| Three magic systems in search of a fantasy book |
[Mar. 24th, 2012|04:49 pm]
Scott
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EMOTION POWERED MAGIC: There are mountains of fantasy novels where someone or other can draw power from people's negative emotions - you know, "Your suffering gives me strength!". But every time I've seen this trope, the power has always belonged to an evil character. That's the kind of lazy writing that makes most novels so cliched. Why not give the power to the good guys instead?
And of course the easiest way to deal with the resulting moral dilemma is to go utilitarian, say "Sure we'll kill or torture a bunch of people to gain magical strength, because we need magical strength to defeat the Dark Lord and save humankind." How boring.
I'd like to see a book about a group of deontologists with this power who are reduced to trying to get people to consent to be killed or tortured in order to provide them with magical strength. They could either convince their victims of the necessity of the sacrifice ("We've all got to pitch in if we want humankind to be saved") or else resort to simple bribery ("We'll give you 50 gold pieces if you'll cut off your arm in this magic circle so we can draw strength from your pain"). In the case of necromancy, such bribes might have to go to the next-of-kin. And although this would raise fewer ethical issues than the utilitarian version above, there's still the same kind of issues that make us uncomfortable with letting people sell their organs.
Maybe the best dramatic situation of all would be a world in which the method of gaining magic from human suffering was known both to good and bad factions, giving the evil factions a major advantage and forcing the good factions to determine exactly how far they wanted to go to catch up.
Then again, why should the only human emotion that generates magic be suffering? What about a world in which magic can be fueled only by human surprise? You'd have whole clans of wizards jumping out at people from behind bushes, or telling them counterintuitive facts ("Did you know that more time elapsed between the Pyramids and Cleopatra than between Cleopatra and the present day?") in preparation for magical duels. Eventually the population comes to expect wizards jumping out form behind bushes, and all the counterintuitive facts become common knowledge, and wizards have to up their game or risk losing their powers.
Or how 'bout a world with magic based on human happiness? "Once I give every child in my clean, well-run orphanage a puppy, I will be unstoppable!
BRUTE-FORCE SPELL GENERATION: Magic spells are often triggered by words or sentences, but books rarely explain how one figures these out: who was the first person to try shouting "Avada kedavra!" to see if it would kill an enemy? In a world where magic spells and the means for discovering them have both been lost, one of the simplest routes to become an archmage is to brute force the problem. If we know that there exist several one-word magical spells of eight letters, for example, we can start by waving our wand and shouting "Aaaaaaaa!", then "Aaaaaaab!", "Aaaaaaac!" and so on. Now, this does leave 208 billion possibilities, but we can cut down on this pretty quickly if we have some phonetic constraints: if magic is based on some ancient language spoken by humans or creatures with human-like phonetics, combinations like "Aaaaaaab!" and "Brtxkfkl!" are right out. Forcing alternating vowels and consonants reduces our search space by a factor of a thousand to about 200 million, but since magic words may not obey constraints quite this strict, let's round it off to an even 2 billion.
If a thousand different magic spells exist, we should expect to stumble across a magic spell in this reduced search space once every 2 million attempts. If testing a word for magical properties takes ten seconds, then in a ten hour workday one can test 36,000 words: that means stumbling across a new spell about once every two months.
But wizards are haughty and proud: no self-respecting archmage would put in two months of ten hour days testing nonsense words. Wizards in such a world would quickly settle upon the solution of "magical sweatshops" - taking on dozens of "apprentices" and assigning them the thankless task of testing letter combinations. A sweatshop with twelve apprentices working ten hour days could discover a bit over one new spell a week.
But by the time this process of magical research had shifted into high gear, the world would look quite different than when it began. It would be full of disgruntled apprentices, promised glory in the glamorous world of wizardry, who found their hopes betrayed by a "master" who has set them the most menial task imaginable and who takes all the fruits of their labor without teaching them anything in return. Some might believe the inevitable promises that "this great task I have assigned you is for the sharpening of your mind, and until you grasp the inner mysteries you will never know how important it is that you obey", but others will no doubt see through the facade and want the magical education they were promised.
If I had to make a plot out of this, it would involve such an apprentice wizard who one day stumbles onto a spell for immortality, or infinite wealth, or secret wisdom, or something else that gives him power lots of people want. Instead of turning it over to his master like he's supposed to, he decides to go rogue and use his newfound power to start a sort of proletarian revolution.
