Magic Systems: Psionics vs. Divinity Authority

[Greywander]

I'm always on the lookout for ideas for new and interesting magic systems I can use, in this case probably for an original system. Today we're going to be looking at two different types of magic whose origins and outcomes are very different, but the principles behind them are actually quite similar. In a way, one could say these are opposing systems, and in some settings they might end up fused into a single type of magic.

Before I get into it, here's a quick recap of other magic systems I've come up with. I'm looking for systems that are suitably "weird" and could fit in with these.
Geomagy
Magical programming via geometric figures and symbols. Casting a spell typically involves drawing the right kind of magic circle, and the target of the spell is the inside of the circle. Anyone can learn geomagy, but it can be dangerous if you don't draw the circle perfectly. Magic circles can be made out of anything, including things like roads or city walls, and the size of of the circle increases the power of the spell. Once a circle is completed, the spell immediately activates, and stays active until the circle is broken. Some spells use material components, placed in specific places on the circle, and the component may or may not be consumed. Magic circles can be inscribed onto scrolls, often larger, more rug-sized ones, with only an activation rune missing, or requiring a material component to function, so that it remains inactive when not in use. For obvious reasons, Geomagy isn't that useful in combat unless prepared in advance, but has major utility potential, and magic circles can also be inscribed onto objects to give them magical properties.

Sorcery
Sorcery is the innate magic of supernatural creatures, such as a dragon's breath or a medusa's gaze. Sorceries are associated with different supernatural bloodlines which determine the weaknesses of those sorceries. For example, fey sorcery might be entirely blocked by a suit of iron armor, and fey illusions might not be reflected in iron mirrors. A typical sorcerer only has access to a few sorceries, but can use them like an extension of their own body. In other words, sorcerers are almost more like super heroes with powers rather than wizards with spellbooks.

Witchcraft
Witches seek out spirits and make pacts with them to become their familiar. The witch can then call upon those spirits to provide services to the witch. How I want this to work in-game is that players write up a contract, but instead of being like a legal document having it be more like they're writing a class feature and describing how it works. I would provide a standard set of clauses players could use while writing their contracts, the most important being the services the spirit provides and the payment the witch offers in return. These can include things like permanent pets, temporary combat summons, single spellcast summons, or letting the spirit possess the witch in order to share their supernatural abilities as self-buffs. Witches do have to seek out the spirits they want to contract with, and these can include anything from mostly mundane animals (e.g. making a pact with an ordinary spider to get a spiderclimb ability) to powerful demons, elementals, or celestials. Functionally, witchcraft is sorcery-by-proxy, as you're getting someone else to use their sorceries on your behalf.

Theurgy
Theurgy actually works off of the same principle as witchcraft, but the execution is quite different. While witchcraft is often more of a business transaction, theurgy is generally closer to a ruler bequeathing power to a subject, though it varies from deity to deity. Any sufficiently powerful spirit can grant theurgic power, not just gods. What usually makes the difference is that a witch's familiars aren't able to grant power to more than one witch at a time, while a god or other theurgic spirit is able to split their power between many people. Some gods might empower all their high ranking clerics, while others might only empower specially chosen champions. Some gods will grant theurgic power to anyone, even those who aren't their worshipers, so long as they believe that person will advance that god's goals with the power given to them. Naturally, this makes it super tricky to write up a generalized system, but would be beautiful for having an entire splatbook dedicated to nothing but theurgy.
The first of these two magic systems is some kind of psychic magic. But while psionics is often allowed to do anything, I want to make this more interesting by making it more specific. Let's take a quick detour away from fantasy and into sci-fi. Imagine a setting where everyone has a neural chip and either cybernetically enhanced eyes or the brain chip connects directly to their visual cortex; in either case, people live in augmented reality (AR) that allows them to see things from the digital world that don't exist in the physical world. Most people can no longer tell what's digital and what's real, and it's possible for hackers to abuse this by creating digital illusions, or even hacking directly into someone's brain through their neural chip. It's not possible for a hacker to create a real fireball, but they can create the visual effect of one, and they can convince a person that they've been burned.

Like with this sci-fi example, what I'm thinking is that this psychic magic system (which could use a good name, I'm leaning towards psychomagy but maybe that's not a good fit) is the magic of the mind, and can only interact with other minds. It can be used by any creature with intelligence, and the more intelligent a creature is, the stronger it becomes. However, I'm also considering that perhaps the more intelligent a creature is the more susceptible they are to it as well. A human mind is complex and can be manipulated in a lot more ways than, say, a mouse. But then I'm not sure how you'd defend against mental attacks.

