Here's an idea Veeky Forums

Here's an idea Veeky Forums

Instead of going "it's magic I don't gotta explain shit" try to have your magic follow some kind of narrative or dramatic convention. Magic doesn't need "rules" but good magic should have some manner of emotional theological association to it.

For example if a player asks "How can this hot arid dessert be right next to this cold winter tundra" try to think up a reason. It doesn't need to be a logical one, just one that follows. Like: Thousands of years ago a Frost Giant did battle with an army in this tundra. When it was slain its enchanted blood frooze the land and summoned torrid winds that forever cursed the place.

That's just an example obviously but it's important to remember anyway.

Alternatively if you want the inconsistencies to be more mysterious than anything just say "Nobody really knows. Occultists and adepts have studied the area for years and they've only found small hints of a battle against some kind of creature here in a time before recorded history..." give them enough to bite into but not enough to fill them.

Magic is a means to explain things but there should still be a who why and where to it or at least some manner of in-setting analysis.

Evokers are just perpetually pissed off, like barbarians of wizards.
Fireballs are literally their great balls of burning hatred.

5e dnd uses forgotten realms as the default setting. aka the weave.

done. enjoy your owlbears.

One idea of a "rule" I've been tossing around is this: the more pure a soul is, the more powerful it is. Or, to say it another way, the more single minded or specialized a soul is, the more energy it's capable of drawing from cosmic powers.

If a person is pure hearted (good or evil) they're capable of amazing feats, but these types are actually the weakest of the souls. People can't really be totally pure, as too many biological functions and personalities get in the way. You can't just want one thing; eventually you'll want to eat, or sleep, or have a sex drive or something, or by virtue of being a person you'll have other wants you can't fully divorce yourself from. People can only reach a certain threshold of purity, because in the end they're people.

Now, a naked soul is different. This is a spirit or ghost, and losing its body has in a sense purified it, but it still retains much of the personality it had as a person. While it's generally going to be stronger than a person, it has the same flaws. Older ghosts, however, are much more powerful. Over the years they've begun to forget things, and in losing their personality they begin to fixate on the things they can remember. After a while you get an extremely powerful spirit that knows nothing except what it managed to keep. Perhaps vengeance or similar but ghosts get powerful because they've only got one thing keeping them going. However, they're not as powerful as they could be because they're a large soul with only a small amount of personality. Less powerful because the purity is diluted by empty soulstuff.

From this point it's slightly unintuitive, but to get stronger the soul actually needs to be shattered or have pieces extracted. A soul's pieces can only hold so much will, but that very lack of space causes them to be more "pure" (and filled completely) and thus more powerful. Shattered souls typically become demons or angels.

Get enough soul fragments of the same domain together, and you get a god.

I kind of did this by accident for a setting once.

I wanted to have a desert made of nothing but volcanic ash, and while I was showing the setting to a Geologist friend of mine, we started to try to figure out the actual geological and meteorological phenomena that would require a desert made of volcanic ash. I don't remember most of the actual science off the top of my head, but I went something like
>We have two mountain ranges, one of them volcanic, which erupts while a pressure front blows the wind towards the other range. The other range acts as a buffer towards the fronts and towards the ash, and basically making a big weather sink which traps a lot of weather between the two ranges. Over time, the desert in between is pretty much all ash. it was also a very, very big volcano.

That was probably weird bullshit, but that's what I remember of it.

So basically a strong enough soul or a god is basically far more of a force of nature than an actual character?

Essentially yes. The strongest souls end up being so focused on one thing they can't do anything else. Ghosts, demons, and angels are all so single minded in pursuit of their goals that they have no free will and simply do their thing.

Gods are a bit different because they're made of soul fragments from so many donors. The differences between individual soul fragments are almost nothing, but there are so many that it can actually dilute some of the gods' purity with intelligence, making them less powerful but more able to control themselves. The absolute strongest ones have rejected that intelligence and are Azathoth tier blind idiot gods, though.

>Here's an idea Veeky Forums
>Instead of going "it's magic I don't gotta explain shit" try to have your magic follow some kind of narrative or dramatic convention.


No, fuck you, you condescending cuntwaffle.
Tippyverse all the way, baby. You can't handle my illogical madness.

>Tippyverse all the way, baby. You can't handle my illogical madness.
Tippyverse is D&D magic played straight and to it's logical conclusion though.

That sounds exactly like the Silmarillion.

Yeah, I've got to agree with . The Tippyverse isn't really illogical at all - everything follows somewhat-logically from everything else.

Armies of golem soldiers? They last forever, are extremely loyal, very strong, and tend to just accumulate over time.

Mega-cities? Permanent teleportation circles, once set up, cause trade to become centered around those hubs. Also, they last forever.

Vast unexplored barbarian wilds between the cities? With widely available point-to-point transportation, the bits in-between become mostly irrelevant.

