The human search for understanding of the world around us is unending, and has produced a depth and breadth of information that I don’t think can easily be articulated. In the modern era, that search has been through the mechanism of the Scientific Method, and our discoveries have painted the picture of a materialist universe. Though our accumulated information is vast— too vast for one person to know everything, or even a significant fraction of it— a basic understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology has become the common basis for our model of the world.
This has not always been the case. In the pre-modern world, before the Scientific Method had been codified, human tools for understanding the world were more limited, and our understanding was more piecemeal. We knew vastly less about how the universe works, and to rationalize what we could observe based on what we did know, we built models of the world that the benefit of hindsight tells modern humans were incorrect.
A core part of these early models was magic. Before we understood what bacteria were and how they contributed to disease, for example, we blamed invisible, malevolent spirits. Before we understood thermodynamics and weather patterns, we blamed storms on gods and giants, and droughts on curses and divine punishments.
Our understanding of the world was that it was fundamentally a magical place, and our stories reflected that understanding. Wise men and women could perform magical deeds by casting spells, but animals, places, objects, and events could also be magical in nature. The circumstances of burial could determine whether or not the deceased would remain dead, animals could be intelligent and speak to each other in their own language, omens could appear to hint at future events, and materials like salt could ward off evil.
These stories still resonate with us today, and their fantastical nature delights and entertains us. It’s only natural that much of our own fiction should reflect this fantastical nature, and, with their roots in such fiction, it’s also only natural that our fantasy roleplaying games should do the same.
The Disconnect
However, many modern fantasies— and fantasy roleplaying games— suffer from a crippling disconnect between their fantastical elements, which draw from historical models of the world that incorporate magic at every level, and the story or game’s own model of the world, which essentially mirrors the materialist model we use in the present day. This disconnect in turn serves only to make the magic such works portray banal and artificial. To better articulate this, I’d like to quote from John Kim’s excellent article, Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems:
RPGs tend to say that the world works exactly the way that modern science describes it, except for magic. Magic is required for anything that works differently than modern science — and conversely magic is never involved for things which science can explain. Thus, the RPG system is designed first to simulate a non-magical world, and then a neatly self-contained extra set of rules is tacked on to handle magic.
This approach can make it easier for players to understand the game-world. Since they are modern-day people, they can take their scientific viewpoint and just add a few new rules. However, the concept of magic really comes from a pre-scientific age. From a pre-scientific viewpoint, magic is not a thing apart from Nature. Indeed, many things in Nature are inherently magical. Magic is integral to explaining why it rains, the beating of your heart, and many other things.
The Disconnect in Practice
To help clarify, let’s look at an illustrative example— Dungeons and Dragons, and the difference between the Monk and Fighter classes. Specifically we’ll look at 5e, the current edition, though previous editions have all been similar as far as this goes.
In Dungeons and Dragons, Monks and Fighters are both skilled practitioners of martial arts who use their bodies to battle their foes in physical combat. In most cases, the Fighter does this without the help of any magic— there is an Eldritch Knight subclass that Fighters can take, but this explicitly makes them spellcasters in the same arcane tradition as Wizards. Taking this subclass allows them to learn magic as a separate practice from their martial arts, rather than as a facet of them.
Apart from those abilities granted by the Eldritch Knight subclass, Fighters’ class features centre on the Fighter’s superior physique, proficiency with the tools of violence, and the maneuvers of their martial style. There is also a minor aspect of combat leadership and tactical command, but this is very limited, extending only to a handful of abilities of one subclass, the Battle Master.
Contrast this with the Monk.
Dungeons and Dragons’ Monk class draws on kung fu movies, which in turn draw on wuxia fiction and the syncretic mix of Taoism, Buddhism, and historical Chinese myth and folk belief that informs these works.
As such, Monks practice martial arts much like Fighters do. However, the abilities of Monks are often powered by Ki, and their use of this resource allows them to perform superhuman feats, like jumping impossibly far, becoming immune to all poison and disease, or even turning invisible. Monk subclasses further allow the practitioner to conjure blasts of elemental power, or to use other spell-like abilities.
These things are not possible in the real world, so the Fighter, who has no magic, cannot do them; the Fighter is constrained to the limits of real-world physics and human ability, perhaps stretched ever so slightly. The Monk has the magic of Ki, however, and can transcend the physical limits of the real world.
