Make Magic Great Again

Magic is a living force that, while somewhat incomprehensible in its motives, acts to defend itself. Magic wants to be used, but it doesn't want to be controlled and it will become diminished if it is drawn on by too many people. Even magick is not an infinite resource, though it may seem like so to us sometimes.

The reason magic has never become commonplace or exploited for world power is because it doesn't WANT to be. Every time a generation of wizards gets their head up their ass and tries to comprehensively catalogue how magic works, either so they can become as gods or to give magic tot he masses, magic reacts by changing the rules of magic. Entire magical species can end up extinct in the process, and wizards will wake up the next day to find themselves utterly powerless as all of their spells no longer function. New spells exist now, spells that work differently, and humanity has to start learning magic from zero all over again.

The only 'stable' magical ecosystem is one where there is a small number of wizards bumming power off of magic, training only the minimum number of apprentices to keep the tradition going. Any wizard that tries to rock the boat risks taking magick away from everyone else and destroying hundreds of years of research, so they tend to get slapped down incredibly hard by their peers.

hm, not bad!
i'm actually stealing this idea for a setting of mine!

As much as I hate to give this clusterfuck of a game credit for anything, I rather like the way Destiny present's Hive Magic.

>"We will not give you the Deep, King Auryx — that power is for us, your gods. But we will teach you to call upon that force with signs and rituals. Small minds might call it magic. You are no longer bound by causal closure."

Essentially the implication is that the magic the Hive draw on is "living" or "sentient" to some degree. It may even be a god. The point is, the signs and rituals that make magic work not because they have any inherent power, and not even because the casters have inherent power, but because the consciousness behind this "magic" chooses to recognize these things. There's no real way to analyze how it works because it makes up own rules, essentially ignoring causality and the regular laws of physics.

Still true thou

>writing a setting for a book or something
>thinking up how magic works and how people interact with it
>"Magister Anonion, we study spells and incantations, but how does it all work?"
>"That, my dear Apprentice Anonkin, is an eternal mystery called "Ji-ehm-fiat-duh". Nobody knows what those ancient syllables mean..."

yeah, no, thanks for your non-contribution

Recommended reading OP: darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html

thank you, kind user
may your days be long and your hardship few

Have multiple theoretical systems of magic for different cultures.

They all result in more or less the same thing (for game purposes) but in universe they are all mutually exclusive and contradictory.

>what are humanities

Is that really such a bad thing? I mean mystical magic is nice, but techno-magic is also nice.

Anyway, elaborating on a form of magic I posted in a napoleonic fantasy thread.
Magic derive from the will of sentient beings. Popular fuelled magic, kind like the classic "believers create gods" except with magic in general, empowering people, place, nations, ideologies or whatever you want.
The resulting magic is conflicting, rash, unstable as people believe many different things, but it is possible the channel it. Heroes and tyrants, tribunes and demagogues, all use that magic, sometime without even realising they do.
It is possible to manipulate it and exploit it, like it is possible to manipulate public opinions. But never totally and never reliably. You're never safe from the public opinion shifting or going out of control.

As such, while being a popular figure is a good way to magical power, people tend to believe in the image they have of you rather than your true self they often never met. Meaning that if you break that image by acting differently that they expect, you may lose your magic. Even worst, the magic may change who you are to correspond to people expectations.

So a reasonable person would try to remain low key with that kind of magic. Either in scale (passionately empowered by a few number of people he directly knows) or in intensity (a politician that would try not excite passions).
More adventurous people would have to face opposite magically empowered opinions, fickleness and uncontrollable surges of magic. It will probably end badly, but some enjoy the ride.

Tl,dr : Politic is magic

>but techno-magic is also nice
but it ain't magic anymore, it's just sufficiently advanced science

>Not a science nor a scientific pursuit

Don't.
If you want to solve the problem of science removing the magic from magic, simply do this.
It kills you.

Use of magic creates a radioactive waste emission that affects all those near it(including the environment).
Small exposure to this or exposure windows that are sufficiently separated from one another will merely make you a bit sick and peter off after a while.

