Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

I have found that it is near-impossible to have magic feel mysterious and eldritch while allowing PCs to get their hands on it.

There are a few issues: if you give magic to players, you sort of have to explain it to them and that decreases some of it's mystique. Another issue is that players tend to (reasonably and realistically) start to view it as another tool in their toolbox. Even putting harsh consequences on its use doesn't seem to fix that. I ran a game with a homebrew system that was vaguely like Threshold, but with Threshold 0 (magic is volatile and dangerous and every spell can go out of control, but the more magic you've recently used, the more likely it is to go out of control). That led to two types of mage PCs that I noticed. There were those who embraced the risk and still overused magic, revelling in every backlash and there were those who internally preformed a cost-benefit analysis for each spell. While this was cool, neither was what I'm talking about. It's hard to think of magic as a primal cosmic force when performing a CBA of it vs a shovel for making a hole.

I've largely given up on simultaneously letting PCs have access to magic and making magic feel like a cosmic, vast and mysterious force. However, I was talking about this with one of my players and he said I should ask you guys for your thoughts. So, apologies for not being able to clearly articulate what I want/mean, but I'm curious if you have had similar or different thoughts on this, or if you have a solution that you think works.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Well, you can always give PCs restricted access rather than no access. The key thing for being mysterious is lack of information, though, and it's hard for players to make use of something if they don't know what it does.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

That actually goes with anything, not just magic. If sci-fi technology runs on handwavium, it won't be easy to play an engineer/technician character.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

If the players understand the rules that control magic, then it is not a mysterious and cosmic force.

If magic is reliable and consistent, then it is not a mysterious force.

If you want magic to be mysterious, then you need to have some motive behind it that influences the results of just about every spell, but the goals and intent of this force must not be known or easily identified.

One approach might be to think of spells as opening a portal that allow some cosmic being to reach through and affect the world according to it's own whim, but also puts a post-it note on the door-frame saying 'please do X'

Now this cosmic being may have specific goals it is pursuing(preferably ones beyond the understanding of the PCs and only the oldest and wisest of sages can even get a glimmering of which way it is trying to move), or it may just be bored and capricious(imagine Q from ST:TNG but everyone with magery can tap him on the shoulder and make a request)

This is the sort of approach that makes magic a force with a will of it's own.
You can make a request, bu regardless of how well you cast the spell, the odds of getting what you want are fifty-fifty at best.

If you want magic to be a little more controllable, you could assume that magic is drawing power from some cosmic entity, you might even make up a hit-location chart for that entity, and each location has an impact on the spell effect.
But the stronger the spell, the more likely the entity is to notice and decide to intervene(perhaps it likes the caster or the caster's cause, or perhaps it dislikes having it's power stolen and will exact vengeance, perhaps there is more than one entity and they cover a whole spectrum)

The problem is, to make magic mysterious you must remove much of the control from the hands of the spell caster. And you can't even explain the details of what and why, you can only inform them that magic is very fickle and any time a spell caster gets exactly what they asked for, they were very lucky.

Of course none of these options are conducive to flinging fireballs at orcs on a regular basis...

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Sanderson's Laws of Magic are some important keywords here. Cost-Benefit Analyses are just part of life, especially for humans in Anglo culture, so I don't think you can get away from them.

One simple option with Threshold Magic would be keeping the backlash table secret. Sanderson's Laws explain why there have to be clear rules governing player-accessible magic, but nothing says that the players have to know more than "overusing magic has risks ranging from X to (in legends) Y. Track the following information and warn the GM whenever you ... he may ask you to roll more dice." Another is making plenty of magical things not be systematic, such as magic items with an assortment of cool and unique effects, individualistic monsters and spirits, etc. Nothing says that every magic sword has to be +1 to skill and able to cast Flaming Weapon from a dedicate Powerstone, or that every walking corpse has to have standardized abilities chosen from a monster manual and available in game terms on an Occultism roll.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

I played around with having Threshold costs include some randomness. I subtracted 4 from the fatigue cost and added 1d, minimum 0. I know that doesn't make magic feel so much mysterious as a little bit wild, but it might make the CBA become more of an intuitive calculation. I don't know, as the only player who used it was risk averse, and always assumed that the roll might go badly before using magic.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

I have exactly this problem, and I'm glad you've raised it, dfinlay - I'll be reading the rest of this thread with interest. I'd love to find a way to make magic feel deep and mysterious.