The only really "illogical" thing I can think of would probably be the idea of infinitely self-resetting traps of Create Food and Water, but that's easily solvable by just saying that entropy is clearly a bullshit theory in such a universe. Which, let's be honest, it clearly is in D&D.
Not to mention that, well, there's already unlimited-use food and water items out there - it's just that, much like Continous Light and Raise Dead and all the other extremely useful spells out there, world-builders have a certain tendency to ignore that they exist. It's hard for kings to be assassinated in D&D without a coup being involved!

>the more pure a soul is the more powerful it is
>...but to get stronger the soul actually needs to be shattered or have pieces extracted

I'm now imagining some wizard setting up the soul equivalent of Uranium enrichment to grind away the less useful desires in the soul to get incredibly powerful servants. Chopping up souls, taking the somewhat more pure parts, and putting them through the process over and over again.

Magic is just administrator access, and any energy or material required is simply borrowed from the Sun.

I like to give my players multiple pissible explanations.
>The dwarves believe this was the site of an ancient frost giant battle against a dwarf army
>The local humans believe that the land is cursed by a the ghost of a frost elf princess. She was kidnapped from a faraway tribe to marry an evil prince in the southern lands. She took her own life at this spot rather than marry the prince.
>The university wizards believe that this is the site of a natural ley line nexus aligned to the elemental plane of ice. The nexus weakens the barriers between planes, making the land cooler than its surroundings.

Maybe they're all true, or maybe none of them are true.
If a player wants to investigate the giant's grave, then I'm not gonna say "you find nothing". Or if a player wants to travel to the ice plane, I might tell them about how they can find the center of the nexus.
Likewise, it gives me multiple options for later development. Maybe I want to have the big bad start trying to resurrect the fallen frost giants. Or maybe the big bad is actually the great grandson of the evil prince, and now he's gonna kidnap a princess to perform a ritual.

The most I ever do to explain magic is to describe the cycle of energy that feeds it. In my setting, I imagine all things existing as part of a natural cycle of energy. Starting from what we know best, physical, the energy of things moves from physical to spiritual to elemental to templative and back to physical. Knowing the basic not-physics of the game universe allows me to explain things that wouldn't make sense in our world... but for simplicity sake, i just don't put a tundra next to an arid desert. That would be dumb.

Your example is "Why does the ice desert exist next to the hot desert". Seconding that you shouldn't try to force magical explanations where normal ones will do.

Anyways I personally always explain the low incidence of magic users on magic use being an intensely personal experience for each caster. So much so that while certain schools of thought show similarities, it's not unusual to have students with completely different methodology than their teachers. Given the practical nature of having comic fucking power, Wizards have just gone with "If it works, it isn't stupid. If it doesn't, well you gotta have some big fucking balls to be a Wizard let's just say."

Is servitude to a specific individual a valid drive?

What if there's some super charismatic king who manages to make people ridiculously loyal to him, tons of people who's biggest drive is serving the man. When they die, some leave ghosts behind who focus on this one thing, some get shattered, these shards coalesce into a god. Now the king has a god entirely composed of devotion to him.

It is still magic, and I am still not required to explain shit.

Does the bullshit I come up with to "explain" the loli wizard really matter? Really? Will it somehow catapult her into an ascended realm of fictional integrity?

Oh this thread again. I see you were assblasted enough to make another thread with the same topic but not so much so to be btfo and never come back.

So, the shit everyone already fucking does, and don't need to be told to do?

Like, holy shit, this is literally what "it's magic, I don't gotta explain shit" actually means, you goddamned autist. No-one ever actually uses that phrase literally; it's a jokey paraphrasing of whatever actual fantastical explanation the GM came up with for stuff not obeying the conventions of our own reality.

Fucking hell.

I like magic to not be explained but have relatively consistent rules.

IE you have mana/prana which is generated by the soul or from the great beyond or whatever, which can do certain things with certain amounts. HOW it does it is not explained, and maybe no one is even entirely sure in universe, but WHAT it does is relatively consistent under most normal circumstances.

I would say servitude is valid, but a single country probably isn't enough soul shards to make a god. Even if he's loved and inspires loyalty in every single subject, only a fraction of the population would actually become ghosts, and an even smaller fraction of said ghosts would fixate of their loyalty. Souls usually only shatter after something traumatic, like an emotionally charged death (but almost any emotion works), a particularly nasty magic attack, terrible revelation, or demon/angel encounter, but sometimes a soul can reject parts of itself naturally. Either way, shattered souls are rarer.

If anything it's too specific to get a god devoted to one person. What might be possible is several countries practicing slavery or inspiring similar loyalty producing enough fixated ghosts or shattered souls over centuries to create a general god of obedience. They wouldn't be devoted to any individual so much as the concepts of loyalty and following authority.

Producing a god dedicated to one person would require a bit more work, the intention to do it, a ton of souls, and at least a few generations. That might be the overarching plan of a Lich or other immortal, maybe an Elf if they're using Humans to do it, but it would have to be done deliberately.