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Shinizak
2022-04-28, 12:04 AM
What’s the most plausible excuse for why magic exists? Of any setting I mean. I’m never content with “magic just exists,” it’s just extremely unsatisfying. So what is your personal favorite?

I liked the pyre-flies in final fantasy 10, and how they were effectively used to conjure up dreams, memories, and ghost monsters. They were nebulous enough that they could be used to explain a LOT of fantastical powers and antagonists.

Anyway, what’s your favorite?

NichG
2022-04-28, 12:58 AM
I guess there are a couple...

One take is that the universe doesn't have strictly forward causality, but there are low level particles/energies which natively form tiny self-consistent time-travel loops in such a way that if the only way for self-consistency to happen is something very improbable to occur, that must occur. And if something very improbable could be made more probable if something else only slightly improbable happened, then that kind of exchange will be favored (basically like a kind of improbability budget getting shifted around). Things which respond to small signals with large changes in macroscopic behavior tend to be convenient lightning rods for improbability to ground itself out like that, and mages are people who have learned to configure their minds in various ways such that some large improbability is resolved only if the particular small improbability they focus on happens in their immediate future. Other kinds of spellwork can involve for example forcing the improbable chain of events to connect through things that are extremely robust, so rather than just letting probability flow as it wants to they have to 'hold out' against undesired improbable events being easier ways to resolve the conflict than the thing they're trying to make happen - dangerous to do in an organic brain since 'the person has a seizure and dies' might be better than fulfilling their byzantine wish, but more feasible in enchantments wrought in metal or crystal, or in magical creatures which have evolved structures designed to be robust against that kind of slippage. Higher level magics consist of chaining and connecting these improbabilities together into networks, traditions, massive delocalized engines and improbability transport networks.

Another one is the dream logic/consensus reality take. The only thing that actually exists is minds, and reality manifests from the barrier between the conscious and subconscious - minds have the ability to step outside of themselves within themselves, surprise themselves, hide things. That ambiguity is an opening that permits a mind to interact with another mind, rather than just being stuck in a solipsistic dream. As such, when minds come together and influence each-other through this pathway, there are mechanisms to accept and integrate events, or reject them. Strong enough rejection means that in the end, it wasn't you that the other mind was interacting with, it was just their subconscious - you kick yourself out of the shared reality by pushing too hard, so over time passive acceptance becomes more common than passive rejection, and some kind of coherent patchwork of contexts is created at a subconscious level. Awareness of this is excluded from the conscious level for the most part, but it's possible to learn to recognize it in the same sort of way you'd learn to lucid dream. That means that one can now consciously choose whether to accept or reject elements of reality. Even without that awareness, one could find that they're able to manipulate the collective subconscious with certain patterns even if they might not know why it works. And those whose subconscious is particularly strongly bent in certain ways will just passively alter the 'weft' of reality around them without even meaning to. At the highest level of intentional practice, one could step outside of the consensus entirely and create their own reality around themselves, fully consciously shaping the nature of the bridges they make with the consensus reality - this would be something like attaining godhood, in that they can fully reject any imposition of the consensus reality on themselves, even while retaining at least some ability to inject their own actions and desires into that consensus.

Mechalich
2022-04-28, 01:02 AM
The best generalized setup I've found is to treat the world as a simulation. It goes like this:

Someone, divine or otherwise, sets about creating the world
They develop a specialized programming language to do this
When they finish creation they leave the language in place, in case they need to tweak things later
In-world agents are able to access this language (probably to allow for divine avatars or the abilities of deputies like angles and demons)
Mortal in-world agents figure out a way to access this language as well. That's the magic system.


This matches well with mortals and monsters having the same type of powers, but different capabilities of using it, and with magic being reliant on esoteric linguistic structures that don't appear to have any in-universe meaning.

There are a number of examples of fantasy worlds that are explicitly setup this way. For example in Star Ocean, Till the End of Time, the world familiar to your party is a simulation used as a game and you eventually step out of it and smash in the faces of the people who are trying to delete the instance. OOTS, actually, also operates in this fashion, as Thor explained to Durkon that wizards can perform more or less the same arts as deities, only that without divine quiddity they are weaker and less real.

Mastikator
2022-04-28, 01:35 AM
Parallel universe with entirely different set of physics, magic is just careful swapping between universes.

Bohandas
2022-04-28, 03:15 AM
Parallel universe with entirely different set of physics, magic is just careful swapping between universes.

Or h=just the default game world has diffetent physics to begin with

Mastikator
2022-04-28, 03:18 AM
Or h=just the default game world has diffetent physics to begin with

Then the origin is just "the same as the rest of the world"?

Yora
2022-04-28, 03:24 AM
Magic is a fundamental aspect of the underlying laws of reality. The magical creatures who were produced by magic at the beginning of time naturally know how to cast spells, and their understanding of what they do gave the first mortal sorcerers the guidance to discover how to cast spells themselves.

I guess magic just does exist.

Vahnavoi
2022-04-28, 03:31 AM
"Magic" is a psychological phenomenom and an action. It is born when humans come face to face with causation they can't quite understand and develop rituals, spells and charms in attempt to control such causation.

The common rules of magic are that like controls like (law of symbolism), things that have been in contact remain connected (law of contagion), mental events have direct influence over physical events (law of mind over matter) and that magical things only exist as long as the magician is focused on them (law of object impermanence).

None of the above cares of whether magic works - non-working magic is still magic. What, then, decides if magic works or not? Daemons and Paths. Daemons are the unperceived causal agents or forces, the men behind the curtains who make the world sometimes adhere to the will of the human magician. Paths are the ways which connect the practice of magic to the Daemon who does the work. But don't confuse Daemons for origin of magic. Daemons don't originate magic, they simply facilitate it. If you remove the human practicing magic and the need to interprete them from the equation, there is no magic in what the Daemon does from the Daemon's perspective - it is merely taking the necessary steps according to rules of its world to achieve a task. If you try to be clever and ask "what is th origin of Daemons, then?", you are asking for origin of everything, for Daemons are not of one kind, nor are Paths. The things that make magic work are not unified nor constant in this world, nevermind across all possible worlds. I stress again: non-working magic is still magic. The psychological phenomenom and the practice of magic can and do exist even in absence of any Path or Daemon.

As a corollary to the above, magicians can be split into two main categories:

First, the possessor of true knowledge. These people have peeked behind the curtains and know at least something of how their world works, thus making them an independent agent within it. They are magicians not in their own eyes, but in the eyes of others, who do not know which Paths and Daemons they are using for their work.

Second, the follower of belief. These people do not know how the world truly works, but they have, wittingly or unwittingly, stumbled upon a Path to a Daemon who is at least intermittently co-operative with their needs. They are dependent on their Paths and their Daemons and if stripped from them, would be left unable to continue their work.

Both kinds exist and have always existed in our world. You might not call people in the first group magicians and might argue against doing so, on the premise that you can count yourself among their ranks. There is a a better than even chance that your protest is hollow, because you truly belong in the second group, and simply do not want to admit to yourself how ignorant you are of Paths and Daemons of your world.

Grod_The_Giant
2022-04-28, 07:59 AM
"Magic" is a complete theoretical description of reality, from the movement of galaxies to the quantum level where everything smears out into probabilities. Where science explains everything in terms of the four fundamental forces, magic casts all of existence as the byproduct of interactions between the nine* fundamental elements.

The trick is that science and magic are both true. Magic seems impossible when we try to understand it through the lens of science, but only because its internally consistent laws and principles are totally different from the ones we know.

The inverse is also true, though. If all you know are the laws of magic, you'll never be able to explain something like a computer or internal combination engine. You can get close, like how you can describe the expansion of a fireball using science, but eventually you'll have to say "and at this point the demispirits do something that's theoretically allowed but impossibly unlikely," just like the poor scientist will eventually have to say "and at this point an impossibly unlikely quantum fluctuation occurred."

It's just coincidence that while science needs a whole external assemblage to create a blast of fire, with magic the "machinery" is built of thoughts and words--but a flamethrower will work regardless of who you hand it to, while casting a fireball spell requires a great deal of personal expertise.

(There's also a third equally-valid method for understanding the world, where the fundamental underpinnings of reality are imagination and willpower--that's how psionic stuff works)



*Earth, water, fire, air, wood, flesh, thought, sound, and light.

Lord Raziere
2022-04-28, 09:16 AM
There can be many explanations, serving many purposes.