But what is this "mysteriousness" that we're looking for?

• Unpredictability is part of it - but only part. Poker machines are unpredictable, but don't feel magical and mysterious.
  
• Inexplicability is part of it - but only part. there are plenty of inexplicable things that don't feel magical. Human behaviour, for instance. The "impossible crime" that begins a whodunnit is inexplicable, and thus mysterious, but not mysterious in a magical way.
  
• What really makes magic feel deep and mysterious is when it seems to imply some deeper order to the universe - a deeper order that;s not just physical or scientific, but truly intentional or moral in character. Wizards need to be able to mutter things like "Deeper powers than mine forbid it", "No; I sense it is not yet time"; "Now is my hour!" and so on, without anyone but them being able to understand why.

One option I've considered for modelling this is to use a lot of "narrativist" mechanics for magic.

Example: restricting wizards to a certain number of effects per session, or per story arc, as per Serendipity or Wild Talent, etc. (plus adding some ways to push those limits if necessary, at grave risk).

Then PC magic use really would be governed by a deeper order than any of the characters can perceive: the narrative demands of the story.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

The only way to keep magic feeling Magical is to remove it from the hands of the Players.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

In pulp fantasy and horror, magic is Other. Few who encounter it are left unaffected; all those who traffic in it are severely affected. The effects in question are always dehumanizing, whether morally, physically, rationally or any combination thereof. Mere mortal death is the least eventuality of concern.

As soon as magic ceases to be Other, it becomes Tool and can no longer be "mysterious and eldritch". At that point, it is a science, albeit one based on supernaturalism rather than naturalism.

As for gaming, I concur with previous posters, because magic in the hands of PCs is inevitably magic as Tool.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

It doesn't have to be, but it will call for a lot of trust between players and GM. Magic tends toward being a systematic tool for the same reasons that RPGs have rules at all: it creates a shared and well-understood definition for what characters can do. If your group is willing to be more improvisational, then the rules aren't so necessary, and the magic will be more mysterious since no one knows exactly how it will work. That will not, of course, be to everyone's taste.

There's something of a contradiction in wanting magic to be "cosmic" and "vast" while also wanting PCs to be strictly limited in their power, especially with the zero-to-hero model. If the only magic the players ever see or have access to is highly constrained, it's not going to feel vast. So yet another angle is simply to let the mages have vast power. This will require different GMing techniques to make sure all the players have something to do and some spotlight time. And again, different power levels within the group is not to everyone's taste.

Also, a significant portion of "feel" comes down to how the group does its narration and description. You aren't going to get cool eldritch effects while people are just mumbling about numbers of game resources remaining and saying "I cast Fireball", any more than you're going to get cool combat choreography and kung-fu moves when people just say "I attack. I do 14 damage". Adding color to the bare mechanical bones is the responsibility of the players, but that means going out on a limb in a attempt to create interesting and entertaining descriptions of what's going on, and not everyone is necessarily skilled at that. So you'll have some failures, and have to have some tolerance while everyone learns that much Performance to go with their Hobby (RPGs).

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

A good mix between known laws of magic and mysterious magic can be found in the Staff of One from the Marvel comic series Runaways. The staff can only cast any spell once (presumably in the presence of any potential caster), and the caster can only suggest intent with a word or short phrase. Another well known Marvel mage, Dr. Strange, has the trappings of Mystery, calling upon Eldritch forces from beyond the veil of reality, but he has so many go-to spells like the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak that he's become kind of ho-hum.

A friend ran a fantasy campaign with a new system of magic that he didn't explain to us (we had to learn via trial and error), and the magic was just returning to a world that didn't know magic at all, so no NPCs knew it either (except for the dragons...) However, once we learned the basics, we started treating it as a tool. I would suggest creating two of your own magic systems, and using them alongside every magic system GURPS offers. That won't prevent the players from treating magic like a tool, but at least there will still be magic they don't understand.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

The thing is, if you did succeed in making magic not a Tool, rational players would never use it, because they'd know it couldn't be made to do what they needed it to. And they would have a legitimate complaint if anybody else in the story did manage to make it do something they wanted, so it's difficult to justify the NPCs using it much either.

