How do you get magic an unnatural feeling? To make it taboo and uneasy instead of just a means to expand power and levels?
Make it clearly and obviously fucking evil, needing the blood of virgins and the sacrifice of children on their 13th birthdays.
>>44421863
If every peasant starts throwing rocks at you, animals flee and you attract more and more shady figures with magical greed who want to be your friend.
>>44421863
I've got a few ideas:
1) Every spell you cast has an aura of unnaturalness emanate from it. A cold wind blows, plants shrivel and die, animals flee. Just things that make it obvious that this shit isn't natural.
2) Even successful rolls have some sort of unintended consequence, which is usually weird, but not outright dangerous. Things healing spells leaving hideous scars, offensive spells having their victims die with a look of abject terror on their faces, the caster's eyes glowing an ethereal colour we have no name for.
3) Using magic for too long makes you start to see things that aren't there. Your decision on whether they're real or not. You could even go full Pratchett and have using too much magic break down the walls of the universe, allowing Things inside.
4) Failed rolls always come at a cost. Whether that be hideous boils erupting all over your body, your target for healing developing some kind of disease, transformation targets mutating into something inhuman (over time, in the case of PCs).
Just think of the things that disturb you the most and then incorporate them as consequences of using magic. That's the easy way to make it a bit weird, a bit unnatural, and a lot scary for the people in setting.
>>44421863
Don't let players use it.
>>44423648
>this
Some other good advice in here as well
Make it unpredictable, or amoral. Or both
If you're using magic, you're gambling a bit and picking at forces you don't quite understand. This is great for villains, given they can ignore the whole risk factor (it's established that they've already succeeded), and their morality is either of a "ends justifies the means" flavor, or just straight up vile, depending on the mood of your campaign.
Players with decency might still be willing to use magic, especially if pressed, but will usually try to work around it. Magical power might serve as a constant source of temptation, a wild card they can apply to any scenario to win it. Sort of.
The classics have lots of good examples of costs. Sacrifices. Pacts. Your personal vitality or humanity. Curses. Madness. Soul manipulation. Etc.
Don't make it easy.
Don't give it hard and fast rules. Things that can be understood are by definition less scary.
Make it slow.
That should make magic more risky and not the perfect solution to everything like it is in D&D
Make people question "Okay, is this really worth using?" because yes, it might get the job done, but it will fuck up something else in the process.
Or, hell, make it subtle. No fireballs or flashy shit like that, you want hexes and curses and a feeling of uneasy where you are constantly observed by some animals, where others will just flee on sight.
If a character uses too much magic, have some freaky shit come to them. One night they'll just open the window and see a crow with a dog's head staring at them unblinkingly. And that's only the beginning.
Read Appendix N.
Go after the Stormbringer/Elric RPG books.
Make it have a cost, be it sanity or health, or something like a pact with a mysterious entity.
>>44421863
I prefer the old fashioned use of every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. If you cast a fireball you'll cool the area around you, an extremely powerful fireball can actually give you frostbite or straight up kill you.
Illusions as a result would be the safest magic, but they also have the ramification of being relatively shitty and limited in what you can actually do.
Healing magic requires some other source of biomass and energy, and doesn't quite compensate for things such as blood born infections or parasites, so if you shove a piece of rotten meat into a wound to heal it you'll fuck things up worse.
>As the orcs flee, you make your way to the wounded merchant
>"Rest easy good man, I will take care of this cut"
>Somewhat taken aback the man's eyes rest upon the sigil on your chest
>"No! Stay away! I'll have nothing to do with your kind!"
>Despite his gushing wound he attempts to crawl, only to whince from the pain
>Ignoring that man's plea you stretch out your arms, your palms hoovering over the wound
>As you lock on the flesh with your mind, a thin shrowd fills the air, as if someone put a blanket over the sun
>Soft light emanates from your palms, drifting towards the torn flesh
>As you feel the energy flow, an eerie sound fills the air as the sky seems to get even darker
>The merchant's horse snorts and tramples and tries to get loose from his reigns
>It was not long before flesh crept back to seal the wound, only to leave a charred scar
>>44421863
well, for starters give it a reasonable sanity cost/roll
next give it odd side effects, like rotating everything in the environment 90 degrees in a random direction. maybe take some cues from the 40k-RPG and it's Perils of the Warp and Warp Phenomena tables
Don't name spells. They don't have names or explanations. They're just the bare minimum information needed to cast the spell. The only way to explore a spell is to cast it on something.
>>44421863
Make so that using magic can fuck you up, and exactly how is up to DM. Nothing scares players as much as giving power over their characters to DM.
>>44424474
This is neat.
>>44424529
I think this is dangerous advice. You can seriously impair the quality of your game if players suspect that the DM is playing favorites. Rules and dice offload some of this responsibility to an even playing field that everyone abides by.
When I DM, I don't use spell names or the word "cast", or even mechanical effects. If needed, I point at the player, if needed, and say that he must roll a save. Then describe just the outcome in a full-blown horror-novel style. The party tends to run the fuck away from each and every magic user.
