Gisk

Mundane fantastic slice of life

I've added some of my work in progress to the opening post. Nothing is set in stone there yet, but I'm working on it.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

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I'm just trying to twist my mind around to how this came about so I can better image a character to fit within its framework. I'll probably file the bits I brought up for a future rp.

@Expendable

Yeah, I hear you, believe me! In this world, magic is one of the sciences. It isn't treated differently from engineering, electricity, radiation etc, and it developed alongside them.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

@naomimyselfandi Ah! Yes, sorry! It really did keep getting buried, my bad. It sounds great, algorithmic spellcraft is definitely a thing, too. If you need a spell to affect things differently depending on certain criteria, or to only affect certain targets etc.

I think I've brought up that there's some very real overlap between programming and spellwriting. But if I'm to understand correctly, this person isn't studying magic personally, are they?

Mundane fantastic slice of life

@Expendable magic is an accepted part of the the natural world in this setting. Your questions keep centering around magic and science as opposing forces, but in this setting they are not. Magicians didn't come out, because they were never hidden.

I recognize the instinct to try to fit everything together, because you're right that the world would be drastically different if magic were real. But the premise of this roleplay is that magic is just another part of modern life. I know there are aspects that are unrealistic, and if I were trying to make a movie or publish a book I might try harder to address them.

As Naomi points out, yes, anyone can use magic.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

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Okay, magical alternate world scenario. What is the level of technology in this world? Keep in mind that most of the things in our lives were created out of need - ships, planes, cars, etc. Who needs electricity if you have magic? Want to preserve food? Make a preserving cabinet. You can put hot food in, then come back days or weeks later and the food is still hot on the plate.

Why build cars or planes if you have a flying broomstick or carpet?
Why build motors or engines if you can craft golems who do all the physical work - pumping water, winding gears to make ship's propellers turn, etc?
Why build telephones or computers if you can use crystal balls?

DO we have classes in the natural sciences?

@Expendable

my mindset on that stuff is 'because it's not easy to do' and 'there's potentially very bad drawbacks for doing it wrong or badly'. Part of a setting idea like this is to just accept the premise and suspend the disbelief and allow it to exist for its own sake, methinks.

@Fading Memory

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I know this was a rhetorical question, but I don't think it should be. "Magic as technology" is one approach, and many well-respected stories use it, but it's not the only way, and I don't think it's the approach @Gisk wants to take. As long as magic requires a witch, it will never replace electricity - no one's going to contract a witch every time they want to put the kettle on. To be clear, I'm not trying to argue for the superiority of either approach; I'm just not sure we're collectively on the same page about what sort of story we're trying to tell here.

Gisk, am I correct in understanding that you see the setting here as more or less like the real world?

@naomimyselfandi

Yes, 1994, and it's more or less the real world.

Fading and Naomi(is that an appropriate thing to call you?) both raise good points for answering your question, @Expendable, and I'm going to expound a little more.

I said before that magic is prescriptive. What I mean by this is that, in a given spell, you have use magical principles to tell the spell exactly what to do. Magic requires understanding, and our scientific knowledge of the world has been essential for increasing our magical capabilities. So magic and science developed together in this world.

Remember that I've said magic used to have a reputation for being unpredictable? That's because before our understanding of science caught up, we would create magical effects by pure trial and error, and then just repeating the steps that produced what we wanted. Magic was powerful and mysterious, but unreliable. And our understanding and use of magic tracks with our understanding and use of science.

So, yes, you have to take natural science classes. But I won't make you as the writer explain the full mathematical implications of every spell your character casts ;P

Also, like my pal Fading said, don't forget to suspend your disbelief a little.

I know magic is often the most interesting thing in a given setting, but I want to remind everyone that it's meant to be just background to an RP about a bunch of friends fucking around over the summer. It's fun to peek at it behind the curtain every once in a while, so I certainly won't put a stop to these discussions, but let's not get bogged down by details.

And if you've seen me around, you know I'm the pot calling the kettle black with that one, but there you go.

Busy few days, ahhhhh

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OT a bit, but if you want to use real-world scientific principles, this is the first law of thermodynamics ("The energy of a closed system remains constant").

@naomimyselfandi

Uh, fair point there. No fourth law but I stand by that Newton invented a lot of the math that magicians use to analyze their magic. He was also a major forerunner in kinetic magic. There are still apples in orbit from his experiments.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

@kalanggam The Blue Ridge Mountains actually span multiple states! But funnily enough, most of the features listed in Country Roads are in fact in VA, and not WV.

Great character, happy to have him.

@Expendable Yes, absolutely!

I think a great real world analogue for magic is electricity. It's a powerful force that exists in nature in various forms. Humanity, through study and experimentation, have learned to harness and refine it, to the point that we can use it for amazing things.

