Magic and the Mundane

A Ladder to the Moon, By Me

This is a topic that I've been stewing on for basically my whole life regarding fantasy worldbuilding.

This is a good video about it! 

 I Hate Modern Magic 

Magic has become boring. I hate that. Even the oft praised Brandon Sanderson's Magic systems leave me dissatisfied, even thought they have interesting elements and are worth a look. They're good power systems, don't get it twisted, but they're not really... magical? As for DnD and Anime and video game magic systems, they're all awful and boring. If I see one more Elemental magic system I'm going to scream. Everything's about mana points and floating magic circles and aura farming and it's all so dreadfully boring. Beyond the flashing lights and the spectacle, these magic systems are built on thin air. They lock Fighters and "Muggles" out of the action in favor of special magic people and make everything disconnected from the material realities of life. The worst of it is that this magic is nothing at all like Real Magic.

Magic does not actually exist- sorry if you're a member of one of the modern religious denominations which still believes in the power of ritual, but I'm writing under the assumption that nothing supernatural exists. If ghosts or extrasensory powers do exist... then they aren't magic. Because if we can put it in a lab and measure it, then it isn't magic. For something to be supernatural it must not be part of our world, and by definition things that are real are part of our world. When Magic is real, it's physics.

People in the past believed in Magic. They had a bunch of different concepts around how it worked- but by and large they believed that there were things which you could do that would mysteriously grant you effects that benefited you. They were right, obviously, there are lots of things that they did that were Magical thinking that actually did work.

It turns out that planting fish-heads in soil next to your crops really does bring you a bountiful harvest, because fish carcasses are full of calcium and phosphorous. Herbs really do have special powers, too, and those powers have been refined and studied by modern sorcerers to create the wondrous elixirs we take for granted, like Advil, and Xylitol. Bones ground into the forge introduced carbon into the iron, making an early form of steel that really was better than the contemporary non ancestor-blessed metal. Alchohol really was pure and holy and better than (dirty) water. They didn't have comprehensive proof that these occult rituals did anything, and of course, a lot of them didn't. Runes didn't confer any protection when inscribed into stone or metal, deathbed curses weren't real, and even if you personally believe in a few of them, you agree that 99% of the gods, spirits, and demons they prayed to weren't there to listen.

We live in a world blanched of magic. The catoblepas was just an ugly cow, the peak of olympus was empty and abandoned, the Blemmyes were just a mistranslation passed through a system of Chinese telephone until people thought there were a bunch of crazy Humanoid subspecies in foreign countries. Yes, there exist magical rocks and flying chariots- but those things aren't magic, they're science, which is unfortunately a lot less cool.

As funny as it is to call a bottle of Nyquil a magic potion and larp as a witch's apprentice drinking experimental brews to cure the deathly curse you contracted by kissing butch lesbians at the club during flu season, it is not a magic potion. It's a drug sold from a drug store and it gets made in industrial batches by machines, not witches or goblins sweating over a smoking green cauldron. The wondrous things that exist today that we would have called magic back then did not exist back then, yet we believed in them anyway.

TV killed the magic mirror and the wishing star.

Modern fantasy makes magic a sterile thing, severed from the underlying archetypes and mythology that make it compelling, but dropped into our magicless world and clumsily reattached. Wizards are a type of guy. If you are not a Wizard you are not a Magic Person. A Fighter is a guy holding a wedge with a lever attached, and that's it. His sword does the things that a mundane piece of metal can do, in our sad blanched world. Wizards can do anything they want to though. Because Magic!

Magic is when a Magic Guy points a Magic rod and it acts like a Rifle that shoots "force." What even is force? It's like if you made throwing a firebolt boring. Except they already did that, because Magic Fire doesn't actually act like fire. Magic fire is stripped of its significance, it's just a gun without the bullet because the material conditions that are required to create firearms are more disruptive to "fantasy" than the presumption that a portion of the population can hurl lethal bolts of directed energy at will.

