Annoyingkid
Master
This sounds very written and artificial. Having different drawbacks that seem tailor made to each class.
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The Price of Magic
- Thread starter Rkcapps
- Start date
This sounds very written and artificial. Having different drawbacks that seem tailor made to each class.
FifthView
Dark Lord
I like this. It uses the natural development we see in our own world, in which practitioners take on qualities that long practice or employment in a field will promote. E.g., those working with their hands (farmers, mechanics, whatever) might develop calluses, small or large injuries related to their work, an eye for practical solutions. Those who are professional athletes develop the characteristics of athletes. Those who go into politics....well, not pretty, heh.
I use something like that in my current WIP. The focus of this story is in one land of the larger world where the magic is isolated to a class of "monks," (loose analogue), and prolonged use changes them. The change is mostly mental, personality-based, ties into the practice of a philosophy/religion, but some of those who have practiced this magic long enough stay in magical physical states for prolonged periods.
I'm also using something RedAngel mentioned. My MC will be a novice, a new practitioner, and there are dangers associated with that.
C. A. Stanley
Master
Great example. I do prefer to think of magic as a 'muscle', like in the film Chronicle. “It’s like a muscle, we just have to learn to use it.â€. In a similar vein to mental traits, which you can improve over time (reduce emotional sensitivity, or apathy; improve confidence, or decision making etc.)
In many religions, myths, stories, and novels music is often described as being part of creation. So I tend to associate it with magic as it makes sense. I interpret it as fire, water, earth, wind, lightning, light, and darkness are the aethers that comprise everything. they are the base notes in each scale that forms all the keys or keys of creation. The vibrations each note creates can manipulate the aether that things are made up of in time, space, and structure.
Each individual note has a specific purpose in magic. Each is pleasant but some can be combined to create greater effects as a chord while others create disharmonies. A chord is the essence of casting a basic spell. The more one learns about magic the more tones can be combined to make more useful or intricate spells.
A new magic user is like a piano which is out of tune with some keys being dead and others being horribly out of tune. The more they play the more the strings come to life until they gain an understanding of harmony and the dead strings start to make sounds. Each race is made up of varying notes which allow them to use one type of magic, some types of magic, or all types based on their makeup.
I see each type of aether having an effect over the others. Depending on their strength water will put out fire or it could create steam. Fire will evaporate water or it can boil it. wind can erode earth or earth can slow or prevent it's movement. Lightning can set earth to flame or it can be absorbed. They can also be combined as water and earth to form acids or water, earth, and fire to form a poison gas. It just depends on what the effects are intended to do.
Mind, body, and spirit are the three most common scales as most intentions are to affect another person. Other scales are animation, conjuration, divination, evocation, and so on. They do various things in the enviornment beyond other individuals. Notes can also be bended.
I would say that the the price of magic in this example is the strings that vibrate if they are played too hard or often they wear out or snap and fall out of tune which gets harder each time to keep them in tune. If one breaks a string it cannot be replaced and would render the effect it is used to create less effective.
The drawbacks of magic would be unintended notes that either one does not understand when learning or also a missed note that can cause the music to fall into disharmony. This disharmony can either come to an abrubt halt causing a spell to fizzle out before it is fully cast or to be intterupted altogether just before it is cast in which the spell either becomes highly unstable and can explode in all directions or to cast something the user did not want to cast.
I would also go as far to say that there should be a type of exaustion like if you ran a marathon with extended use. Just simply casting a spell should not necessarily tire one out spiritually unless it is a major spell being cast. The pool of mana within a spell caster should allow someone to maintain a sort of stamina for a while before the potency starts to wane. At which time maintaining a frequency or resonance would be much harder to keep up which would then cause the ill effects.
And as music evokes emotion, emotion should evoke higher or lower wave lengths in the frequency. Causing the spells to be stronger or weaker, wide or focused, and other held notes that emotions of sadness, anger, calm, fear, joy, disgust, surprise, etc. And also effected by an overarching morale in groups of people that would also effect spells being cast.
Belief in gods or faith in religions halp to shape the songs people like to play as their beliefs help to shape their outlook on life and the songs that are being played around them and in their universe and the expanse beyond.
