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Magic systems - What Are They And What The Fuck Do Those Words Mean

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mothematics

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This is going to get real abstract, real fast, and if that's not your thing, then this isn't the thread for you.

I have spent the past few weeks reading over everything I can, about the nature of the fantastic - of its intersection with fantasy writing, of what we commonly refer to as magic- and of 'magic systems'. I have a lot of thoughts about these, and I've tortured @EricD, @100thlurker, @aeqnai and too many others for me to reasonably tag, in beating those into shape over the past few weeks. I was going to wait to post this thread but since my free time for the immediate future consists of 'study, and more study' I don't really have the time to prepare things, and since the Exalted thread is getting onto this track I figure I might as well jump the gun a little bit and begin this discussion and post what I have later, and begin with a prompt for SV, since if there's one thing I cannot deny this site has, it's an interest and willingness to discuss this topic at length.

Let me state that in all the reading I have done on this topic--and it is a lot--not once have I seen people actually define this term. Nobody explains what 'magic' is; and nobody explains what they mean by, ultimately, 'magic' system.

So, with this in mind - I toss you two questions, and they're not easy ones.

What is a magic system?

And just what is magical about it; why should it be called as such?
 
If I had to define what I think "magic" is in the context of 'fiction', I think it can most straightforwardly be described like this:

Magic is something that not only is, but is described as, a set of principles of action that exist parallel to and separate from 'physics' - the underlying, consistent set of rules that govern how the universe appears to operate.

That doesn't mean that magic can't be a consistent set of rules. But it does mean that magic and physics can explicitly coexist in ways that contradict or conflict with each other. Compare with 'technobabble' in science fiction: these principles are supposed to integrate with 'physics' (even if they don't necessarily accomplish this task).

Thus magic does not need to 'explain away' conservation of energy. Magic does not need to explain away faster-than-light travel. Magic does not need to explain away...anything. The two systems operate in parallel and are separate from each other, and conflicts are acceptable.
 
Off the top of my head... I'd say a magic system is a set of rules to govern something that should not be. That violates the laws of physics even in the setting it exists in. It's magical because it explicitly breaks those laws in some way, and does so on the regular.

Just my two cents, not a deep reply, I admit.
 
I like to think of magic, in certain settings, that is a branch of science that simply governs supernatural occurances. Like, you know, physics, except with concepts of physics replaced with those of magic.
 
If I chant mystic words and wave a wand, it's magic. If I describe an equation and push a button, it's 'science'.

Magic is, literally, whatever we want it to be. We make it up. It is exactly what the story needs it to be and nothing more. Maybe it exists 'parallel' to physics, maybe it is physics, maybe its sufficiently advanced technology, maybe technology is sufficient advanced magic.

Is it made up and does it do Plot Things? It's magic.

I commonly refer to science fiction technobabble as 'bullshit space magic' and it is. The only difference is aesthetics.

Which isn't to say that aesthetics don't matter. Genre is aesthetics, after all. And we are very attached to genre, here at Sufficient Velocity.
 
Magic is much like obscenity, in that readers know it when they see it.

A magic system on the other hand is the rules and principles that define in some ways what magic is, how it works, what it can do, and how it feels in the story.
 
@Rook

In the abstract, a magic system is just a narrative tool used to justify events happening that would otherwise strain disbelief on the part of the reader, designed to evoke verisimilitude.
 
In my opinion, magic is the way in which characters impose their will and agency on the world (and therefore story) through ritual to accomplish effects that would normally strain verisimilitude.

(The ritual need not be long, just to be clear.)

This does not exclude technobabble. Because let's face it - technobabble is magic with a different facade, one that's shiny and chrome. Look at the classics - Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, hell, Asimov. None of the technology, none of the technobabble, is feasible as we know it. Sure, we approach some of it. That's irrelevant to my point; all of these are, in their story, functionally equivalent to magic.

Consider a generic cyberpunk that I made up on the spot, where a "hacker" hacks into a computerised lock to let the party in.

This isn't, narratively, different from a wizard (who's named, let's say, fandalG) using wisdom accrued over lifetimes to open the doors to the mines of Moria to let the Fellowship party in.
 
Rook said:
This is going to get real abstract, real fast, and if that's not your thing, then this isn't the thread for you.

I have spent the past few weeks reading over everything I can, about the nature of the fantastic - of its intersection with fantasy writing, of what we commonly refer to as magic- and of 'magic systems'. I have a lot of thoughts about these, and I've tortured @EricD, @100thlurker, @aeqnai and too many others for me to reasonably tag, in beating those into shape over the past few weeks. I was going to wait to post this thread but since my free time for the immediate future consists of 'study, and more study' I don't really have the time to prepare things, and since the Exalted thread is getting onto this track I figure I might as well jump the gun a little bit and begin this discussion and post what I have later, and begin with a prompt for SV, since if there's one thing I cannot deny this site has, it's an interest and willingness to discuss this topic at length.

