How do you make magic mysterious when it's available to the players?

How do you make magic mysterious when it's available to the players?

You know how in The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo is brought to Rivendell all fucked up and Elrond heals him? We never really find out exactly HOW he heals him. Gandalf's wizardry is also never described in any detail, and so magic ends up being a vague and nebulous force in Tolkien's world.

Do you think it might be at all possible to achieve that in a game system and setting that allows players to take the role of magic users? If it were just NPCs, sure, just be vague and shadowy with the descriptions. But players need rules, they need to know what they can and cannot do and how they should go about it. The moment you give the magic user "spells" or defined abilities, magic becomes a toolbox instead of an obscure force of nature. I suppose you could limit how much of the system is obvious to the players, but not forever.

Make it like the Force before George and EU started overexplaining it. Something mystical, difficult to understand, and reliant on introspection and dialogue rather than spell books and mana pools. The Force as it originally was was available to basically everyone, because it exists in all living things. Just some people (Yoda, Obi-Wan) were way more in tune with it than people who just told themselves it was all nonsense or was beyond their grasp (Han Solo).

Give the players a system of magic based in magic objects or runes or something like that, and give them a shadowy backround and an efect, this way the players won't know the origin of magic

Make magical abilities really broad, broad enough that you NEED to be creative in order for them to be useful.

Get rid of the concept of a spellcasting character. Magic isn't something you can devote your life to studying, because "magic" is a catch-all term for poorly understood phenomena which occur as a side effect to a lot of different things, not a series of tightly defined rules you can study until they let you shoot fireballs. This is the case on Tolkien's stuff. The elves aren't really sure what mortals mean by "magic" because the term is so vague. The wizards can only do wizard shit because they're disguised gods and as such play by different rules to everyone else, not because they studied really hard.

This is a good starting point. Perhaps the players could simply gain "attunement" to the magic power, and instead of "spells" they could simply try to DO things with the power and their attunement would determine whether they are able to do so (as well as any relevant die rolls).

>obscure force of natural
>toolbox

Magic can be all, non, or one of these things.

So, never fully explain the mechanics to the PCs? That actually sounds not bad.

Have two (or more) kinds of magic, like in The Name of the Wind.

One is reliable, measurable and scientific, and relatively limited in what it can do. This is what is avaliable to players. The other is crazy plot-magic. This is restricted to artifacts, god-like beings, and might be avaliable to mortals on a limited plot basis, but isn't reliable enough to be part of the rules.

It could actually heighten the sense of mystery when your PCs - who are used to dealing with their own comprehensible, rules-based magic system - are suddenly forced to confront alien forms of magic that break the rules they had taken for granted.

This sounds readily doable. Could even have the players' magic become erratic when exposed to the chaotic magic

Maybe turning real magic very restrict and accessible only through the intervention of some kind of otherwordly entity, like gods, eldritch abominations, primal spirits and powerful fey.

Also, make sure such dealings always come with a price. I'm posting a couple of pages of what I have in mind.

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And that's it. I guess you can't get more Verbena than this.

Spoopy, I like it.

It entirely has to do with presentation.

Chemistry, physics, all that stuff may seem like the most dry, banal bullshit in existence, but to be blunt, humanity does not really understand existence or reality. We have a solid comprehension of how the world works, we've reduced phenomena to four fundamental forces, we have a smoking gun for our universe's birth, but does anyone really know why the Big Bang singularity occurred or existed in the first place? Of course not. Despite our seemingly vast breadth of knowledge, the true nature of this world eludes us and a major anomaly could entirely change our current paradigm of understanding reality. We can only make assumptions based on our observations, and the plain truth scientific naturalism boils down to as far as we know is 'we are gene-copying bio-robots living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe'.

Which isn't to say you should make magic like science, necessarily. It's simply to illustrate that even the familiar can be ultimately mysterious, and the perception of mystery ultimately comes down to familiarity and how much is definitively explained.

You mentioned the magic of Lord of the Rings, but the nature of Tolkienian magic does have an explicit origin and metaphysics behind it - it all can be traced back to Eru Ilúvatar. Even Tom Bombadil, who was never quite explained, was an -enigma- rather than an anomaly. An anomaly is something discordant, unrelated, out of place; an enigma, on the other hand, is a mystery, a puzzle, something which seems to be discordant, unrelated, out of place, but isn't. Indeed, although never said outright, from all indications Tom is most likely Aule.

(cont)

The game Bloodborne did something interesting with this. The most "magical" aspects of that setting trace back to Lovecraft's ideal of the occult - that is, jagged shards of cosmic wisdom man was not meant to know. But in BB's setting, the eldritch lore has become of academic interest and is actively studied by several pertinent, if clandestine institutions (which all schismed from each other) who pursue their research in different ways, usually with horrific results. But you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as they say.

Adherents of the arcane plod ahead in experimentation, using what they know to accomplish miraculous (and often grotesque) feats of eldritch innovation, groping blindly ever farther into the cosmic dark for yet more of the transcendental knowledge they crave. Oftentimes, they just have no fucking idea why something works the way it does, but it sure does work (regardless of side-effects), so they make use of it. On the one hand, this leads to horrific werewolf plagues and intermittent periods of seemingly unending nighttime ruled over by a maddening red moon; on the other hand, they can make cool light blasts and summon tentacles formed from phantasmal slugs with no real harm and kinda-sorta managed to hijack the nightmare plane conjured by the vengeful curse of a dead alien god, and while the processes behind these things aren't directly explained, there is enough consistency and infrastructure throughout the game to make it seem like it's working based off consistent, if not really fathomable cosmic laws.