For example, the origin of magic could simply be primordial chaos or potentiality all things come from. the world was created from this chaos and thus everything leftover is what is called magic, when really magic is the norm and the world created is the exception to it. to harness magic therefore is to carve out parts of the primordial chaos into familiar or controlled forms. The world is infinite mayhem and all order even physics is mere artifice to filter it out into useable magic so that we mere mortals can live at all. (Exalted uses this)

In other examples, it could be an alien force that came to the planet and changed or disrupted its natural order with its presence. a foreign thing from beyond the world that disrupts and remake the ecology that everyone has had to adapt to, often from some meteor or alien introducing it. this also often causes mutations in the local life forms so that they can use magic naturally. (Elden Ring, Chrono Trigger, FF7, stuff like that use this explanation)

another origin of magic is that it is a thing of thoughts and dreams, and the act of casting is making dreams reality, that magic inhabits its own world of thought connected to our own made of our ideas and imaginations. (WH40k, Dragon Age, Dresden Files and other urban fantasies)

another origin is....that magic is simply enlightenment. as you understand more and more about reality, the more you can manipulate it like a god until you basically become one. this understanding is not through books or science, but introspection, awareness and mystical revelation. there is no energy to magic, reality when you know the truth is simply manipulable like this but most never realize it. (Elder Scrolls, Mage the Awakening, things like that)

a good potential origin is that magic and its uses is what resulted from killing a certain god or godlike entity long ago or perhaps multiple ones, releasing their power into the world. the remnants of magic are thus could be shards or aspects of that beings power in various forms.

if you want to go super-scifi, magic could be the result of a strange plants producing magical energy as a byproduct of photosynthesis and growing, converting sunlight into magic naturally and others simply figuring out ways they can use it. as in, magic is literally produced BY the plants, its the SOURCE of all magic, there is no greater cosmic magical thing that made the plants themselves, they can just... DO that.

Anonymouswizard
2022-04-28, 09:18 AM
The universe is shoddily constructed, the logical result of it being subcontracted about six times. Oh sure the cracks have been patched over, but with a bit of luck and effort you can dig around and find those half-finished bits and bodge jobs that if you push them just right let the impossible happen.


Alternatively I'm very fond of the humanocentric universes in Mage: the Ascension and Unknown Armies. Reality is defined by the whims of the population as a whole, and magic is being passionate and bloody minded enough that you can batter down the passive beliefs of those nearby, grab the universe by the ears, and say that this is how reality works. This works somewhat differently in each game, but in broad strokes if you disbelieve in your toaster enough it won't cook your bread.

Unknown Armies has even more quibbles with things like Archetypes, the necessity of a paradox to access certain kinds of magic, and competing in-universe theories, but consensus reality fits most of the facts (including magick changing massively over the 20th century). Actually that shoddy construction theory is also from Unknown Armies, is not mutually exclusive with a consensus reality, and makes a lot of sense. Would you trust humanity with constructing a functional universe without any bugs?

The required level of will and passion is incredible though. We're talking literal one in a million levels of rarity, and not everybody with it is going to have the motivation or insight to become a wizard. But if you can please enjoy your form of magick based around filing systems or whatever.

Kurt Kurageous
2022-04-28, 09:31 AM
Magic is the manifestation of will.

Whether that was from a god, gods, sentient universe, or an individual is a moot point.

The means to bring about this manifestation gives us the different kinds of casters in the game. But it all comes back to will/wanting it to happen.

Willie the Duck
2022-04-28, 09:35 AM
Then the origin is just "the same as the rest of the world"?

That can work. Have a world that works like our own (or close enough for casual inspection, if you want things like square-cube-breaking giants to be non-magical) as the default, but then magic can be another layer of allowable physics within said world. Perhaps it is like various exotic particles or particle constructs that can exist in our universe (various bosons, high atomic number elements), but generally don't except in various high-energy experiments. Spellcasters and magic items and the like can be (to mix my chemistry/physics analogy even more) enzymes and stabilizers towards those states.

Bohandas
2022-04-28, 01:36 PM
Basically additional fundamental interactions beyond the familiar four

KorvinStarmast
2022-04-28, 02:06 PM
I’m never content with “magic just exists,” it’s just extremely unsatisfying. How do you feel about gravity? Magnetism?

My favorite 'why magic exists' scheme is very basic, as it is based on the tension between Chaos and Order. The original state of All That Is was Chaos. Taking the stuff of Chaos (which is ever changing) and making permanent, or semi-permanent stuff from it is the function of Order, and is usually an exercise of the mind or the will of {some being}. When successful, that exercise of the mind or the will is often described as magic.

Under this scheme, magic is as dangerous as it is powerful (to the user and to others) but it is also potentially beneficial.

In time most things eventually revert to a more disordered state and either approximate chaos or indeed rejoin primordial Chaos that is the original stuff of Everything.

My most useful mental model for the metaphysics that supports the above is the seven elements of earth, wind, fire, water, spirit, time and location.

Cikomyr2
2022-04-28, 09:03 PM
Magic is a storytelling trope that can be explained or left unexplained, at the leisure of the author.

Is it actually important to your lore and story world? If you have people digging for an answer, then you better have an answer ready. Any answer would be satisfying as long as you keep versimilitude in your universe.

If you want to make the entire plot or setting revolving around the nature of magic ("we live in the ruins of a cyberpunk civilization who created an energy field accessible for use by everyone who studied how") or you can just make it a hippy-like universal truth ("magic is the fundamental threads of reality that binds the Planescape together").

Magic is what you make it to be. Dont let yourself be boxed by expectation of what magic "should be".

Imbalance
2022-04-28, 09:09 PM
There's no such thing. That's what's so magical about it.

Chauncymancer
2022-04-29, 02:07 PM
Magic is the behavior of the Subtle Etheric Body of a mage. Arcane magic is learning to reach out with your body into the Aetheric Plasma that passes through all things and thus connects all things in its currents. You change the currents to create an essential nature of some kind (hot, light, melting) and then bind it to the Etheric Body of the spells target.

Magic is the behavior of an arcane or divine spirit leaving the physical plane. Casters prepare their spells by summoning an arcane spirit, such as a mote of Ignition, or a seraph of Motion, and then bind the being summoned spirit into their own body. The spell 'hangs' off of the mage, following them around until they are ready to 'cast' the spell, which is simply a matter of conducting the spirit to be coterminous with the spells target and then allowing it to revert to its primal nature. Spell effects are simply the side effects of this reversion process.

Magic is an invocation of a commandment of the divine pact, an agreement between the gods of the immaterial and eternal planes and all things living or numbered. Spells are individual paragraphs and clauses of the pact which when invoked in full, specifying the parties of the second, third, agreements implied herein, etc, compel the divine entities to execute their predetermined duty.

Tawmis
2022-04-29, 02:18 PM
What’s the most plausible excuse for why magic exists? Of any setting I mean. I’m never content with “magic just exists,” it’s just extremely unsatisfying. So what is your personal favorite?
I liked the pyre-flies in final fantasy 10, and how they were effectively used to conjure up dreams, memories, and ghost monsters. They were nebulous enough that they could be used to explain a LOT of fantastical powers and antagonists.
Anyway, what’s your favorite?

For my own home brew, the gods are responsible.
The gods discovered a primative world (pretty much dinosaurs) - where there was already a "god" there - he/it - did nothing but thrive on the war between dinosaurs.
These new gods, banished him (and he's furious!) - and began reshaping the world.
In doing so they introduced magic.
As the races evolved, some learned how to manipulate that magic (Wizards), which led to portals/planes being accessed that shouldn't have (Warlocks began making packs).
This led to angels and demons getting involved, and eventually some were born with magic (Sorcerers).
As the mortals grew - the gods called on them (Clerics, Paladins) and others learned to use the magic with nature (Druids, Rangers).
So on and so on.

Draconi Redfir
2022-04-30, 07:39 AM
it's not my setting, but i remember reading a thread here on the forums once that took place on a spaceship or a simulation or something, but nobody alive was fully aware of this fact.


So "Magic" was done by speaking "magic words" and using "Mystical hand motions" to cast "Spells"

in reality, the caster was activating the ship's environmental controls, pressing buttons on an invisible keyboard (invisible due to the ship being damaged or something) and speaking commands in the ship's original language to cause a brief, rapid change in the ship's simulated environment.

So things like Control Weather would just be the cleric programming rain into the ship's environmental control, and Fireball could be activating a hidden weapon's system or triggering a localized Contamination-purging device.


So less "Magic", more "Sufficiently advanced technology"




In my personal setting, think the closest thing i have to an explanation is two factors:

Magic comes from the soul

and Magic ages like a fine wine.

So if you're a normal, every day person, and you spend a lot of time with a particular item, lets say a necklace, and that necklace is very important to you, then that necklace just might become enchanted due to prolonged exposure to you and your care for it.

After that, the longer that enchanted necklace exists, the more powerful it will become. Even when you are dead and gone, that necklace will be more powerful in 100 years then it is now.

The most magical location in the setting is actually a place where a caveman who had an enchanted weapon of some kind got into a battle, but the weapon cracked but wasn't destroyed, so magic has just been leaking out of the thing for millions of years all while growing more and more powerful. Thanks to this occurring in a valley surrounded by mountains, it has kept the magic contained and concentrated. Slowly creating this setting's version of the Feywild, and the creatures inside evolving with exposure to this raw magic in mind, creating fey things like gnomes.

wilphe
2022-04-30, 09:15 AM
Magic is a creation of our world, or at least those parts of it where the world view is informed by things like science, enlightenment and rationality - or banality and mundanity.

Its a word for something that doesn't exist and can therefore be clearly defined and when writing about it writers in our world tend to draw a clear distinction between mundane and magical.

In an actual magical world it is very likely there will not be a clear difference and people will no more understand you if you say you don't believe in magic anymore than a fish can disbelieve the existence of water.

