Magic use in contemporary fantasy

[Willowhugger]

In my world, magic takes place in the "real world" like Harry Dresden so there's a question as to why it's not more prominent.  Magic needs to be inhibited, in my opinion, because it's a deus es machine that can do whatever you want it to unless you really DETAIL out the ground rules for it.

I went for the idea in my campaign that magic is really, really, really difficult.  The idea that its exhausting and mentally taxing seemed like an excellent way to handle it.  The bigger the effect, the more you risked your life and sanity to do it.  Plus, it also gave me the excuse for a lot of extra plots solely by this limitation.  Stuff we see in other worlds like human sacrifice, ley lines, and pacts with demons are things that solely exist to provide someone more magical 'oomph' to draw upon.  Magic can also be done without spells and the like, which makes some scenes easier, but they're really needed to pull off more difficult effects and make the cost for the spells less cumbersome.

I think that gave a good excuse as to why someone would just go out and buy a gun as opposed to trying to kill someone with fire from above.

How do you think it should be handled?

[Josh]

Well, you've got one of your big questions to solve right there. If magic is so darned difficult, exhaustive, costly, etc. then why would anyone use it? They would have to have a compelling reason...magic would need to achieve something entirely impossible to achieve otherwise, otherwise...just get a gun.

The other question is, what kind of people are going to be willing to take these risks? Madmen? Powermongers? Those with nothing to lose perhaps? Groups of people? Can more than one person be involved in the same spell, thus lessening the risk to the individuals? If so, then you'd likely see some sort of social structure, clans, guilds or the like pop up around magic use, making it safer and more accessible to those in the know. This would also inhibit it because these "insiders" wouldn't want to involve many more people than necessary because they could just become potential threats.

Anyways, I've probably made it more confusing than helpful. One could ask these kind of questions all day. One thing I would ask is, what are the parameters of your "style" of magic in the first place? What does it affect? Can it be used to do anything, or are there boundaries, immunities, shieldings, etc.? Knowing this often will help you narrow your focus and get a better idea of where a practitioner could go with it.

[Willowhugger]

Well it can still do anything.

This is less about my sort of magic than what kinds of magic you like to read about in contemporary fantasy.  What do you, for example, like out Jims or want from what you read?

[Josh]

Ah. I see what you're looking for. Out of Jim's? I enjoy that the magic is driven and shaped by the person wielding it. I've always seen magic as any sort of tool or weapon. It can be used to hurt or heal, build or tear down. And those who have morals and values always are more constricted in how they use it, thus making it easier for the bad guys to be deadlier, simply because they have less qualms about drowning a baby to fuel their black magic. This adds an inherent frustration of "Yea, but...yea, but...Fine. I'll be the good guy, even though it puts me at a natural disadvantage." More built-in conflict to any story.

I also enjoy creative magic...magic that has some system and rules to it...not necessarily limiting what it can do, but just defining factors that keeps the story from being about a bunch of godlings running around beating up on each other. That gets tiresome.

[trboturtle]

In the novels I am creating, magic involves chanelling energy that's around everyone. The problem is that so very few people can sense the magical energy around them. To be a sucessful wizard in thiss uuniverse, you have to have the talent, the teaching and the will. All three are needed for 'Order Magic' both light and dark. 'Chaos magic' is a whole other kettle of fish that will be explained later.

To keep those who have the talent to feel and direct the energy, but are not either well enough or are too young, some are isolated, while others have the ability to sense the magic blocked off. An untrained person with the talent can accidently leave a smoking crater. So magic can be rough......

Craig

[Abstruse]

In my world, magic is drawn from energy from other plains of existence, from your own life force, or from a deity of some sort.  Anyone could theoretically use magic, just like anyone could theoretically bench press 500 lbs or swim across the English Channel.  Part of it is natural ability -- some people are just better at channeling energy -- while part is training.  There are also three different factors that limit what and how much you can do.  Being a former gamer (only former due to time really), I set up loose rules.  Call it three different stats.  There's instant channeling, extended channeling, and long-term channeling.  Picture it like a power meter.  The first is how much power you can channel at one time -- the instant you cast the spell.  The higher your capacity, the bigger a spell you can cast.  The second is how much energy can be channeled over a short period of time -- a few minutes or an hour.  It's how much you can do in one like active stretch of time without having to rest to recharge your batteries.  Then there's long-term, which is how much you can channel without getting some serious rest.