So it's okay to define magic. You don't really need to explain its origins too much beyond nudging hints as to its true nature. You just need to have it play by a consistent standard with regards to how it works and its aesthetics. Said consistency needn't even be perfectly absolute as long as exceptions are arbitrary.

>as long as exceptions are arbitrary.

AREN'T arbitrary, I mean.

That's pretty fucking important.

Don't be arbitrary.

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Verbenas simply love blood, maybe even more than vampires. Not as nutrition, though.

This right here.

People, especially people who only watched the movies, tend to forget that magic was a naturally-occurring, if rare, phenomena: all kinds of people in the setting had access to unique magical powers that they didn't fully understand. High elves and dwarves would infuse magic with purpose into their weapons with little thought as to the process. Sure, the Wizards were just the best at it, but that's because they WERE magic, not just using it. I'm pretty sure there was even a short-story about a man who woke up one day with the power to speak to horses and he just kind of ran with it.

Depends on setting.

Have the world react to magic with awe and have players work hard to get magic stuff.

Two ways that I've seen.

Firstly, you can just leave magic's "rules" themselves very fluffy and vague. Barbarians of Lemuria does this. There's no spell list, and a sorcerous player wanting to do magic needs to meet certain requirements, and then something... happens. Bigger sacrifices mean bigger results, but ultimately the player is designing a new spell every time they cast one. It keeps wizards from being "figured out", because the whole premise is that you don't have to explain shit.

Secondly, you can create a whole fucking *bunch* of magic, but only stat out a tiny slice of it. Unknown Armies does this very well. There are "schools" of magic, everything from Fulmaturgy to Pyromancy to Pornomancy, and the vast (((vast))) majority of them are schools with exactly one student, which are never given any stats at all. Even of the more established schools, not all of them are statted (meaning player-accessible), and the game makes very clear that the magic available in the book is a tiny, itty-bitty smidgen of what's actually out there. Ultimately, in UA, if your character is an Adept, you get what amounts to the demo version of magic, and the GM is going to be coming at you with the full game.

Make 10% of the spells simple and available to every spellcaster (or at least generally available to learn) and 90% of the spells complex and lost to the ages, requiring salvaging and quests to acquire them. In essence, make magic mysterious by having some effects mundane (but possibly rare) and the vast majority unique or otherwise inaccessible.

If a spell's in a player's repertoire, it shouldn't be mysterious. The mystery comes from trying to unravel how another spellcaster's spell works, and how to counter or beat it. Case and point, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The mechanics of each Stand are specific and explainable, but the mystery is deducing those mechanics mid-conflict.

This is pretty good.
thank you for posting that overly long shit, user.

I love that chick's face with the green shit.

>Oh god she's talking to the fucking sacrifice again
>She's just mad she got kicked in the face

Lyta is a goldmine of reactions after her phenomenal nervous breakdown.

I can see that

Doesn't she become one of the Furies or some shit?

She becomes a vessel that allows the Furies to take action

She's really not even aware that anything's going on around her at this point, she's trapped in her own mental world/psychotic break/spiritual revenge journey

She enables the Furies to completely obliterate Dream. After they destroy him, she gets better.

Sort of.

No need to go crazy. Just tell your players that magic works and it works by a set of internally consistent rules. Just don't tell them the rules. Spells still mechanically function the same, but now the "why" is a bit murky.

Somehow, she still perceives things from the real world in that state of mind, but in a twisted way.

She perceives Thessaly as a white dove, a gecko in a dirty alley as the three-headed dragon that protects the apples of immortality, a light post as an immense female cyclops, etc. There's no way to know exactly how much these things she finds in her spiritual journey can actually exert influence in the real world (as an example, it's heavily implied the rotten fruits she ate in that alley really turned her immortal).

ugh looking back on it there are only a few gems of the story that I really like.

I remember re-reading the Cereal Convention and being like, "Damn this shit is fucking edgelord"

There's no hard and fast rule for which of the things she saw or did were or were not real. Almost all of them were a little of both. It's intentionally 'vague'.

...yes? What? That was... literally the point? Did you not even read the end?

It was summarized, very pointedly, as "Y'all are a bunch of self-rationalizing edgelords, cut that stupid shit out. Stop pretending you're anything but a bunch of shitty, murderous children."

I suggest you to read Delirium's own story, Going In. It made me feel cursed for a couple of days.

Oh boy, here we go...

I like the idea of giving your players a basic rundown on magic but not a full list of rules.

Look at the game The Consuming Shadow as one example.

-You can cast spells by combining runes in the right pattern.

-These runes invoke the power of eldritch abominations.

Thing is, you don't know the spells. You can hunt them down in dungeons, or find them through trial and error.

You don't know what the abominations are, or why they choose to grant you these spells, or how they do it.

Last but not least, invoking runes incorrectly will fuck up your sanity gauge.

Because of this magic feels weird and otherworldly, and never "safe" even though with the right preparation you can cast spells all day.

What little lore you get on spells makes things worse, because they're usually just a handful of lines about a kid using a death spell on a school bully or such.

First, ask yourself if this is truly important. Do your players honestly give a shit about this? Will it make a difference to them, or will they go 'Neat.I cast Magic Missile'?

Technology, for the most part, isn't understood by the general populous. We know wires and circuits with electric and tech babble, and you just posted something stupid on Twitter. The specifics aren't as important to the every day person as the result is. Magic for a tabletop is sort of the same way. It's easily at the fingertips of the player, and while the character might have a firm grasp of the inner workings of mystical forces beyond the comprehension of most mortals, the character's player could just as easily give two shits less, or even fluff it themselves. Either way it puts an immediate kibosh on your own ideas.

So, before you go hog wild, make sure your players are even going to give a shit if Magic is simple or complex in it's flavor profile. Because if the ultimate outcome for them is explosions by numbers, it doesn't really matter.