Other angles I'm looking at this include stuff like "the mind makes it real" (i.e. psychosomatic), where a mental attack can manifest physical effects. So an imaginary fireball might manifest actual burns on a person's body, but not on any of their equipment or the surrounding environment. Another angle is something like the orks' "WAAAGH!" from 40k, where if enough people believe something strongly enough then it can manifest an effect even in the real world, and that might be where this psychic-based magic system intersects with the next one we're going to talk about. A third angle is that there is a sort of mindscape that is a real part of reality, so your thoughts and ideas are, in a manner of speaking, actual, tangible things that truly exist somewhere. This psionic magic then involves interacting with that psychic space to create changes there that can influence other beings connected to it.

There's still a lot of fleshing out to do, but there's enough there to get started with.

The second system is based on divinity (and could also use a good name). This is not the same as theurgy, aka divine magic granted by a god, but rather has to do with a creature's own divine authority and the ability to influence the world around them using that authority. We can imagine ranking things based on how divine they are: a plant is more divine than a rock, an animal is more divine than a plant, a human is more divine than an animal, an angel is more divine than a human, and a god is more divine than an angel. The gaps between different divine ranks are so great as to be functionally infinite; there is no number of humans you could gather together such that their collective divinity would outrank a god, for example. Or, perhaps, divinity simply can't be pooled like that. A collection of smaller diamonds simply doesn't have the same value as a single large diamond.

One thing I like to do is integrate magic with the mundane. So for example, one way I can see this divine authority manifesting is through the use of tools. After all, using tools is basically just a much crappier version of the raw creative power of the gods to shape something from nothing. So the reason animals can't use complex tools isn't just a matter of the lack of intelligence, but that they don't have the authority to effect changes on the world to that level. A more divine being would be able to just grab a hunk of iron and twist it into a sword with their bare hands. A more divine being could just command the iron to become a sword. This doesn't have to be limited to creation, with more authority you could command beasts or the weather or the ocean.

One major challenge is figuring out how this would actually function in a tabletop game. From how I've described it already, it sounds like every human or other humanoid race would have approximately the same divine authority, and thus they would all have basically the same powers. There's little wiggle room for them to gain enough authority to be able to outrank something that other humans don't. With that in mind, it seems like this should then lean more towards learning how to exercise the authority they already have. A human might outrank a rock, but most humans don't know how to properly command a rock to do anything, and even if they stumble across the appropriate means of conveying a command to a rock they lack the conviction to impose their will upon the rock. Then again, perhaps the difference between a normal character and a "divine spellcaster" is specifically taking a trait that gives them a higher divine rank. In any case, I need to put some limits in place that help to shape how this form of magic works.

A twist to this concept that I like is that divine rank differs even between humans. So one person could literally be born to be a king, being given an extra portion of divinity that, when properly exercised, commands obedience. I can't help but think of something like the Conqueror's Haki from One Piece. Though perhaps it makes more sense to implement this via a Charisma stat or something similar, rather than formalizing it as an explicit difference in rank.

As previously mentioned, some settings might fuse these two magic systems together, making intelligence synonymous with divine authority (and thus the exercise of that authority being merely another expression of psychic power). As distinct concepts, it would be possible for a creature to be sapient but of a lower divine rank, or for a non-sapient creature to outrank a human (e.g. a sacred tree or beast). I think it's more interesting to have them be separate, but it can make it more difficult to wrap your head around. Most people get uncomfortable at the suggestion that something might have human-level intelligence and yet be considered lesser or inferior, so even if they're separate it's probably still a good idea for intelligence and divinity to roughly correlate.

Anyways, looking forward to hearing your ideas on how to flesh out and develop these systems.

[NichG]

What I'd use for the metaphysics behind a psionics system would be to think in terms of there being something like an information layer of reality. Rather than being a physical place or coterminous plane, this is sort of the set of all possible implications created by cause-and-effect relationships. Minds are nexi of the information layer because they aggregate perceptions and patterns from the world, so naturally a well-studied and perceptive mind becomes more and more 'present' on that layer the longer it lives and experiences. Those who use psionics actively would be those who have figured out how to intentionally modulate the boundaries of their mind on the information layer in order to first sense it, then ultimately to manipulate the information linking things together independent of the material manifestation of that information. The manifestation of this backwards flow is that random events in the physical world 'line up' to either erase or inject information as desired by the practitioner.

So for example, the sorts of things you could do by just being aware of the information layer would be to see whether things are connected via past cause - e.g. 'if this person had chosen differently in the past, would this thing be different than it now is, and how?'. That could be used for anything from psychometry to Sherlock Holmes deduction on steroids (the idea being that directly viewing the information layer lets you in principle make any sort of viable statistical inference about things within your apprehension that could be possibly correctly made, just by 'looking' directly at it) to getting insight into alternate possibilities of how things could have been. At that stage, 'reading minds' is more like inferring either 'what would this person have said if I had asked this question?' or 'what sort of mind would be consistent with these actions and microexpressions and such?' - you don't get deep stuff, and you don't get ambiguous stuff.

