions—that's what makes the story interesting, after all—but that's where external costs come in. As random blogger asks: What about the villagers in the town that you just blocked off with a landslide? What about everybody else in the city that your calling heaven's fire upon? Needed to bend some water on the fly and grabbed it from the nearby plant life? Congrats, you just destroyed the livelihood of the man you were sent to befriend. Nice job breaking it, hero!

Focusing on external rather than internal costs makes the magic fit in more elegantly because, if magic is how your characters manipulate the world around them, external costs better mimic the challenges that we face in real life. The laws of thermodynamics are fundamentally simple. Heat flows from hot to cold. The universe becomes more disordered. Well, work with me here: though these assumptions are still of some debate, particularly the latter, let's assume that we're responsible for global warming, and that global warming is responsible for all sorts of environmental ills. Did thermodynamics declare that the price of our teleportation would be starvation from more severe droughts, billions of dollars in property damage from more severe wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes, or immeasurable loss in human life?

It would be impossible for any storyteller to match the complex interactions that underlie the real world. But the base concept is not: instead of having the All-Truth amulet simply require the sacrifice of a loved one in order to unleash its power, work your plot to be a series of unhappy coincidences, or, better yet, a thirty gambit pileup, which leads the hero to such an unwelcome choice. A cost as simple as having to rest and recuperate for a day, dismissed by random blogger as too temporary, more closely mimics the result of real-world exertion and, through clever plotting, can be just as devastating and much more satisfying then a more direct but less natural cost. Is it, for example, the magic itself which turns you insane in some mysterious and dangerous way, or the social ostracization that comes with being known and talked to only for what your magic can do, and then, by poor allocation of your limited resources, failing to use that magic effectively when it counted the most? I myself empathize more with the latter.

A mediocre fantasy author wrote:
A slightly better fantasy author wrote:

Couldn't agree less, because

This reduces "magic" to a pseudo-science, and its practitioners to technicians. Give CERN a few years and a hundred billion dollars and they'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Gi.

What, exactly, is wrong with this. I mean, of course it's a matter of personal preference, and I for one want to know as much about Gi as I can. Well, not really, actually, but this is where I think Sanderson's First Law really comes into play: an author's ability to solve conflict satisfactorily with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. Your "slightly better" fantasy author has definitely captured the sense of wonder and mystery that many fantasy readers love, but Melishanda better not start praying to the gods during the climax. That scene would be great for establishing the feel of the world or developing Mel's character, but for "Would they listen to her pleading this time?" to be the resolution of any major plotline would be the definition of deus ex machina.

On the other hand, the "mediocre" fantasy writer has laid the foundations for Mel to use her magic at the moment of truth: we can hinge the resolution on how she manages to sneak the required metallic ore into the villain's all-wood headquarters, and thus give the reader the understanding they need to appreciate your conclusion.

I was thinking implications for culture, for production, for economics - even at the most obvious level. Why is there no ice cream in the Forgotten Realms? Why has nobody created a police state with divination? Why do conventional armies even exist? Why is political organisation and technology approximately the same as a generic medieval country?

Yes, indeed. These are things which are fun to explore, and I'd love to see more works do so.

One way to go would be to have a world where magic does the job of modern technology, with people commuting to work on flying carpets and watching news and soap operas on crystal balls.

Ooh, magitek! I like. I love how, in The Last Airbender, the trains in Ba Sing Se are moved through earth bending, and how earth bending is used for the mail in Oma Shu, and how they propel submarines with water bending. I even love the mundane utilities, like how Katara using waterbending to stir soup while cooking. And then Korra started off like it might also look into the social effects of bending but then veered off into a much more boring story. Korra also has the lightningbenders producing electricity, which is great and all, but brings up another one of these "basic societal impact" questions: why are magicians always just throwing fireballs at each other instead of using them to boil water to turn turbines to move electrons?

But that is IMHO silly, and literally drains the magic out of magic.

