i have a lot of complaints about Gladstone's "Craft Sequence" but putting a fantasy story in a modern setting by making it an alternate history where magic is normal was good and important. Whenever people put fantasy in a modern setting, it always seems to become about the "masquerade", the secrecy and the means by which this is kept from the public. Or, not "about", but.... it makes the whole thing seem unimportant, like all magic does is protect from magic threats, which undermines the premise that discovering the world of magic is so fascinating, and that relatable protagonists follow the thread of the supernatural unlike the unrelatable incurious people.
also, if you don't set the story in a world where scientific naturalism doesn't exist, i can't help but feel like the msot important thing happening in the story is the disproof of scientific naturalism!
I like htat in Gunnerkrigg Court it mentioned that the Randi Prize has already been collected. Well, I don't think it specifically mentioned Randi, but... ah, the "Eugene Gould psychic challenge".
Yeah, all my old daydream scenarios with hidden vampires and werewolves etc ran hard into “but why don’t magic users just take advantage of everybody else?”
I wound up making their immediate recent history being of superpredators/old boy’s club taking up almost all the magical resources, everybody being super horrible and way too busy to spend any time in the regular world. No time to do much in person because the distraction would leave them open to attack by a rival. Thus an overall absence from regular history. Coz they all dragged each other down into the shadow realm, and then stayed there where it was possible to magic up e.g. weapons and clothing and evil puzzle palaces. Inasmuch as this left the story with any stakes, I’d generally go “and THEN the whole rest of the magical ecosystem eventually went killer whale on their shark asses and wiped all the magicians out worldwide; the new crop of magical people find themselves growing aware of a strange, emptied landscape of established societies of very annoyed magical creatures and rare survivors that view them as being on thin fucking ice.” So the new situation is one where magic IS likely to become mainstream again, after an extended absence caused by the extermination event being in progress. Which broke the cultural chain of powerful magicians driving each other turbo insane. But also removed them as keystone predators that had been keeping the shadow realm or whatever mostly barren and cut back away from normal reality.
so like… the previous magic culture was creating the scenario that annoys you to read (what is the point of these people if they’re totally divorced from reality?). They were stopped by an external force that has set new rules of specifically human non-violence, which has allowed way more human magic users to survive and use magic freely. But now there’s both TikTok AND the violence prohibition, which means all sorts of grifts and scams targeting normal people are totally possible, so long as they don’t get blood on your soul or whatever which marks you as “To whom it may concern: URGENT: to be eaten by the Fae.”
worldwide stuff never really works because of everybody having such different traditions, but pretty much every culture agrees that there are evil spirits like for sure definitely, so that’s what would be broadly speaking Evil Magician Influence. Then that tapers off and vanishes right before “modernity” during the time period all the evil wizards (…humans in general) are being beaten out of the shadow-world-rug, so there isn’t any magic to rly find even if you look. Or if you do look, you find someone who died in a weird accident, or an object that vanished or doesn’t do anything you can figure out bcs you’re normal. And then only juuuust recently are totally naive people coming into powers, without any evil wizard examples for how to amplify or concentrate them.
otherwise yeah the whole Masquerade thing just, it is so tiresome to me as well. Who cares. Tell ppl about the magic!! Teleport your Lyft/Uber past traffic! Curse the person sending you anon hate! Dowse for radium! Like for gods’ sake.
I do also like having complete invulnerability to magic be a fun aspect of normal people though, like if you can manage a kinetic field strong enough to get them out of Real to begin with they can just walk right into the hearts of crazy spells and curses and adjust the focus elements like it’s nothing, when magic users would be fried. So you could be a normie magical technician! Or detective, or bodyguard, or etc., so long as someone handles the accessibility issue of getting you places you can actually exist (and not stranding you there or smearing you into a fine paste on the way out).
Some of my favorite approaches to this:
- Arcanum: A computer game where both science and magic are real, but magic fucks up physics locally whenever you use it, which creates both strong social(cuz ppl dont generally appreciate industrial calamities) and personal(cuz you go boom/poof/squish too) pressures against using magic anywhere machinery, chemistry more advanced than brewing, or anything explosive might be present
- Shadowrun: Our whole universe is moving through a supraversal medium we can't perceive which has regions of variable "Magic", creating cycles of "magic" and "non-magic". Science advances during the low and no magic periods, only to fall out of use as magic rises, eventually ending in magical "Peaks" wherein C'thulhu monsters break through the thinned barriers btwn our universe and the medium to eat all the tasty, tasty Reality. Using magic makes magic stronger, and also thins these barrier. As an aside, Dragons have a really neat ecology in this setting, related to the cycles.
- Pillars of Eternity: Gods, Politics, and Guns. You never really had mages going crazy cuz magic is available to EVERYONE, so a mage who is too tyrannical will just eventually piss off enough other talented mages/priests/paladins/shadow-assassins/whatever that they get iced. Also: gods are Real, have direct access to magic(unlike mortals who have to channel it), and so if a mage pisses THEM off they're likely to get squished pretty quick. As a result, the most successful and long-existing mages are the ones which have focused their ambitions on more personal projects than ruling over others. Even with all that mage-monarchs tended to dominate politics, until the invention of gunpowder. The speed and force bullets and explosions move with rendered all existing magic defenses useless in a stroke, and allowed those who didn't spend their lives studying magic to murk even the most powerful of mages. The game is set maybe a generation after that invention, and mages have yet to invent any effective defensive spells to counter firearms and explosives, tho enchanting some armor to a ludicrous degree is still a viable option.
- Strange and Norrell: Wizard-King left and magic forgot it worked here |:T
In a similar vein to all this, I REALLY like that idea of Fae as a downward pressure on mages mbl mentions :3 :3 Like: yes they're a huge danger to mortals all on their own but that's just what they ARE you can't blame them for that, and in their defense watching what the humans they taught magic to did with it was SUPER FUNNY, and also tbh they didn't really understand how this whole "Death" thing worked until one of you FINALLY took the time to sit us down and EXPLAIN IT my GOSH how AWFUL(or the mortal mages just happen to knock over their proverbial coca cola and it suddenly becomes Our Problem), and then they go ham on the mages showing them what REAL Magic looks like, and after that they're Real Squirrelly about any other humans who start fiddling with their toys >:3 >:3 >:3