beccaelizabeth | Entries tagged with magic comes back

Naming systems are complicated. You don't realise how many assumptions you've got until you start poking at them. I've got a character I was trying to name, so I started looking up Chinese names. I knew about surname first, and how actually a lot of immigrants gave up on that and flipped it for convenience, and how some have a traditional name and a westernised name, and how there's not very many different chinese family names. (Which I nearly wrote last names. Because updating programming takes a while.)
I still know nearly nothing about chinese names.
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I have this idea brewing about a world where the magic comes back, ( Read more... )

I think I've found my summer script project. I think it's looking quite interesting.

Reading GURPS Supers they've got a section about universe building, including figuring how many Supers there are in a country. It seemed to find it a problem that judging by population or land area wouldn't give you the disproportionately American Supers that you get in comics. It also had a line about Supers in other settings: "Campaigns can be set in the distant past - which often also means in foreign countries, at least for American players." Yes, because clearly, America was empty. *facepalm of WTF*

It did make me think though: Britain is really very tiny. On the 'Area' and 'Population' charts we don't even show up. If magery is simply distributed evenly by population size, China and India will rule the world. The system I decided on where you can draw energy from non-mage supporters makes that even more likely. Many people, big magic. So either I'm talking about a very different world, or there has to be some other set of factors.
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I did have a though about vampires. It's like, mostly, we don't think of vampires as a literal sort of a problem. They used to be linked to aristos, leeching off the land, and in their day they did kill people. But now they're linked to different groups and it's all a bit fuzzy. Only I was thinking: rich countries eat, and otherwise consume, way more than their share of the world's resources. We're eating higher up the food chain, and we're taking food from less well off nations - there's places with actual famine problems that still export edibles. You want to look for leeches? People hooked on their greater abilities and feel good lives, at the expense of others? Reckon I could look in a mirror.

Don't feel so very good about that thought.

But then within countries, I'm not exactly on the big consumer end of the spectrum. Vampires with vampires upon them.

And I'll leave it there to go eat.

I've been thinking more on what you'd use magic for in the current high tech world. If you can catch a bus why would you need Movement spells? And why use spells for Flight when you can get a plane or jump out of one with a parachute?

Magic is more personal, a more direct experience, under finer control, potentially by a single individual. It takes a lot of people and a lot of organised processes to get an airplane up, but one man with a spell might be able to do it solo. Anarchy, in a way.

Magic is also more artistic. A lot of mass produced stuff fills up the world right now. A lot of mass produced experience even. And most people are fine with that. But there's always a few who want to tweak everything they own, hack their tools and customise the themes on everything. Magic would appeal to that set both aesthetically and as a means of optimisation.

Magic could be quicker. Especially if you can hire in the knowledge. Instead of studying up for a pilot's licence, one spell gets you up. So the people wanting to take advantage of that? Are going to fill the air with amateurs. Fun.

But there's also things technology can't quite do, or things that are available but the access is heavily restricted.
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All of it makes solutions available to individuals or small groups. But the problems are in the big groups. Would it just give the big groups another excuse not to change? Why make buildings accessible when you can just slap up a sticker for how to call your local access magic group?

... optimism, I no has it...

*sigh*

I think I've come up with a system of spellcasting that will generate a wide variety of story, including the stuff I want to write.
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This variety of spellcasting allows for the independent flashy stuff, but makes teamwork more flexible and effective. It's the captain, crew, and away team. I haven't seen magic worked like that elsewhere, and it's something I miss.

So then there's just deciding who all this magic is going to be aimed at.
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All these rules and types are not yet characters and plots. But I think you can get a lot of character and plot out of them.

If the government knows about magic, what do they do with it? How do you study it? Are there evening classes, or adult education courses, or degrees? What's the specialities? Does it do pretty much what technology does, only more so? If so, what's the point?

... yeah, once I get to 'what's the point' I need a really good answer before I can make story...

The point of course is that the existing power structures are arranged that way because certain groups have access to necessary resources and can block other groups.

Magic is new (magic is back, rediscovered, as in earlier posts).
Groups with magic have different requirements, different resources, accessed different ways.
That can change the order of thing, rearrange the gatekeepers, empower different groups.

Once it's settled out so there's a new powerful and some oppressed powerless then it's much less interesting, though with more defined where to aim the fights.

Trying to use a new sort of power to even things out with the older sorts, that's the point. And hopefully the fun.

Been thinking more on the magery as genetics thing from earlier.

If it's possible to test for magery genes then people will test for them. One main group would be rich people that can pay for their own tests. But who else plays with dna lately? In Britain, there's a massive police database, gathering more people all the time. If *they* test for magery routinely, then that may be the more common way to discover you carry the genes. And testing for magery would have its place in a psych eval, though there's nothing to say someone can't have Magery and mental disadvantages. If police and psych services do by far the most testing, then anyone who knows they have magery might be assumed to have found out that way - a social stigma, possibly a nasty one. Rich people would seek the gene, but they'd keep it hush, because they wouldn't want anything in common with those people. But a government that gathers all that data on who has trainable magery would probably want to do something about it. At the very least it would be a possible job, and not taking the opportunity could impact negatively on your benefits! If the options were 'government mage' or 'have benefits withdrawn', you'd get government mages with significant trained power and a social perception based on how they were recruited. Which could get interesting.

If the practice of magic is potentially dangerous to the wielder then any government pressure to perform would politicise mages quick sharp.

This is fun.

And I haven't started adding in the beliefs that might be encoded in old school religious texts. Culture clash time...

I have been poking the rules for GURPS magic again, getting more ideas for world setups.

So today I ended up trying to remember basic genetics, which I last paid any mind to, er, possibly 15 years ago. (It hasn't been quite that long since A levels... but I borked A levels.)

I was looking for a 'the magic comes back' urban fantasy background, and I thought with the recent population explosion simple maths might do it. If the chances of being a mage are one in a million then there's quite a lot of mages around by the end of the 20th century. Add in the new access to information on the internet, and the newest techniques for reading ancient books, plus the stuff like I saw in a documentary where texts that have been buried in the sand for centuries are being brought up in a more favorable political climate, and ordinary archaeological finds, and you have a possible critical mass of people who could not only find out about this stuff from newly reaquired texts but also have the talent to make it work.

Then I started thinking about the genetics of magery.

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So, anyway, all that maths and the big square, that just adds up to:

For a long time, nobody understood where magery came from. Very strong mages always had very strong mage children, everyone else had to guess. Nobody could tell who was a carrier, so magery could turn up in a family for no readily apparent reason.

Then there were persecutions. People with a little magic, but not enough to defend themselves, at best had to hide, at worst got killed. Magical communities got torched. Mostly the mages went away. A few Magery 3 families could be strong enough to avoid the hunters, and would have mage children, but only if they married other such families. Either there's strong ties between distant families, with any such tie increasing risk of discovery in that two can keep a secret if one is dead way, or there's isolated pockets of closely related people with an odd belief system. And they'd be trying to hide. Either way, magic goes back to being something secret that just turns up, sometimes, out of nowhere, when neither parent has it. This makes it difficult for mages to get any training, and leaves them very vulnerable.

Cue 21st century. In many parts of the world the persecution is over. And, finally, science has caught up: There's a test for the magery genes. Carriers can be identified, Mages confirmed genetically, and all the tricks of biotech are available.

Add that to the information explosion and boom, magic is back.

... with all the associated problems.
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