24 September 2008
The Greatest Magic
)Published on September 24th, 2008 @ 11:49:00 am, using 1234 words, 253 views
Hells, but it’s been a busy week or two. It was a public holiday today in SA, thankfully, so Denbeigh and I took the opportunity to go watch Hellboy 2 this morning and I quite enjoyed it. Over the years I’ve gone off elves in general in fantasy but I have to say the ones in this movie were totally badass. The creatures in Guillermo del Toro’s movies in general are wonderful, both in Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. Kudos to him for breathing life and excitement into some old fantasy cliches like elves and fauns.
After the movie we came home and I intended to do a bit of work on SoW in the afternoon. But then I lay down for 5 minutes and suddenly it’s dark outside and I’m wondering why I’m starving? Ah well, I guess my body decided I needed the rest more.
Anyway, enough nattering. Let’s talk about SoW. 
Some people, on reading my descriptions of the setting, seem to have gotten the impression SoW is a low magic setting. Well, it isn’t. There is, in fact, a fair amount of magic. So no, SoW is not low magic. What it is is what I like to call logical fantasy.
What do I mean by that? It’s best illustrated by an example, I think. Let me show you the most influential magical working in the entire SoW setting.
It’s called an Uld Stone, one of many. You can find these stones all over the setting, wherever you find civilization, a great latticework of the things. Besides the gently glowing runes you won’t notice much else to distinguish them from ordinary rocks. If you touch them your fingers might tingle a bit, if you touched the runes themselves, but little else distinguishes them from any other rock or boulder you might find in the fields.
Yet these stones are the most influential, most important workings of magic in the entire setting. Destroying one results in a public flogging and a 10 year jail sentence. The mages who create these Uld Stones, a specialized sect known both singularly and collectively as Amandar, are greatly respected in society, nearly as much as healers and physicians. As they travel the lands, creating and maintaining the magic of the Uld Stones, they can expect to be treated with the utmost courtesy; no Amandar pays for his meals or lodgings while traveling.
What is it about these rocks that makes them so special? Why do their creators receive such reverence?
Simply put, because they make plants grow better.
From each stone emanates a subtle magical field, a gentle weave of magic which seeps through the soil, twining about the roots of plants, strengthening them, guiding their growth, warding off rot and disease. This great magical latticework, spread throughout field and farmland, has had a greater impact on the setting than any other working of magic. Fireball slinging and spells of invisibility may seem more impressive, visually, but they pale in comparison. The Uld Stones affect entire societies at a fundamental level.
You see, the fundamental basis of every civilization lies in food production. Here’s some interesting reading to go along with this post, something I read a while back on the Codex that has stuck with me; try to spot the parts that directly inspired the concept of the Uld Stones. 
To summarize for those not interested in reading the entire thing, a societies’ ability to produce food efficiently determines many, many things about that society. The number of individuals of non-food generating professions, such as warriors, blacksmiths and politicians, supportable army sizes, population density per acre of land, the prevalence of cavalry in warfare and hence the weapons used, the rate of technological advance, even the equality of the sexes.
In most ancient societies, around 90% of the population were farmers. A very small fraction of people did anything more than work continuously just to feed themselves and their families. The reason the Uld stones are so important in SoW is that they change this ratio. Crops are larger, more resistant to blight, more stable. Each peasant farmer produces greater surplus, allowing them to support a larger number of other professions. In SoW that farmer ratio is closer to 70% of the population, alowing three times as many non-farmers as a standard medieval society.
This changes the setting, quite significantly. You see, another mistake people make is thinking SoW is medieval fantasy. Sure, it is fairly medieval in it’s technology levels, for the most part (some aspects, like sanitation and architecture are closer to the ancient world, before the dark ages). But in other ways, cultural, political, societal, SoW is closer to the later periods of history, the early Renaissance. There are large, powerful guilds, many unrelated to food production. Politics is more complex, Athar for example has both a Royal Court and a Senate. Universities and schools exist, home to scholars pursuing esoteric knowledge. The arts flourish in the major cities. There are even banks, but I will come back to that later.
As I said, SoW is logical fantasy. In many games, magic is put to use in fairly selfish, individual pursuits, mainly in amassing more power for the mage. But any force or knowledge which could reliably be harnessed for society would be applied to solving the fundamental problems of that society, not just individuals. Food, shelter, medicine, transport, communication, warfare, even simple things like lighting the darkness at night. I’ll discuss these more in future posts, but the most fundamental and influential of these is food production.
I’ll end this post by coming back to the Amandar. In most fantasy settings, any discussion of magic users who deal with plants would inevitably involve that most hippy, tree-hugging of fantasy archetypes, the druid. Amandar aren’t druids. They don’t preserve abstract natural balances, or commune with nature spirits, or resist the influence of civilization, or what have you. They are highly trained, respected specialists in a very useful, practical field of magic. The Amandar tradition stretches back through recorded history, there have always been mages who used their magic to enhance the crops for their people, and they have always been highly considered. Unlike druids, Amandar don’t fore go material wealth. In fact, they are, for the most part, quite well off. Their talents are always in demand; merchants, landowners and farming communities paying well for them. Most spend a fair amount of time traveling the countryside, like country doctors on call-outs, except their patients are the hills and fields, the countryside itself. While most appreciate nature, they have no special connection to it, many choose this field for financial reasons, for the pay and job security, in the same way some modern doctors choose to specialize in urology. Which reflects another reality of mages in SoW. Most aren’t battle mages. Their powers make them highly useful, in demand, and most use this to seek high positions and comfortable lives in society, not combat. Most aren’t wondering around looking for spell duels.
You know, it probably says something about my personality that I find thinking about setting “fluff” details like this the most satisfying part of game development. I’ve just written an entire post on magical rocks, heh. And one day I hope to be able to work full time on making games which allow me to think about magical rocks and the like all day.
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