How should magic be handled in a low fantasy setting?

>Fuck daily limits on magic. Drain, unlimited use, rituals, unique components, or bust.
I also can't stand daily limits on magic, I feel it cheapens the characters gimmick if he can only use his gimmick X number of times a day

>Also I like supernatural powers being often connected to the devil.
Most old school "magic" that I have seen requires pacts with various supernatural creatures be they Devils, Fey, nature spirits, or some other entity to be able to preform any magical feat

Really I would look into literature about traditional real world magic
Here's some shit about hermetic traditions
youtube.com/watch?v=UvV8vLON-nY&list=PLG8klsjxFY-N1NgvgJZP7efU5AYGJkakQ&index=1

>>Fuck daily limits on magic. Drain, unlimited use, rituals, unique components, or bust.
>I also can't stand daily limits on magic, I feel it cheapens the characters gimmick if he can only use his gimmick X number of times a day

The whole point behind Vancian mechanics is that originally it was intended to demonstrate a low-magic setting. Player characters weren't wizards or magi, they were merely "Magic-users." Magic was supposed to be something mortals could only barely grasp, so Magic Users would have to contemplate arcane scripts for hours to cast 99.9% of the spell, and keep it hanging there until later on they want to release the energy, so they trigger the effect and fire off Magic Missile or whatever.

Obviously we all know the game balance issues this caused for 40 years, but the idea of spells being something really difficult has long since been lost.

I think what you meant to say is that Vancian casting came about because Gygax needed to give his walking artillery pieces ammunition and prevent them from using plot breaking spells every encounter so he just decided to ripoff Dying Earth

GURPS: Ritual Path Magic

That's how

...

1) Consider leaving magic exclusively in the hands of NPCs. This will help keep the low fantasy feel by making magic rare

2). Make it relatively weak, or require huge effort to create powerful effects

3). Avoid systematizing it, leave it feeling unknown and occultish

4). True magicians are exceedingly rare, most are charlatans or people whose skills and knowledge are obscure and thus mistaken for magic

Make it that if someone that's been taught by someone wise, they can use it safely, but if someone starts stumbling upon magical phenomena and tries to manipulate it without knowing what they're doing, it's extremely dangerous,

No magic unless the DM want to.
Aka all magic is plot magic.

>4). True magicians are exceedingly rare, most are charlatans or people whose skills and knowledge are obscure and thus mistaken for magic

It's at to this and say that even actual magicians use a lot of tricks and slight of hand to make what they do more impressive. Most of what they do is, educated guess work, cold reading, hypnosis, chemistry/"alchemy" and other mundane tricks and illusions.

I would generally limit it to npc only, or very clearly let the player know that magicians are very much support characters.

Like mysticism

why not use literal magic ammo a la runescape

Handle it just like how magic in Conan universe is handled.

Have no evidence of magic.

The PCs don't use it, the NPCs don't use it, they never see it happen. It's a real shame fantasy has become so addicted to doing the opposite and showing people the depth of magic and the intervention of real gods. Magic in real life is only interesting because there's no solid proof. Real life is only interesting because there's mystery. Your PCs should hear of magic lots, and many historical events should be explained with magic, but they never get proper evidence of magic being a thing.

Rare, subtle, and unexplainable.

I love it when magic is something where an extraordinary thing has happened, but it could be explained away if you tried really fucking hard.

Wizards are basically people holding a lot of magic artefacts and knowing how to use them.

So wands, runes, glyph, rings, etc etc

WHFRP dealt with magic really nicely.

By basically every now and then randomly making the magician explode/sucked to war/summon demons.

That said, making the magic ritual only is one of the better ways like thus

It should be considered mythical or not real by most people, and those that do know how to handle it are likely secretive about it, and the effects of the magic are not flashy, but are powerful.

Because players bitch about having to track material components.

Amp up the mystic and ceremonial parts of magic. In my setting a magic spell is basically a religious ritual which can only be achieved by people with the right training and equipment and even then the effects are pretty much (if not only) placebo. Most magic rituals are basically people entering into dancing trances and ritualised chanting and/or singing. An imperial army wouldn't dream of going into combat without first consulting haruspicy.

youtube.com/watch?v=W_Km4j36khA

Magic is slow, rare and sublte. Think of the game of thrones where the witch causes dragon girl to miscarry with a ritual.

So very little fireballs, but a lot of slow, long-term rituals with low-key (but still possible powerful) effects. Reagents etc required

I myself prefer the opposite approach. Magic should be seen as a real and potentially dangerous thing amongst most societal classes while the learned hold it as silly superstition. Any effect magic have should be clouded by placebo and self fulfilling prophecy.

Indeed. And even where it has effect it's still unclear if it was effective due to magic or due to some other things such as herbology, illusions or placebo.

I always liked the bloodborne-esque route: greater power is traded off for sanity/deformities.

do you have a source on Vancian magic being for a low-magic setting? this seems intuitively true to me but I have never seen evidence

The insinuation that Witcher is low fantasy deeply troubled me.

it's relatively low magic compared to most other fantasy settings. Most people have never seen a wizard. It's one notch above Game of Thrones

Yeah but most people in the Northern realms have seen a drowner or ghoul and no one is surprised to see a wizard or sorceress. It's not high magic for sure, but it's also very far from low magic.

It's rare and often requires sacrifice of some kind to work. This can be physical or metaphysical in nature but something must be given to have the magic work. Of course, it doesn't have to be you who makes the sacrifice but that is by nature corrupting as it's theft of the highest order. Other than that its powers are often indirect with curses and blessing being the most common rather than the typical fireball to the face that most settings use.

