Has the level of magic in your setting always been constant? What are some settings in which magic is fading, or...

Has the level of magic in your setting always been constant? What are some settings in which magic is fading, or, more rare, settings in which it's in an upswing?

>What are some settings in which magic is fading
Our own setting prior to 2015.

The Inquisition spend centuries hunting witches and burning their texts to sever the link to the gods and powers of the ancient past.

>settings in which it's in an upswing?
Our own setting after 2015.

The old gods are coming back in the memes. Though they are but faint echoes of their former selves, their power is growing and in time they will rule once more. Kneel before Kek and his pale herald, Ebola-chan!

In my homebrew setting there have been a string of cataclysmic events over centuries, each with an attendant magical upgrade of sorts.

One involved a chthonic god dying and causing a massive volcanic eruption (the god-power was eventually harnessed into certain forms of destructive magic).

The most recent was basically a big magic asteroid leveling one of the continents. Mystics are currently wrestling with how that's fucked up the ambient magic situation over thirty years later.

I haven't fleshed out what the previous ones were, but old-timey druid/witch magic comes from those older, more settled forms of magic (possibly cobbled together from several previous catastrophes; it's unknown to the players and I personally don't care to plot it all out yet).

Shadowrun is all about magic returning to the world...

Well, writing was invented relatively recently, so the magical rituals used by mortals are becoming more widespread and a little more advanced, but the overall magicalness of the setting itself is probably steady.

That's always interested me. Imagine a setting where magic can be put on paper without much in the way of materials beyond ink and paper, and then throw in a printing press.

If I get what you're saying right, that's neat, but not technically what I'm going for with my setting. The writing in itself is generally not magical, it's just that knowledge and skill regarding performing magic can now be transferred by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls in addition to oral tradition. I'll agree that one way or another the printing press is very likely to help revolutionize magic in any setting.

I have three settings:

In the first, magic is really just the shifting of gods that collectively make up what is the physical and abstract universe. Their movement is sudden and not common whatsoever but there is always the constant chance of it.

In the second setting, magic comes about via geometry. As such, it's innate to nature all the time but only recently have people come to realize it and formulate how to manipulate it. But through it they find lost technology and civilizations that went to tame it and understand it.

The third has a sudden appearance of magic and the supernatural in the world. A terrible event caused a short term opening of the spirit world into our own when held quite a large number of spirits of the dead and their aspects to manifest and manipulate the world around them. As it's not a total merger the amount of spirits is limited but most are not aware of this yet. Some work alongside spirits such as their ancestors to be empowered and defeat violent, dangerous spirits.

I generally always run settings where magic is in an upswing. I usually treat it like technology, if a little slower advancing. The PCs might not be around for things to get really crazy, but it helps keeps the sense of wonder in a high magic setting if everything is still quite new to them.

I keked.

Explain magic in an upswing like tech. I have a hard time understanding this.

I'm working on a setting in the middle of a magitechnical revolution with turn of the 20th century vibes. Magic in the setting is pure and simple the exertion of your will on the universe. Which incidentally is also how physics works. It's all willpower, just in many cases not the will power of living things as we would understand it.

As time goes on the universe increases in complexity, and with complexity comes more complex and concentrated will. So the setting as a whole is in a sense becoming more and more magical with time.

Humans have just figured out how to through the use of intricate shapes, bend reality without a direct mental connection (aka what if material science was runes). This allowed them to break free from their home planetoid, which was immediately followed by first contact. The race they met evolved in a much more magical way than humans did. Through their intuitive use of magic and human's penchant for tool use combined, things have begun getting ridiculous.

Unknown Armies: Magic died in the stone age, reborn in the bronze age with rituals, died again with monotheism, reborn with Christian mysteries and demonology, died with new age, reborn with spiritism and mesmerism, died again with faith crisis, reborn with post-modern rethinking of our world.

Nope. Certain astronomical events can increase or diminish it, like eclipses or great eclipses

Followup:

Malifaux:
Magic died off in the XVII century because its resources depleted. Mages gathered in XVIII century and opened a portal to Malifaux where magic was found in soulstones that were renewable. The Neverborn closed the portal and ate everyone on the other side leaving just a few bits of soulstone on this side. The portal opened again in the XIX century with more magic.

Deadlands:
Magic came into existence when American indians woke up the manitu.

Shadowrun:
Magic came into existence in 2016 or so when dragons woke up.

No. Because all it does is pretty uninteresting trivia element nobody really cares about. Magic gets stronger? Gee, why aren't we playing when it will be useful already? Magic was stronger? Gee, why then we have magic at all, when I need to sacrifie a firstborn baby just to create a magic ligh for 15 minutes.

It's one of the most obtuse setting elements imaginable. And if it adds magic from nowhere to a setting that was "mana free", it usually leads to completely wasted potential and the setting barely changing despite, you know, having fucking magic all out of sudden.

Unimaginative GM ranting about things he does wrong: the post.

In my current game magic is rapidly increasing, and that's a Bad Thing as far as most of the PCs (and NPCs) are concerned because it's causing all kinds of horrible bullshit. The only PC who doesn't mind is undead, so he's obviously biased.

So far we've been first-hand witnesses to the destruction of two major cities due to magic bullshit, barely managed to get through a peaceful forest with our lives when the trees suddenly came alive, will never ever get on a boat ever again because fuck fighting underwater monsters, and turned a dwarven stronghold into "let's never go there again"-land due to accidentally tearing open what we believe is a direct portal to skeleton hell.