I always pictured it like a video game with three energy bars.  The first one refills immediately upon the spell being cast or when the spell is no longer being sustained.  The next refills slowly until you sit down and catch your breath, refilling completely within 10 minutes to an hour or so.  The last refills very slowly and doesn't refill at all while energy is being channeled.

Also, each spell has unique limitations on how much drain it puts on each of the energy bars.  Most spells take an equal amount of each, while some take more in one area while less in another.  I'm giving up too much already so I'm not going to give away some of the cool effects I've come up with for spells, but for example...take your average fireball.  It knocks out all three stats in equal proportion depending on the strength.  There's another spell that's really simple and easy to pull off that involves directly manipulating someone's aura, and it doesn't take much immediate effort, but it will take you a week to recover completely.  A third spell involves heavy manipulation of the earth which requires a fantastic amount of effort to sustain and few can keep it going for longer than a minute or so, but you can keep doing it over and over and over all day if you just give yourself a little breathing room.

You can tell I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, can't you? :p

The Abstruse One
Darryl Mott Jr.

PS. If anyone likes this magic system, check out my thread on shared universes then PM me...

[The Corvidian]

Magic, at least in my ideas, is the ultimate potential energy. If you know how to tap into it, you can all most anything, but it doesn't come free. Its like a fire hose, if you don't control it, it can get away from you. You can also damage youself if you don't manage your power, it can comsume you, and it can escape back into the environment and cause damage. Magic is created by natural and supernatural forces. Natural forces like earthquakes, wind, fire, and such; supernatural ones like fortean sightings, and weird events. The whole thing that make magic somewhat hard it finding an easier way to raise it, its there, you just have to learn who to tap into it, for this you have to find a crutch, aka talismans & foci. I know that my take is nothing new, and I freely admit that I am influenced by all of the authors I have read. The only path that I have taken that is a little different, and again no orginial is that I think magic and science can work together, they just have to be watched, and they sometimes have synergistic effects on each other; in other words magic and screw up your electronics and your electronics can screw up your magic.

[Willowhugger]

The other question is, what kind of people are going to be willing to take these risks? Madmen? Powermongers? Those with nothing to lose perhaps? Groups of people? Can more than one person be involved in the same spell, thus lessening the risk to the individuals? If so, then you'd likely see some sort of social structure, clans, guilds or the like pop up around magic use, making it safer and more accessible to those in the know. This would also inhibit it because these "insiders" wouldn't want to involve many more people than necessary because they could just become potential threats.

Anyways, I've probably made it more confusing than helpful. One could ask these kind of questions all day. One thing I would ask is, what are the parameters of your "style" of magic in the first place? What does it affect? Can it be used to do anything, or are there boundaries, immunities, shieldings, etc.? Knowing this often will help you narrow your focus and get a better idea of where a practitioner could go with it.

I always get the impression that a main motivator for magic in my world is that a lot of magic's continued use is cultural inertia.  Most people ended up using technology because it could do everything that magic could do far easier. 

But yeah, you describe exactly something that also happened in my books that I'm glad at least Jim paid attention to.  Magic users are definitely organized in my world and it's always good to see large groups of them operating together for shared purposes as opposed to seperately

I like secret societies and they show up a lot in my books.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

This is less about my sort of magic than what kinds of magic you like to read about in contemporary fantasy.  What do you, for example, like out Jims or want from what you read?

Depends on the tone of the book.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has a lot of very mysterious, unearthly magic, particularly associated with Faerie, and that works for that story; something like Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire, set on a totally urbanised planet where magic is generated by something like feng shui and distributed after a model very like an electrictiy company, I expect it to feel more rational - which it does extremely well in those two books, particularly the second.

[WonderandAwe]

In the world I am currently working on, magic is not really taxing, but rather limited.  You won't find wizards throwing fireballs here.  Rather magic is based on human life energies and influencing such energies.  Another limitation is that you can only influence human energies.  Animal energies are very difficult to alter; difficulty increase as you move further away from humans.  Mammals are comparatively easier to work with than say reptiles.  Plants and micro-organisms are impossible to work with. 

Most people can at least sense the energy.  It is the feeling that you get when you are being watching.  More preceptive individuals can sense changes in this energy (empaths).  Those who are strongly gifted basically have a second sight.  They see the real world and life energy as a overlay.  This is useful for seeing internal injuring or diagnosing diseases.  Cancer, for example, is seen as a blinding light. 