The next step up is being able to actually 'push on' the information layer. So you could send someone a message by creating a link 'the result of their random coin flips is now informative about what I am currently speaking aloud', meaning that the coin flips would just happen to correspond to your message if someone knew to interpret them that way, but without that knowledge would be indistinguishable from random. Or instead of coin flips, it could be neurons firing, at which point if you and someone else with the same talent do that to each-other you really do have mind-to-mind communication. But it'd still be hard to telepathically speak to someone without the talent, because while you could make random neurons in their brain correlate with what you're thinking they wouldn't have the ability to look at the information layer and understand the flashes of color or sound or other such things as actually being your thoughts and not just having a stroke or something. But someone very, very good at it could control the manifestation of that informational link and maybe manage to communicate into the mind of someone without the talent.

Similarly, once someone is directly messing with the information layer, they could destroy 'the ability to infer a thing from a thing' independently of the physical reality of those things. So wiping all of the traces and clues from a crime scene. The way that would manifest is that random factors would correlate to make all conclusions ambiguous - yes the evidence is still consistent with what actually happened, but it also happens to be equally consistent with a bunch of other possible chains of events. At the small end of this, you'd get effects like invisibility of Jedi mind tricks - block a specific person from making a connection that is right in front of their face. At the extreme end this could allow effects like 'making everyone everywhere forget that this person exists', but that would require a mind that has more informatic 'weight' than the totality of things about that other person - probably requiring a hive mind at minimum to actually do.

Another branch of development would be to basically push your own 'self' to exist more on the information layer than the physical layer. That would be the direction of body-hopping shenanigans or being able to repair brain damage to your body by using your information layer existence as a backup.

I'd tend to have psionics actually be pretty weak at directly manipulating the physical world, so moving away from things like 'telekinesis' or 'thermokinesis' - not so much in the way of forces and fireballs and the like. They're theoretically possible in the sense that elaborate shaping of implicature could demand that the only thing an object could do would be to leap forcefully in a certain direction, but in practice it'd be too unpredictable and cognitively heavy to use in the field. On the other hand, low-end probability and fate manipulation would be the physical bread and butter of combat uses. Instead of applying a force to projectiles that would strike you, you suppress the formation of an information link between the ammunition of your enemies and the state of your own body, and so shots just seem to always miss or glance off. It might sometimes look like telekinesis to an outside observer though, but the main difference is the specificity of control - the psionics user is acting on the outcome and leaving the physical world to figure out how to ensure that outcome, meaning that there can be side-effects or loop-holes or things like that.

[Greywander]

An interesting read. The idea of an "information layer" is pretty similar to my idea of a "mindscape" or "mental reality". There's nuance, but it's pretty easy to fuse the two concepts together.

To break it down a bit more, I'd say that the first major step is simple self-awareness. Entities without self-awareness might still be capable of psionics, but not on a conscious level. It would be like how a bird relies on instincts to build a nest, it's not something they consciously learn how to do and make a deliberate decision to do, more of just an impulse that they follow.

After self-awareness, the next step would be mastery over your own mind. Your mind is like a bubble in the mental landscape, a mental sandbox made specifically for you.

Next would be the ability to see the mental reality beyond your own mind. "Reading", as you put it.

From here we can imagine a split path. One path extends your ability to read to other minds, allowing you to peek inside someone else's mental bubble. The other path is "pushing" or "writing" to the mental reality. The two paths then converge to the ability to "write" into another person's mind, implanting thoughts or ideas in their head.

We might even have another step beyond merely "pushing" information, but rather "forcing" information. I imagine a "push" would be like telling someone, "Oh hey you're on fire". You implant the thought into their head, but they can easily tell it isn't real. "Forcing" would be more than just a transfer of information, but a coercion of a mind to align itself with that information, making them feel the heat of the fire and the pain of their burning skin and the visceral panic that comes with it. So instead of just a dry statement of fact (or fiction), it's screaming into their face and whipping them into a confused panic. You know, when I describe it that way it kind of sounds like using magic to give people mental illnesses (e.g. hallucinations). Which... isn't inaccurate.

Since your brain is your physical link to the mindspace, damage to your brain can damage your mental bubble. Keeping a backup mind would be tricky, because it would need to exist outside your bubble, which leaves it vulnerable to other psions looking to either read it or make changes to it. You might want to create some kind of artificial mind to store it in, maybe just a mental bubble with no physical brain.

Anyway, one of the interesting consequences of psionic magic is that it actually replicates some of the existing quirks of D&D spells, like how you can be blasted with fire and acid and not have your equipment damaged, or how a lot of spells only affect creatures and not objects. A psionic fireball isn't real fire, it burns the mind but not your clothes. Psionic acid can't be collected into bottles and sold, nor can it melt through locked doors, only splashed onto bad guys. Heck, it even makes mimic checks make sense; launch a psychic attack at something you think might be a mimic, and if it doesn't react at all then that probably is because it doesn't have a mind and is therefore not a mimic.

