D&D General Who Invents Spells, and How Old Are They

[Teemu]

I usually dont use the spells in the PHB as ''spells'' in fiction: they are a description of the effect produced by expending a spell slot on a custom/personnal/setting specific spell.

ie: Wizard Bob in my game doesnt cast ''Fireball'', he cast ''Invoke the Sovereign Pyre'' as spell creating the ''Fireball'' effect, designed by the cultist of Imix somewhere in the Hordelands and who found its way to his spellbook when he traded his best shoes and a nice bottle of chianti for it.

So even is 2 spellcasters have the same spell effects loadout, they dont necessarily have the same spells in their books.

I think this is the most coherent approach. If we assume that the spells we have in the PHB and other products are specific creations (or maybe given by gods or nature spirits), then what about monsters' innate spells that are identical? If shatter is actually Mordenkainen's shatter, what about the monster that casts the same spell because it needed a sound-based spell for flavor? Or if fireball was created by a Netherese mage, why does a fire elemental creature cast the same exact spell innately? Or a cleric who receives fireball as a domain spell? It doesn't add up.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah, that's Tolkien's ethos alright. One part rejection of the modern industrial world and the horrors of World War I, one part a particular line of Catholic thought holding that the world was perfect at the beginning in the Garden of Eden and it's been all downhill since. For better or for worse, Middle Earth was his personal creation and it really reflect him. It's just, being one of the foundations of a new genre, his every little quirk got encoded as a new tradition.

Well, it isn't just a Catholic notion there. Europe still carries the legacy of Rome. I relatively recently learned how much Europe collapsed after the end of the Roman Empire--with some cities literally collapsing into occupying just the amphitheater, and that being sufficiently spacious to hold the whole town's population! And the Greeks themselves often saw themselves as the weak, feeble, flawed descendants of an ancient, lost golden age, with the preceding era of Greek culture being seen as the last echoes of that bygone age of greatness (that is, the era of the Homeric myths.)

Idolizing a forgotten past is a pretty common European thing, and I'm fairly sure it's found in Chinese myth as well (but it's been a while, I could be mistaken.) With Europe in particular, it really was the case that for something like 800 years, they couldn't really match the feats of engineering and architecture of the ancients, and it's taken modern science for us to figure out some of the things that made their work so durable (e.g. the recent discovery of the self-healing properties of Roman concrete, or the slightly less recent discovery that using seawater in concrete can make it dramatically harder.)

Consider the enormous amount of ancient literature lost in Europe but preserved in the Arab world before returning through Al-Andalus, and the nearly-unquestionable status of thinkers like Euclid, Galen, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, etc., and you get a justifiable sense in which the "great works" of the ancients were difficult to surpass for an age. It wasn't that they couldn't be in principle; it's that their society was built on a higher degree of infrastructure and organization than medieval Europe could support. Coupled with the difficulty of preserving the knowledge and technologies of Antiquity, even if people did make advancements, it was hard for those advancements to have major impact. Not impossible, just hard.

All that said, it is something of a Euro-centric perspective to put SO MUCH emphasis on "the ancients were just, like, WAY cooler than us." There's a place for that, to be sure, but there's a place for the world getting better. My setting has something of an advantage here; the "ancients" were the ancient Genie-Rajahs, who were powerful because they have innate magic, and who abandoned the world a couple of millennia ago. They took basically everything except the cities themselves with them, so the mortals they left behind had to rebuild their society themselves. Not quite "from scratch," but definitely a lot of effort. There have been setbacks and blind alleys, but by and large, mortal society has been successfully putting itself together and getting stronger rather than weaker. Much, much more is known by mortals about magic than the ancients could have known.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, it isn't just a Catholic notion there. Europe still carries the legacy of Rome. I relatively recently learned how much Europe collapsed after the end of the Roman Empire--with some cities literally collapsing into occupying just the amphitheater, and that being sufficiently spacious to hold the whole town's population! And the Greeks themselves often saw themselves as the weak, feeble, flawed descendants of an ancient, lost golden age, with the preceding era of Greek culture being seen as the last echoes of that bygone age of greatness (that is, the era of the Homeric myths.)

Idolizing a forgotten past is a pretty common European thing, and I'm fairly sure it's found in Chinese myth as well (but it's been a while, I could be mistaken.) With Europe in particular, it really was the case that for something like 800 years, they couldn't really match the feats of engineering and architecture of the ancients, and it's taken modern science for us to figure out some of the things that made their work so durable (e.g. the recent discovery of the self-healing properties of Roman concrete, or the slightly less recent discovery that using seawater in concrete can make it dramatically harder.)