This tends to be hard to write though

OldTrees1
2022-04-30, 10:05 AM
Level 1:
It is not actually magic, it is physics and technology that differ from our world.

In universe:
They call it magic because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They did not understand how it works, so they made up explanations and called it magic. Some left it at that. Others tinkered to expand their knowledge of how to use it, without understanding why it works. A few study it and find out parts of how it works, but they too call it magic because by now the word "magic" in universe has a different meaning than the word "magic" in our language. Magic is just a field of physics and a category of technology.

Out of universe:
The game calls it magic because we bring preconceptions about what is possible. It is more comfortable to describe it as magical (our comfortable reference frame) rather than learn a new language (the in universe reference frame).

Level 2:
Sorcerers are hard to explain. Sometimes they are described as using their force of personality to demand reality change, and reality complying. You could base the entire physics and technology of magic around this principle that reality can change itself upon request. When a dragon beats its wings, reality complies to allow the dragon to fly. Wizards speak to reality through a complex low access user interface. Divine Clerics speak to reality through an easy to use restrictive medium access user interface created through their faith. Sorcerers have a high access very nitpicky terminal but no assisting documentation. Most input is gibberish but they remember the ones that worked.

PS: There is also the phrase "any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science" - Agatha Heterodyne (Girl Genius).

Cluedrew
2022-04-30, 11:55 AM
Then the origin is just "the same as the rest of the world"?This is my default explanation, even if there is a solid line between the magical and non-magical parts of the world, usually they come from the same place.

I have broken this rule many times for various settings. Some magic entered the setting later, like when one world "bumped into" another and the interference caused strange effects. Sometimes magic forces predate the universe and may have played a role in its creation. In at least one it was created by a team of researchers as an infrastructure project.


Magic is a creation of our world, [...] Its a word for something that doesn't exist and can therefore be clearly defined and when writing about it writers in our world tend to draw a clear distinction between mundane and magical.To the point when "magic is right" people start proclaiming it is not magic and science appropriates it. I've done some study on what people considered magic in the past and it was much fuzzier back in the day. Something that creeps into my settings fairly frequently.

This also reminds me of Avatar: The Last Air-Bender where bending is not considered magic. I think they might call spirit world shenanigans magic, but bending is just a useful cultural practice. Other than the fact you just have to have a certain aptitude for it to do it at all it is pretty interchangeable with many other practices.

Vahnavoi
2022-04-30, 01:28 PM
PS: There is also the phrase "any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science" - Agatha Heterodyne (Girl Genius).

A better formulation would be to say that empirical analysis of magic is a science. It naturally follows that any application of science of magic is technology. In any case, real life anthropologist have already found out that sharp delineation between "magic", "technology" and "science" is a cultural trope and in actual application they differ mostly, or even only, in idioms used to describe them. Magical thinking and ritual behaviours relate to the same cognitive abilities and attempts to learn through trial and error as empirical sciences do - which is why going back in history, a good chunk of proto-scientific academics and scholars were some flavor of magician, and created the mythical and fictive archetypes for wizards and clerics.

NichG
2022-04-30, 01:35 PM
Maybe rather than 'magic vs science' it's better to think of it more like 'magic vs technology' - more about the style of exploitation of the available forces than about whether some forces are natural and others supernatural.

I do tend to draw a distinction that 'magic' generally means forces which appear to operate in a cognitive fashion - any time physics cares about intent, resolves what someone 'means', reacts to words and language, is influenced by moral or karmic considerations, cares about equivalent exchange in terms of emotional or historical weight rather than raw materials, etc. The fictional impact of magic vs tech to me is that magic promises the possibility of a personal and internal relationship with power - by wanting something hard enough, thinking the right way, training and meditating, being born chosen, etc, this force is accessible at a personal level and one's circumstances can be directly negotiated with. Whereas technology is more about external power - multitudes build and maintain the infrastructure that lets you replicate your favorite food, teleport around, etc - you can understand how those things work and how to build them and invent new ones, but that doesn't make those effects innately something you can do on your own.

Basically, fictional universes with magic are (to me) ones where parts the laws of physics are best understood by modeling them like you would an intelligence, rather than through invariant mathematically simple local interactions (simple as in having few terms/constants, not simple to calculate or understand necessarily).

Of course stuff blurs these lines, and those blurred cases can be the most fun... It looks like the universe is intelligence, but actually it was just a mirror of people's intelligence; it's 'magic' and individually cognitively accessible, but enchanting lets people automate that cognition so it behaves more like tech.

Vahnavoi
2022-04-30, 03:05 PM
The most relevant blurred line is when mechanical technology begins approaching the point where a machine can purposefully be made to act as a Daemon - interpreter of human language, emotions and intent, translating those into physical action. Modern information technology already qualifies - I'm drawing two thousand year old symbols mapped two human vocalizations on a screen, with the expectation that they'll be turned into unseen waves of energy capable of going through walls, their meaning preserved and transmitted to people I have never met.

NichG
2022-04-30, 03:26 PM
The most relevant blurred line is when mechanical technology begins approaching the point where a machine can purposefully be made to act as a Daemon - interpreter of human language, emotions and intent, translating those into physical action. Modern information technology already qualifies - I'm drawing two thousand year old symbols mapped two human vocalizations on a screen, with the expectation that they'll be turned into unseen waves of energy capable of going through walls, their meaning preserved and transmitted to people I have never met.

Well, when such things become so omnipresent and inescapable that society forgets how they work or where they came from, such that it becomes a feature of the self rather than the device. Or if it's hidden well enough.

E.g. society with so much automated autonomous surveillance that no one controls it anymore, but certain eigenbehaviors that look similar enough to those of past rulers get awarded different permissions from the system -> people come to believe that eating avocado toast for breakfast leads to financial fortune.

Bohandas
2022-04-30, 04:21 PM
Maybe rather than 'magic vs science' it's better to think of it more like 'magic vs technology' - more about the style of exploitation of the available forces than about whether some forces are natural and others supernatural.

I do tend to draw a distinction that 'magic' generally means forces which appear to operate in a cognitive fashion - any time physics cares about intent, resolves what someone 'means', reacts to words and language, is influenced by moral or karmic considerations, cares about equivalent exchange in terms of emotional or historical weight rather than raw materials, etc. The fictional impact of magic vs tech to me is that magic promises the possibility of a personal and internal relationship with power - by wanting something hard enough, thinking the right way, training and meditating, being born chosen, etc, this force is accessible at a personal level and one's circumstances can be directly negotiated with. Whereas technology is more about external power - multitudes build and maintain the infrastructure that lets you replicate your favorite food, teleport around, etc - you can understand how those things work and how to build them and invent new ones, but that doesn't make those effects innately something you can do on your own.

Basically, fictional universes with magic are (to me) ones where parts the laws of physics are best understood by modeling them like you would an intelligence, rather than through invariant mathematically simple local interactions (simple as in having few terms/constants, not simple to calculate or understand necessarily).

Or, similarly, where it operates in a top-down rather than a bottom-up fashion, starting with the big picture, and filling in the details from there, rather than starting with details and aggregating them to form a big picture.

(The closest real world analogy would probably be classical or relativistic mechanics versus quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics everything everything has and maintains a definite state, we always can say for sure where it is, where it's going, and how fast (and in relativity we can do the same thing once we specify a refrence frame), but on the scale of quantum mechanics, according to the copenhagen interpretation at any rate, the universe only keeps track of a particle's position and so forth in general terms, there's a general area where it probably is but it doesn;t have a specific location until some reaction or another occurs which forces it to commit to being either here or there. The universe knows its general vicinity and that determines its state, rather than the universe knowing its state and that determining its general vicinity. But this weak real world analogy falls far far short of what I'm talking about)

In a magical world you might get a similar lackadaisicality on a much much grander scale. You can make a wish for a spoon and the universe can grant it without you having to wish for a specific spoon, and it's highly plausible that certain highly magical creatures, particularly outsiders, might not have any organs until somebody cuts them open

This also gives the advantage that a lot of the game's abstractions can be handwaved as part of the magic of the world

Also, I think that ultimately this synergizes well with the Intelligence/Artificial Intelligence analogy (provided it's he kind that generates images (or text or whatever) rather than interpreting them), and it occurs to me that if we combine these with the multiple parallell universes idea earlier in this thread that they could all combine together to something that has the further advantage of also more-or-less literally describing a multi-player roleplaying game

Vahnavoi
2022-05-01, 12:28 AM
Also, I think that ultimately this synergizes well with the Intelligence/Artificial Intelligence analogy (provided it's he kind that generates images (or text or whatever) rather than interpreting them), and it occurs to me that if we combine these with the multiple parallell universes idea earlier in this thread that they could all combine together to something that has the further advantage of also more-or-less literally describing a multi-player roleplaying game

Reality-as-simulation, reality-as-dream and reality-by-consensus all dance around the idea that tabletop roleplaying games are behaviorally magic rituals, where the participants engage in symbolic actions to purportedly enter an altered state of concsiousness, to create a world that only exist when and as long as the participants spend mental effort on it. The obvious corollary being that the players, and specifically, the game master is the Demiurge / Evil Daemon of the illusory world. Some games already go all in with this, for example indie supplement for D&D and OSR games, Dragon Union, makes "Game master is God" into outright game rule and the roles of characters are adjusted to suit (f.ex., the Cleric has direct hotline to God and is responsible for holding the Fighter (=party leader) for following God's commandments.)

