Technology is in the realm of understanding the laws of nature and applying them. But if magic existed in a world, that would be part of the nature too. Often times it's few privileged people who can afford to study it full time for years, often with a cultural or born talent for stuff magical, who often like to use it for personal gains, or otherwise withhold the knowledge in order to keep out competitors. But same has been for technology. What stops people from tapping into this part of nature and applying it in way in which common folk could use them? Can magical energies be channeled without a person educated in magic in anyway with limited training? Possibly with material tools, with engineering?
Could any laws that might govern what is known as magic to be simplified so that they could be controlled like natural forces we know in the real world (i myself have been troubled by lack of any comprehensible limits or laws when it comes to 'magic')
Thoughts, examples, experiences, world building etc?
>>47355143
Best way I've found of doing it is to take all the ideas /tg/ creates about magical theory and apply them to the world of your choice at the same time.
Ever region has its own ideas on why shit works and they all work and most of them are mutually contradictory.
A Dökkálfar mage-smith is pounding all of his considerable hate into a blade to make it burn cherry red eternally like a forge fresh iron whilst an onlooking Ljósálfar is watching in bemusement as that has sweet fuck all to do with anything he has been taught and shouldn't work. But it does.
In a similar manner the Dökkálfar watches the Ljósálfar fuck around with the physical properties of the world by messing with True Names and such and that's just bullshit and impossible bullshit at that.
I think what define magic as opposed to other stuff is that magic operates on the level of concepts and symbols, not elementary forces. So it can has more arbitrary rules.
>>47355240
Are you meaning that there are different laws of physics every few hundred miles/kilometers or maybe the laws are the same but collective differences with sentient/non-sentient creatures have slightly different results?
Do the magic practiced on other regions still work the same everywhere? Or do they maybe be affected by some sort 'field like' area created by the local populace? The magic seems to have many intricate difference between individuals and schools of though, but it must all come from somewhere, right?
>>47355143
Your issues are because magic, historically and in literature, is analogous to *power,* and by that I mean "power over other humans." In real history, power was by right of birth, or by knowledge accumulated by studying, which was reserved only for the wealthy, so you end up with wizards and sorcerers who have magic run in their veins or acquire it after long years of solitude and studying. Or, you have people that vanished in the woods or whatever, so you end up with fae and goblins and shit out there that's dangerous to people.
>i myself have been troubled by lack of any comprehensible limits or laws when it comes to 'magic'
That's because magic is an analogy of social institutions--it's not a parallel set of natural laws. If contemporary technology exists, you should move away from the archaic nobility analogy of magic and move to a modern analogy, like sorcerous power being derived from accumulating wealth, or emphasize contracts, or work bureaucracy into it some how, or magic derived from clandestine meetings of businessmen shaking hands behind closed doors.
>>47355265
>arbitrary rules
Seems like the fabric of space, constants of the universe or whatever are very malleable by the thought/willpower of certain individuals, at least at certain 3-dimensional range. While in our world that requires enormous mass and magnetic fields etc. And then there are the summonings. Stuff is manifested, whether intelligently by the universe itself via input from a mind qualified, or from a another dimension.
>>47355384
> like sorcerous power being derived from accumulating wealth, or emphasize contracts, or work bureaucracy into it some how, or magic derived from clandestine meetings of businessmen shaking hands behind closed doors.
That's just making other people doing one's bidding.
>>47355357
>Are you meaning that there are different laws of physics every few hundred miles/kilometers or maybe the laws are the same but collective differences with sentient/non-sentient creatures have slightly different results?
Nope. A dude from the middle-east equivalent with nephilim blood could go to to anywhere else in the world and his residual authority of God's First Servants running through his veins would still allow his magic to work. Local wizards who operate on a wood, fire, earth, metal, water elemental system are going to be left wonder how the fuck that even works and vice versa.
>Do the magic practiced on other regions still work the same everywhere?
Yes
>Or do they maybe be affected by some sort 'field like' area created by the local populace?
