Low-Tech: Magic?

[Greg 1]

Am I the only one here who would love to see a Low-Tech supplement for magic?

It could stick strictly to the facts, explaining the place of this (non-working) technology in society. However, it would likely be very useful in games where magic is real.

[Dinadon]

Isn't that just Fantasy Tech 1?

[Greg 1]

Originally Posted by Dinadon

Isn't that just Fantasy Tech 1?

Fantasy Tech 1 is a work of creative fiction, not a guide to the way that this technology really fails to work.

[vierasmarius]

I'm a little confused about what you want. Are you talking about a book discussing the mythologies of past cultures, but only treating them as the fiction they turned out to be? There are certainly books that address myths, even in the "Historical" books (for example, 3rd edition's Japan, Imperial Rome, Russia) but they include information on how to handle those stories as though they were real.

[Greg 1]

Not all mythology. My interest is in magic, as something actually used by humans in the real world.

[Dinadon]

I think you need to explain more clearly what you would actually do with this information. Fantasy Tech 1 contains one shot inventions, alternate technology paths and pseudo-science. The first two work in reality but weren't used due to economic reasons. The last is the only set of things that doesn't work, but we are told how they were thought to work or the myths surrounding them. If they don't work in a setting then you just don't use the rules given for it working.

People won't use things that don't work, only things that they believe will work. Fantasy Tech 1 covers alchemy, astrology and medicine as it was believed to work. The reason alchemy and medicine didn't always work requires modern knowledge of the processes used. With astrology it is the simple question of do the stars actually influence events.

Ultimately though, telling you why something doesn't work doesn't tell you how it should work. What you really want is probably more along the lines of Thaumatology: The Real World.

[Greg 1]

As long as it covers real magic in society (as Philosophers and Kings does for other social elements) I would find it interesting.

Or put it this way: GURPS Crusades covers real people acting on what they think are supernatural directions. It isn't a book of rules for miracles or paladin powers - it is a book covering the actions of people who believed in miracles.

[eustakos]

Originally Posted by Dinadon

Thaumatology: The Real World.

This or
Low Tech: Historical Magic

[panton41]

I would go with the comments about referring to the myriad of 3rd Ed. location books. Most historical magical systems were either religious in nature, pseudoscience or both and almost universally they were highly regional.

I'd also suggest the late Issac Bonewit's Authentic Thaumaturgy if you want to stick to SJ Games material, though he was one of the few, if only, people academically qualified to write on magic.

Having brought up Mr. Bonewits I'll add I would strong suggest avoiding a vast majority of "New Age" type books on "magic". Despite people drawing sincere religious and spiritual belief from them they are by and large works of fiction with little to no basis in historical fact. Many are so poorly researched that anyone with even a slight understanding of the subject can call out the B.S.

For example, I've seen books that call the Norse runic alphabet "Celtic" and my major beef with GURPS Thuamatology is using another totally inaccurate, openly and admittedly fictional work on runes as an authoritative factual source. A vast majority of books about Wicca refer to a historian's work that was universally discredited 70+ years ago and most draw from world traditions willy nilly so that their "Celtic ritual" might tell you to use Hebrew Kabbalist imagery and a Hellenist (Greek) view of Elements.

Just for full discourse, I consider myself a "Heathen" or a Norse Reconstruction Pagan and have read quite a few of the types of books I just mentioned. The main thing I've learned over the years of being a Pagan is to assume everything you read about it is false unless you (or the author) has an authoritative second source, which ideally would be a contemporary historical source or a well respected modern source.

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by Greg 1

As long as it covers real magic in society (as Philosophers and Kings does for other social elements) I would find it interesting.

Or put it this way: GURPS Crusades covers real people acting on what they think are supernatural directions. It isn't a book of rules for miracles or paladan powers - it is a book covering the actions of people who believed in miracles.

Maybe unlinking this from the Tech books, it would be possible to imagine an hipotetical GURPS Religion and Magic, or GURPS Esotericism or GURPS Cosmologies, trying to conceptualize and handle in a rules wise ways the spirituality and magic (BTW, often two different things) own of diverse ancient cultures. I'm thinking about this hypothetical work since 2007.

I believe that the purely technological, biological and materialistic approach about these things is already covered by Low Tech Companion 1: Philosophers and Kings ("Technicians of the Sacred", p. 16 (*)), and the purely fantastic approach -but sometimes anthropologically suitable, too- is handled by the Magic and Thaumatology books. Ah, and I was forgetting Fantasy . . . Right now, it's a bit scattered.

(*) From a purely mechanic point of view, there's not much additional room for expanding on these subjects. For that, you would need to enter into the beliefs, cosmologies and world-views of different "Low-Tech" peoples, which by the way didn't see themselves in the contemporary terms of their available technology ("Stone Age", "Iron Age", etc).