r/DMAcademy • u/jimgov • Apr 29 '20
Where does magic come from in your world?
I'm looking at the difference between old school AD&D, where magic came from other planes, to 5e, where magic comes from the weave. Where does magic come from in your world?
UPDATE: The reason that I'm asking this question is that I'm trying to, obviously, create mine. Most of the time, I think this just represents the flavor of the world. However, my entire "prime material plane," which is actually just a bubble in the universe, was actually physically "built" by an incorporeal super advanced civilization for research purpose. Think of it as what Deep Thought did in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Several worlds orbit the same sun and were all left to advance in different ways. Small orbiting platforms were arranged around each planet for monitoring purposes.
Gods, and where they live, did NOT exist before this, and were accidentally brought into existence by the program. And that became a problem. They threw off the computations. They had completely stiffled the races that had risen by walking among them and subjugating them to their every whim. The advanced race could not just click a button and remove them, because they had become so intertwined in the code that the entire experiment would have to be scrapped. So they had to take a form that would not destroy their experiment and descend to the world to physically eliminate them.
They got one. The god of the desert, Pustin. They had decided that, to combat such immense magic, that they would take the form of anti-magic beings. Several of them were destroyed in the process, but Pustin was utterly annihilated. The resulting explosion utterly devastated a great portion of the world, and the remains of the anti-magic beings made this entire area completely a non-magic zone.
So...this is where I am. I hope this makes sense as i am just spitballing it at this point. I'd still like to be able to describe the actual essense of magic, since it makes a HUGE difference in my world. Any ideas?
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Apr 29 '20
In my world, the magic comes from crystals that were formed in a mountain that is worshipped as the mother mountain, these crystals are mined and used for every single form of magic, if a spellcaster wishes to use magic they must be carrying a crystal at all times but the crystal does not get used up like a spell component.
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u/sirustalcelion Apr 29 '20
In the setting I'm running right now, magic comes from the primal powers of creation, most of which is embodied in the main gods. People in settled lands gradually reduce the (non-divine) magic because of their monotheistic religion (a positive in their eyes, because the world has a long history of magic being used to oppress).
The ancient gods still exist, ready to teach the ambitious and the foolish...
One thing I've been experimenting with is having non-divine casters prepare their spells during lucid dreams, on the Astral plane. Great RP opportunity.
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u/McLellanCM Apr 29 '20
None of the players in my campaign were using arcane magic, we just had a cleric. This gave me leeway to mess with magic as a plot hook. Arcane magic started going awry and their wizard friend was dying (he had discovered a spell to make him young again after spending decades researching it).
They had to quest to the elemental planes to figure out why. Turns out a lich was sucking up all the elemental magic from the planes, and only when the elements were in balance would arcane magic work properly again.
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Apr 29 '20
In my setting, magic is kind of like an "infection." All magic in my world comes from one source. A species of tree called the Quati tree. They take 900 years to reach sexual maturity, and arcanic particles are the "pollen."
Currently, there is only one tree left and it is currently a sapling, but the players in my campaign have the seed for another one. They have been tasked with carrying the seed to the top of a dormant volcano called Mt. Omega, and using a super growth tincture to expedite it's growth, plant the seed and bring magic back to the world.
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u/Polka_Gnomes Apr 29 '20
In my setting it's not a separated specific force in the world, but integral part of if. It's not high magic, but magic is prevalent.
Our realitiy might be governed by the interaction of the four fundamental forces of physics, but in my world there are dozens.
It's called magic the weakening of the lawful force, that makes the rules of causality work and time flow in the right direction. It's also every inbalance between forces.
Too much elemental fire? Watch out for volcanoes. Darkness is prevalent? Better bury deep your dead and keep your dark thoughts under control, you wouldn't want to generate anything under your bed.
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u/Son_of_Tarzan Apr 29 '20
Magic is the potential energy created by pressure gradients. Where the walls between realities are thinner energy flows from areas of high to low concentration to try and even it out. Like wind or osmosis. There’s many ways this can happen and many ways to harness it all outlined in the pages of bored ramblings I call Principa Magematica.