As far as divinity-based magic, I'd like to break it down into a similar series of steps, but I don't think this concept is as well trod in pop culture so there aren't as many existing tropes to draw from. The foundation of it seems to be based on commands, though. Hmm, if we go back to sci-fi as an example, this could correspond to something like clearance codes or admin credentials. It is obviously ridiculous to think that you can just order a rock to do something because you outrank the rock on the divine hierarchy, so there must be more to it than that. Each divine rank might have its own set of permissions that limit their means of interacting even with lower ranked entities. Humans can shape wood and stone using tools, but can't just command them to assume a shape. Or maybe they can? To use a tool you have to practice and actually learn how to properly use the tool, so higher expressions of divine authority must likely require a similar learning process. Hmm... this will require more thought.

[NichG]

An interesting read. The idea of an "information layer" is pretty similar to my idea of a "mindscape" or "mental reality". There's nuance, but it's pretty easy to fuse the two concepts together.

To break it down a bit more, I'd say that the first major step is simple self-awareness. Entities without self-awareness might still be capable of psionics, but not on a conscious level. It would be like how a bird relies on instincts to build a nest, it's not something they consciously learn how to do and make a deliberate decision to do, more of just an impulse that they follow.

After self-awareness, the next step would be mastery over your own mind. Your mind is like a bubble in the mental landscape, a mental sandbox made specifically for you.

Next would be the ability to see the mental reality beyond your own mind. "Reading", as you put it.

From here we can imagine a split path. One path extends your ability to read to other minds, allowing you to peek inside someone else's mental bubble. The other path is "pushing" or "writing" to the mental reality. The two paths then converge to the ability to "write" into another person's mind, implanting thoughts or ideas in their head.

We might even have another step beyond merely "pushing" information, but rather "forcing" information. I imagine a "push" would be like telling someone, "Oh hey you're on fire". You implant the thought into their head, but they can easily tell it isn't real. "Forcing" would be more than just a transfer of information, but a coercion of a mind to align itself with that information, making them feel the heat of the fire and the pain of their burning skin and the visceral panic that comes with it. So instead of just a dry statement of fact (or fiction), it's screaming into their face and whipping them into a confused panic. You know, when I describe it that way it kind of sounds like using magic to give people mental illnesses (e.g. hallucinations). Which... isn't inaccurate.

Since your brain is your physical link to the mindspace, damage to your brain can damage your mental bubble. Keeping a backup mind would be tricky, because it would need to exist outside your bubble, which leaves it vulnerable to other psions looking to either read it or make changes to it. You might want to create some kind of artificial mind to store it in, maybe just a mental bubble with no physical brain.

Anyway, one of the interesting consequences of psionic magic is that it actually replicates some of the existing quirks of D&D spells, like how you can be blasted with fire and acid and not have your equipment damaged, or how a lot of spells only affect creatures and not objects. A psionic fireball isn't real fire, it burns the mind but not your clothes. Psionic acid can't be collected into bottles and sold, nor can it melt through locked doors, only splashed onto bad guys. Heck, it even makes mimic checks make sense; launch a psychic attack at something you think might be a mimic, and if it doesn't react at all then that probably is because it doesn't have a mind and is therefore not a mimic.


It's a nuance, but it does change some of the conclusions below. I guess the background here is, I go with 'information layer' in the sense of real world information theory. Which does mean that even without a proper 'mind' in play, there are going to be things which are or are not possible to be inferred on the basis of past interaction. E.g. the way that if you walked on wet concrete, the imprint is 'just a physical pattern in wet concrete' but is also simultaneously 'information about the shape of someone's foot'. And if someone takes a photograph of that concrete and destroys the concrete, the information about your foot still exists - so it can be copied, and it can propagate via contact. So that's a nice kind of substrate of elements I can use which are both sort of grounded in reality and which are supported by the physical but which are also not actually equal to the physical.

Then on that kind of substrate I can add fantastical elements like 'things in the information layer can act back upon the physical' and 'the information layer can be manipulated independently of the physical' and 'the set of possible inferences is a place', none of which are true (or even meaningful to speak of) in real-world information theory. And from there I can sort of derive the consequences of 'what would it be like to live in a world where this was actually true?', without just having to make things up completely from nothing.

So in that fantastical version, minds would not be fundamental to 'existing' on the information layer, but minds are physical engines which allow physical objects to engage with the information layer. The information layer itself is more about causal connections between things, but minds let organisms reason about and utilize those causal connections. The fact that the footprint in concrete tells you about someone's foot doesn't require a mind in play to be true, but it requires a mind in play to be able to use that fact.

As far as the 'weight' of minds on the information layer then, it would not just be because they're aware or special but its more of a natural consequence that minds (or anything that accumulates large amounts of memories) aggregate those causal links with other things in the world, so they're like self-organized hubs in the graph of connections that makes up the information layer. The contents of a mind contain copies of so many things, that you start to get enough connectivity to 'get anywhere from anywhere' - e.g. you're probably only a few links away from any particular thing about the world that isn't deeply hidden, like 'six degrees to Kevin Bacon'.

