The Magic of Magicbuilding: Introduction

Hi!  We've gotten far enough into our worldbuilding process over on Worldbuilding Wednesdays that we can start considering the fine art of crafting magical systems.  The thing is, that's a complicated bit of work in its own right, so we've decided to spin it off into its own feature!  Every Friday, we'll spend some time building a magical system, explaining as we go what we're doing and why.

The Magic of Metaphor

When we first started talking about worldbuilding, we likened it to building a house.  The metaphor is pretty apt, and you can approach it any number of ways: working on a foundation, utilizing a design philosophy, customizing for a specific client/audience, etc.

If we were to talk about magic building the same way, it would be more akin to developing a sport.  Your house (which, in our metaphor, is the world you're building) can stand without it, if you've done everything right, but it's something fun for your characters to engage in.  Should the sport be important enough, those characters might be defined by their association, or lack thereof, with the sport.  Maybe being really good at the sport can make them rich and influential.  Maybe being extraordinarily bad at the sport makes them a pariah... or maybe nobody cares.  Maybe other characters treat them differently based on which "team" they support.

Another reason to treat magic building similarly to sports is that, while you don't need magic to make a world, magic can definitely impact the world to varying levels.  Maybe your magic system is like table tennis, and the most impact it will have on the world is if a ping pong ball bounces off one of your world's "windows."  Maybe it's more like football, and you have to play it very carefully to avoid wrecking your house/world.  Maybe it's like polo, and your world is going to need drastic alterations to survive, since most houses aren't built for horses to gallop through.  It will all depend on the sport you end up developing.

Casual vs Competitive Gameplay

For this first post, we're going to focus on the most basic questions you'll need to answer before you even start making a magic system.  Of those, the most important is the amount of organization you're interested in.  Put simply:  will you be building a soft magic system, or a hard magic system?

Or, to continue with our metaphor:  Are you putting together a sport that you and your friends can play casually, or a sport that will have competitions and professionals playing?  And before you assume, note that we make no judgments either way.  There are advantages and drawbacks to both approaches.

  Soft Magic.  Soft magic is, by its nature, not clearly defined.  It shies away from rules and definition, and favors spectacle and feel instead.  Surprisingly, a classic example of soft magic is The Lord of the Rings.  For someone who wrote an entire book because he wanted to keep track of what color a door was, J.R.R. Tolkien was a firm believer that magic was not meant to be explained.  Rather, it was the will of powerful characters, worked upon the world through grace and song.  Done right, a soft magic system allows for greater narrative control and an immersive sense of wonder.

  The downside to soft magic is that, being ill-defined, it is also unreliable.  You'll never be certain what exactly can be done with magic, if anything at all.  Soft magic also tends to turn into a crutch for lazy storytellers, as they write themselves into a corner and spontaneously decide that magic will get them right back out.  For every instance of Gandalf confronting a balrog with staff and sword, you also have an instance of someone bellowing, "Why didn't they just have the eagles fly them to Mordor?"

  Hard Magic.  Hard magic is science fiction.  One of our favorite adages is Clarke's Third Law and its corollary, which we've mentioned before and will state here again:  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," and "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."  When someone writes science fiction, especially hard science fiction, they take rules that we are familiar with- laws of science- and apply them in novel ways.  When someone writes a hard magic system, they also take rules and apply them in novel ways.  The only difference is that the rules they start with are not necessarily the laws of science that we are familiar with.

  Hard magic is built upon rules, and it lives and dies by those rules.  They are its strength and weakness, for once you have those rules in place, you can rather precisely determine what happens when magic enters your world... but your system is only as good as the rules you use to define it.  A poor set of rules will cause more problems than they fix, and a good set of rules is wildly difficult to conceive.  Wizards of the Coast, the owners of Dungeons & Dragons, have been trying to craft an ideal hard magic system for decades.  Ask even their most ardent fan if they've succeeded.

Splitting The Difference

Returning to our sports metaphor, what we're effectively saying is:  we've decided to invite a bunch of people to come play with us at our new house.  We've further decided that what we'll be playing is an entirely new sport, and our first question is, "Do we want to play something like Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes- a game where the only rule is you can't use the same rule twice?  Or do we want to play something like Formula 1 Racing, which has some 300 pages of regulations?"

Confronted with these two options, most folks opt to split the difference, and we'll be doing the same, but the question still has some use.  Most of that use comes from the follow-up question:  "Okay, where will you be splitting the difference?"

Let us be clear.  There is no ideal answer to that question.  The more rules you apply, the more the wonder of your magical world will be cranked down into discrete, knowable chunks.  Along with that, each additional rule cranks up the complexity of the system.  While it is every creator's dream to hit the sweet spot, where the magic system has enough rules to clearly define all aspects without issue, but also retain enough wonder that you haven't just relabeled "physics" as "magic," the best we can reasonably shoot for is "fun, useful, and doesn't contradict itself."

Given our metaphor, where does that put us?  Well, knowing our tendencies here at Vagrant Dog Productions, we'll be happy if our new sport is around the level of lacrosse- lots of shouting and running, people wearing silly headgear and waving sticks at each other, but mostly safe to play indoors if you use socks instead of balls.  And if Billy accidentally knocks over a vase while playing goalie, well, that's part of the fun too.

We might need to make sure our house has high ceilings, though, just in case.

Conclusion

We've set a target level of complexity for our magic system.  As we explore magic building, we'll be slowly but surely writing rules for how magic works in our world.  These rules will encompass how to use magic, as well as the consequences of its use, not just within the system itself, but also in our house.

Speaking of, stop by next Friday.  We'll be hitting one of our favorite topics, consequences.