Genetics of magic
Feb. 12th, 2015 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I'm idly pondering the genetics of magic inheritance. Again.
... specifically, setting it up so women are most powerful and are, like, legally obliged to have more than one husband, especially if the first one doesn't work out in the making more mages department.
If you've got heritable magic, you've got magic, so it's entirely possible that the whole thing does not work by the rules of standard genetics. Stuff just happens. Possible, but not in any way satisfying, to my mind.
... also, I generally intensely dislike heritable magic, since it goes along with the logic of aristocracy in that some people are born inherently more powerful and everyone else has to live with that. Like, you might have nice magical overlords, or you might indeed have an enslaved magical underclass if somehow their magic wasn't enough in the face of some other power differential, but you have huge imbalances of power from birth. And while I prefer the idea that anyone can learn anything, given the opportunity, I do have to admit the real world has giant imbalances in opportunity and, as the world currently stands, power. White men at birth have more power than the rest of us, the shambling remnants of aristocracy linger on, and inherited power is a real thing. So, magic is one way of exploring all that.
... a way that rather lends itself to stories of poor put upon powerful people who have to learn how to be the nicest overlords possible and then get all the cookies for it, but I'm sure there's ways around that. Somehow. That I will think of at some point.
The obvious starter is to have the mages be, one and all, from less powerful groups in the RL, thus giving us a happy little power fantasy. Hence, women are most powerful mages.
... yeah, okay, I just like blowing stuff up with my brain. Who doesn't?
So if you've got a sex linked trait in ordinary genetics, and we have to start somewhere so we'll start with that, then you have something hanging out on the X chromosome and not the Y. Women can have a double dose, men cannot, tada women are more powerful. Except obviously not all women are XX and not all men are XY and actually that's not obvious in most fantasy worlds and would be an interesting starting point for exploring gender variation.
And if you're inheriting magic from a parent, it could be either parent, but a woman could pass the magic to sons and daughters where a man could only pass it to his daughters. Again, women are more reliably powerful.
Buuuuut there's rare cases where someone gets their X and or Y in odd ways? Like, same like people can end up XXY, stuff happens so they get both from one parent, or none from one parent. A son could inherit his father's magic in rare instances. Which would puzzle people.
And then there's dominant and recessive genes. Recessive genes are fun because they hide so you get surprise magery, like, an XY mage's daughter with a non mage mum could have mage sons. Magic that skips a generation when descending from men could easily get lost and turn up in unexpected places. And also a super powerful mage lady could have a daughter with no obvious power, with a non mage father, but sons would always have a little power from her. But that's not the way round I want it to work. Women always powerful, men might lose it. So then it's like Magery 1 per X chromosome.
... in actual GURPS useage there's a standard 4 levels of magery, 0 being the basic one that lets you sense it but very little else, then 1, 2, and 3. You need 3 for very few spells, they'd be legendary stuff, like resurrection and gate spells. You can't get 4 levels out of a yes or yes yes genetics, or ever get to Magery 3 even if you ignore 0. Unless they're super rare XXX people.
I looked up XXX http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/triple-x-syndrome and it's 1 in 1000 people? And they're taller and have more chance of learning difficulties and seizures. Huh. That's rare but not as rare as I thought. Also would go with RPG magic systems in interesting ways since they're typically Intelligence based but GURPS is Magery limited, so you might get people who could do the spells if they could learn them, but it would take a real long time to learn them. Make a difference from the usual supergenius player character mages. And really if you've got rare genetic magery they wouldn't all be geniuses, though obviously the answer to that is the ones that aren't are not protagonists.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/abnormal/abnormal_5.htm has as many as XXXXX , which would be super rare and very mage indeed, if somehow all five X came from mages.
That page also says males with XXY or XXXY are somewhere between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1000 male births. I did not know that.
But our imaginary mages can start out as rare as the setting requires, so then they wouldn't be having 1000 boy births in a year, so the male mages as strong as women would be super rare.