But that’s not how ki works in wuxia. In wuxia, any person that could be considered a Fighter has some awareness of ki, and some ability manipulate it, at least in their own bodies. Monks are monks not because they have it, but because they are members of monastic traditions. A warrior monk is as much a fighter as is a wandering swordsman, a cavalry officer, or a river pirate; the differences between them are their individual martial arts and practices.
This is because in wuxia, monks and other fighters alike do not live in a world which is akin to ours but with magic splashed on top. In the Taoist worldview, ki isn’t something exclusive to monks and absent from the rest of the world; it is a property of the universe, and every creature has it simply by virtue of being alive. The practice of martial arts, and the cultivation of the physical body, has an equal effect on the cultivation of one’s ki, and the fighter whose ki flows poorly is consequently a poor fighter. Even magicians and alchemists manipulate ki, because it is deeply embedded in the model of the world that wuxia ascribes to.
Why a Holistic Approach?
This holistic integration of magic into the world is essential for consistency, and to give a setting the quality of believability.
Fantasy creates and asks us to immerse ourselves into a fantastical secondary world. One might argue that magic is inherently unbelievable, and so the burden is entirely on the participant to suspend their disbelief, any disconnect be damned. But this ignores that for a huge stretch of human history, magic was not only plausible, but that, based on the available information, it was the most logical answer to many of life’s mysteries. Societies before ours constructed models of the world which were consistent with magical events and practices, and sincerely ascribed to them.
As we understand the world now, they were, of course, wrong. But those models still exist in myth and folklore, and have been delved into in scholarship. I believe that it is the height of laziness and folly to take only their most flashy and obvious magical aspects— gods and monsters, sorcerers and spells— and to leave behind those things embedded at a deeper-than-surface level, which make such models consistent and give them a quality of sincere human belief. Even if a setting is invented from the ground up, it should maintain the level of holistic integration of magic that actual belief systems enjoyed.
Done Right
To express how I think this kind of setting can be done well, I’d like to provide a new example— specifically the setting of Legend of the Five Rings.
Legend of the Five Rings is a game about fantastical samurai in a setting that is mashed together out of historical and mythical Japan, China, and Mongolia, with a touch of India and the Silk Road thrown in. It draws inspiration from Shinto and Buddhism for its magical landscape, and the principles it lays out for its magic hold true at every level of the setting.
Namely, Legend of the Five Rings has an animist worldview in which spirits abound. Everything in the universe is composed of the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and through them flows the fifth element of Void. The main four elements are embodied by tiny, invisible spirits called kami, whose actions and interactions are the cause of all natural phenomena. Other spirits are native to this world, or enter it from adjacent planes of existence.
All magic in Legend of the Five Rings is the product of these spirits. Magician-priests called shugenja can speak to them in their own language, and ask them to perform tasks on their behalf. Other spirits can likewise be entreated— honoured ancestors, animal spirits, even the gods themselves.
Those who cannot speak the language of the kami still benefit from their actions; when warriors hone their bodies, they are cultivating the elemental stuff within themselves. They get faster and more agile as their inner Fire grows, more enduring as their inner Earth does, more perceptive as their inner Water courses, and so on. This is not a setting in which muscle is composed of proteins that are in turn composed of carbon, which is turn composed of atoms. Muscle is built of the stuff of elemental earth and water.
These spirits are likewise at work in the land. Water kami are responsible for rain, earth kami for the fertility of the soil. Wildfires occur and spread because the fire kami are unhappy, and they stop when the kami are placated. The setting of Legend of the Five Rings is magical from top to bottom, even when spells are not flying and no magician can be found for miles.
This level of integration is crucial for the consistent and believable feel of Legend of the Five Rings’ universe. You cannot divorce the system’s magic from its setting, because they are one and the same. The same cannot be said for Dungeons and Dragons’, or for many other systems, because their settings are constructed piecemeal— our materialist world on the bottom, and a thin veneer of magic on top.
Further Reading
I cannot recommend enough the article I mentioned above, John Kim’s Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems. This post deals with the same topic as one of his points, but he also talks insightfully about several other ways in which common approaches to magic depart from genuine myth. You can find the article here: http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html.