I guess my point is, by having the information layer have a 'matter' that exists below the level of minds, then it becomes a bit more clear how you'd do things like 'copy your mind into the information layer'. In real-world information theory, the photograph of the concrete imprint and the concrete imprint itself have (roughly) the same information about the shape of the foot. So in the fantastical information theory, while those two objects are two separate objects in the material world, they would be bound to the same singular object on the information layer. So therefore if you want to copy your mind, you would just have to cause other physical objects to contain the same information-layer object that your physical brain does, at which point you would be using those other physical objects as a sort of phylactery. Because in the fantastical information theory, things at the information layer can themselves have causal impact on the world, if your mind is capable of psionics and you cause, say, a society of 100k people to have a distributed mirror of your mind, then you could still 'do psionics' even if your original physical brain were damaged or destroyed, because your physical brain and the distributed hypnotic suggestions you've made to the 100k people both have the same implications as to 'what would you do or think next?'. You might not be able to do anything other than psionics though, since just because the information pattern of your mind still exists that doesn't mean that 'the way that the world interprets your information' (e.g. turning your will into muscle movements, etc) would be the same.

The kind of cool thing about doing it this way is that you sort of get something like the 'law of contagion' from other magic systems. If someone has interacted with an object, they've created a link on the information layer connecting that object to their mind. If you then interact with the object, you're at most two hops away from their mind. The more they interacted with the object before you got it (and the more plastic/malleable the object is) the stronger the link. So things like personal possessions making it easier to scry/curse/etc someone fall out almost naturally, with the nuance that getting someone's journal (which was strongly influenced directly by the contents of their mind) is going to be a much stronger link than getting a piece of jewelry they wore (which is only influenced indirectly based on patterns of wear and tear, which days the person chose to wear it vs not, how the person's choice of clothing changed the patterns of wear, etc).

[Vogie]

These are some cool ideas.

I like your take on so-called psionic magic - it reminds me of the secondary world imposed on the real world from Daniel Suarez's Daemon and FreedomTM. In that setting, a powerful sentient AI, the Daemon, slowly takes over the modern world and those who interact with it gain, essentially, special powers at the behest of that program. For example, someone makes a "ring of invisibility", although it just makes them invisible from cameras or any other recording device. High-level users could "summon" the robotic pawns of the Daemon, often Razorbacks, which are bulletproof, self-balancing and -driving motorcycles with weapons attached to articulating arms (originally swords, hence the names, but later expand to other weapons and various tools), and cast "curse" on their targets - as minor as hits to credit or having their stuff repossessed, to as major as releasing damning information, shutting down companies with ransomware, or being labelled as an escaped, dangerous criminal. In the second and final book, the adherents to the Daemon wear Augmented reality glasses to see into this darknet world, as well as wearing feedback gloves and vests to feel & physically interact with it it.

That being said, this "mental" magic will probably be the most difficult to pull off in a system like this. Largely because the things it can do will feel like a heavily-gerrymandered version of normal fantasy magic,
focusing on some of the most "problem" magics that many of the traditional D&D-likes run into:

The illusion problem - having deceptive magic illusions trying to do certain things tends to cause a metamechanical problem. In a narrative, a bit of magic that pretends to be damaging can be thrown around and can trick their target into feeling the pain of that illusion. At a table, on the other hand you can say things like "You've been hit with a fireball" but when that fireball happens to be a will save (or intelligence saving throw) instead of the normal one, there's a level of meta-knowledge that says "hey, this is an illusion". If you've found a way to remove that mechanical issue, I'd love to hear about it.
The Enchantment problem - The other side of mind-effecting coin, enchantment-style magics tend to be either too weak or too strong. They usually fall into the "save or suck" column, where the effects are hard to have scaling levels of success. Pathfinder 2e did some of the best executions of this, by adding a scaling effect to all of their spells (there are options for success, fail, critical success and critical fail) and, more importantly, scaling on their conditions, which in turn gave their enchantment spells a better diversity of effects. You aren't just frightened or not frightened, clumsy or not clumsy, slowed or not slowed - saving against a fear spell could make you only frightened 1 instead of frightened 3, for example, or Slowed 1 for one round instead of slowed 2 for 1 minute. They also tied incapacitation effects together by a mechanical trait that allows those effects to be useful for targets of lower or even level to the player, but act slightly differently on targets that are higher level of than the player - So it's impossible for the big boss to critically fail against a, say, paralysis spell, and then be curbstomped into a dissatisfying conclusion.
The Divination problem - Whenever you have something that enhances the mind and senses of a character, you run into easy ways to get across that data to those specific people. There are also things that'll be left on the table or spread around because of how your play setting is - if you describe the scene to the whole party, then tell the psionic magic user a bunch of other information that their "Heads Up display" shows that the others can't see (there are three minds around the corner, the person talking is lying, and the guard keeps looking between you and one specific door down the street), that information is also said in front of the other players, and telling them to not use it will be as effective as a judge striking something from the record - theoretically, the other characters can't know it, but you can't exactly unsay it in front of the players. This is something that things like video games do really well, as the game engine can show one player one thing and another player another thing, but doesn't translate well to a group of people around a table, physical or virtual. The same goes for when you build a character to be smarter than the player is - making mechanics to represent how that character figures out puzzles, identifies creatures or weaknesses, and the like, are hard to pull off. In theory, as you're playing a game, creatures could have certain pieces of information that such abilities could find. In practice, that means a ton of spare work for whoever is writing the creature list for publication as well as the game master or storyteller that is homebrewing things.
These aren't completely overcome-able, but can be potential issues that come up as you build of the system.