Humans are very varied in real life. Poking around mixing real with imaginary rules feels uncomfortable. But otherwise all the rules are imaginary? And some people never get into other people's stories because the writers haven't thought of them. Still, easy to be a jerk about gender stuff. Not that chromosomes are the end all of gender at all at all.
... I think about the genetics of Magery repeatedly. It is daft, considering the utter lack of real world use, and the thing where in stories it would be inherited at the frequency of the plot anyway. but I googled this journal for Magery mentions and got distracted by my own meanderings.
I also dug out my spreadsheet of spells and prerequisite numbers and so forth. The spell you can cast with Magery 0 are actually quite a diverse set, you can do definite noticeable magic with just M0. The ones with no prerequisites interest me, since they're the beginners spells you could pick up with the least study. They're basically the Sense and Seek set, with a bit of Purify Air and Ignite Fire thrown in. That's little sparks, not big deals. Measurement, Seek Air, Seek Earth, Seek Fire, Seek Food, Seek Plant, Seek Water, Sense Foes, Sense Life, Keen Sense (one spell each for sight, hearing, etc), Test Food. That's the sensory suite, completely invisible, all inward focused knowledge things. Plus there's Dull Sense, again five different spells for species with five senses, and you can cast that on others but it's resisted. Debility, Foolishness, Itch, Haste, all have noticeable effects and can be cast on others as well as self. Ignite Fire, Light, Sound, very small spells with clear effects. Purify Air is kind of hanging out on its own on the list there, possibly because Seek Air is so seldom useful - the other Purify spells have prerequisites.
Simple Illusion ... nothing about the Illusionist's art is Simple that I can see. I can figure the Sense spells are beginners spells, but being able to make an illusion without Sense anything seems like an artefact of the college system and how single college illusionists are going to be popular.
... apparently I didn't finish my spreadsheet. Or leave myself a key to it. Great, now I'll wonder if I'm reading it right forever. I color coded things, but did I color code them for the things I think I did?
The male character I have in mind pretty much just uses the Sense and Seek suite, Keen Senses himself sometimes, and combines it with longbow to be an exceptional sniper. ... yes he's magic Hawkeye, it's fun.
So to get him I only need XYs to be M0 in GURPS terms.
But then XX would be M1, and gigantic numbers of spells are out of reach. Like, the entire Enchantment college. Actually that would add to the flavour of the 'verse I have in mind, where mages are rare and precious assets. If nobody has figured out how to put spells into objects yet then spellcasters are it. You couldn't turn other people into frogs, but you could turn yourself into animals, I think. Magery 1 is a pretty broad range of spells. Huh, then only women or about one in a thousand mage men can be shapeshifters.
I think the M0 vs M1 distinction is enough to use GURPS rules and still give me the women are super powerful universe I was looking for. So we do only need X to carry a Magery gene, which stacks. And then if I really felt the need there could be XXX who have M2 and XXXX who have M3.
But the rarer certain Magery levels are the harder magic gets to teach. If there's a whole set of spells you can't pass on to your son, only your daughter, then someone might end up studying with grandma or grandpa, or just lose a set of spells in a generation. Written tomes help, but the number of hours it takes to learn without a tutor makes it really sincerely difficult to pick up magic that way. If magic is passing down a single family line then it is going to get cut.
Magic is going to be as rare as the plot requires.
What I want is to set up Lady Mages like... not kings and queens, since they have to spend all their time studying magic if they want to learn more spells, and any spell they don't learn they can't teach and it'll be lost to the ages, so responsible mages would study all the time. They wouldn't have so much time for the little things like ruling the world. So there would be kings and queens, and a kingdom would have... one or two or three? Mage families. Or single mages who they really hope will turn into families. And because any given mage gives a kingdom a huge advantage, and entirely lacking them would be a huge disadvantage, the royals are really invested in the mages having big families. But it's set somewhere they don't understand genetics well enough to test for it, so it's a bit random if these big families are all magic. Or indeed any magic, if there's a guy in the family tree. So the kings set them up with an estate to support them so all the women have to do is study and have children.
Pretty little gilded cage so far.
