Explain the origins of magic to me

[Hagashager]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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" (and it's successors) covers similar ground.

[Anonymouswizard]

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]

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.