The ability to influence such energies, however is more rare.  It really isn't all that taxing, but it takes discipline. 

Healing is the most common use of this energy.  You can't really cure disease; you can only help boost an individual's energies and repair the damage caused by the disease.  Broken bones, cuts, etc are easy to heal as long as you clean them out first. 

You can also alter people's perceptions.  Limited use of this is you can make people more or less favorable to your suggestions.  A greater use would be to draw attention away from yourself or confuse your appearance. 

And of course there is necromancy.  How one raises the dead is that you take the residual life energy left in the body and add part of your own to it.  Thus you have a walking animated puppet.  Most healers are given a basic lesson in raising the dead (to raise murder victims mostly for trials).  However there are those that learn enough about necromancy to raise armies. 

[terioncalling]

I always pictured it like a video game with three energy bars.  The first one refills immediately upon the spell being cast or when the spell is no longer being sustained.  The next refills slowly until you sit down and catch your breath, refilling completely within 10 minutes to an hour or so.  The last refills very slowly and doesn't refill at all while energy is being channeled.

I had to stop and stare at the screen at reading that because of how much sense it makes.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I always pictured it like a video game with three energy bars.  The first one refills immediately upon the spell being cast or when the spell is no longer being sustained.  The next refills slowly until you sit down and catch your breath, refilling completely within 10 minutes to an hour or so.  The last refills very slowly and doesn't refill at all while energy is being channeled.

I had to stop and stare at the screen at reading that because of how much sense it makes.

I don't know.  I've never liked books where whenever anyone casts a spell you can almost hear the dice rolling, and that model feels unfortunately close to such.

[WonderandAwe]

I always pictured it like a video game with three energy bars.  The first one refills immediately upon the spell being cast or when the spell is no longer being sustained.  The next refills slowly until you sit down and catch your breath, refilling completely within 10 minutes to an hour or so.  The last refills very slowly and doesn't refill at all while energy is being channeled.

I had to stop and stare at the screen at reading that because of how much sense it makes.

I don't know.  I've never liked books where whenever anyone casts a spell you can almost hear the dice rolling, and that model feels unfortunately close to such.

Same.  Game models were designed to make the "real world" idea of magic easier to convert to numbers and balance out with other forms of combat.  Limitations that are used in games to balance out people's characters (mostly to prevent power gamers from abusing thier characters power) don't make sense half the time in the "real world." 

I always found stories that take game models and try to convert them back into the "real world" model to be quite dry.  I don't really want a blow by blow account of HOW and WHY the character won.  Just give me a pretty description of the fight. 

The best example I can come up with the Fade/Adrick fight at the end of CF.  It wasn't all "Adrick back stepped after Fade parried his blow. Fade renewed his attack and Adrick barely dodged the next attack. "  It was a general description of the tone of the fight.  How Fade's attacks were very fluid next to Adrick.  How Adrick was basically freaking out by the fact that Fade was there. 

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

The best example I can come up with the Fade/Adrick fight at the end of CF.  It wasn't all "Adrick back stepped after Fade parried his blow. Fade renewed his attack and Adrick barely dodged the next attack. "  It was a general description of the tone of the fight.  How Fade's attacks were very fluid next to Adrick.  How Adrick was basically freaking out by the fact that Fade was there. 

Oh yes. And the other advantage to sticking with the general tone of the fight is that if you don't happen to actually know the technical details of swordplay well, you're less likely to do something that will cause someone who does to throw the book across the room.  Mind you, that fits a lot better with the viewpoint of someone watching who also has no idea than from the viewpoint of one of the actual fighters,

[Abstruse]

Like I said, that's just how I picture it in my head.  The descriptions are much more fluid and the system works for visualization but is flexible enough to allow me to play fast and loose with it when writing.  It's not meant to be something like this:

"...and Elle knew she only had fourteen levels of moderate power left, but she also knew that she had her full immediate energy left to cast the fireball."  If I wanted to read (or write) that, I'd just write an RPG.

In my writing, it looks more like this:  "...and Elle had started to breathe deeply.  She'd exhausted most of her reserves of power, but her vision was still clear enough to visualize one last spell.  Flames filled her mind as she brought them into existence.  Sweat beaded from the effort and she knew this was the last of her energy..."

The Abstruse One
Darryl Mott Jr.