Flipping the "Mundanes Find Magic Disturbing and Incomprehensible" Stereotype?

[Vrock_Summoner]

The usual way magic vs mundane works is that it's considered "mind vs body," with non-mages lacking in mental understanding and mages lacking in physical capability. But I had an idea that was both somewhat interesting and made me laugh a bit... Especially in worlds where magic-users are of a different species (LotR) or experience the world differently (Dragon Age), what if we had the mages be totally baffled and horrified by concepts most mundanes would have no trouble understanding? And before you start, I mean an actual mage/non-mage divide, not things that are simply a matter of circumstance, such as the typical shut-in (but otherwise human) mage who doesn't understand friendship or love for having not experienced it.

I'm having trouble thinking of things that aren't extremely fundamental to our nature, though. Maybe we could go there, though, if we're assuming mages who are so connected to magic that they can't comprehend these things. Maybe in the same way we can't comprehend how they manipulate magic to move their form, they can't comprehend how we manipulate out muscles to move independently of magic? Hm...

How do you think this could be made to work? (And should I have posted this in World-Building? It seems like more of an RP issue, and thus appropriate for here, but I dunno.)

[Honest Tiefling]

What about water? Mages burn at the touch of water, and possibly die if submerged. As for food, either they cannot eat overly wet foods, or because the universe hates them, they still must eat and drink as normal. So they have to very carefully imbibe small amounts of that which kills them.

Perhaps water burns parts of them, such as spell tattoos they wear to focus their spells, so their face is fine. In wetter weather, they cover everything but their face for protection. It could also just react very badly with their blood, so eating, drinking and bathing is fine, but if they are wounded suddenly rainfall can become deadly. Perhaps it even sets their blood aflame, making them deadly not just to themselves, but to everything around them.

Screw that necromancer, he's not too bad, but that water mage? What a monster!

[calam]

They could be so invested in learning magic that they don't understand the basis of mundane solutions like technology. While levitating a block of stone is simple for them they have no clue how a pulley works and doesn't understand how you can lift more with it than you could with your bare hands. Someone with magic might not even understand the basics of physics or chemistry!

[LibraryOgre]

Isn't this more or less the situation of the Wizarding World in Harry Potter? Most are ignorant of even basic technology... when Sirius is on the loose, they have to explain what a gun is to the Wizarding world.

What if being constantly immersed in magic means that you start losing understanding of basic physics? Kind of like when you switch video games and suddenly can't remember how to do basic things... because you can't remember if this game's engine lets you jump, much less what button you press.

[Honest Tiefling]

Maybe mages go into an ethereal form through meditation. This form releases them from the needs of the physical body and lets them cast great magic. However, the tie between their fleshy body and their will is loosened, so you have the case of mages returning to their bodies and forgetting how to breath without concentrating it, or understanding that the unpleasant sensation they have is hunger and that they really need to focus on swallowing so they don't choke.

[VoxRationis]

You could go the obvious route and have mages be blind for one reason or another. They might sense the world via alternate means, like finding disturbances in magical fields, but come into situations where the magical sense doesn't quite make up for the lack of vision.

In fact, if magic is a thing completely separate from technology, such a handicap could explain why mages have trouble with technology: living creatures affect the flow of magic in easily distinguishable ways, but all inanimate objects seem about the same, so a computer or clock looks just like a box.

[Honest Tiefling]

Expanding on this magic sense, what if it renders them unable to read? Many fields in many time periods would rely on written knowledge (such as engineering or medicine), further explaining why they are divorced from technology. It would also put a neat spin on things, in that mages either intrinsically know things through eldritch forces, or have oral traditions passed down. Your average fighter would stand a better chance of being a well-read and well-rounded individual.

[GlasgowPhill]

There's an excellent series of books called Shadows of the Apt which uses this exact thing. Characters are either Apt because they understand and can work technology or they are Inapt which means they retain some echo of magic. Because the technology gets quite advanced by the end of the series it's quite clearly a big deal not to understand it.

Sadly despite being written by a roleplayer it doesn't have an attached roleplay system that I've heard of but maybe Adrian will write one or work with someone to write one some day.

[Kane0]

Mages rely on a constant flow of magic to sustain themselves. If they can't rest or regain that flow somehow after a hard days work magicing around they run the risk of seriously injuring themselves, not just feeling a little tired. They cannot begin to understand how non-mages can survive a half night rest with just a cup of coffee or two, or how people can manage to stay up all night drinking and only get a headache in the morning.

