Magic In A Vaguely Realistic "Real World"

[doctorbadwolf]

Now, first, this isn't DnD magic!

Imagine the real world. It's roughly now, give or take a decade or so, and both real magic and non-human sentient beings and supernatural creatures begin to act upon the world to a degree where they can no longer be hidden. Rangers, a loose association of people who work to protect the world from supernatural evil, and keep both humans and non-humans safe from eachother, and until now protect the Secret, have begun to recruit and to work toward easing folk toward knowledge of the world as it really is, to reduce panic and violence when the news breaks on a wide scale.
Meanwhile, magic is getting easier to learn as it gets easier to believe that it's real and as the world is less...blocked off from sources of powerful magic.

I wonder how others here would deal with the fallout of such changes and revelations, giving the assumptions in this here OP.

How magic works in this world is, anyone can learn Physical Magics, or Thaumatological Magic. This is magic that combines the user's Conscious Will with the Thaumatological Field to create physical changes in the world. Because this magic is filtered through the mind of the user, and because the T-field intersects with all sentient beings' Will, the physical magics don't always work in a way that is purely scientific, but things like Newton's Laws tend to apply to at least secondary effects. If you create fire, the energy has to come from somewhere, and the air around the effect will be heated, etc.

Using magic is tiring. Anyone can learn it, but doing more than tiny amounts of it at a time is exhausting for most people.

Magic items that aren't very very powerful/hard to make require direct interaction with a person of some kind. Person here means "a creature possessed of Conscious WIll", not just like..a human. Otherwise, magic and tech have no issue working together. You can power an object with magic, but its much easier to, say, transfer wasted kinetic and thermal energy from a person using an object to recharge it's battery.

Some things are weird from a scientific perspective, like Cryomancy. This is because, again, physical magic intersects with the collective Will of all sentient beings, and people think in terms of Cold as a thing, rather than the absence of something.

There are Ancestries other than human, some of which are inherently magical. Alfar, for instance, as descended from land spirits (vaettr) who made themselves semi-mortal to better interact with mortals, in ancient times. As such, they can speak with spirits more easily than others, and live incredibly long lives, slumber for extended periods every few centuries and awake young and malleable again (essentially reverting to a young adult without the hard-coded personality of old age but also losing much of their power and advanced knowledge). Shifters, OTOH, can turn into animals, and can enter the spirit world easily, especially in dreams, and are called every year to fight the Night Battles against horrors of the First Gods in defense of the waking world.

The greatest beings of magic still have a hard time being on Earth (rather than their home world) for any significant length of time, and as such are still largely a matter of rumor and legend.

There are also spiritual magics, dealing with spirits and gods, and the energy that runs between the 9 worlds, but let's stick to the physical magics for now.

How do you think the world would look in such an era, vs, say, 30 years later?

 

[Tonguez]

Im not getting a good sense of the magic system except that its Willbased.
What is the nature of the T-Field? Are you saying people will still be throwing fireballs and casting mage armour and cure wounds or is the T-Field a fundamental force and magic suppose to be more subtle and ‘physics’ based ie mage can increase the kinetic energy of a substance to the point that it has a rapid exothermic reaction or they can refract the light around themselves so they become invisible?

Also I’m assuming at this point at Alfar and Shifters look like variant humans in this setting? Or are they obviously Elfs and ...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's not DnD, as I said in the OP.

So, Alfar and Shifters are wholly separate creatures from humans, but have no real connection to the DnD races. Shifters are were-people, but with their history and lore focused on legends of benevolent were-wolves like the benedanti or those Irish ones. (but with several types of shifters based on different legends)

Magic is skill based, rather than spell based. You can train spells during downtime/extended rest, but what that means is that you're taking an advanced or complex use of one or more magic skills that would normally be harder to do and more costly in terms of your own mental and physical energy, and training it to the point wehre it is no longer an improvised thing. It may still cost more energy, but it isn't harder to do anymore.

