In Michael Moorecock’s Elric series, most magic came from bargains with gods and demons. If you wanted something done, you had to:
A. Find out which entity could do it, and
B. Find out that entity’s preferred bribe.
Most of the time, Elric is not really doing magic of his own. He is just cashing in on his ancestors’ IOUs.
Chaotic in the sense of destructive to the Chaos wizard. Chaos wizards who aren’t careful in their use of magic get ill more easily, they prematurely age, wine turns to vinegar around them, food won’t stay fresh, etc.
I have a sword and sorcery style novel I’ve been working on where the gods are sentient, extradimensional expressions of the gravitational effects of celestial bodies—the larger the body, the greater its gravity well, the larger its extradimensional “shadow” and the more sentient it becomes. Thus, the sun and the planets are the locii of the strongest gods, but also the most sentient…therefore, as a priest of one of those gods, you wield considerable supernatural power, but only at the discretion of that being, who doesn’t wish that power wielded frivolously. Wizards command the power of the “wilder gods,” smaller, less powerful beings whose locii are asteroids, smaller moons, etc…they are less sentient and thus more easily manipulated and their power more easily used, but they are also less powerful and being used by any different wizards. Thus only the wizards with the most powerful wills can do anything truly massive, which discourages most people from becoming wizards and encourages wizards to organize into a guild to prevent the limited power from being wasted frivolously.
The True Game series. I really enjoyed them.
This, of course, is a problem that never arises so long as wizards keep their eye on the true purpose of magic, which is to create a social pyramid with wizards at the top of it.
Of course, there are very few neighborhood disputes over fencelines when your neighbor can turn you into a turnip and makes sure to tell you that several times a week.
In Robert Heinlein’s Magic, Inc., he threw up a couple absolute laws that would cause complete failure of magic spells. First, magic is invalid if used on, against, or over consecrated ground. So even though there are flying carpets flying all over the city, they tend to stick to streets because if a pilot accidentally flies over a church, the carpet will fall out of the sky. Second, magic has no power over cold iron, so the main character, the owner of a hardware store, has little use for it because so much of his business involves iron or steel.
In Eddings’ the main magic-using enemy, Otha, is very powerful. He has all the abilities of a god at his disposal. Unfortunately for that god, Otha is also quite dim. For example
He creates guardians to protect his palace, but neglects to give them free will to move. Therefore they are all just the guardians of the individual stones on which they stand.
Another is DC’s Spectre. He’s the Wrath of God, and as such can do pretty much anything. However, he must be bound to a human host to give him perspective, and he can only act after a sin has been committed.
From The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:
(Not clear if the above is actually part of the historical mythology of the Simurgh – which mythology is Persian, not Arabian.)
In Tanya Huff’s The Keeper Chronicles series, a major constraint of magic ( aka “using the possibilities” ) are “The Rules”. In essence, anything from The Other Side is typically a kind of avatar; reflecting a greater reality, but defined by human beliefs or imagination into a subset of itself. They are restricted to loosely following the rules that define them; so that, for example, a Dark Lord HAS to answer a challenge to personal combat. Now, the Rules can be broken, but that frees the other side to ALSO break the Rules, and apparently the side that does so first is at a serious disadvantage.
{slight hijack} Didn’t Superman, quite early in his career, swear an oath never to kill anyone?
If he didn’t have that scruple to choke on, he’d probably win just about every fight he ever got into with any mortal creature.
Thank you! You just mentioned the obscure book from my past that I’ve asked about twice on this board. I had only vague plot points to work from, so no one figured out what book it was.
I forget who it was, but an author who was talking about writing good fantasy said that you have to build limitations into the magic system or it’s no fun at all. A character who can do literally anything is extremely boring at best, and can make a story unreadable if they can just upset the rules of their world and our real one anytime they feel like it. He or she said: set up rules, limitations, and forms for the magic, and above all be consistent. Very little is worse than pulling the rug out from under the reader by violating the rules you’ve spent pages and pages building up.
In Mercedes Lackey’s books there are several practical limitations on magic, varying depending on the type of magic. There are also ethical considerations that are right in the foreground in almost every one of them. Her main characters are usually very human, very powerful, but extremely moral heroes. The morality is usually how they get into trouble, as they’re always trying to take care of everyone.
In the Tarma and Kethry books, Kethry’s main limitation is that her school depends mostly on abjuration, so if the spirits she’s asking a favor of don’t want to work with her, her power will be limited. She can make use of free energy, power built up through meditation, and other mage’s spells sometimes, but her main kick is through either direct power boosting from spiritual allies, or indirect help where they do something for her. It takes time, effort, and a great deal of discipline for her to contact them on the spiritual plane. If she’s successful, though, she can do cool stuff like binding demons in appropriately vulnerable forms.
Valdemar has two main kinds of magic. The first is mind magic (psychic power). Mind magic can be temporarily boosted through mage ability (the other magic ability), but mostly it’s limited by inherent strength and personal energy reserves. It is shown indirectly that the use of Talents is essentially a metabolic drain like strenuous exercise. Talented Heralds eat like crazy, especially when exercising their abilities or recovering from doing so.
