skavenhorde said,

This treads closely to one of my daydreams that I hope to make a book or at least a nice simple game out of one day.

Call me crazy (and you probably will after I post this), but I’ve a few ideas with how magic could affect this world.

The story goes that Gaia finally has had enough of her children being such evil little shits who seem to want to kill her. So she chooses on man/woman to be her avatar to fullfill her wishes. That avartar then has all of Gaias powers which for all intent and purposes means he is a demi-god no one can kill. He gives the world an ultimatum. Fix your problems with the earth and your people within five years or he’ll drop the human race down a few knotches in the food chain while he summons in creatures of all kinds to live among them.

He promises heaven on earth or hell on earth depending on what choices all the humans around the world make.

He can’t be stopped, killed, bribed or taken out of the picture in any way. In essence America is dumbstruck that they can’t just shoot him in the head and be done with it.

Something about that always appealed to me because I know it would take something like to get any governments working on common goal for the good of the earth and its people.

It’s quite a large bill to order, but that thought always appealed to me 🙂

Menigal said,

This is pet peeve of mine, when magic is simply dropped over a world with no thought as to the real changes it would force. Old fantasy stories (think Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, etc.) tended to make magic a rare and dangerous thing (incidentally, does anyone else wish there was more swords and sorcery in games?). The users were powerful, but distrusted and quite rare. Your average person probably never experienced it.

Over time magic’s become more and more commonplace, and quite a few games, stories, and settings defalt to the the old magic-as-technology trick, giving magical versions of modern conveniences, still without really addressing the cultural changes.

A lot of the big, world changing powers started out as answers to gameplay problems. An orc hit you with an ax? Healing spell. Some strange mold in the dungeon gave you a disease? Here’s a spell to handle that. You went into a Gygaxian dungeon? Guess you need a spell to raise the dead now.

Unfortunately, moved out of the dungeon crawl, these gameplay-extenders shake the foundations of the world you’re playing in. Investigating the changes they would make in a pseudo-medieval world would change it into something less recognizable, which may be why some writers/designers ignore them.

I still like the idea of a rare, largely distrusted magic. Maybe not to the point of all-out witch hunts, but still a world where magic-users are viewed with as much superstition and fear as respect. Healing magic, as one of the bigger “problem” areas, is rare or nonexistent. In a game there are countless other ways of fixing the same problems.

I think, as far as games are concerned, the designer should think about how he would fit each spell into a story. If it would demand a change in the world there, then the game should reflect that same change. Of course, I like my game worlds to have a sense of believability. Most people these days don’t seem that bothered by it.

WhineAboutGames has a good idea. It might be fun to take, say, all 1st level D&D spells (1st or 2nd edition might give a wider range) and look at just what changes they would make in a generic medieval setting. Maybe the next time I get bored I’ll toy around with that.

Maklak said,

What I really wanted, but never managed to do in a DnD game, was to build a trading empire based on teleport spell (and maybe others of the kind). The Red Mages from Forgotten Realms had a splendid idea about building trading outposts.

In DnD there is considerable impact of magic on society, but nowhere close to the level of not needing to farm. It is handwaved by rarity of spellcasters, and how expensive spells are (but then again DnD economy is badly broken). IIRC 100GP is 1kg of gold, and even 1st level scrolls cost 25 GP. Adding a spell to mage book costs 100 GP per level. If you think about it, that’s just insane.

Jacek Dukaj wrote “General’s move”. While it is mostly about ascention to power of a very clever litch, it also describes to some degree a society with megetech. There were flying vehicles and such, but magic had the biggest impact on war. There was no point in sending conventional armies against battle mages.

Ewa Bialolecka wrote “Weaver of illusion” about a boy with skill in creating illusions, that surprised even other mages. It also described blending of mages into society. They were a separate race that invaded the land almoust a thousand years ago, and conquered it. They had a capital city and mage school with walls of solid rocks, made of stones melted together with extreme heat by ‘sparks’ (pyrokynetic mages). No other country even bothered to invade them. There were a few separate magic talents, and so magical castes. ‘Makers’ were the strongest. They had power over matter. They could turn stones into gold, sewage into milk, and basically could provide whatever thay wanted for themselves. One limitation they had, was difficulty and danger of transforming living matter. They would not even attempt healing. They were annoyed by pleas from the general population, and didn’t really need payment for their services anyway. ‘Sparks’ had Pyrokinesis. They could ignite flammable materials, shape glass by selectively heating it with their power, and so on. ‘Travelers’ could teleport. They mostly just moved stuff from one location to another in an organized way. Since there were no silly limitations on teleporting living matter (like in DnD) they could also teleport someones internal organs away it they got pissed. ‘Illusionists’ could create belivable ilusions. ‘Observers’ and ‘Speakers’ had claivoyance and telepathy. They formed an effective information network. There were a couple more brands of mages. Mages hid the fact that they were a separate race even from most mages. They handled breeding by having a special brothel with carefully selected females, and dropping orphans in various villages. They also generally had disabilities, often proportional to their power. It was also hinted, that upper echelon of mages was purposefully limiting power of mages, because to great a power in hands of thousands of individuals would be too dangerous. There were also hints of some ‘makers’ from ages past, who could transform living matter, and made dragons, and other fantastic creatures.

