The Magic of Magicbuilding: Spellbook Construction

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're trying to figure out how the people of our setting would use the magic we've put together to make things Go Away™.  Spoiler alert: our title for this post is going to prove quite apt.

What We Have So Far

We've put together a sturdy enough framework that we can start figuring out how people would use magic as civilization develops, and we already know that magic will evolve alongside technology.  One other thing that we know our people will want to do is to use magic to deal with extra-dimensional creatures and monsters.  It's a bit of a natural response to seeing those same creatures using magic themselves.

Something important to consider is that, while initial magic likely won't involve sigils, over time, nearly all magic will utilize them.  Sigils are much, much safer than regular magic to use and produce a more uniform result.  Since sigils can be considered a variety of writing, we can get an idea of how people will use magic by considering how writing developed on Earth.  After all, sigils of the present might be placed with stickers and stencils, but the first sigils will predate modern writing surfaces.

Writing On The Wall

The first writing surface for sigils is hard to pin down, but one surface that will rapidly see use is the dwelling wall.  It's nearby, stable, and smooth, and unlike a floor, there is no concern of the sigils being marred by traffic.

One of the interesting things about our chosen magic system is that location, in part, dictates use.  For example, the first sigils to see use will likely be quality-of-life sigils, such as lighting.  Air conditioning and heating are also options, and considering that our people will have many, if not most, of their dwellings in trees, sigils are much safer than fireplaces.  Once the concept becomes known, similar wall-based sigils can serve the same purpose as indoor plumbing.

These applications are interesting, but what we're primarily concerned with this week is how to use sigils to protect.  Those methods won't be used in individual houses as much as to protect the community as a whole, for much the same reason that city walls are (initially) more popular than defensive walls around individual houses.  In fact, for the same reason that dwelling walls are a great place to put sigils, city walls will also be a great place to put sigils.  We haven't developed a way to trigger sigils, so they will be active defenses.  Picture guards roaming the walls, as you would see in any classical or medieval city in a fantasy setting, with the key difference being that, in the event of an attack, they rush to place a hand on a prominent, semi-permanent sigil.  The sigil activates, and one of the four primary elemental energies pours out.  Water splashes down the walls, blocks of stone spring up, and blasts of fire, wind, and lightning surge directly toward the attackers.

How, exactly, those energies defend the cities will depend in part on the walls themselves, and because magic and technology develop side by side on our world, we can expect the two to influence each other.  We'll get into that specific aspect a bit more in our next Worldbuilding Wednesday post, but for now, we suggest thinking about how elemental energies might be used against the monsters (and larger predators) of our world.  Remember, think basic.  You can't expect our people to leap from "I can summon a gout of flame" to "I can use this chain of sigils to power a steam engine that in turn drives a ballista capable of automatic firing," any more than you can expect construction technology to jump from "let's make an artificial cave to sleep in" to "I've got this idea for something I'm calling a 'skyscraper.'"

Portable Mayhem

The problem with sigil placement on walls is that you cannot simply pick up a wall and take it with you if you want to move the sigil.  This is a known problem, and one of the reasons that we invented paper.  Before paper, we used stone and clay tablets, runestones, carved sticks, and similar items to make movable writing, and when sigils are developed, the natural inclination is to use similar methods to make them movable as well.  Our first mages will carry a half-dozen or so carved sigils, each allowing for a basic use that will work regardless of the location of the sigil at the time.  Battles between mages will (initially) involve manipulating their opponent into position so that one of their pre-prepped spells can land.

Wands and staves may pop up later.  In both cases, the ability to precisely carve a sigil (or sigils) onto their surface will dictate how and when they'll be used.  In between staves and clay tablets will be smaller, sturdier, shaped stones- think something like a runestone, but with a sigil in place of the rune.

Ultimately, the development of paper will lead to the spellbook.  The ability to carry dozens of sigils, each with accompanying information for reference, is the magic equivalent of a gun.  Printing presses, in turn, will allow for democratization of magecraft in the same way that mass production of rifles spelled the end of knights.

Most of these developments are future considerations.  The important part is that, when people first start weaponizing magic, they'll do so by carrying around pre-drawn sigils that they then activate.  Since they're pre-drawn, they'll have a limited effect, and magic will develop in a direction that encourages either finding a sigil that is always useful, or setting up combat so that a specific sigil can find use.  Given that our setting has a strong inclination for trap-setting, we'll more likely see the latter than the former.

Magical Combat:  Preparation is Key

One of the advantages of preparing the field of combat with an eye for traps in mind is that our casters won't be limited to the sigils they carry.  They'll have time to craft sigils within the area they wish to fight in, adjusting them to fit the specific area and their plans.

Conversely, one of the major disadvantages of sigil magic is that it requires a level of preparation and forethought to be useful.  If you're just carrying sigils meant to generate pillars of earth, that won't help you against a winged fae flying overhead.  Similarly, using custom-crafted sigils to take advantage of the combat area only works if you actually have time to craft those sigils.

This is true regardless of how many pre-crafted sigils a caster has available- a few slabs, a sack of etched stones, a shaved staff covered in sigils, or even a spellbook.  Any fight that doesn't allow for that time and preparation suggests that the ideal tactic is to create that time.  While a caster could do that by themselves, having someone else whose entire job is to cover the caster is more efficient.

...And just like that, we've justified the development of adventuring parties.  Casters, covered by warriors of various stripes, not quite glass cannons but certainly most powerful when the group works together to corner an opponent just so.  While they wouldn't actually be enchanted items, by the time staves are a useful magical tool, it would be possible to put at least one or two sigils on other weapons as well, allowing for limited casting from the others.  Should these parties decide to subjugate nearby dungeons filled with monsters and extra-dimensional creatures, they'll want to bring with them someone capable of bypassing the various mechanical traps meant to kill said creatures.  A typical adventuring party would need at least one warrior, one magic-user, one dungeon expert... just as they have for the last 50 or so years.

Considering that mass combat will not be popular, due to its expense and the lack of population pressure inciting such behavior, the majority of combat seen on our world will come in two flavors: guards protecting the cities from incursions by monsters, and adventurers thinning out the monster population, likely by delving into the dungeons that form to trap them.  Should that be the case, we can now see that casters will come in three primary flavors themselves: adventuring types, wandering afield; casters that work to defend the city; and, most common of all, casters drawing sigils inside of houses, keeping the lights on.

Conclusion

Not only do we have a rough idea of how magical combat will look, we also have a rough progression of how casting sigil magic through the ages will look.  Some of what we've discussed today has interesting implications for development in the future.  Perhaps most tantalizing is the idea of using people themselves as a canvas for sigils.  Nothing we've discussed so far precludes the idea of making temporary sigils with, say, woad paint that briefly warps a warrior's strength to near-dangerous levels.  Similarly, tattoos could serve to grant their bearer the ability to permanently call on a specific magic.  Care would be extremely necessary; imagine what the magical version of a "No Regerts" tattoo would be like.

We're far enough along now that we can start coming up with specific (but generic in application) spells that would see use.  We won't be generating a definitive list, but a descriptive one is possible, using example spells to establish the known boundaries of our magical system.  We'll see how far we get next week.