Let me state that in all the reading I have done on this topic--and it is a lot--not once have I seen people actually define this term. Nobody explains what 'magic' is; and nobody explains what they mean by, ultimately, 'magic' system.

So, with this in mind - I toss you two questions, and they're not easy ones.

What is a magic system?

And just what is magical about it; why should it be called as such?
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A set of rules layered on top of a world for doing things that go against the conventional understanding of what is possible, often requiring a specific set of skills or some type of trait, in a world that more or less resembles a world with physics as we understand it if the set of rules is taken away.

This is partially influenced by the blurry line between science and magic 2e Exalted apparently had. Thaumaturgy was repeatable by anybody given training. The laws of physics in that world allowed it. By the standards of Creation it deserves the title of Science, but because of the name and the impossibility of the principles in our world, we call it magic anyway. Take thaumaturgy away and 2e Creation gets bleaker for mortals but it is still Creation with all the weirdness that implies.

If you get rid of mana in Nanoha, you just have regular people.

I haven't read it, but lets use Greg Egan's Clockwork Rocket trilogy as a contrast. He tinkered around with certain cosmological constants, and in the books and the 80,000+ words of supplemental material he explains how everything works. The rules are not layered on top of the world. They are the world.
 
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I just came up with (what I think is) an excellent short form for my argument.

The purpose of magic is "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit".

"I can make pretty lights from my hands"
"how"
"it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit"

That's literally the purpose of the magic system in any given story, right there. It gives you a bye on explaining the occurrences defined by that system.
 
Tempera said:
@Rook

In the abstract, a magic system is just a narrative tool used to justify events happening that would otherwise strain disbelief on the part of the reader, designed to evoke verisimilitude.
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Well she did it so now I have to talk words OKAY HERE WE GO. I'm not going to really build off of this exactly, but I will use it as kind of my jumping off point for what I'm going to say. So without further ado...

Magic is in the end part of a narrative; perhaps large, perhaps small. Circumstances vary. It isn't...critical in the way that I feel a lot of writers and readers think it is. You do not need to put any more or less thought into your story's magic than you need to put into your story's laws of physics, or politics, or laser swords, or people. It matters as much as it matters, and if you do it well, will contribute commensurately (that is to say, you'll get out at least as much as what you put in). The most pertinent example I can think of is The One Power from the Wheel of Time, which is a fucking gorgeous element of a largely substandard narrative. It's divided into male and female halves--saidin and saidar--that division itself supporting the (odd) themes running throughout the book of the divide between men and women. Aesthetically, the way it's described--I literally can't do it justice when I tell you that it's some sweet-ass knitting--is beautiful, unusual and dovetails nicely with the aesthetics of the world at large; time is a weaver's wheel, upon which the threads of the tapestry that is time are spun and woven together. Magic is weaving in elements of your own inspiration, adding to the tapestry yourself. I could keep going with this metaphor, that's how fucking sick these aesthetics are yo. Mind just...step back for a moment and try to square that with the world we live in today and it's some ridiculous bullshit but it works and it's fine, so you accept it.

But even so, Wheel of Time is...bad. It's bloated, far less interested in moving its supposedly epic plot along than it is in describing in extreme detail just...any of the many vistas it's using, or the outfits of the characters involved, even as characters can often be reduced to like....*pulls braid*. It sprawls so poorly that one of the central characters could afford to disappear entirely for a book because 'honeymoon' without adversely affecting the overall pacing or plot arc. Good magic can certainly be part of a good story, and you should try to make it good, just like any other element, but that's all.

Truth told this post sprawled a bit and I wasn't as fast in writing it as I really should have been but c'est la vie, at least I got it out in a sort of timely manner.
 
In the modern parlance, 'magic' is a term for things that, at glance, we don't understand how it works. It is also used to refer to things that evoke wonder.

These meanings are applicable to fiction. As Firnagzen and Tempera said above, 'magic' is commonly used as narrative tool that allows things to happen that otherwise would contradict our perception on how things supposed to works (based on our obseravation of the real universe). Though I'll contend that it doesn't have always to mean 'I don't have to explain shit'. In many fiction which goes at length in explaining their magic system (or in the minds with too much time and/or too much obsession with magicworldbuilding) , 'magic' means more along the lines of 'the rules are different here'.

