The Magic of Magicbuilding: Hard and Soft Limits

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'll be discussing what happens when we set boundaries in our relationship.

...With magic, we mean.

The Return of Hard and Soft

Hey, remember when we talked about hard and soft magic?  One of the things that differentiates hard magic and soft magic is just how firm the limits of magic are.  To compare these limitations, let's look at two of the most popularly depicted magical systems of all time.

  The Tolkienverse.  JRR Tolkien did not set out to build a magical system.  He set out to build a mythology, and the fact that the mythology followed certain rules created magic as a byproduct.  Possibly the best example of this is in The Fellowship of the Ring, when the Fellowship enters Lothlórien and marvels at the magic of the elves... and the elves respond with mild confusion, since they don't consider their works magical.  This is repeated both up and down the chain in Middle Earth; Aragorn prepares medicines that others consider magical and he considers just something you have to know when you're a ranger; the greatest of elves make works that are impossible for even angels to replicate, but consider them mere examples of skill, not magic; and the angels themselves sing to the world and mold it thereby, but consider this just one of those things that creation does.  For Tolkien, magic was simply what you called the abilities of others that were outside your ability to understand.  That some of those abilities lined up nicely with what we consider magic in popular culture today was a coincidence, not a goal.

Tolkien was a firm proponent of soft magic, and you'll see this again and again in his work.  Magic ebbs and grows in strength according to a wide variety of circumstances, up to and including its need in the narrative.  This was intentional, and Tolkien cleverly built the concept of "magic becomes stronger when I need it to become stronger" right into the universe through the assertion of Eru (the God Above All) and His will.  This is why, for example, the song of Luthien is strong enough to put to sleep even the mightiest being of Middle-Earth, Morgoth, despite Luthien being a "mere" elf.  This is why the Valar can destroy entire continents by accident, but even they cannot scratch the Silmarils, made by Fëanor, another elf.  The limits of magic, per Tolkien, are "wherever they need to be for my story to work."

  The Forgotten Realms.  There are several settings, each with similar magical frameworks, that are claimed by the creators and/or owners of Dungeons & Dragons.  Debatably, the most famous is the Forgotten Realms, invented by Ed Greenwood and given by him to TSR (which in turn handed it over to Wizards of the Coast) in exchange for getting paid to write lore about the Realms.  We could tell you stories about how the Forgotten Realms came to be, and the inspiration behind it- for example, the Sword Coast looks an awful lot like the Pacific Northwest for a reason- but instead, we'll focus on something important.

Unlike the other D&D settings used by the various sourcebooks, there are in-universe reasons for the way that magic works... as well as its limits.  Several millennia before the current year in the Realms, the strongest empire was one of wizard-kings, each capable of using epic magic spells to literally lop the tops of mountains, flip them, and build floating cities atop them.  The greatest of these wizard kings fashioned a spell so powerful that it could turn him into a literal god, albeit by stealing the power of divinity from another god.  In his arrogance, he decided to take the divinity of the goddess of magic, figuring it would make him the new god of magic.  Unfortunately, she was also the source of magic, so when he stole her godhood, all of magic briefly winked out of existence.  Among other things, this cancelled his spell... and the spells holding those floating cities in the sky.

The goddess of magic recovered quickly when her godhood returned, but she decided that mortals couldn't have access to that much power anymore.  The spell was a 12th-level spell; to make sure nobody got close, she capped spells at 10th level.  Further tweaks made later rendered even 10th-level spells so rare as to be legendary and epic in nature.

This is a sterling example of a hard magic system in action.  Not only are the abilities of magic strictly defined and codified, but magic has upper and lower bounds.  What's more, the closer you get to the upper bound, the more difficult the approach becomes; while the conventional limit is 10th-level spells, the functional limit tends to be 9th-level spells.  Past that requires so much effort that your typical "10th-level spell" is simply a slightly stronger 9th-level spell.

Last Time, on...

That brings us to the subject at hand.  When we left off last week, we had several questions about our magic system.  Most of them could be boiled down to, "What are the limitations of our magic system?"  To answer that, we should decide where exactly, on the scale of soft limits to hard limits, that we sit.

Due to the inclinations we've already discussed, we certainly aren't going to have very soft limits.  In fact, since our magic is meant to blend with technology and technology seems to have hard limits, we might be inclined to go all the way to the opposite end and set rigorously defined hard limits.

That would be a mistake, mostly because technology's limits aren't as hard as you might think.