Ah, well, mileage may vary and all. I recall that zompist said something similar about Almea:

I don't like fantasy magic systems that can be used like technology. Partly this is because I think it misses the point of fantasy— it's not supposed to be read like Popular Mechanics with altered physical laws. And partly it's because magic at the D&D level is just incompatible with a premodern world. You wouldn't have kings and peasants; you'd have essentially our modern world, with light spells in place of light bulbs and teleportation in place of cars.

This does make me wonder why I love functional magic and magitek so much, when by all rights it does render magic much less mysterious and quite similar to technology. But there's still something different between flying by innate ability and flying with an Iron Man suit. I think part of it is that a world with technology carries a lot of baggage about how we expect that technology to behave as an extension of the technology as we know today, whereas magic allows you to discard much of that baggage. I really like the idea of modern fantasy in the sense that magic is used to improve society, where the natural consequence of magic is things such as long-distance travel and communication, but in that I enjoy the opportunity to create and experience settings that still have distinct differences from our world. To go back to WeepingElf's point about commuting to work on flying carpets, I do agree that it's silly when you have essentially the same society as ours except with one-to-one magical replacements. New York with flying carpets and crystal balls instead of taxies and televisions can be a sort of silly fun, but what's really interesting is to stop, really consider the side effects of your magic system, and see where it leads you. In the end, a society where people can create fire on the fly would look no more like modern New York than it would medieval Europe.

[KathTheDragon]

Fasinating post, Sevly, and I assume that my magic system falls under the 'internal cost' systems. Which brings me to wonder if mine is as bad as you seem to make out all systems with an 'internal cost' are.

[Hallow XIII]

I beg to differ about the internal cost part. Namely, if they are consistently integrated to form a part of the world's physics, they can make perfect sense. I like to go with simply making magic tiring to use; the biological processes that I should really work out properly some time that allow you to make use of magic simply take a lot of energy, so if you go around casting spells you will end up hungry and tired and generally unfit for anything very quickly. And possibly short of breath, if I'm not misremembering how the whole ATP cycle works.

Another idea might be to simply extend Newton's third law - magic allows you to project energy in rather curious ways but the same always happens to you. You would need to work out how non-straightforward applications interact with this, though.

That said, I very much agree on the whole external costs thing. It is worth remembering though that consideration of the world as a whole is a very niche hobby, and also very complicated. For stories, or games, or whatever that focus less on the world itself and more on something on a more abstract level I hold that other kinds of magic systems have their place in these settings.

[Drydic]

I got around the 'magic should feel like an integral part of the world' part partially by magic having been shut off for the last 4-5,000 years, then turning back on 50YBP. There's parts fully integrated into the world, but the cultures have yet to fully internalize the consequences of having magic available.

[WeepingElf]

I don't like the idea of magic having a "cost," when it pops up in fantasy literature. It implies (like the example of Harry Potter, above) that magic is an extra thing laid over top of an already plausible world.

Couldn't agree more. There's this random blogger who has written about magic systems, and in her post on the cost of magic she makes the distinction that really captures the problem for me, namely that between internal and external costs. Internal costs are things intrinsic to the magic itself, such as draining life force, sacrificing small children, blah blah blah. As you said, the problem with these is that they seem to just be overlaid on top of the rest of the world and they make magic feel like something separate and different. Now, for many people that's exactly what they want magic to be—mysterious and different—and if that's their preference, then all the power to them. But I prefer magic systems where the magic comes across as a natural part of the character's world. It's magic to us, because it breaks the pesky laws that are killing me in my thermodynamics course right now, but to the characters the "magic" is the pesky laws that they fail courses over, the physics of their universe, so to speak, although I like to avoid the term "alternate physics" because it suggests realism and deep analysis which is more than necessary. To use TVTropes terminology, I find something appealing in functional magic: it doesn't matter how plausible the rules are—you can build me an enjoyable story over "clap your hands and time will stop, allowing you to move even though the frozen air molecules have nowhere to be displaced to and should hold you in place, and what's more how are you breathing anyways?—no, it doesn't matter to me, as long as your magic is consistent and fits in with the other elements of the story, and with the storyworld as a whole.