However rapid or consistent exposure like the kind that would be necessary for any form of magical engineering would kill people exposed to it in short order.

This encompasses the use of all magic including and up to enchantments, healing magic, storage, charms, hexes, wards and invocations.

People will find ways around this, like swapping out practitioners or operators in high magic areas over time but this requires an exponentially increasing non magical component (human and material resources, time, logistical concerns, etc) that make it infeasible for most major undertakings.

This was a wonderful read, user. Thank you.

I would say a goodnway to do it would be to add a layer a mystery everytime the players figure out something.

The players are going to analyse the magic on one level or another. After all, when you want to burn a building down, you cast "fireball" not "create water". The players deduce (even if its obvious) that fireball + building = burning building. They don't research "burn building" they use what tools they have at hand (fireball).

Because the scientific method doesn't work in that setting.

Science as we understand it depends on reproduceable results and dissemination of knowledge. In a world where magic exists, results are often not reproduceable.

You thought you invented a form of agriculture that yielded greater crops? Sorry, but crop yields are influenced by the X factor that is 'the emotional status of Elihuri the Harvest Goddess'. If Elihuri is happy, you can get a bountiful harvest using nothing but gravel and water. If Elihuri is depressed, no amount of crop rotation is going to help you.

You want to study genetics? Good luck making sense of that in a world where you can be born 2/3rds god, or animal hybrids are a thing.

The world is full of spirits and magical creatures like fey, visible and invisible, that can and will throw off your work. They don't even need to be malign. Dickish spirits will throw misfortune in your path and ruin what should have worked, and helpful spirits will make things better for you in ways no one else will ever be able to replicate because you didn't know spirits were involved.

How do you come up with the area square rule in a setting where dragons exist? In a world where magic can summon fire at a whim, what IS thermodynamics?
The correct answer to those questions is that the very fact that you are asking them makes you a metagaming fucktard, because it is impossible for anyone within those settings to approach their world scientifically in the first place. The answer doesn't matter, because the question is nonsense.

>the emotional status of Elihuri the Harvest Goddess
except I remember that Oglaf strip about Dwarfs and Ice Queen

>contributing a shittier reply to a shitty post

Just to break up the circlejerk, I'll go ahead and say that I personally believe that understanding magic is a bit like quantum mechanics: people know that people can understand it, but the people that do either don't understand it completely because it's so alien and complex OR they are so few and far between that it doesn't make a huge difference to the world that magic can be understood.

I like this too. Anyone else read El Goonish Shive?
That's neat, but seems like a super terrible setting to live in. Becoming an all mighty god emperor is as easy as convincing people that you're invincible and immortal, and so you just become that? No thanks.

Oh shut up. Waving your hands around and making a fireball appear out of nowhere will always be magic.

>Oh shut up. Waving your hands around and making a fireball appear out of nowhere will always be magic.

>our every movement causes vibrations
>certain combination of movement, coupled with intoning of certain syllables, creates a complex vibration harmony that resonates with dimensional harmonics and open a portal to another dimension, which - for all we known - is filled with everburning fuel streaming at large speeds.
>maybe it is a surface of fast-spinning star, who knows. whatever is the case, said combination of gestures and sounds creates what is known to laymen as a "fireball".
>utmost caution is advised! only this particular combination opens a portal oriented in the same direction as the movement of plasma. even minute difference can open a portal with a different orientation, incinerating an unwanted target - or even the wizard himself!
>however, it is advisable for an accomplished wizard to learn this matrix of vibrations to achieve utmost flexibility when weaving the fireball

Yeah, that just makes matters worse. There isn't even just one X factor force that can fuck up your day.

Is the harvest goddess happy? What about the ice queen? Is the rain god dead again? Oh, the rain god is alive but a local water spirit is sick and poisoning the ground?

The list of shit that can interfere with your results is endless. You need a comprehensive understanding of the magical and spiritual world just to filter out all of the supernatural forces so you can run your mundane experiments with any kind of accuracy.

