Resonance Worldbuilding

[pedromvilar]

CuriousDiscoverer wanted to create a setting where magic basically depended on/needed "covens" to work well, so we came up with Resonance, being threaded in here. Here's the worldbuilding thing.

The setting and the magic
The setting is an alternate-Earth with a mostly-similar history to our own, except magic has always been known to exist. Furthermore, anyone can do magic. It's typically ritualistic, requiring circles of specific things, stones, candles, runes, symbols, materials, words, herbs, meditation, etc. The end result is an effect embedded into something, an object/action that need to be acted upon/performed to trigger the effect. So, for example, you perform a short ritual, and for the next week the next time you say a certain word a certain thing happens, or maybe you rip a piece of paper in half, or something like that. Only the person or people who actually participated in a ritual can use magical triggers (like saying something or ripping the paper etc), but magical artefacts that can be used by other people are possible, if exponentially harder to create. There are also multiple ways of performing the same spell, some more efficient than others but none unique.

When it comes to raw power, a good rule-of-thumb is that an hour-long ritual generates an effect equivalent in power to that of a square wishcoin, and the distribution in time/complexity/resources is exponential too, specifically in powers of 100 (so 36s for triangles, 100h for pentagons, 10,000h for hexes, etc). This has a few caveats. One, versatility: it's basically impossible to be very good at general magic, and people tend to specialise. Two, it's hard to be good at magic in general, especially because doing magic in a place where no one has done any magic in a long time is harder, whereas doing magic in a place that sees frequent magical activity makes it more powerful but much harder to control, and being able to discern that kind of thing is a specialised skill that takes lots of practice and divination tools and even then it's risky at best, especially without any theoretical backing.

So magic is hard to do, can be either completely useless or pretty catastrophic if done without prior knowledge about the location you're doing magic in, and it's hard to be able to do more than a handful of kinds. It has, thus, not been terribly useful throughout history, until a recent breakthrough about how magic works.

The magic field
There is a magical field everywhere, which attunes to people and objects and symbols and actions and all that, and performing magic consists in disturbing this field in the right ways and attuning actions/symbols/objects to it. When the magical field is disturbed, it takes a while to settle back down, and it becomes easier to perform magic there again (disturbing it further) but it also becomes more volatile. Using a magical artefact or effect in a different place than the one it was created in also disturbs this magical field but to a much lesser degree, and small effects sometimes disturb it so little it settles back down in a few seconds. The reason people have to specialise is that their personal magical signature resonates with the kind of magic they do, and the more they do it the harder it is to do other kinds of magic without creating internal dissonance that can create problems, from ineffectiveness to magical storms.

Other than waiting for the field to settle down, there are two ways to make sure your magic is stable.

Covens
It has always been known that doing magic with more people, each person with a different specialisation, makes magic more stable and less likely to blow up in anyone's faces. Whenever you perform magic with the same group of people, your signatures start aligning and your magic resonates. Performing magic in groups stabilises the field and the more people participating in it and the more diverse (but still relevant to the spell) their specialisations, the less you have to worry about not enough or too much magic having been performed recently in that place.

Furthermore, when you've performed enough spells with the same group of people that you're effectively "in sync," you can use a covenmate's magic to perform feats you wouldn't have been able to, with your own specialisations, even at large distances if you've got a very strong connection. It is customary to call a covenmate's name and "role" in the coven while channelling their powers for a spell, but not actually strictly necessary. In fact, in some contexts that's considered unprofessional, but it's a very strong social custom otherwise.

Coven magic, however, has less raw potential than individual magic. Or rather, since it doesn't allow the magical field to accelerate too much, more work is needed for the same effects, so there's a tradeoff between safety and power. Also, the more in sync you are with a coven, the harder it is to do magic on your own or with other people, and the less powerful that magic is. If you continue doing magic without your coven, however, your bond with everyone in the coven will dissolve.

Gifts
1 in 100 people are born with a "gift," which is an innate power, sort of like Aurum witches. These gifts have a very large uneven distribution of power, however, with the vast majority of them being very small things like seeing in the dark or having hearing a little bit better than most, and very few being as powerful as shapeshifting or telekinesis. Furthermore, these gifts are also a sort of "forced specialisation," in that your magical signature will always have a component relating to your gift, so doing magic not related to it is much harder for you than for someone without any gifts. The more powerful the gift, the harder it is to do other kinds of magic, to the point that some people are basically unable to perform anything complex unrelated to their gifts without a coven.

There is a huge advantage to having a gift, however, which is that gifts stabilise the magical field, as well. They stimulate a "still" magical field and settle down an agitated one in order to be used, so gifted people are often sought out by covens to serve as field stabilisers. Covens with powerful gifted people can make do with less people than covens without for safety and power, so even people with very restricted gifts are coveted for that alone.

