Is Magic a Setting Element or a Plot Device

[Tequila Sunrise]

I happen to be reading Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time at the moment -- 13th book, so don't tell me whether it ends if you know!

I think one of the things that makes Jordan's WoT series so great is that he manages to make the One Power both a plot device and a setting element. During the first book, magic is mysterious, powerful and unknown to most characters. As the series goes on though, several characters realize their own magical abilities and learn to harness them.

Magic becomes even more powerful -- several characters actually rediscover lost spells -- and Jordan clearly put thought into how magic affects his world's politics, economies and culture. Magic isn't some isolated phenomenon that everyone ignores. One of the characters, a queen, is currently trying to get a group of channelers to settle in her realm in exchange for regular access to teleportation and Healing.

At the same time that the characters learn and adapt to the One Power, it isn't 100% understood by anyone. Why can only certain people use it? How did the Dark One poison the male half? How will the Dragon Reborn defeat Him once the last seal of His prison is broken?

I didn't intend to write a gushing review of WoT, but it looks like I did. Oh well.

 

[S'mon]

Even the whole "dark ages" thing seems to be getting debunked pretty thoroughly in historical circles.

There was a fashion for denying the dark ages, as a way for historians to make their reputation by refuting the previous generations. Now that 'Late Antiquity' is pretty old hat, the new generation are making their reps showing that the Dark Ages were indeed pretty damn dark. I recently read the (IMO) excellent The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization which demonstrates through primary sources the massive impact of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire - in Britain civilisation literally disappeared completely, and while the effects were more nuanced in other areas, they were ultimately devastating throughout the West. For instance north Africa more or less survived the Vandal conquest, but was eventually done in by the Islamic conquest a few centuries later. In the West you go from a civilization where urbanites scrawl literary grafitti on brothel walls, and city streets, confident that passers by can read their words, to one where literacy is entirely the preserve of a small class of monks.

The situation in the Eastern Empire was more nuanced - and Late Antiquity advocates have typically relied on Eastern literary sources for their 'Late Antiquity' claims, because there was nothing coming out of the West for several centuries. But even there we see a massive long-term decline as the ERE contracted under barbarian Ostrogoth, Arab and later Turkish attack.

 

[S'mon]

. Progress might get stalled in some areas typically due to some fairly specific reasons, but, it's rare that it ever goes into decline.

Maybe you're a glass half full kinda guy and I'm a glass half emptier, but I just can't see this. Stuff gets forgotten all the time. You even mention the Chinese treasure fleets - right after, China goes into a 500 year decline she's only been pulling out of for the past 30 years or so! And even in the West, while technology has mostly advanced pretty consistently in recent centuries, stuff does get lost and rediscovered. It's most noticeable for me in the soft sciences like history and anthropology - looking at pre-WW2 sources I see a lot of stuff which seems to have then been forgotten during and after WW2, just disappears down the memory hole. The sources are still available, but they get left out of the stream of knowledge transmission. Some of it gets rediscovered later. It's the same with biology, natural history and other stuff - things are discovered in the 19th century, published, then forgotten. I see the same thing reading classical Latin sources; eg on the first page of Ovid's 'metamorphoses' - a book of myths/fairy-tales for a wide readership, not esoteric science - he describes how the early Earth was formed into a spherical shape through the power of its own gravity(!). A thousand years later, who knew about gravity?

Just maintaining civilisation and an existing knowledge base takes a huge amount of effort. Entropy is natural to the universe; without that effort things fall apart very fast. We just had a major demonstration of that here in England.

 

[mmadsen]

But, as far as examples, well, Lord of the Rings leaps to mind. Here's a world with fantastic elements - intelligent, immortal aliens (elves), giant intelligent animals, magic weapons and the like - but the setting pretty much entirely ignores these. Sting is a plot device, not a setting element.

The magic of The Lord of the Rings is not integrated into the setting? Really? I guess I don't understand what you mean, because those elements all seem extremely well integrated into Tolkien's world of Middle Earth, with elaborate histories explaining how everything came to be and how everything's tied together.

In The Hobbit, our hero does not follow your formula and find a short sword of dragon slaying. He finds an elf knife, long enough to serve as a hobbit sword, and its powers -- especially glowing in the presence of goblins (orcs) -- make perfect sense for a weapon left over from an elf-orc war, and don't perfectly match his immediate needs.

Conan and most Sword and Sandals style fantasy fits this mold as well. You have magic, monsters and whatnot, but, it's all plot device, never part of the setting.

