The Magic of Magicbuilding: Hand in Hand

Welcome to the Magic of Magicbuilding, our little spinoff feature that focuses specifically on building a magical system for a fantasy setting.  This week, we were going to speedrun technological advances with the aid of magic.  Unfortunately, we forgot that you fine folk might want to know why we're doing that speedrun.

What We Have So Far

Over the last couple of weeks, we've developed a rough "spellbook" of example spells that our civilization of nascent mages could come up with, even without the aid of modern knowledge.  Our next step is to apply that basic magical know-how to the technology of the time.  If this were a worldbuilding article, we'd likely iterate this process several times; magic would inform technology, which would lead to new ideas of how magic could work, and then the cycle would repeat.

This, however, is a magicbuilding article.  We're more concerned with the result than we are with the process, since magical systems don't often rely on taking classes on The History of Magical Theory... although, for the record, we wouldn't mind taking that class.  For that reason, we're going to look specifically at how basic magical casting would transition to casting using sigils.  From there, we can take the process as read and jump straight to "and this is how they use sigils now."

We're iterating the magic-technology circle once because of the final form our magic takes.  If we were using a different system, we wouldn't need to do this at all. Or, depending on the system, we'd need to do it repeatedly.  Ours in particular relies on a basic technological development to really take off, so we need to jump forward from the very beginnings of civilization... oh, about 2000 years.

The Difference Technology Makes

Because we don't intend to walk through multiple magical systems, we should probably explain why technology matters at all.  Briefly, let's consider some different magical systems we could have used.  The Vagrant Dog Productions team being hacks, we'll go ahead and use some well-known magical systems with the serial numbers filed off to make our point.

  Spellbooks and Component Pouches.  Consider a system where magic is a readily available energy that anyone with the proper knowledge (and many without but a natural talent for manipulating the energy) can mold said energy to create a magical effect.  A combination of trial and error and the innate belief of the caster that their selected method will work has crafted a set of known spells over thousands of years.  The individual effects vary from caster to caster, but every caster knows that casting fireball involves an intonation of coordinates, a specific gesture, and holding the ingredients for gunpowder in a cup made by curling three fingers of your dominant hand.

This system doesn't require much in the way of technology for magic to work.  The vast majority of restrictions, knowledge, and accessories are designed to make casting come more naturally, but high-level casters get good enough that they can ignore even these "requirements" and cast basic spells freely.  For a system like this, our spellbook building would be more rigorous, but we wouldn't worry about technology.

  The Song of Creation.  Any sufficiently advanced skill, in this system, is indistinguishable from magic.  The "casters" themselves are often confused as to why people keep saying their stuff is magical.  One might even believe them, until you hear that the things they craft are objects such as a crown that burns the evil from those who touch it, ships that can sail off the edge of the world, and chain mail that can negate kinetic energy in the same way that Captain America's shield could in the Avengers movies.  And even among these wonders, there are unknowably ancient guys with staffs of authority who can speak to animals, ignite objects with a whispered command, and smite demons with a gesture of defiance.

This system requires a great deal of knowledge about how the world works, so you would be forgiven for thinking that scientific advancement would be involved, but no.  In this particular setting, knowledge of the world involves learning snatches of the Song of Creation, which created and defined existence.  Learn the part of the song that, say, described a very specific rock, and by altering the song, you alter the rock's properties.  To put it in a more modern parlance, the Song of Creation is the programming that created the universe.  Learning magic means learning the code, getting to the point that you can find a specific line of code that relates to what you're doing, and carefully editing the code.  The more powerful you are, the more system authority you have, with the most powerful beings capable of altering the entire world... though it does come at a cost, because even the greatest of beings only have a limited number of edits they can make.

  The Future of Clarke's Third Law.  At the opposite end of the spectrum is a setting that would require us to iterate repeatedly, though not necessarily from the beginning of civilization.  Consider a future so far advanced from our own that we can't understand how the technology works.  We're honestly pretty close already, what with the electrified rocks that so many of us read these articles on.  Still, go even further out.  Technology advances to the point that the entire planet is inundated with, say, nanites- nanoscopic robots that execute pre-programmed functions upon receiving the relevant command.  Since nobody can see the nanites, it would appear as though someone giving them commands were invoking magic through some arcane language, especially if we advance the setting to the point where nobody remembers that there are nanites, merely what happens when you give the commands.

In such a setting, iteration is necessary.  Nanites replicating a fireball on command doesn't make much sense.  However, nanites creating a spark of ignition on command would make sense in certain scenarios, and then tweaking the baseline parameters for the spark could mimic an explosion, in much the same way that young delinquents like to take cigarette lighters and adjust the flame on them to ludicrous lengths.  To get your fireball (or any other spell), you would need to start with "What did the original creators of the nanites want to do?" and work your way to "How do people use a warped version of that same command now?"

  Magical Educational Systems.  Roughly 800,000 books have been written about magical academies, and the number is likely only lightly exaggerated.  Each of them works in roughly the same way:  Technology has developed mostly independent of magic, to a point similar to that of Europe during the XX century.  Crucially, things are far enough along that private institutes of learning are a thing, which puts us no earlier than the 9th century A.D.  From here, any future technological developments are inexorably linked to magic.

The magical systems themselves are varied, although in practice most of them seem to consist of waving a hand or a stick, shouting the name of the spell, and unleashing the fanciest elemental magic that the special effects team can afford.  The important thing here is that two iterations have to occur.  First, technology has to get at least as far without magic as that 9th-century cutoff, to justify the existence of academies at all.  Second, if there's any technology past that point, you have to go at least one round with magic available to see what changes are made.

The Line in The Technological Sand

Our own setting has two points where technology irrevocably alters our magical system.  The first isn't when writing is developed, although you would be forgiven for thinking so, since sigils are where it's at.  Instead, it's when the predecessors to paper are developed.  The first time that a scroll or book can be used to store sigils and carry them around, rather than a slab of some sort, instantly turns magic casters from dangerous sorts slowly turning into monsters (which, if you'll recall, is one of the consequences of not using sigils) into walking, low-level artillery units.  As portable writing becomes more compact, casters become more varied in their ability.

The second, and this is where we're going to iterate to next, is when people figure out languages.  Not how to speak them- how they work.  Because sigils are effectively a form of programming that you can force reality to run using magical power, that programming, perforce, has a certain syntactic order to it.  In turn, this means that it can be deciphered, and when that occurs, casters will be able to craft whichever spell they like, so long as they can properly write the code for the effect.  They don't need to know that the effect is similar to writing a computer program- they just need to know how to write the set of commands.  And that means knowing how languages are put together in the first place.

On Earth, the gap between those two points was some 2,000 years.  The Egyptians invented papyrus in about 3000 BCE, and the first systematic language analysis, on Sanskrit, occurred somewhere between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.  Since we're taking our cue ancient-technology-wise from Earth history, it stands to reason that we should probably do the same for the development of scientific fields.

With this, we are ready to go through the 2,000-year gap between these two points and investigate how magic can make said gap shorter.  Of course, we've also run out of space for this article, so that will have to wait until next time.  Womp, womp.

Conclusion

We didn't get as far as we would have liked this week, but on the bright side, we have at least explained why the cycle we're performing is important and how you can apply it to your own system.  Hopefully that's a decent consolation prize.  In the mean time, look forward to next week, when we finally get around to what we talked about last week.