Meanwhile, next town over, a bunch of dunderheads that wouldn't recognize fertilizer if it slapper them in the face are getting better harvests than you because they sacrifice better goats than you do.

>Becoming an all mighty god emperor is as easy as convincing people that you're invincible and immortal, and so you just become that?
Well, that wouldn't be that literal and absolute. I think it as a magical enhancement more than complete reality warping magic.
And again, it can just as well power a revolution.

One of the point of it in the not-napolonic setting was the shift from empowered kings and emperors toward empowered ideologies (including nations). Also people in universe simply don't know how magic work and just assumed kings, and to a lesser extend nobles, have magical blood. Even the royal family, that had the knowledge ultimately fall for it's own propaganda of divine blood.

I can't for the life of me think of a game where they actually explain the intricate working of their magic. The game mechanics are explained sure, but that's something different from how the magic works in universe.

Even D&D doesn't explain in detail how its magic works. Sure it will tell you that a fireball takes some bat guano and some finger wagging along with some words of some sort, but it never actually says the reasons why or the in universe theories for it. The magic just does what it does, but repeatedly so since the wizard himself has figured it out to an extent in universe to make it repeatable.

The cleric just prays to their god for blessings. The sorcerer just makes spells happen instinctively.

Do people want magic without game mechanics or just magic that isn't explained in universe? Because the first isn't fun for games and would only work for NPC characters and the last is pretty much every setting i've seen including every single D&D one.

As to OPs question, you can't. The scientific method will find a way of measuring and analyzing the magic. I mean, we figured out how to measure gravity waves. If magic happened in real life, we would have that shit figured out in a couple decades, and made for mass consumption in a few more.

Write your setting like a cape comic setting, minus all the Dr. Strange types of course.
No one learns magic from reading a book. Some people have specific magical powers by birth, others by accident, a few by contract, and many are so good at ordinary jobs that it becomes magic, but no one just "does magic" with a book full of many different unrelated spells. At best, you can only understand a lot of other people's magic on a theoretical level.
Magic is fine, wizards and clerics ruined it.

The source of the Hive's powers is the Darkness and to seemingly gain that power they have to prove worthy of it since the Darkness believes that nothing should be given, it has to be taken.

you can't

most systems of magic is based on debunked scientific and metaphysical theories. Literally "what if those theories actually were how the world worked"

best you can have is arcane theory of magic were all the magic comes opening a gateway to alternate dimensions that have different laws of physics.

>but it ain't magic anymore, it's just sufficiently advanced science

As I recall the entire point of sufficiently advanced science is that there is no difference between the two, they're the same thing with different trappings. Technobabble and incantations are the same thing.

Isn't that the plot of El goonish Shive? Magic is a living being that hates being studied and will change itself to prevent itself from having it's working be revealed to the world at large?

I think it's more that the consciousness of magic doesn't want a lot of people to have magic power. But yes, changing itself is something magic is considering doing.

...The fuck is wrong with all of you? 3.5 is the setting where magic was science. All effects, ALL EFFECTS in the game where based off of spells. I don't know what you faggots want more of

Base it off alchemy. Alchemists studied the natural world for years, but that didn't mean they understood it.

Basically, no-one knows where it comes from or how it works, but it can't just be used for anything - you've got to find the notes of an alchemist/ do some research before you can even attempt a ritual, and it takes centuries of accumulated knowledge to create a truly world-changing spell.

...

Easy: just have invalid spells kill the caster in order to discourage experimenting. Hard to science something if your experiments have a 99% chance of killing you. Add in some sort of skill/mana threshold so the wizard can't just have slaves act as a proxy caster.

In muh settan, magic is given by a goddess, and was put into an easily-studyable and Vancian format on request. She hates the way this works, and has been attempting to overturn the decision for millennia. Right now, she's allowed free reign of her own domain so long as she keeps providing magic and not fucking with the Material Plane, but she resents it immensely.

Magical Illuminati that spread disinfo and use magic to alter magic.

All fantasy was at some point based on personal taste.

"Gods did it".