There's a certain charm to the aesthetic of magic school: apprentice mages in clean, neatly-pressed robes, learning formulaic spells from textbooks not unlike our own. From Harry Potter to Strixhaven, it's a powerful image that's endured for good reason. Most all of us in the RPG community have gone through formal schooling, so we can immediately grab hold of familiar tropes and orient ourselves by our own experiences.
I just don't much like what that paradigm says about magic.
Ok, so we all know magic items should feel magical, there's nothing more sterile than a +1 sword, yadda yadda. It's easy to lose the wonder of sorcery when you're talking about physical objects; they quickly start to feel like ray guns, or washing machines, or toaster ovens.
Clarke's Third Law works in reverse here: "Sufficiently systematic magic is indistinguishable from science."
Now hang on a second. That last paragraph doesn't mention magic items at all. It applies just as well to spellcasting as it does to Potions of Stone Giant Strength. The tradeoff of standardizing magic, of having every hedge-mage and warlock draw from a universal list of spells, is that the mystic becomes a bit... cheap. It's hard to maintain a feeling of wonder around sorcery when it gets debated in the same register as card games. "You still play mono white? Well, nobody can accuse you of making it easy on yourself." "Why'd you take fire bolt? Eldritch blast is just better, especially at higher levels." Doesn't exactly bring to mind the mad wizards of yore.
At the risk of veering into the weeds, this is NOT a post about metagaming. The above exchange about fire bolt vs. eldritch blast could very well happen in-character, in the halls of some prestigious magical university (minus the part about levels? eh, who knows, wizard school is weird). The point is, when magic gets systematized, it's a short step to it being trivialized.
The key here is understanding. If everybody knows what a pyromancer does, her craft is no more awe-inspiring than a farmer's. On the other hand, in a world where nobody knows what makes crops grow, farmers might be viewed with amazement and suspicion.
Wizards are supposed to be extremely cagey with their lore, right? In most fiction, at least, going up to an archmage and asking how to cast fireball is not going to end well. Learning anything at all takes years of trust, usually built up through apprenticeship--and sometimes even that's just a ruse to get free labor!
So why are spellcasters so hesitant to share knowledge? To some degree, this behavior is inspired by real-world history. Alchemists synthesized phosphorus almost a century before the chemistry was understood, but they kept it to themselves because each one thought it was a key step on the path to turning lead into gold. In the context of a competition--a race--it makes sense to keep your cards close to your chest.
That's one reason why magic-users might not want to teach their craft to others. A well-heeled apprentice is a ready-made rival, one who knows all the tricks you taught them. Unless you have a very good motivation to pass on your secret knowledge--maybe because you're dying--you probably aren't going to feel the urge to give away your biggest advantage in life.
We see this particular pattern a lot in fantasy literature, but it seems inherently unstable. All it takes is one clever apprentice to steal her teacher's spellbook, and the cat is out of the bag. In a world with the printing press, this problem is even worse: pretty soon every library in the kingdom will have your book of spells and rituals shelved in the reference section.
I prefer a different solution. What if something about the nature of magic prevents it from being shared and spread like other forms of knowledge? After all, sorcery is supposed to play with the fundamental threads of reality. What if those threads object to being played with?
I've already written about one form of this idea, so-called monosophia. Magical secrets act like unique items; telling someone else erases the knowledge from your mind. You don't teach your apprentice fireball until you're absolutely sure that you will never want to cast it again.
The title of this post, though, is inspired by yet another possibility. The idea of a "wizard school" is predicated on the assumption that magic is a feature of reality, a fact about the way the world works like gravity, electricity, or heat transfer. We can set up a formal institution to study it, learn more about it, and refine our understanding--and thus, mastery.
What if, instead, magic is a bug?
The world of video games shows us many examples where clever players exploit flaws in the game-world programming to perform otherwise-impossible feats: clipping through walls, flying through the air, dodging bullets at point-blank range. They find edge-cases in the rules of reality, then pull hard enough on those edges until something breaks.
Of course, when exploits like that come to the attention of the game developers, what do they do? They patch the bug. Sometimes, they ban the players caught using it from the server, either for a period of time or permanently.
If you're a wizard, magic is a bug, and the developers are the gods, this should make you very nervous.
One may tend to accumulate glitches
Why do we find mages living in isolated towers in the abandoned places of the world, rather than ruling over vast kingdoms with their supernatural powers? Maybe because flaunting your reality-hacking skills like that is the best way to get smitten with divine lightning, and every trace of your existence expunged.
Why are sorcerers so hesitant to share their secrets with an apprentice? Perhaps you want to be completely sure that your protege is not going to rush out and get caught cheating by the moderators of the universe. It could be that once one reckless mage brings a spell to the attention of the gods, they start combing through history to find if anyone else has been breaking that particular rule.
That would also explain why there are so many wizard-specific spells: "Melf's acid arrow," "Bigby's grasping hand," "Aganazzar's scorcher," etc. Finding your own personal exploits ensures that you won't get caught up in a purge initiated by some other mage's overconfidence.
It would even give us a reason for Gandalf-style wizards, wise men who seem to know more than they're letting on, but never actually use magic except in the direst circumstances. You can blind the Fell Beasts or shatter your rival's staff, but each time you do it's a roll of the dice on attracting the baleful gaze of some great System Administrator. By playing outside the rules, you also lose the protection they offer.
That sums up the old-school wizard archetype pretty nicely, doesn't it? Those who willingly jailbreak themselves from the constraints of reality, and in doing so renounce the safety of the chains that others wear. You very rarely hear about bakers being eaten by inter-dimensional ghouls, or having their souls sucked out by demons they accidentally summoned, or turning themselves inside out.
Then again, would you rather spend a long life making bread, or a short one gazing upon the skein of the universe laid bare?
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