No brains
2022-05-01, 09:01 PM
My favorite origin of magic is when the primordial matter of the big bang slowed down enough to produce electrons. If electrons aren't magical, why can they do so many magical things? Shoot lighting! Grant life! Organize matter! Behave differently going backwards in time!

Mechalich
2022-05-02, 12:15 AM
Reality-as-simulation, reality-as-dream and reality-by-consensus all dance around the idea that tabletop roleplaying games are behaviorally magic rituals, where the participants engage in symbolic actions to purportedly enter an altered state of concsiousness, to create a world that only exist when and as long as the participants spend mental effort on it. The obvious corollary being that the players, and specifically, the game master is the Demiurge / Evil Daemon of the illusory world. Some games already go all in with this, for example indie supplement for D&D and OSR games, Dragon Union, makes "Game master is God" into outright game rule and the roles of characters are adjusted to suit (f.ex., the Cleric has direct hotline to God and is responsible for holding the Fighter (=party leader) for following God's commandments.)

I don't think that really holds for the Reality-as-Simulation setup. That one is based much more on how simulated realities actually operate. A simulated reality has a set of operational physics with agents in that reality that operate according to those physics, ie. ordinary NPCs. It may also have another set of agents that are able to access special exploits that violate those physics, whether specialized NPCs or PCs. We, as humans, have managed to build simplified simulated universes with this setup, such as No Man's Sky - which has 'magic' tech like teleportation to the hub zone that violates the procedural physics engine of the universe.

A lot of mythology has this sort of basic setup as well: there was some Creation event that just kind of happened or was conducted by an extinct lineage of deities, but when the present deities showed up they started mucking about in the world because it didn't fit their desires properly. Magic is simply the means they utilized.

Eldan
2022-05-02, 02:53 AM
Reality-as-simulation, reality-as-dream and reality-by-consensus all dance around the idea that tabletop roleplaying games are behaviorally magic rituals, where the participants engage in symbolic actions to purportedly enter an altered state of concsiousness, to create a world that only exist when and as long as the participants spend mental effort on it. The obvious corollary being that the players, and specifically, the game master is the Demiurge / Evil Daemon of the illusory world. Some games already go all in with this, for example indie supplement for D&D and OSR games, Dragon Union, makes "Game master is God" into outright game rule and the roles of characters are adjusted to suit (f.ex., the Cleric has direct hotline to God and is responsible for holding the Fighter (=party leader) for following God's commandments.)

Huh. You think with how many RPGs in the urban fantasy/weird fantasy/dark fantasy sector of the thematic map have taken inspiration from gnosticism, someone would have thought to call their GM the "Demiurge", but I actually can't think of a case.

Vahnavoi
2022-05-02, 03:19 AM
@Mechalich: dreams are simulations, they have their own operational logic and straightforward homologue to PC-NPC- distinction in the dreamer-dreamed-distinction. My point is that the worlds of tabletop roleplaying games are simulated in fundamentally dream-like manner, namely through functions of the human mind and brain.

---

@Eldan: it's something of a missed opportunity, yes.

Bohandas
2022-05-04, 02:48 AM
It occurs to me that in worlds where life force is a thing then that implies a life field and you could get spontaneous generation by excitation of that field, which could explain certain conjuration

Talakeal
2022-05-04, 03:56 AM
The best generalized setup I've found is to treat the world as a simulation. It goes like this:

Someone, divine or otherwise, sets about creating the world
They develop a specialized programming language to do this
When they finish creation they leave the language in place, in case they need to tweak things later
In-world agents are able to access this language (probably to allow for divine avatars or the abilities of deputies like angles and demons)
Mortal in-world agents figure out a way to access this language as well. That's the magic system.

.

This is more or less how it works in my setting.

The story of Prometheus is a metaphor for said code being leaked to mortals.

KorvinStarmast
2022-05-04, 09:04 AM
It occurs to me that in worlds where life force is a thing then that implies a life field and you could get spontaneous generation by excitation of that field, which could explain certain conjuration That's a thought I'll take with me.

This is more or less how it works in my setting.

The story of Prometheus is a metaphor for said code being leaked to mortals. I find magic-as-computer-code to be a terrible fit (magic is too chaotic for it to be computer code, see my initial post in this thread for where I see magic fitting) for a fantasy/swords and sorcery setting, but for futuristic genres maybe ... although I prefer psionics for that kind of setting.(A matter of taste, to be sure).

Vahnavoi
2022-05-04, 10:46 AM
Real computer programming is sufficiently chaotic that real programmers started using terms such as "magic" and "wizardry" in reference to non-transparent code. Hence the appeal in equating language of magic with programming languages in minds of contemporary people.

When applied to sword and sorcery, it's worth remembering that the protagonists of that genre are not meant to be programmers. They are meant to be equivalent of barely or non-literate layman using a smartphone: not only do they do not understand first thing about coding of the device, the user interface of the device has been actively designed to hide what is really happening within and be able to be used in total absence of understanding what is really happening.

Also, that all writing, reading and debugging of the code has to be done by humand hand, eye and mind, often with pre-printing press levels of technology.

Talakeal
2022-05-04, 06:03 PM
I find magic-as-computer-code to be a terrible fit (magic is too chaotic for it to be computer code, see my initial post in this thread for where I see magic fitting) for a fantasy/swords and sorcery setting, but for futuristic genres maybe ... although I prefer psionics for that kind of setting.(A matter of taste, to be sure).

It's an analogy, with the gods in the place of programmers and mortals in the place of users.

In practice, yeah, magic is much more chaotic and unpredictable than code would be for a variety of reasons.

KorvinStarmast
2022-05-05, 08:49 AM
It's an analogy, with the gods in the place of programmers and mortals in the place of users. It is an analogy I don't care for, in part because I have no mouth and I must scream.

In practice, yeah, magic is much more chaotic and unpredictable than code would be for a variety of reasons. Chaotic and dangerous is a theme that I prefer for magic: I find magic to be a bit too bowdlerized in the current style. (Tastes of course differ in that regard).

Bohandas
2022-05-05, 11:21 AM
Chaotic and dangerous is a theme that I prefer for magic: I find magic to be a bit too bowdlerized in the current style. (Tastes of course differ in that regard).

I come from more of a horror background, so for me D&D magic looks too hard. In a horror movie, as long as you say the words right and no part is missing the spell works flawlessly every time, even if you haven't read the terms and conditions, even if you're not expecting it to work, even if you think that the necronomicon is just a book, that Candyman is just a myth, and that the puzzlebox is just a puzzlebox.

Anonymouswizard
2022-05-05, 03:08 PM
Chaotic and dangerous is a theme that I prefer for magic: I find magic to be a bit too bowdlerized in the current style. (Tastes of course differ in that regard).

I think most settings could do a lot by making magic not 'just another bit of physics'.

I like magic to be where the world breaks down and symbolic logic matters more than hard science. Where there are rules but they vary by individual, or ones you look at and go 'how does that even work'. Where magic is things that reality will let happen, but won't allow the actions that causes it. Or where it just isn't really explained beyond 'you have power over kettles' and you kind of have to work out what that means and if you can maybe also command pots with a bit of creative thinking.

Or a world where mages don't cast spells because the knock-on effects of staying dry are hard to determine. But that's just because I like Earthsea.

KorvinStarmast
2022-05-06, 04:57 PM
Or a world where mages don't cast spells because the knock-on effects of staying dry are hard to determine. But that's just because I like Earthsea. That appeals to me as well (your general point) and maybe it's no surprise that I also like Earthsea. :smallsmile:

Grim Portent
2022-05-06, 07:12 PM
My preference is generally for magic to be from somewhere else, the intrusion of unnatural forces into the world, warping and twisting things in defiance of the laws of the material realm. Not sure quite what the best word is, but the sort of magic that is found in Warhammer, Dragon Age or books like the Bartimaeus books, where magic really isn't supposed to be part of the proper order of things.

Second preference is for magic being performed through the invocation of spirits. Mortals cannot cast spells, but they can learn how to command or bargain with spirits to use magic on their behalf. A man cannot levitate a boulder, but the spirits of the night wind and the moonlit sky can do so if given the right incentive.

Segev
2022-05-12, 04:48 PM
For Vancian-style, and 3e-like pseudo-vancian style, I like a semi-animist view. Spirits/kami/small gods/whatever exist for just about everything. Elemental matter is host to elemental spirits which are often dormant. Entire chaotic societies, organized courts, and divine armies of these things exist, and they are an integral part of the laws of physics of the setting. Generally, when they're just working with each other and interacting in the ways their natures drive them, we get something like real-world physics, at least close enough for it to be recognizable in our fantasy milleaux.

Magic is what happens when they act differently than through their normal behaviors and interests, due to things happening that aren't mediated by material interaction alone.

