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Magic beyond comprehension rule
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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All these stories about zoomers not knowing how to do computer stuff is making me want to write a fantasy world where magic is prevalent but most people do not bother to know how it works or question it beyond its surface applications, despite it being the basis for all military and economic might.
Well I wanted to write that, but then I realized I was talking about FMA: Brotherhood.
I feel like the Empire in warhammer 40k operates on a similar premise, all there machune rituals and what not are just maintanance, but nobody understands the machines, so they'll just reenact what was shown to someone eons ago or what have seemed to cause some effect.
just like me blowing into NES Cartridges when a game would not start :D.
Smearing computers with weird oils and burning sage in a server room sounds crazy now, but rather that than try your luck with a customer service LLM.
You mean an Abominable Intelligence
Lmaoo thank you for this.
This is why all my stuff is painted red. It goes faster!
Don't forget your purity seals!
Don't forget to add some Speed Holes!
In sci-fi proper that is also a plot point of Isaac Asimov's The Foundation. The giant galactic empire collapses and all the scholars are holed up on a planet to preserve knowledge. They then go out to other planets and give technology, but everyone is so ignorant that it seems like magic and the scholars kind of roll with it.
In a similar vein is A Canticle for Liebowitz which is about an order of Monks whose goal is to preserve all technology and information after an apocalypse scenario. I think it may have been the inspiration for the Brotherhood of Steel.
It moves through time and shows how ignorance of technology can mix too easily with religious power.
What I really loved about Foundation was the sheer timescale of it. Too much Science Fiction is only on a scale of an individual doing something, and maybe it will follow a few individuals over the course of a few decades or even a couple of centuries and you're left to fill in the blanks, meanwhile Foundation is on a timescale of tens of thousands of years
Discworld's magic system is like this. The wizards often don't know why certain parts of a ritual or spell are in place, but it works so they don't touch it
Half of the plots of the Wizard books are about what happens when someone ignores that advice and does start poking at things better left alone. Wizards are only human after all, and the magical equivalent of a "don't touch; wet paint" sign leaves them so very tempted.
Ridcully would see a wet paint sign, take it down, touch the paint, then demand the Bursar to do something about "all the messes they keep leaving around here."
Basically every day I look at weird code as a programmer
Hello, can I suggest the package code for LXML? I once wondered why the fuck etree.tostring() returned a bytes object instead of a fucking string and made the mistake of diving into the function. Never again. That library is cursed script condensed from the haunted cries of forgotten pharaohs and inscribed in the blood of a newborn foal onto an ancient ash tree under Venus' vexatious gaze.
I got the impression that most Discworld wizards actually avoid doing magic altogether, because the way things work traditionally is way too risky.
Meanwhile a research such as Miss Level asks, and keeps a log of, what subspecies of henbane works best and does it work better if collected at midnight under the full moon?
While Esmé Weatherwax eschews most magic mostly, preferring Hard Work and Headology, even against Death. Unless magic is really required, when she digs deep into the strongest magic imaginable.
Ive seen at least one other anime that was like that, cant remember the title but the magic system was surprisingly fleshed out for a 12 episode anime
Edit: Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor
It's also basically how the Adeptus Mechanicus operates in 40k. Lots of worshipping the old tech, preserving it, and there's some limited giant machines that they could never fathom rebuilding or even fixing so they're very protective of them
To this day, I don't understand how wired telephones worked.
I mean, I kinda do, since I watched a bunch of YouTube videos explaining it. But then I kinda don't.
onward kinda has this, but practically everyone forgot magic
I wanted to like that movie more, just for the novelty. I got a strong impression that the story wanted to be a book, but it was forced into movie script shapes that didn't quite work?
That could be the least comprehensible critique I've ever written, but I did just wake up. If it doesn't make sense I'll try again when my eyes have stopped trying to close.
i got the impression it was meant to be made about 10-15 years earlier with jack black and michael cera instead of chris pratt and tom holland
Haha! That's already a way better movie tbh.
This was one of my biggest gripes with the JK Rowling Wizarding World before Rowling herself gave me other reasons to dislike it
As a worldbuilding enthusiast who cares a lot about making it all hang together as a rich tapestry and all (come check us out at https://lemmy.world/c/worldbuilding btw) it really does chafe to see someone become a billionaire by literally only making their worldbuilding serve the plot and the tone, with no effort to make it internally consistent or even coherent outside of the main narrative.
This is something I think about a lot, and has been done well in fiction plenty already. My adhd wouldn’t just go away in a fantasy world. Sure I might have a burst of motivation for a while, but I probably wouldn’t magically be interested in studying and research just because I might be able to do some basic magic.
Disability in fiction is always going to be fertile soil imo because it's such a genuine aspect of the human experience. Even when fictional devices have answers for some things (a focus spell would be nice), there are still always personal struggles that are worth exploring.
[Conjure Caffeine]
What fantasy world can you think of where most people bother to learn how magic works?
Harry potter, they all go to wizarding school (not that HP should be used as a reference for world building...).
That's a series where people learn how to use magic, not a thing about "how it works". The series is very careful to never explain anything about the mechanics of magic, other than "incantations are a thing unless they aren't, willpower maybe matters, and quality of the magic wand is relevant except when it isn't".
Kind of the inverse, but you may enjoy Gene Wolfe's book of the new sun, and the Numenera TTRPG.
I guess Vance's Dying Earth series, that inspired how spells work in D&D, also would fit there, though I'm not personally familiar
I read the Dying Earth stuff. It's writen between 1950 and the 1980is, I think. And you can fucking tell. It has rape scenes that are handed so utterly casual as if they said "and then the character got on a bus." Got a lot of other problems along those lines too.
That said, it does give an interesting idea of how D&D Magic might look if you translate the game mechanics of spell slots etc. into how that would work and feel in a practical sense and what implications it would have for the world it is set in, in general.
But read it as a historical document, it you do so. It helps that the main protagonist is a fucking unlikeable brick.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were wild like that too. Main character has leprosy and bitches about it making him a worthless person the entire book then raped a woman that helps him and more or less shrugs it off because he thinks the fantasy world is a delusion.
I only read the first book because yikes.
Fans will still foam at the mouth about the moral complexity but those fans are always weird edgelord incels for some reason. It is meant to be a deconstruction, but it's one written by someone that's definitely a rapist, and in the end it's still just an absurd power fantasy with cynicism and casual 70's misogyny.
Yeah, I can imagine it's kind of in the Lovecraft category, as in, clearly influential, but, uhhh, yikes.
I love the Numenara RPG concept - haven't had a chance to play it, but I've workshopped ideas with a friend who likes to write stuff in it. I'll put that book on my radar, another lemming got me going on Glen Cook's Black Company series currently.
It's actually a collection of four books, which I think these days are sold in sets of two.
It's got some fun stuff, like an author who's convinced of his own infallibility, and fantasy-like vocabulary, except none of the words are really made up, it's just applications of somewhat obscure latin and greek words. I'd also kind of encourage going into it blind, since there are some bits of it that are more fun to figure out as you go along.
Bonus for /c/[email protected] players: it has Ascians.
Someone call Brandon Sanderson!
I mean, it's kind of a major point of Elantris, albeit inverted: Nobody knows why magic stopped working because they don't know why it worked in the first place.
You would enjoy the nightlord series. First book is a bit rough though
Or Mad Max.