This board and I’m the first to mention Granny Weatherwax? Really? Sweet. From Discworld, she generally prefers not to use magic. Knowing whats Right is what limits her from doing a lot of the stuff she could.
That’s not quite accurate…in the Dragonlance world, the moons are the gods of magic: Solinari (white magic), Lunitari(red magic), and Nuitari(black magic). By AD&D rules, the three orders (white robes, red robes, and black robes) were constrained in their spell choices by the strictures of their respective gods, not by some sort of compact with the common folk.
Looks like there is three main ways that magic powers can be restricted:
Self imposed (even if it is due to a psychological problem), societally imposed (rules of the magic order), and technical (magic only works if the user performs a blood sacrifise).
Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series is another in which magic is dependent on an external material (“Phazite”). Some magic-users restrict their use of magic to preserve the natural resource. The most powerful magic-users (Adepts) are also limited by the fact that each of their spells will only work once.
I’ve always wondered just how that limitation works with some of the Adepts. I mean, it’s easy to figure out how it limits Blue, White, and Red while still making them effective, but what about Black? How many different ways can you use a line? What about Yellow? Does she have to try a new potion recipe for every single potion she makes? Does she ever run out of materials to mix? Is it that Brown can’t make the same golem twice? Every golem has to be unique in either size, or looks, or attributes? And who decided that Tan could be an Adept? The evil eye? How can you not do that single power twice?
Sorry…I’m trying to inject logic into Piers Anthony. My bad…
In a setting I’ve been working on with my writing partner, we’ve limited magic in two ways.
First of all, too much magic is detrimental to a person’s health and the environment, and is especially devastating to the magic user’s future children. There’s a cumulative effect somewhat similar to radiation poisoning, so it should be used sparingly. Since it’s dangerous to those around the magic user as well as the magic user, there are legal bodies to deal with it as a matter of public safety.
Secondly, magic doesn’t always work. The greater someone’s skill, the more likely it is to work properly, but there’s always a fail rate, just as there would be with any skill. Even a fantastic marksman might occasionally bungle a shot, and the same goes for magic. Because of this it’s used as a tool rather than as the solution for every problem.
In a home-brewed campaign, a friend of mine has his mages start with a finite ‘mana pool’, which drains a little bit each time a spell is used. The more power you pump into a spell, the greater the effect, and the more the pool is drained. When the pool is gone, you die.
So, by the time you’ve spent decades practicing, you know all these incredibly powerful spells, which if you cast them, may kill you. So his arch wizards usually do things the mundane way.
I always thought Firestorm’s limitation was more like Element Lad’s; he could affect organic substances in theory, but in practice rarely did because it was so freaking hard. Organic molecules are, after all, going to tend to be a lot more complicated than inorganic ones, and I imagine that if he lost control of the process, bad things would happen. I can easily imagine Jan practicing in Brainy’s lab and seeing that, even under controlled conditions, he tended to destroy organic substances three times out of ten, and saying, “Ah, screw it. I won’t use my power directly on people unless I’m simply intending to kill them.”
Likewise, I can see the Martin Stein half of Firestorm’s psyche coming to a similar decision and simply not telling the Ronnie Raymond side anything other than “It won’t work.” Firestorm’s powerful enough so that he’d rarely need to, anyway, unless he were fighting Superman, and somehow I think screwing up a living solar battery is going to lead to very bad things.
Reading the thread, the only thing that surprises me more about no one mentioning Spawn is that I myself didn’t think of him.
It’s been ages since I read the books but I remember the mages coming to some arrangement with the common people after the common people turned on the magic users post-Cataclysm. A couple Towers of High Sorcery were destroyed and all that. I think the “Arrangement” boiled down to the wizards getting out of town and falling back to their more remote Towers. In Pali-wherever (the city with the Great Library), the tower was supposed to go to the head city councilman fellow before it was cursed at the last second.