3.PF wizards, for example, have books filled with notes and entire discussions and copies of ancient magical treaties with various spirit courts and entities, as well as sociological notes on the needs and wants of these beings. They spend an hour each morning performing various tasks and rituals that generally fulfil "if" clauses of contracts with these things, and which give them permission/rights to demand certain services (through verbal invocation and proper gestures, and sometimes additional tokens or signs in the form of material components or foci) in return for the things they did during that morning preparation. "I evoke a fireball where this bead streaks by right of Infriet!" for example, because he traced the symbol of Infriet Triuphant over dry dust that morning, which was important to the servants of Infriet and gave him rights to make that demand. Once. If he prepared multiple fireballs, he probably did that multiple times.

In this paradigm, different spells might be straight-forward contracts negotiated specifically for those effects, or they might be a combination of several contracts whose effects the wizard has figured out how to rules lawyer together into the spell he wants. Spellbooks tend to be a combination of law review and tips and tricks and exploits, and each wizard's is unique because he's working from his own understanding of existing things.

Higher-level wizards can prepare more spells because they're better at balancing the requirements of "their side of the bargain" to ensure none of them cancel each other out.

Sorcerers instead have cadres of besotted, loyal, or otherwise obedient servitor-spirits that do select things for them, or work their side of the bargain for them as part of the casting, which is why they have fixed lists.

Clerics are actually members of the divine hierarchies, and get their spells and the services of various spirits animating the world because they have authority to do so, generally in the form of specific rites and permissions they may call upon.

Druids are similar, but are more getting it out of the same way you make trades with your neighbors, doing each other favors and the like, calling in IOUs.

Bohandas
2022-05-12, 11:38 PM
Generally, when they're just working with each other and interacting in the ways their natures drive them, we get something like real-world physics, at least close enough for it to be recognizable in our fantasy milleaux.

That's what physicists refer to as a "correspondence principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_principle)", "Classical Limit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_limit)", or reduction to classical mechanics

Segev
2022-05-13, 01:00 PM
That's what physicists refer to as a "correspondence principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_principle)", "Classical Limit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_limit)", or reduction to classical mechanics

More or less, yes. Though I feel it is important to differentiate, a little, between the use in physics, where it's a test for whether a new theory for "underlying physics" in real-world physics - such as quantum mechanics, relativity, and the like - is valid by virtue of whether, at scale and values we interact with on a real-world daily basis, it approximates sufficietnly well to classical mechanics that we would notice no difference, and using it to explain a fictional "underlying mechanics."

The principle is the same: the underlying mechanics of your magical fantasy world should reduce to classical mechanics when you don't have "overt magic" being used and just conduct tests that would normally be classical mechanics.

However, in fantasy magic-physics, you also can allow for overt magical actions to have overt magical effects.

Normally, water doesn't freeze without some super-cold stuff, and cold doesn't come from seemingly nowhere. But a spellcaster should still be able to wave his hands, invoke the contract (in my model, anyway), and command either cold energy be brought from the proper elemental plane or that the water itself freeze by spontaneously becoming ice or something.

DarthArminius
2022-05-13, 01:13 PM
So for magic exists, I have this idea:
Your universe is mostly normal, the reason magic exists is because on the other side of the universe, far far away, there exists a small area of space that intersects with another dimension/universe. Because your universe intersects with the other one, the way to manipulate the supernatural is available to mortals. (And gods.)

NichG
2022-05-13, 02:23 PM
For a more sciencey magic that'd have very specific mechanics, I like the idea that there are different parallel universes with different conservation laws (including abstract concepts like 'equivalent exchange' or 'karma'), connected only by a small number of 'motes' that manifest as either red or blue.

Red motes pull something that would be conserved in their far side connected universe out of the near side one, turning immaterial things into material things and then removing them, but also must pull things conserved on the near side into the far side to drive the process. Blue motes pull in things that would be conserved on the near side from the far side, but also draw things conserved on the far side into the near, and the far side conditions determine the rate of flow. Structures can be assembled around a mote to filter or direct these conversions.

Magic is just the manipulation of these motes. Pairs of red and blue motes enable more stuff and higher power levels than single-type, because you can set up currents that carry the exophysics to everything along the path between them, rather than a limited area around the mote.

Gnoman
2022-05-15, 12:27 AM
Magic in my settings is fundamentally simple, and based on the matter-energy dualism. The only major break with the physics of reality is that a force of will, applied through intermediaries like magic circles, incantations, gestures, and the like can directly harness this dualism to shift a substance between the two states, in a way that achieves the desired result. A Fireball converts tiny amounts of ambient matter to energy, which creates a thermal pulse that ignites the air. A freezing spell instead drains energy from an area by converting it to matter, creating an area of cold. My fantasy setting puts it in terms of Law and Chaos, but it is the same thing.

Rilmani
2022-05-15, 03:55 AM
There is one perpetual motion phenomena for each planet. It is mirrored by something like a black hole, an object which can absorb energy, but not matter. Like the positive and negative energy planes in some cosmologies. When the first phenomena overpowers entropy, it becomes a star. When entropy animates after sufficient amounts of absorbed energy, it becomes an aberration akin to the old gods. When the forces form a sort of harmony (which usually looks like a sine wave) a planet with life and magic develops.

Fusion in normal stars produces many different elements. On a long enough time scale, energy from the perpetual motion phenomena warps the qualities of matter it suffuses (generally on the nearby planet or a moon). Natural elements break down, are eaten by various forms of life, and are inevitably eaten my mortal creatures such as sapient humanoids. Certain ratios of various enchanted elements are prone to effects akin to oxidation (spontaneous combustion), but with the products being a variety of magical spells.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-05-15, 11:25 AM
I think it's important to be careful about what we mean by "magic". Do we mean

1) all the stuff that differentiates Earth from a fantasy world (ie the stuff that couldn't happen on Earth but is part of the fantasy world)
2) OR overt manipulation of supernatural forces by individuals (aka spells).

#2 is a sub-set of #1, but relies on it. #1 is much more interesting, and answering that question (ie why is #1 not the null set) is necessary to answering #2 (why can some people do specific acts falling into #1).

I strongly dislike the "magic as exception to natural law" model. It does violence (IMO) to the concept of natural law itself and causes incoherence once you dig even the slightest bit deeper. I also do not accept the correspondence principle as stated--reducing to earth-classical law imposes substantial and unnecessary constraints that mean magic (#2 and #1) are basically written out. Or bloats the concept of "overt magic" to swallow the principle.

Instead, I prefer a naturalistic but not realistic model. One where the correspondence isn't between modern understandings of classical mechanics and the "non-magical state", but instead that the fantasy world's surface phenomena would be roughly familiar to an medieval (~12th century) alchemist, using tools and concepts he's familiar with. So much more of an Aristotelian world-base. Atoms, molecules (which, FYI, are mostly-classical objects once you get above H2, being very well explained classically unless you really need the details of the bonding energies), cells, etc? Those don't exist as on Earth. But things like "unsupported objects fall" and "if I push something across a table, it slows down" and "the planets move in a regular fashion" and what things are flammable, etc? Those are basically the same. Coincidentally, that fits the player-side naive physical intuition (unless you're playing with physicists or chemists). In essence, the what is the same (the mathematical or phenomenological descriptions and predictions) as on Earth for these surface things. However, the why (the underlying theory and explanations) are very different.

My setting works on a unified-substance model. There is only one "base thing", which makes up all matter and all energy. Anima. Aether. Both names are used. It comes from the dreams, growth, and souls of mortal beings, and can be condensed, given aspects (elemental or otherwise), etc. There is a cycle of anima--mortals create it by living; after their death a large chunk of it (that which isn't eaten directly by another being, including that bound up in the nimbus[1] around the soul) passes into Shadow, where the soul is gradually freed of this encumbrance (and passes Beyond). The remaining anima passes upward into the Astral, where some of it is consumed to power the Great Mechanism and the lucians (the residents of the Astral, encompassing both angels and devils and all the other residents) but most is distributed among the elemental planes, where it is solidified and brought back into the Mortal to complete the "natural cycles" (ie hydrological, air, etc). That is, the mountains don't grow because of "natural" plate tectonics or whatever--there are elemental forces distributing earth-aspected anima to shape them. And to fill back in the old abandoned mines (slowly). Anima is not conserved--in fact, the natural trend is upward.

There is an ambient level of diffuse, only vaguely-aspected anima all around everything. Thicker in some spots than in others. "Natural" magic (ie the parts of #1 that aren't spells) involve drawing in this anima and using it in various ways. Dragons fly (despite that not working physically because they're just too big and heavy) by (unconsciously) manipulating ambient anima, imposing aspects that allow them to fly. And breath energy in much the same way--they have natural elemental ties and aspect their exhalations appropriately. Yet this breath is not the natural stuff--a breath of lightning is not generating a bunch of positive and negative charges with a potential difference. It's imposing a particular mix of lambent fire and umbral air onto a region, which produces the phenomenon known as lightning with a bunch more control. Dragons gain their control and "power" via their hoards--a dragon simply cannot consume enough food to survive properly if deprived of their hoard. At least as an adult+ dragon. Giants are strengthened well beyond what physics would suggest (ie able to violate the square-cube law) by the runes which reprogrammed them to draw on the elements more directly. Undead, being anti-life and "powered" by spirits of entropy and destruction from beyond the world's edge, actually drain the ambient anima in small ways. Life around a cluster of undead is weaker; plants don't grow well, babies are stillborn or sickly, etc. Eventually, regions long-inhabited by undead become completely sterile and even the condensed anima of the rocks and dirt starts breaking down, creating a blasted moonscape of "ash" and dust, incapable of supporting life.