Likewise, 'magic' are also a set of aesthetic used to evoke the wonder of fantasy.

Note, that 'we don't understand how this works' is an out-universe understanding. 'Magic' doesn't have to have the same connotation in-universe.

(as an aside, Firnazgen note how technobabble is qualify as magic and so I want to note than even technology and science in real life is magic to quite a lot of people :p )
 
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I think a major component of what makes a magic system feel distinct from just different physics is its irreducibility - particularly when there's a fundamentally mental or social aspect. You can't dissolve magic down to pieces: it deals in omnipresent forces, universally applicable principles, personal relationships and the soul. It's something you can understand, but it's not really something that lends itself to modelling, so when you try and piece together the rules you end up with a lot of broad strokes and no sense that things can be broken down further.

If I wanted to get even more narrow I might define magic as specifically involving dealing with a world through relationships, but at that point I'd be reaching for things I've heard from @100thlurker and @shinaobi so I'll leave it to them.
 
LordSquishy said:
Magic is something that not only is, but is described as, a set of principles of action that exist parallel to and separate from 'physics' - the underlying, consistent set of rules that govern how the universe appears to operate.

That doesn't mean that magic can't be a consistent set of rules. But it does mean that magic and physics can explicitly coexist in ways that contradict or conflict with each other. Compare with 'technobabble' in science fiction: these principles are supposed to integrate with 'physics' (even if they don't necessarily accomplish this task).

Thus magic does not need to 'explain away' conservation of energy. Magic does not need to explain away faster-than-light travel. Magic does not need to explain away...anything. The two systems operate in parallel and are separate from each other, and conflicts are acceptable.
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This distinction doesn't quite apply in regard to fiction with 'sufficiently advanced' stuffs or fiction that falls under 'sci-fi masquerading as fantasy'.
 
Aaron Peori said:
If I chant mystic words and wave a wand, it's magic. If I describe an equation and push a button, it's 'science'.
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I just to note that traditionally, "magic" was considered a science and subject of study for scholars. They believed there were universal rules they could examine, test for, and then replicate.

@LordSquishy mentioned before that magic coexists with physics and the forces of nature, and I agree in principle as it being the distinctive definition, but that's not how many people will treat its existence in-universe. It may not be science, but it can be scientific.

Out-of-universe, of course, it's a narrative tool, as @Tempera said.
 
A 'magic system' in a work of fiction is a literary device designed to set reader expectations. It sets the bar for what is 'normal' in a given world with said magic system.

'Magic' tends to be forces that are not completely understood top to bottom by whoever names it magic.

'Magic systems' are the framework of cause and effect in a given story's setting, with regards to a given form of magic. They define the limits of what that magic is expected to do, to a point. The reader knows that if those limits are broken, it's a plot point to focus on- as opposed to simply shrugging and saying 'it's magic.'

It kind of works like a mystery novel. A magic system is designed to set limits to what is possible, just limits that are higher than mundane reality's. It serves to allow a slightly wider field of possible actions any character could take, and consequences of those actions. In other words, a tool. A mystery novel will give you the scene of a crime and the possible tools used to commit the crime, and when done well, the reader is given all of the information needed to piece together what happened before it is revealed in the narrative.

Magic systems allow for a given amount of suspense or gravitas. The nature of 'magic' as opposed to technology is its mystery, and the lack of complete knowledge of it. Abusing this too much makes for boring reading, and allows for magus ex machina plot resolution. Not invoking its mystery at all leaves no room for a sense of wonder. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just a factor.

Brandon Sanderson is known for this kind of thing, and his books have been hit or miss with many readers. I'm more interested in the lower level system to the magic across all of his books that share his 'Cosmere' over-setting; the rules that govern the creation of the magic systems in those different worlds themselves. I want to glean some insight and try to predict what might happen in the setting before it does. I enjoy that kind of thing. Others couldn't care less.

Magic without systems is Tolkien-esque or Lucas-esque; the magical characters will continue to pull (or for whatever reason, fail to pull) a magical solution out of their ass with no real sense of suspense. You don't know if Gandalf will do something big or if Obi-Wan is going to fight back properly at the end of A New Hope, and you're given little knowledge of their limits. They are walking plot devices. You can't appreciate if something they do is impressive (for them) or mundane (for them). There's no sense of scale or comparison or anything.

Magic systems give readers a metric to measure magic users against. It makes them better characters rather than magic dispensing plot devices. Or so I tend to think in general.
 
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So, for the 'what is magic' bit you basically have two answers.

