Mysterious magic

[Harlequin]

One completely orthogonal line on the challenge of magic comes in if it's really, really unknown and strange.

I don't know that I've ever seen an RPG which handled this out of the book, but to me this brings in far more "realism" than the systems in most games.  I'd point to the books "Mythago Wood" and "Lavondyss" by Robert Holdstock as fabulous examples of this... and I use the word 'fabulous' exactly, as I think that's a key descriptor for this version of magic.  Magic like it works in fables or legends, not like it works in D&D or Tolkein or Crowley.

Usually, in these, there's no "mage" type at all; magic is just there, and everybody interacts with it, whether that be via objects, places, or what have you.  If there's any "mage" or "wiseman" archetype it's invariably the counselor/guide figure, not appropriate as a PC at all.

One could play the Holdstock books as challenges - to figure out the nature of magic, starting from vague hints only (intuition, a cryptic legacy).  And progressing deeper and deeper into needing that understanding to survive or progress.  Many Grimms Brothers tales could be played out the same way, though typically on a cruder scale: the tinker figures out what the enchantment on the princess is, finds magical resources and/or allies, defeats the enchantment, etc.  He's not a mage.  The game would have no "magic system."  But magic is indisputably a part of it, and comprises the main challenge.

Has anyone seen a game which handles this?

- Eric

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

The above was split from Making a game out of Magic.

Best,
Ron

[John Kim]

  Usually, in these, there's no "mage" type at all; magic is just there, and everybody interacts with it, whether that be via objects, places, or what have you.  If there's any "mage" or "wiseman" archetype it's invariably the counselor/guide figure, not appropriate as a PC at all.  

One could play the Holdstock books as challenges - to figure out the nature of magic, starting from vague hints only (intuition, a cryptic legacy).  And progressing deeper and deeper into needing that understanding to survive or progress.  Many Grimms Brothers tales could be played out the same way, though typically on a cruder scale: the tinker figures out what the enchantment on the princess is, finds magical resources and/or allies, defeats the enchantment, etc.  He's not a mage.  The game would have no "magic system."  But magic is indisputably a part of it, and comprises the main challenge.

Has anyone seen a game which handles this?  

I'm not familiar with Holdstock books you refer to, but I have a relevant essay on my site, called http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html">Breaking out of Scientific Magic Systems.  

I don't think I've seen what you say in a published system.  I tried a related approach in my Water-Uphill world campaign -- magic was a mysterious place which had various tricks and riddles.  Unfortunately, that campaign is not well written-up currently.

[M. J. Young]

I haven't seen the game, but the design journals for John Wick's Orkworld suggested that he was attempting to achieve something like this.

--M. J. Young

[talysman]

I haven't seen the game, but the design journals for John Wick's Orkworld suggested that he was attempting to achieve something like this.

as an aside, John Wick introduces the magic section with a discussion of mythic magic versus "scientific magic", using the same term as John Kim.

there are two alternate magic systems for orks and one seperate system for elves in Orkworld, with the elven system looking more structured, but still quite loose (it slightly resembles Soulless singing sorcery from GURPS Fantasy II, another game that attempts a more "fabulous" approach, or a stripped down version of Ars Magica.) ork magic is mostly just charms, talismans and magic items with a simple bonus, which remind me of magic items in Fantasy Wargaming (remember *that* game?) the alternate ork magic system works more by GM fiat and is somewhat freeform.

my own thoughts on making magic more mysterious is to emphasize the "figuring out the nature of magic" that Harlequin mentions, but without abandoning structure completely -- maybe not "scientific magic", but craftsman magic. I've been working on a system inspired somewhat by fairy tales but also by magic items in games like Nethack (although I want to avoid the unimaginative extremes of Diablo.

for those unfamiliar with Nethack, the most interesting feature of magic items is that they are unidentified at the start, but you can use either magic or trial and error to identify them. for example, potions are labeled by appearance: brown potion, bubbly potion, effervescent potion, and so on; scrolls are labeled with nonsense words like "ELBIB YLOH", "ANDORA BEGOVA", or "TEMOV". all items with the same label do the same thing. so, you could try writing on the ground with an ebony wand, and if something happens (the bugs slow down,) you can guess what all ebony wands do.