Spells and other "coherent" magical effects (of which spells are just one small portion) are methods of manipulating the ambient anima in a more conscious, directed format. Each spell consists of two parts. Every spell has a pattern and an activation energy.


The pattern is a complex construct at the nimbus level, facilitated by particular movements, sounds or outside material catalysts (aka spell components). Note that simply performing the components is not enough--unless the pattern is constructed consciously in your nimbus and fed by energy, nothing happens. Simply memorizing the components is not enough. Patterns are effectively universe-level API calls. Requirements and outcomes set in place by the Great Mechanism (via the god of magic). They can be discovered, but they cannot be created. And there are a lot of them. Way more than in the PHB/all books combined. But they do fixed things. There is a certain amount of tolerance for slop and variation, however, so better casters can make the fireball a bit harder deal with, but can't generally change its shape or size.

Different traditions learn their patterns in different ways, leading to four basic "varieties" of magic, each with their own focus and area of specialty.
1. Harmonic magic (bards, plus lots of "common" magic) is one of the oldest. It mediates the patterns in rhythms and sound. Anyone can perform a chant (which produces very minor effects like making weeds easier to see and only has an effect while the chant is ongoing). Bards can perform more powerful spells. Harmonic magic tends to resonate best with souled creatures, especially those with minds.

2. Primal magic relies on convincing the micro-spirits of nature to assist. A druid or a ranger (among others, including many shamans) makes deals (although not in any concrete language, more like teaching an animal to do a trick) with these micro-spirits that are all around. In exchange for a bit of personal energy (the spell slot) and being allowed to "ride along" with the caster, the spirit will enter the caster's nimbus and become the necessary pattern. Druids make and dissolve these deals constantly; rangers tend to make friends and "embed" their favorite spirits into their gear.

3. Divine magic is mediated. Paladins and clerics have access (the one via stubbornness and the other via faith and being chosen) to a repository of pre-set patterns. When they prepare spells, they're literally accessing that repository and downloading the chosen spells into their souls. They don't understand them--the spells come from the outside and access to re-arrange their prepared list can be cut off. But they have access to a huge library of spells. This also lets them handle the most complex patterns, such as healing or resurrection (which require understanding/describing the entire being).

4. Arcane magic is "direct". It can be taught or innate, but once acquired it's fixed. Wizards encode the spells in writing and symbols, learning to encode them onto their souls via mnemonics and other techniques. Sorcerers are born with the spells--their struggle is in expressing them and disciplining the patterns so they can actually successfully cast them. Warlocks are gifted the spells[2] as a consequence of their contact with some greater being. Because they cheated the process, their spells are unruly and require force of will to express rather than learning by intellect and mastering that way. Gaining new spells requires further contact with the patron. Artificers (although I do that differently) mediate theirs via "technology" (more like mad science, it only works for them most of the time).



Some spells are trivial enough that they can draw on the natural production of the soul without meaningfully diminishing resources. But most of the more powerful ones require either sacrifice or bound "capacitor-like" storage. The first is messy (and dangerous if sacrificing larger, more complex creatures[3]) but can be very powerful. A willing, knowing sacrifice of one's life is the most powerful source of energy around. But that's way too much to deal with. So instead, people have learned to open pockets in their souls to store energy, which then can be dumped through a pattern to produce a spell effect. Opening these is hard, usually requiring meditation, solitude, and personal struggle. An average person might spend most of a decade's apprenticeship struggling to open their first, of the lowest capacity. As a note, these are quantized and the matching requirements are such that you can't simply dump N lower level "slots" to power a higher level effect. Not directly, although some people have a bit more control and other "reservoirs" of energy they can play around with (aka sorcerers and metamagic).


When a spell resolves and comes into being, the pattern imposes a resonant cascade on a portion of local anima. A fireball doesn't actually start a fire--it simply says "you're hot" to a large volume. This is why some "fire" spells don't naturally light flammable things on fire and why ray of frost cannot freeze water--it doesn't have the right aspects or duration to trigger that reaction. Control spells like hold person impose aspects onto the nimbus of the target. Etc.

[1] A person has three parts: The body, composed of condensed anima that interacts with other condensed anima. The nimbus, composed of diffuse anima that interacts with other diffuse anima and mediates between body and spark. And spark, the soul, the self, the ineffable whence personality flows. Death is the separation of body and spirit (nimbus + spark); the spirit passes into Shadow while the body stays behind. Except when things go wrong.
[2] As well as the spell slots necessary to power it--they don't acquire those through meditation and growth. Instead they're ripped open unnaturally by contact with the Other.
[3] A chicken? Meh. A horse or cow? Risks attracting unfriendly things or creating hostile fey. A fully-souled creature such as a person? The trauma and spill-over weakens the boundaries, drawing jotnar (the entropy spirits that power undead and demons). Leading to twisted landscapes and monsters, if not outright spontaneous undead and demons. And pollutes Shadow in that region, leaving the spirits there vulnerable to consumption by demons. And that's just using their body/nimbus as fuel. Those rites that actually consume the spark are really horrible. Like the worst form of industrial dumping. There's a reason such things are forbidden by every sane society on pain of immediate, no trial death for anyone caught performing them.

KorvinStarmast
2022-05-15, 01:30 PM
For the OP: there was a time during the Rennaissance era/late Medieval period that Alchemy and Magic went hand in hand. (12th to 17th centuries, roughly)

The Emerald Tablet, and the Hermetic Corpus (alleged to have been the work of Hermes Trismegistus) were some baseline works that informed this view of things.

In a nutshell, the universe/all of creation was in harmony at the macro level because everything was infused and directed by one spirit, but, at the micro level, there were a lot of practical difference between various phenomena, substances, or essences that were ascribed to the prime matter of a thing. (Won't digress into the "a thing in itself" musings of philosophy here).

Going into further detail would take far too long. There were a variety of philosophical stances feeding it, to include Platonic and Aristotlean schools of thought, but I will observe that it seems to me no accident that
(1) the Prime Material plane and prime matter look to share a linguistic root
(2) the ideas of sympathetic magic (like evokes like) is certainly a part of using material components for spells.

The trick for the practitioner of magic, then, is to find ways to see beyond the prime matter and tap into that unifying spirit (whatever that is, Phoenix calls is anima in his system) in order to do something alchemical. That may be transmuting lead into gold, making a tree grow faster and larger, turning some bat guano into a great ball of fire, and so on.

You can adapt something like that into your magic system, if that's what you are looking for in getting explanations about magic.

jjordan
2022-05-16, 09:32 AM
"Why does magic exist?" Well, examples from human history posit:

-Magic is a creation of a god (or the gods) gifted to humanity to help them protect themselves from danger (including malign spirits).
-Magic is a knowledge of the power of the gods gifted to humanity (often favored/privileged members of humanity).
-Magic is a knowledge of how to compel/cajole lesser powers to carry out actions on behalf of the knowledgeable.
-Magic is a knowledge of the power of the gods that can be discovered through investigation.
-Magic is a knowledge of the rules of reality that can be discovered through investigation. And now we're on the road to science, though it's interesting to observe that magic always started with science.

So, a tool set a god or the gods created and gave to mortals. A tool set mortals were granted access to. A tool set mortals could force/ask others to use on their behalf. A tool set mortals started figuring out for themselves. I typically extend this progression to include mortals creating their own tool sets on the road to divinity.

This kind of shifts the question. Rather than thinking of magic as a separate energy, we can think of it as the knowledge of ways of manipulating reality. Not 'why does magic exist' but more 'how does it work'. Although it also answers the 'why' question: because the gods made a tool for mortals, because gods gave mortals access to the tools, because mortals figured out how to ask/force lesser divinities to use the tools on their behalf (really just a more forceful version of prayer directed at lesser divinities), and because mortals figured of how gain access to the divine toolbox.

In fantasy settings I have enjoyed using a basic model of chaos shaped into order by will. Combined with a multiverse cosmology this allows for pretty much anything, including competing/contradictory explanations of the nature of magic, to co-exist. That gives me a lot of flexibility.

Psyren
2022-05-17, 04:17 PM
More "why do metahumans exist" than "why does magic exist" but I've always been a big fan of Marvel's explanation - the Earth is simultaneously a Celestial Egg, was bled all over by a dying celestial and is also well-positioned as an intergalactic and interdimensional hub, you combine all of those and you get a hotbed of superheroes along with a metric ton of mystic energy for tons of magic-users. This has allowed Earth to pull off feats almost no other planets have (like repelling Galactus multiple times) and having the largest incidence of Sorcerers Supreme.

Warcraft/Azeroth has a version of this what with the whole planet being a Titan Egg.

Beleriphon
2022-05-31, 02:21 PM
We, as humans, have managed to build simplified simulated universes with this setup, such as No Man's Sky - which has 'magic' tech like teleportation to the hub zone that violates the procedural physics engine of the universe.

You want to get meta? Lets get meta! NMS universe is also a simulation being run by Atlas.