Mages are no longer required to keep familiars- spirits who taught mankind sorcery. They are no longer forced to consort with devil or Djinn or brew magic potions or meet their fetch in Annwn or the Duat's riverbed, they do not sell their soul, they do not reach anamnesis, they are no longer required to learn the name of God, they are no longer required to do anything other than be the Simulacra. Palpatine could throw lightning because he was a Dark Sorcerer of unending evil- using the Force that connected all living things in the most deeply perverse way such a power can be used: to inflict excruciating death onto another person. DnD Wizards can throw lightning because it's something that a player might want to do. (Anime wizards can shoot lightning because it looks really cool.)

There is a tendency in modern fantasy to box up the fantastical into a neat parcel and separate it from the "real." (As per the video I linked at the beginning,) Mages are a distinct class of person, not just smiths who learned the secrets of Atlantean metal, or musicians so skilled they can make rats and children fall into a trance, or or heroes so pure of heart that fate itself will not allow them to die until they complete their quest. Unicorns aren't just a rare creature with a strange ability- they are a fundamentally magical creature compared to a distinctly un-magical creature like a rabbit or a dog.

That's not how the ancients saw the world; all animals were magical. Dogs and cats were, and sometimes still are, thought to be able to see/repel ghosts and demons. But when you crack open a Monster Manual, Fantasy Games feel the need to emphasize that there are Special Magic Dogs that can do magic things that Real Normal Dogs can't. There are magical metals and there are normal metals, Magical people and normal people, Magical swords and normal swords. The thought of a "normal sword" existing in fantasy is ludicrous to me.

I do not mean that all swords must have supernatural special properties, a world populated entirely by vorpal blades and flame tongues, what I mean is that I think the concept of a sword is so inherently resonant that calling one mundane is backwards.

Blood is magic, moonlight and daylight are magic, cold iron and silver  are magic, running water is magic, wine is magic, telling the truth is magic, lightning is magic, fire is magic, singing and dancing and music and poetry are magic, making a promise is magic, Love is magic- the most powerful of all, Hate is magic, Death is magic, Life is magic.

When you say that all of these things are just atoms and math clashing together in mundane and meaningless patterns, only rendered "really magical" upon the introduction of some theoretical "magic" particle of energy, you've lost the plot. You've elevated something produced wholly by simulacra into the space that actual resonant and meaningful archetypes should have taken. Why are you even writing fantasy if you believe that fairy tales are such silly things? Why do you need a Magical Electron to come into your story and make things like love "real?" It's a story. In stories birds can just talk sometimes, you don't need to invent a phony pseudoscientific method- you're just replacing one fake reason with another. 

I hear "in this fantasy world magic is just another fundamental part of physics" a lot. If we lost even a single one of the fundamental forces then the universe as we know it would have been radically altered. Without gravity, neither stars nor any other astral body would have formed- just an endless sea of diffuse particles. I can't even imagine a universe without electromagnetism or the strong force, and the weak force is the reason that stars and nuclear fission work. I cannot imagine how you would come up with or implement a new fundamental force, let alone tailor it so carefully that its emergent properties caused the things we have historically imagined to be magical. What the author really wanted was a pseudoscientific explanation as to why there were long-eared people who could live forever and people could get superpowers from reading books. The thing is, there is no possible scientific explanation for magic- if there were, it wouldn't be magic, it would be science. Magic is the explanation, it does not need to be explained.

Good magic is resonant. It means something. It speaks to fundamental human beliefs and desires, those beyond science. Good magic is a metaphor, or a literalization of one. Good magic is more real than reality. In the same way that we wish that justice and truth and love were real, tangible things, we wish that magic were real. Good magic hits like that. Bad magic can be replaced by a gun- and would be better off for it. (If your magic is a metaphor for technology that's okay... but it should be a good metaphor for technology. Why not just use technology? Star Trek did it.)

I like fantasy stories that don't ask permission. Game of Thrones is really good, because nobody knows how its magic works. It isn't so much a tool the characters can wield as it is a situation they find themselves in. Scarlet Hollow is also really cool and thematic. There's no hurling fireballs, but there's this kind of Seydrcraft connection type magic that allows you to glean information you shouldn't in really cool ways. My favorite of all time is the Force, before all that EU crud bloated it into a lame power fantasy, the Force was a metaphor for Buddhism/correct action and political influence. It was about controlling yourself and giving up control over others, about the corrosiveness of violence, and about how wanting to be an evil fascist wizard is actually really pathetic and you shouldn't invade Vietnam actually. The Dark Side of the Force is a prescient depiction of becoming blackpilled on 4chan.