Most magic is either very simple enchantments like making a weapon never dirty or dull, or bending gravity or air very slightly around yourself to deflect missiles, allowing you to get into melee with a shooter, or using Aeromancy to help you run faster and jump farther, or generating light through a process similar to that of a lightbulb, but without the need for specially made filiments, or accelerating static charge in the air to shock an enemy, feed electricity into a system, etc.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I should probably be more concise with these sort of posts...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The worlds in The Magicians, American Gods, Imajica, Neverwhere, Hellblazer, Dresden Files, Nightside and others spring immediately to mind. Generally speaking.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Harry Turtledove’s Darkness novels have similar magic in other settings.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The worlds in The Magicians, American Gods, Imajica, Neverwhere, Hellblazer, Dresden Files, Nightside and others spring immediately to mind. Generally speaking.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Harry Turtledove’s Darkness novels have similar magic in other settings.

One way it stands out from some of those, even the ones that are strong inspiration for it, is that magic and tech work just fine together. You can enchant a battery to extend its life and have it regain charge from magically converted thermal and kinetic waste energy, or a rifle to never jam and to clean and oil itself, or a tv to steal cable, or a warp drive to convert solar power at nearly 100% efficiency and transmute matter into exotic elements to power the drive, or the computer of a starship to create a magitech neural network that allows the crew to mesh (think drift from Pacific Rim) with the ship’s systems and each other in order to combine human instinct and implicit memory and computer processing and sensors into something greater than the sum of its parts.

But in the modern era, magic isn’t quite that advanced, and magitech barely exists outside of the tinkers and makers among the Rangers and their allies.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I would think...

Those that can learn it will. If it is truly systematic, it will be formally taught, possibly even in schools. It may even be considered a new branch of science.

The Internet will lead to rapid dissemination of a least the easier stuff...regardless of whether it’s good or bad juju. The Dark Web will be truly dangerous.

Magic will be used to enhance everyday life as much as is practicable- fashion, sports, entertainment, housekeeping, healthcare, education, policing, the drug trade, prostitution, gambling, porn and espionage will be touched at the very least.

 

[Dioltach]

Have you read any of the Rivers of London novels by Ben Aaronovitch? Police procedurals set (mostly) in modern-day London, with a codified magic system, where the supernatural is rapidly becoming more and more prominent in everyday life.

Also, they're excellent books, with loads of geeky references. Like when they hear a rhythmic pounding while searching London's sewers:

"Drums!" I said. And then, because I couldn't resist, I added, "Drums in the deep!"

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Some things are weird from a scientific perspective, like Cryomancy. This is because, again, physical magic intersects with the collective Will of all sentient beings, and people think in terms of Cold as a thing, rather than the absence of something.

And what happens when "people" starts thinking in term of cold being a lack of kinetic energy at the atomic level and not as a thing in itself? Does magic change as well? It's a real question because (a) I think education level progressed greatly over the last century or so, and "average" worldview on many things has probably changed, so does magic follows the majority or is magic "individualistic" as in "as long as I think Cold is a thing I can create cold"?

How do you think the world would look in such an era, vs, say, 30 years later?

If magic is powerful enough to be useful (as in, competing with tech ; if you need ten years of training to cast a light spells, people will carry a flashlight instead of going the magic route), it will get incorporated into formal training. A new branch of science will develop to determine the strenghts, limit and behaviour of magic. You can't have a scientific principles shattering discovery and have the scentific community ignore it.

The other community reacting quickly will be lawmakers. Whether to ban it or to regulate its uses, magic will be incorporated into every aspect of life (is it cheating to cast a spell to jump farther at the Olympics? To have the wind whispers answers at an exam?).

 

[Fanaelialae]

Now, first, this isn't DnD magic!

Imagine the real world. It's roughly now, give or take a decade or so, and both real magic and non-human sentient beings and supernatural creatures begin to act upon the world to a degree where they can no longer be hidden. Rangers, a loose association of people who work to protect the world from supernatural evil, and keep both humans and non-humans safe from eachother, and until now protect the Secret, have begun to recruit and to work toward easing folk toward knowledge of the world as it really is, to reduce panic and violence when the news breaks on a wide scale.
Meanwhile, magic is getting easier to learn as it gets easier to believe that it's real and as the world is less...blocked off from sources of powerful magic.