If mages have big families then it don't take long to have numbers on their side. To keep it small and manageable, instead of a whole magical aristocracy, they'd have to have babies at replacement rate or lower. Like now. So maybe mages aren't good at fertility? Maybe a body has enough energy to make magic or babies but not both? Then to make babies would require not doing magic for most of a year, for women, or for... hmmm, not very long for men, really. But magic is a sense, the M0 spells the men are restricted to especially, so it's probably really hard to give it a rest at all. Like I was going to say it would be like deciding not to use your left arm, but it's more like deciding to keep your eyes closed. Go too far down that logic and it's amazing if mages have any children at all.
It would mean that mages would need a lot of non mages around to protect them while they gestated or tried to be fertile. They'd have to give up all their advantages to have children. they'd be super vulnerable, unless they also trained in back up skills for those times.
But it's just the sheer number of training hours that go into it. That would make it harder to give up for months on end as well. They'd have to have spent 200 hours per spell on learning a few seconds of action. The magic tag has my previous thoughts on this matter. They'd have to be really very focused and unusual individuals to have the mental focus to do that much training on that little spell. Like 'wingardium leviosa' and a little dance, but it takes 200 hours before it'll work. Even if you've got a parent around assuring you it will, eventually, work, who even does that? And being the sort of person who does that, who would stop using it after that many hours to learn it?
Also, all the sense and seek spells, if they take 200 hours of taught academic study, that don't seem to fit Hawkeye at all. So he'd be self taught for twice the hours? But that's assuming books still. A system of magic a body can just learn like they learn to use their muscles, that's a very different system than GURPS usually looks like. But if M0 is ability to sense magic then refining that sense and using it to enhance your other senses seems like a thing a kid would just do, like running and jumping. But then running and jumping are also things you can put skill points in, or just use from default. Magery can't be used from default. Unless you change up a lot of the core assumptions.
I mostly just wanted a world where mages are mostly women, women are most powerful, mages are matrilineal and get estates and people to protect them, and they try and have children with bunches of different partners to optimise their chances of some of them being magic. That seems like a fun setup for some id fic.
... specifically, setting it up so women are most powerful and are, like, legally obliged to have more than one husband, especially if the first one doesn't work out in the making more mages department.
If you've got heritable magic, you've got magic, so it's entirely possible that the whole thing does not work by the rules of standard genetics. Stuff just happens. Possible, but not in any way satisfying, to my mind.
... also, I generally intensely dislike heritable magic, since it goes along with the logic of aristocracy in that some people are born inherently more powerful and everyone else has to live with that. Like, you might have nice magical overlords, or you might indeed have an enslaved magical underclass if somehow their magic wasn't enough in the face of some other power differential, but you have huge imbalances of power from birth. And while I prefer the idea that anyone can learn anything, given the opportunity, I do have to admit the real world has giant imbalances in opportunity and, as the world currently stands, power. White men at birth have more power than the rest of us, the shambling remnants of aristocracy linger on, and inherited power is a real thing. So, magic is one way of exploring all that.
... a way that rather lends itself to stories of poor put upon powerful people who have to learn how to be the nicest overlords possible and then get all the cookies for it, but I'm sure there's ways around that. Somehow. That I will think of at some point.
The obvious starter is to have the mages be, one and all, from less powerful groups in the RL, thus giving us a happy little power fantasy. Hence, women are most powerful mages.
... yeah, okay, I just like blowing stuff up with my brain. Who doesn't?
So if you've got a sex linked trait in ordinary genetics, and we have to start somewhere so we'll start with that, then you have something hanging out on the X chromosome and not the Y. Women can have a double dose, men cannot, tada women are more powerful. Except obviously not all women are XX and not all men are XY and actually that's not obvious in most fantasy worlds and would be an interesting starting point for exploring gender variation.
And if you're inheriting magic from a parent, it could be either parent, but a woman could pass the magic to sons and daughters where a man could only pass it to his daughters. Again, women are more reliably powerful.