It is indeed not easy to make a magic theory consistent. Many kinds of magic have all sorts of logic problems; your time freeze example is illustrative. But internal costs needn't be arbitrary. So magic is part of the way the world works and not a "transgression of the laws of nature". Does that mean that there is no supernatural "court of law" that deals out "penalties" for using magic? Yes. Does that mean that there is no way magic can "tax" spellcasters? No. Even if magic is not physically exhausting, it may still be mentally exhausting. In this world, people go crackers if they exert their mind too heavily, as often seen in people involved in the fast-paced world of information technology or the even faster-paced world of financial services. They burn out, become paranoid, develop depressions, suffer strokes or commit suicide because they see no way out. All this happens to wizards in Rosæ Crux, too.

This is where those external costs come in. Internal costs make it difficult for the magic to fit in because the consequences seem so arbitrary. Why does the magic require you to sacrifice that small child? Why do you need the blood of the fourth son of the fifth house of Doo-Wap? Sure, all magic rules are arbitrary, but some of them just seem to be arbitrary chosen to cause the protagonist pain. Well, of course the protagonists have to face consequences for their actions—that's what makes the story interesting, after all—but that's where external costs come in. As random blogger asks: What about the villagers in the town that you just blocked off with a landslide? What about everybody else in the city that your calling heaven's fire upon? Needed to bend some water on the fly and grabbed it from the nearby plant life? Congrats, you just destroyed the livelihood of the man you were sent to befriend. Nice job breaking it, hero!

Focusing on external rather than internal costs makes the magic fit in more elegantly because, if magic is how your characters manipulate the world around them, external costs better mimic the challenges that we face in real life. The laws of thermodynamics are fundamentally simple. Heat flows from hot to cold. The universe becomes more disordered. Well, work with me here: though these assumptions are still of some debate, particularly the latter, let's assume that we're responsible for global warming, and that global warming is responsible for all sorts of environmental ills. Did thermodynamics declare that the price of our teleportation would be starvation from more severe droughts, billions of dollars in property damage from more severe wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes, or immeasurable loss in human life?

Like any intervention, magic can have unwanted side effects - especially if the spell doesn't work the way the caster intended. But even "properly used" and "well-done" magic may have side effects. A place where magic is worked frequently may develop "parasitic morphic resonances" or other strangenesses. (This is something yet to explore in Rosæ Crux. A new spell may enter morphic resonance with older spells, causing it to yield an unexpected outcome.)

It would be impossible for any storyteller to match the complex interactions that underlie the real world. But the base concept is not: instead of having the All-Truth amulet simply require the sacrifice of a loved one in order to unleash its power, work your plot to be a series of unhappy coincidences, or, better yet, a thirty gambit pileup, which leads the hero to such an unwelcome choice. A cost as simple as having to rest and recuperate for a day, dismissed by random blogger as too temporary, more closely mimics the result of real-world exertion and, through clever plotting, can be just as devastating and much more satisfying then a more direct but less natural cost. Is it, for example, the magic itself which turns you insane in some mysterious and dangerous way, or the social ostracization that comes with being known and talked to only for what your magic can do, and then, by poor allocation of your limited resources, failing to use that magic effectively when it counted the most? I myself empathize more with the latter.

You name it. Magicians in Rosæ Crux have to rest and recuperate for some time (from a few hours to several days, depending on the spell) after working magic, and, as I said, they may crack under the stress. Also, they are often considered cranky, like the "nerd" phenomenon in information technology here (and there, too). Magic requires long study and a large amount of specialist knowledge, and magicians therefore tend to be lopsided individuals.

I was thinking implications for culture, for production, for economics - even at the most obvious level. Why is there no ice cream in the Forgotten Realms? Why has nobody created a police state with divination? Why do conventional armies even exist? Why is political organisation and technology approximately the same as a generic medieval country?

Yes, indeed. These are things which are fun to explore, and I'd love to see more works do so.

Right. Many fantasy worlds do not take the social, economic, military etc. ramifications of magic into account. A society where magic is rampant just won't work like Medieval Europe. It probably wouldn't work like modern Western Europe, either, though.