Does not appear so
>The magic seems to have many intricate difference between individuals and schools of though, but it must all come from somewhere, right?
Who the fuck knows.
>>47355601
>>The magic seems to have many intricate difference between individuals and schools of though, but it must all come from somewhere, right?
>Who the fuck knows.
There it is. Even the living gods get it from somewhere (and could probably be killed by it).
>>47355143
I liked the magic batteries in Artemis Fowl, allowing the automation of some spells.
I saw a concept that I appropriated; humans can't do magic because of the iron in their blood. Everyone else has copper-based blood, so I'm kind of drawing a parallel to magic and electricity. Electricity always seemed kind of magic to me because it acts like water, but travels through solid matter. I can understand it enough with that metaphor.
You could have magic be like a Tulpa, where it works because you think it works. So whatever ritual you do, the concentration and accumulated belief of generations is what makes it real. That could explain >>47355240
or you could have magic be the latest cutting edge science, quantum mechanics, and Shrodinger's Cat and all that jazz about observation and superpostion, allowing someone to see the possible futures or excite molecules to throw fire, or entangle themselves to make tactile telekinesis. The rules have always been there, you could just have people tap into them before they know what they are. Birds naturally have airfoil-shaped wings, a shape that we still technically don't understand WHY it works, just that it does. I think that's a kind of magic.
So birds can naturally fly, and we needed years of aviation studies to crack how they did it. We don't fully understand, but we do understand enough to do it ourselves. I imagine one could do the same with any magic you want to use, the natural way and the technological mimic
>>47355143
thats a nice ship there. It sure would be a shame if someone were to...teleport it to hell.
>>47359176
Also, spiders webs and gecko feet and termite a/c and all the other things we're trying to "biomimic". Magic could just be another thing that some were born with, but we don't fully understand it, but we know that those that have it also have this organ or cluster of nerves and those who don't... don't.
Geckos stick to walls because of van der Waals forces. But that doesn't mean anything to you or me, does it? Certainly not to the gecko, just to the people who are trying to copy it. Then they'll invent gecko gloves and we'll buy them and then we can stick to walls. For all intents and purposes, it's still magic.
Magic doesn't mean anything, it's just a catch-all for what we don't understand. However they end up inventing FTL is magic to me, because as I understand the universe right now, it's impossible. Then they do it, they offer an explanation, and that takes the place of magic.
Fucking microwaves. Heat with no flame, no light? Tell me why that's not magic
>>47359528
>we don't fully understand it
That's why magic and tech are mutually exclusive in low fantasy: We understand a lot of tech, but we wouldn't have to 'understand' a force found to be exempt from the iron laws of conservation to exploit it for profit - and you can bet the farm corporate and academic opportunists would do so ASAP. But there's another law on the books - one regarding Unintended Consequences. The immediate consequence of such a miraculous 'free' energy source being 'discovered' in an age when tech defines global economies would be Al Yankovic's "Everything You Know is Wrong" becoming the theme song of a planet utterly transformed into a Magical Realm bearing no resemblance to what we now consider the 'real' world.
I.e., magic is only for fantasy worlds. It's all or nothing. You literally cannot have it both ways.
>>47359304
Yeah, i know. After that clusterfuck, humanity is going to be stuck within a few light year radius for the next 15k years or so due to fear of what could go wrong.
>>47361159
>You literally cannot have it both ways.
I don't follow. Why can't you have tech and magic in low fantasy?
>>47361159
A lot of magic is not like this. It's more like >>47359176 >>47359528
Nobody has the slightest clue of what's going one. Or only a very crude idea. Not even the most powerful wizards. Or if they do, they're sure as fuck reluctant to teach it to anybody.
>>47361609
Warhammer fantasy at least on its RPGs had this strange meld of magic and technology.
Depending how you run the game WHF was either low, high fantasy or some strange middle ground that was a little less silly magic-steam-punk thingy that is warmachine