Different times of year or the environments help to amplify or hinder specific notes which play into the cost of magic that can have devistating results.
Magic should never be taken lightly without having at least some grasp of how things work. The most dangerous uses are those who do not have sufficient schooling in magic or those who understand but use it for personal gain rather than the good of all, for whatever you cast will come back to you three fold some day.
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Alyssa
Master
The price of magic could also be in its difficulty to either attain or execute. What if a spell book was literally that... a book.
One planned world I have is where magic is an innate resource in every person in equal amounts... getting more of it can be a matter of waiting for or, for the unscrupulous and power hungry, hastening someone's death.
Then there can even be that there is no direct cost of it, except perhaps on your characters conscience, whatever the action required to perform magic takes. It might not be pretty.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
One planned world I have is where magic is an innate resource in every person in equal amounts... getting more of it can be a matter of waiting for or, for the unscrupulous and power hungry, hastening someone's death.
Then there can even be that there is no direct cost of it, except perhaps on your characters conscience, whatever the action required to perform magic takes. It might not be pretty.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Hello everyone!
I have been thinking about something like a price for having used Magic under certain conditions, which is an unusual situation for me because in all of my stories Magic has no price or cost at all for the Magical characters. This is for my Alice into Darkness story, and the cost involved would be something like this:
Even though Mages in Wander's Land are free to use their powers without any price, Alice (my protagonist) is now in a position in which she could be using her magical powers to heal injured soldiers after a serious battle. Well, she is much better at killing people than she would be at healing, but nothing stops her from healing the soldiers anyway.
However she does not heal anybody, I was wondering why and it turns out that there would be a huge price in case that she did that:
If people are healed by Mages in that world, your injuries or disease would indeed vanish and you would be fine. The problem would show up a few weeks later, because the fact that you were healed with Magic means that you were exposed to it in a very personal and direct way and this has a consequence.
The consequence is that your body starts to rot, and you soon die a painful and terrible death.
In this case, there is a price for Magic but it affects the ordinary people instead of the Mages. I really love this concept! It has been one of the many nice surprises that this story in particular has given me.
Some stories work well with very limited Magic that is full of prices and consequences, while other stories do great with Magic more like the one so common in my works. To say that Magic should always have a price or always be rare, is the same as saying that Mages should always be capable of annihilating entire armies and cities.
Imagine freely, and enjoy your Fantasy world and your stories.
Two other interesting prices for Magic can be seen in the Merlin TV series, in which saving or creating a life with the help of magic means that another life must be destroyed, and the Foster's Effect from the world of The Worst Witch. Foster's Effect means that if the Witches use too much magic, said magic goes out of control like a storm and causes all types of trouble and disasters.
Fantasy is beautiful.
I have been thinking about something like a price for having used Magic under certain conditions, which is an unusual situation for me because in all of my stories Magic has no price or cost at all for the Magical characters. This is for my Alice into Darkness story, and the cost involved would be something like this:
Even though Mages in Wander's Land are free to use their powers without any price, Alice (my protagonist) is now in a position in which she could be using her magical powers to heal injured soldiers after a serious battle. Well, she is much better at killing people than she would be at healing, but nothing stops her from healing the soldiers anyway.
However she does not heal anybody, I was wondering why and it turns out that there would be a huge price in case that she did that:
If people are healed by Mages in that world, your injuries or disease would indeed vanish and you would be fine. The problem would show up a few weeks later, because the fact that you were healed with Magic means that you were exposed to it in a very personal and direct way and this has a consequence.
The consequence is that your body starts to rot, and you soon die a painful and terrible death.
In this case, there is a price for Magic but it affects the ordinary people instead of the Mages. I really love this concept! It has been one of the many nice surprises that this story in particular has given me.
Some stories work well with very limited Magic that is full of prices and consequences, while other stories do great with Magic more like the one so common in my works. To say that Magic should always have a price or always be rare, is the same as saying that Mages should always be capable of annihilating entire armies and cities.
Imagine freely, and enjoy your Fantasy world and your stories.
