DeusExBrockina
@DeusExBrockina
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DeusExBrockina
@DeusExBrockina
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RightRevJake
@RightRevJake

Magic in stories, I think, always deserves to be treated as something thematically meaningful. What it is and how it works in a setting deserves some consideration. If magic is just a Thing You Can Do, I tend to lose interest.

This is a big part of why I love The Sword, the Crown, and the Unspeakable Power. The Unspeakable Power, whatever form it takes in your session, is the source of magic for all player characters and it has a will of its own. How you use it and what you sacrifice for it matters a LOT.

In R Scott Bakker's The Second Apocalypse series, the metaphysics of sorcery is deeply tied into the existential struggle of the characters. Similarly so with Erikson's Malazan series.

idk man magic should be more meaningful than a weird gun you shoot by wiggling your fingers.


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in reply to @DeusExBrockina's post:

The hours of time I thought I wasted listening to people talk about 5E wizard identity, finally becoming relevant!

Wizards are like, too abstract to have any drama emerging from just the class identity itself. I’ve seen a lot of discussion on the archetypical relationship between Wizards and Sorcerers being founded on the wizards resentment of the Sorcerer for being born with magical powers that the Wizard had to work for, but I think it’s because ultimately that the Wizard is not beholden to their source of power (having independently mastered magic through study) that they don’t really come pre-loaded with an interesting relationship to the world at large, beyond perhaps being a WMD.

This deeply reminds me of Filamena Young's novels (I think the first one is Reaching Out?) about how witches have magic that's very folk very casual and freeform and never done the same way twice. But sorcerers (wizards really) have magic that's entirely based on forcing things to bend to their will by doing it the same way every time. That ritual magic, inherently uncreative and violent has a lot of metaphorical power.

in reply to @DeusExBrockina's post:

I will say, I don't think going and studying a thing has to be boring. I come at this from the perspective of having a skill set that people often attribute to magic that is actually just doing a thing for a really long time to the point you're really good at it, but I think the way you make that interesting is by making the result REALLY specific. Just like academia actually is, once you have studied enough to become The Thing, your actual field of expertise should be extremely niche to exactly what you studied and wrote your dissertation on or whatever.