Hey again! Alright, this's what you've been waiting
like three months for. Magic... as a force of nature. Not in the metaphorical sense,
but the quite literal sense among the four forces of nature.
Or, six forces of nature in fiction. I'll cover psionics next time, but for now, MAGIC!
So... why am I calling magic a force of nature? Well, if you're going to build a world from
scratch, you have to understand how stuff works so that you avoid plotholes and inconsistencies.
It doesn't have to be super-ultra rigorous or anything, just internally consistent.
For me, that means viewing everything from a scientific perspective. When it comes to
magic, that means I consider how it does what it does, and that involves much of the same
stuff we already know about physics, but skewed to work a lil bit differently.
This means that magic has a carrier particle - known as mana. It can be called all sorts
of things, from zeon to aetheric energy to whatever else you can think of, but it's basically
mana. Without this mana, there is no magic. Kind of like photons or electrons, if you
don't have either of those, you don't have electromagnetics.
Now this isn't just me making stuff up. Well it is, but it isn't. See, this's more of a
description of how magic is already used in fiction to begin with. For example, mana flows
in a very predictable manner similar to electrons - a path of least resistance. We see this
all the time, with the most obvious example being ley lines, which may as well be conductive
metal. Other examples are things like wands, or staves... again, basically the same concept
as holding an iron bar in a thunderstorm. I don't suggest holding the iron bar in a
thunderstorm. Just saying.
So before we go any further, what makes magic... work?
Four main things, really. First off, you need an energy source. Magic
doesn't just "magically" happen, as much as that would make sense. No, it still follows
the conservation of energy principle in which energy can neither be created nor destroyed,
merely reconfigured to another form of energy or matter.
We see this all the time in games, actually, it just doesn't seem obvious at first. The
concept of "mana" or anything similar at all, in fact implies this conservation of energy.
You don't consume the mana so that it disappears, you just change it into another form. The
mana was already present as a (super)naturally occurring form of energy to begin with.
The importance of this is that there must always be an energy source somewhere. Maybe
you draw upon the spirit world, or the warp from warhammer 40k, or the lifestream from
Final Fantasy 7, or some other variant upon such - it doesn't really matter the form it
takes, just that there's always something which supplies the energy to begin with. It's
just waiting there to be tapped. The second part of magic is a focusing agent.
This may be a unicorn's horn in My Little Pony, or a wizard's wand in Harry Potter,
or the gloves worn by the cabalists in hellgate for a few examples. The stereotypical wizard's
staff since at least Lord of the Rings is the same concept as well here - it doesn't
matter if you have a ton of mana just floating around you as an ambient source, you still
need to have some way to focus all that energy into a single spot so that it can be turned
into something actually useful. In many cases, this takes the form of the caster's own body
- in games and novels where only "some" people have "the talent" for magic, basically what
they're describing is the body having a low resistance to mana, similar to how some few
people just have a naturally low electrical resistance, allowing for them to conduct electrical
currents at an amazingly efficient rate. What this means is that energy can flow through
the caster like a lightning rod, drawing magical energy to them to be used. A walking battery
of sorts. This takes on a lot of different incarnations across various movies, books
and games, as well as even mythology and actual religions in reality - but it all boils down
to the same concept: you need an energy source, and a way to bring that energy together before
it can be properly utilized. Now that brings us to what we colloquially
call "magic" itself - the spell. A spell is... essentially a computer program,
for lack of a better term. The spell tells the energy you've gathered what to do, how
to do it and the specific details about exactly what's being done. Even a fairly simple spell
has an enormous amount of context which is needed to be able to get it to do what you
want. Consider the basic idea of "create water" as a spell for a moment here.
Alright, so you convert magical energy into matter, specifically water. Yay! That was
easy! Wait... but you need to tell it what water is - two hydrogen atoms spread at 120
degrees apart attached to an oxygen atom... and what atoms even are. More than that, you also need to specify exactly
where that water will appear. Want to create water inside someone's stomach? Oh. That's
uh... that takes some finicky calculations doesn't it? What defines "stomach" in this
case? You need some way to specify exactly where that water's going or it might just
be plopped into someone's bloodstream, which could very well kill them. You also need to
specify that the water doesn't just replace tissue which is already present, lest you
accidentally bisect someone. That would be kinda messy. At least you'd have lots of water
to clean it up on hand, so that's good I guess. Anyway, the point is that the spell itself
tells the energy what to do. This can take the form of rituals, summoning circles, hand
waving, chanting, all sorts of things. One of the novels from Shadowrun explained it
in a very eloquent manner I found - the act of drawing the summoning circle isn't the
spell itself, it's merely the organization of your thoughts in a particular manner. That's
why you can't just draw it out on a sheet of paper and dump it on the ground, the circle itself
doesn't mean anything, rather it's a step-by-step checklist of how to tell the mana what to
do. It doesn't really matter if you actually draw out the summoning circle with chalk or
not to be perfectly blunt, what matters is that you go through the mental motions of
basically printing off a circuitboard for the energy to travel upon so it knows what
it's supposed to do. This same concept can be applied to virtually
every form of magic ever imagined. Shamanism where you get your dead ancestors or some
spirits of the wild to do stuff for you? You still have to tell them what to do, and they
still are the ones to actually cast the spell, and it still requires input to know what to do.
What about using spell reagents in D&D? Yep, still used as a shorthand method of telling
the energy what you're trying to accomplish.
Even like uh, rune magic. Where you draw out the runes and then they trigger. Yeah, same thing.
So that's three out of four... but... but
what's the last bit? You already have a spell! That's the end of it, right?
