The Pragmatic Realities of Magic

There is a lot written here about the deep minutiae and fluffy, fun details of magic, but not a lot of descriptions of what magic actually does. To do this reasonably, we will rely on our friend, the bullet-point list.

What Do you Need to Do Magic?

  • Nothing, besides a soul! Even in places like Shiv with "No magic", your soul, and the souls of those around you, can still be used to perform limited magic.
    • That said, the aether field is sure nice to have. It serves as both a reservoir of potential energy, and a medium in which magic can travel through.
    • Belief is also important. Magic works because people think it should work.
    • Belief can be enough to cast "Petty Magic", small little boons that are hard to notice. A mother praying for her child's recovery from an illness might aid in healing, though the effects would be hard to quantify.
    • That said, actual, powerful magic is another beast entirely. It's surprisingly hard to bluff yourself into having true faith in a new system of magic on the spot. You have to believe so hard you convince the aether around you, and even then, you will be challenged to make it do anything productive and useful.

  • An education in magic is NOT required. Many cast magic through sheer magical empathy. "Heal this", "Burn this", "Protect me".
    • It can be argued that even people who do not cast magic often end up using magic to be stronger, run faster, or jump higher. Like being in a sea of adrenaline you can tap into at any time.
    • Practically speaking though, casting by vibes is (usually) limiting in terms of complexity.

  • An education is nice, and depending on that education, what you need changes!
    • For a written system you'll need a spell book! In Aistorian Academic magic, the spell book isn't something you can just memorize. The pages(often inflexible, thin metal sheets for longevity) themselves are the surface in which spells are cast from.
    • Obviously spoken or gestural spell casting needs free hands.
    • Reagents can also be important. More modern systems try to eschew them (why design a system with a cost), but invoking the perceived mysticism certain can help with the belief. It's hard to resist human nature
    • Aistorian Academic Casting doesn't require reagents but fucking mageleaf costs a ton, so where do they get off acting like 'reagents are a waste of resources'????

  • Luck. Everyone can learn at least a little magic if they were so determined, but being a powerful spell caster seems to take a mix of both luck and skill.
  • Desire. While everyone can learn a little, few do. Weak magical effects are hard to notice, and the dedication needed to do anything useful is high. A random farmer has little need for basic magic, and if they could do more than that, they wouldn't be a farmer.

What is Magic Used For?

  • War, fighting, and killing as is always the case.
  • ... Actually, doing useful things with magic is very hard.
  • Healing grievous injuries.
  • Curing diseases.
  • Warding off daemons.
  • Navigation.
  • Enchanting objects and operating enchantments
    • Make something that flies, make a bow that shrinks down to fit in a pendant, make a glass bead that sees the world from 100 feet above you. Make a door that only opens to a special secret word. Whatever!
  • The unexciting job of recharging enchantments that other people made.
  • Construction and making of certain types of materials.
  • Temporarily changing the physical properties (from bounciness of color) of items.
    • Temporary hair color change, why not!
    • ... Passive magic is why some people just naturally have anime hair anyways.

What is Magic Bad at?

  • Being immediately useful in non-destructive ways.
    • War and violence are the number one uses of magic, as destruction is the easiest use of clumsily used magic.
    • Being gifted with an elemental affinity for something like Fire (like Laon) is useless for anything but murder and party tricks.
    • Places like Shiv will find use for an unskilled mage (basically as a battery), but it's borderline exploitation.
    • Aistorian Academic Magic and it's enchantments require years of study and expensive materials.
    • Magic is potentially EXTREMELY POWERFUL and EXTREMELY USEFUL, but getting to that level for most people is extraordinarily labor intensive.

  • Magic cannot be directly used with technology.
    • ... But you can say, pump water up somewhere with magic, and on the other side of reservoir, if the conditions are right, have a generator that generates electricity from the potential energy. This tends not to scale well though.
    • Make metals and materials with magic to then export to a place with industrial infrastructure.
    • Zeppelins often use spare magic "engines" to generate thrust when in magical conditions where normal engines won't work. These cannot be used at the same time as the mechanical engines, but fortunately they don't have to be.

  • Long distance travel.
    • Astral diving can sometimes allow for some limited teleportation, but it's hard.
    • There are more advanced and crazy ways to achieve long distance, instantaneous travel but they're rare, guarded secrets with their own sets of limitation.
    • Arbitrary teleportation is basically pragmatically impossible

  • Long distance communication
    • The falloff for spells over long distances is very high
    • You might find bonded people who seem to feel each others emotions from across the world, but that is an exception not the rule.
    • Long distance magic communication basically works in the same way any kind of semaphore relay system. Which also means it's expensive and labor intensive and not worth it.

  • No time travel or predicting the future. What are you, crazy?
    • ... Maybe a little 'slow time', and 'time dilation' as a treat?