Two other interesting prices for Magic can be seen in the Merlin TV series, in which saving or creating a life with the help of magic means that another life must be destroyed, and the Foster's Effect from the world of The Worst Witch. Foster's Effect means that if the Witches use too much magic, said magic goes out of control like a storm and causes all types of trouble and disasters.
Fantasy is beautiful.
Simpson17866
Journeyman
The main cost of magic in my world (in addition to materials and exhaustion) is time: you can spend 10,000 hours becoming an expert at playing the piano, you can spend 10,000 hours becoming an expert at dirt bike racing, or you can spend 5,000 hours on each becoming a functional amateur at both. Likewise, my two Fire mages will eventually become capable of summoning raging infernoes, but they will both start out as "human Zippo lighters" (to quote my favorite Stephen King novel).
There are numerous forms of magic available to learn, and depending on what a mage cares the most about learning, the mage might end up with low power and high range (jack of all trades), high power and low range (master of one), or medium power and medium range.
There are numerous forms of magic available to learn, and depending on what a mage cares the most about learning, the mage might end up with low power and high range (jack of all trades), high power and low range (master of one), or medium power and medium range.
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Khryses
Acolyte
In one of my worlds (my higher fantasy one) there's an element of time spent for novice users to learn new patterns to empower as well as practice with similar patterns improving their aptitude and energy-efficiency.
The bigger cost is where those energies come from, as the world doesn't have "mana" per se.
Typically it takes years for a novice to learn how to tap into the world's energies; the natural currents running deep through the land. Before this they are limited to drawing on life energies, their own or other (willing?) donors. In moderation this will exhaust the donor. Drawn over-heavily this can shave years off their life, or even kill them at once.
When the user can draw on the land they have orders of magnitude more energy to work with, without risking killing themselves by overly ambitious workings. The catch is, the land remembers and over time certain areas have been corrupted by evils and civilization's petty concerns alike. Drawing energy through these areas steadily corrodes the geomancer's sanity until (in later ages of the world) they invariably die at someone's hands. This means once geomancers spend the minimum time and energy needed to plausibly claim to be trained, they are mostly very reluctant to use their greater powers any more than they are forced to. They trade on what they could do if they chose to.
In one of my later settings in this world a small band of "high magi" have learned to draw energy from the stars themselves (a combination of aptitude and learned technique). As the continent-spanning empire fell into the hands of lesser rulers, the high magi begin to rule 'for the greater good', and power and good intentions drive them to plunge the empire into bloody civil war (and apparently mutual extermination).
This leads to the latest setting, where those lucky few born with the gift of magic are 'privileged' to spend their days working for the good of their city as a second-class citizen (read: unofficial slave) with minimal training, using their own life magic to duplicate basic foodstuffs all day long. Experimentation in blood, earth or star magic is strictly forbidden and punishable by death.
The bigger cost is where those energies come from, as the world doesn't have "mana" per se.
Typically it takes years for a novice to learn how to tap into the world's energies; the natural currents running deep through the land. Before this they are limited to drawing on life energies, their own or other (willing?) donors. In moderation this will exhaust the donor. Drawn over-heavily this can shave years off their life, or even kill them at once.
When the user can draw on the land they have orders of magnitude more energy to work with, without risking killing themselves by overly ambitious workings. The catch is, the land remembers and over time certain areas have been corrupted by evils and civilization's petty concerns alike. Drawing energy through these areas steadily corrodes the geomancer's sanity until (in later ages of the world) they invariably die at someone's hands. This means once geomancers spend the minimum time and energy needed to plausibly claim to be trained, they are mostly very reluctant to use their greater powers any more than they are forced to. They trade on what they could do if they chose to.
In one of my later settings in this world a small band of "high magi" have learned to draw energy from the stars themselves (a combination of aptitude and learned technique). As the continent-spanning empire fell into the hands of lesser rulers, the high magi begin to rule 'for the greater good', and power and good intentions drive them to plunge the empire into bloody civil war (and apparently mutual extermination).
This leads to the latest setting, where those lucky few born with the gift of magic are 'privileged' to spend their days working for the good of their city as a second-class citizen (read: unofficial slave) with minimal training, using their own life magic to duplicate basic foodstuffs all day long. Experimentation in blood, earth or star magic is strictly forbidden and punishable by death.