In some senses I suppose magic that never appears in play is pretty mysterious, but not in a very interesting way.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

There is a (somewhat) middle ground to allowing PCs access without taking away any of the mystery.

Do not allow PC spellcasters, but allow them to have Patrons, Allies, Contacts, & Dependents who are spellcasters, or be owed Favors from NPC spellcasters. They can access a little magic some of the time and the GM can tightly control what knowledge is available... go ahead and roll against your Thaumatology skill... oh, sorry, there is no default... you'll just have to rely on the cryptic explanations those friendly NPCs give you. You trust them, right?

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

The idea that magic is a force to be controlled is a very new idea, and if you use that idea, it's hardly surprising that it becomes like a science, since the idea that magic is a force is, itself, an idea created by modern civilizations fascination with science. People noted that chemistry had its roots in alchemy, that astronomy had its roots in astrology, and so naturally physics must have its roots in magic.

But historically magic is two things. First of all, it is the knowledge of other realms/domains. A magician is not really someone who weaves spells, but knows lore, things like where one can go in the spirit world to find an answer, or how to control his dreams, or how meditation works. The second thing he has is a relationship with spiritual powers.

Magical thought shares a lot with religious and spiritual thought. If you poke an ignorant man with a scientific world-view and ask "Why does lightning strike," he will say "I dunno. Maybe there's something inherent in clouds and the ground and lightning that makes it so. We should investigate!" If you ask someone who subscribes to a spiritual view, he will say "God willed it so." A magician might then ask "How can I persuade God to strike my foes?"

This is the source of magic's uncertainy. If magic is a force, then you can reliably do the same thing over and over again ("If I cast a lightning spell, lightning will strike my foes"). If magic is the ability to talk to spirits and ask them to do stuff for you, it will not be reliable ("PLEASE strike my foe with lightning? I'll sacrifice a goat to you later if you do! I promise this time, I won't forget!"). The more human-like the spirit, the less eldritch it will seem ("The lightning god is just pissy because the thunder goddess stood him up on a date"), but the less human-like the spirit, the weirder and more incomprehensible and dangerous magic will seem ("The Shadow of the Universe has veiled its face to me. I... I think it disapproves. The stars are not right. I must change the stars in my eyes. I MUST CHANGE THE STARS IN MY EYES!")

So, the first half, knowledge, is more like a force. Once you know how to see spirits, or how to control your dreams, that always works, but it's really just a tool for accessing elements that give you real power, like artifacts that are fragments of godly might, or the favor of gods. It would probably be closer to divine powers than traditional magic, or so is my take.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

...there's also the Call of Cthulu route where PCs learn individual spells, often without being fully aware of what they do.

Actually, this should fit quite well with Mailanka's ideas above - most of the "spells" actually just contact something so that you can petition it for a favour.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Having played Mage The Ascension extensively, Witchcraft, Arcanum, Ignis Fatuus and quite some different magical systems from GURPS Thaum (Currently using 5 different magical systems in my setting), I'd say that to attain the mysterious and eldritch feeling you're looking for, you'll have to go away from the usual "D&D/DF/DungeonCrawling-esque" mechanics.

If you look at books, movies, tales, legends... normally what composes mysterious is something you quite can't grasp as a whole or understand the full extent of the system and its outcome, even if you manage to understand some bits of it .

For magic, more specifically, what I mean is you gotta break some part of the system and take that away from players, so that leaves them wondering what could happen exactly.

I'd say at a very basic level, a straight hermetical magic type spell would be something like:

Effect Visualization > Performer/Material/Targets Gathering > Ritual Performance > Manifestation > Check of Visualization X Manifestation

So, as I previously said, this full complete system and its understanding takes away any (or almost all) variance and mysticism, because all possible variables are controlled or already expected by the performer.