Mages have a constant, near telepathic link to other magic users in their vicinity, and are attuned to the flow of magic. Too many casters or attuned in one place creates interference and is like a dull roar in their heads all the time. For them crowds are a nightmare, cities are deathtraps and libraries/colleges are tortuous prisons. The few that have built up resistance to this or learned to block others out to some extent come off as divorced from reality or devoid of most emotion and other basic responses.

I had a third, but I forgot.

[Flickerdart]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure. You could also make magic so seductive that they can no longer comprehend why anyone bothers to do anything but study or practice it. In most cases, this just makes mages devoid of initiative and easily manipulated, but in extreme cases they could forget to eat, breathe, etc.

[Cealocanth]

What if a mage is someone who exists outside of the normal bounds of reality. They have no real corporeal form, only what they create for themselves, and manipulate 'magic', essentially meaning the fabric of reality, just to stay alive. Absorbing life energy from the world around them is as fundamental to them as is eating and drinking, and reshaping the world in order to allow for movement is as easy as walking is to us. The powers of some of the most benign of such creatures would be magic indeed to the ordinary eye, but they would see practical things such as tool use or chemical interactions such as love and morality as alien and purely superficial concepts. "Why do these odd creatures need an object to shape their world, and why do they need to damage the earth to use its stone? Wouldn't it just be easier to conjure some stone where they want it? How inefficient."

Another idea: What if mages are born with a speical "gift" from some sort of divine creature that acts as both a blessing and a curse. They can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste reality just like anyone else, but all machinations of logic and reason come across as utterly alien to them. Instead, the obvious parts of the world come from emotion and morality. To ask "what causes this to happen?" would be as difficult and unsolvable a question as "what is the right thing to do?" Yet give any mage a situation in which there is no clear right and wrong answer and present a moral dilemma that would baffle even the most practiced of ordinary humans and they will answer "This is obviously the correct choice." The source of magic, in this case, would come in their uncanny knack for the minds of others. Human courses of action are obvious, and so they gain an Oracle-like foresight of events. With practice they can persuade anyone and everyone they know to do one thing or another, to think a certain way. A society of mages would be impossible, as the very notions of civilization and organization would baffle them, but an ordinary society could be seen to worship the "cult of mages" for their incredible abilities to lead.

[Jacob.Tyr]

Maybe Mages could be so out of touch with the physical world that they fail at basic things like not soiling themselves while simultaneously being amazed that other people can just tell when they need to use the bathroom. They could be incapable of controlling their breathing, constantly choking, falling asleep without realizing they were ever tired.

[Knaight]

To some extent, you can take the wonder that already exists. People have accomplished ridiculous physical feats, from moving in extremely controlled and impressive ways to surviving extremely grievous injuries to feats of amazing endurance. On the mental side, there's the complexity of all sorts of specialized fields, the amount of knowledge so called "primitive" societies have about the world around them, savants learning dozens of languages in a week or performing mathematical calculations at amazing speeds.

Now, say there's a culture where magic is just the norm. It's used for just about everything, it's what just about everyone specializes in. People from that culture are pretty likely to be shocked when coming upon the extremes of natural ability. Said extremes are likely to be seen as incomprehensible, seeing them as disturbing is also very much possible. After all, that person walked a hundred miles with a spear stuck through them on no food and next to no water. That person just performed a bunch of impressive acrobatics with a bar. That person calculated the precise behavior of something without even magically looking at it.

[Kantaki]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure. You could also make magic so seductive that they can no longer comprehend why anyone bothers to do anything but study or practice it. In most cases, this just makes mages devoid of initiative and easily manipulated, but in extreme cases they could forget to eat, breathe, etc.

The opposide is fun as well: the arcane energies are a absolutely chaotic force. Those that are attuned to them, either by birth or through study, are unable to grasp the pure logic needed for the mundane sciences. Basicly while they could draw an perfect summoning circle thanks to their knowledge of magic they have no idea of the math behind it.

[Mando Knight]

Or, perhaps, the ability to use magic requires so much of one's mental capacity that they simply can't remember anything else. A thief dabbling in cantrips might be a little airheaded sometimes but otherwise alright, while the wizard might have forgotten his own family just so he could memorize one more spell.

[Hjolnai]

Maybe magic causes agonizing bodily degradation, so that wizards have little understanding of a number of human activities. Aversion to the risk of death or injury is alien to them, when they live in constant pain and can expect only a few years more. Planning for the future? Why? They won't be around to see it.

This also gives a pretty good reason for most people with magical potential to refuse to use it. The cost is far too high for the benefits.

[nedz]

You could just make the use of magic addictive — like gambling or various substances — and have mages acquire the usual side effects of such behaviour. This would give rise to things like Temperance movements, Prohibition, Component running and Mages Anonymous.