One way to go would be to have a world where magic does the job of modern technology, with people commuting to work on flying carpets and watching news and soap operas on crystal balls.

Ooh, magitek! I like. I love how, in The Last Airbender, the trains in Ba Sing Se are moved through earth bending, and how earth bending is used for the mail in Oma Shu, and how they propel submarines with water bending. I even love the mundane utilities, like how Katara using waterbending to stir soup while cooking. And then Korra started off like it might also look into the social effects of bending but then veered off into a much more boring story. Korra also has the lightningbenders producing electricity, which is great and all, but brings up another one of these "basic societal impact" questions: why are magicians always just throwing fireballs at each other instead of using them to boil water to turn turbines to move electrons?

A very valid objection.

But that is IMHO silly, and literally drains the magic out of magic.

Ah, well, mileage may vary and all. I recall that zompist said something similar about Almea:

I don't like fantasy magic systems that can be used like technology. Partly this is because I think it misses the point of fantasy— it's not supposed to be read like Popular Mechanics with altered physical laws. And partly it's because magic at the D&D level is just incompatible with a premodern world. You wouldn't have kings and peasants; you'd have essentially our modern world, with light spells in place of light bulbs and teleportation in place of cars.

This does make me wonder why I love functional magic and magitek so much, when by all rights it does render magic much less mysterious and quite similar to technology. But there's still something different between flying by innate ability and flying with an Iron Man suit. I think part of it is that a world with technology carries a lot of baggage about how we expect that technology to behave as an extension of the technology as we know today, whereas magic allows you to discard much of that baggage. I really like the idea of modern fantasy in the sense that magic is used to improve society, where the natural consequence of magic is things such as long-distance travel and communication, but in that I enjoy the opportunity to create and experience settings that still have distinct differences from our world. To go back to WeepingElf's point about commuting to work on flying carpets, I do agree that it's silly when you have essentially the same society as ours except with one-to-one magical replacements. New York with flying carpets and crystal balls instead of taxies and televisions can be a sort of silly fun, but what's really interesting is to stop, really consider the side effects of your magic system, and see where it leads you. In the end, a society where people can create fire on the fly would look no more like modern New York than it would medieval Europe.

Fair. What I called "silly" was a society that works just like modern America, with the only difference that all the gadgets, from cars to TV sets, are magical instead of technological. Hence the "flying carpet commuters" and "crystal ball soap operas" of settings like Amazing Engine: Magitech (of which I only know what I have read in various reviews, so I won't dwell any further on it). However, even that is not really as silly as I said a few days ago. Who is there to tell us that "magic doesn't work that way"? Yet, I do not see the point of this. Now we have an altered reality, where things work differently than "at home", so why just emulate the world as we know it? The "literary value" of magic lies in the exploration of a world where certain things are different. But on the other hand, if the conworld is too different from the world we know, the many differences appear random and leave the reader dazed and confused.

So for Rosæ Crux, I decided to make only a few changes, one of them being that magic works. There are also Elves and Dwarves, though they are only human beings with "Elvish" and "Dwarvish" cultures, and, as a consequence of this, a new religion (called "Rosicrucianism", hence the name of the conworld) and some other deviations in history. But otherwise, the world is very similar to ours. Indeed, this project, especially the idea of having magic in a modern high-tech setting, was partly inspired by Almea, which is also technologically more advanced than the usual Middle-earth-rip-off D&D worlds.

[Aili Meilani]

@Sevly: I can't +1 this enough.

In my own conworld of the Divine Plane, most magic miracles are basically "action-replay-ing reality"--quite literally, as they basically "hack" into the laws of physics and change them around for a limited amount of time. Thus, miracles let one do that which is normally impossible, such as affecting incorporeal objects with your physical body (by basically going into the part of reality's "physics engine" that says "COLLISION_WITH_INCORPOREAL: NO" and brute-force hacking it into "YES")

I was thinking about something like that once. I ended up taking it to the extreme: the universe was a Lisp (let's pretend the dialect used is Universe Lisp) program simulating the four basic forces with some very provisional support for more high-level stuff like living things, with limited REPL available to those who know how to access it.

