Fantasy World Seed: Insideous Mana

[PTTG]

So I was thinking about traditional fantasy worlds, and one of the big discrepancies is that magic working makes for a very productive, wealthy world, and that in turn leads to rapid expansion; sooner or later, the adventurous wilderness would go away...

If, on the other hand, the magical monsters of the wilderness are strong enough to resist expansion, then the towns would sooner or later get wiped out by forward-thinking, long-lived monsters such as dragons.

So, what if mana itself is insideous and infectious? Living in mana-rich environments for a long time drives one to madness, corruption, and mutation. There are oasises where mana is reduced, even non-present, and these places are almost always inhabited.

PC and NPC wizards will be weird and bizarre, but useful enough that many communities will tolerate them. Warriors are all the more important, because someone needs to be fierce enough to go out into the mana-rich forests and jungles and collect useful resources... and of course, mana ebbs and flows, sometimes awashing cities in corruption and sometimes making former wilderness into tamable countryside.

Any thoughts on such a setting? Potential refinements and improvements?

[Flyndaran]

Similar to a kind of magical-steam-punk setting I tossed around.
Magic is useful but corruptive like radiation 1950s sci fi style.

Anyone can learn magic, but mages are more the ones inherently resistant to the damaging effects.

I'd love to hear where you go with the ideas.

[evileeyore]

I'm doing similar for my Gamma World/Fantasy mash-up... except mages aren't inherently resistant to the warping effects of magic.

[Benway]

This sort of discussion has popped up at my table now and again.

One thing to consider for a realistic fantasy setting, aka Low Fantasy, is that in real medieval society, 90% of the population was involved in food production.

How would magic influence this demographic? Are wizards and priests altruistic enough to use their magic to create food and water, build solid structures and keep the streets free of ankle-deep refuse? Or, would they keep their magic to themselves and let the peasants toil and suffer. How would all this make a fantasy setting differ from a realistic medieval/early-modern one?

This site is helpful for getting a feel for the composition of medieval low-fantasy societies. Note that 1/30 would be priests, 1/3000 would be adventurer types with 70% of those being fighters, 20% rogues and 9% wizards and 1% others. One might argue the finer points but it's in the ballpark by my estimation.

When I brought these ideas up at our old PF table, the consensus was that we play once a week and we want to kill monsters and steal their stuff. We don't care about the sociological impact of magic or the demographics of medieval societies. If 80% of the population were fireball flinging Githyanki wizard-kings, fine with them, just bring on the 10 foot wide corridors. Fair enough.

That said, some time later, I had an idea similar to yours. I called it The Blight. It was largely a device to eliminate things like infinite this and neverending that, bags of holding, rings of sustenance, permanency, and the like. Peasants had to suck it up and grow their tubers and turnips, adventurers had to carry their gear and travel by foot or horseback. Extradimensional spaces harbored horrible dangers, portals were unreliable and teleportation was extremely dangerous. Structures that were built with magic began to crumble and decanters of endless water spewed bile, acid, blood etc. A wizard, when casting a spell, would know if their spell would turn out blighted and could abort or suffer the consequences. Priests and their Gods refused to use divine powers for "hit points on a stick" and the like. Alchemy, however, was far more reliable and this led to somewhat of a power shift.

I thought the idea was pretty cool and plausible. The push was for the players to investigate and deal with whatever was causing The Blight. My players hated it. They just wanted to kill monsters and steal their stuff. They didn't want to worry about eating or traveling or if their spells were going to cause them to go crazy or break out into hives. (This is why I now play GURPS with three awesome players who find all that to be a bit tired. To each their own, have fun.)

Just a couple of things to consider when one wants to balance realism and cool ideas, like yours, with playability and fun in a fantasy setting. Most importantly, if your players like the idea and want to roll with it, you are on the right track. I still might drop The Blight on my new crew.

[David Johnston2]

It has always been my assumption that the higher the mana level the less likely life is to "breed true". In fact that's my version of the Chaos/Law conflict. It's between those who want magic to be easier versus those who object to having monsters all over the place.

[ericthered]

I've got notes for a setting where Mana became corrupted sometime in the past, knocking over an advanced magical society. Mages were all turned into monsters, leaving the previously marginalized underclass to fend for themselves amid insane creatures, mad constructs, and cursed magic items.