But in Krynn, coming to terms with the plebs makes sense to me. Even in “modern” Krynn (start of the series), no one has much love for magic-users. Mages aren’t common, much less skilled mages. There’s not some giant army of them to defend themselves. And even the best of them has a limited slate of spells (keeping with AD&D rules) so they can’t just blow up people with a hand-wave over and over again. If you have enough torches and pitchforks coming for you, you’re going to need to come to an arrangement or else you’ll be over run (even setting aside the fact that good and even neutral wizards wouldn’t likely be blowing up town militia with fireballs and lightning bolts).
In the Dresden Files, practitioners of magic who fall under the authority of the White Council are subject to seven laws that collectively forbid killing with magic, mind-magic, time-travel, turning people into toads (or anything else), necromancy, and messing around with Lovecraftian Horrors from Beyond. The penalty for breaking any of the laws is death. Even on the extremely rare occasions when the Council doesn’t impose the penalty due to mitigating circumstances (like killing in self-defense), the sentence is only suspended. The perpetrator must have another Council member take responsibility for them, and if the perp steps out of line again, both of them get executed. The protagonist, Harry Dresden, is viewed with extreme suspicion by the Council, and is very careful about the laws. He does abuse a loophole or two when the need arises, however.
On a practical level, wielding magic is physically exhausting in the Dresdenverse, and even really powerful wizards can only do so much before they collapse.
A recurring limitation on magic in a lot of Mercedes Lackey’s books is that it’s easier to just do something than it is to do it by magic. It takes more effort to levitate a book across the room and float it to your hand than it would to walk over to the shelf and pick it up. Magic just isn’t very efficient. Its advantage is in doing things you can’t do by mundane means, or by doing things more quickly than would normally be possible.
In her novels of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, the limitation is different. Magical practitioners only have a limited pool of magic to draw on at any given time. Once it runs dry, they can’t do any more magic until they get a recharge. Using magic for every little thing could leave you without enough in reserve for an emergency.
Reave the Just.
Reave the Just is featured in two stories (that I know of) by Stephen R. Donaldson and is, in effect, the world’s first passive-aggressive superhero. Since we never see things from his point of view we don’t really know all his powers, but they seem prodigious: the ability to shrug off massive damage, theability to open any lock, the ability to cast glamours; and most of all, an immense force of personality, self possession and sense of justice.
The thing is, he never actually *does * anything. For whatever reason, he always respects people’s free will, even if those people are pummeling him to a pulp, and he never - except once, and that’s the exception that proves the rule - lifts a finger to save himself or anyone else. Instead, he berates and shames people into saving him. He sets events into motion, manipulating people and events (but never forcing them to do anything), until they feel compelled, against their better judgment, to do the right thing… or not.
A really facinating character. I wish Donaldson would write more of his stories.
Another D&D setting: Dark Sun. There were two ways to cast magic spells - the easy way (for the caster) was to draw life energy from the world around you quickly and ruthlessly. The wizards who did this were called defilers. The hard way was to draw slowly and mostly from your own energy reserves. These were called preservers. The defilers were more prevalent and socially acceptable, and the landscape showed the results. The world (the part of it in play, anyway) was a desert, and the kings of the city-states were using the life energy of their people to power their spells (killing the people). Preservers were outlawed.
In the Dresden Files novels, the White Council enforces the seven laws of magic. They hold all mortal magic users to them, even those that were unaware of the existence of the laws and the White Council, which isn’t quite fair, but then again black magic seems inherently corrupting in the Dresdenverse.
In Gordon Dickson’s “Dragon” books, there are two limitations facing magicians. The first is that, like in some other settings, each magician’s store of magic is limited, so if he abuses it, he’ll run out. The second is that the effects of magic tend to take more effort and be of lower quality than the same effects done naturally. So, a magician could use magic to sew two pieces of cloth together, but it would generally be a lot easier for him to just use a needle and thread.