I want to develop a system sort of like that, but add the ability to experiment with what you know to create new kinds of magic. in this system I am working on, there is no "magic user" class and no powerful off-the-cuff magic -- no D&D-like, GURPS-like, or Ars-Magica-like spells. anyone can do magic, if they have the rigt supplies. the types of magic would be alchemy (making single-use substances,) sorcery (inscribing words of power on single-use scrolls,) and enchantment (making permanent magical items.) the secret to keeping it mysterious and open-ended is that the GM takes the list of known alchemical/sorcerous operations (a list known to the players) and assigns secret alchemical substances and magical words to them arbitrarily.

consider alchemy. the players would know (or could find out in game) that alchemy requires filling an alembic with water, adding a special alchemical essence, then adding an organ from a creature with the magical power you want to distill into the potion. so, if you know that a mer-pony has the magical ability to breathe water, you know that you need part of a mer-pony to make a potion of water breathing. once you find out what the "special magical essence" is that allows you to distill inherent magical powers from organs, you can make the potions -- no special skill needed.

enchantment would work similarly, except that you place the object to be enchanted into an enchanter's forge first, then add an enchantment essence, then the substance with the quality you want to transfer to the target object. there would be several magical essences, such as an essence of strength that makes the magic item as strong as the next item added; just put a tunic into a forge, add essence of strength, then add a chainmail shirt, and you create a shirt that feels, looks, and weighs as much as a normal tunic, but defends like chainmail.

players will know all this from the start and will probably come up with ides of combos they would like to try to create unique magic items. the "mysterious magic" part comes from not knowing whether eye of newt is the enchantment essence, the essence of strength, or some other essence entirely -- or completely worthless. the magical reagants that contain each essence would be made up by the GM.

[Harlequin]

Another excellent route toward "find-it-out" magic, incidentally, is the pseudo-Sorcerer route.  I used this ages ago in a Shades of Divinity hybrid LARP.

It's based on the same assumption Sorcerer makes: beings have power, humans have power only by commanding such beings.  (Angels, demons, and lesser spirits are all good, depending on your theme.  Summoning angels is remarkably interesting and gets into moral areas fast, if your summoner is impure.  Very Dr. John Dee -esque.)

Now everything can hinge on the elements of the rituals used to call such things, which are always highly customized per entity; you may come up with a way to call a spirit to do X, but that doesn't help much at all with calling one to do Y, except inasmuch as you can convince/fast-talk/use the services of X to obtain dirt on Y.  The summoning ritual itself, the True Name, and the various other paraphernalia like titles and deeds-of-note ("betrayer of ash-morgran!"), can all be requisite, and finding such things - not to mention working out which ones go with which spirit! - can be a fun Gamist sort of thrill.

- Eric

PS: The Holdstock books mentioned above are strongly recommended for anyone interested in this sort of take on magic.  Deeply intense primeval stuff.  Mythago Wood is best read first of the lot, Lavondyss is IMO a better exploration of the shamanic themes with its masks and carven figures.

[Daniel Solis]

How about the concept of "magical realism" where weird stuff happens but it's described matter-of-factly? The best example I can think of is Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Here is an excerpt, immediately after a character has commited suicide:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

"Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.

Weird stuff like that happens all the time in the book. At one point the entire town gets amnesia, at another point a woman inexplicably ascends into heaven while hanging laundry.

I want to express this sort of magical realism in a more tribal/mythic context for Gears & Spears. I want it to be possible for a coyote to suddenly speak a few words of wisdom and a robot can cry so terribly that he forms a lake in the shape of his lost love. But how? It's such an ephemeral, unpredictable concept to get across in game mechanics, but one with enough poetic potential to keep me trying to grasp it.

[Harlequin]

Hmm.  I agree, but it's tricky.  The books of Sean Stewart might also help, the sequence which includes Resurrection Man through The Night Watch (my personal favorite) to Galveston and Mockingbird.  There is also, I am given to understand by my brother-in-law, a reasonable body of work on modern surrealist literature - I'll see if I can get some references.

As a thought:

Say you're on a d10+stuff system.  Rather than an automatic failure/automatic success system, map ones and tens to: "The fabulous occurs."  Treat it as an add-on to the outcome, that the die roll's effect happens and is reflected in some magical-realist occurrence, a changing of the rules.  Associate the fabulous effect with the roll in a symbolic/sympathetic fashion, to help provide guidelines... perhaps even, roll of ten - symbolic link, expands the motif or goal of the die roll into the fabulous.  Roll of one - sympathetic link, the magic grows out of the method or materials of the roll instead.  (Robot stabs someone with a spear... on a ten, the spear leaves a bloodless hole a foot across through the target's chest, leaving him helpless yet alive; on a one, the spear sprouts leaves and vines and trails limply after the yet-living enemy.)