Consider the enormous amount of ancient literature lost in Europe but preserved in the Arab world before returning through Al-Andalus, and the nearly-unquestionable status of thinkers like Euclid, Galen, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, etc., and you get a justifiable sense in which the "great works" of the ancients were difficult to surpass for an age. It wasn't that they couldn't be in principle; it's that their society was built on a higher degree of infrastructure and organization than medieval Europe could support. Coupled with the difficulty of preserving the knowledge and technologies of Antiquity, even if people did make advancements, it was hard for those advancements to have major impact. Not impossible, just hard.

All that said, it is something of a Euro-centric perspective to put SO MUCH emphasis on "the ancients were just, like, WAY cooler than us." There's a place for that, to be sure, but there's a place for the world getting better. My setting has something of an advantage here; the "ancients" were the ancient Genie-Rajahs, who were powerful because they have innate magic, and who abandoned the world a couple of millennia ago. They took basically everything except the cities themselves with them, so the mortals they left behind had to rebuild their society themselves. Not quite "from scratch," but definitely a lot of effort. There have been setbacks and blind alleys, but by and large, mortal society has been successfully putting itself together and getting stronger rather than weaker. Much, much more is known by mortals about magic than the ancients could have known.

It also kind of ignores the fact that while some things were lost, other things advanced beyond what the “ancients” could accomplish, and even some of what was lost was lost before Rome began to “fall”. (Ie, decline over at least a few hundred years).

Not to mention the influence of Voltaire on the invention of the concept of the Middle Ages being a time where basically nothing good happened so that he could pretend that the Italian Renaissance was much more of a distinct and abrupt shift in the cultural, philosophical, artistic, and scientific, sophistication of all of Europe.

Which is why I love Eberron. It does a much better job of having things that have advanced and things which have been irreparably lost, at the same time. Makes the world feel much more real, to me.

 

[Umbran]

Who invented the common spells?

How old are they?

Do you give players input on these questions?

For my D&D games, this is an example of something I typically don't specify unless it becomes relevant in play.

If I wanted to run a game where the nature and history of magic itself was a major pot point or mover of the action, I probably wouldn't use D&D for the purpose.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

For my D&D games, this is an example of something I typically don't specify unless it becomes relevant in play.

If I wanted to run a game where the nature and history of magic itself was a major pot point or mover of the action, I probably wouldn't use D&D for the purpose.

I see this kind of sentiment a lot, and fair enough, but generally IME one is looking to fit an element into a D&D game, not base a whole game/campaign on that element.

I do think that 5e could use a robust spell modification and creation system, though.

 

[Stormonu]

What Baker is forgetting-- or, rather, is embracing what D&D was forgetting-- is that new tech was never safe and sure. Aside from a singular specific subclass, there is no concern about the operability of magic in D&D. That surely wasn't true in the great wars of the 20th century where mines and mortars and guns and bombs didn't always go off as expected.

...and still true sometimes.

Now this makes me wonder what spells might be "inferior" copies that arose as cheap or fumbled magic. Maybe shocking grasp, for example, came about because some mage's apprentice couldn't wrap his head around lightning bolt...

 

[Rabulias]

If shatter is actually Mordenkainen's shatter, what about the monster that casts the same spell because it needed a sound-based spell for flavor? Or if fireball was created by a Netherese mage, why does a fire elemental creature cast the same exact spell innately? Or a cleric who receives fireball as a domain spell? It doesn't add up.

Look at this the other way: maybe Mordenkainen was inspired by a creature's sonic attack to create his shatter spell.

 

[Umbran]

I see this kind of sentiment a lot, and fair enough, but generally IME one is looking to fit an element into a D&D game, not base a whole game/campaign on that element.

Well, you asked about what each of us does. I'm telling you what I do.

There's a lot of fantasy fiction out there in which exploring the nature of magic is a large element. I don't typically use D&D for such stories. I don't find D&D's magic system to be well-suited for it, and would typically look for another system. The result is that my games usually have relatively few house rules.

You may find that's typical of me. I don't try very hard to make D&D, or whatever system, do what I want. If it doesn't do it natively, I find another system to do the job.

I do think that 5e could use a robust spell modification and creation system, though.

No argument there.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Alternate tongue-in-cheek answer:

Everyone knows mathemagicians do their best work young!

 

[Grantypants]

This question came up in passing at my table, and I suggested that the names attached to some spells were brand names. Other generic spells were either knockoffs or the copyright/patent/etc had expired. The campaign didn't really dig into this any further, but I think that concept could support an interesting Acq. Inc. style game.