D&D General Folkloric Magic?

[Bohandas]

Did they do a control group with just the wine?

 

[Tonguez]

I like to think of them as magic that most people don't remember how to work but if someone put's it together or some ancient order or religion is still around will work.

There's even modern precedents. Some scientists a few years back took an old book of quack herbal remedies and found out most of them worked. The most effective one was, a clove of garlic, an onion, some other member of the onion family like a leek chop em up real fine put em in a brass cup pour in a cup of wine and let it sit at room temperature for 3 days I think. then use it to dress infected wounds. Sounds like certain death right? Nope the brass reacting with the wine and the actual bacteria that survive it will kill most of the bacteria that infect your wound. But till someone analzyed it and watched it under a microscope no sane person would have tried it. Just like those folkloric rituals.

That sounds perfectly plausible to me, wine is an acid and both onion and copper have known antiseptic and antibacterial properties. It has been observed by scientist that brass vessels will release copper ions into water which can kill up to 1 million bacteria per milliliter (fecal bacteria counts).

It also reminds me of the fact that the Ganges River despite being polluted has proven anti-bacterial and bacteriophage properties.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I like to think of them as magic that most people don't remember how to work but if someone put's it together or some ancient order or religion is still around will work.

There's even modern precedents. Some scientists a few years back took an old book of quack herbal remedies and found out most of them worked. The most effective one was, a clove of garlic, an onion, some other member of the onion family like a leek chop em up real fine put em in a brass cup pour in a cup of wine and let it sit at room temperature for 3 days I think. then use it to dress infected wounds. Sounds like certain death right? Nope the brass reacting with the wine and the actual bacteria that survive it will kill most of the bacteria that infect your wound. But till someone analzyed it and watched it under a microscope no sane person would have tried it. Just like those folkloric rituals.

It's almost like people before the modern age weren't actually morons!

Also, I want someone steeped in this sort of stuff to design the next iteration of the ranger.

 

[Coroc]

I would say that even if adventurers do not use these spells, seeing them in action makes the setting more real. No reason they cannot occasionally be added to a plotline in an adventure as a change of pace. If your party of heroes is hired for escort or bodyguard duty for a princess who is with child, your party cleric may well need one of those spells. Finding a Girdle of Birth-Easing in a hoard of treasure just adds to the realism of setting.

Agreed, but you can easily just narrate them. The same goes for big boom spells, the like which, with the exception of plot based/one-shot occurrences should never fall into the standard repertoire of player characters. I mean those who have cataclysmic effects and the like; the best way to do them is not to make complicated fixed rules with numbers but just tell the players what they see and the outcome.

If numbers are needed just wing it a bit, you can do this in small scale and large scale, it will not unbalance anything, e.g.:

The local level 1 cleric which is nearly a saint of his faith has some unique skills to tend to his community, which is currently plagued by vermin laying waist to the crop. So he begs his deity for help in an extended prayer while in the vicinity of the afflicted fields.
Roll 4 d10 to determine a number between 1 and 1000 that's the number of rats which suddenly emerge from their holes in the ground and succumb to some mystic agonizing pain.

or bigger:

The evil archwizard nemesis calls down some gigantic hailstorm to devastate a city, the players are in the midst of it.
Let them make dex saves every minute for the duration of the storm, and if they fail they take 1d4 damage.

There you go, no rocket science needed on that. You neither want them PCs to replace the local cleric, nor to have them have powers like the archwizard, so you really do not need accurate rules in a mechanical way for every aspect of such things.

 

[Bohandas]

That sounds perfectly plausible to me, wine is an acid and both onion and copper have known antiseptic and antibacterial properties. It has been observed by scientist that brass vessels will release copper ions into water which can kill up to 1 million bacteria per milliliter (fecal bacteria counts).

It also reminds me of the fact that the Ganges River despite being polluted has proven anti-bacterial and bacteriophage properties.

And the ethanol in wine is an antiseptic as well

 

[nevin]

Looks like I messed up the formula a little but here's an article on Scientific American about it.

Getting Medieval on Bacteria: Ancient Books May Point to New Antibiotics

A salve of wine, garlic, leeks and oxgall was found to be kill staph and MRSA

www.scientificamerican.com

 

[77IM]

So, "magic," traditionally, has meant several different things in folklore beyond just "a power you can weild to do stuff." So I think a great way to approach "folkloric" magic is to consider its origins. Why did people think some things were magic?

Here are some of my ideas, which are all closely related variants on a theme:

Superstition. Human brains are powerful pattern-recognition engines. Superstitions develop when your brain interprets coincidences as pattern (there's a cognitive bias in which people tend to remember and consider unusual events more than normal ones).

Magical Thinking. This is a psychological phenomenon in which people think two totally unconnected events or phenomena are related. Sometimes people mistake correlation for causation, and sometimes it's just more superstitions. People still beleive this today, from the "power of positive thinking" to athletes with lucky socks.

Sympathetic Magic. This is like the "noun form" of magical thinking; people associate the part with the whole. Homeopathy is a modern-day version. People think that acting upon a representative object will translate into changes on the actual object, like the classic voodoo doll, or scrying/enchanting someone by acting upon a bit of their hair or a drop of their blood.

Symbolic Reasoning. "The symbol is the referent," so if you manipulate the symbol, you can affect the referent. This is the more generalized version of sympathetic magic, as it can also encompass magic words, numerology, sacred geometry, etc. Language itself, and writing, were seen as magical in ancient times.