Thanks to Lisp being an extremely dynamic language, you can monkey-patch just about anything. You want to make gravity 5% stronger? Sure, you can do that. You can define your own physics, if you really want.

Of course, this kind of "magic" is hard to use effectively. First, there's the problem that you have to know Lisp to do anything. That's quite a hurdle by itself, because the only way to learn the Universe Lisp is by trying to use it. There's no tutorial, no documentation, no nothing.

Second, knowing the programming language alone won't buy you much, you have to intimately know the code you want to modify. You don't want to accidentally redefine an important function in a way that makes it spew errors all over the place. This is, of course, assuming you know which functions are the ones important for you just know. The language and the REPL won't help you. There's no global symbol array or anything like that. Of course, it's not like the symbol names would, at least initially, tell you anything anyway. Universe Lisp, being a well-behaved real-world-originated programming language, is English-centric. Which is, for obvious reasons, a total nonsense for you if you live in the universe.

Okay, so you managed to learn Universe Lisp and spent half of your life analyzing the code to learn which parts do what? You're still screwed, unless you're a particle physicist. As I said, the support for high-level stuff is very provisional. Which means you'll probably spent most of your time messing around will elementary particles. Good luck.


I eventually ditched the idea for three reasons:
1. I know myself enough to know I'd surely want to implement it. As in write a universe simulator.
2. The barrier-to-entry is ridiculously high.
3. The system feels woefully underspecified. There's too much stuff I'd have to worry about to make it work. See also #1.

That said, I think the implications of such a system would be very interesting.

[Sevly]

I beg to differ about the internal cost part. Namely, if they are consistently integrated to form a part of the world's physics, they can make perfect sense. I like to go with simply making magic tiring to use; the biological processes that I should really work out properly some time that allow you to make use of magic simply take a lot of energy, so if you go around casting spells you will end up hungry and tired and generally unfit for anything very quickly. And possibly short of breath, if I'm not misremembering how the whole ATP cycle works.

Oh no, I quite agree that internal costs of magic can feel quite natural when they imitate the internal costs of other natural things. Physical exhaustion is a natural choice.

Even if magic is not physically exhausting, it may still be mentally exhausting. In this world, people go crackers if they exert their mind too heavily, as often seen in people involved in the fast-paced world of information technology or the even faster-paced world of financial services. They burn out, become paranoid, develop depressions, suffer strokes or commit suicide because they see no way out. All this happens to wizards in Rosæ Crux, too.

Yes, that's a very good way of looking at it, and when you explain it like that it does seem quite natural as well.

Another idea might be to simply extend Newton's third law - magic allows you to project energy in rather curious ways but the same always happens to you. You would need to work out how non-straightforward applications interact with this, though.

Indeed. Actually, mentioning Newton's laws reminds me of one of the ideas that I've been toying with, which I call pull channels, where channelers can create anchors on objects and link those anchors together to create a channel, which essentially acts as an invisible rope. Each channeler has a finite amount of energy, which varies according to innate ability and experience, that they can apply to their channels: they can apply all the energy to one channel, or they can apply one-tenth of the energy to ten channels, and so on. Then, when a channel is energized it contracts with an amount of force proportional to the energy applied, thus pulling the anchors, and the objects to which they are attached, towards each other.

This system provides for a sort of telekinesis, but with several limitations. First, as their name suggests, pull channels can only be used to pull, rather than to push. This is a direct consequence of the underlying "rope", which can apply a force in tension but not in compression. Thus a channeler who needs to push two objects apart must instead pull each object to a distant anchor, which can be difficult because, Second, anchors can only be applied by physically touching an object. This makes it difficult to use pull channeling without foreplanning, especially over long distances, although the logistics are simplified by the fact that channelers can work with anchors created by others. (Of course, that in itself is both a blessing and a curse, since your enemies can potentially use your anchors against you.) It also makes it downright impossible to use pull channels to deflect bullets in the like, which is an unfortunate limitation that I'm still trying to work around. (I mean, I like the difficulties it implies, but I also want to work with gunpowder fantasy and projectile deflection is pretty useful for that.)