[NichG]

One interesting take on it might be that if you understand magic, it stops working for you. So basically, mages have to either be capable of dissociating their own mind at will, lying to themselves really well, or must remain ignorant of the details of how their powers work. The idea would be something like there being a set of paradoxes which, if you believe in both sides of them fully, it causes the universe to become undetermined in a way that you can subconsciously control. But if you understand why they're paradoxes and thus what part of the universe they blur, you can't believe both sides of them and get the effect.

[Shalist]

In Peter Hamilton's 'Nights Dawn' series, those able to connect with other minds from birth ('Edenists,' via an artificially developed telepathy gene; vice 'Adamists,' who oppose such tampering) find the thought of not being in constant contact with their peers to be terrifying. Imagine not having that openness and intimacy with everyone, or losing a loved one to something as preventable as death (since they eventually just upload their minds into the local hub)...

Really, any societal split between magic / mundane could lead to significant differences in quality of life, i.e. "Why...why in the world hasn't that person just gone to the Healers to get [whatever] fixed?" And that can run both ways ("What in the world is this 'indoor plumbing' of which you speak?").

An unrelated anecdote...There was a Forgotten Realm trilogy that took place in Halruua, a kingdom where magic is so omnipresent that at one point a main character (who was incapable of using it) performing on the street was unable to convince a crowd that her tricks were really just sleight of hand and such, vice actual magic :P

[Blackhawk748]

Expanding on this magic sense, what if it renders them unable to read? Many fields in many time periods would rely on written knowledge (such as engineering or medicine), further explaining why they are divorced from technology. It would also put a neat spin on things, in that mages either intrinsically know things through eldritch forces, or have oral traditions passed down. Your average fighter would stand a better chance of being a well-read and well-rounded individual.

This made me chuckle. "Ya Wizard, the Fighter is the knowledge junky now!!"

[Ettina]

In Dresden Files, wizards tend to make technology fail by being near it. As a result, it's pretty tough for them to make use of technology, and most of them know very little about it. In one book, a regular human takes something the wizards want and cuts a deal with them to tell them where it is. To avoid double-crossing, he has the information in the form of GPS coordinates on a flash drive so they can't find it if they steal it from him.

[Slipperychicken]

mages totally baffled and horrified by concepts most mundanes would have no trouble understanding?

[at a gym]
Wizard: "Let me get this straight. You're telling me that every day you lift these objects up and put them back down again.."
Fighter: "Eee-yup"
Wizard: "And you restrict your diet..."
Fighter: "Uh huh. Protein shakes, steaks, no sweets"
Wizard: "And you endure other harships.."
Fighter: "No pain no gain, bruh"
Wizard: "For MONTHS on end.."
Fighter: "Years, actually.
Wizard: "And repeating the same rituals, for countless months, somehow makes you strong enough to wrestle a dragon"
Fighter: "Pretty much. You do have to increase the intensity if you want to get big"
Wizard: "And then SOMEHOW, WITHOUT MAGIC, this also increases your physical size"
Fighter: "If you don't believe me, just check these gains" [flexes]
Wizard: "And I thought the arcane secrets were baffling!"

[Segev]

A concept I had once involved "elves" being a race of intangible creatures that are incapable of effecting real, solid things, but which find illusions to be quite real. And they're able to conjure them. Their illusions can't actually effect humans, except for the sensory input, however. Through possession during procreative acts, half-elves can be born who are tangible and find illusions to be all too real, as well.

Such a setting might create this kind of mutual bafflement.


Take old traditional restrictions on witches or fae and apply them to mages. Can't cross running water, must repay any debts incurred, unable to cross the threshold of a home uninvited... Mages would understand these rules as intrinsically as we appreciate gravity and the fact that we can't walk on water or take to the air and fly on a whim. So seeing us do them would be as fascinating to the mage as the mage's ability to teleport is to a non-mage.

[Marlowe]

There's an excellent series of books called Shadows of the Apt which uses this exact thing. Characters are either Apt because they understand and can work technology or they are Inapt which means they retain some echo of magic. Because the technology gets quite advanced by the end of the series it's quite clearly a big deal not to understand it.

Sadly despite being written by a roleplayer it doesn't have an attached roleplay system that I've heard of but maybe Adrian will write one or work with someone to write one some day.

Read a bit of that. Some races are building clockpunk airforces but can't do magic at all while others can throw around the equivalent of low-level spells as easy as wiggle their fingers, but can't figure how a doorknob works or how to open a window.

[hiryuu]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure.

I hate this stereotype. So much.