Narrative Reasoning. This is the idea that there is a "story" and things play out according to some plot. I think it's more prevalent in modern fiction (Star Wars can be read this way particularly well -- the Force is the Plot, and Obi-Wan and Darth Vader are both Dangerously Genre-Savvy). But you can also find it in the more self-aware myths and fairy tales. This is related to the above ideas because plots and narrative structures are really just more patterns.

Unexplained. Magic, on some level, defies rational explanation. Comic for reference: https://www.sciencecircle.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/S-Harris-Then-a-miracle-occurs.png . People still often shrug and say "it's magic" when they don't have a good explanation for something, and we have phrases like "voodoo economics" or the magic numbers in software. Clark's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") isn't really about the power of advanced technology, it's about the inexplicability of advanced technology.

Hidden Laws. Putting this all together, I think the theme is that a belief in magic asserts that there are hidden laws governing the universe, and that these laws can be learned and utilized, but not (fully) understood. Humans crave reasons for things to happen, but often the universe is not forthcoming, so we just make stuff up.

But in a setting with folkloric magic, that made-up stuff should actually work. I think this is what people are getting at when they talk about "rituals" in this thread. To me, it's not so much about casting spells without using spell slots, it's more about the practical knowledge of a supernatural world. E.g., sleep with an egg under your bed to ward off the Evil Eye. Or, if you want to go to the Feywild, visit the crossroads at midnight under a full moon and when a troupe of elven troubadors comes through, go with them. But before you go, pry a nail from your house; once in the Feywild, if you suspend the nail by a string over a bowl of water, it will swivel and point the way home, like a lodestone. Stuff like that.

If I were running a folkloric magic setting (and I might, very soon) I'd jam it full of twisted little laws that the players can exploit. I'd probably make some of them common knowledge, and for others, I might require knowledge checks. I'd love to make some random tables to help generate superstitious elements on the fly.

It's important to keep Sanderson's First Law in mind with this kind of change ("The ability of protagonists to use magic to solve their problems is directly correlated with how well magic is defined"). This is why the D&D spell system is so well-defined; it's meant to allow protagonists to use it to solve problems. Using folkloric magic, which is much more nebulous, should be risky and uncertain and have unexpected side-effects. Instead of solving the protagonists' problems, the magic simply swaps them for new problems which may be slight easier to solve and also slightly more interesting. E.g., instead of searching house-to-house for the fugitive, you can perform a spell to locate him, but this requires you to first gather some magical doodads and learn the fugitive's full name (a bit of mild investigation). Either way would take about the same game time and be about equally effective.

 

[Samloyal23]

Agreed, but you can easily just narrate them. The same goes for big boom spells, the like which, with the exception of plot based/one-shot occurrences should never fall into the standard repertoire of player characters. I mean those who have cataclysmic effects and the like; the best way to do them is not to make complicated fixed rules with numbers but just tell the players what they see and the outcome...

...There you go, no rocket science needed on that. You neither want them PCs to replace the local cleric, nor to have them have powers like the archwizard, so you really do not need accurate rules in a mechanical way for every aspect of such things.

That is exactly the kind of hand waving that to me makes a setting less authentic. Winging it feels like cheating. Sure, it is quicker and easier, but I think everything in a setting should have actual rules behind it. I think a DM or game designer should be able to show his work, the way we did in Algebra class. Also, letting players see things in the rules beyond their part in it makes the setting more real.

 

[Coroc]

That is exactly the kind of hand waving that to me makes a setting less authentic. Winging it feels like cheating. Sure, it is quicker and easier, but I think everything in a setting should have actual rules behind it. I think a DM or game designer should be able to show his work, the way we did in Algebra class. Also, letting players see things in the rules beyond their part in it makes the setting more real.

Well I did it the complicated way also, when I let my players cast a toned down version of the rain of colorless fire to evaporate 400 orcs, I did let the party mage roll hefty arcana checks every round (because it was a scroll, far above his league being quasi a 10th level spell), and the rest of the group, who additionally empowered the spell with their life force, had to roll for the damage they take each round, as well as to make a constitution save.
Fun thing was, the mage botched a check with a nat. 1 and one of the group rolled a 1 on his save, and since I use the "something can always happen if you roll 1s on a d20" house rule, that player fell dead instantly (no dead saves).
They still managed to burn things through ( I rolled the amount of damage dealt every round), so 400 orcs were turned into sluggish ash.

I did fetch my inspiration on how to do that mathematically from melcot.com , describing a 3e version of the spell, as well as the three part trigger artifact (Ashen staff), of which the party had acquired and assembled two parts.

So if needed, I detail things a bit more. I just wanted to express, that most often it just is not worth the effort, most RAW spells are described, so even if a combination of them or metamagic applies, there are rules on how to do this, and if it is something not in the books, you got to determine the purpose upfront, and either do the details, or not.

 

[Bohandas]

Well I did it the complicated way also, when I let my players cast a toned down version of the rain of colorless fire to evaporate 400 orcs, I did let the party mage roll hefty arcana checks every round (because it was a scroll, far above his league being quasi a 10th level spell), and the rest of the group, who additionally empowered the spell with their life force, had to roll for the damage they take each round, as well as to make a constitution save.

There's already two player-accessible Rain of Colorless Fire type spells officially (in 3.5e at any rate). Apocalypse From the Sky is a ninth level corrupt spell from Book of Vile Darkness, and Rain of Fire is an epic spell from the Epic Level Handbook. The former requires an artifact focus and deals serious backlash to the caster, and the latter requires an epic feat and a DC 50 skill check