Even better would be using this with a draw-stones system, where you could put single "fabulous" stones in with your whites/blacks or whatever.  Neither good nor bad, just magic.  In fact using that last phrase as part of your canon when designing for this end would probably be excellent.  Not even a tool that can be used for good or for bad... no, it's just itself.

Giving the fabulous over to a die roll, so that it's never predictable when it will occur, captures (IMO) the out-of-nowhere element of magical realism not badly.  Guidelines for the matter-of-fact tone are just that, guidelines on tone and mood, nope, nothing special here, just leaves and vines, everybody carries on.  Managing guidelines for what kinds of effects are appropriate - that, I think, is the tricky bit.

Si?

- Eric

[Bill_White]

Say you're on a d10+stuff system....map ones and tens to: "The fabulous occurs."

I like this idea a lot.  I think it and its potential variations are very nice ways of capturing any kind of "magic is a part of how things are" ambience (in contrast to the magic-as-funky-technology approach).

Combining this approach with the ideas suggested further above, you could design a system where characters who did the right things (answered the sphinx's riddle, e.g.), were in the right place at the right time (Stonehenge at Beltane, e.g.), or had the right characteristics (seventh son of a seventh son, e.g.) could increase their chances of having the fabulous happen.  

It might never be clear to players or their characters why fabulous things happened, and so they'd develop superstitions about things to do and things to avoid doing.

[Brennan Taylor]

I have been struggling with this one for some time, actually. I have two games I am working on with strong magical themes, and I have not been able to capture how I think magic should feel using the game mechanics. It's a tough one.

I really think part of the issue is just that: magic in most fiction just has a different feel. I think John's essay is good in clarifying the issue, but coming up with a solution is still not easy.

One of the games I am working on is modern-day supernatural, but I am trying to implement a more real-world conception of magic into this. I wanted to have the right sort of feel--when performing magic, a sorcerer would call on the powers that can grant him the magic ability. I've read some books on medieval magic spells and wanted to incorporate some of that, along with the widespread folk belief in charms that can protect you from bullets (found all over the world, in diverse cultures).

I think a tighter integration of the regular and magical mechanics would be good for this one, and I like that suggestion of an added magic variable (like a die or stone). This way, magicians do the same sorts of things everyone else does, but then they can step it beyond the everyday into the supernatural.

My solution in the other game is coming along fairly nicely. In this setting, any craft is inherently magical, whether it is tanning a hide, throwing a pot, or forging a weapon. All of these skills are taught by restricted societies a character must join, and all of the characters will be, in essence, wizards. There will be no such distinction in the game, though.

[Harlequin]

Yeah - the amulets and charms thing is one of my touch-stones for much of this, too.  Thinking of curse-tablets and bless-tablets in Byzantium, amulets invoking Lilith as protector of children, etc.  So few games allow this.  Sorcerer and Sword touches on it, but in the more extreme transgressive sense, instead of the domestic and hearthcrafty sense.

The more I think about it, the more I think that one of the statements in my earlier post is key.  Literary magic, whether fairy-tale, magic-realist, or classical myth, is almost never a tool at all.  You cannot use, not like a gun or like any other piece of tech.  It's more like a mountain.  It's there, you adapt to it, you learn it, in some forms you bargain with it (usually from a position of weakness!), but you never apply or create it.  So any RPG desiring to integrate such elements should immediately forget about incorporating it directly into a skills-and-powers set of "you can do this" rules, and should instead focus on the rules on what happens when magic meets the characters, and vice-versa.

As for the "everyone is a wizard" approach, Earthdawn takes exactly this slant on things - you might want to check it out.  Crafting pots is magic, though one can learn to do it without - it's just much harder and usually not worth doing unless, for example, the Crafter's guild (I forget the terms exactly) hates you and won't teach it.  I like it partly because it is a level-based system... where the levels are in-character, they're ranks in appropriate (and exclusionist) societies.  Which is a neat countertwist on classical RPG forms.  Another nice reference would be the Babylonian content in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.  Things to check out, if you haven't already.

Come to think of it, Earthdawn's "Blood Magic" bears some similarities to the amulets-anyone-can-make thing above, and might bear a reread with this in mind.

- Eric

[Brennan Taylor]

The more I think about it, the more I think that one of the statements in my earlier post is key.  Literary magic, whether fairy-tale, magic-realist, or classical myth, is almost never a tool at all.  You cannot use, not like a gun or like any other piece of tech.  It's more like a mountain.  It's there, you adapt to it, you learn it, in some forms you bargain with it (usually from a position of weakness!), but you never apply or create it.

