Bullets and Badasses.
Mistborn. Runelords. Prince of Nothing. Name of the Wind. Aside from being some of my favourite works of fantasy, what these settings all have in common are the well-structured and internally consistent magic systems.
I can now add Hard Magic, book one of the Grimnoir Chronicles to that list. As in my previous post, Hard Magic features superpowered folks (henceforth referred to as Magicals) in an alternate 1932. Alternate, that is, because of aforementioned Magicals. Crime, war, medicine, sports, politics: these things are all affected by the presence of the Magicals. But that's the subject of another post. Today, I discuss the magic system.
The explanation of superpowers in the Grimnoir setting holds together nicely once you've finished reading. There's this vast cosmic entity that arrives near* an inhabited planet and delivers a package of energy to random people. These people become Magicals. As those people grow up and use their abilities, the Power within them grows. When they die, the Power returns to the entity and it exalts an even larger batch of Magicals on the next go-around. Net profit for it, win-win for everybody else.
Beyond that however, is the structure of the Power itself as it relates to the Entity and the human Magicals. When the book begins, rule of thumb is one power per person (although, to quote TVTropes, everyone's got Required Secondary Powers thus the superstrong Brutes have enhanced durability, Healers have extremely detailed X-Ray vision and so on.) In-setting, everyone believes this to be true. Spikers like the protagonist Jake Sullivan manipulate gravity. Most of them are considered good for nothing much more than heavy lifting and firing crew-served weapons. Sullivan however spent six years on a chain gang doing nothing but break rocks and practice. As a result, he figured out how to access (partially at least) the physical forces most closely related to his own like density and velocity. Further into the book, we learn that the powers sit on a spectrum like ROYGBIV; one power shades into another. It's actually a bit like the Quade Diagram, only more intuitive. You don't have to memorize anything if you have a decent understanding of real-world physics and have read a few comic books. In the book, Sullivan has a near-death experience and gets to see the Power as it really is. I'll quote directly from Hard Magic to clarify:
There was a faint line leading from the center of his chest where his own Power connected to the great mass above. It linked directly to one point of a shape that Sullivan understood was where the Power interacted with the laws of gravitation. He followed the shape to other sections-mass, density, velocity-until they formed one tip of a triangle ...
Thousands of other glowing connections linked the Somme to the magic above, each line attaching a different Active to a different geometric area of the Power, until the thing draped down over the real world like a cloud of Spanish moss made of pure crackling energy. Sullivan could see the triangle he’d been born linked to. His line led to the gravity point. The next point pertained to the realms of electromagnetism, while the final point represented nuclear forces far beyond his comprehension. There were other shapes inside the triangles, hundreds of them, each tied inexorably to the fabric of reality, all of them working together in a tight seamless mass. An artist’s interpretation of all the laws of the universe, only this art wasn’t imitating life, it was influencing it. - emphasis mine
Faye the Traveler discovered something similar during her training with the Grimnoir (underfunded good-guy Ancient Conspiracy):
The area around her had always been like a map in her head, and when she picked a spot to Travel into, she could focus more on that space, but she’d been Traveling so much lately, that she’d discovered that her head map had gotten bigger and clearer. It was almost like her thoughts could Travel on their own, and she didn’t even need to send her body to see what was going on. A big book Mr. Browning had, written by a Dr. Fort, had called her Power by the name of Teleportation, but even it hadn’t mentioned anything about being able to have a magic map in her head.
You get the idea. Powers, depending on what they do and which aspects of reality they're rooted in, are related. Healing is Biological plus whatever energy fuels the process. Superstrength is Biological plus Density. Teleportation, as quoted above, bends space thereby tying into Gravity. Fill in the blanks for yourself. This would make a wonderful setting for comicbooks, RPGs, movies even; I'd watch it.
In my next post, I'll talk about the Words of Power, glyphs and kanji that can be etched into objects or branded into flesh to create magical effects. Peace out.
*paradimensionally adjacent if not literally)
I can now add Hard Magic, book one of the Grimnoir Chronicles to that list. As in my previous post, Hard Magic features superpowered folks (henceforth referred to as Magicals) in an alternate 1932. Alternate, that is, because of aforementioned Magicals. Crime, war, medicine, sports, politics: these things are all affected by the presence of the Magicals. But that's the subject of another post. Today, I discuss the magic system.
The explanation of superpowers in the Grimnoir setting holds together nicely once you've finished reading. There's this vast cosmic entity that arrives near* an inhabited planet and delivers a package of energy to random people. These people become Magicals. As those people grow up and use their abilities, the Power within them grows. When they die, the Power returns to the entity and it exalts an even larger batch of Magicals on the next go-around. Net profit for it, win-win for everybody else.
Beyond that however, is the structure of the Power itself as it relates to the Entity and the human Magicals. When the book begins, rule of thumb is one power per person (although, to quote TVTropes, everyone's got Required Secondary Powers thus the superstrong Brutes have enhanced durability, Healers have extremely detailed X-Ray vision and so on.) In-setting, everyone believes this to be true. Spikers like the protagonist Jake Sullivan manipulate gravity. Most of them are considered good for nothing much more than heavy lifting and firing crew-served weapons. Sullivan however spent six years on a chain gang doing nothing but break rocks and practice. As a result, he figured out how to access (partially at least) the physical forces most closely related to his own like density and velocity. Further into the book, we learn that the powers sit on a spectrum like ROYGBIV; one power shades into another. It's actually a bit like the Quade Diagram, only more intuitive. You don't have to memorize anything if you have a decent understanding of real-world physics and have read a few comic books. In the book, Sullivan has a near-death experience and gets to see the Power as it really is. I'll quote directly from Hard Magic to clarify:
There was a faint line leading from the center of his chest where his own Power connected to the great mass above. It linked directly to one point of a shape that Sullivan understood was where the Power interacted with the laws of gravitation. He followed the shape to other sections-mass, density, velocity-until they formed one tip of a triangle ...
Thousands of other glowing connections linked the Somme to the magic above, each line attaching a different Active to a different geometric area of the Power, until the thing draped down over the real world like a cloud of Spanish moss made of pure crackling energy. Sullivan could see the triangle he’d been born linked to. His line led to the gravity point. The next point pertained to the realms of electromagnetism, while the final point represented nuclear forces far beyond his comprehension. There were other shapes inside the triangles, hundreds of them, each tied inexorably to the fabric of reality, all of them working together in a tight seamless mass. An artist’s interpretation of all the laws of the universe, only this art wasn’t imitating life, it was influencing it. - emphasis mine
Faye the Traveler discovered something similar during her training with the Grimnoir (underfunded good-guy Ancient Conspiracy):
The area around her had always been like a map in her head, and when she picked a spot to Travel into, she could focus more on that space, but she’d been Traveling so much lately, that she’d discovered that her head map had gotten bigger and clearer. It was almost like her thoughts could Travel on their own, and she didn’t even need to send her body to see what was going on. A big book Mr. Browning had, written by a Dr. Fort, had called her Power by the name of Teleportation, but even it hadn’t mentioned anything about being able to have a magic map in her head.
You get the idea. Powers, depending on what they do and which aspects of reality they're rooted in, are related. Healing is Biological plus whatever energy fuels the process. Superstrength is Biological plus Density. Teleportation, as quoted above, bends space thereby tying into Gravity. Fill in the blanks for yourself. This would make a wonderful setting for comicbooks, RPGs, movies even; I'd watch it.
In my next post, I'll talk about the Words of Power, glyphs and kanji that can be etched into objects or branded into flesh to create magical effects. Peace out.
*paradimensionally adjacent if not literally)