Third, and this is where Netwon's third law comes in, the tightening of the channel exerts the same force in both directions. You can easily retrieve your pen from across the table through an anchor around your palm. If you try to use the same setup to pull down a tree, you'll be dragged forcefully to its trunk and, if you're particularly lucky, might just dislocate your arm. Ouch! To actually uproot a tree you'll need to anchor your channel against something a bit more weighty—like, say, your house.

The more interesting half requires some exposition. When a spell is cast, the mana is channeled from the earth, and upon completion of the spell, the expended mana remains in the air and slowly settles back down into the earth, where it is able to recharge without interference from whatever particles whizzing around out in the open air. The more powerful the spell, the more mana expended, the longer it takes the mana to settle and recharge. This is called the Mana Cycle.

Yeah, this is another setup that I like. Cycles of depletion and regeneration are so common in nature—water cycle, phosphorus cycle—that a mana cycle is a very natural addition. This also makes me think that it might be interesting to have a similar elementalish system where earth mages draw power from the earth and reject it to the air, while air mages draw power from the air and reject it to the earth, so that the activities of each complement the other, sort of like the carbon-oxygen exchange between plants and animals.

That said, I very much agree on the whole external costs thing. It is worth remembering though that consideration of the world as a whole is a very niche hobby, and also very complicated. For stories, or games, or whatever that focus less on the world itself and more on something on a more abstract level I hold that other kinds of magic systems have their place in these settings.

For sure, although I actually don't do that much conworlding myself and generally look at magic systems from a storytelling perspective, from which I would agree that while a great story can be told without working out the detailed impacts of magic on the world, my favourite stories still weave indirect impacts of magic into the plot.


Hmm I had some more points for Kath, Drydic, and Weeping [oh! and another post to read!] but this post is already getting long and I have to run to class. Thermo, actually. Anyways, later.

[ObsequiousNewt]

I've had a story floating in my head for a while, where the form of "magic" is that anything that can be proven to exist, with mathematical logic, thus exists, and this power is known only to a small few: Kile, Eli, and November, who are joined by the protagonists, Q, Seymour, Xeb, and Washington, to defeat the villain, Justin Thyme. (As you can see, I did not go lightly on the names, although five of them are aliases and one is a nickname.)

Of course, the story is a lot more convoluted and interesting than that, and I should really write it someday.

[Pole, the]

Indeed. Actually, mentioning Newton's laws reminds me of one of the ideas that I've been toying with, which I call pull channels, where channelers can create anchors on objects and link those anchors together to create a channel, which essentially acts as an invisible rope. […]

This system provides for a sort of telekinesis, but with several limitations. First, as their name suggests, pull channels can only be used to pull, rather than to push. This is a direct consequence of the underlying "rope", which can apply a force in tension but not in compression. Thus a channeler who needs to push two objects apart must instead pull each object to a distant anchor, which can be difficult because, […]

Third, and this is where Netwon's third law comes in, the tightening of the channel exerts the same force in both directions. You can easily retrieve your pen from across the table through an anchor around your palm. If you try to use the same setup to pull down a tree, you'll be dragged forcefully to its trunk and, if you're particularly lucky, might just dislocate your arm. Ouch! To actually uproot a tree you'll need to anchor your channel against something a bit more weighty—like, say, your house.

Is your name Brandon Sanderson?

[Sevly]

Oh no, I quite agree that internal costs of magic can feel quite natural when they imitate the internal costs of other natural things.

To clarify, I think WeepingElf said it best:

Does that mean that there is no supernatural "court of law" that deals out "penalties" for using magic? Yes. Does that mean that there is no way magic can "tax" spellcasters? No.

