metapunk

“… and that’s when I pulled out my soul-drinking rune guitar, +1!”

In my last post I mentioned that I was trying to think carefully about how magic ought to work in Martian Cycle. In most games, and most fantasy fiction, magic is a given—that is, within the confines of the setting, magic is real and obvious to everyone.  In fantasy worlds, magic is the high technology of the day, and magical talismans are as common as cellphones are in the modern world.  Everyone has a crystal ball in their house for watching dragon races on, and the heroes might be able to sling fireballs as easily as you or I might turn on a light.

But I wanted to do something different. First and foremost, most people in the game—at least, most Ironfolk—don’t believe in magic, psychic abilities, or the supernatural (at least, not outside of organized religion). Meanwhile, the Iduni, in general, do believe in magic and spirits of the kind that a shaman might be involved with. So magic in Martian Cycle needs to be subtle, reflecting the animism of the Iduni, while still allowing for the skepticism and derision of the Ironfolk. Standard fantasy magic just won’t do.

“Magic is seldom spectacular because it seldom needs to be”

—Donald Tyson, Ritual Magic

Real world magic, if it exists at all, is a profound but elusive thing. It lives in the space between certainties, in the realm of coincidence and luck. Very rarely does something obviously inexplicable happen—quite often, events simply turn out this way or that, for the best or for naught—without us ever really knowing or even suspecting if there’s someone behind it all, manipulating things. Magic in roleplaying, or at least in Martian Cycles, should reflect this.

“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

—Eden Phillpotts

Okay, so it has to be subtle—Check. What else should the magic system be? Well, consider the article Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems by John H. Kim. In a nutshell, Kim points out that most of the magic systems you’ll encounter in roleplaying games—and even in a lot of fantasy fiction—follows the patterns of modern science more than those of mysticism, which really doesn’t make much sense. Magic is rated in terms of energy, in the form of power points or mana.  Spells are formulaic, and they always work no matter who is casting them or why. Magic itself is described in most systems as supernatural—that is, above and beyond nature.

Contrast this with classical literature, where magic is a mysterious thing. It only works for certain people, often depending on their individual morality, be it the magic sword that only works for the pure of heart, or the demon who only answers to the wickedly evil. Magic in such stories is immeasurable and ultimately creates more questions than it actually answers—and yet it is a part of nature—it’s just there, it always has been and always will be; an unusual but normal manifestation of a living cosmos.

Another essay linked on John H. Kim’s magic page is an essay by Lev Lafayette, called Magic in Roleplaying and Reality. Lafayette expresses some similar views to Kim, in that magic, when you consider real world examples of animistic / magical worldviews, is not really open to scientific inquiry. Magic in such a worldview revolves more around wisdom and meaning than it does around knowledge, which is the purview of science. Magic transcends the subject/object distinction that science depends on in order to test hypotheses. As such, magic is not something science can either prove, or properly falsify. The two worldviews are like ships passing in the night. So it doesn’t make much sense to base the magic system in a roleplaying game around scientific principles of mass-energy, measurable properties like “magical radiation,” specific genes responsible for magical ability, or even conventional causality.

“Choke on that, causality!”

—Hubert J. Farnsworth, Futurama

I was a little more passionate when I first thought about these ideas, and wrote about them in my notes:

Magickal beliefs pre-dated science by thousands of years, and there’s no reason that they must conform to scientific thinking—anything but, in fact.  Magick, by definition, deals with metaphysics, not physics.  Its power lies not in forces of electromagnetism or gravity, but in emotion, attention and intention, and metaphor—qualities associated with a living cosmos, not a mechanical one.  Philosophically, a magickal worldview is more akin to idealism than materialism—a counter-point to science, not a slave to it.  So, where magick is concerned, take all the rules you learned in science class and chuck them out the window.  I mean, it is magick, after all.

Looking for magick in physics is a classic example of not being able to see the forest for the trees.  It’s like casting about the world asking “but where are my eyes?”  You can’t see these things because they are what allow you to see.  Magick is the stuff of subjective experience, not objective matter and energy, and we are in fact performing magick all the time.

Or, to put it another way: consider how cool and awe inspiring the force was in the original Star Wars trilogy when it was a mysterious but meaningful force; compared to how stupid it sounded when The Phantom Menace introduced us to the essentially scientific notion of the midichlorians, microscopic organisms that live in a Jedi’s bloodstream. Sigh. I’ll never get my money back, will I, George?

Well, anyway, I think the main problem is that traditional “scientific” magic systems are mechanically easier, and fit well within simulationist and gamist-oriented fantasy games. A more mystically enabled magic system means more roleplaying for the players—which seems like it might be initially more challenging, since not everything is spelled out, but ultimately more rewarding, since it evokes a sense of meaning and wonder, transcending the merely mechanical aspects of the game. Some mechanics are probably unavoidable, but those mechanics should be as unobtrusive as possible—they should let the magic shine through.

“Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with the will.”

—Aleister Crowley

So, our magic system has to be subtle, believable even; but it also has to be literary, mysterious, and definitely not scientific in its approach. But what exactly is magic and how does it work in the context of the game? Well, I don’t know exactly. Not yet. I have several possible explanations in mind, which should be different enough to allow different factions in the game to have wildly different views of the subject, and wildy different abilities.

There’s a third factor, besides subtlety and non-sciency-ness, that magic should have: it should be personal—it should connect the magician to the wider universe. I want to leave you with one particularly interesting quote I found on the io9 science fiction blog. Author Ted Chiang says:

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it’s science, and if you can’t, it’s magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she’s made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it’s something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she’s a magician. And I don’t mean that she’s a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren’t dependent on a specific person.

Electricity might have seemed magical at one time in history, but it works for everyone; you don’t need to have an innate talent or be descended from someone special for a light bulb to turn on which you flip a switch. It took the work of very smart people to get us to the point that we can all use electricity, but none of them were magicians, precisely because they were able to make their discovery work for everyone.

To go on at slightly greater length, the reason magic can’t be mass-produced is that it usually relies on some subjective quality of the practitioner: her intense concentration, her spiritual purity, something that can’t be substituted with another person or with a machine. Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. When people say that the scientific worldview implies a cold, impersonal universe, this is what they’re talking about. Magic is when the universe responds to you in a personal way.

In all seriousness, I have experienced times when the universe seemed to know me as a person—which, for me, is why it is so much more important to be good to other people, to yourself, and to the planet itself. If you trust and honour the world, it’s far more likely to trust and honour you back—in the long run (just not always in the ways we imagine). No matter what happens in life, how lost you might feel, or what beliefs you might hold, there’s something out there that cares about what happens to us. God maybe, or maybe just a universe that’s alive and cherishes every part of itself. Who knows? I just know it’s something to trust. Nothing is permanent, not even the manifold injuries and embarrassments of a human lifetime.  Magick has never left the world, people have just stopped paying attention to it.