Magic & Otherwise - How Special Powers Fit Into A Setting

Ralph Richardson playing Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest

Probably one of the first and biggest things that most folks remember about settings like Star Wars or Harry Potter's Wizarding World is the special powers inherent to those settings. Oh, fine, let's call a spade a spade: they both use magic. Same with Naruto, if we're being honest, except they call them "jutsus," and with the Avatar: the Last Airbender universe, where the powers are called "bending."

The examples above, as well as many more, are an example of how magic, or whatever your special powers are called, work as a functional and defining characteristic of your chosen universe. This particular blog posting will go over a few of what I consider essential plot-based reasons for making use of magic, present a few ideas for how you might adapt them into your own setting, or how you might explain these special powers to your players, if they're ever curious at the gaming table, or to your readers in your own writing, and of course present a lot of examples of all of the above as I go along. I plan to end the blog with a few examples of my own worlds and how I'm using magic - or whatever - in each of them, again, as living examples.

Before going any further, however, I am going to directly address the "magic/magick/majyckx/etcetera" controversy, because it annoys me enough to make me highly tempted to actually swear. When it comes to anything related to the occult, I generally take a look at whatever some...person...like Aleister Crowley and other charlatans and centers of cults of personality might do, and then ignore it. And yes, when I said "person" up there, I was indeed restraining myself from swearing. My opinion is simple: if you have to call it something besides "magic," because you claim that what you're doing is "real," or whatever, and different from stage magic, or illusionism, or...anything else, really, then no, you're not actually using real magic either. I first ran into this trend in the game Mage: the Ascension, looked into the real-world historical background behind the tendency, and have been deeply annoyed ever since: if you have to tack on a useless "-k" or anything else to show how special you are, you're just trying too hard and can be safely ignored.

Having said all that, the subject of juvenile behaviors with the supernatural is something other authors have brought up, such as Neil Gaiman in a notable scene involving a "new age pagan" in the book American Gods, and Terry Pratchett in Lords and Ladies. In both those cases, there are most definitely gods and magic and other weirdness. But then there's also the tendency of normal people to get all worked up over something, to go "true believer" on you, and take the issue so seriously that they can't improve. A friend of mine (who is vegan, and I do want to stress that I respect the vegan lifestyle choice) described it in terms of vegans: there's the newly converted, who tend to get loud and confrontative about any use of non-vegan products anywhere in their presence and generally give vegans a bad name because of this vocality; and then there's the older, more experienced vegans who take steps behind the scenes, who follow the lifestyle, who do their best to educate and inform and convince rather than blaring their message at anyone who gets too near.

In both of the above examples, though, that's actually an important pair of issues to bring up regarding magic, or the Force, or whatever it is that your special power is: first, how common is the power, and how easily can people acquire it; and second, how do people who don't have the power in question react to it.

Those are darn good questions! In the Potterverse, as well as the Dresden Files, and in similar "secret magic" worlds, magic is something fairly rare which you either have or you don't, sort of like the mutant powers of the Marvel Universe's X-Men. Immediately you've got a significant flavor to the universe, a sense of overarching and underlying tension, of something that needs to be kept hidden from the common folk so that they don't develop any ideas. Because, again, like the rest of the world's reaction to the X-Men and other Marvel mutants, or to the goblinized humanity of the Shadowrun universe, there is almost certain to be a reaction of prejudice, fear, and violence. A reaction that is all too often completely justified, as the Ultimates series of Marvel comics made very clear, where a single rogue mutant with especially great - and quite randomly determined - power wiped out a significant fraction of the world's population just because he hated Professor X and wanted to ruin his efforts to promote mutant-normal human relations.

On the other end of the spectrum are worlds like Piers Anthony's Xanth or Incarnations of Immortality, where magic is literally everywhere, a fundamental part of the setting. Actually, not being able to use magic is seen as a serious handicap, and in the first book of the Xanth series, not having a magical power is grounds for being banished from the setting.

That leads rather naturally to the question: what the heck even is magic? Or whatever your super power is called. Which is a very fair question. In the Xanth series, mentioned above, it's caused by the leakage of power from a cosmic being tied into the fabric of reality itself, a sort of radiation that warps everything around it in weird ways. This is a perfect source that ties into the setting itself, because Xanth relies heavily on puns and other literal sight gags, besides general assorted and quite random silliness to drive the plot of the various books.

A more common approach to magic, or whatever, is to regard it as a fundamental element of reality, like light or magnetism or gravity. The setting introduced in Perdido Street Station (which, incidentally, is a pretty darn incredible book in my opinion - I've only just finished reading it and am still processing it all), the Discworld of Terry Pratchett, and the magic system introduced in GURPS all very explicitly state that their special powers are based on quantifiable magical particle-waves or quantums or thaums or quintessence other similar functions of reality itself. What is called "magic" in these settings is the set of actions that allow people to directly manipulate these forces, just like people in our reality can manipulate light - an especially appropriate metaphor in the Discworld, where there is indeed a literal "Colour of Magic," octarine, which serves as the source of magic there.

