prokopetz:

Fantasy RPG worldbuilding tip #137: mess with what counts as magic.

I don’t mean replicating modern technology with magical analogues – that stuff’s common as dirt. What I mean is taking a step back from the conventional paradigm of starting with a world that fundamentally resembles our own and layering magic on top of it, and asking yourself: what if this obviously non-magical thing is a form of magic in this world?

History furnishes numerous examples. It’s well-known, for example, that the Ancient Greeks didn’t distinguish between pharmacology and sorcery – but did you know that the Vikings considered picking locks to be a form of magic? That it’s demonstrably a mechanical skill that can be learned by anyone is beside the point; that a person was able to learn that skill in the first place was, itself, seen as evidence of consorting with evil spirits!

So run with that: pick a perfectly ordinary skill or pursuit, one that’s integral to our everyday life, and suppose that in your world, it’s a mystical practice that transgresses against the natural order. What does your world look like then?

To pose a common example: literacy. Treating literacy as a form of magic isn’t historically uncommon; the modern word “grimoire” – a book of spells – ultimately derives from the same root as “grammar”. So let’s run with that. The process and mechanics of learning to read are the same as they are in our world, but the implications may be very different. Perhaps knowing how to read books automatically confers the ability to read minds. Perhaps literacy grants the ability to understand the speech of beasts. There’s all sorts of directions you could go with it.

It’s critical to resist the urge to fall back on describing our world with magic laid on top. If you’re doing the literacy-as-magic thing, then you are not describing a world in which a reading-based school of magic exists; you are describing a world in which the acts of reading and writing are and always have been mystical practices, with all the societal weirdness that implies – and further, the mechanics of reading and writing do not materially differ from those of their real-world counterparts, though the outcomes may vary wildly.

The other major trap to watch out for is picking something too esoteric to really dig into. You’ll find plenty of fantasy settings where, say, clockworking or steam engineering is a form of magic – but clockworking isn’t something that ordinary people do in their daily lives. This sort of worldbuilding is much more effective when the practice in question is ubiquitous.

Other everyday activities that might make good candidates for converting into mystical practices:

• Cooking or baking
• Dressing (i.e., the act of putting on clothing)
• Farming or gardening
• Keeping pets
• Lighting fires
• Makeup (i.e., facial cosmetics)
• Personal hygiene (bathing, grooming, etc.)
• Representational art (that is, drawing pictures of things)
• Rhyming (even unintentionally!)

Again, no wimping out; to pick a faintly ridiculous example from the preceding list, if you’ve decided that bathing is magic in your setting, that doesn’t mean that there’s a magical way to take a bath – it means that taking a bath is an inherently mystical process, and there’s no non-magical way to go about it. Similarly, if you went with cooking, what you’ve got is a world in which all prepared food is, in some sense, also a magic potion.

Give it a shot!