As for the second one, I think "divinity" isn't the word to use, but more like "hierarchy" or "authority" magic, maybe something like "heiromancy". This way you can have a sort of innate ranking system between wielders with the power, as well as giving the image of being able to impose one's will on the natural world. You could add some relatively simple rules on what various natural things would do - rocks could hold together or roll, plants or wood could be made to grow, water could be told to change between states, wind swirls, and so on. Then the concept of taking the natural world and then imposing forms of tools into it could be overshown by the other magic types. A higher user of the authority magic could improve someone's creations, or eliminate them. You could see people skilled in this art doing things like removing the manacles from their hands and transforming them into lockpicks or a dagger, have the earth rise up to form a stool beneath them as they sit down, or work in construction and demolition departments.

What would be interesting is if you also tied this type into the law systems of the land - so the nation/state could essentially imbue a group of government officials with very specific powers, almost a 3rd version of the theurgy/witchcraft style. These individuals would have their powers narrowly defined by their roles in the government, or by specific magically influenced edicts like warrants or ownership certificates. Essentially a sort of magical version of bureaucracy.

[Greywander]

Help how do I keep my posts from getting so long? This is after I've trimmed it down.


It's a nuance, but it does change some of the conclusions below. I guess the background here is, I go with 'information layer' in the sense of real world information theory.
[...]
I guess my point is, by having the information layer have a 'matter' that exists below the level of minds, then it becomes a bit more clear how you'd do things like 'copy your mind into the information layer'. In real-world information theory, the photograph of the concrete imprint and the concrete imprint itself have (roughly) the same information about the shape of the foot.
A lot of the ideas here are quite interesting. I assume that both the concrete imprint and the photograph are both physical manifestations of that specific information, and that the information can be preserves as long as at least one of those still exists, but destroying both would cause the information to just vanish (though possibly leaving behind other information as a result of the destruction that could partially reconstruct the original). Just like a mind backup, if you could access that information before it was destroyed then you could create a copy somewhere on the information layer, though in reality the copy would probably exist inside your own mind/memories, so destroying your brain would erase the backup. Does everything need a representation in physical reality? E.g. a backup mind would need to exist as a book or data disk or something that can store all the information about your mind? Obviously there would be a lot of ephemeral data, things that exist only as derivatives of other things and thus have no physical manifestation. This also brings in the question of if you can create information from nothing that forces a physical manifestation into existence (probably not because your own brain would already act as the physical manifestation of such information unless you can somehow create the information without knowing what that information is).

I'll have to do more research on information theory before I can say much more.


At a table, on the other hand you can say things like "You've been hit with a fireball" but when that fireball happens to be a will save (or intelligence saving throw) instead of the normal one, there's a level of meta-knowledge that says "hey, this is an illusion". If you've found a way to remove that mechanical issue, I'd love to hear about it.
I mean, if they fail the save they still suffer the negative effects of the spell. Knowing it's psionic magic might mean something on a tactical level, but only if there's actually something they can do about it. They can't just say, "I disbelieve the fireball," because that's not how it works; failing the save specifically means they don't disbelieve it and suffer some kind of psychic damage as a result.


The Enchantment problem - The other side of mind-effecting coin, enchantment-style magics tend to be either too weak or too strong. They usually fall into the "save or suck" column, where the effects are hard to have scaling levels of success.
Yes, this is always an issue dealing with "status effect" type of things. An effect too severe can essentially mean that the afflicted character is already out of the fight, while an effect not severe enough simply isn't worth using. PCs and boss monsters are both especially susceptible just due to the numbers issue; the fewer members a team has and the stronger those members are, the greater a status effect will debilitate the team. Inflicting paralysis on one goblin out of a horde of twenty is essentially useless, but inflicting paralysis on the lone dragon ends the fight.


if you describe the scene to the whole party, then tell the psionic magic user a bunch of other information that their "Heads Up display" shows that the others can't see (there are three minds around the corner, the person talking is lying, and the guard keeps looking between you and one specific door down the street), that information is also said in front of the other players, and telling them to not use it will be as effective as a judge striking something from the record - theoretically, the other characters can't know it, but you can't exactly unsay it in front of the players.
There are ways around this, such as passing notes if playing in person, or using a private/secondary chat when playing online. But honestly I think it's actually a really important skill to be able to handle the separation of player knowledge vs. character knowledge, and it's not unreasonable to expect someone to learn that skill once they've been playing for long enough. What you're basically asking the player to do is to actually think about what their character would do based on what the character knows, which is actually what roleplaying really is. It's about putting yourself in the head of someone else, someone who isn't you, who doesn't think like you think and doesn't know what you know. This isn't just a good skill for roleplaying, it is an important skill for real life, helping you to see things from another person's point of view and understand their perspective.