We~ell, no. The last part is your triggering mechanism.
A lot of the time this's built into the end of a spell. If the spell itself is a program,
then the triggering mechanism is when you compile your spell's code and actually run the executable.
This isn't always built into the spell itself, though. Any sort of delayed spell, a trap, runes or warding
spells all have a separate trigger. Consider it to be like a safety match. Your
standard strike-anywhere match in old cartoons had both the ignition source and the fuel
together, so you could just strike it anywhere and poof, done. That was also dangerous as
hell. Today, virtually all matches come in three parts, the fuel is the wooden matchstick
itself, but the igniter is two separate stages - the tip has half of it, the box has the
other half. It's only when you put the two ignition halves together that you actually
get the fire started, which is an awful lot safer to use. As such, you may see this kind
of a thing show up in games or novels from time to time. Saorsa itself actually has a
two-stage casting sequence for it's spells where you build the spell's program into a
spell lattice, then you collapse the lattice as a separate action into the actual spell
for use, triggering it to actually perform the spell's actions. Meaning you can create
a spell long in advance and hold onto it, ready to release the moment it's needed at
a fraction of the normal cost, other than the fact that doing so would kind of keep
your attention busy elsewhere most of the time. And you couldn't cast another
spell if that one turns out to be inappropriate. You'd just have to lose it basically.
Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that the triggering mechanism for a spell is not actually
the spell itself, but a separate step which just normally happens to be built into the
spell in most cases, but it's important to recognize that it's a discrete action in and of itself.
Soooo with all of this, we now know that, even in fantasy, even in myth, even in actual
religions which practice magic in reality, or at least they believe they do, there's still a scientific basis behind all
of it. Magic is not, interestingly enough, magic. You can actually understand how it works.
In terms of how magic works in fiction, the
more you study it, the more it actually seems to work suspiciously similar to electricity.
Mana, or any other energy source for your magic regardless of what you call it, is essentially
the carrier particle for magic, just as photons and electrons carry electricity, gravitons
carry gravity, and the bosons, mesons and gluons handle the nuclear forces. So in this
case, "mana" is not a generic source of energy, but rather an actual particle which can be
exchanged back and forth. You can have metals infused with mana particles, which suddenly
means things like how cold iron supposedly works now makes sense! It's simply iron with
a positive mana charge, which causes it to negate the negative mana charge in most forms
of magic by prying away the free mana particles. This explains so much in a consistent manner,
from magical spells to enchantments to magically enhanced creatures to things like mythril
and orichalcum. Everything just kind of falls into place with a reliable predictability
of sorts. Yes, it's complex and has many facets of how it works, but by treating magic as
a fundamental force of nature, it actually ties together all the different forms of magic
in every book, every myth, every video game and every other source you can think of.
Magic is... a force of nature. Literally speaking. This grand, unified theory of magic allows
for every concept of magic which has ever been made up to coexist within the same setting.
Some forms may be incompatible with others more or less, much in the way an alternating
current and direct current don't play nicely together without an intermediate point of
conversion between the two, but they're technically the same thing.
With this concept, things like ley lines also make perfect sense - all they are in this
theory is a location where the natural resistance values are either low, or nonexistent. Meaning
you could quite literally build a magical superconductor.
But anyway, that's magic, and magic works on a broad scale. It's big, it's kinda clunky,
and you need an awful lot of energy to do even relatively simple tasks with magic. That
being said, magical energy tends to be quite abundant in most settings. Even the settings
where magic is really scarce, there's still actually quite a lot of it around when you
think about it, it's just not in a usable format most of the time. You need to "do"
something to be able to put the magical energy to work for you... namely, a focus and a spell
and trigger, and these may not be especially refined to performing magic on a regular basis.
It doesn't mean there isn't high background levels of mana, just that it's difficult to
access it most of the time. Psionics, on the other hand, work on a vastly
smaller scale, with very small bits of energy to create a cascading effect, more of rolling
a snowball down a hill where the hill is the other natural forces. Magic tends to do most
of the work on its own, psionics just acts as the initial spark. We'll get into that
next time though when we cover psionics, because it works similar to magic in some ways, but
vastly differently in others. If you want a hint on such though, we can
pretty clearly define the "alchemy" as portrayed in Full Metal Alchemist as actually being
psionics, not magic. Or more specifically, that the human characters in the show and
manga are technically using magic... but indirectly - they're using psionics to trigger a magical
effect. Sound weird? Well, you've got a few weeks to think about it before I explain it myself.
Unless... you're watching this in the future after I've already posted the psionics episode...
In which case I guess you can just go click that. Whatever.
Oh yes... and one last thing - HOMEWORK. Le garsp. We'll be covering magic in a lot more
detail later on in the Playing God(dess) series, but for now, your homework is to get the basics
out of the way. Figure out what the energy source of your magic is and what viable methods
of focusing that energy into a specific spot are available. Once you have an idea of what
your energy source is, and how to get it gathered into one location for use, then consider what
kind of methodology for using that energy source would likely arise. We'll get into
the traditions and spheres of magic later on, so the specifics aren't toooooo important
at the moment, just get thinking about where this would logically go is all.
And with that, I'm out. I'll see you next time!
Mana mana mo mana... wait that didn't work right.
Uh. Oh. I need to put more stuff here, huh? I uh, I only had the one lame joke.
Er... right. Well then, uh...
Two mages walk into a bar, and demand to see the staff. The bar wench pulls it out from under the counter and gives them a fireball a la flambe.
Yes, I made that crap up on the spot. This's what happens when I'm backed into a corner. So really, that awful joke is your fault.
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