Is your complaint that none of the magic permeates the setting -- that it's rare and costly -- or that it doesn't fit in the setting?

Because the monsters in Conan are, for the most part, exotic beasts found in faraway lands, and the magics are exotic mysteries that require years of research to unearth, years of study to decrypt, and unspeakable costs to unleash.

The thing is, even in these examples, magic isn't uncontrollable. It's very controllable - people make stuff with it. People use it. But, because it's a plot point and not a setting element, only certain, very specific people get to use it or make things with it and no one else can.

Perhaps you have a different definition of controllable. The One Ring practically defines uncontrollable. (Stormbringer also comes to mind.) The wizards in many Conan tales clearly risk their lives and their sanity pursuing supernatural power and esoteric knowledge.

 

[Herobizkit]

In my games, magic invariably becomes a tool to create a more modern, yest still magical, way of life.

Examples:
* creating Tree tokens en masse in order to repopulate a barren wasteland with viable oak trees.
* decanters of endless water and clever elemental summoning allow for indoor plumbing and aqueducts.
* garbage disposal handled by ooze/slime/jelly cultivation.
* using an array of lyres of building to re-create whole cities.

... All stuff that happens in terraforming a new culture in SF.

For me, SF + Fantasy = a great time.

 

[steenan]

From my point of view, magic in a good book or a good RPG is always a "setting element". It fits there, is well integrated, even if rare and generally unknown. If it is not, there is a dissonance, a jarring feeling that the whole does not make sense. It would be nearly impossible for me to run or play a game in such world.

The opposition I would point to is the one between magic used as a plot device and magic used as a tool.

The first one fits the "mythic" style. Magic plays an important role in the story, but the story is not about how the magic works and how it does not. There may be moral questions about if and how magic is to be used. There may be challenges concerning acquiring magic or fighting against it.
But you'll never be able to clearly tell what a spellcaster can and cannot do. You won't be surprised by creative use of magic. Magic won't follow rules, other than some very general principles.
That is what we see in Lord of the Rings or Wizard of the Earthsea.
This kind of magic is extremely hard to do in an RPG. If you give it to players, you need to dress it in rules and it destroys the concept. If only used by antagonists, it feels like GM fiat. Only a system that is abstract enough to resolve the conflicts while leaving all "magical" effects to the GM may work here.

The second kind is magic working as a tool. It follows strict rules. It may be explored in the setting and tested to its limits. It may surprise in the same way as a crime story surprises - by doing something that the reader could predict, but probably did not, even with all available information. This kind of magic is used to solve problems by itself, because it has clear limitations that make it interesting. "How do I achieve X with magic that does A, B and C" is a good question.
The best examples of this approach to magic are Brandon Sanderson's books. Sanderson also wrote a good article about it.
This kind of magic is much easier to do in a RPG game. When magic has its own rules and they are interesting, game mechanics does not have to put any additional limitations on it. The surprising thing is that not many fantasy RPGs fully embrace this paradigm.

The worst approach - unfortunately, frequently used - is trying to mix these two. On one hand, players are given magic with rule-defined effects, forcing them into "tool magic" thinking. On the other hand, settings are built on a mix of "we ignore magic here" and "a wizard did it handwave". As a result, neither mythical nor modern way of thinking about the game world works. Mythical thinking cannot survive rule-enforced, non-thematic limits, while "tool magic" approach leads to game-breaking effects.
It's really funny (in a sad way) when compared to Sanderson's Mistborn - where characters often did what most GMs would decry "abuses" and "loopholes" (like using a few coins, steel and iron burning for rapid travel).

 

[Hussar]

The magic of The Lord of the Rings is not integrated into the setting? Really? I guess I don't understand what you mean, because those elements all seem extremely well integrated into Tolkien's world of Middle Earth, with elaborate histories explaining how everything came to be and how everything's tied together.

In The Hobbit, our hero does not follow your formula and find a short sword of dragon slaying. He finds an elf knife, long enough to serve as a hobbit sword, and its powers -- especially glowing in the presence of goblins (orcs) -- make perfect sense for a weapon left over from an elf-orc war, and don't perfectly match his immediate needs.

But, if "elf knives" are left over from elf-orc wars, then why aren't there more of them? After all, orcs and goblins are a common enough threat in Middle Earth that having something that can tell you when they're around would be pretty durn handy.

I'd say you've shown my point rather handily.

Is your complaint that none of the magic permeates the setting -- that it's rare and costly -- or that it doesn't fit in the setting?

Because the monsters in Conan are, for the most part, exotic beasts found in faraway lands, and the magics are exotic mysteries that require years of research to unearth, years of study to decrypt, and unspeakable costs to unleash.