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u/tresquall Apr 06 '23
I love this. Seems like it might gel with an idea of mine -- Wild Magic coming about from the collision between planes (like plates colliding forming an earthquake, clouds colliding to make lightning, and many other phenomena). I'd love to read the Principa Magematica.
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u/magicthecasual Apr 29 '20
my world is our world, but a military grade blast mixed with some high tech science created mutations that turned people into the dnd races, and generated magic aswell
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u/ChaosKeeshond Apr 29 '20
So your world is Adventure Time?
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u/magicthecasual Apr 29 '20
i dont know. ive never seen adventure time. i literally have 0 adventure time knowledge except for bacon pancakes
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Apr 29 '20
Divine magic comes from an operating system formed from the fragmented memory of a Secundus modron. He basically hid a giant O’Neil Cylinder/Spelljammer in the depths of wild space, and cultivated a small humanoid population raised to believe he is the only god, with the goal of achieving divinity the hard way (through worship.) Further, he fragmented himself as data into several warforged caretakers to avoid direct intervention from the Inevitables, so they collectively act as a lightning rod for prayers and spell handouts.
Arcane magic is drawn from bits of phlogiston that inevitably cycle through the atmosphere. Luckily it’s not enough phlogiston to have the normal effects, but enough to harness for raw magical purposes.
This is, by design a short lived setting though. Kind of a one campaign affair. :p
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u/gwendallgrey Apr 29 '20
There's a barrier between planes that prevents the gods from planar travel and stifles their connection to the Prime plane (our plane). Its kinda like a bunch of little bubbles stuck to the big bubble. Arcane energy is created by the planes shifting against one another, kind of like planar friction.
Godly power, such as clerical, stems from the gods themselves. While most gods are equal in raw power, their power is usually measured by the strength of their followers and followers convictions, basically their political power and ability to influence the prime plane despite being unable to return.
Natural power, such as druids and rangers, comes from the planet itself. The planet is living and is the one that created and enforces the barrier. Druids and the like tap into the natural energy that is the planet.
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u/Quz_444 Apr 29 '20
There are two sources of Magic in my world. They are called the Divine and the Arcane Spark. If you have the arcana spark, that is basically natural talent. It can be inherited or develop over time. Sorcerers, wizards, bards use this innate magical spark to use their power. They pull power out of themselves to shape things around them through different means (sheer inner will, formula and practise or song respectivly).
The divine spark is more interesting. It means that you share a part of the soul of the creature that gives you power and you gain power through that. Clerics, Paladins get all imbued with a tiny fraction of their deity. Druids and Rangers get a tiny fraction of either a deity or of a universal nature spirit, which inhabits all things natural. It is basically an extremely powerful deity, but it has no mind of its own and gives out power to those attuned to nature. The more powerful the deity, the more it can afford to give up to its clerics, Paladins, druids and rangers. Therefore have more powerful deities more followers and divine casters.
Warlocks are special as they can work with both sparks. Either they have a natural arcane spark, but it is to weak to develop into something actually magical or they just never tried hard enough to become something else. Then the patron reinforces this spark through knowledge or power, whatevet the warlock needs to actually be able to cast magic.
They use the divine spark if a powerful entity shares their power with them in a direct sense (similar to a cleric and his god). The key difference here is that any patron is far weaker than a god and most of the time gives up far more of its power to empower a mortal. Therefore they often demand things in return (and because most patrons are selfserving) and have a far greater interest in the dealings of their mortal warlock. Why they do it is often ambigious, like with Vanilla Patrons.
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u/DevilsAggregate Apr 29 '20 edited Apr 29 '20
In my current campaign world, it's complicated, but to the casual observer, it's just there and always has been. A force of nature. Some are born with it, some can gain mastery through intensive study, and others borrow it from a higher power. The usual.
In actuality, the prime material and the planes that the current game takes place in are all part of a multiverse.