Buuuuut there's rare cases where someone gets their X and or Y in odd ways? Like, same like people can end up XXY, stuff happens so they get both from one parent, or none from one parent. A son could inherit his father's magic in rare instances. Which would puzzle people.
And then there's dominant and recessive genes. Recessive genes are fun because they hide so you get surprise magery, like, an XY mage's daughter with a non mage mum could have mage sons. Magic that skips a generation when descending from men could easily get lost and turn up in unexpected places. And also a super powerful mage lady could have a daughter with no obvious power, with a non mage father, but sons would always have a little power from her. But that's not the way round I want it to work. Women always powerful, men might lose it. So then it's like Magery 1 per X chromosome.
... in actual GURPS useage there's a standard 4 levels of magery, 0 being the basic one that lets you sense it but very little else, then 1, 2, and 3. You need 3 for very few spells, they'd be legendary stuff, like resurrection and gate spells. You can't get 4 levels out of a yes or yes yes genetics, or ever get to Magery 3 even if you ignore 0. Unless they're super rare XXX people.
I looked up XXX http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/triple-x-syndrome and it's 1 in 1000 people? And they're taller and have more chance of learning difficulties and seizures. Huh. That's rare but not as rare as I thought. Also would go with RPG magic systems in interesting ways since they're typically Intelligence based but GURPS is Magery limited, so you might get people who could do the spells if they could learn them, but it would take a real long time to learn them. Make a difference from the usual supergenius player character mages. And really if you've got rare genetic magery they wouldn't all be geniuses, though obviously the answer to that is the ones that aren't are not protagonists.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/abnormal/abnormal_5.htm has as many as XXXXX , which would be super rare and very mage indeed, if somehow all five X came from mages.
That page also says males with XXY or XXXY are somewhere between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1000 male births. I did not know that.
But our imaginary mages can start out as rare as the setting requires, so then they wouldn't be having 1000 boy births in a year, so the male mages as strong as women would be super rare.
Humans are very varied in real life. Poking around mixing real with imaginary rules feels uncomfortable. But otherwise all the rules are imaginary? And some people never get into other people's stories because the writers haven't thought of them. Still, easy to be a jerk about gender stuff. Not that chromosomes are the end all of gender at all at all.
... I think about the genetics of Magery repeatedly. It is daft, considering the utter lack of real world use, and the thing where in stories it would be inherited at the frequency of the plot anyway. but I googled this journal for Magery mentions and got distracted by my own meanderings.
I also dug out my spreadsheet of spells and prerequisite numbers and so forth. The spell you can cast with Magery 0 are actually quite a diverse set, you can do definite noticeable magic with just M0. The ones with no prerequisites interest me, since they're the beginners spells you could pick up with the least study. They're basically the Sense and Seek set, with a bit of Purify Air and Ignite Fire thrown in. That's little sparks, not big deals. Measurement, Seek Air, Seek Earth, Seek Fire, Seek Food, Seek Plant, Seek Water, Sense Foes, Sense Life, Keen Sense (one spell each for sight, hearing, etc), Test Food. That's the sensory suite, completely invisible, all inward focused knowledge things. Plus there's Dull Sense, again five different spells for species with five senses, and you can cast that on others but it's resisted. Debility, Foolishness, Itch, Haste, all have noticeable effects and can be cast on others as well as self. Ignite Fire, Light, Sound, very small spells with clear effects. Purify Air is kind of hanging out on its own on the list there, possibly because Seek Air is so seldom useful - the other Purify spells have prerequisites.
Simple Illusion ... nothing about the Illusionist's art is Simple that I can see. I can figure the Sense spells are beginners spells, but being able to make an illusion without Sense anything seems like an artefact of the college system and how single college illusionists are going to be popular.
... apparently I didn't finish my spreadsheet. Or leave myself a key to it. Great, now I'll wonder if I'm reading it right forever. I color coded things, but did I color code them for the things I think I did?
The male character I have in mind pretty much just uses the Sense and Seek suite, Keen Senses himself sometimes, and combines it with longbow to be an exceptional sniper. ... yes he's magic Hawkeye, it's fun.