Internal costs are not bad per say; it's just that, when they seem to require some external entity or "court of law" to apply them, then the magic becomes layered on top of the world instead of being part of the world's natural workings. For example, in Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series, "There are three things you cannot do. You can't use your power for selfish advantage, you can't use it to do harm to others, and you can't use it to kill." This is all well and good if you consider your magic system to be intelligent in itself, or driven, perhaps, by the whims of the gods, who would be perfectly capable of making such moral judgements as "selfish" or "harmful", but it seperates the magic from the natural world which, as we all know, has no such notion of morality. I prefer it when the costs of magical actions are simple and mimic the costs of other regular physical actions, because the world as a whole then seems to be more cohesive, but of course that's just one way of viewing things. Many people prefer magic to be a mysterious entity, rather than a set of fixed quasi-phyiscal rules.

Is your name Brandon Sanderson?

Yup, you caught me. It's the ZBB's second celebrity appearance in as many days. (But seriously, obviously I need to read more of his work. Which series is that?)

[WeepingElf]

@Sevly: I can't +1 this enough.

In my own conworld of the Divine Plane, most magic miracles are basically "action-replay-ing reality"--quite literally, as they basically "hack" into the laws of physics and change them around for a limited amount of time. Thus, miracles let one do that which is normally impossible, such as affecting incorporeal objects with your physical body (by basically going into the part of reality's "physics engine" that says "COLLISION_WITH_INCORPOREAL: NO" and brute-force hacking it into "YES")

I was thinking about something like that once. I ended up taking it to the extreme: the universe was a Lisp (let's pretend the dialect used is Universe Lisp) program simulating the four basic forces with some very provisional support for more high-level stuff like living things, with limited REPL available to those who know how to access it.

Thanks to Lisp being an extremely dynamic language, you can monkey-patch just about anything. You want to make gravity 5% stronger? Sure, you can do that. You can define your own physics, if you really want.

Of course, this kind of "magic" is hard to use effectively. First, there's the problem that you have to know Lisp to do anything. That's quite a hurdle by itself, because the only way to learn the Universe Lisp is by trying to use it. There's no tutorial, no documentation, no nothing.

Second, knowing the programming language alone won't buy you much, you have to intimately know the code you want to modify. You don't want to accidentally redefine an important function in a way that makes it spew errors all over the place. This is, of course, assuming you know which functions are the ones important for you just know. The language and the REPL won't help you. There's no global symbol array or anything like that. Of course, it's not like the symbol names would, at least initially, tell you anything anyway. Universe Lisp, being a well-behaved real-world-originated programming language, is English-centric. Which is, for obvious reasons, a total nonsense for you if you live in the universe.

Okay, so you managed to learn Universe Lisp and spent half of your life analyzing the code to learn which parts do what? You're still screwed, unless you're a particle physicist. As I said, the support for high-level stuff is very provisional. Which means you'll probably spent most of your time messing around will elementary particles. Good luck.


I eventually ditched the idea for three reasons:
1. I know myself enough to know I'd surely want to implement it. As in write a universe simulator.
2. The barrier-to-entry is ridiculously high.
3. The system feels woefully underspecified. There's too much stuff I'd have to worry about to make it work. See also #1.

That said, I think the implications of such a system would be very interesting.

These ideas remind me of this. Being one who was dissatified with arbitrary lists of fixed spells as in D&D-like RPGs, I was intrigued by that for some time, and experimented with a similar system. Later I felt that computer programming wasn't really the right model for magic, but I still wanted something like a "spell construction kit", and got attracted (like many other roleplayers) to the Ars Magica magic system. From there, it wasn't a long way to the way magic is handled in Rosæ Crux.

[Rhetorica]

I eventually ditched the idea for three reasons:
1. I know myself enough to know I'd surely want to implement it. As in write a universe simulator.
2. The barrier-to-entry is ridiculously high.
3. The system feels woefully underspecified. There's too much stuff I'd have to worry about to make it work. See also #1.

That said, I think the implications of such a system would be very interesting.

I don't think the barrier is too high at all; if you're trying to construct a realistic universe it's absolutely essential. Kids learn programming at age eight, after all. I'm sure they could pick up some basics. FWIW, Thet's magic system is very similar (although I haven't gotten to the language part yet and am currently considering some kind of homoiconic Haskell) and there are plans to go ahead and implement it in an MMO prototype once time is available. For reals.