The practice of magic is heavily superstitious. Humans don't inherently "get" magic, it just doesn't make sense to them, so when they learn a magical procedure from a supernatural creature (either by direct tutelage or remote observation) they memorize it by rote without comprehending how and why it works. Which parts of the ritual are actually necessary and which are unrelated things that you've associated with the ritual incorrectly? There's no good way to know, because fucking up a ritual means that horrible things happen to you and nobody's going to risk their lives on an experiment like that when they know of a way to do the thing that does actually work, even if some of the procedure is superfluous.

"Low fantasy" setting??
Harry Potter is low fantasy.
Pretty sure you mean "low magic."

We limited magic to more or less just divine magic that priests have access to, which we also nerfed. Wizards are exceedingly rare, and magic is very difficult to progress in. If a PC wants to be an arcane caster, they have to hold advanced degrees in sciences (we're doing a self stating campaign) and npc arcane users are low level, pretty much all the time. No wizard has the power of a 7th level spells, for example

Make it cryptic and inscrutable. The incantations on a single basic Scroll of Limited Amphibian Transmogrification could have ENIGMA-tier encryption (i.e. scrambled German). Something more powerful could be on par with the Voynich Manuscripts (nearly unintelligible and maybe a hoax). A truly powerful spell is too powerful to be merely written down and would require the psychic concentration of an entire society to telepathically decipher.

Strange, difficult to understand, and usually contradictory. What the hedge wizard from your village knows and understands is complete nonsense to the hedge wizard three villages over.

Also, magic makes people weird. Now, this weirdness might just be them being a hermit who lives out in the woods talking to squirrels, or it might be the third eye in the middle of their forehead that glows green and looks around independently of the wizard.

> A truly powerful spell is too powerful to be merely written down and would require the psychic concentration of an entire society to telepathically decipher.

>tfw you infect the society with an especially spicy memetic trojan so you can use them as a botnet for deciphering the spell you want to cast

Bury it in shit-tons of esoteric ritualism and bullshit.

Ars Magica is low fantasy.

I like doing magic as something that probably that probably could be a science but is far beyond the understanding of the people. Some groups have learned cool tricks, they don't know exactly how it works.

Many magic groups are dedicated to a single arcane secret and guard it closely.

I think you want the blue and black smiley.

There's nothing transhumanistic about memes. I don't know if the required smiley even exists.

Shamanistic and ritual focused like most anons here said.

Even though I prefer this path I always find it difficult to execute outside of doing completely random bullshit. I've always wanted to start a thread asking for spooky-druid rituals so I could compile a list.

Do it.

At a heavy cost. You need energy for magic, a lot of energy. Sure you can do picky things yourself, but for big effects you need to harvest energy from sacrifices. More intelligent and skilled animals yield more energy. There may be a modifier for killing innocents for power in a setting where you want magic to be primarily bad guy material.

Literary low fantasy is not the definition used by basically anyone in the context of RPGs. It's also not a useful term, because almost nobody gives a shit whether earth exists in-setting.

In literary terms, harry potter, Lord of the rings, Conan, star wars, forgotten realms,DC comics, and marvel comics all count as "low fantasy".

It's neither useful nor practical.

Magic has consequences. A botched spell will not only fuck up you, but your immediate surroundings and everyone unlucky enough to be in a thirty foot radius of you.

here we go

My personal preference is that in settings with high magic, people and creatures can just do magic, with only their bodies, brains and maybe a wand or similar focus, and nothing else.

But in settings with low magic, magic requires stuff, lots of stuff. Rituals, objects, proper locations, various catalysts, sacrifices, specially constructed buildings, proper materials, etc.

Basically, high magic means people make magic happen and low magic means that stuff makes magic happen and people just know how to arrange the stuff in the necessary way to get the effects they want.

Someone said GURPS?

You know how people react to the unknown which is clearly dangerous?

And you know how much people liked witches back in the day?

Yep, them wizzies are getting their asses persecuted all day and night.

This. Someone came up with the idea of Iron and Stone magic, which I've always loved. Basically, in mechanical terms, magic isn't an active thing, it's passive, removing penalties to rolls rather than adding something.

Example 1, Kerri the night witch, bound to the moon and the stars, can't go casting "moon bolts" at her enemies or anything, but her magic reduces the penalties for low light, and lets her make potions that work better than they should be able to.

Example 2, Thuck the barbarian is a man of mighty thews and miniscule brains. He also happens to be a master of battle magic, which doesn't improve his rolls when he chops someone with his forty pound sword but does negate the penalty for his making a called shot to groin-shank the innocent guard that happened to have the misfortune of walking in on Thuck as he was stealing the king's jewels.

Quantum magic
The universe retroactively causes the magical effect, but the effect is otherwise still limited to physics.
You want to cast a fireball? Whoops, turns out that spark you made lit up natural gas leaking from an underground source. Good luck surviving that explosion.
Fuck around too much and the universe decided you never existed in the first place.
Too bad this cant be translated into rpg rules

Why not? It sounds mechanically likes combination of mage and Buffy.

Done

It's not even distinction between "literary" and "gaming" definition, it's just modern and practical definition vs outdated, obsolete definition that serves no purpose anymore
The old definition only clinged to by autists with OCD about semantics and trolls pretending to be said autists to start arguments.

No visual effects. Rare. Complicated. No limits, but an immediate personal cost. Scary. No real understanding by anyone. No pre-defined "spells" or anything. No safe permanent magic items. No magic user PCs. Final Destination.

Because that's the kind of setting Jack Vance wrote