How could you plausibly introduce magic, as in real magic as opposed to psychic powers...

It's not like it isn't something every space opera ever hasn't done.

I mean I'm not sure if you know enough about sci-fi to run a sci-fi game

what is the difference between real magic and psychic powers. also what is the difference between real magic and ultra tech, or alien tech.

sounds like the mechanics will boil down to the same thing, so really it amounts to your description/fluff.

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I wouldn't.

Just like generally I don't put cowboys or crashed super heroes in fantasy settings.

I'm just going to keep posting characters that are essentially space wizards for a while

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Techniques of control of energy sources in 7th and 12th dimensions. Don't even ask why touching 8th dimension is forbidden.

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Is that Tzeentch?

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Magic is the manipulation of quantum entanglement.

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Unless you mean absolute out-of-the-blue magic, I think what could work is some sort of magic-from-technology deal. There are a lot of ways to go about this, the first example I give is from Supergods.

>An individual forced to meditate on his own atomic structure unlocks a deeper understanding of atomic bonds and is able to manipulate the fundamental building blocks of matter after learning this basic truth, but has gone completely insane as a result.

>The construction of the first Matrioshka Brain was created in tandem with a direct neural link to a willing subject, instantly endowing them with the mental processing power that could be produced by using the entirety of a star's energy. As a result, they are able to literally envision and manipulate the course of dark matter, due to sensory perception they have achieved far beyond that which could be comprehended by any human.

>Creation of first endogenous artificial nutrition units allows a person to subsist entirely passively off of microorganisms they filter from the air - the issue is that when they begin to absorb larger sources of raw flesh, they find themselves endowed with the capability to manipulate it in unique and terrifying ways.

>First inquests into complete haptic lucid dreaming units allow certain users to amplify their neural waves and communicate/interface via an undiscovered and mysterious wavelength of energy. Those that get lost in the void become vegetative, but it is suspected they still exist as some sort of incorporeal manifestation.

>The combination of neural links and nanobots has provided individual humans with tenuous links over kinetic nanoswarms which are advancing themselves so quickly so as to be utterly indistinguishable from magic, but are still tethered to the plugin in the back of everyone's neck. For now, at least.

I think this works better for magic in space but might not be what you were looking for.

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you could say that an early progenitor-style race harnessed magic, and used it to dominate the galaxy. However, they realized that it could be used to destroy them by technologically weak, but magically powerful races, or they feared the potential of sufficiently powerful individual mages to threaten the fabric of their society as a whole, so they built a giant antimagic generator the size of a planet, a vast automated system to enforce the laws of physical reality. The race went extinct through other means (space-plague, killed each other off, marauding extragalactic threat, AI uprising, killed by slaves, whatever floats your boat, really) ages ago, but the generator was self-sustaining. It only recently was damaged by a freak accident (maybe hit by a huge piece of space debris, maybe it's orbit finally decayed and it fell into the star it was orbiting because it got hit by a moderately sized bit of debris ages ago), allowing mages to be born again (if you want an interesting young wizard thing) or use the powers they were born with (if you want mages to vary in age).

At least he thinks he is

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OH!
It's pasta.
Thank Christ, I was worried the first time I saw it.

Muscle wizards are just a shitty Veeky Forums meme, user.

Just a psychic; 'sorcery' is what rubes call psychic powers, and there's no difference, because our Spiritual Liege is boring as shit.

>Literally just make it Lovecraftian magic
Advanced mathematics, quantum physics, and madness.

Or you could go with hard light holograms, nanotechnology, super drugs, etc.

Not that user, but.. doesn't mean those characters don't use magic in settings that are space.

and regardless of your shit taste in Veeky Forums, Muscle Wizards are a thing; focusing your spirit into a blast of energy that you fire from your palm is magic, even if it does come from being overly stronk.

No, user, the difference between psychic powers and sorcery in 40k is that psychic powers are something someone is born with, and sorcery is something that you've learned how to use by performing rituals and invoking words of power.

It's basically like the sorceror/wizard divide in DnD.

>Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It's ubiquitous in fiction because it just kind of makes sense.

>magic as opposed to psychic powers

But psychic powers really are the way to go if you want to have even a shred of "realism" in your setting. The most plausible way for supernatural shit to happen would be to uplift the human mind/consciousness until it can do that.