There's another variable, though, even in worlds where magic - or whatever - is relatively common, and that variable is the question "who gets to use it?" In China Miéville's universe, anybody can if they know how, just like anybody can study physics or engineering or medicine in our world - it's just another field of study, which might as well be magic to outsiders. More common, though, are "chosen ones," special people who happen to be able to use the power in question. On the one hand, this is great for presenting the story you're telling as a part of the great Hero's Journey mythic cycle that I've talked about in previous blog posts. On the other hand, this can make your fans feel left out, since there can only be one Chosen One.

Case in point: there was a pretty big stink about this when Episode I of Star Wars came out, since suddenly there was a biological component, a required symbiotic relationship with a fictional species, midi-chlorians, before someone could manipulate the Force, which took the whole magic system out of the realm of philosophy and mysticism and put it squarely into fictional science. In other words, where before people in our world (especially children) were able to fantasize that they might be able to do something akin to Force powers, quite abruptly that door was slammed in everyone's collective face. While I generally live in a personal universe where I can pick and choose what parts of any given fictional universe's stuff I acknowledge as being "real" in my personal canon, I can understand why this might have caused problems for people without my blissful and willful and very deliberate self-ignorance.

As for me, I've been working on figuring out the place of magic in a few of my fictional universes, its source, its capacity, its look-feel qualities. Probably most significant are the psionics of the universe of The Man from Rock Bottom (which I call the Cosmic Bullfight Universe, but for reasons I haven't disclosed yet). These aren't the mystic powers of the Force, but at the same time they're not strictly "hard" scientific either. The power of empathy is the major one in the book, and it finds use by both the titular Man, and also by the character of Scintillant Camor.

Now, you might be saying to yourself something along the lines of "Heh, empathy, so the foxy guy can tell how I'm feeling. That's cute."

In answer, I share a bit from chapter 14 in the book, titled "The Temptation of Scintillant Camor." It's the chapter where the foxguy gets seriously pissed:

Something welled up in me, dark and terrible. How dare this Preacher Man decry the sins of others when his own spill over in gore and filth? How dare he accuse us of any sin at all, when he oppresses orphans, when he enslaves them and drives them to death, and grinds down their hearts until they start to believe monstrosity like his and those who follow him is normal!

How dare he!

...

Too many people think that empathy is the weakest of all the powers that might manifest. The one with the least combat application. How, they ask, can knowing what someone is feeling help me win a fight?

Fools.

Have you ever been so sunken into sorrow that your irises, your sclera, leaked out all their color with your tears?

Have you ever felt the anguish of body and spirit so intense that you were left paralyzed, your limbs bereft of strength?

Have you ever experienced pleasure so great that your spine was arched, stretched, and contorted until it snapped?

Have you ever been so wracked with guilt that your pores sweat blood?

This Preacher Man, these humans, these vile, wicked, and disgusting sinners, they will all soon understand the true horror of a Gentle One unleashed upon them! I will teach them the Thousand Pleasures and the One Great Pain! What evils they have inflicted upon the innocent, I will visit upon them a hundredfold and more, until they are trapped beneath the weight of their own sins, like fruit in a winepress, pressed down and squeezed of their very essence!

For the Greater Good of us all!

Uh...yeah. Sometimes I really need to be a little more careful when I'm channeling a character during my writing. Oh, and that ellipses in there is a chunk of text I cut for reasons of length, just to make that clear.

So in that sci-fi universe, the special powers are semi-scientific. Some, like empathy, are akin to the "soft sciences" and liberal arts, grounded in real stuff, but rather "squishy" around the edges. On the other hand, powers like telepathy, by contrast, rely on a "hard science" approach, on the actions and reactions of the neurochemical powerhouse that is the brain, and its capacity for reaching out and influencing the world around it.

All of these powers, though, are incumbent upon being able to reach into something Scintillant Camor calls "the heart of God," a sort of universal wellspring of power that underlies all of reality. There are some hints that this kind of power source might indeed exist, in religion - such as the concept of the Atman-Brahman in Hinduism - and also in science, with the concept of the driving forces that keep the universe constantly expanding infinitely into infinity, or various hyperspace conceptions, or even the simple idea that the entire universe itself has a color (it's cosmic latte, incidentally, though originally it was thought to be a color called "cosmic spectrum green"). Seriously, though, that's the deep end of the science pool, where the stuff of fact and the stuff of fiction starts to get really mixed up - and that's in the real world! Taking that stuff and running with it in my fictional universe, I generally feel completely justified in using them however the plot demands - there's almost certainly some science out there that completely supports whatever I think makes the most sense.

The Cosmic Color Spectrum

And just at this moment, I notice that this blog post is going on a bit long, and also that this is actually a pretty decent point at which to pause. So, until next week, I shall let your brain work at digesting the ideas I've presented thus far while I work on churning out some more nourishment for your imagination.

Be safe.