The other kind of magic is Mage ability, or what we’d consider “real” magic. This is the throwing lightning, transforming, blowing shit up kind of magic. Here, the limitations are several. One, they’re limited by the amount of power they can channel through their minds. Too much and, oops, you’re brain burned, or little bits of charred former mage. Two, they’re limited by the amount of power on hand. They can gather energy from the environment, slowly and laboriously, and build up a personal store. They can tap into usable concentrations of energy, usually in the form of magic. They can use nodes, lines, and heartstones, a particularly demanding and dangerous source of energy that only some of the strongest mages, and probably only those specially trained can do. Or, they can perform ritual sacrifices.
There are drawbacks and limitations on all of those forms of gathering power, which is why, for the most part, mages don’t go around blowing their enemies’ socks off without a damn good reason, and lots of lead-time. On the other hand, if one or a group of them is inherently powerful enough and cares to spend the time and energy on it, they can create incredibly violent storms, mutate or transform creatures, shape landscapes, and even cheat death.
Barbara Hambly has a few societal and practical limitations on mages in her books. Mages all seem to work in roughly the same way, and she ties magic into extremely advanced science with at least one of her books.
The main limitation of her mages is knowledge. You have to know a metric assload of facts to do effective magery. The level of learning to be a powerful mage seems to be like a cross-disciplinary PhD in engineering, physics, chemistry, astronomy, materials science, linguistics, etc. The more you know, the better you can make spells or gizmos work because you know how to design them better, work more efficiently, and tap into more energy sources.
You also don’t get something for nothing. Energy has to come from somewhere, and often needs to be manipulated into another form to be usable. Even more important, you need to know how to limit the effects of your spells. Just setting a “come here” spell to attract a fly, without imposing limits on the type, number, duration, radius of the spell, etc. could eventually attract all flies from everywhere, and if the mage wasn’t able to cancel the spell or cut themselves from it, that lack of limitation on boundaries could suck them dry as the spell tries to fulfill its design.
Mages also have to invest a significant amount of personal energy into most spells. Almost all of them take some kind of physical component, or at least the invocation and focus of an appropriate rune, to work. Preparing spells takes time, concentration, the right mind set, and of course the knowledge of how to do it.
All her books seem to be set in a time after there were a few wars between mage-backed nations. After that time, the Church (a semi-analog to the medieval Catholic church) became a big factor in politics and a block against mages. The other institution is the Guild, which intentionally imposes limits on mages so that there aren’t unfettered witch hunts — literally — as there were after the wars. All mages are supposed to belong to the Guild, or they don’t get access to Guild knowledge.
Dog wizards are those with mage ability who refuse, for one reason or another, to belong to the Guild, or those who have been cast out. If you don’t have the Guild protecting you, you’re fair game for the Church and its Witchfinders, which are very much like inquisitors, down to getting their rocks off by torturing and killing anyone who practices heresy i.e.: anyone who is a working mage.
In effect, this means that Guild mages are oath-bound and forbidden to interfere with anything outside the Guild. Their uneasy truce with the Church was made to stop a large subset of the fanatically religious (or just frightened and suspicious) populace, led by the Witchfinders, going on a pogroms to wipe out any known or suspected mage. Non-Guild mages have to settle for the few paltry scraps of knowledge they can trade each other, and have to constantly watch over their shoulders for fear of the Church deciding that this is a good day to have a burning.
Her active mage characters typically spend a large amount of time trying not to get nailed by either the Guild or the Church as they’re trying to get stuff done. These severe limitations mean that while magic is used, it’s mostly not the big flashy kind, and the guy who’s trying to prevent the Big Bad from doing its thing is fighting on multiple fronts at once.
Except robots. He can pull the heads off of robots all day with no compunctions.
Just a couple things to add:
Mage ability was retconned as one specialized psychic talent- the psychic ability to sense magical energy. Without it, a would-be mage would be like someone deaf from birth trying to compose music.
And the Eastern Empire of the Wolf Crown went about as far as you could go in making magic a routine part of the system. All the top bigwigs were skilled mages, and the Empire was heavily dependent on creating gates through which the imperial legions could instantly travel thousands of miles to enforce the imperial will. Which is why the empire was hurt worse by the Magic Storms than any other country.
Sounds a lot like the Harry Dresden stories: he’s a good guy, but because he once yielded to the temptation to use dark magic (albeit under desperate circumstances), which supposedly inevitably leads you to take the Dark Path, he’s on permanent probation with the magical authorities, several of whom hate his guts and would love to see him executed. This means he has to fight the bad guys almost always without help and frequently as the main suspect. In other words, the magical equivalent of the hard-boiled private detective who is always on the outs with the police.
An additional magic-related limitation in the Dresdenverse just came to mind–binding oaths. Breaking an oath is seriously bad juju for anyone on the magic side of things. It can seriously hurt or handicap some magical beings, and it can cause feedback in a wizard’s powers, diminishing them and causing a variety of unpleasant symptoms. If a wizard breaks too many oaths, especially oaths specifically sworn on his power, he could wind up powerless.
Well, in the Final Fantasy worlds, the only rule I see in operation is that what happens in cutscenes are the only things that magic can’t fix. (You can res “ko-ed” characters willy-nilly during regular battle, but if they happen to eat it in a cutscene, that’s the end for them. Also, you can throw around powers of astounding destructive ability and not even make a scratch on the local environs, again with the exception of cutscenes.)