Day 16 – Seekretya - More Speculation

 

"Well, today is another day to nail down the rules for how your magic… work[s] in your story."

I boiled the exercise down to three bulleted question and two bulleted instructions:

1.  What are the limits of your speculative element?

2.  What is that cost? If there's no cost, then what's the trade-off?

3.  What keeps it from being used all the time, for everything, or is it used that much after all?

A.  Write down your rules, specifically focusing on what's impossible…

B.  Establish the limits and boundaries of your spec element today.

The first thing of note is I was thinking about who can do magic and I think it would be silly to have repulsor bolts, at least the way I described.  If only Wizards can do magic and everybody else just dabbles then where are the factories making magical instruments of war?  Who runs them?  I would guess that under this system only Wizards could make real magical weapons.  But if they did then those would be tremendously expensive.  That’s fine for a suit of armor or maybe Excalibur, but you would never go throwing them at the enemy as arrows, would you?

I’m going to modify that and keep it in mind as I go through today’s exercise.

1. The limits, simply put are:

a. That there is almost no enchanting of people.  The nature of magic is that it is an energy flow, at times sentient and personified (different Ley lines vary in that respect as well as in respect to how much power they carry).

b. Magic draws its power from another dimension of the multiverse, so it doesn’t tax our normal world’s energy or distort it.  It could draw on the power of that entire universe, but it is limited by the Dragons and how much they can be or that they can channel.  The limits will not be strained or reached in this story.  They will not be a factor.

c. How powerful are Wizards; is another question.  The most powerful Wizards are probably on a par with some of the Dragons themselves.  The limits are the same, but there are some exceedingly rare superstars.  Although there was only one Da Vinci and only one Michael Jordan, and only one Alexander the Great, when you put them all together you get a list, probably similar to the power list of Wizards.  Wizards are not only more powerful than ordinary folks; they are specifically practitioners of magic.  A wizard, in addition to being a type of Ranger of Magic, he is a Wizard.  He’s not a wiz at baking a cake (maybe employing magic in the baking) but an actual Wizard of Magic.

2.  The cost of using magic, for non-Dragons and non-Magic Trees, is study, practice, some inherent skill, dedication and lots of time.  Those are the overall costs.  What I was talking about before with who builds magic weapons can be answered here.  All highly skilled artisans in Seekretya employ some magic in their craft or art.  That little thing a highly skilled electrician in the real world might do.  In the real world we say, “How did you do that?!”  and they may answer, “magic” either because they themselves don’t consciously know how they did it, or they don’t want to tell you.  In Seekretya those situations ARE magic.  Any truly skilled bowyer and a highly trained archer can impart some magic on arrows to give them extra punch.  These arrows could be described as magical, but what they do is hit unnaturally hard.  This is actually how I’m going to use them.  For more magical effects the combatants will use less, disposable weapons.

3.  What keeps it being used for everything all the time?  It’s hard to do correctly and for most applications it isn’t really needed.  You don’t need Da Vinci to paint your house ceiling, but he sure came in handy for the really important jobs.

A.  I think that the rules are all here; my 15 minute alarm has gone off so I don’t have time to recap.

B.  The limits and boundaries?  The only thing I didn’t talk about today is the boundaries.  I have mentioned them time and again; they are the boundaries of Seekretya.  These boundaries do not keep you from crossing into or out of Seekretya except if you get caught in a very specific angle in relation to the Ley lines.  It might be possible to be tangled in them in a airplane if your plane’s ability to fly and the Ley web’s nullifying effect on technology came into an exact balance, the plane may be stuck in mid-air.  Normally though, you could just walk right through.  When you aren’t surrounded by the magic providing Ley lines you can’t do magic (duh) but otherwise that is no barrier.