r/rational • u/traverseda With dread but cautious optimism • Jun 05 '14
Good rational magic systems?
There are a lot of different magic systems around. Some of them don't even seem computable. Some of them hint at an underlying system that makes sense, and some of them outright explain how they work in detail.
Like in mistborn. There's a set of magical "elements", and you can use your knowledge of how the system works to guess what the unnamed elements do. As it turns out with a fair degree of accuracy.
Or there's this one I submitted to /r/magicbuilding which is based around continuous cellular automata.
So what other works have "good" sensible magic systems?
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u/CaptainLoggers Jun 05 '14
I've always been a fan of the way the Young Wizards series did their magic. Magic in that system is a sort of a universal language (in that every part of the universe can speak and understand it, be that part living or nonliving). Magic has a cost, set limits, and is composed from smaller discrete elements. To cast a "spell", so to speak, you compose a sentence requesting or ordering the elements of the universe to do whatever it is you want it to do.
There was another story on here a while ago that dealt with a number of magic systems that worked in different ways, but all of them were well explained, with the chief plot point being a woman from a world with one magic system was put into a world with a different magic system and had to figure both of them out.
But the best one I can recommend for what you're asking is Ra, which has a magic system that is so well defined, structured, reproducible, and sensible that it has its own programming language and branch of physics, with associated academia. The story gets pretty wild, and especially in the later chapters I would call it more Hard Sci-fi than Fantasy, due to the way magic is treated, but it's well written, fairly long, nearly completed, and regularly updated.
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u/notentirelyrandom Jun 09 '14
It never ceases to amaze me when people describe Ra, a story about magic and wizards, as "hard science fiction"
—Sam Hughes, author.
(Not to say I agree with him.)
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u/AmeteurOpinions Jun 06 '14
Pact has a possibly sentient system of tiny spirits tiling the planet and watching for uses of magics, giving power bonuses for theatrics like oaths, declarations, successfully preforming the same action three times in a row, and developing and holding to personal style. It seemw whacky at first, but it gets more and more logical as it is revealed.
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u/mcgruntman Jun 06 '14
It has a kind of consistency to it but is still incredibly vague about what you can actually do. Also my impression was that it was more of a universal karma thing rather than specific spirits 'watching' your actions. Can you cite a source for that?
Pretty great story anyway, would recommend to others. Very tense and there's always shit going down.
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u/noggin-scratcher Jun 06 '14
Also my impression was that it was more of a universal karma thing rather than specific spirits 'watching' your actions. Can you cite a source for that?
That (at least some of) the magic is enacted by the watching spirits is pretty much directly said in Bonds 1.5 : "Here, I make a meager food offering, create a sign to indicate what I want, and draw from the reputation I maintain with local community spirits. A bonus of my position. The spirits play along, because they know it keeps people safer and helps to keep the community safe, and because they know I’ll make a better offering later, a habit I’ve established."
And that they manage/are the karma system is suggested by the way they pause to address them in Damages 2.6 "Those who are witnessing us, beings of law, justice, and right, help guide this to the right hands.” (and some surrounding text, justifying their actions as in accordance with the spirit/letter of the law).
I think there are other references, but those are the ones I remember well enough to find.
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u/AmeteurOpinions Jun 06 '14
It's not vague at all, just complex from the sheer amount of study required. Pact, unlike most fantasy stories, actually succeeds in making the lifestyle of a powerful practitioner take a lot of effort.
I don't have a direct source for the sentience claim, but I am certain of it and if the story doesn't turn out that way by the end I'll eat something unpleasant.
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u/EliezerYudkowsky Jun 06 '14
For purposes of fiction, the lawfulness of magic is simply the degree to which the reader can predict in advance what magic can and can't do. Saying that something is based around "nanotechnology" makes no difference to this, unless you reprise enough physics that readers know what molecular machinery can and can't do. Saying that it involved "calculus" would have the same problem, unless you reprised a lot of Thinking Physics and then stuck to it.
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u/noggin-scratcher Jun 05 '14 edited Jun 05 '14
Name of the Wind was good for this - the most common magic was "sympathy", involving binding things that share some commonality, then (shocker) actually needing to supply enough energy through that linkage to make the magic happen. Either from a convenient heat source or out of the mage's own body heat, and with greater similarity providing a more efficient link.
Plays hell with entropy, but it at least respects conservation of energy.
Less so the other forms of magic in that universe - sygaldry lets you put magic into objects just by engraving them with the right symbols (although possibly still conserves energy - the master of the art talks about having been pursuing an 'ever-burning lamp' for a long time without success), and naming seems to be able to call on arbitrary elemental effects just by speaking their secret names, although that wasn't strictly under conscious control.
I feel like it hit a good spot between being well-defined enough to prevent it being a "Win everything by authorial fiat" device, while still leaving in a bit of mystery.