If you don't care about all that, then who gives a shit, just chuck wizards in there. Adding magic to the future is no different than adding magic to the past.

There's an additional fundamental force, similar to gravity, electromagnetism, or the strong and weak nuclear forces, that has gone undiscovered up until the current era because it mostly blended into the background. However, once isolated and harnessed by an intelligent mind, it is capable of altering the ways that the other physical forces interact. Telekinesis via gravity manipulation, bolts of energy via nuclear force manipulation, messing around with a person's brain via electromagnetic manipulation, etc.

Console commands for the universe. There's an underlying code that makes up the fabric of reality that can be changed on the fly by superusers.

So what makes that magic as opposed to just something science and technology can figure out?

Advanced tech is powered by advanced magic that allows people to break the rules of the universe to force their tech to work.

Author fiat.

Turns out an alien civilization from beyond the observable universe has artificially altered the laws of physics in some way or another probably 3 billion years ago, and this alteration of the laws of physics only just reached human space where we can detect these changes.

You see, they're not really changes. They're systems stacked on top of the laws of physics. These rules can be invoked in specific scientific ways.

>probably 3 billion years ago
I just realised that'd mean this change would be faster than light, which is a bit odd, but it technically can work, since theoretically dark energy also moves faster than light because space can move as fast as it fucking wants.

You're worried that alteration of laws of physics propagates faster than light?

I absolutely love To The Stars for that.

Make magic, by its very essence, unknowable, hermetic, physic breaking and following weird nonsensical rules, but not so much as it can't be optimized and studied using science. Make the rest of the setting hard SF as fuck, and then explore the many points where the magic system collide with the world.

In To The Stars they have magical girls in the military, magical stealth girl for their stealth ships, teleporter serving as bodyguards, magical kill team specialized in quick interception of capital ships, etc. Magic resources have been optimized in a pure capitalistic way, and while no-one knows how magic truly works, they have psychologists that helps you with power development and stuff. All very neat, very hard SF around a core of pure weirdness.

Don't make your magic an ill-defined 'Force/Psyker' like spiritual presence. It cheapens your SF and transform it into fantasy. Don't make your magic simply another physical force, because by then you're not doing magic anymore, are you?

The just balance is a rational, planed, logical usage of irrational powers.

So basically an entirely separate branch of science/nature?

One that can be studied empirically, but simply cannot be rectified with normal science?

Turns out there's magic. The concept of it was introduced to Earth by ancient aliens, but humans never learned how to use it because the iron in our blood interferes. Once humanity entered the stars scientists began working on fixing that problem, and now with the help of several implants and tools to compensate for the biological hurdles humans can use magic.

The force is not magic, it is the force.
Biotics is not magic, they are biotics.
Lenses are not magic, they are lenses.
The emotional spectrum is not magic, it is the emotional spectrum.
Ki is not magic, it is ki.
The matrix is not magic, it is the matrix.
Alien technology is not magic, it is alien technology.
Materia is not magic, it is materia.

>it's not magic, it's explained.
Ok. So your argument is, if it has an explanation, it's not magic.
The answer is simple, then:
Just have magic show up. No explanation, no mcguffin-stone, super-serum, or phebiltunium. Just have magic show up and break things, then...
"It's magic robots. I don't gotta explain shit."

>So your argument is, if it has an explanation, it's not magic.
OP said "real magic as opposed to psychic powers", and my argument is, if it's called anything other than magic in-setting, it's not real magic.

Have it as some sort of ancient technology or power source which was forgotten by time. It's a reality altering power which is the energy of creation, allowing you to alter or defy the very laws of the universe. Since no one knows anything about it, it's a slow upward climb for all of the civilisations to advance their magic research, or other civilisations just choose to go with conventional technology and science in order to combat this new threat.

Both of these paths will eventually lead to godhood, so it would be a race against time to see which one will get there first.

You've got star wars space wizards

You've got mass effect biotic implants

You've got "it's just magic, duh"

You can have another race teach humans magic by showing us how to open our third eye/chakra/murkaba and so it's a learned thing

It can be a rare material found on a certain planet or combiNed with some new thing and so basically it's become this material anyone can utilize.

Some super cosmic event or whatever grants the universe magic, like a God exploding

The traveller from Destiny.