 Honorable Mentions;

• Worth the Candle, for having a huge maximalist gauntlet of good metaphor magics. Water magic is depression, responsibility, and the weight of generations! Gold Magic is the way we alienate and dehumanize ourselves and others for the sake of capital and power! Spirit Magic is Nofap! 
• Curse of Chalion, for being an actually good depiction of Divine magic instead of just having it be Yellow lasers instead of Blue.
• Mythras, for being the only ttrpg with an interesting magic system.
• Cultist Simulator, for making me feel like an actual Wizard attaining occult powers.
• Hunter X Hunter, whose Magic System is essentially "What if every sport, game, craft, or autistic hyperfixation could be used against someone like a martial art? What does a fight between someone playing slots and someone using Jujitsu look like? Also they can cheat and make up new rules, and the loser sometimes gets actually violently murdered by the winner." 

 

Urgh. This was a bit navel-gazey and overly negative, I'll try to write something more creative and constructive next time so I don't go insane.

Material Conditions and Pretending to be an Elf

https://pantmonger.artstation.com/projects/GnBAz

So.

Dungeons and Dragons is a game, or a set of games, or the idea of a genre of game where you roll dice and pretend to be a wizard or a thief or a paladin or something in fantastical locations meeting classic monsters like goblins and mimics and dragons. There can be plots, you can be on a dungeon crawl or a railroad or a sandbox. When I talk about RPG's, I mostly refer to games like this. They have different names, like Pathfinder, Old School Essentials, or Worlds Without Number; but I'm talking about games with a distinct fixation on the simulated realities of the characters in them. You can call these games DnD-likes, if you absolutely have to.

Material Conditions refer to a person's, well, material conditions. The conditions of their material reality. Do you have a car? What is your house like? Do you have enough food for the week? Can you walk? People have needs which dictate their behavior, and they have Material Conditions that determine how and if those needs are met. I subscribe to the idea that human history is best understood through a study of Material Conditions and the Labor involved in them. History is a record of the tools humanity has used to meet their needs- the logistics of feeding, clothing, and housing people. I think that understanding how people meet their needs through the tools and environment available to them is crucial to an understanding of humanity. Culture, history, politics, these things stem from Material Conditions. This is called Historical Materialism.

This understanding of Material Conditions can, obviously, be translated to Dungeon Type games. Do you have a lockpick? Do you have a torch or a lantern? How large is your inventory? Do you have enough hirelings and wagons to carry that Dragon's Hoard?

DnD-like games in particular are obsessed with Material Conditions. Even 5th edition, whose case I will get on in a bit, has a surplus of tables and rules and resources pertaining to encumbrance. It cares about how much stuff you can bring with you into a dungeon, it cares about the prices of chickens and cows and wagons. Hell, there's a table that lists the volumetric capacity of jugs, waterskins, barrels, and tankards separately.

I characterized this type of game as a "Equipment Table" type game; where you track the number of coins in your purse in a specialized spot on your sheet and have to make sure that you packed lunch before going into a forest to hit things with your sword- which also needs to be typographically specified from a list of swords with different mechanical characteristics based on its length. 5e has tridents, pikes, javelins and spears, all different weapons with different stats! This isn't just about weapon types, it's about granular distinctions of even apparently minor changes in the Material Conditions in the game world.

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/543.html

  

Monsters are differentiated even further, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Goblins, Gnomes, Redcaps, Boggarts, Boggles, and a dozen other creatures with the same folkloric origin but different names have entirely different stat blocks.

5e lists monsters like Hobgoblins and Orcs down to the last stat point- even though realistically you should only really need one "Humanoid with Weapon" monster statblock. And... I agree. Something in me recoils at the thought of not having separate stat blocks for different monsters, that one "just use bears" article viscerally repulsed me when I read it. A Human being is not a Hobgoblin- they need different stat blocks, even if nobody except me would ever know. 

