Monday 1 December 2008

Pic of the day: I had a great idea! Now to write it down before it evaporates.

MoM2008 Worldbuilding

Just because I managed to blow up my novel does not mean I plan to lose the worldbuilding I did on it. Admittedly a good part of it was done before, partly in entries from a few years ago and partly by the game Master of Magic, which provides the basic setting for the novel.

The story takes place several hundred years after the medieval world of the game. Magic has become so advanced, it can barely be told apart from technology. Enchanted items are common, making life easy for those who don't know the spells themselves. That said, knowing spells is what makes you something, at least in the cities. If you fail learning basic spells, you are exiled from the cities and have to live as a farmer or somesuch in the countryside.

The magic system of the game has been preserved, at least the basics: There are different "colors" of magic which covers different aspects. Green is nature magic, red is destruction, black is death, white is life, blue is water and air and mind, and gray is enchanment. (You will recognize this from the card game Magic: The Gathering if you have played that.) Magic can come from nodes of the different colors, or from temples or magic metals or crystals. Some races are also slightly magical.

My great invention was in the actual shaping of the spells. I combined the magic system with Japanese writing. OK, not literally Japanese, but practically. The idea is that to cast a spell, you need to know the sigils for each element of the spell. These are fairly complex drawings, and many of them are so similar that they could be easily confused, or so complex that they are easily forgotten. But while Japanese kanji only let you read and write, the kamri (Cambric sigils) in MoM2008 lets you craft magic.

Children learn reading and writing and other school stuff until they become teens, at which point they transfer to high school which is almost all about magic. From now on they learn the Cambric sigils, one at a time (though most have picked up a few at home already). Before you can use one, you have to be able to write it perfectly, each little line in the right order and in the right place. Messing up such a detail later when you craft serious spells could cause death and destruction (or simply fail, but you never know). So there is an iron discipline and no room for sloppy students.

Nobody is born to be a mage or not. If you get the sigils right, you can use the magic. So it is mainly a question of IQ and hard work. The more sigils you learn, the higher your status. In high school you learn the sigils needed to live an ordinary life in the city. Most then go on to college to learn sigils used in some profession or other.

Spells are crafted from several sigils written in the right order. Each sigil in itself has either little effect or none at all. The early sigils just deal with the basics of the elements. For instance the first fire/heat sigil cannot even light a candle (with a couple exceptions, see below). It is barely able to heat a cup of water by a few degrees - if you repeat it a few times, you can have a nice cup of tea. But try to heat a whole bathtub full of water, and you are out of luck. It would literally take hundreds of repetitions, and at some point the water would probably cool faster than you could heat it. There are more powerful heat sigils, but they are vastly more complex and have special properties or side effects. You not only have to remember a complex pattern, but also in which context you can use it. If you remember wrong, the spell could fizzle or blow up or backfire or do something different (in roughly that order of probability).

Combining related sigils power up all of them to a higher level, but there are also modifiers that have no other meaning than to be used together with certain other sigils to make them stronger or weaker or better suited for a particular target. A perfect spell even for an everyday occasion will usually require a whole string of sigils, written the right way and in the right sequence at the right time and at sufficient speed. It does not matter however whether you write them on a paper with a pen (the way you learn at school) or trace them with your finger on a table or even in the air. With enough concentration you can even write them in your mind, but this is strongly discouraged, since the mind is the least stable of surfaces and at the same time one you really, really don't want to blow up.

Spells do not draw energy from the caster but from the surrounding ambient magic. For this reason, it matters greatly to have a suitable source of magic. Some cities are built near nodes, which each have a special color of magic. That magic will be particularly strong in the area. If you live near a Chaos Node, your heat spell will be quite a lot hotter than elsewhere, all other things being equal. Opposite spells will however be dampened, so a fire spell will be hard to use near a Nature node. Most cities have plenty of temples and shrines that provide White magic. This can be converted to any other color except black (death magic), but less readily to Red than to Green or Blue. And there is always a loss of energy when using a different color as source.

With long experience, people become better at focusing the magic, and even their basic spells will become more powerful. So a Red adept will in fact be able to light a candle using just the first simple heat spell, while a student will have no chance, and neither will an adept in a different color.

Natural selection favors a high IQ, a long lifespan and a prolonged youth in this situation. My main character notices how his body, supposedly 16 years old, seems more like 14 to him. (He is an earthling who drowns in a car accident and is resurrected on Arcanus in the body of another drowning victim - evidently their souls had passed so far from their bodies that they were accidentally switched. Or perhaps suicide boy was actively resisting the resurrect while our hero desperately wanted to live. It certainly came as a big surprise to all else involved.)

Well, that should be enough for me to resume this world later if I get the inclination again. Oh, and language drift over several hundred years. The language has been simplified, so that Myrror is now pronounce Mira, while Arcanus is ... Akane. ^_^