SPELL PIRACY: But if I had to write only one unusual-magic-system book, it would be about spell piracy.
In most fantasy books, all the powerful magic is kept very, very secret. If it's not locked inside a glowing crystal at the bottom of the Well of Dreams in the Mountains of Madness far across the Freptane Sea, then at least it's in a moldering book in the secure library of an arch-wizard who refuses to share it with you.
The wizards usually say this is because lesser souls are not ready for the secrets, but that's exactly the sort of thing they would say. Rare is the spell as dangerous as the common fertilizer-bomb, yet bomb-making instructions are all over the Internet and civilization hasn't collapsed yet.
More likely, the wizards just want to maintain an advantage over their competitors. They have the very capitalist - and admirable! - notion that the one who does the work ought to reap the benefit. If I cross the Freptane Sea, climb the Mountains of Madness, and dive into the Well of Dreams seeking the ancient crystal upon which a spell is inscribed, I'm going to be pretty pissed if I see Gandalf casting the same spell next week without having done any of that stuff, just because he overheard me chanting the magic words.
But this hurts all wizards: even the mightiest wizard ends up with no more than the few spells he manages to discover himself. If there are synergistic combinations of spells, or high-level spells which require mastery of multiple lower-level spells to obtain, no wizard will be able to discover them. If a wizard dies without taking a pupil, all his spells are lost forever. And if a goblin horde or a Dark Lord threatens the land, these measly wizards with their couple of spells each will be easy pickings.
So a smart King, as his first priority, would implement an intellectual property system for magic. If Merlin discovers the spell for summoning blizzards, he can copyright it. Then he can write as many books about it as he wants, publicize it to the international magical community, but be secure in his knowledge that anyone who wants to summon a blizzard will have to pay the licensing fee. The advantages are obvious: wizards who need a spell can pay for it, wizards are further incentivized to develop as many spells as possible, magical libraries can be open for unrestricted research, and after the death of a wizard his spells can go into the public domain, creating a wide base of freely available spells after only a few generations. And if a goblin horde or Dark Lord attacks, the King will have an army of wizards proficient with every known spell to fight them off.
But magic copyright will encounter the same problems as mundane copyright. Imagine knowing the spell to cure plague, having all of the components arrayed in front of you, your sister is dying of plague this very moment, but Allanon discovered that spell and won't let you cast it without paying his fee, which you can't afford. And the Magic Copyright Police are the most feared wizards in the land, and the penalty for infringement is more gold pieces than exist in the entire world, because the wizardry industry has really good courtiers.
Also, there would be literal patent trolls.
No, I take it back. I would merge this with the last idea. Spells can only be discovered by brute-forcing it. But the only incentive to found magical sweatshops would be the knowledge that you would retain intellectual property rights of the spells you invented. And a young apprentice, overwhelmed with the exploitation inherent in the system, discovers a spell that allows him to evade the Magic Copyright Police and absconds from the sweatshop. Now able to cast unlimited spells without negotiating agreements with the license-holders, he is the most powerful wizard alive, and sets about trying to destroy the corrupt system. But unbeknownst to him, demons lurk on the edge of the world, and without the exploitative economy and its incentives to continue discovering spells, the wizards will go back to hoarding the few shreds of magic they got from crossing the Freptane Sea and so on, and the inhabited world will become easy prey for the legions of Hell.
And one of the characters would basically be Voldemort leading the RIAA, and he would end up being the good guy.
These three ideas are available, Magic Copyright Police-free, to anyone interested in expanding on any of them, although I warn you that I keep hearing these weird rumors that fantasy is supposed to be escapist or something. |
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See also The Ethical Psychic Vampire. What might you do if you're dependent on other people's energy rather than (as most do) getting energy directly from the universe? One answer is to become a therapist-- you'll never be burnt out by being around painful emotions, you can just chow down. Seriously, the book is non-fiction (the author says it's from experience, and it matches a good bit of things feel to me, though I haven't had those specific experiences), but has plenty of ideas which would be valuable for fantasy writers. Edited at 2012-03-24 06:06 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
2012-04-13 02:29 pm (UTC)
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Just bought and devoured it. I strongly recommend the first three chapters. It's rather a lot of work to separate the woo from actual observations, but worth it if you or anyone you know is the needy type.
Nancy, want to talk about psivamps? I'm MixedNuts on LessWrong.