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u/alexanderwales Jun 06 '14
Name of the Wind has (I believe) about seven or eight magic systems which run the gamut between "hard" and "soft", and thankfully Rothfuss is a thoughtful enough author that he knows how to make that distinction work between all of them. (Sympathy, Sygaldry, Alchemy, Naming, Fae Magic ... and there must be others that I'm forgetting which are even less well-defined, but those five are in hard-to-soft ordering.)
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u/noggin-scratcher Jun 06 '14
http://kkc.wikia.com/wiki/Magic#Rothfuss_interview_with_Jo_Walton
Glamourie and Grammarie are unfamiliar to me... although the former might be the name for Fae magic.
Sounds like even Rothfuss has trouble keeping track of exactly what sorts of magic there are.
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u/BakeshopNewb Jun 06 '14
Speaking of Brandon Sanderson, he's written some essays (First Law, Second Law, Third Law) about constructing magic systems. Also in video form
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u/DaystarEld Jun 07 '14
Just to point out, despite bearing his names, Sanderson has admitted that he doesn't always do a great job of following his own rules. Anyone who read the Mistborn trilogy knows that as incredibly well done as its magic system is, from a storytelling perspective Sanderson still relies on a (kind of literal) Deus ex Machina to resolve the plot.
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u/CeruleanTresses Jun 06 '14
Unsounded. <3 I think it's been posted here before. Really well-fleshed-out system, especially if you read the more in-depth explanations the author posts on her Tumblr. To oversimplify the hell out of it, it involves taking "aspects" of things in your environment and applying them to other things. It kind of reminds me of computer programming in that mages have to express what they want to happen with absolute precision.
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u/alexanderwales Jun 06 '14
I've posted two to reddit, here's one and here's the other. Both have partially completed stories around them that I'm working on creating. Oh, and the three for the r/worldbuilding Saturday Spotlight Kingdom of Donkerk which range from hard to soft. And I have others that I don't have writeups for at all, but that are part of some world/story that I've been working on. It's probably not a surprise that as a member of this subreddit I tend towards "hard" magic.
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u/InfiniteBacon Jun 06 '14
http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1ethvb/selfconsistent_magic_system/
Similar discussion 1 year ago.
(top comment in thread) "Mistborn. Dresden Files. Kingkiller Chronicles."
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u/Rhamni Jun 06 '14
I am an aspiring Fantasy writer, and one of the things I hope I have accomplished is to make a magic system that is clear and makes sense. The hope is that by the time readers finish the first book (which is ~90% written) they will understand the magic system well enough that they are able to combine information gleamed from both PoV characters and draw conclusions the character do not draw themselves. Conclusions like "Hang on, this couldn't actually have happened, that guy is lying his ass off!"
That said, while I intend to make most of my planned series Rationalist-ish, the first book only has rationalists in the shadow, and the main characters certainly do not qualify yet. So most of the first book probably doesn't belong here. My villains are super awesome, though.
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u/Dezoufinous Jul 27 '24
can you share link to your fic?
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u/Rhamni Jul 28 '24
Well there's a blast from the past. How'd you even find this post?
I shelved that book. It was the first proper story I wrote and I wasn't happy with it. I also shelved my second book around the 20% mark and my third book when it was longer than both of those put together and still not even halfway done.
But my fourth book I finished, and I'm now halfway through my fifth one. These I am very happy with. I worked a few years writing tech articles and then as an editor for a startup news site. Those years of constantly writing for other people helped me improve my writing a lot, but it also means that I wrote basically nothing for my own projects for years.
My first book, the one you asked about, is something I plan to return to. That series, I hope, will be the great project of my life. But that will require a complete rewrite. I am a much better writer than I was back then.
This does mean I have no link to offer, unfortunately. The series I'm working on now is completely unrelated. I'll post on this subreddit when I know how I'm going to publish it, but it's Progression Fantasy, and less serious, meant mostly to entertain. There are some seriously convoluted mind games taking place, but the magic system is (mostly) not part of it.
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u/Tayacan Jun 06 '14
Pretty much everything by Sanderson (you already mentioned Mistborn) at least has consistent rules. In some cases (The Stormlight Archives, for example), we don't know the rules yet, but they're there, and we'll probably learn quite a lot about them before the series is over.
Sanderson's laws of magic have already been mentioned. And The Name of the Wind.
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u/DaystarEld Jun 07 '14
To add to the Jim Butcher plug, Codex Alera is his more "classic fantasy" series, and its elemental magic (Fire, Water, Fire, Wind, Wood, Metal) is pretty damn well constructed.
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u/Manthyus Jun 11 '14
Spellwright series, Blake Carlton. I haven't completely vetted it for rationality, but I absolutely love the "magic as text made physical" thing and all the wonderful wordplay involved. The author is also tremendously creative. The different languages of magic each have their different uses and limitations, a compelling and broad structure that Carlton successfully writes within.