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[Muz]

I think the B12 forums, of all places is the best place to talk about this. Magic is well.. like a shortcut in some games. Wave your hand and you toss a fireball. It was carefully rationed in D&D with material components and spell memorization (or it was supposed to be), but now, every angsty teenager in RPGs can toss flame darts with enough mana points. It's cheapened a bit, and a bit lame that people can do anything and say "Oh, I can eat the dragon because I have magic teeth"


So.. my question is this: Where does it come from? It doesn't have to be perfectly scientific.. just as long as it makes some sense.

I had this little theory that magic is like something that opens up another dimension and sucks in energy or dumps it. Someone casting a fireball opens a portal to another dimension, gets a lot of heat from that dimension and tosses it.

My theory was that Mithril/Adamantium/Elerium is somehow a conductor of magical energy.. so an adamantium sword would be able to store some bit of magical power. And that the reason magic doesn't work on Earth is that there's just no mithril in the core or in the rocks. Fantasy worlds would have like a minor magical radiation thing that makes them easier to exploit.

Or maybe you guys have better ideas?

[Cthulhu]

I always thought it was manipulating reality, like the crazy stuff they do in the Matrix.  Some kind of "Once you understand the rules you can break them" kind of deal.

[Rilder]

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/comic.php?current=2279

Clearly the most logical way magic works.

[Siquo]

There's several forms of magic. I like the following definitions:

One's derived from the elements of old, where all matter was composed of those elements. To conjure a fireball, you conjure fire from air. Possible, but it's easier if you already have a flame that you can modify. Just as it's easier to conjure water from wet sand than from dry rock.

Then there's the enchantment, which usually takes a property or function of the subject, and enhances it. It's easier to make a sword sharper, than to make a quarterstaff sharper. Properties and functions are of course subjective, and symbolical. Magic is not logical.

Healing/harming magic alters the 'life-force' of the body, sending it along in the healing or hurting direction.

Rilder's comic talks about chaos-magic. It's based on the idea that every now is a single point in time, with a number of possible futures that can happen from it, and a number of possible pasts that led to it. It's about altering either the possible future, OR the possible past. Or both. It's hard to incorporate in games.

[Armok]

Each setting has it's own rules for magic, there is really nothing you can say abaut magic in general at all, the closest you'll ever come is pointing out tropes.

[Starver]

It is, of course, a sufficiently advanced technology.

(Whether I'm paraphrasing Clarke's 3rd Law or Niven's corollary is up to you.)

[Jude]

As for games, I've always tried to think of a system that would get away from the "mana" thing, but the best I could come up with was a system where it would just drain your fatigue instead.

Who the heck knows? If magic existed, it would probably just be physical/chemical processes that we don't understand yet...electricity would seem like magic to somebody from 500 years ago. A magician is somebody who knows how to use that stuff.

The other sense of magic is as in "magical thinking" - commonly seen in schizophrenic patients and others, it's basically a belief that one event can cause another when there is no logical connection between the two. That's pretty much what magic amounts to, except that when it's systematic, then the connection almost starts to seem logical. Sure, who knows why mixing up eye of newt and maiden's hair under the full moon should make the king fall ill, but if it works every time then you can almost make a science of it.

Then there's the mythologies where it's just some innate talent that some people have, like in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. Wizards are born/created that way; it's apparently genetic.

[Hawkfrost]

Magic (As I understand it) is the manipulation of energy (Which is everywhere), and the transformation of it into something tangible.

The whole concept of magic words spoken to use a spell comes from the ancient Runes, which is a concept that since the entire world vibrates to a certain frequency, then if you can vibrate words a certain way then you can change the flow of energy.

Since everything is made of energy, healing magic is using the energy in your body and around you to replace or fix whatever is sick or injured in you.

Energy is charged with whatever element is prominent in the area, and as usually the elements are in balance with each other, it creates neutral energy that can be used for anything (By this logic, a place where fire is prominent would be an ideal place for fire magic.).


I'm going to stop here before I ramble into nothingness.

[Granite26]

Check out the magic discussions over in Suggestions.... they're relatively complete, if you can get past the fanboys preaching their fav. system.

[Ohaeri]

Each setting has it's own rules for magic, there is really nothing you can say abaut magic in general at all, the closest you'll ever come is pointing out tropes.

This.

There's a really great episode of Writing Excuses that talks about magic systems. If you don't know about Writing Excuses, here's the gist: three very good authors (Brandon Sanderson, the guy tapped to finished the Wheel of Time series; Howard Taylor, recently nominated for the Hugo for his webcomic Schlock Mercenary; and Dan Wells, recently internationally published horror author) sit around and talk about topics related to writing. At the end they give a writing prompt. I love the podcast even though I'm not a writer, since I apply a lot of the concepts to my homebrew D&D campaigns.

Anyway, here's the podcast in question: http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/05/12/writing-excuses-episode-14-magic-systems-and-their-rules/