No idea where the GM is planning on going with this because I'm not seeing any happy endings here.

Yes user, the only reason something is one of the easiest to spot signs of lazy world-building and scoring "free variety points" is because you are unimaginative. Sure.
Magic comes, magic goes is among the most cliche and mishandled situations you can have in games. It creates NOTHING for the setting itself, aside trivia that doesn't even matter for the game itself, since your party won't live long enough to ever notice the change in power.

>I can't think of a way to make it work, so it can never work

Please return to /v/.

Not even him, but take Shadowrun for example. It has magic and magic creatures suddenly thrown into a world that was without any magic whatsoever.
Does it change the setting besides adding races to it? No.
Does the magic really change the world? No, since it's reduced to zero utility and almost fully weaponise.

I mean... MAGIC! How hard it can be to create an interesting setting out of breaking laws of physics in a world that couldn't do that before? Even the horrible ChtulhuTech was more imaginative in this field, despite also squandering the potential.

Please post solutions, rather than bitching. Because all you are doing right now is "lel, he can't figure it out!", without giving any solutions
>inb4 no spoonfeeding
Maybe because you neither have the spoon or idea how to use it?

>What are some settings in which magic is fading, or, more rare, settings in which it's in an upswing?
Up until 3e, D&D's bog-standard rules contribute to a setting that is in something of a Dark Age of Magic--or at the very least, "post peak magic"--where true understanding of how magic works was lost. That's why spells and magic items are largely scrounged from dungeons and why wizards horde their knowledge in their towers, which they guard jealously.

user, that was just the hand-waved excuse for then current autists to stop questioning why all that is in the game is dungeon crawl and the deeper you go, the more outlandish the gear.

No, it's because D&D's representation of magic is drawn from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series where actual understanding of magic was lost and wizards horde their books magic words jealously.

There are tons of ways you can work changing magic levels into your game.

For example, if magic is growing stronger, this might mean new types of magic start appearing that the players know nothing about, so they don't immediately know what it is or how to deal with it. If magic is growing weaker, this might place a higher importance on hoarding magical artifacts and cause people to hunt for stuff made when magic was still strong. Or the reverse: Spells and artifacts that people have relied on for generations stop working one by one. Transportation breaks down because portals close and airships start dropping from the skies, cities start to rot from the inside as the healing magic and resource-generating spells that kept them free from disease and famine stop working, etc.

It doesn't really require a lot of imagination to come up with ways a changing level of magic might affect your setting in interesting ways. Stop playing video games and start using your brain.

You must not know anything about shadowrun if you don't think it changes the setting. There's immortal dragons running massive corporations, immortal elves have set up a country, entire chunks of the map are now inhospitable nightmares thanks to magical flora and fauna, not even counting the astral shit. Just because the average game never explores those things, that doesn't mean they aren't there.

Yeah, this is why it has always bothered me that DMs don't always make this a part of their setting but run with it anyways. There has to be a reason Evard's tentacles and Tenzen's disc exist but I can't come up with my own magic. If there isn't, then can I?

I think the magic in my setting is technically increasing, though with the way power is divided and renews the highest levels have gone down. Essentially exchanging depth for breadth.

Basically, the way it works is that a Soul functions as a pool of energy for magic that replenishes on a daily basis. The goddess who shaped ether world has a whole lot, but steadily used it to create some children. So while she was at 100, for example, all of them were at 10. Of course, then they schemed to overtake her, so after they divided her power among themselves, they would all have 20. A total of 200 overall, but now at a level where shaping entire worlds from scratch is still above them. And of course, thus progresses further as they too eventually make servants, more beings rise up, and generally you have more and more magical energy bring accumulated over time

Nice strawmen, retard.

I've run a bit of a game (before it fell apart due to scheduling conflicts) based on a setting where magic was the purview of witches and hedge wizards and was mostly vestigial of a larger system of spellcraft that lay dormant for a long time.

Eventually the city of wizards reappeared (raised from the sea by the advisor of a king) and that kingdom subsumed it into itself, turned it into a quasi-capital and started pumping out magical experiments to try and relearn the lost magics of the original, with no regard for why the city was drowned in the first place.

The campaign was meant to be about the more rural PCs having to deal with the changing landscape and they'd eventually get dragged into the aristocracy's politics by a young baroness.

I got a real kick out of describing the weird magical shit they had. It was basically biopunk but I didn't have to explain shit. The noble houses of the empire had been making designer babies for a while, by melding their kids with summoned magical creatures and such, for example, and the royal guard was made up entirely of artificial humans. I could basically just dig through lists of magical items and make NPCs based off of them.

Yes, it does rise and diminish. Latent magical energy tends to decrease over time, which is why the last magocracy fell apart: too much magic use drained it from the local areas faster than it could naturally replenish, leading to dead zones that are taking thousands of years to repair themselves.

It's also why any burgeoning magocracy is quickly put down by a conglomeration of other nations.

>Has the level of magic in your setting always been constant?

as far as the world knows magic has only been a thing since December 2005.

My modern fantasy setting has 1990 era earth suddenly experience an influx of fantastical flora, fauna, and materials, as well as the introduction of mana which humans can use to cast spells. It primarily has dealt with the fallout from those events, along with the breakup of the soviet union casting a shadow on the rest of the world as various groups fight in order to secure the nuclear armaments to crystallize their nation.