Talakeal
2022-05-31, 08:05 PM
snip.

That's actually remarkably similar to how it works in my setting.

The only thing I don't follow is why it is ok to have a setting that follows a 14th century understanding of physics with different mechanics under the hood, but how a setting that follows a modern understanding of physics but with a different mechanics under the hood collapses into a broken mass of disbelief.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-05-31, 11:51 PM
That's actually remarkably similar to how it works in my setting.

The only thing I don't follow is why it is ok to have a setting that follows a 14th century understanding of physics with different mechanics under the hood, but how a setting that follows a modern understanding of physics but with a different mechanics under the hood collapses into a broken mass of disbelief.

Because modern physics makes demands. And has to be self consistent. So change any parameter and the whole thing collapses. Basically, modern physics puts tight constraints on what happens under the hood. Ones that just don't work with magic. And can't handle exceptions because those contravene the predictions and break the models.

If all you ask is that the gross surface phenomena are vaguely similar, you can alter the how and why much more freely. The lower demands mean that you can keep basic verisimilitude and still accept a lot of fantastic stuff.

In one sense, it's like midichlorians. Trying to explain it in modern(ish) scientific terms ruins it, because it draws all the inconsistencies into the harsh light. I don't have problems with movies or books that don't try to be scientific or explain things when they have holes. But I naturally hold ones that do say they're realistic or "hard" to the standard they set for themselves. Which none of them survive well.

Anonymouswizard
2022-06-01, 02:03 AM
On the other hand Shadowrun is hugely popular despite mixing extrapolated modern science with magic, and I believe that Deadlands: Hell on Earth and Lost Colony do the same. Then again in Deadlands a lot of post-1870s tech is magical in origin and power source. Then you have games like Mage and Unknown Armies which have magic despite taking place in 'our world'.

Mixing magic with modern or even future technology isn't inherently suspension of disbelief-breaking. You just generally need to apply some form of explanation, or several if you really want to.

Lord Raziere
2022-06-01, 02:35 AM
On the other hand Shadowrun is hugely popular despite mixing extrapolated modern science with magic, and I believe that Deadlands: Hell on Earth and Lost Colony do the same. Then again in Deadlands a lot of post-1870s tech is magical in origin and power source. Then you have games like Mage and Unknown Armies which have magic despite taking place in 'our world'.

Mixing magic with modern or even future technology isn't inherently suspension of disbelief-breaking. You just generally need to apply some form of explanation, or several if you really want to.

Agreed, not all urban fantasy is Dresden Files where technology breaks down if a wizard sneezes near it. there is TWEWY with magic smartphones and pins that give you superpowers, there is Werewolves with their techno-shamans that commune with their spirits of machines, Vampire 20th Anarchs that learn magic to super-hack electronics, Fate/Grand Order literally kicks off by uniting the power of magic and science to travel through to save all of humanity from extinction, Demon the Descent blends tech and magic so much its hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

For Mage the Ascension in particular, If magic couldn't coexist with physics or tech? a big chunk of the settings factions wouldn't even exist. the Technocracy would just not be a thing. No Sons of Ether or hacker-mages either.

or how about Star Wars where the Jedi exist right alongside things like the Death Star, city-planets, big spaceships and wield lightsabers? one of the biggest franchises in the world founded itself on a magic/tech mix that everyone loves.

there is also WH40k which blends the two a bit as well.

FF7 is well known for how it integrates magic and technology together; the entire setting is built upon how its industrial use of materia and mako energy is screwing everything up, and its story is built upon tampering with magic using technology.

mixing magic with tech is not only not inherently suspension of disbelief breaking, its the foundation of some of the most known and beloved franchises in the world. modern pop-culture would be very different if it was.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-06-01, 09:08 AM
I think I mispoke/misread the question.

You can absolutely have modern (or super-modern) seeming technology and magic. That's fine. No substantial issues there (at least fundamentally). What you can't (IMO) have and preserve verisimilitude (for me) is modern science (meaning the laws of nature as we know them in all their details as the fundamental underpinnings of reality) and non-trivial magic. Because magic breaks those laws entirely, which means they can't be the operating laws of the universe (definitionally--a physical law with exceptions isn't a fundamental law at all and there is [presumably] a more fundamental one that handles those exceptions[1]).

So you can blend magic into your fundamental laws, producing something that, on the surface (defined differently per setting), looks pretty Earth-like (except for the magic and magical elements). But you can't claim the physical laws are the same and magic is some kind of external exception that gets to break those laws. Because that's a contradiction.

The 14th century (although really I go for about 12th century) "surface" definition is what I use for my own, D&D setting. Because that's what fits best (IMO) both D&D's core model and my own preference for aesthetics (no guns, among other things). You could set that surface in other places. As long as you do define some "surface" below which things vary. And the further you go down before you say "ok, things are different below here", the harder time you'll have constructing a consistent "lower" model. Because the more those things depend on having all the (delicate) parameters of the modern physical laws in place to support them.

As for the particular settings mentioned (taking the ones I know):

* Fate/Grand Order (and all the Fate settings) rely on magic being part of natural law, not an exception to it. They use fantasy tech and abuse the Earth laws of physics horrifically in doing so. That is, they have the trappings of tech, but it's premised on very different underpinnings.
* Mage literally runs on consensus reality. Tech (and the laws of physics) are actually derived phenomena from the power of mass belief. That's not "modern physics is the real underpinning" at all (the reverse, actually). Magic is reality, technology (well, modern science) is the thing that imprisons/constrains magic and it's entirely constructed/external to the core reality.
* Star Wars (at least the good ones) run "tech as magic". They don't actually try to explain anything, which is good because none of it makes even the slightest lick of sense when you look at the details. Which is what ruined the prequels for me--they tried to take it seriously and in doing so showed that the Emperor had no clothes.
* WH40k literally runs on the rule of grimdark (like the rule of cool, but grimmer and darker). No attempt to use actual real-world science there. All the tech words are handwavium.
* Shadowrun incorporates magic into the fundamental laws as a natural force. And most of the tech is fairly hand-waved as well. To the degree that they actually claim that they're using real physics, it does violate (my) verisimilitude.
* FF7 doesn't even try to explain anything beyond "mako energy coming from the lifestream". Which places it very firmly outside of the modern-science-is-real envelop.

[1] in the same sort of way that relativity (combining general and special) handles newtonian mechanics in that limit, but also explains a lot of things where newtonian mechanics gives the wrong predictions. Here, you'd have some "magical mechanics" that, in the proper limit, reduces to something that looks pretty firmly newtonian. But at its underlying core is very different.

Hagashager
2022-06-01, 04:00 PM
In my own fantasy setting magic is a particle. Before the setting's industrial revolution this is unknown so everyone assumes it's supernatural sorcery.

During the setting's late enlightnment/early Industrial Revolution the magic particle is discovered and wizards begin researching how to efficiently harness it.

By the setting's Edwardian era technology starts shifting into magitek as its discovered that magic is an energy source and wizards are living batteries.

This is important because my fantasy setting eventually merges with my sci-fi setting where Earth discovers the planet of my fantasy setting. The humans of my fantasy are surprised to find that the humans of Terra could not manifest magic and that we harnessed nuclear energy instead and the magic particle is not found on all earth-like planets.

The humans of Terra, meanwhile, are baffled to discover that there is an element in the universe that can confer honest-to-god sorcery.

KorvinStarmast
2022-06-01, 10:40 PM
In my own fantasy setting magic is a particle. Before the setting's industrial revolution this is unknown so everyone assumes it's supernatural sorcery.

During the setting's late enlightnment/early Industrial Revolution the magic particle is discovered and wizards begin researching how to efficiently harness it.

By the setting's Edwardian era technology starts shifting into magitek as its discovered that magic is an energy source and wizards are living batteries.

This is important because my fantasy setting eventually merges with my sci-fi setting where Earth discovers the planet of my fantasy setting. The humans of my fantasy are surprised to find that the humans of Terra could not manifest magic and that we harnessed nuclear energy instead and the magic particle is not found on all earth-like planets.

The humans of Terra, meanwhile, are baffled to discover that there is an element in the universe that can confer honest-to-god sorcery.

Well, at least it's not John Norman's Gor.

Demostheknees
2022-06-03, 01:53 PM
In the world of Myr, the Material Plane is the result of the Immaterial Planes, the Astral Sea (Order) and Void Below (Chaos), colliding. This event resulted in (Creation), and reality sprung forth from this new power. As sentient life started to develop, it had an innate connection to (Creation), but could only affect the Immaterial. Their thoughts, desires, and emotions gave birth to what would be called The Gods - at first primitive beings that held power over a single, primal domain (Fear, Joy, Death), but as sentient life became more complex so did their counterparts in the Immaterial. The Old Gods merged, evolved, or were replaced by the Pantheons that we know today. The Gods now held power of many complex domains, and were able to use life's connection in order to bestow power onto their followers. This is the Origin of Divine Magic.

For a long time, Divine power as all that there was. Mortal life could not directly access the Immaterial, only by strengthening their bond with a being outside of reality. The Gods grew more powerful as they gained more worshippers, as those with strong connections would essentially become "part" of the God upon death. The Gods grew greedy, and viewed mortal life much like one would food.