An idea similar to your first one is explored in Runelords by David Farland. You can use magic runes to transfer attributes from one person to another, which lasts as long as both parties are alive, so local lords use part of their constituencies for greater strength, intelligence, endurance, speed, etc. but have to keep them under constant guard in order to stay functionally invulnerable. "Good" lords do this with consent and honorable rewards for their subjects but the bad guys just force it on peasants and thus end up significantly more powerful.
There's a discussion of how magical words are discovered in HP And The Methods Of Rationality, including why certain words work while others don't. I rather enjoyed it.
From: (Anonymous)
2012-03-24 08:10 pm (UTC)
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If you liked Methods of Rationality, ma-a-aybe you remember a minor character named Scott who appears for 2.71 seconds in chapter 33? ;)
| [User Picture] | From: squid314
2012-03-26 07:26 pm (UTC)
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And now I worry I duplicated myself, forgot about doing so, and now my duplicate is posting my LJ comments anonymously a few minutes ahead of me.
From: (Anonymous)
2012-03-26 08:28 pm (UTC)
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That would be kinda nifty, if you think about it.
That's pretty cool! I've made it into the "thanks" section once or twice, but not actually appeared in fiction!
| [User Picture] | From: turil
2012-03-24 07:11 pm (UTC)
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Well, there is Harry Potter, in which his power (protection against Voldemort) came from his mother's love and sacrifice...
From: (Anonymous)
2012-06-20 08:17 am (UTC)
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Hey Neil Scot Corbett here from Utah I am at the brink of destruction it seems as I was supsepod to launch the world greates and most controversial website and domain on jan1st 2007 and failed.I could really use your help on re creating my website it seems that I am unable to upload the original from my works program.It should be pretty simple I'd think! yeah right it was all going great until I went to direct my squeeze pages and found out that my domains had been parked. What right do they have to park my domains for any way and bob parsons whos that thanks Scot corbett
Rick Cook's Wizardry series had a lot of brute force discovery.
"Once I give every child in my clean, well-run orphanage a puppy, I will be unstoppable!"
Possibly the funniest thing I have read this year.
I *so* have to use this in a game...
| [User Picture] | From: xuenay
2012-03-25 12:04 pm (UTC)
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Okay, now I have to ask - would you be interested in trying to co-write some fiction some time? (I find that I do my best writing if I partner up with somebody, but finding good partners is rare. But I have a suspicion that the two of us together might be an unstoppable combination.)
| [User Picture] | From: squid314
2012-03-26 07:25 pm (UTC)
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Thank you for the offer, but I'm afraid I probably couldn't handle a cooperative project like that.
The Mode Series by Piers Anthony gives the good guys emotion-powered magic--both joy and suffering. (One of the lead characters is a prince who can distribute others' emotions; his main duty is taking a wife who is very joyful and distributing her joy. He ends up attached to the protagonist, who is depressive. The adventures of the main characters involve a fair amount of reliance on his magic. Read these ~15 years ago; I would not necessarily recommend the books now.)
| [User Picture] | From: fiddlemath
2012-04-11 06:59 am (UTC)
surprise-based magic | (Link)
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Surprise-based magic would make a fun fantasy setting, but it would make a truly wonderful live-action role playing game.
From: (Anonymous)
2012-05-18 03:52 pm (UTC)
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The movie Monsters, Inc. features emotion-powered energy.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0198781/
I would buy this book, especially if it was written by you. Otherwise, I may attempt to write it instead, but I'm not optimistic about what the result would be.
spell piracy and copyright and sharing info:
Back when I hung around the Ars Magica list, one common observation was that for supposedly being rooted in medieval scholasticism and looking to the great past, wizards actually acted a lot more like Enlightenment scientists, making new research and inventions. Except they share cautiously at best, which then led to observations that a bunch of PCs who trusted each other and mass-produced texts could transform magical society.
Which is kind of true, but then I look at Girl Genius, "where mad science rules the world, badly!" If your scientific discoveries are easily weaponizable and your peers are unsocialized emotionally unstable megalomaniacs, it makes sense to encrypt your notes and keep mum. Classified data and arms export limitations are the model. Yes, you could progress faster if you shared, but so could what are basically your enemy.
Put another way, who teaches mind control spells? And if they can be derived from the principles of magic, who isn't cautious about teaching those principles? | |
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