Taking away 1 or more of these steps from the control of the performer would add degrees of variance which in turn could add mystery (Not necessarily, though...variance can be taken as annoyance if done wrong).

Braking each step to see what we'd gain from removing the performer control:

Effect Visualization removed

I find taking this away would be more annoying than mystifying, since if you can't even decide what you're trying to do or alter, how are you supposed to expect it to even work in the first place.
For me, this is a no no to remove from the control of performers and thus players.

Performer/Material/Target Gathering

Here things start to become interesting... What if materials are not strictly defined and/or depending on what you use you have somewhat different results?
Performers would have a wild guess on what could be used as material, but often could try different or unusual components to try different effects. This could lead to quests often found in tales for special materials or leave a feeling of "What's gonna happen" at each casting with different or improvised materials.

Performer is also quite a good one, imo. WHO actually performs the magic? What if the magi only puts things in motion, put the real magic is done by a superior thing from the void? What if performers only open energy lines to the primordial planes and then the entropic forces act on their own? What if performers are bound to ancient pacts with fey Thuatá De Danaan and their whimsical desires is what actually can mold reality?
Even if they know what actually performs the magic, not being the ones in control of it allows room for exquisite things to happen.
This, I believe, is a step with great potential for mysterious depth and adding. Depending on the variance of the true magic force matrix, even castings with exact same steps on the other points could come out quite different due to this step possible variance while still being true to its set definition.

I wouldn't mess with Targets, since it tends to get annoying fast, when performers and thus players, start missing their expected targets or simply not affect them the way they thought.

Material, good to tweak. Performers, very good to tweak. Target, bad. imo.

Ritual Performance

I like to mess with this step quite a lot for the purpose of mystifying magic, specially coupled with the previous Material and/or Performer step.

If the forces moving the universe around and thus the ones peforming magic are subject to considerable change and mutability and the rituals that put those forces in motion are also not quite defined or known, you have a lot of wiggle room for the players to be wondering what exactly would happen, how it would happen and so on...

Personally, I find this couple with the previous step is where your gold is.

Manifestation

I normally find that tweaking with this gets frustrating quite fast. If players are performing the same rituals, with the same mats, to the same forces and the results are wildly different they tend to treat it as an unreliable force quite fast and will only apply it when they can withstand the chance/variance or almost not at all.

If tweaking this, do it only for fluffy mostly and not really sweeping, significant variances, imo.

Check

This is simply the stage where the magi, the player, checks if the effects meets his desire.
Put it simply, is the step where somehing like "I wanted to cast a Fireball...did I cast a Fireball?" happens.
Sometimes magic takes time or doesn't leave any visual/material manifestation and not knowing straight right away if your magic worked as you desired it to work, if done in the correct amount and tone, can also add some degree of eldritchness.
You know those scenes in movies where the main characters push something, or perform a ritual or do something and there's that 2-5 seconds with complete silence and stillness and camera shows the whole area and you kinda stop your breath waiting what's gonna happen and IF its gonna happen?
While it's an excitement buildup, if you look from the magi/player perspective, not being 100% sure if/how it'll work, even after performing correct known magical formulae, it could add a layer of mystery to it.

Just don't overdo it or magic will fall into the "unreliable" territory quite fast.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

You could use GURPS Powers: Divine Favor as a base, where magic is this indescribable and fickle force. It doesn't necessarily need to model a deity, just this mystical force that you are petitioning for help... You might not necessarily get what you want, but you might get what you need depending on the request. Just ignore the pre-approved prayers part.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

This is much the same thing as magic is actually performed by those spirits or gods and you negotiate with them for it every time.