There's the modern answer, which I suspect everyone here is familiar with (And @100thlurker is having an argument about on IRC while I write it) which is basically 'technology+aesthetic'. It's what gets you settings like Eberron and Forgotten Realms and Jack Vance and Way of Kings. It's different from Steampunk primarily in how it looks, and also in that fantasy, unlike steampunk, is not inherently an apologia for the british empire made primarily of bullshit. It's more descriptive of an aesthetic than any feature of the system.

Then we have magic. As in the Vedas and old Myth and even, say, Star Wars. Here a dude being able to shoot an arrow into the next country isn't magic, nor is a man being able to rip out his own guts and play a sick guitar solo on his nerve endings. That's just being good at your job. What is magic is, inherently, external. It is something brought from spirits, gifted by gods, channeled through the force, and a dozen other things. It is rarely quantifiable or, even, reliable, and it's very rare in modern fiction. Things like rituals to dark gods and enormous one-off effects, treated as unique wonderwaffe in the modern genre, are the closest thing that exists to it in many cases.

tl;dr, Star Wars has better magic than, like, 90% of modern fantasy. :V
 
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Historically, magic was basically a matter of anthropomorphizing the universe, of treating it as persuadable and purposive rather than acting according to insensate physical laws. Inscribe the right symbol, speak the right words or convince the right spirit and you could make the world work like you wanted. By nailing up the right talisman you could ward off evil spirits the way a "No Trespassing" sign wards off people; by figuring out what the magical forces of the world wanted you could persuade them to help you.

A lot of modern magic systems though work more like weird physics than traditional magic. In modern times it's blurred heavily into soft sci-fi; sometimes complete with mages fighting like tiny groundbound Star Trek ships, exchanging energy bolts that bounce off their personal force fields. Whoops, I mean, attacking each other with magical blasts that are deflected by their wards, which are totally not like sci-fi ray guns and force fields.

It's hard to tell the difference between soft sci fi and magic because the line has just blurred that much. Many of the more well thought out magical systems are closer to classic sci-fi extrapolation than a lot of the things officially called sci-fi are. In a real sense they are sci-fi.
 
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Golden Lark said:
Magic without systems is Tolkien-esque or Lucas-esque; the magical characters will continue to pull (or for whatever reason, fail to pull) a magical solution out of their ass with no real sense of suspense. You don't know if Gandalf will do something big or if Obi-Wan is going to fight back properly at the end of A New Hope, and you're given little knowledge of their limits. They are walking plot devices. You can't appreciate if something they do is impressive (for them) or mundane (for them). There's no sense of scale or comparison or anything.

Magic systems give readers a metric to measure magic users against. It makes them better characters rather than magic dispensing plot devices. Or so I tend to think in general.
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What are you even talking about here? Because while you name Tolkien, Lucas, Gandalf, and Obi-Wan, you clearly aren't talking about them. Gandalf has some moments of power, but they don't really fit what you're talking about, unless you really read the backstory, but in that case you know exactly why he generally doesn't pull out his power. Otherwise, it's generally limited to small, immediate displays, like flashes of light or the inspiration his presence brings. And most of the exceptions don't have him simply solving a problem. Obi-Wan in a New Hope seems a really odd example: the force we see in the original trilogy is very low key, and we know that the Jedi were killed by Darth Vader, so I'm baffled by your description here.

I can understand wanting everything to be spelled out explicitly, but I think you're selling people's ability to understand things without that. Especially when the text or movie says something else. Just because it's not laying out the rules of magic explicitly doesn't mean it's not informing us of some of it's limits.
 
As @EricD has taught me, magic is the art of calling forth spirits (which may be demons or the shades of the dead, scholars disagree) in order to ask questions of them and obtain secret knowledge. Anything else is modernist heresy.
 
Omicron said:
As @EricD has taught me, magic is the art of calling forth spirits (which may be demons or the shades of the dead, scholars disagree) in order to ask questions of them and obtain secret knowledge. Anything else is modernist heresy.
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But remember not to summon Valefor as your familiar, because he'll make you break the law and then turn you in to the authorities.

Valefor is a rat bastard.

Also, there are the spells inscribed on sheets of lead and dropped into old wells (Roman wishing wells basically IIRC), spirits who you can contract with to secretly kill your enemies (Also goetia, but can't remember which), etc.
 