Take computer technology as an example.  At one point, the upper limit for miniaturization was thought to be the molecular level; past that, we wouldn't be able to build individual devices that responded in 1s and 0s.  Then the concept of quantum tunneling was looked at with a critical eye.  Suddenly, spaces too small for electrons to fit through became valid, and miniaturization became an order of magnitude or so smaller.  It's possible to get smaller still, but it won't happen for some time.  Not because subatomic physics is a hard limit; even Planck lengths are just where how things work breaks down, not the absolute limit.  It's because, at the point we're at now, developing anything smaller isn't yet worth it economically.  Trust that as soon as some entrepreneur comes along and invests billions into making bacteria-sized nanobots that can eradicate disease in the human body, suddenly, engineers will find a way to use quarks to run computers instead of electrons.

All of science is like that.  The "hard limits" aren't hard so much as they are inconvenient to progress past.  We already have the technology to send people to Mars; the limit isn't building a shuttle, it's doing so within the budget that interested parties have set for it.  We could build generation ships that could travel between the stars, but that is ludicrously expensive.  We can fix climate change within a few years, but as of right now, the work we would have to do to fix things is more inconvenient than continuing to slowly destroy the planet.  Solving world hunger is a logistics issue, we already make more than enough food for everyone.  So on and so forth.

With that in mind, we've decided to use similar limits in our magic system.  By that, we mean that we'll have "hard but fuzzy" lines.  Magic will be possessed of limitless potential, but past a certain point, it "won't be worth it."

Consider our current concept of magic possessing a mental cost.  We've already established that going past a certain point would likely knock a person unconscious, and that it's possible to push past that point, but doing so would instead likely kill a person.  That's the kind of hard-but-fuzzy limit we're talking about: a known safe limit, and an unknown but dangerous-to-lethal limit.

We don't have to set that limit in terms of physical or mental effort just yet, but we do want something concrete for what we can do with magic.  To that end, let's close out by considering the limits of what can be drawn as "magical energy" from other dimensions.

Soft Science, Hard Magic

We've already made a few suppositions that will help us pin down what we want our limits to be.  There will be a Dimension of Fire, for example, that we can pull fire from.  That's fairly straightforward; fire is thermal energy, thermal energy is an application of kinetic energy, and kinetic energy is just particles in motion.  We also mentioned a Dimension of Water that we could pull water from.  That would imply that our magical portals are strong enough to pull entire molecules through.

We also said that the Chthonic Realms could be tapped to heal, and that the First World could be tapped to create enchantments.  That's... less particle-based.  In fact, it's less science-based altogether.  Should we change that aspect of our magical framework?

This will make things more complicated, but we think the answer should be "no."  One of the things that distinguishes magic from science is the inherent unknowability of how, exactly, magic works.  Including aspects of magic in our framework that will have even the most weathered of archmages scratching their heads is technically something in our favor.  So with that in mind, here is our thought:

Magic involves drawing from one of a number of dimensions.  Though we've determined the sigils necessary to pull magic from a set of known dimensions, the number of potential dimensions to pull from is endless.  Many a mage makes their career in using experimentation and research to discover a new dimension of use.  Many more have discovered new dimensions, but learned that the energy pulled is not useful, or indeed dangerous.

Each dimension that is drawn from works by its own set of rules.  Regardless of the dimension, the sigils used to draw from them only pull basic aspects of their energy through.  So it is that, for example, we can pull fire from the Dimension of Fire, but nothing else, even though we're aware that creatures and spirits of flame exist in that dimension.  Similarly, we know that the Chthonic Realms and the First World both house sentient creatures, but when we tap those dimensions, we only pull through the essence of those dimensions.  Most famously, several dimensions that are made up of precious materials, such as gemstones, have been found... but drawing from them does not generate endless amounts of gemstones.  Instead, crystalline energy is pulled through, which can be used to create crystals out of available substances, but doesn't change their inherent worth.  You could shape a diamond using a portal to the Endless Caves, but you couldn't "make" one.

Conclusion

We now have our "hard-but-fuzzy" limit for what magic is capable of.  Energy can be manipulated, and the essence of a dimension can be pulled through, such as water from the Dimension of Water, or potentially Earth from the Dimension of Earth.  Beyond these most basic elements, however, magic shapes and forms, but does not create.  Even better, because the known dimensions are limited, if we consider a potential application of magic to be too problematic, we can simply say that the relevant dimension is not known.

However, this does bear investigating.  We've introduced a fairly significant change to the Form of our framework.  Before we go further, we should probably map out the consequences of that change, and decide if we can live with them.