Part of the problem is that magic is mysterious is a late literary convention too. When a real magician works a spell, he does think it's a tool, one he expects has a good chance of doing whatever it is he wants to happen. If he didn't expect it to work, why would he bother. Likewise somebody buying a spell may not know how magic works, but he doesn't know how blacksmithing works when a buys a new ax either, he doesn't particularly think the magic amulet is any more mysterious.
Magic is mysterious is an *excuse* for why it didn't work, which you only need in a society that has gotten into the habit of investigating stuff to the point of noticing that it usually doesn't.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

This is the tension - for players to use magic, it must be Tool. For magic to be as the OP desires it, magic must be Other.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

I'm about to embark on GMing a TL2 fantasy campaign and approaching this problem what I will try to do is:

-use multiple skins over a fundamental magic engine known only to me in order to stovepipe mage types such that while they may have some mechanistic understanding of their own magic use, the capabilities and methods of other mages will be obscure to them;

-base threshold levels on CP levels;

-use a high threshold but make recovery slow;

-base spell threshold costs on the scale/scope of the effect, and make the scale and scope of effect partially unpredictable;

-make spell failure complications common and relatively manageable, but subject to potentially cascading if bad luck and foolish risks combine.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Yes. Divine Powers can work for a specific God ("Thor is displeased"), but it can also apply to fickle forces or elements ("The spirits are displeased" or "The Universe knows you mean ill.") In fact, if you really dig deep into theology, or even mythology, you'll find that the personification of a god is a simplification. While many Christians might picture God as a bearded white dude sitting on a throne on a cloud in the sky, actual Christian theology* depicts God as an omnipresent entity that suffuses, or is, the universe.

The best way to make things eldritch is to play up the alienness of this entity. You can easily do this by just claiming that "the Magic does what it wants to do." If "magic" becomes inherently malign, that might make it more eldritch, andif it become inherently ineffable, then it becomes more mysterious (though, ideally, you want it to be somewhat logical, because the point of a mysterious thing is that it can be investigated and understood: the magic teases you with glimpses of structures that you do not yet understand)

*depending on your sect of Christianity, of course.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

I believe the trick to keeping magic “Mysterious” is to actually do that. Keep the Rules of the system a mystery to the players.

By only giving the players partial information about the magic system, it’s possible to keep magic as a mysterious element. Instead of fleshing out the entirety of how the system works only give them a brief overview of what the penalties, rules, and possibilities entails at the outset. This would force players to pay attention to every bit of detail when spells were being cast to try to figure out what was going on. Net effect: Mystery.

Example: Say your magic system is based on a free-form keyword base like RPM, with costs coming from Threshold and Fatigue. Threshold starts at 0 and has a minimum cost of 1, with no upperbound. Fatigue is generally used to offset the Threshold cost but a minimum Fatigue expenditure is also based on key words used in the spell (IE: All Damage spells and ones that affect an area or multiple targets have a minimum 1 FP, etc.).
Threshold costs are assigned based on how “big” of magic the PCs want to use, but with random element added to them. Then, the effect of the spell is based on a Reaction Roll table, much similar to Divine Favor. A better reaction = a “better/bigger” effect or less Threshold costs.
Increasing your Reaction Roll on the spell table is based on a number of attributes: character behavior, the subjects involved, any esoteric items/ingredients involved, chanting, special locations, time of day, etc…By adding these “Traditional Trappings” to the spells they start to feel more eldritch as they don’t seem to follow the natural order of the how Science explains the universe to work. “Why does creating a magic circle out of the dust of a dead relative make teleportation spells easier?” etc. But also, the randomness adds a hint of unpredictability to the casting. You could think you know all the rules of how to get bonuses, but still get a bad roll and have a wimpy spell go off.

However, you only tell your players that spells use Fatigue and might require research or knowledge checks to make their spells better. The building of the spell is all in the GM’s hands. The GM merely asks the player “what do you want to do?” and assigns keywords and costs based on what the player describes. The GM can give the option of asking “Do you want to spend any FP?”, without telling them what that paying of FP does. Then the GM rolls the 3d Reaction Roll (in secret) every time a spell is cast and doesn’t tell the PCs what that does. Already the Pc’s are curious at all the unknowns. Ah! Mystery!
At this point PCs will start with just trying to cast spells with the least amount of FP. This generally results in faster Threshold accumulation and either less spells or more catastrophic ones. The GM should liberally allow them Per-based Research/Thaumatology/Occultism checks to notice one aspect of something affecting their spells: “Oh the moon was especially bright during your previous Ray of Frost and doesn’t seem to have the same effect during the day.” “Your research shows that those who spend more of their body’s own resources allow spells to be more stable.” Etc.