I wonder how others here would deal with the fallout of such changes and revelations, giving the assumptions in this here OP.

How magic works in this world is, anyone can learn Physical Magics, or Thaumatological Magic. This is magic that combines the user's Conscious Will with the Thaumatological Field to create physical changes in the world. Because this magic is filtered through the mind of the user, and because the T-field intersects with all sentient beings' Will, the physical magics don't always work in a way that is purely scientific, but things like Newton's Laws tend to apply to at least secondary effects. If you create fire, the energy has to come from somewhere, and the air around the effect will be heated, etc.

Using magic is tiring. Anyone can learn it, but doing more than tiny amounts of it at a time is exhausting for most people.

Magic items that aren't very very powerful/hard to make require direct interaction with a person of some kind. Person here means "a creature possessed of Conscious WIll", not just like..a human. Otherwise, magic and tech have no issue working together. You can power an object with magic, but its much easier to, say, transfer wasted kinetic and thermal energy from a person using an object to recharge it's battery.

Some things are weird from a scientific perspective, like Cryomancy. This is because, again, physical magic intersects with the collective Will of all sentient beings, and people think in terms of Cold as a thing, rather than the absence of something.

There are Ancestries other than human, some of which are inherently magical. Alfar, for instance, as descended from land spirits (vaettr) who made themselves semi-mortal to better interact with mortals, in ancient times. As such, they can speak with spirits more easily than others, and live incredibly long lives, slumber for extended periods every few centuries and awake young and malleable again (essentially reverting to a young adult without the hard-coded personality of old age but also losing much of their power and advanced knowledge). Shifters, OTOH, can turn into animals, and can enter the spirit world easily, especially in dreams, and are called every year to fight the Night Battles against horrors of the First Gods in defense of the waking world.

The greatest beings of magic still have a hard time being on Earth (rather than their home world) for any significant length of time, and as such are still largely a matter of rumor and legend.

There are also spiritual magics, dealing with spirits and gods, and the energy that runs between the 9 worlds, but let's stick to the physical magics for now.

How do you think the world would look in such an era, vs, say, 30 years later?

Assuming that things don't go post apocalyptic due to religious war or the like, I would expect another tech boom - well, a magi-tech boom.

It sounds like magic can be used to solve certain problems more easily than science (your example of a star drive that converts photons into exotic particles). And it is compatible with tech. Therefore, I think that as soon as it became available tech companies would immediately begin examining whether projects they've had to shelf due to engineering limitations might now be possible thanks to magic. Those with the skills would almost certainly be in extremely high demand, which would in turn increase demand for education in the field (the T-field, pun intended). It wouldn't just be people who have a genuine interest in magic who want to learn, but also those driven by more material and social interests. Years down the line, you'd have a field where demand would likely still be strong, but saturated with second-rate magicians, where many companies will have learned the hard way that not just anyone with a BS of T-Field Studies is equivalent.

I believe it's likely that with the exposure that the big tech companies could provide (and their vested interest in having the public gain an acceptance of magi-tech) that magic and "demihumans" would rapidly gain acceptance from the general population. People might be nervous in the short term, but once Shpoogle and AceBook begin touting the amazing conveniences of magi-tech, the majority of people will likely come to embrace it. I mean, who wouldn't want a TV that will find the show you want to watch, without any channel surfing, and without you even knowing it? Some hate is likely to exist of course, but probably only within a minority. There will likely be people who claim all sorts of things, like magic gives you cancer or causes you to become possessed, but especially if big tech stands against them (in the interest of preventing the spread of bigotry and misinformation of course) they'll be relegated to standing on street corners and shouting. Lawsuits over freedom of speech would be sure to follow, but after the years it would take to resolve those general acceptance would already be firmly rooted, with nothing short of mass catastrophe being likely to dislodge it thereafter.