Anyway, the traditional D&D "mage" is based on a mistake made early during D&D's development about a large number of preconceived notions of druids, Gandalf, Merlin, Islamic alchemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan (who was a badass - his big trick was that he claimed he could make people with the right chemical compounds), and the fact that the devs were super big fans of The Dying Earth. So, before getting in to anything, bear in mind that our ideas about what constitutes a "magic user" in standard thought in regards to D&D and a lot of gaming in general are actually very limited. In cultures around the world, magicians are priests and warriors and explorers and comedians (this is actually a deadly serious role in many cultures).

In all these iterations it is important to note that what we're calling a "wizard" is actually a very hermit-like priest attempting to determine how god (or gods) created the world and what needs to be done to keep that world working properly. It is, essentially, the same story as a scientist, but without our modern method of discernment from logical deduction; anybody who was going to be a chemist or a biologist had to deal with the prevalent zeitgeist and assume certain things that had been guessed outright. This changes in, say, a D&D universe, mind you, where there is obviously some form of scientific methodology going on - wizards and the like aren't just randomly guessing and never bothering to directly test it, they're actually doing tests and running experiments and making up new spells. In our world, this kind of testing led to telegraphs and phones and cars and skyscrapers and it's propelling us to other planets and potentially other universes.

Of course the entire point of this is the "mundanes" in our universe often find "magic" disturbing and incomprehensible. Don't believe it? Go to youtube and look for how many people are there trying to "debunk" evolution, thermodynamics in general, AIRPLANES, and the idea that genetically modifying crops is somehow a completely different process than hybridization just on a much faster scale. I can wait.

That's why it's a stereotype. Because to the uneducated, an educated person is mysterious, scary, and seems confident to the point of disgusted aloofness. Now imagine that scary guy doesn't have to fly to Sweden to fire up his particle accelerator to fry you. She can do it right there. With the right word to the right place at the right time with the right hand motions. D&D mages, at least, are freakin' Dr. Who.

Anyway, in the mythology I grew up with, mages were all "big men," I guess you could call them. Glooscap and giants, the stikini owl-women, Chokfee and Breathmaker. Imagine how weird it would feel if you were suddenly introduced to this whole fantasy novel business and the only stories that you could relate were stuff about the time Chokfee stole tobacco from possum so he could sneak into Thunder-man's pavilion, and rode around on his cloud for a while, or where all the magicians you heard about punched holes in the sky and wrestled lightning for sport, and suddenly you're confronted with the bearded white man in every book. An endless parade of this strange being, who might as well be an alien to you, seems to be taken for granted by the entire community you're meeting.

Which I think is the crux of my problem in all these sorts of ponderings - if magic exists in the universe, then it is a perfectly normal part of that universe's physical laws (whether the common folk know about it or not), and someone studying it will certainly learn and forget more about the universe than your average peasant just by necessity. "Magic" isn't a system or a process, at least as D&D presents it. It's a force, and if it's a force, then a system designed to describe forces can definitely step in and deal with it - and once they start applying the scientific method to their universe, well, magic will fall in line. At least enough to get us that class we call "the wizard."

[Marlowe]

So, magic in a D&D-verse is a known natural force that follows observable and empirically proven laws, a spellcaster is more like a scientist who brings his lab and gadgets with him wherever he goes than a mysterious manipulator of the supernatural, and that distrusting "magic" makes as much sense in this milieu as distrusting physics or chemistry does in ours.

I agree with that. Only trouble is diving into this leads to a campaign atmosphere more akin to science-fiction than fantasy. I don't have a problem with this, but I've noticed a few people do.

Completely unrelated, I now have a desire to play a character who doesn't believe in "magic", and explains away everything the spellcasters do as the result of spontaneous combustion, freak weather, mass hysteria, marsh gas, ball lightning, or whatever.

Bonus points if he's a high-level Swordsage who throws around supernatural abilities like peanuts.

[LudicSavant]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure.

I hate this stereotype. So much.

Anyway, the traditional D&D "mage" is based on a mistake made early during D&D's development about a large number of preconceived notions of druids, Gandalf, Merlin, Islamic alchemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan (who was a badass - his big trick was that he claimed he could make people with the right chemical compounds), and the fact that the devs were super big fans of The Dying Earth. So, before getting in to anything, bear in mind that our ideas about what constitutes a "magic user" in standard thought in regards to D&D and a lot of gaming in general are actually very limited. In cultures around the world, magicians are priests and warriors and explorers and comedians (this is actually a deadly serious role in many cultures).