When I play, I do the same, except I inform the DM in private about what I do, what the fuck I cast and stuff, and all the refluffs. The looks on the party's faces, trying to understand what just happened and how my character is capable of that, is priceless. Especially when it was simple stuff like refluffed color spray or grease.
Works wonders.
>>44424474
I'm gonna need more.
How about magik transforms your body, i.e. heavy usage of fire magik makes you bald with thick oily skin. Your diarhhea wiped the village and average lake.
OBVIOUS PLUG TIME!
pactwebserial.wordpress.com
Possibly include a layer of "what's actually there underneath 'normal' reality", a la Bloodborne, that only the magic-users can see.Like the fact that the cat the warrior is petting has tentacles spouting from its face and back. Eh, he's a warrior, he'll die eventually.
>>44421863
I'm letting the party discover that the more magic is used in my setting the more dangerous and monster filled it becomes as the plane itself destabilizes. I want them to be using their power and sway to convince people to abandon magic to save the world, or at least expose the truth of why there are horrible monsters or children born aberrant or why demons always push magic as a solution to problems.
Eventually they will be given the option to ride the setting into the apocalypse or destroy all magic.
>>44421863
I did a cyberpunk campaign and had my players thinking it was gonna be straight "corperations are evil" then had the hunt down a corperate cult to Satan.
Only one guy used magic, it was the final boss. Every Fucking time they raided one of their hideouts they'd find scrolls with instructions for ritual spells and shit and they couldn't figure out whether or not they were bullshit without trying the ritual but none of them wanted to do it.
So basically, make it unnatural. Make it a thing your players aren't expecting and aren't prepared for and make it mysterious as fuck.
Never explain how it works. Don't say it's of the gods or spirits or from the arcane realm, just no one knows, other than we do stuff, it works.
Why do complicated rituals work? Why do incantations work? Why do carved runes protect doorways? Why do ancient glyphs seem to whisper secret knowledge? Why does silver subdue spirits but gold draw them?
No one knows, no one can know, you can just trip over and accidentally uncover something incredibly dangerous, and the worst part is no one can help you if you do. You discovered an incantation to cast fireballs? You sure you wanna use it? Could be useful. But how does it work? Is it just energy? Is it a fire elemental? Is it made of souls? YOUR soul? Maybe the stink of arcane flame smells good to vampiric spirits of the frigid air above. You might get wizards hunting you down because they want to hoard this new secret.
>>44421863
By not playing DnD
>>44424474
So basically make it so all magic is the same as using forbidden black magic, the type of which is super duper cursed and makes mother nature shriek with rage?
>>44421863
Make mages secretly binders. Every spell they have is a ghostly bird spirit which they trap inside their body and release from bonds. A Mage who studied fireball has red glowing eyes until he releases the spell. At the beginning of the day, Wizards float three inches off the ground and spark lightning at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day, they're ordinary people
At least Dragon Age had the sense to put student mages in a high security place.
Eldritch Knowledge, never know how eactly it works, weird connections and traditions, like ancient magic texts written chiefly in draconic as if the language was magical, translated into Elvish, which was translated further into other languages. Also spells should be entities of themselves, solidifying in your mind so much one can learn them by studying (eating) a prepared wizard's brain. How do you think there are arcanist Illithids? Get weird and esoteric.
>>44421863
Take notes from Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy RP and Unknown Armies.
Sacrifices and costs are the best way. You dont even have to do much more, just make it clear that magic is never free.
A powerful wizard would have had to give up a lot and may be disfigured or made mad/immoral by what they've had to do.
Want to know the ultimate secret of magic?Any cunt could do it
That being said. Magic has a cost.
It doesn't always have to be blood.
Remake reality and you allow elements of unreality to remake you.
Think about what its like to beat a man to death with your bare fists.
It was all of you. No weapons.
Just all of you Verses all of him.
And you overcame him.
You are better than he.
Everything he is. Everyone romantic tryst. Every delicious meal. Every dream for the future His history and potential future. All of it. It is in your hands. Yours to decide.
You can erase him. Erase what he could be.
Unmake him and take him from those he loves.
Look into his eyes as the life fades from them and know that you are for all intents and purposes now his god.
That - Is power. That sort of power changes you
Now think about the power that comes from practicing the arcane. You manipulate not only the physical but the abstract.
Think about what that could do to a person.
Think about that power.
>>44421863
>How do you get magic an unnatural feeling?
Not by making it "taboo and uneasy", that's for sure.
If you want magic to feel different and out of the ordinary, you can't give it to your players. Simple as that, really. You can't give them rules for how it works, even if you have them yourself, because then it stops being magic by definition.
>>44421863
Read The Black Company. Then pattern magic-users in general after the Taken.
>>44421863
don't tell your players how it works, give them a plain English description or an legend/riddle of some kind. any wizard casting a spell just needs to kinda eyeball it. also make it interesting with situational rules and multiple rolls on a grid/flowchart, and yeah make it rare to much time and freedom to experiment will let them understand it
>>44422528
penguin_boots is best name
>>44421863
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHrTTgmB_3w