02:54 		EricD I would say that I00thlurker is similar to myself in that we both have something of an... Anthropological approach I suppose you could say?
02:55   *** NS_QTR quit (Ping timeout: 122 seconds)
02:55 EricD So like, Lurker uses Sappho's love poetry or Homer's incantation to the Muses as examples of magic. Historical examples, from historical folklore.
02:55 Firn2 Yup.
02:56 EricD Magic, to me, is the voice telling Ilya Muromets that the two roads lead to a long life or to glory and death
02:56 EricD Magic is the Lady in the Lake's slender arm holding forth Excalibur
02:57 rook so
02:57 EricD It's, as Lurker says, a part of the world where human agency is the not the driving force
02:57 rook something you in particular would find interesting as a discussion
02:57 rook or really you and lurker
02:57 I00thlurker At heart the idea, morality isn't just a social construct
02:57   Shinaobi points at rook
02:57 Shinaobi don't
02:57 Shinaobi get it twisted
02:57 Shinaobi see above metaphor with screwdrivers
02:57 I00thlurker in the fantastic, in magic, morality is /real/
02:57 Shinaobi and the other, belabored metaphor preceding it
02:58 Shinaobi about newton, and alchemists
02:58 Shinaobi and science
02:58 Shinaobi it would be wrong
02:58 Shinaobi to talk about the One True History of the screwdriver
02:58 I00thlurker that would be the extreme TL;DR of it firn2
02:58 rook so i found a kind of weird blog
02:58 Shinaobi and EricD and I00thlurker don't do that
02:58 rook with a lot of shitty stuff on it
02:58 rook World-building Depth vs. Relatability: Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
02:58 Firn2 EricD: Question. Is the Lady in the Lake's *presence* in the lake magic?
02:58 Shinaobi they're not going to bloat their explanations with excess hedging
02:58 rook there is one thing of value here
02:58 rook on this link
02:58 Firn2 I00thlurker: I see, thanks.
02:58 rook it's in the first three paragraphs
02:58 Shinaobi because it makes those explanations harder to read, more arduous to write
02:59 Shinaobi and more difficult to understand
02:59 rook it's in a book I didn't know existed
02:59 rook and it's a /quote from it/
02:59 rook Farah Mendlesohn wrote a book called Rhetorics of Fantasy, which described an axis of categorization between including "immersive", portal, "intrusive", and "liminal" fantasy. Essentially, immersive fantasy involves a secondary world that is "impervious to knowledge of an outside reality". That outside reality being Earth. Basically, it avoids direct refe
02:59 rook rence to Earth in the narrative.
02:59 Shinaobi when fundamentally all that's needed to be able to accept that they both Will Describe Magic To You (in a 'history of screwdrivers' sense)
02:59 rook And that got me thinking about what people go to for fantasy..
03:00 I00thlurker right, Shinaobi .
03:00 rook like, when most people think fantasy, they're going to think "historical [not contemporary] and magical" most likely
03:00 rook Which incidentally did make me think about urban fantasy
03:00 rook which is to say, urban fantasy is just the fantastic made contemporary
03:00 Shinaobi is to understand that history is multifaceted, the human mind works best with narratives, and so magic (again, in this sense) is best understood with that multiplicity
03:00 I00thlurker yeah
03:01 I00thlurker I think Firn2 , you might find this relevant
03:01 I00thlurker as an easy example
03:01 Shinaobi I'm actually proud of that somebody quote it and dump it in the thread
03:01 Shinaobi I'll even pay you in a like
03:01 I00thlurker you know Aragorn in Lord of the Rings right?
03:01 Shinaobi trust me this is an even trade
03:01 rook sure :^)
03:02 Shinaobi this is why I love you rook you help me out
03:02 EricD Firn2: The Lake is never specific in Arthurian myth.
03:02 Shinaobi and I post in your threads
03:02 Shinaobi
symbiosis
there you go @shinaobi :^)
 
On reflection, I think that - particularly in the context of modern fantasy - a lot of magic exists as thematically and aesthetically congruent abstraction of things we're already happy with. To pick on @Firnagzen 's example - who cares if you do it with a bump key or an oxy torch or a sidechannel attack on the bolt or a 'hacker'? Street crooks can open doors, we are comfortable with this, it doesn't impose much strain on suspension of disbelief. But having a hacker, steeped in decades' experience with the Internet of Inadequately Secured Things, honed by a place and time where breaking digital security measures is a highly saleable skill, is just the cyberpunk-appropriate way to make it happen.
 
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The definition I use is one where you use a phenomena or technology without understanding it. So if you were a Jaffa shooting a staff weapon it would be magic to you because you do not understand how lightning comes out of this rod. And you probably have heard mythical stories about the source of this power. Likewise the System Lords are magic to iron age level inhabitants of planets they rule over. Once you figure out the mechanism it ceases to be magic become technology. For example in real life you had shamans responsible for weather forecasting, medical care and so on. Now that we have better understanding of how it happens it falls under science.
 
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