• he/him

shameless furry turbobisexual
astrophysics undergrad
professional manwhore boyfailure

pfp by DumbDogDoodles!


Twitter (I refuse to call it “ex”)
twitter.com/apoapsls?s=21

FreyjaKatra
@FreyjaKatra

What is your fantasy setting's ultimate act of magic?

It doesn't have to be a spell, necessarily. It just has to be some thing to do with the magic of your world.

Warhammer and Drain Magic

In Warhammer Fantasy, old world, one of the ultimate spells - and arguably the ultimate spell - is the one that drains magic from the world. Magic is carried on the wind from an ancient portal on the north pole that is constantly spilling for chaos, and Ulthuan - realm of the high elves - hosts a maelstrom that drains magic back out, like an everflowing bathtub. They can wield this on a small scale with their High Magic, and in its various incarnations it's an ultimate dispel, makes casting magic more difficult or impossible, kills magical beings and banishes demons. The ultimate act of magic is the denial of magic, to yourself and to others, a reflection of the kind of attitude the greatest mages of the setting - the high elves, wood elves, slann - have towards magic as a force in their world. It says so much about the setting.

Frieren and the favorite spell

In Sousou No Frieren, there is no one ultimate magic, no ultimate defense or ultimate attack. The magic that matters to you as a person most is the ultimate magic, whether it's in what it does for you or - more commonly - how it represents your connection to others. Frieren uses her teacher's favorite spell - one that conjures flowers - to conjure the favorite flower of her deceased party leader, one she realized only too late that she was in love with. She has a deep abiding love for the petty strange weird spells of humanity because she was there for the birth of magic among humanity, and this is how she has her power in the narrative of Frieren.

D&D and Wish

Hate to mention it, frankly, because it's boring. Wish is simply "magic that lets you do anything." The ultimate power fantasy of a power fantasy, it largely has been defined through the years as 'can let you play a character longer', 'can raise your stats' and 'can let you win at the economy.' One of its most powerful expressions is 'can cast magic that is otherwise denied to me by the arbitrary class system.' Only a subset of characters even gets Wish as an option and it's always been a huge problem and headache, but never removed because it is, for better or worse, the ultimate expression of what the game is and what it's saying, down to 'wizards rule everyone else drools.'

Kamehameha

How is that the "ultimate spell" of Dragonball, Freyja? Surely it's one of the forms, or other techniques like spirit bomb?

No. It's Kamehameha. Used in any form. Reliant on the core of Dragonball's entire philosophy of personal strength. Magnifies the power of the user, based on the user. Crosses generations, denotes passing of torches, literally creates the classic beam struggle that represents clashes of people and their ideals. The spirit bomb is merely part of the philosophy of Kamehameha, an expression that being personally strong isn't always enough, but strength used for others might be; the strongest Kamehameha is always the one used for the sake of both the self and others. The personification of pure strength of self, used selflessly.

It is the essence of what dragonball is, given pure expression, defining the story far more than any other technique. Strength of self and selflessness.

What is my ultimate spell?

For a setting me and my wife to be @quakefultales are making, we talked about this. What are we doing and saying? We want a cosmopolitan fantasy setting that involves mass cooperation in the face of impending disaster. We landed, after a brief discussion, on the ultimate spell being understanding. Magic in this setting is (probably) going to reflect real life cognitive dissonance and competing ideas, inherently contradictory mutually and in the self, more an artistic or philosophical expression than a coherent set of physical replicable rules. The ultimate spell will be fully understanding someone's magic expression. To comprehend them, essentially, as who they are as individuals, fully and utterly. To See. To be seen. It will (probably) be characterized as a form of perfect defense against their magic while active.

What is your ultimate magic?



You must log in to comment.

in reply to @FreyjaKatra's post:

In the setting I have scattered across documents and half-made notes, magic is an inherent property of the world that led to cultures having vastly different approaches to it. Long-lived peoples spending centuries as an individual carefully developing methods to begin working it, multi-generational scholars passing their studies to their interested children and eager apprentices to speed their understanding, or rituals to just pump a bunch of latent magic energy into a person and hope the resulting natural talent is not immediately wildly dangerous.

It results in a lot of unpredictability: one could just as easily find themselves turned into another physical form entirely as ending up only being able to light candles with a touch. Studies from all approaches end up discovering two unwavering truths: Any practicing mage finds themselves tuned to one particular application of magic over the others, and there's no way to know what that is until it happens.

So as far as the ultimate magic goes, with it being such a personalized experience, it would likely be the moment someone understands why they use magic how they do. Sometimes it's easy, as a healer carefully undoes the ills of others and feels the contentment of helping the way they can, and other times, understanding does not come until the man who entered the infusing ritual circle and left it with scales, wings, and an urge to hoard things in the corner to build a nest finally builds up the strength of her wings enough to soar for the first time and realize "This is right."

To start at the very beginning, in my setting everything was originally a maelstrom of magical potential. Anything could take shape but nothing would last for more than fractions of a moment. That was until the voice of a god called out and by her decree did Prisma cast the magic into a vibrant spectrum. That's basically her whole thing, division not for the sake of enforcing hard boundaries but to allow for granularity. To allow everything to have some unique aspect to it.

Thus the most powerful form of magic in this setting is Prismatic magic, where one channels all forms of magic at once without them collapsing into a incongruent mass. It's incredibly difficult for any being, mortal or divine, short of Prisma herself to use even a sliver of this sort of magic, but it would allow one to alter reality in exactly the same way she can.

I haven't read much fantasy, but the first example you give reminds me a lot of what I remember from the ending of the Inheritance cycle. Magic, seen as a force that can be used for benefit of the individual as easily as for the benefit of others, is ultimately removed from the world entirely. An wall between those who can use magic and those who cannot is felled.

One of my favorite endings, simply for the ramifications it has.

A lot of the magic in my dieselpunk setting is either offensive or maneuverable in nature, and tends to be personal in scale with the exception of three areas: transportation, warfare, and construction/fabrication. The ability to make giant hulks of steel fly and build things require industrial amounts of the setting's magic fuel, crystals called arcadium that concentrate particles of weird (used in the same sense as "Weird sisters") energy called thaumata, but even those are dwarfed by the power requirements of defensive magics, namely light diffraction and elementally-based shielding.

(magical analogues or equivalents to nuclear weapons remain a mystery, but there is still time in the setting to lock that box.)

Perfect focus and awareness, or absolutely incandescent passion, is required to maintain the face of a shielding Power, which is why armor is the preferred method of defense (and is one of the chief ways nonmagical people can get and maintain an edge over magical people) in that world.

But every so often, one person will have something they believe in with such utter conviction, have something they need to protect with such complete devotion of their soul, that they can charge facefirst into the fires of Hell and emerge unscathed.