This gives your players incentive to figure out what the hell is going on in your magic system due to all the info they don’t know. The players will then have to make notes on what helped and what didn’t and slowly begin to unravel the rules, the mystery, of the system. But, the Reaction Roll keeps everything not quite "A+B+C = D"-like science.

**But make sure the players (not the PCs) know that there are things the GM is looking for behind the scenes when they cast spells and are on board with this system first!**

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

This sounds like an excellent bundle of solutions. I do think they'll go a long way towards making magic feel mysterious, even to wizard PCs who have significant control over it.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

This is also a damned good idea. I would love to play a wizard in a campaign like this. Doing magical research would be great fun, since it would not just be a matter of the character learning things, but of me, as a player, gradually piecing the puzzle together. Awesome!

All this assumes that I trust the GM really does have a workable magic system behind the GM screen. But this one seems workable.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Yes and No. And ignoring theology for aesthetics. Chesterton in one essay said that paradoxically people do not get scared of trees until they imagine tree-people inside. When it is just a wooden organism it is not very scary. If it has a guardian nymph that dislikes being disturbed it is scarier. If the guardian nymph has a regular audience with Artimis you are in big trouble. It is true when you think of it. Anthropomorphism when done right is SCARY. Or make it a Celtic version. For some reason Celtic myth seems more frightening then Greek; maybe because it is less obviously subdued and there were folks not so long ago that believed a distilled version of it, and not just intellectual chic but the peasant stuff.

The trick to making things Eldritch is to combine the Anthropomorphized with the Mysterious and Inhuman in the proper way.

When magic is used have a Wise One communicate with something like this-however. He will not see the roll, the GM will make the roll. It will require good acting for the GM to scare the PC playing the Wise One. He will give a cryptic message to the Wise One(perhaps a riddle or whatever in fact a riddle is a good idea). What the other PCs will see is something spectacular and mysterious happening to the Wise One until he returns with his message.

In any case the Eldritch Creature has to be anthropomorphized just a little bit or it will be just beastly rather then eldritch. But the anthropomorphism can't be taken to far. Perhaps a good guide is to imagine the Wizard of Oz-without a little man in the corner.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

It can also be roleplaying. If warriors of your PCs culture always shout "In Nomine Dei!" when they charge then that's a spell. If sometimes the fiends flee then it worked and god gave them the victory.

If the GM lets the players know that sometimes doing these things right will help, or at least keep the ancestors from getting mad, then their characters will keep trying magic.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Since this is the GURPS sub-forum, the question isn't just whether rational players would ever use it. It goes much deeper than that: Would rational players ever choose to pay points for it?

Purchasing abilities with points implies ownership of said abilities. GURPS then has some pricing game mechanics, Limitations, that can be used to limit ability ownership, so that the character can in many cases be said to to fully (100%) own the ability that the player playing the character paid points for.

Thus, it's an RPG mechancis design issue:
A question of how to use the existing mechanics to as fully as possible achieve the desired goal, or seeking to tweak, change or modify the RAW mechanics so that the goal can be achieved more fully.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Here are some of my ideas. Not for GURPS, for a different system, but they can all be used in GURPS:

1. Have multiple magic systems in the world, not just one.

2. Create broad random-roll tables to determine the consequences of magic use Fumbles. Instead of just one 3d6 table with 16 different outcomes, try something like first a 1d6 roll to determine which of six 1d18 sub-tables to roll on. Magic mishaps should be able to produce a very wide variety of undesirable effects, ranging from the annoying or embarassing to the truly dangerous, preferably with more powerful magics being more likely to produce the truly dangerous ones. Ideally each magic system should have its own set of Fumble tables, thus if your world has four different kinds of magic then you'd need 6 times 18 times 4 outcomes, but fortunately in some cases it makes sense to have a smaller and less broad table, for instance Divine magic can use just an 1d6- or 1d12-based Divine Displeasure Table.

3. Magic should never work all of the time. Unlike AD&D and D&D, this is already an intrinsic element of most GURPS magic systems (so this won't induce cognitice dissonance in you guys), with GURPS Powers as the exception where you have to actively apply one of the several available "doesn't work 100% of the time"-Limitations to achieve this.