These ideas remind me of this. Being one who was dissatified with arbitrary lists of fixed spells as in D&D-like RPGs, I was intrigued by that for some time, and experimented with a similar system. Later I felt that computer programming wasn't really the right model for magic, but I still wanted something like a "spell construction kit", and got attracted (like many other roleplayers) to the Ars Magica magic system. From there, it wasn't a long way to the way magic is handled in Rosæ Crux.

I think I wrote the first half of a document similar to this when I was 16. One thing that all programmatic magic systems seem to lack is support for divination: if the universe is a dumb computer, how can it possibly interpret wishes like "give every person in town their favourite biscuit"?

To close the realism gap, I think you need to start off at the subatomic level and use libraries to create macroscale effects. I'm pretty sure that means any grand high wizards in such systems would have more or less the same skillset as a theoretical physicist. (Which Thet also does.)

Of course, that's not suitable for players of a P&P RPG, so some corners have to be cut. But still.

[Pole, the]

Is your name Brandon Sanderson?

Yup, you caught me. It's the ZBB's second celebrity appearance in as many days. (But seriously, obviously I need to read more of his work. Which series is that?)

Mistborn.

Ok, I'll explain.
(There can be some spoilers below.)

In the series there is a magic system called Allomancy. If you are an Allomancer, you can be either a Misting (and have access to only one power) or a Mistborn (and have 'em all!).
Allomancy is a rare thing (and Mistborns are even rarer) and you must be born with it or acquire it in by supernatural means.

Two of the powers are Pushing and Pulling. They are some mashup of telekinesis and magnetism: you can affect items that have some metal in it by a pushing or pulling force in your direction. You can also use either power to detect metals around you — so you see an ilusoric blue line connecting you with the item. And the Newton III applies as well!
That means for example:
· if you are a Coinshoot (Pushing Misting) or a Mistborn, you can levitate by throwing a few coins on the ground and then Pushing them; if you are a Mistborn, you can fetch them back afterwards ;
· if you are a Lurcher (Pulling Misting) or a Mistborn, you can levitate inside a building with a metal roof or inside a metal cage;
· if you are a Coinshoot or a Mistborn, you can deflect bullets — unless they are made of a non-metal material or aluminium, which is the neutral element;
· if you are a sufficiently skilled Mistborn, you can fly using some horseshoes by Pushing some of them to the ground and Pulling others back while still in the air;
· and some more equally awesome things.

But there are three magic systems used in the trilogy. And every type of the Metallic Arts has its price.

(i) Allomancy is powered by burning ingested metals in your stomach.
If you do not have the metal, you can't use Allomancy.
If you ingest it, but you are no Allomancer — or you are, but you don't burn it quickly enough, or it is not pure enough, it will be toxic for you and you can turn ill and die.
If you are too stupid to use Allomancy, you can kill yourself as a result of an irreasonable use. Imagine you are flying high in the air and suddenly you run out of your metal reserves.

(ii) In Feruchemy you can store your own properties for later use.
You, however, don't gain actually anything. You can be, for example, 50% lighter for an hour and then 50% heavier for another hour. Or 100% heavier for half an hour. Or 25% heavier for two hours.
You can use a given type of Feruchemy only having an appropriate metal with. You cannot store memories in gold or health in steel, for example.
You can store your properties and make yourself light, ill, slow, weak, for unlimited amount of time (as long as you have iron, gold, steel, pewter with you.
You can't use more of a property than you have already stored. You can't also use another people's Feruchemical metals.

(iii) In Hemalurgy you can use properties (physical, mental, Allomantic or Feruchemical) of another people.
There is a serious drawback of this method: you have to firstly kill (or maybe just seriously hurt, it is not certain) another person with a piece of metal, and then put that metal inside you.
You have to know the exact place, where you have to spike yourself — otherwise it won't work.
You also have to do it quickly — the charge stored in the metal is decreasing in time.
And by actively using Hemalurgy, you become heavily influenced by a Shard — a supernatural spiritual being, a main source of the magic in the world of Mistborn.

[Sevly]

Oh yeah, I was vaguely aware of the Mistborn series but I haven't actually read it. Sanderson is pretty awesome though.