Then came Selune. A deity who held the domain of magic itself - born from the desire to understand and control the strange and unexplainable. She saw the fascination that Mortal life had with changing reality itself, and despised those gods who saw the relationship as purely transactional. To her, all who sought to understand the true nature of reality were equal - and realized that in the current status quo, understanding would always be held back by those deities that only sought to court followers for the purpose of their own gain. Knowing this, she made a sacrifice - She fractured herself into a trillion threads of power, and forced those threads into the material plane. This functionally killed her, but allowed for mortals to create a connection to the Immaterial without a deity serving as the bridge.

Though she was no more, the process of forcing herself into the Material Plane manifested her being into a physical form, a floating disk that hangs in the night sky, and shines from the remnants of her light. This is the Origin of Arcane Magic, and why the mortal folk of this world call the moon "Selune".

Pixel_Kitsune
2022-06-03, 05:37 PM
Anyway, what’s your favorite?

My favorites are anything with hard rules or details. Not so much RPGs but L.E. Modesitt Jr and Brandon Sanderson are masters of this IMO. Each has multiple different fantasy series that have their own magic systems that stay internally consistent.

Modesitt's are always about cost and balance. His most prevalent series is one where the magic is divided into "Order and Chaos" which are literally seen as just the stasis and change aspects of the world. Magic users are able to sense the energy conflicts similar to how a scientist with the right equipment sees atomic movement. The original magic users were a much higher teched species that ended up stranged on the world on accident and so a combination of certain people can kind of feel these energies and they understand advanced science, the traditions begin.

It stays very rigid as well, "Order" mages can heal, control weather, turn invisible, create nearly indestructible items. It seems all over the place but it's all specifically restructuring what is. You heal by strengthening internal systems and forcing disease or disruption out. You control weather by adjusting wind currents and moving whole systems, etc. "Chaos" Wizards are much more simple destruction because they're literally just unleashing the Entrop/Change element of life. Rather that's throwing actual fire, or directing Lava to force land changes or also healing, by focusing down and destroying the disease itself in a person.

Even his more loose systems have hard rules. He has one called Imagining that at the start looks like raw reality warping. A person wills things into existence or changes their nature. But it is quickly apparent that this is limited by the Imager's knowledge (IE if an assassin takes out a target, they specifically knew anatomy enough to place a wooden plug in the esophagus, or imaged specific types of toxin into the brain.). It also becomes apparent that they don't actually create out of nothing but re-arrange what's around them. So an imager who just tries to make gold can accidentally kill themselves as it looks for Gold in the area and rips all the trace amounts out of your own body, or if you know science TOO well, rips other elements out and re-arranges them to be gold.

Sanderson I could talk even longer, So I won't. All his magic stems from a fragment of a divine being killed millenia ago being present on a world and the rules tends to fit to certain ideas. IE in one book we have a group called Wind Runners who on casual description can fly, lift ridiculous weights. Climb to weird places, etc. But in reality what they have is specific control over Gravity and Adhesion. They don't fly, they decide up is down, fall that way, change their mind when they get to the height they want, decide "down" is the direction they want to go. They don't climb weird or deflect things, they decide an object is uncontrollably drawn to another.

Bohandas
2022-06-14, 02:02 PM
This next thing isn't a general explanation, it's about two specific things in a specific context, but I find it interesting.

I've had a theory in my head for a while that good luck, or rather an absence of bad luck, would naturally arise from the ability to time travel provided that paradoxes cannot occur. The basic idea is that anything that you would go back to change can't happen in the first place because then you would go back and change it which would cause a paradox. Such timelines would destructively interfere with themselves not just in a quantum sense but also in a regular every day sense.

The luck would be proportional to your cleverness and resources; the bigger the things you could change the bigger the things that don't happen. (edit: and to the robustness of the time travel system, because sometimes the easiest way for a paradox to not occur may be for the time machine to break)

Bulhakov
2022-06-14, 03:18 PM
I like the explanation that magic is (ancient) technology that is so advanced that it is not fully understood and only exploited through spells/rituals that are basically interfaces to this technology.

There is a very good Polish fantasy/sci-fi book called "Master of the Ice Garden" (unfortunatelly only translated into Czech and Russian) that is a good take on this. It's basically "reversed Erich von Daniken" - i.e. humans as gods to aliens. In the far future humans find an alien planet with medival level humanoid inhabitants and decide to try to "follow the prime directive" and just observe the culture in secret.
The protagonist is an astronaut/cyborg/ninja that underwent extensive plastic surgery to pass off as a local and who is sent to find out what happened to the scientists that were supposed to be the observers, but ceased sending reports. Spoiler: it turns out the scientists gained awesome magical powers and set themselves up as gods on different continents of the planet. Slowly the protagonist discovers he can do magic as well, drawing "energy" from magical mist that plauges the land causing mutations and manifestations of nightmares. At the end of the book series we find out that magic is basically the pinnacle of technology for any civilization, i.e. something that can read the will of intelligent beings and reshape reality to materialize it (in this case it's a swarm of nano-machines that form the magical mist). The better someone understands physics and reality, the more effective and powerful his magic can be, explaining the "god-like" state of the earth visitors. The original civilization that invented the nano-machines "ascended" to a non-material state, but left the technology behind to entertain themselves by observing the new civilizations that arise on their planet (occasionally "resetting" them to primitive levels every time they get too technologically advanced or too profficient at using the magic).

Anonymouswizard
2022-06-14, 07:17 PM
I like the explanation that magic is (ancient) technology that is so advanced that it is not fully understood and only exploited through spells/rituals that are basically interfaces to this technology.

Eh, I'm pretty much over that. There's almost never a good reason for why the advanced technology is doing what it does, which is generally throwing fireballs. I'm not even a fan of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in my sci-fi, you can have better tech but people who can realise it's tech (most civilisations with modern technology or better) can find the device if they try to look.

I've considered using 'magic is actually psychic powers before', but that doesn't really say much beyond 'doesn't necessarily require motion, can likely be studied'. But I'm really falling in love with magic existing because the universe is, on some level, broken, and if you can work out how you can get from point A to point B without much effort.

Anymage
2022-06-15, 12:06 AM
From a fiction level that might be workable in a narrative based game, I like the magic in Ferrett Steinmetz's 'Mancer series. If you're passionate enough about something you can convince the universe to run under your preferred metaphor, but if you gain anything from enforcing your metaphor the universe will try to extract an equivalent exchange and if too much magic gets thrown around the universe can break. Equivalent exchange based magic systems and build-your-own-paradigm are both narratively interesting to me.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology and "reality is a computer code, and I've figured out how to hack it" are less interesting to me. The latter is hard to do as anything other than pure fantasy. The former doesn't have much narrative room beyond trying to figure out the nature of that technology and maybe whoever set it up. I prefer magic systems where metaphor and narrative are more active parts of the system because those can feed into stories directly.

KorvinStarmast
2022-06-15, 10:37 AM
It's basically "reversed Erich von Daniken" - i.e. humans as gods to aliens. In the far future humans find an alien planet with medival level humanoid inhabitants and decide to try to "follow the prime directive" and just observe the culture in secret.
The protagonist is an astronaut/cyborg/ninja that underwent extensive plastic surgery to pass off as a local and who is sent to find out what happened to the scientists that were supposed to be the observers, but ceased sending reports. Christopher Stasheff's "Warlock in Spite of Himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlock_in_Spite_of_Himself)" (and it's successors) covers similar ground.

Anonymouswizard
2022-06-16, 04:45 AM
From a fiction level that might be workable in a narrative based game, I like the magic in Ferrett Steinmetz's 'Mancer series. If you're passionate enough about something you can convince the universe to run under your preferred metaphor, but if you gain anything from enforcing your metaphor the universe will try to extract an equivalent exchange and if too much magic gets thrown around the universe can break. Equivalent exchange based magic systems and build-your-own-paradigm are both narratively interesting to me.

That interesting, and it avoids a common issue with magic systems. It pushes the focus back on the characters, which is where it should be. Far too many magic systems move the focus to the intricacies of the mechanics.


Sufficiently Advanced Technology and "reality is a computer code, and I've figured out how to hack it" are less interesting to me. The latter is hard to do as anything other than pure fantasy. The former doesn't have much narrative room beyond trying to figure out the nature of that technology and maybe whoever set it up. I prefer magic systems where metaphor and narrative are more active parts of the system because those can feed into stories directly.

I mean, 'reality is code' can work, but magic generally tends to work more like programs than hacking. You boot up the spell, input the parameters, and get the result. But it's also kind of boring at this point, it tends to bring nothing new to explore.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology is the same, but just tends to have everything make less sense than when everything was unexplained.

Altheus
2022-06-16, 09:43 AM
Magic is the base building language of the univers, spoken by the oldest god when the universe is sung in to being.

Few people have the intellect to shape the language in their minds. Fewer still have the necessary brain lobes to make the language interact with the world.

Spells are words and movements to focus the mind to think in the appropriate way and cause the effect.

Components are items for the magic to interact with and also sometimes additional focusses for the mind.

The greatest mages need none of the frippery, they alter the world with a thought.