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 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.

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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