So to get him I only need XYs to be M0 in GURPS terms.
But then XX would be M1, and gigantic numbers of spells are out of reach. Like, the entire Enchantment college. Actually that would add to the flavour of the 'verse I have in mind, where mages are rare and precious assets. If nobody has figured out how to put spells into objects yet then spellcasters are it. You couldn't turn other people into frogs, but you could turn yourself into animals, I think. Magery 1 is a pretty broad range of spells. Huh, then only women or about one in a thousand mage men can be shapeshifters.
I think the M0 vs M1 distinction is enough to use GURPS rules and still give me the women are super powerful universe I was looking for. So we do only need X to carry a Magery gene, which stacks. And then if I really felt the need there could be XXX who have M2 and XXXX who have M3.
But the rarer certain Magery levels are the harder magic gets to teach. If there's a whole set of spells you can't pass on to your son, only your daughter, then someone might end up studying with grandma or grandpa, or just lose a set of spells in a generation. Written tomes help, but the number of hours it takes to learn without a tutor makes it really sincerely difficult to pick up magic that way. If magic is passing down a single family line then it is going to get cut.
Magic is going to be as rare as the plot requires.
What I want is to set up Lady Mages like... not kings and queens, since they have to spend all their time studying magic if they want to learn more spells, and any spell they don't learn they can't teach and it'll be lost to the ages, so responsible mages would study all the time. They wouldn't have so much time for the little things like ruling the world. So there would be kings and queens, and a kingdom would have... one or two or three? Mage families. Or single mages who they really hope will turn into families. And because any given mage gives a kingdom a huge advantage, and entirely lacking them would be a huge disadvantage, the royals are really invested in the mages having big families. But it's set somewhere they don't understand genetics well enough to test for it, so it's a bit random if these big families are all magic. Or indeed any magic, if there's a guy in the family tree. So the kings set them up with an estate to support them so all the women have to do is study and have children.
Pretty little gilded cage so far.
If mages have big families then it don't take long to have numbers on their side. To keep it small and manageable, instead of a whole magical aristocracy, they'd have to have babies at replacement rate or lower. Like now. So maybe mages aren't good at fertility? Maybe a body has enough energy to make magic or babies but not both? Then to make babies would require not doing magic for most of a year, for women, or for... hmmm, not very long for men, really. But magic is a sense, the M0 spells the men are restricted to especially, so it's probably really hard to give it a rest at all. Like I was going to say it would be like deciding not to use your left arm, but it's more like deciding to keep your eyes closed. Go too far down that logic and it's amazing if mages have any children at all.
It would mean that mages would need a lot of non mages around to protect them while they gestated or tried to be fertile. They'd have to give up all their advantages to have children. they'd be super vulnerable, unless they also trained in back up skills for those times.
But it's just the sheer number of training hours that go into it. That would make it harder to give up for months on end as well. They'd have to have spent 200 hours per spell on learning a few seconds of action. The magic tag has my previous thoughts on this matter. They'd have to be really very focused and unusual individuals to have the mental focus to do that much training on that little spell. Like 'wingardium leviosa' and a little dance, but it takes 200 hours before it'll work. Even if you've got a parent around assuring you it will, eventually, work, who even does that? And being the sort of person who does that, who would stop using it after that many hours to learn it?
Also, all the sense and seek spells, if they take 200 hours of taught academic study, that don't seem to fit Hawkeye at all. So he'd be self taught for twice the hours? But that's assuming books still. A system of magic a body can just learn like they learn to use their muscles, that's a very different system than GURPS usually looks like. But if M0 is ability to sense magic then refining that sense and using it to enhance your other senses seems like a thing a kid would just do, like running and jumping. But then running and jumping are also things you can put skill points in, or just use from default. Magery can't be used from default. Unless you change up a lot of the core assumptions.
I mostly just wanted a world where mages are mostly women, women are most powerful, mages are matrilineal and get estates and people to protect them, and they try and have children with bunches of different partners to optimise their chances of some of them being magic. That seems like a fun setup for some id fic.