Bits of society
There are a few bits of society that are obviously different. For one, magic is a research field, the way it works, the maths behind it, etc, and it's somewhat coupled with physics. There are university courses in theoretical magic, and it's somewhat treated like a fiddly science. It's also coupled with psychology, anthropology, and sociology, since memetics affects spells both in an individual and in a social way.

There are some high-school-level schools that teach the basics of magic to people who want to use it/work with it, a bit like a technical school. Gifted people tend to go to those more often than others, for having had contact with more powerful magic for a long time. Studying and working with magic can be used both to aid other fields (like engineering) or as a field on its own (like magitech). Law enforcement, at least in moderately large cities, has covens of policewixen to deal with magical crimes.

Hardcore magic studying (and, consequently, power) is a somewhat geeky field, akin to programming or engineering, but amateur covens to create simpler effects, powers, and artefacts, like you and your neighbours getting together to create magical lawnmowers, are pretty common, usually using the help of a gifted person who doesn't want to follow a magic career and/or already existing spells downloaded from the internet.

Fin

[Bluelantern]

Thank you Pedro!

To really put in perspective how geeky magic is, imagine gathering with your neighbours to create lawnmowers.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Steel likes this magic system.


...Nick kind of hates it.

[pedromvilar]

Why? To both :P

[rockeye_stonetoe]

It practically mandates peaceful cooperation, is the answer to both.

[DanielH]

Do all the parts of a ritual need to be done together? Or can you do some of a ritual, eat dinner, do some more of the ritual, go to bed, and finish the ritual the next morning?

If I understand correctly, having more people working on a ritual slows it down somewhat because the magic field won’t respond as much? Does that mean that a square’s worth of ritual with two people will take slightly longer than an hour, or slightly longer than 30 minutes (because there are two participants each doing magic)?

[Bluelantern]

Steel likes this magic system.


...Nick kind of hates it.

It practically mandates peaceful cooperation, is the answer to both.

That is sort of unsurprising. :p

Do all the parts of a ritual need to be done together? Or can you do some of a ritual, eat dinner, do some more of the ritual, go to bed, and finish the ritual the next morning?

Most modern magic is designed around safety, so being interrupted won't kill you, but stopping will cause the magic to "unravel" and will have to redo parts of the ritual. I think some rituals (especially the longer ones) might have points where you can take breaks, or are done in turns by coven members.

If I understand correctly, having more people working on a ritual slows it down somewhat because the magic field won’t respond as much? Does that mean that a square’s worth of ritual with two people will take slightly longer than an hour, or slightly longer than 30 minutes (because there are two participants each doing magic)?

I think the problem is more about complexity, because you have to adjust for more than one person casting. I don't remember if we have an answer for the last question.

[pedromvilar]

Do all the parts of a ritual need to be done together? Or can you do some of a ritual, eat dinner, do some more of the ritual, go to bed, and finish the ritual the next morning?

Most modern magic is designed around safety, so being interrupted won't kill you, but stopping will cause the magic to "unravel" and will have to redo parts of the ritual. I think some rituals (especially the longer ones) might have points where you can take breaks, or are done in turns by coven members.

Yeah, if you pause a ritual it starts unravelling but can be picked up later. Also, the further along you are in a ritual, the more it unravels while paused, so pausing for an hour after 16h of ritual does more harm than pausing for an hour after 8h of ritual.

If I understand correctly, having more people working on a ritual slows it down somewhat because the magic field won’t respond as much? Does that mean that a square’s worth of ritual with two people will take slightly longer than an hour, or slightly longer than 30 minutes (because there are two participants each doing magic)?

I think the problem is more about complexity, because you have to adjust for more than one person casting. I don't remember if we have an answer for the last question.

I think the answer that makes most sense is taking slightly longer than an hour.

[DanielH]

For cooperative rituals, does everybody need to keep participate in all the parts for it to not unravel, or can they trade off active work on the ritual? If it’s the former, has anybody even done a pentagonworth of ritual?

[pedromvilar]

A ritual where a person can replace another person's "role" is very complex and needs to account for two people's different signatures at the same spot somehow, but there are probably rituals where person 1 has a role and does a thing and then takes a break and person 2 has a different role and they can do their thing while person 1 is taking a break so that the ritual itself isn't interrupted but parts of it are paused while other parts are resumed. And these rituals also take longer and are more complex than rituals where everyone's active all the time, which would be the ones that'd take a bit more than 100h to do.

Also, a professional witch would definitely object to this description of ours as too simplistic and reductionistic, and there are in fact things one can do to a ritual that make them take less time if you do the first thing there with more than one person having the same role and keeping them in sync, so a large number of people could in fact accelerate a ritual and make even star effects possible without needing 100 years, but that's only in theory and no one has really managed it yet.

And so yeah, pentagonworth of ritual has been done, maybe hexworth if we think of a good enough idea.