That makes sense in these sorts of settings, I would say. 1001 Arabian Nights springs to mind, as well. Magic all over the place, but when it is used, it is a character having control of a jinn or some such.

For Mortal Coil (the above-mentioned supernatural game), the players take the role of the magical beings, as well as magicians tapping into this power, so the player character abilities are going to be beyond the normal as a given. For all of these creatures, I have a strong "great power comes at great cost" sort of mechanic. For everything you try to do, you have to make some sacrifice.

As for the "everyone is a wizard" approach, Earthdawn takes exactly this slant on things - you might want to check it out.  Crafting pots is magic, though one can learn to do it without - it's just much harder and usually not worth doing unless, for example, the Crafter's guild (I forget the terms exactly) hates you and won't teach it.  I like it partly because it is a level-based system... where the levels are in-character, they're ranks in appropriate (and exclusionist) societies.  Which is a neat countertwist on classical RPG forms.  Another nice reference would be the Babylonian content in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.  Things to check out, if you haven't already.

Very similar to what I am doing in my game (this one is called Fifth World), but the characters are allowed to join more than one society. Also, the societies teach the "right" or socially proper way to do things, and if you try to craft without their training, you accumulate a sort of taint that comes from wrong-living.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

There are a lot of new posters in RPG Theory lately, which is great. One thing that's encouraged at this site is taking some time to check out past discussions, because we've really chewed over a lot of things. Rather than run over the same ground and responses again and again, the point is to develop the ideas past old assumptions, or to nail down those assumptions' validity if they're good enough.

It's kind of hard to do that as a newcomer, so older Forge members are expected to use their memories and sense of community to look up old discussions and refer to them in threads like these, and readers of the threads are encouraged to check them out. In this case, the ones I found are Magic as plot device, including all the links within that thread, especially those to my old Sorcerer mailing list discussions from about five years ago. Others that might be interesting include: Sympathetic magic, Magic speculation, and Actor, Author, Director: three spheres of magic, and more!

If anyone else can remember or sniff out some older discussions, please add'em in here as well.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

How about the concept of "magical realism" where weird stuff happens but it's described matter-of-factly? The best example I can think of is Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Daniel, you might enjoy some of the works of Charles Williams (the contemporary and friend of Tolkien and Lewis; there is more than one author by this name). I particularly recommend Descent Into Hell where this kind of thing is prevalent. The Greater Trumps was excellent, but less magical in some ways, and War in Heaven is a popular one, but I don't recall whether that was the other one I read (lent it to someone and never got it back). Williams creates modern setting stories in which the "real" material world feels like a small piece of the greater supernatural world. Descent is particularly good for this.

--M. J. Young

[neelk]

The more I think about it, the more I think that one of the statements in my earlier post is key.  Literary magic, whether fairy-tale, magic-realist, or classical myth, is almost never a tool at all.  You cannot use, not like a gun or like any other piece of tech.  It's more like a mountain.  It's there, you adapt to it, you learn it, in some forms you bargain with it (usually from a position of weakness!), but you never apply or create it.  

I dunno. A magic chest that is filled with gold every time you open it and flies through the air to carry you wherever you want to go is pretty much a magic tool, and it's straight out of Hans Christian Anderson. Perseus was as tricked out as a D&D character when he went after Medusa, and Indian myth is pretty much the story of heroes and villains acquiring powerups, with the heroes finally winning because they either are gods or are favored by them and so get more cool powers.

I think that what makes magic feel magical isn't how mysterious (in the sense of unknowable) it is. If magic is genuinely unpredictable, it can't be anything other than a pure plot device, and stories that hinge on plot devices won't be very compelling. So I bet making magic unknowable will tend to marginalize magic in your game, since characters can't take genuine responsibility for its use. Rather, I think the causal logic of a magical tool reflects moral, social, and psychological concerns in a way that a mechanical tool doesn't. When people in engage in magical thinking, they believe that their beliefs have a causal impact on the world -- a voodoo doll works because you hate the victim, whereas a gun can go off accidentally.

Something you may want to do is look at the Heroquest game, and especially its system of augments. Simply rule people can augment magical skills with emotional or relationship traits, and can't augment scientific skills with them, and you have gone most of the way to having made a magical magic system. One step further is to require certain traits as prerequisites -- perhaps fireballs require a anger trait to cast, or flight requires heedlessness, or so on. (Note also that this establishes a symbolic language for magic right from the beginning.)