The Charmed Ones were not allowed to use magic for personal gain. I was never clear on what would happen if they broke that rule, or whether the question of what does or does not constitute “personal gain” was ever tested. One of them did once cast a truth-spell on a prospective BF to find out how he would react if she revealed her witch-nature (it turned out he honestly would be thrilled to date a real witch; also turned out he was married).
Real-life Wiccans don’t have that rule, BTW, and are allowed to cast spells for any purpose, “An it harm none,” on the understanding that any good or evil you do will come back on you threefold.
In the world of Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, wizards cast spells by drawing on “mana,” which as it turns out is a non-renewable resource of the land, and once enough spells have been cast in a given location, magic will never again work there.
In Lyndon Hardy’s Master of the Five Magics, each branch of magic has its limitations. Sorcerors draw on a limited store of personal power and can cast only a limited number of spells in a lifetime. Wizards can never conjure a demon without risk of losing the dominance-submission contest. Magicians can create perfect magical items, but only if they perform the necessary rituals perfectly, which is a great challenge. Alchemists risk poisoning from cumulative long-term exposure to their materials. Thaumaturges are regarded as lowly workhorses, apparently because what they can do is so limited compared to the others.
Element Lad’s first appearance in Adventure Comics #307 (April 1963) established his inability to affect checmical compounds. Interestingly, it meant the writer was limited to plot points that involved at least a token nod to actual science, instead of relying on phoney-baloney stuff like “meklinite” or “fortanium.”
He did, pre-crisis DC Comics Presents #17 (Jan 1980). Supes kicked his ass until the mind-control faded.
Of minor note, that story ended with Supes extending an invitation to Firestorm to join the JLA.
I have that one. I also have many instances of Jan affecting chemical compounds anyway. For instance, at the end of the EarthWar, he creates a huge ball-o-earth in which to imprison Mordru. Which, I think, kinds of supports my case. The entire Legion is assembled, and all the ranged-power typed are blasting ole Merciless, but they know their absolute best is only a delaying tactic until Mordru thinks of an especially amusing away to kill all the guys and rape all the girls. Brainy thinks of a way to contain Mordru (as thinking them out of jams is, after all, his job) and starts to suggest it to Element Lad, who immediately shoots the idea down; the compound is far too complex for him to handle in the time available. Then the improbably sluttily-dressed Saturn Girl mind-links them so Brainy’s computer mind can handle the computations whilst Jan supplies the magic whammy.
Conclusion: at the beginning of his Legion career, Jan, who was maybe 14, was not skilled enough to create chemical compounds. But after years of experience and practice, he could do so.
He did, pre-crisis DC Comics Presents #17 (Jan 1980). Supes kicked his ass until the mind-control faded.
Of minor note, that story ended with Supes extending an invitation to Firestorm to join the JLA.
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I remember that story. At the time I wondered why 'Storm didn’t just create kryptonite, but in fact his not doing so makes sense, as he’d have to know at least the atomic weight and number (if kryptonite’s an element) – and that’s assuming kryptonite isn’t some impossibly exotic form of degenerate matter.
(I wonder if Superman was thinking of Element Lad when he issued that invitation? He certainly was thinking of the Legion in general; it would be natural to extend that to, “Holy crap. Jan was the only Legionnaire who could probably take me in a fair fight, and this kid is the same, only on steroids. Best get him some tutoring before he accidentally destroys New Zealand.”
This must be the single geekiest post I’ve ever written.
Also from the Potterverse, there are the 5 exceptions to Gamp’s law of transfiguration.
Wizards are incapable of making by magic,
- food
- love
- life
- information
- money
Sheri S. Tepper had a series in which magic was powered by drawing heat energy from the surrounding area. Armies preparing for magic battles brought combat ovens with them and kept them stoked. If the magic pulled more than the oven gave off, it could pull body heat from nearby combatants, damaging or killing them.