We're dealing with a spaceunk setting. Odds are, the last time somebody called something 'magic' was a thousand years ago, with Carl Sagan levels of atheism and science. They'd see somebody pull a fireball out of thin air and probably think 'nanites', 'technology we haven't had a chance to look into yet', or 'neato, I have lasers.'
Magic's gonna have to do something so blatantly anti-physics, be non-reproducible by techno-babble fabrication stations, or just be completely immune to analysis and observation that people are gonna have to dig up a Ye Olde English dictionary and say "okay, fuck it, it's magic."

Have it able to cover spheres of influence and answer questions that conventional science can't. For example, magic includes being able to contact gods and other magical beings, being able to raise the dead, proving that there's an afterlife, summoning creatures which defy all common sense or things which just outright fuck around with the laws of physics. Being able to improve your magic doesn't seem to be tied to anything except your own force of will too. Someone being able to create more energy from nothing because they started thinking harder doesn't make sense from any scientific standpoint, so it can't be replicated or reproduced by scientific methods.

Can Robots/AI in your setting learn Magic OP?

Many magic systems are off-limits to non-living intelligences/those without a soul.

If it's not 'magic' but just another way of changing reality (as science and technology is a way of changing the world), an AI should be able to do it.

Imagine an AI that has a 500TB spellbook and can multi-cast a thousand spells/round

They'd see somebody pull a fireball out of thin air and probably think "psychic powers" which is precisely what OP said to avoid.
We need to come up with universally accepted, setting-agnostic definitions of the terms "magic" and "psychic powers", so that we can agree on a concept of something that is the former but not the latter.

The number one rule of magic is it doesn't need to be explained

Why r u doing this?
What's next?
You gunna try to explain the speedforce?

It doesn't matter because psychic powers are literally just magic anyways.

>Applied Demonology

Speedforce kek

Let's start with basics. What would divide "science" and "magic"?
If for "sciense" we will use galilean paradigm of best-fitting hypothesys for results of reproducible experiments, from which the physics spring (note: what is considered "science" and "scientific today" is physics that has blobbed into all fields - and less physics there is, less scientific the thing is)? then magic will be something grown rom another paradigm
I would suggest cabbalistic approach. following may be discerned:
- use of symbols; sympathethic actions - an effect can be produced on object A by manipulating object B by something that symbolises it
- revelatory nature; knowledge is there, and surest way to it is to dig into sources, going to 3rd, 4th and so on layers of meaning (through linguistic and semantic tricks, and heavy use of symbolic translations) as opposed to finding data\facts in experiments or observations
- interaction with personal (although more-or-less transcendal) powers as opposed to studying\applying impersonal "laws"

So, pah - and we have witches, voodoo shamanism, daemonoligists, cabbalists and stuff. And they are all unscientific, as science rejects notion of sympathethic actions, or intrinsic symbolism. Yet when witch uses bat's wing in her brew to call on the powers of the night - it works

>have them discover a super-super-computer that automatically fulfills requests anywhere in the universe for people with the right access codes and who know how to program it.

Just mention quantum foam and manifesting non-realised timelines and handwave any opposition away,

>You gunna try to explain the speedforce?
The speedforce is the embodiment of motion, both literal and narrative. It's pretty well explained. It makes you go as fast as needed for the story, and provides concessions to physics as the plot requires.

make it technology based

And branes, gotta have branes man

Selectively unifying branes in N-dimensional bulk space

Magic has always existed but technology has only just reached the point of being able to actually detect and confirm supernatural forces beyond the physical world. Before that point, the supernatural defied all empirical study thus making it near-impossible to sort out what was real from what wasn't.

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or you know a wizard (preferably sorcerer due to use of CHA instead of INT also spontaneous cast>prepared cast) with a STR and CON of 16+ without magical assistance. then you take a bunch of harmful touch spells and replace every instance of touch, grasp, palm, hand, or any word signifying it as a spell that comes from your hand and put "fist" in its place.

like shocking fist, chilling fist, mage fist, etc.

for which to better fisticuff dragons and/ or aliens with

>reality warper becomes reality fister
Thats right fist that reality.