As for the second one, I think "divinity" isn't the word to use, but more like "hierarchy" or "authority" magic, maybe something like "heiromancy".
Yeah, "divinity" wasn't quite accurate and probably wasn't the best word to use. We can imagine that there's this "stuff" and some things have more of that "stuff", and having a certain amount of that "stuff" is specifically what makes something a god. So calling it "divinity" isn't entirely wrong, but it's more like it's a specific amount that would be called "divine", and anything below a god doesn't have that "divine" level of the "stuff". "Authority" is a much better descriptor.

I like the name "hieromancy" and I might use it for something else, but it doesn't quite have the gravitas I'm looking for. "Hieromancy" sounds like the type of magic that an Egyptian priest would use. It does sound like a cool name, but it sounds a little silly for the divine power of the gods. After doing some more research, I think I like "regnancy" as it more properly evokes the idea of rulership. Though despite everything I just said about gravitas, I'm well aware that this will lead to the occasional "Honey, I'm regnant" jokes. And yes, that's also a real word. I'm still not sure what a practitioner of regnancy would be called, though "regent" is probably the most appropriate.

It also occurs to me that this recontextualizes theurgy. Previously I'd conceived of theurgy and witchcraft being different expressions of the same foundational concepts, and perhaps they still are at the most basic level. But while witchcraft is sorcery-by-proxy (mostly; you could contract a familiar to use their regnancy on your behalf), theurgy is now regnancy-by-proxy (again, mostly; a deity could probably still bestow sorceries to you). Although the relationship is now reversed; instead of getting a spirit to use their sorcery on your behalf, a deity is getting you to use their own regnancy on their behalf. This means instead of doing a spaltbook entirely on theurgy I'd probably combine theurgy and regnancy into the same splatbook, and likewise it would make sense to put witchcraft and sorcery together for a splatbook. While you're using them by proxy, they would still follow a lot of the same rules.


What would be interesting is if you also tied this type into the law systems of the land - so the nation/state could essentially imbue a group of government officials with very specific powers, almost a 3rd version of the theurgy/witchcraft style. These individuals would have their powers narrowly defined by their roles in the government, or by specific magically influenced edicts like warrants or ownership certificates. Essentially a sort of magical version of bureaucracy.
Ooh, this is a cool idea, and exactly the sort of thing integrating the magical into the mundane that I want. When you weave magic into everyday stuff, you either end up making the magical feel more mundane, or, as I want to do, you make the setting feel more fantastical. We're too used to thinking that magic and mundane are hard separations, but to ancient cultures something like steel would have appeared to be a magical indestructible material, similar to adamantine in D&D. A proper fantasy setting should feel just a little alien to us; instead of normalizing the supernormal, it should mysticize the mundane (but not too much).

In practice, this would probably somewhat resemble theurgy, but instead of being bestowed regnancy by a deity, it's being bestowed by the people you're ruling over. They are voluntarily submitting to your rule, which is acknowledged on a cosmic level and your comparative authority is adjusted to reflect that. Even against a lawbreaker or rebel, who doesn't voluntarily submit to your authority, there's still a level on which they're under your rule, unless they have the regnancy to challenge your authority over them. This is why a person's innate regnancy can be important for determining who is a viable leader; if you're rebelling against the existing order, it becomes much easier if you're rallying behind someone with a valid claim of rulership and a natural regal bearing.

Approaching regnancy from the "divine power" angle indicates authority probably isn't uniform. Different gods have authority over different things, their domains. Logically, this would extend to lower beings with less regnancy. A god of storms can't just start planting forests, and likewise a blacksmith can't just suddenly start doing underwater basket weaving and expect similar results to their smithing. So there's likely an element of regnancy that includes establishing a domain, things that are under your authority. It's not enough to simply outrank something, you have to also claim ownership/authority over it, and asserting that claim isn't necessarily easy or simple.

Having a domain is also insufficient on it's own, you need to have a method of communicating your will to the object of your regnancy. People can understand speech, so words are sufficient for giving commands. A rock cannot understand speech, but a hammer and chisel can work just as well. If sufficiently powerful, you can imbue your hands, your words, and even your thoughts with enough regnancy that your will can be understood regardless.