I know a lot of people who frown when presented with a system that elides these material conditions in favor of Narrative solutions. Dungeon World doesn't make characters track inventory items; they can pop open their backpack and pull out a rope or torch or something at any point in the adventure up to a certain number of times. They hated that! Those same people want their character sheet to contain an exact amount of gold pieces and torches and waterskins. They spend time before the game looking through the equipment table picking out these items. They care about them. And I'm one of them! The Equipment table is exactly what drew me to these types of games to begin with. When I was too young to really understand the game or find a group to play with, I'd imagine play scenarios while reading equipment tables, imagining how I would use all the different strange little bits of adventuring gear when I played. My first few games I was basically a point and click character, constantly picking up random crap and trying to use it to solve puzzles, greasing hinges and trying to feed animals poisoned bait.

Then I learned that the material conditions sold to you by these games are fake.

The games include these things- but that does not always reflect their importance to the game itself. The existence of the volumetric capacity table in 5e doesn't mean the designers care about how much liquid random containers can contain, they were just cargo-culting based off of the neurotic table-obsession of Gary Gygax! Tridents and pikes are in there because half of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons' weapons table was different polearms. Those things are in there because they were in ADnD and 4e was a huge failure and they needed to try and recapture that old-school magic so they just went rifling through old editions' pockets. News flash, nobody uses encumbrance! The age of the material condition has ended; the culture of play that lives upon 5e does not care about tracking lamp oil or caltrops or the exact differences between a glaive-guisarme, glaive, guisarme, and voulge-guisarme. They do not care about Material Conditions. There are fake equipment table type games and there are real ones- and the problem is that nobody even knows that these are two different genres. Maybe not even the designers.

For a brief period I thought that the equipment lists themselves were the problem. I was dissatisfied with games that didn't feel connected to the fictional reality. I didn't like that spells like Prestidigitation and Light made torches and tinderboxes useless.

This led to my spiral into the compromise, Daggerheart and Dungeon World and Pathfinder 2e. These games retain the aesthetics of materialism without the bite. Weapons are largely interchangeable props, not distinguished by their physical characteristics, but by attached gamist or narrative principles. Your character can use a Scythe as a weapon for god's sake!! They're stat sticks with microfeats baked into them! You wear armor, not because it stops daggers and arrows, but because it has "aura!" I found myself even more deeply unsatisfied by these games. You could do anything, be any kind of character, but that was simply because none of those choices mattered. Every character ended up being equally useful because every character was equally disconnected from material conditions. I didn't have to puzzle out scenarios in which my character's items and skills could be useful, because the games are tilted in such a way that basically the only things worth doing are shooting monsters in the face- something every character class and ability has been very delicately balanced around so that there are no real wrong choices.

(I actually think that these games are fun and well designed in general- but part of a genre that I do not care for.)

I could slot Narrative, Simulationist, and Gamist games into a neat continuum. Simulationist games are the most invested into material conditions, while Gamist games are only interested in the aesthetic of them. Narrative games are wholly uninterested in material conditions- or at the very least just the bare minimum required for action scenes. I'm not sure that's wholly productive though. Most games aren't strictly separable into that neat typology. 

So, why am I ranting about this? What is so important to me about Material Conditions? Well... I have a lot more to say, but this post is getting a long and I don't even know if it's a useful lens of analysis. Am I saying important things or just navel gazing? I think losing sight of material conditions leads to a loss of something essentially captivating about Dungeon type games; explaining the gradual loss of identity the "official" DnD game line has suffered- including the tragedy of the Martial/Caster divide and combat bloat. More on that later, I guess.

 

Kismet and Writhing Nothing

That which does not exist wishes to do so. Worms writhe upwards through the dirt, blind eyes and blind minds. There exists flesh without the divine spark. The world is a system of carefully spinning plates and when they fall, wrong things come into being.

When a toad inseminates a hen's egg the Basilisk is born, a child left unnamed becomes a Monster, a body left to rot becomes Undead. 

Bad Luck is real. It is called Kismet, and it has nothing to do with a toss of the dice. Wrong action- violence, theft, waste, tangles Fate into Kismet. A rope under tension. Small trespasses open small doors, children born out of wedlock bear a deformity, promise-breakers fall ill, mistreated dogs grow rabid. This eases the tension. But the Wrongness lurks. A hundred years from now someone will open a big door, and that rope will snap down like a whip.