It is common knowledge, feature in every day life, and anybody would recognize it immediately if they encountered it. People have varying degrees of knowledge about it, and how to use it. There are a variety of professions and fields that utilize it, and some people even work with it as a hobby.

The RP takes place the summer of 1994.
SHU was founded in 1790.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

Well you're certainly welcome!

So I'm planning to write up town details and a character sheet this weekend(the weekend for me includes Monday, just saying that ahead of time lol) but I'm at work right now. For today, I'll probably pop in occasionally to say things like:

"Magician" is an official title, like a medical doctor. You can't just call yourself one, you have to actually attend school and pass exams. Someone who practices magic without passing official exams is called a witch(this term is gender neutral). Not all professional magic users are fully qualified magicians, witches can be employed in all kinds of fields. If they do magic for money, technically they are supposed to be registered with a state governing body.

I like my players playing a roll in world building, so if you want to write up a town feature to submit, feel free! I may make some small tweaks before adding it to the town's lore, but I'd love to see what people want to add.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

@kalanggam great list! I actually also live in a smallish college town, so this list is funny to me because of how much of it I recognize.

A quick note: this is in the western part of Virginia, not West Virginia. It probably doesn't matter a lot, but I wanted to nip that confusion in the bud.

My own character idea is a young townie. Big awkward gay mechanic. Their family runs a local mechanic shop that's been there for generations. They actually went to SHU for their Auto Tech program, so any of the characters who were upperclassmen might have seen them around for some basic classes, and/or orientation.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

Newton's Fourth Law explains that in a given magical system, the energy applied in its effect will be equal to or less than the energy supplied to the system. There is complicated math to describe the loss of energy through inefficiencies in the spellcasting.

But we're getting a little off the rails here.

I'm calling the school Sanctuary Hill University, and it's situated in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western Virginia.

Tell me things that y'all want to see in this town, so I can include them as I work on writing it up.

Mundane fantastic slice of life

Maybe it's considered more like a private Ivy League school - difficult admissions process, requiring outstanding extracurricular activities/achievements or strong SAT/ACT/equivalent scores. It's divided a College of Theurgical and Thaumaturgical Arts which has additional requirements to get into (like how one might have to audition to get into a performing arts school, or need an impressive project on their resume to get into a technical institute) and has interdisciplinary studies within other traditional colleges, which were gradually incorporated in the 1800s/1900s as firearms industrialized, becoming more deadly and gaining equal, if not greater, footing against magic.

@kalanggam

On the contrary, I was thinking this was like a step down from a state college. Like, it's old and historic, and certainly capable. But in terms of prestige? This is some kid's safety school.

Like, sure, there's a graveyard where every dean has been buried since the school opened. And maybe the dead deans serve as a ghost council that advises the current dean. But at Yale, the dean is an actual vampire, so I mean it's kinda lame when you think about it.

It also definitely has more mundane curriculums. It's definitely worth noting that magic isn't a monolithic field. Like, one person might go to Sanctuary Hill University for eight years to learn medical magic, and another is there for two to get a certificate to use kinetic magic on a construction site.

For the magic system, I think it makes sense for nothing to happen if you don't have enough materials - like in chemistry, when you don't have enough reagent for a reaction to continue. If you do something wrong, your magic can backfire, sometimes in improbable or bizarre ways, perhaps with even greater force than what your initial input was. A simple prank hex could become a harsh curse.

Maybe magic, like life, is just borrowed energy - as such no spell can last forever, and at some point it must decay and return its energy to nature. A magical contract can fade if it isn't "fed." Everyday enchantments need some kind of fuel to keep going - there are a variety of associated costs or sacrifices with them, but there's always a price to be paid, even if that price is trivial, silly (perhaps whimsical, even), or embraced with enthusiasm.

@kalanggam

I definitely think you're on the money about cost, although I don't know that we want to plan too much about magic. My idea here is for the magic and fantastical elements to be a little like window dressing for a college town slice of life.

I like the idea of keeping the process of doing magic deliberately vague, since it's a tool for the narrative, and not the focus of it. But there's definitely a need to define some general rules and boundaries.

Like you say, any spell has a cost, and the cost must be paid for the spell to remain in effect. By the same token, I think we can hold with "equivalent exchange" as described in Fullmetal Alchemist.

Ritual fires burn without smoke, and don't give off heat, because the fuel isn't being expended for the fire, but for the spell. Cold spots are a telltale sign that magic has been done, because spells suck heat out of the air. Particularly vigorous spellcasting can create enough cold spots to make warmer air rush in, causing gusts of wind, even indoors.

Magic is prescriptive. You have to write a spell, and lay out its elements to describe your desired effect. It's kind of like programming in a way. You don't raise your hand and cast a fireball, you arrange the formulae to describe your fireball, and hope that you didn't mess up the scale or intensity. Magic requires preparation.