Perhaps you have a different definition of controllable. The One Ring practically defines uncontrollable. (Stormbringer also comes to mind.) The wizards in many Conan tales clearly risk their lives and their sanity pursuing supernatural power and esoteric knowledge.

I'm not going to go point by point here because it's not going to go anywhere. As I said, I was painting with a broad brush. I look at Conan, with monsters under every rock, wizards all over the place, heck, it's got GODS hanging around in the middle of the city (The Tower of the Elephant).

If this kind of thing is possible, then it's possible to exploit. The one ring is most certainly not uncontrollable - if it was, then why would Sauron want it. Granted, it's not controllable by anyone else, BUT THAT'S THE POINT. The One Ring is a total plot device.

Look at it like this. Someone makes the One Ring, so, now it's known that it is possible to do. Yet, no one, in all the history of the Middle Earth, thinks, "Hey, that's a pretty nifty idea - I think I'll get me one of those too." and copies the idea?

That would be what I'm talking about. None of the fantastic is ever exploited in LotR, despite it being fairly easy and/or obvious that it quite possible could be exploited.

Not that this makes LotR a bad book. It doesn't. It's totally a taste thing. There's nothing wrong with using magic as a plot point. It's a tried and true method and it's been done rather successfully for a long time.

My point is that it's not the only way of doing things. I tend to see it more in fantasy but, that again makes sense. Nobody breeds the Pegasus in Greek myth because it's the freaking Pegasus and totally not the point of the story.

Upthread Robert Jordan got mentioned. My personal favorite for this is Steven Erikson who has truly created a setting where he explores the consequences and whatnot of the existence of the fantastic in his world. Heck, his various races actually evolve around magic. Very well done IMO.

 

[S'mon]

If this kind of thing is possible, then it's possible to exploit.

Not everyone is a Connecticut Yankee.

 

[Hussar]

Not everyone is a Connecticut Yankee.

I should rephrase what I said. If this kind of thing is possible, then it's possible to exploit, unless there is some reason why it isn't.

Now, once you've started down that road - giving reasons why X isn't exploited, then quite often, X becomes a plot point and not a setting element. No one creates another One Ring because only Sauron could do it and only Sauron can control the One Ring, so it has to be destroyed and not exploited.

Again, totally nothing wrong with that kind of story. It's perfectly fine.

I, me, for my personal tastes, find it unsatisfying. I don't like it. Again, not saying it's bad, just saying that it's not to my taste.

I think that's why I tend to run D&D campaigns where possible resources are almost always exploited and used. The first D&D naval campaign I ran, the first thing the players came back to me with was a Lyre of Building. And, while it was a total PITA in the game, I couldn't fault them for it. Hrm, automatically make your ship immune to all damage for an hour and, with a decent skill check, you can play it for several more hours. Yeah, that's a really, really good idea.

It's such a good idea that I was rather at a loss to explain why every ship didn't have one. After all, a ship is a heck of a lot more money than a single Lyre of Building. Having at least one in a fleet makes too much sense not to. If nothing else, the ability to repair ships on the move would be invaluable, never mind the fact that you could actually build more ships.

This is the sticking point I run into in D&D quite often. Because a lot of the magic and fantastic elements are just crammed in with the thought of how they affect dungeon crawling, as soon as you leave the dungeon, D&D starts cropping up all sorts of problems.

 

[S'mon]

The first D&D naval campaign I ran, the first thing the players came back to me with was a Lyre of Building. And, while it was a total PITA in the game, I couldn't fault them for it. Hrm, automatically make your ship immune to all damage for an hour and, with a decent skill check, you can play it for several more hours. Yeah, that's a really, really good idea.

It's such a good idea that I was rather at a loss to explain why every ship didn't have one. After all, a ship is a heck of a lot more money than a single Lyre of Building. Having at least one in a fleet makes too much sense not to. If nothing else, the ability to repair ships on the move would be invaluable, never mind the fact that you could actually build more ships.

This is the sticking point I run into in D&D quite often. Because a lot of the magic and fantastic elements are just crammed in with the thought of how they affect dungeon crawling, as soon as you leave the dungeon, D&D starts cropping up all sorts of problems.

I've only ever experienced this problem with 3e D&D, with its "you can make any item, here's the cost" philosophy; extremely powerful items derived from 1e (where items could not be made), and worthless costings - AIR a regular stone tower costs about the same as Daern's Instant Fortress!

I haven't seen this problem in 4e D&D, but maybe it's out there.