World of Darkness handled magic in an iteresting way. Mages exist, and some of them are powerfull, but they hide their existence and abilities. Any overt displays of ‘reality deviatios’ are punished by paradox from magic failing to botching up to and including erasing a mage from existence.

Andy_Panthro said,

I quite like the way Terry Pratchett handles it in his Discworld books. The magic users all tend to be kept away from normal people to prevent them from altering things too much (partially because of the problems it would cause the economy – and therefore government, and partially because of cosmic horrors).

I really liked the way Dragon Age presented it’s magic users, even if the game failed to follow through. It stands to reason that those without magic would be fearful and jealous of those with it. The power struggle between the two groups could have been fascinating, especially if you were given the opportunity to play on either side.

Rampant Coyote said,

I always liked the comment from Neuromancer (or one of Gibson’s books) about how “the street finds uses for things.” Meaning that people will adapt technology to purposes that may not have been intended by the original makers. Like the telephone. By my understanding, it was originally intended as more of a broadcast device – like radios are now. Or my favorite – how cell phones get used as flashlights.

sascha said,

I find magic is often like Deux Ex Machina. It usually makes too many things possible too easily by breaking the barriers of limitation and intrication. Sometimes it does create intrication because it messes more things up than it should fix. I guess that’s a plus but other than that magic is bit like cheating for me (like players being able to fly in Second Life, heh). I do like the idea of psychic powers however, stuff like telepathy, telekinesis etc.

fluffyamoeba said,

For all the flaws in the execution of the idea in the 2 games, Dragon Age explores the effect of magic on society pretty well. It is actually the subject of the main plot in DA2.

The main trouble with focusing on the effect of magic in a game, rather than just a setting for a book, is very evident in DA2 – you have to treat a PC magic user very differently from a PC who doesn’t use it.

UDM said,

Don’t have much to comment on the article itself since I just skimmed through it, but Menigal makes a good point. Magic has become so integral to a setting today, that even Age of Conan, which is based on a setting where magic is equivalent to what contemporary society calls “black magic”, “voodoo” or “witchcraft”, is going with the high-fantasy crowd.

Personally, I too prefer when the mere mention of “spells” or “magic” would strike a wild, unmentionable kind of fear or bewilderment in the player. As Jay said above, a cellphone might have been considered heresy 1000 years ago because it is unlike any traditional convention that people then were used to. In the same way, lo-fantasy magic has an element of atypicality, and that’s why it surprises.

It doesn’t mean the reverse is always bad, but we’re all taking magic too much for granted today. I’d like to see a setting when magic had stronger roots in reality rather than surreality. Even so it need not be uncommon – just shroud it in enough mysticism and intrigue to appear unconventional to those unused to its ways, but with a better established lore behind it.

I recall one of Solomon Kane’s short stories that reflects the cellphone analogy quite well. I believe it’s called The Hawk of Basti – Kane is in Africa and there he meets an old Caucasian acquaintance who had usurped the throne to an African tribe before being subsequently exiled. As they were conversing while passing through the jungle, they came upon some warriors of that very same tribe who had started the coup against Kane’s buddy. As the negroes came forth to attack the two white men, Kane leveled his pistol and fired off, the sound being described as “thunder” to the blacks. Immediately, the rest of the tribe went down on their knees and offered their unhesitating subservience to the duo.

That’s magic for ya ^_^

Detritus said,

Fantastic post!

The manga series Dorohedoro has an interesting take on magic that rpg designers may be interested in.

It certainly does a lot to account for how the magic works and the kind of society it causes.

The story takes place in “the Hole” (a grim, dilapidated city)where ordinary people live in fear of wizards, who come from another dimension to perform magical experiments on the hapless inhabitants.

The wizard’s dimension, isn’t without its problems, as it is a very hierarchical society and is an equally dangerous place to live.

The interesting thing is the magic is some kind of black dust that gets produced in the blood stream, due to small cancerous (and devil shaped!) growths. The humans of the Hole are without these, making them a different species from the magic-using hunmans of the wizard’s world.

A wizard can only use one kind of magic, but the varieties are varied and often completely strange. As raising the dead is possible, many wizard characters have a complete disregard for life and death is rarely considered an important issue.

I like settings such as this that explore the effects of magic, set up specific rules of what it can and can’t do and provides a believable culture and society. I wish more rpgs would delve deeper into their settings!

Of course this is very different from rpgs, as a poster above mentioned, where magic is more of a gameplay feature and as such, is often “tacked on” to a medieval European setting. At least in conventional RPGs!

Xenovore said,

The magic of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea always rang true with me. There, magic is ubiquitous — everybody knows somebody that can use magic, even if it’s just the village witch. However, the ability to use magic is rather limited; most people can’t use magic at all, and among those that actually can use it, very few — the mages — can really do anything substantial with it. And the mages know that if you get too crazy with magic (other than illusion), there’s a high probability of majorly screwing up yourself or even the entire world, so they tend to use magic only when it’s really necessary.

Another cool limitation there is the concept of “true names”, where you can’t do much to anything without knowing its true name first. (I think this concept would be very cool in a CRPG: near endless questing to discover the true names of everything so you could work magic on it.)

I’ve always thought that if we had magic in the real world, it would work something like that — most people would know about it but it would not be a major factor in their lives. The “mages” — the elite few that can actually use magic — would most likely be part of a church or sect, like the Catholic church in medieval Europe or the Shaolin monks in China…