Although now I'm trying to think of how regnancy isn't just a regular skill system but extended to Exalted levels. I think part of the issue is that literally everyone uses regnancy to do everyday things, but few people actually push beyond normal human limits to supernatural levels. The skill system would have to be a part of regnancy, but it would be weird to have a separate system that handles the supernatural aspect. Hmm, how this could be implemented is that you're still making skill checks to do things, but regnancy as a magic system is more like special feats that allow you to do more things with your skills. So like, you could wrestle a river by doing an Athletics check, but you still need to pass the check. Simply having the ability to wrestle rivers doesn't automatically make you good at it, so you'd still be required to properly invest in your skills in addition to grabbing the regnancy feats. Not entirely sure I like that, I'll give it more thought but at least that's an option.

[NichG]

Help how do I keep my posts from getting so long? This is after I've trimmed it down.


A lot of the ideas here are quite interesting. I assume that both the concrete imprint and the photograph are both physical manifestations of that specific information, and that the information can be preserves as long as at least one of those still exists, but destroying both would cause the information to just vanish (though possibly leaving behind other information as a result of the destruction that could partially reconstruct the original). Just like a mind backup, if you could access that information before it was destroyed then you could create a copy somewhere on the information layer, though in reality the copy would probably exist inside your own mind/memories, so destroying your brain would erase the backup. Does everything need a representation in physical reality? E.g. a backup mind would need to exist as a book or data disk or something that can store all the information about your mind? Obviously there would be a lot of ephemeral data, things that exist only as derivatives of other things and thus have no physical manifestation. This also brings in the question of if you can create information from nothing that forces a physical manifestation into existence (probably not because your own brain would already act as the physical manifestation of such information unless you can somehow create the information without knowing what that information is).

I'll have to do more research on information theory before I can say much more.


You can talk about information between purely abstract what-if stuff, like 'what would be the mutual information between these two variables drawn from a joint distribution p(x,y)' or 'what would be the information if I were to assume that these physically real observations were drawn from this mathematical model of the world?'. But if we talk about the 'real' information in the real world, its something like a bound on the possible: no matter how clever you are, you can never infer more than this amount about A given an observation of B. When we talk about the abstract stuff, we're trying to estimate that (and also establish how we would do the inference) but then if you register your predictions, there will be some real bound that doesn't get exceeded. The thing that allows you to attempt to make an inference is that you know something about the process by which the pattern was generated - e.g. you can look at a photograph of a divot in concrete and say 'ah, therefore Joe's foot looks like this' because you have the additional context that Joe stepped in that concrete, and then someone took a photo of the concrete that Joe stepped in. In a broader sense, you can imagine the alternatives - if someone else had stepped in that concrete, would the shape be different? If Joe's foot had had a cut on it, would the photo be different? Your understanding of that context (which can be partially incorrect) gives rise to a model of how things work ('feet leave their imprints in concrete +/- some meltiness', 'cameras capture what something looks like according to these principles of optics +/- noise and blurriness'), which in turn is used to figure out things indirectly. But when you're actually talking about inferring things in the real world, you're always inferring those things from observations of the real world, so in that sense there's always a physical manifestation somewhere in there or there's nothing to infer.

Another way to think of inference is if there were all sorts of possible universes where things could be different, and you only know a finite set of things about the universe you're in, how well can you narrow down which universe you're in out of all the possibilities? So the thing that makes that meaningful is the contents of your universe, e.g. things physically real within your universe. But of course you can do thought experiments and math problems and such where you set up hypotheticals, and the mathematics still works for that.

Anyhow, to convert this into a fantasy system, I'm taking an extra step and saying, well, what if that abstract fact that its possible to infer things from things has a metaphysically 'real' and object-like existence to it, in that it can be interacted with the same way you'd interact with physical things - moved, changed, created, destroyed, picked up and locked away, etc. Of course you can't do that with the abstract concept of information as it applies to the real world. But for the purpose of imagining a fantasy world, you can say 'well what if you could?'. So in that fantasy imagining, its a world-building choice as to whether or not you could get away without there being physical manifestations, and have information itself somehow impose itself on a physical reality that has otherwise forgotten about it. You're already off the reservation of real world information theory at that point, so you can pick how you want it to work. I'd probably make this intentionally ambiguous. Rather than saying 'yeah information can definitely exist totally decoupled' I'd want to ask the question 'how can you know you've really destroyed everything that could let someone reconstruct this?'.

Even in the real world, someone can e.g. train a language model on all of your social media and forum activity and create a chatbot that sort of talks like you. How much about you does that sort of process capture? How much could a perfect version of that capture? Its doubtful its everything, but its also clearly more than nothing. If the physics of the universe were truly deterministic, it would actually be impossible to ever destroy information, only obfuscate it. In a non-deterministic universe, information can actually be lost (but the non-determinism from quantum mechanics actually makes this subtly nuanced, and it depends on what 'measurement' actually is among other things). So leaving it ambiguous as to whether the fantasy world information entities have really and truly become independent existences or if they've just managed to cobble together a mind from, say, people's collective memories of interacting with a person in the past seems like good mystery fodder.