Magic Runes Spell Books and Magic-Programming Parallels
So I was thinking about how magic works in the setting and the sorta belief/will model but how it intersects with more scientific thinking about magic. Basically, while certainly some people have crazy goofy runes that are like ‘some (totally not) ancient divine language”, what does magic text look like for people kinda know how this all works? I could go with “the alphabet”, but that’s boring.
So I began thinking about simplified characters. The PalmOS had kinda wonky writing recognition. But for it to work, the characters had to be simplified. Simple, single stroke shapes, perfect for software to read. So you end up with something like this…
(PalmOS Graffiti is slightly different from this but whatever). So considerations like this might important for magic alphabets and glyphs. Someone who writes spells in the air on the fly might want to use something very simple to speed up writing. Also simplified shapes would be easier to ‘display’ with magic.
Some shapes are probably easier to draw then others and some shapes probably lend themselves better to scrawling on a spellbook page or within the ‘magic circuit. So then I started looking at shorthand.
Something like this might also be extremely popular. It looks like illegible chicken scratch, but instead we have alphabets designed for speed and simplicity.
Now a lot of magic actually uses stand alone glyphs to represent larger ideas (more efficient than words). But that would probably, to the mages eyes look like…
Wiring diagrams and electronic notation. Because that’s how written magic spells work. Not exactly the same, but many of the same ideas. Now, spell circles are circular diagrams, but mostly because circles are an easy shape to generate with magic (As such there is probably horribly efficient display alphabets that resemble braille so the systems used for reading vs writing are probably different).
So yeah. Reasons why magic texts look different. Margin notes and stuff in spells are probably written normally, unless a magic is being secretive (and then they might use their own alphabets and ciphers to encode things).
Doing a whole bunch of stuff with Sinlen and her doing magic research and thinking about how she does things has made me like the ‘programmer’ metaphor more. This makes Sinlen sorta the… ‘Commandline scripting’ nerd of the magic world. She’s someone who takes many small spells, pipes them into each other and writes spells on the fly to bridge and fill in gaps to accomplish goals very quickly.
They even have libraries. The way I’ve had Sinlen use her spell book is she literally takes out pages (or ‘panels’, some sorta relatively thick, engraved sheet in a book where pages can be removed and reinserted) assembling them and linking them to execute goals. “Oh lemme take the spell that detects magic levels and link that to the movable magic probe and link that to the thing that prints results on paper with this magic stylus and…” etc etc etc or some panels might just be a bunch of functions and libraries other spells need to operate.
A big question here is “Why doesn’t Sinlen need her spellbook all the time?” Beth has her wrist tattoos. I figure Sinlen might have jewelry but I don’t think she’d be happy trusting her life to something she could lose. Part of me thinks she is just so versed that she can remember the spell circles for various things like her defensive magic or little floaty disk or sex stuff and will that into existence. And that such an ability wouldn’t be exclusive to her, but is definitely a sign of an extremely gifted mage.. Then maybe a bangle or a pandora style bracelet that has additional spells etched into them (so she could swap out what spells she took with her if she had them on individual charms).
Engravings like that are no different from spellbook sheets. The difference between that and say, Beth’s ring is that since Sinlen is controlling the magic, her will goes through the drawn out spell and interprets it. But when enchanting something you need to do that but then impress your will on it, so it exists whether you’re there or not. Thus the need for an object that is already sorta magical, so you have sorta a foundation to leave energy or something.
Return to Lore Journals
Categories: Lore Journal