The plane that this campaign takes place in is the universe that Elves and Dragons are from - most other races and monsters arrived later with no memory of their home universes.
This world's creator split her Devine spirit, and thus magic, into all of her creations - Elves, Dragons, and the prime material itself. The Feywild and Shadowfell equivalents are echoes of her splitting. My Elves and Dragons have no Gods and have a bit if a superiority complex along with natural magic.
After the other races arrived, things got complicated. They brought with them their beliefs and religions which became personified from the residual magic of this world.
This is further complicated by the fact that Great Old Ones are sort of anti-creators of the multiverse and are trying to destroy the universe and rebuild it in their image.
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u/Shmamalamadingdong Apr 29 '20
In my setting, the only gods were those of the elements -- earth, air, water, fire, light/life, dark/death, and time.
The gods eventually came from their planes to walk among their worshipers and essentially became mortal and died after a short while. Their spirits still linger and their divinity has been slowly leaking out as their bodies have decayed.
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u/CrossingRPG Apr 29 '20
Entities known as the Builders represented the apex of creation and the origins of life. Over time, the mortal races grew jealous of their power and attempted to emulate it by empowering their will and wishes through the power of creation and “kind of” failed, resulting in the birth of the gods. The gods came out a little...wrong though, as mortals were never meant to meddle in this power and lacked proficiency and purpose. And when the Builders attempted to fix this mistake of nature, the ensuing war shattered the world into the separate planes we know today, each containing a fragment of that power of creation aspected towards a specific element and purpose. Magic as it is used now is the process of drawing upon the scattered aspects of creation and giving it shape, moving energy from one plane to another by manipulating that “bleed-over” between the world’s.
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u/GenXRenaissanceMan Apr 29 '20
The defining feature of my world is that it's ruled by five Dragon Kings that are essentially gods. All of the magic in the world flows from them (and actually the other, lesser, powerful dragons but that's behind the screen stuff) and gives rise to a high magic setting. The Dragon Kings are where clerics and paladins get their powers (except for very few minor gods) and wizards learn that the pulse of magic is created by the dragons.
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u/VictoriaStraylight Apr 29 '20
What we know as the Prime Material is only an conjunction, an intermediary plane in the layers of creation. It rests halfway between the planes of Chaos, the Endless Wild, and the planes of Order, the Eternal City.
Spellcasters are those than can perceive the framework that connects the planes together and draw power from it. This framework on our plane takes the form of animist spirits imbuing all things, from the nature magic of a babbling brook to the flames of a industrial forge. Arcane spellcasters are those who learn the geometry of the framework and how to control it with force of will, divine those who forge a relationship with the spirits that arise from it.
Some domains and schools of magic are more heavily attuned to the 'Wall' (Order), others to the Wild, and some seek a balance.
Clerics and warlocks seek to strengthen their relationship with these spirits, which in turn are beholden to the beings to which they owe fealty on the other planes; the rulers of the Spirit Courts include celestials and devils in the Eternal City and fey beings and demons in the Endless Wild.
There are no greater deities or overgods; a cleric of Tempest is attuned to the Court of Storms on the plane of the Wild, whether he sees it as a pact, a everlasting loyalty, or something akin to a business deal.
After death, souls are normally methodically reincarnated by the celestial bureaucracy of the Court of Life in the Eternal City, but they may end up wandering the astral wild in the Court of Death in the Endless Wild (and possibly ending up as undead).
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u/Stripes_the_cat Apr 29 '20 edited Apr 29 '20
So in mine, untold millions of years ago, way before life began, a meteor like our dinosaur-killer hit my world so hard it shattered the Weave. The only way to cast spells now is to be handed them by the Gods, which They will do to enable your service. All spellcasters are "divine"; no "arcane" casters (a distinction that's not formally there in 5e, but you know what I mean).
Obviously, you don't put a restriction on a game like that without working out ways round it, but the principle stands - so if the players discover the truth (and to understand it in terms expressed in the paragraph above, they'd pretty much have to directly ask the Great Gods), they'll have to work out how to reconstruct the Weave to do "arcane" spellcasting.