4. Keep the characters guessing as to what is and is not magical. In one of my posts on my OdinsDay Blog, I rant against the super-availability of Detect Magic in AD&D and D&D. In most cases it's a 1st level spell, and the exceptions means it's a zeroeth level spell or a constantly available ability. That's exactly the wrong way to go about it. Instead, it should be difficult to determine whether magic is actually present, e.g. in an effect (a warrior moving very swiftly in battle, dodging blows with superb grace - is he or is he not subject to a spell buff?) or an item (a very good sword might be magical or it might not; after using it in a few fights you have a sense of how sharp and balanced it is, but you cannot be sure if it is extraordinary because of magic or merely because it was made by a very skilled smith). Detect Magic should probably still be a possibility, just not something as trivially easy as the equivalent of an AD&D 1st level spell (and detecting exotic kinds of magic should be harder). TvTropes has the MaybeMagicMaybeMundane trope, and that's a good place to start. Decipher's "Lord of the Rings" RPG also has an interesting page on different ways for magic weapons (or other items) to have bonuses, rather than everything just being due to Enchanting.

5. Avoid generalist magic users being the norm. Instead, try to have most magic users have an easier time learning some kinds of magic and a harder time learning other kinds, with different magic users finding different kinds of magic easy or hard. That way you get specialist casters being the setting norm, and so not everyone will have access to the Detect Magic Spell (which doesn't mean you can downgrade Detect Magic to a "1st level spell" again!), and when you're preparing to fight a magic-using enemy, part of the intel you'll want to gather on him is what kinds of magics he actually can use - something that is nonsensical in worlds where the magic system makes it easy to be a generalist magic user, such as GURPS Magic or AD&D/D&D.

6. Have exceptions occur. In some RPGs, the only way to get that, for a player, is to perform a sexual favour for the GM, but GURPS has this wonderful mechanic called the UB, which facilitates the resolution of such desires without needing to stoop to the metagame level. In this way, exceptions from the setting's usual cap can exist, and can surprise the other characters ("I didn't think that was possible!"). For instance, instead of setting a hard cap of Magery of X levels, say that the cap can be exceeded by two (i.e. to X+2), the first such additional level costing an UB of 5 points, and the second additional level costing an UB of 10 or even 15 points (an even more sophisticated implementation would base the UB not on levels of Magery but rather on points in Magery). The UB mechanic can be used for a lot of things, including starting the game having training in a magic system that is ultra-rare in in-world terms, adding to the surprise value.



It'll add to the mystery if the player characters don't always immediately (or at all) share capabilitistic information with each other. Not always sharing information is bad tactical practice in a Dungeon Fantasy paradigm (the party leader needs to know how badly the Wizard's spellcasting ability becomes gimped if he gets a ferrous dagger stuck into his body, as just one example), but makes sense in a lot of other fantasy settings (although the benefits can be mitigated if character creation is an intensely collectivist activity where the players almost sit on each other's shoulders when they make the characters).

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

I played a game where magic was really mysterious and frightening. It was a Palaeolithic setting where magic was newly discovered and not well-controlled.

You had a tally, of all the magic points you'd ever used, and as it went up, there was a gradually increasing chance that any working would run away, be vastly more effective and kill you. Some characters worked really hard on finding ways to do a lot with a few points; the system was improvisational, but responded well to ingenuity, and the characters knew the odds. Some simply did no magic unless it was a matter of tribal survival.

Re: Making Magic Mysterious and Eldritch
 

Further to my remark regarding threshold based on the CP of the character in post 20, I have decided on the function for the relationship:

Threshold = [(sqrt (23* Total CP + 1) -1)/2.3] + CP spent on magery advantages.

This produces the following thresholds at key CP levels:

0 CP -- Threshold = magery CP spent
25 CP -- Threshold = 10 + magery CP spent
150 CP -- Threshold = 25 + magery CP spent
250 CP -- Threshold = 32 + magery CP spent
500 CP -- Threshold = 46 + magery CP spent