>naturally evolved sentient beings have a portion of their brain that extends into a higher dimension
>eventually after millions of years of evolution they will usually evolve the ability to use it, or you can just use cybernetics/genetic engineering to access it sooner. Only elder races fully understand the intricacies of it to the point of reproducing it artificially
>the rules of reality within individual dimensions (like ours) are quite fragile and can be modified temporarily on a local level by this portion of the brain, there are basically no actual set 'rules of the multiverse' which remain constant across dimensions
>'magic' (applied metaphysics) is all about altering the reality state of a local area to allow phenomena which would otherwise be impossible
>meme magic sort of exists
>esoteric/eldritch horror and posthuman aesthetic

Thats how it is in my setting, anyway.

Jack Vance did it 1st.

As cool as that is, it's definitely the opposite of "real magic"

Define "plausibly."

When I need to add magic to a setting, I usually go with the energy manipulation route. Similar to what Doctor Strange and Magic in the MCU is seems to be doing. Manipulate Energy to perform the impossible.

Go the Voltron route, manipulate extradimensional energy that when interacting with our plane can be used to cause effects and events almost identical to magic?

>Voltron's case, the manipulation and refinement of Quintessence

>almost identical to magic
I've always been satisfied with stuff like that as "real magic" itself. That's what Doctor Strange's magic is, and I've always liked that. Because the thing is, once you introduce other dimensions, and drawing power from them, you have gone beyond the natural laws of the familiar universe. You've entered a field that while it has a sliver of basis in science, is squarely "supernatural", rather than the field of sci-fi magic that's actually just advanced nanobots or prosthetics, or some other thing that may look like magic, but is actually just complex manipulation of the familiar natural world.

>as opposed to psychic powers
Why opposed? "Psychic powers" is just the terminology people use to describe magic these days. The demons might be called "energy beings". Do you really think an advanced civilization would be comfortable admitting that all of their "warp engineers" were just wizards, and their FTL capabilities were all dependent on a force which defied everything they thought they knew about physics and completely ignored the laws of thermodynamics?

They use words like "psychic" so they can pretend it all fits into their little box, that it's just like all the other sciences. They might not understand it personally, but it helps them feel in control. Like they don't need to question everything they thought they knew about the nature of reality, and the validity of those laws they once believed immutable.

If it makes them feel better to call them "psychic powers", just let them.

Try Mage the Ascension.

Agreed. The manipulation of extradimensional shit is the only really way to get truest sci-fi magic

OK Google, fuck this motherfucker up

Behold, a setting where magic and technology exist in the universe together, and humans are capable of exactly one of them.

Fucking this. For the last couple hundred years psychic phenomenon has been folded into the same category as ghosts, fortune tellers/divination, curses and goetic demons and Chaos Magic.

If you want to be magical or, more specifically mystical, just don't play up the biological or physical side of. Use the psychological, symbolic trappings of the parapsychological outlook on the Goetica and Chaos magic.
Magic is altering our place in the cosmic paradigm. It's working under the gnostic principle that our reality is mutable and only one level in an greater structure. By altering the perception of the paradigm, be it your own or that of the community you alter the paradigm itself.

Its sounds like wacky hippy, metaphysical bullshit but that's because it's the wacky, hippy metaphysicians that put the most effort into creating detailed modern magic systems.

The core idea is that magic has some kinds of rules but unlike "scientific" explanations they are explained in terms of pseudo-psychology, sociology or philosophy instead of physics. It's not about "energy" it's about perception and logical structure. There is still technobable and if it's good it has an abstract internal logic.
That's how I'd do it anyway.

My suggested fiction for inspiration for this take:
-Core occult-scifi Stuff
>Beyond the Black Rainbow
>Serial Experiments Lain
>Video Drome
>Shinji's Super Rad Fuck-Up party
>EYE: Divine Secret of Cybermancy
>The Invisibles
>/x/

-Stuff that has a similar mindset or aesthetic :
>Paranoia Agent
>Wuxia/Dragon/Swordsman
>Kill Six Billion Demons
>FLCL
>Mignolaverse stuff
>A Field in England
>Mob Psycho 100
>Dune
>Elder Scrolls weird lore
>Holy Mountain
>Night of the Demon

Magic cycle, aka shadow run.
Alternate dimension turns out to be hell. Corporations mine it for resources, but the open gates begin leaking exotic energies into the world.

What the fuck is spacepunk

So what is magic in To The Stars if not a "spiritual presence", but also not a "physical force"?

So, the difference between Magecraft and Magic in Fate series then