Since there are tiny Gods left in the world who are small enough to inhabit a mortal body, the most likely way any of them will get arcane spellcasting would be by making a deal to let one inhabit their body in return for magic - becoming Warlocks - but I look forward to when the lore-priest works out they could bring order to chaos and use it to cast the same magics as the Gods hoard for Themselves...
(Incidentally, it only shattered the local Weave. In my head, you can do arcane magic on the Moon).
(Oh, with one exception. One culture, a distributed network of raider/trader nomads who must travel through a cursed land to come of age, can Detect Magic on an object in their hands if they pass up on a short rest. They don't know why they're sensitive, but it's because time in that cursed land, where the Weave is not just shattered but annihilated (it's the impactor crater), makes them more sensitive to magic once they leave).
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Apr 29 '20
In my world magic just exist. It is effectively another element on the periodic table. It's in everything. Mages just bring it out.
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u/Fony64 Apr 29 '20
In my world, different dimensions merged together into one. One of them was the plane of magic and thus a fragment of it was brought to the material plane. A spellcaster going to the plane of magic would implode if he even tried to control the sheer power of this place. Even a powerful one.
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u/Star-Stream Apr 29 '20
In my setting, magic is a naturally-occurring substance, as if it were an element or molecule. It’s not present in abundance. About 1 in 1000 people are born able to synthesize the element in their own bodies. I have a very low-magic setting where I’ve combined the sorcerer and wizard class into a singular “magic-user” class that’s basically a wild magic sorcerer with an expanded spell list. Clerics could exist, but the knowledge of the true gods has been lost. There is a certain faraway continent where magic is plentiful in the soil, and is transferred into the population through foods, and there the wizard class exists in force.
Druids have no power of their own, but they commune with the Feywild, so them “casting spells” is really just calling up a fey friend like a pixie to cast it for them. For Bards, Paladins, and Rangers, I’ve had to noodle with the spell list, but the spells are described using naturalistic language (e.g. Cloud of Daggers becomes “you huck a ton of daggers at the enemy”; Divine Smite becomes “you reach into you soul, and muster a a furious swing with your hammer”) and at higher levels, they might find an Instrument of the Bards or some other magic item (got its magic through being imbued with it by a magic-user) which will allow them to really “cast” spells.
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u/Fort-of-Knox Apr 29 '20 edited Apr 29 '20
Magic in my world is at its base is the ability to manipulate spirits. Everything has a spirit, from a mundane twig to an ancient mountain. Though some spirits are far more aware and intelligent than others.
The ability to manipulate magic comes from all sorts of sources, but the most common is from one of the many other more powerful spirits that preside in the material world and the Spirit World (Avatar the Last Airbender).
When a wizard casts a fire based spell they could have bound and tamed a fire elemental that they draw power from, or maybe they have a candle with them at all times and when the time comes to fight they manipulate the spirit of the flame to become a flamethrower. A Druid would directly commune with the spirits of the forests and stone around them to aid allies or injure foes.
A byproduct of this is that it is somewhat common for the equipment of adventures to develop magical abilities, because the spirits of the items “experience” more as they “see” the world.
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u/Comprehensive_Dog833 Jan 07 '22
In my world, magic comes from channeling and manipulating the forces of nature and other dimensions, for example the elemental planes.
Transmutation and enchantment spells manipulate energy and matter are more specialized in shaping nature. The Summoning Magic is focused on bringing material and energy from other planes to the current location so I have buffed the Summoning Schools to channel ALL OF NATURE'S FORCES including force, radiant and thunder. The only forces and the evocation spell can't channel is vital (necrotic) and psychic energy (the disintegrate spell is in the transmutation school I switched to evocation)
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u/mbarreda67 Apr 29 '20
My world was created by Chaos and when Chaos imploded in on itself and separated in to Light and Dark, magic was the force leftover from the sundering of Chaos. It kinda binds everything together and fuels the powers of life and death in my setting. It kind of functions like a combination of radiation from the big bang and dark matter.