Magic as a corrupting influence...

[gamecat]

Well - Once upon an upon, I tried developing flavor text like this. Given a Red Wizardesque Magocracy, with each faction in charge of a school, each school had its own backlash.

Abjuration leads to a paranoid wizard, one who's warding himself against freeking everything.

A prolific conjurer is going to be snatched away one day, summoned himself against his will.

Diviners trade their senses (sight, hearing, etc.) in for the senses magic gives them.

Enchanters begin to crack at the seams, and eventually lose all willpower, to the point of a slight suggestion by a stranger being a binding command.

Evokers had a special one. Evocations entail using the human body as a conduit for energy. This energy blazes scars, symmetrically on the body. If these scars ever were to be made unsymetrical, the spell energy would be channeled into the body, but unable to leave, making for one dead mage.

Illusionists, having compensated the truth so many times, become compulsive liars, eventually to the point of having no control of the veracity of a statement.

The first Necromatic spell someone casts turns a single cell inside them cancerous. Further spellcastings accelerate the tumor's growth and the Necromancer's eventual death.

Transmutation affects the caster's mind, jading him and making him manipulative of other people. A well-casted transmuter eventually cares nothing for his "friends", being little more than tools.

Pick your poison, eh?

 

[reason]

...

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the obvious - magic is power, and power corrupts. Give a human being power over his or her fellows, any sort of edge you like, and you'll likely end up with a corrupted human being. Greater the power, greater the corruption. Add that to the selection effect; only those interested in using power tend to chase after power. Just look at politicians in the real world.

Reason
Principia Infecta

 

[Dirigible]

* Magic is not That Which Man is Not Meant To Know; it is That Which Man Was Meant To Know, But Is Not Equipped To Cope With.

The Creator / Good Pantheon wanted to create sentient life and the universe in a state of perfect enlightenment and puissance. This would include the ability to mutate reality on a whim, and the wisdom to do so with judiciousness. The Archnaughty / Evil Pantheon interfered with the genesis, however, and as a result life is finite, full of suffering, and ignorance. All sentients are tainted with this 'original sin' equivalent, so when they come into contact with the unbearable purity of magic, the force of mutability that was supposed to be installed in life from day one, they are driven mad, poisoned by their own innate taint reacting against the purity, and unwilling to face the fact of theirflawed natures.

Is is just me, or does the above read like the Bible, the Gnostic Heresies and Mage the Ascension shoved in a blender and set on 'bastardize'?

* Magic is a fundamental protomatter from before time. The dough of creation. Channeling it in certain ways undermines the fabric of reality, leading to all kinds of tenticular problems. If used in other ways, it merely overwrites reality, which is a bit safer, though vastly hubristic.

* Err... I had one setting where arcane magic as stlen form Beholders. Over time, practitioners heads would start to grwo... their bodies atrophy... their eyes merge into one cyclopian organ... stalks would grow from the sides of their heads...

Maybe not my greatest idea ever.

Think of them as like abstract mental parasites,

Brilliant! I love it!

 

[arscott]

I enjoy the WarCraft View: Magic isn't corruptive, it's addictive.

But magic belongs to the demons. And theres no telling how vile and depraved a wizard is willing to become in order to feel the eldrich fire rushing through his veins.

 

[Bagpuss]

So, does anyone have any other ideas on what could cause this type of corruption? I'm just brainstorming for my campaign, and want to come up with a good reason why magic is so dangerous to use.

Are you looking for a mechanic or a background. Loads of folks have suggested mechanics so I'ld thought I'ld chip in with some in game reasons, for magic corrupting an individual. I know some of these have been mentioned before, but lists are handy.

1) It just does, not all things are understood or can be understood.

2) Magic is only provided by demonic sources, (of course this would raise questions about the standard clerics in your campaign world, if you have them).

3) Magic by its very nature alters the fabric of reality, use it enough it damages the fabric of the person that preforms magic, this can be permenant or recover over time as reality heals itself.

4) Magic draws on power within the earth itself, unknown to the pre-sciene cultures it actually draws on background radition sucking it up like a vaccum cleaner so magic users get a considerably higher dose over years of use, and are likely to develop cancers and mutations (depending on how bad you want it to be).

5) Magic access an alternate plane which is toxic to the people of this plane. Depending on the power of the magic (or just bad luck) the effects on the magic user can be minor to debilitating.

6) Power corrupts, magic is raw power, and chips away at the sanity of the user leading to megolmania, eventually.

7) Magic is like a drug (see Willow in BtvS).

8) Magic involves interacting with the spirits of items, nature, etc. Their goals do not always match with the mages and he must give up part of himself to bend them to his will. Sometimes the spirit could even claim control of the mages body for a time.

 

[Pbartender]

To expand upon a thought from a PDF I bought recently...

Let's say that Magic is simply the means to change Reality using your Will alone. You think of something happening, perhaps with a few incantations and gestures to help you concntrate your Will, and it happens.

Now, you change reality often enough, and it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what truly is Reality and what isn't. Under such circumstances, who can really predict what the Laws of the Universe will be from one Moment until the next? Living within a mutable Reality, even one over which you have such limited control of the alterations, would eventually put a strain on the Sanity of anyone short of a God or Demon.

 

[mythusmage]

I'm now reading Blue Rose from Green Ronin. There magic that harms another is of Shadow, and use of it can draw the user into Shadow.

In Mythus witchcraft and sorcery cannot be used unless the prospective witch or sorceror makes a pact with evil, pledging to commit acts of great wickedness and villainy in return for power and the use of the associated magics. It should be noted that a person can either be a witch or a sorcerer, he cannot be both.

With divine magic in Mythus one must chose an Ethos (kind of like a D&D alignment) and swear an oath of service to a god of that Ethos. Magic of any other Ethos (alignment) is forbidden.

Hope this helps.

 

[rbingham2000]

To expand on Reason's point earlier in this thread:

I had a thread on here at least a year ago about a magical corruption system based on the Change for the Machines humanity loss rules for Cyberpunk 2020 on the Blackhammer Cyberpunk Project site. As far as I know, they're still online.

Basically, the kind of magic you use determines how it works its changes on you and messes you up.

For example, if you use a lot of abjuration and evocation magic (spells that you blast people with and protect yourself from harm with), you're likely to become, if you aren't one already, an ego-tripping jerk who doesn't feel that he has to listen to anyone because he thinks he's so much better than them. Enchantment magic's even worse in the arrogance department -- it's easy to forget that you need to listen to other people when you have the power to bend their minds to your will.

If you use a lot of divination magic, it's a pretty good indicator that you don't trust the senses that God (or whatever other deity or force) gave you, and that you're most likely paranoid.

Using a lot of shapeshifting magic (or other magic that lets you do things that other humans can't do normally) tends to isolate you from the people at large and lead to both arrogance and paranoia. And so on and so forth.

I threw in as part of this the degradation of normal skills that you're used to augmenting with magic -- you've become so used to using magic to enhance the skill that when the magic's taken away, you find yourself unwilling and less able to use the skill without it. Which makes a certain amount of sense, if you think about it.