The notes plan for a time-travel mechanism, where the reward of each dungeon is going back to the time before the mana-plauge and getting 24 hours to try and avert the impending doom.


--------------------------------------------


When building a setting like this, the SHAPE of magic vs safe areas is important. If you have a sea of magic with mundane pockets, settlements are very isolated and independent. Each will have its own personality, politics, and cultures. If you've merely got point sources of monsters that won't go away, you're likely to have a single culture that tries to manage the locations. I have a setting with spots that spawn monsters, and a holy warrior order sprang up around tending such locations.


--------------------------------------------



The difference in what players want is amazing. I'm currently playing a game where the players worried about how much of a town's food they can trade to goblins for fine boat-building tools without having food problems. And we have a reasonably realistic answer for that.



And I've seen games where the GM can't keep players focused on the plot, because they want to run off and kill snakes for XP.

[Toptomcat]

Something that will dramatically change the ‘feel’ of mana in this kind of setting is the decision of exactly what kind of ‘corruption’ it causes. Reasonably ‘realistic’ mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia? A slow transformation into a devoted servant of Things from Beyond the Veil? A corruption of the soul with metaphysical evil, turning magicians into frightening psychopaths with no regard for anything but their own amusement- or into a megalomaniacal Saturday morning cartoon villain, seeking to conquer the world Because They Can? A slowly-growing hunger for human flesh? A tendency to have blackout periods in which you behave in a dreamlike fashion and forget your actions afterwards? Drifting memories, making it impossible to remember if your mother had brown hair or red hair- or eventually, whether your neighbor is a bosom friend or mortal enemy?

Grossly supernatural physical mutations, like a working limb made of glass? More grounded deformities, like missing fingers and twisted, crippled limbs? Animalistic features like fur and the tendency to eat raw meat and chase squirrels? A slow thickening of the skin, making movement difficult as if wearing a denim bodysuit and eventually entombing magicians in their own bodies? Slow-growing tumors? Symptoms that closely mimic a real-world disease or syndrome like Parkinson’s, radiation poisoning, or pituitary gigantism? A gradual dwindling of size until the magician shrinks out of existence- or a growing, until the heart gives out? A drastic change of biology, slowly transforming the magician into one of the Lizard-Kings who once ruled the continent- complete with cold-bloodedness, a nocturnal sleep schedule, and the need for dietary supplementation with mercury and arsenic?

All mana doesn’t have to be equal in this respect, either. Perhaps using magic of each College comes with a different, characteristic set of changes. Or it could be regional- using mana outside the ward stones of Uru, last bastion of the civilization of Man, exposes you to the corruption of the Elder Things which lurk outside... but too much mana from *inside* the wards risks transmuting part of your body into the Ward-stones which must be used to fuel the wards. Racial differences are a possibility: maybe magic warps the lesser races uncontrollably, but the One who made the elves, firstborn among mortals, could not bear to see them warped so- and they must instead transform into strange, fractal trees and bear beautiful, jeweled Chaos-fruit which must either be processed into manastones or be disposed of Very Carefully.

[somecallmetim]

Originally Posted by Toptomcat

All mana doesn’t have to be equal in this respect, either. Perhaps using magic of each College comes with a different, characteristic set of changes. Or it could be regional- using mana outside the ward stones of Uru, last bastion of the civilization of Man, exposes you to the corruption of the Elder Things which lurk outside... but too much mana from *inside* the wards risks transmuting part of your body into the Ward-stones which must be used to fuel the wards. Racial differences are a possibility: maybe magic warps the lesser races uncontrollably, but the One who made the elves, firstborn among mortals, could not bear to see them warped so- and they must instead transform into strange, fractal trees and bear beautiful, jeweled Chaos-fruit which must either be processed into manastones or be disposed of Very Carefully.

I just wanted to compliment you on this. There are a lot of very cool and evocative ideas in here.

[AlexanderHowl]

One alternative way to do corruption would be allow mages to take energy from ambient mana...with the consequences of Assisting Spirits (Thaumatology, pp. 90-94). As mages abuse the free energy, their bodies, fates, minds, and souls become twisted by the corruption of excess mana flooding through them. After a while, people start associating all magic with corruption when it is just unwise borrowing.

[Flyndaran]

Could also add a Willpower roll to avoid using non-personal ambient mana. That promotes the whole easy path to power trope while still allowing trustworthy iron willed PC mages.