  • Scale. It's hard to build infrastructure around magic. Magic is not so common that you can have a magic light the street lights every day.
    • The most common job for mages often involve transportation. A common job for mages is working the magic engines and recharging nitrogen on the ships.
    • Healers are the other most common job. Well off city hospital might have a few very skilled healers on staff. Armies might collect as many low skilled healers as they can to stabilize the injured, but they can't do much more than that without hitting extreme recruitment issues.
    • Shiv has managed to commodify low skilled mages for making magical materials, but the bottle neck in this supply chain is the mages themselves.
    • Magic can be used to make products in places like Aistoria far less labor intensive, but why would you do that in a place where labor is cheap?
    • As a general rule, mages are specialists, not commodities.

  • Creating life. It just never works.
    • Real freaks work around this by trying to purposefully create and modify daemons. Who cares if they're not even technically alive?

  • Raising the Dead.
    • There are some ways. It's arguable that Loni got resurrected and put into a doll's body, but her death would have been very fresh.
    • Definitely no resurrecting long dead people.
    • ... You can KINDA at least commune with the dead, but it's like talking to someone during a dream. And that's assuming you even find their soul in the astral plane.
    • If someone becomes a ghost I guess it's easy but even a ghost will fall into that dream like pattern of behavior.

  • Magic cannot directly access the minds of other humans. No psychics or psionics, especially adversally.
    • People with strong magical empathy might be good at getting a vibe off someone, but that's about it.
    • Sometimes two souls can be in communication. Silent speaking, shared dreams, and other seemingly 'in mind' experiences CAN happen.
    • Illusions can be performed by directly influencing light in front of someone or the air around them. You can fake some sensations
    • There isn't any magical hypnosis or mind control (though n theory you could use magic to AID non magical techniques, assuming they were real).
    • ... There is also daemon soul grafting, which leads to results similar to what happened to Vayn, basically 'breeding' a daemon for the behaviors you want, grafting that to a person's soul, and letting the daemon basically puppet them.
    • This is very very bad, evil stuff.

  • Directly and adverserially damaging another soul.
    • Nobody likes this.
    • You can kinda jab a person's soul and it sucks, but it's short term discomfort.
    • Really fucking up a soul takes EFFORT and is a taboo in a lot of places.

  • Math. No this can actually be important!!
    • Magic functions tend to be 'fuzzy', since every bit of aether is going to have different behaviors, biases, and interpretations of your own magic.
    • This makes it hard to brute force really complicated magic by what would amount to programming.
    • Someone ridiculous like Sinlen might work around this by doing the math ahead of time and "hardcoding" everything, though this limits the flexibility of any enchantments.

  • Perfect healing.
    • Healing gets way harder the more superficial it gets.
    • The soul does NOT want a hole in its body oh god oh god oh god
    • But cuts and bruises and scars are much harder to deal with
    • Most healers will refuse to waste energy on things like that unless it's for rich nobles or something.

  • Physically change and alter and transform someones body in a permanent, non-destructively.
    • The soul resists this this too much.
    • It's possible, depending on the person or circumstances, but magic certainly isn't GOOD at it.
    • Things like plastic surgery can use magic for healing, but it has to be used carefully and with normal surgery technics.
    • Magic materials get used in cosmetic contexts, like tattooing, but that's different.
    • Gender affirming care generally isn't needed as much in Brave Earth, but in the situation where it's needed (late onset gender dysphoria), well... the body wants to resemble the soul, so now it becomes easy.

Risks, Difficulties, and Challenges when using Magic

While the existence of magic has many drawbacks (... Daemons), using magic is generally pretty safe. Still, there are considerations...

  • Exhaustion. You can use so much magic it damages and weakens your soul, which probably feels awful.
  • Miscasting. Poor understanding of the magic system your using may cause spells to have unintended and dangerous affects.
  • Runaway magic. Influencing Aether too strongly can cause a runaway "empathy" wave, such as fires erupting when Cassara loses control of her emotions. These can have dangerous consequences to unintended target
  • Relatedly, most magic fire (or any magic element, honestly) isn't real fire. It's the idea of fire. To burn it needs to overcome someone's soul, which is why blasting someone with a fireball doesn't just burn off all their hair and cook them immediately. But magic can be used to create real fire (more intensive, but possible, even on accident), which can no longer be controlled.
  • Failure at magic can lead to failure spirals. Failing and thinking you're no good leads to more failure in most things, but this is EXTRA rough with magic, where belief matters.
  • Experimenting with magic and astral diving unsafely is a good way to kill yourself, in one of a thousand ways.
  • As such, pushing against your limits can be dangerous. Trying to cast something intense, under pressure, on the edge of your skill can easily lead to a miscast.
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Categories: Magic