Balanced game rules for your game that you play

Balance, the great and wretched altar to which I kneel. You have taken my respect, my joy my creativity. balance Balance balanace balanace balcnanlajel nbalnacen labblancnanlhe.

 

Power budgets and DPR and whiterooms and the END RESULT STILL FUCKING SUCKS!!!!!!!

 

I WORSHIPPED YOU I BELIEVED YOU I TRUSTED YOU AND ALL THE GAMES YOU GIVE ME STILL SUCK SHIT.

 

PF2e: SHIT GAME for SUCKERS

5e: SHIT GAME for BABIES

 3.5: SHIT GAME for IDIOTS

4e: SHIT GAME for WOW PLAYERS

WWN: SHIT GAME for 5e BABIES IN DENIAL 

 LANCER: IT"S JUST FUCKING 4e AGAIN GODDDDAMMMMITITTT 

 

Roll 1d12 for a cool ass weapon your wizard will never fucking use

1. Moonblade
2. Glaive
3. Katana
4. Nunchaku
5. Miku sticker Baseball Bat
6. The Jar
7. Crossbow
8. 1d4 darts
9. Iron Spined Spellbook
10. Dagger
11. A staff like Gandalf from Peter Jackson
12. Family guy dvd sharpened into a chakram
13. A small sinew bound crossbow formed from your own flesh that fires your phalanges like bolts
14. club
15. blowgun (1 extra poison damage!!!!)
16. The Throngler
17. A trident (those are in this game?)
18. The Pen
19. The Sword
20. Divorce papers

 

Sexmagic:

 level one: Your penis explodes

level two: Her penis explodes

level three: the cum dimension

level five: sex 2

level six: handjob 

level seven: The dao of torsion

level eight: Homosexuality

level nine: Your penis explodes \

\

 

 Paizo be like

PLAYABLE BEHOLDERS:

 Beholder kin are uhhh um basically just like a person but like,,,,,, imagine if ewer let you play as beholder heuh that would be so fucking sick...... youy have more yes ;:::)

 

+1 to all REGULAR and OCCULT spells that have the OCCULAR effect.

+1 to the RACISM skill as a RACIAL bonus

+1 to any SAVE with the TRIPWIRE or PRESSURE plate taggle, because youar FLYING but not really you can still be knocked prone and stuff but don't worry cutie pootie pinky pork pie, you still are a big sexy flying beholder

 RACial FEAT: BEHOLDERS DON't HAVE ANY FEAT THEY FLOAT

 

 Potions elller

NEw class

 

AB: Ambien
CD: Ambien

EFG: AMbien

 

ABCDEFG: Ambien: You take ambien and fall asleep instantly. Roll uyp a new character you piece of shit 

 

Power word: KILL

Powerful, EPIC, Rare, Uncommon, Necrotic, PRimal, Wisdom, ALPHA, Manipulate, incapacitate

9th level 

Walmart: onew illing creature without the SIGMA trait

range:touch

components verbal lmomatic saterial: the legs

tunch: sprunges

You call out to the primordial ether to turn your body into a turning fork for the energy of Karthassus the nihilosmic lord of killamanjaro. Choose one unwilling creature in range. It must make a fortitude saving throw or be force to make a fortitude saving throw or be forced to make a wisdom saving throw against making a reflex saving throw against a strength saving throw that would strongarm it into making an intelligence saving trhow against making a ranged touch attack with a melee spell weapon against your saving DC to make you make a ranged strenght attack its spell save dc against your touch ac against its cosmic spelggaar p ;l;sdf north of the city of wisdom or else take 3d6 plus your wisdom modifier necrotic damage. Constructs, fairies, gnomes and elves are immune to this damage. If this spell kills a creature that th DM spent mor ethan two seconds pulling out of his ass he's legally allowed to skin you alive and hang your flayed hide over his DM screen to warn everyone else away from BEING A MUNCHJKING POEWWR GAMER WHO WANTDS TO RUIN EBVERYONE"S FUN!!!