In all these iterations it is important to note that what we're calling a "wizard" is actually a very hermit-like priest attempting to determine how god (or gods) created the world and what needs to be done to keep that world working properly. It is, essentially, the same story as a scientist, but without our modern method of discernment from logical deduction; anybody who was going to be a chemist or a biologist had to deal with the prevalent zeitgeist and assume certain things that had been guessed outright. This changes in, say, a D&D universe, mind you, where there is obviously some form of scientific methodology going on - wizards and the like aren't just randomly guessing and never bothering to directly test it, they're actually doing tests and running experiments and making up new spells. In our world, this kind of testing led to telegraphs and phones and cars and skyscrapers and it's propelling us to other planets and potentially other universes.

Of course the entire point of this is the "mundanes" in our universe often find "magic" disturbing and incomprehensible. Don't believe it? Go to youtube and look for how many people are there trying to "debunk" evolution, thermodynamics in general, AIRPLANES, and the idea that genetically modifying crops is somehow a completely different process than hybridization just on a much faster scale. I can wait.

That's why it's a stereotype. Because to the uneducated, an educated person is mysterious, scary, and seems confident to the point of disgusted aloofness. Now imagine that scary guy doesn't have to fly to Sweden to fire up his particle accelerator to fry you. She can do it right there. With the right word to the right place at the right time with the right hand motions. D&D mages, at least, are freakin' Dr. Who.

Anyway, in the mythology I grew up with, mages were all "big men," I guess you could call them. Glooscap and giants, the stikini owl-women, Chokfee and Breathmaker. Imagine how weird it would feel if you were suddenly introduced to this whole fantasy novel business and the only stories that you could relate were stuff about the time Chokfee stole tobacco from possum so he could sneak into Thunder-man's pavilion, and rode around on his cloud for a while, or where all the magicians you heard about punched holes in the sky and wrestled lightning for sport, and suddenly you're confronted with the bearded white man in every book. An endless parade of this strange being, who might as well be an alien to you, seems to be taken for granted by the entire community you're meeting.

Which I think is the crux of my problem in all these sorts of ponderings - if magic exists in the universe, then it is a perfectly normal part of that universe's physical laws (whether the common folk know about it or not), and someone studying it will certainly learn and forget more about the universe than your average peasant just by necessity. "Magic" isn't a system or a process, at least as D&D presents it. It's a force, and if it's a force, then a system designed to describe forces can definitely step in and deal with it - and once they start applying the scientific method to their universe, well, magic will fall in line. At least enough to get us that class we call "the wizard."

This post is absolutely fantastic, and I couldn't agree more about hating that stereotype. I am sick to death of straw vulcans. Emotion and logic do not run counter to each other. In fact, logic often serves emotion (just look up instrumental rationality, for instance).

[Segev]

If you want excellent works that examine magic in a way that both retains the sense that it is magical (because it operates in ways that are wholly impossible to real-world physics, most notably violations of the three laws of thermodynamics), but treat it as a learnable and masterable subject with definite rules that can be explored and understood, read any of Sanderson's novels set in his Cosmere. A good starting point is the Mistborn trilogy, but all of it is very, very good.

[Blackhawk748]

If you want excellent works that examine magic in a way that both retains the sense that it is magical (because it operates in ways that are wholly impossible to real-world physics, most notably violations of the three laws of thermodynamics), but treat it as a learnable and masterable subject with definite rules that can be explored and understood, read any of Sanderson's novels set in his Cosmere. A good starting point is the Mistborn trilogy, but all of it is very, very good.

Ive read a bit of Mistborn, seemed really interesting, i just never got around to reading the rest of it

[Segev]

Ive read a bit of Mistborn, seemed really interesting, i just never got around to reading the rest of it

It's worth it. Elantris is another great one, and there are several others. His magnum opus, that starts pulling the background elements together, is his Stormlight Archives series; the first book is The Way of Kings, and is well over a thousand pages long.

Mistborn, in particular, however, does a great job of establishing that Magic A is Magic A, and then exploring what you can DO with it. But magic still is magical; it's controlled by the practitioner's will and is something you do, not something you use a tool to do (even if you built the tool).

I think that might be the essential bit of "magic" vs. "technology:" Magic - and psionics - is almost like an extra limb or sense, whereas technology, even when you build and design it yourself, is done through the medium of your very human body pushing, pulling, and manipulating things that technically any other human could do. In a sense, martial arts and extreme levels of gymnastic and other athletic performance are more "magical" to most modern humans than technology is just because they get their bodies to do things that most of us cannot.


So, in a sense, if the mages just don't have the ability to balance on one hand, lift ox-pulled carts out of rutts, or run for long periods of time, but the mundanes do, that could almost seem magical. (The reason it often doesn't to mages we're used to is that "magic can do anything," so the mage can do all of that with the right spell, too.)