Tabletop Magic for Your Novel

Picture courtesy mmorpg-info.com

This past week, I've been worldbuilding for Beggar's Twin. One thing I never really did with my other two books was sit down and hammer out details of how the Magic works before I wrote the story. I ended up regretting that during every stage of the process - I didn't know how to describe it while I wrote my rough drafts, and it affected the plots during revision and made them take longer. Sure, I eventually got all the pieces figured out, but it slowed me down.

Beggar's Twin has a very complicated magic system - more complicated than any I've written thus far. Not only are there a number of different branches of magic, the casting style is singing-based, which creates a whole new set of issues. I knew I was going to have to do a bit more planning here in order to keep everything straight, so I sat down with my friend Eric (an avid tabletop gamer who paid a lot more attention to the rulebooks than I ever did) and hammered out some rules for the magic system as if it were a tabletop RPG.

Here's how we got started:

Background

First, I described to him the basic construction of the magic system. I'd like to point out that I already had the basics in mind. The following diagram is the division of magic: what type of magic it is, what effects it has, how it's categorized, who can have it, how many branches can they have. This is all information you need to know before you begin.

A few points of pertinent background information (and the notes and ideas they spawned) are as follows:

1. Each branch of magic resonates with a particular key. There are six branches of magic, and there doesn't appear to be a rhyme or reason for the particular key it's associated with. (There are probably professors at the University who devote their lives to finding significance in these keys, but in terms of the story, nobody knows.)

2. Sound is vibration, but not just any sound can be used for spellcasting - it has to be voice. However, I decided that outside sounds would certainly disturb the spellcasting, because of interference. (You know what that means for historical warfare? WAR GONGS.)

3. Given the above, Professors at the University will have something akin to giant tuning forks in a dissonant key to their area of teaching, so they can disrupt any student spells likely to go awry. All Magicsingers carry small ones to act as a pitch-pipe before singing.


After establishing the background information, Eric and I decided to work with the D20 system, since it's what I'm most familiar with. 


If this were to be a real tabletop game, I would probably spend ages and ages coming up with a whole bunch of spells for each branch of magic, plus a couple of spells that could be done with particular combinations like esper/divintion telepathy. This, however, is not something I'm concerned with working out before I write, so I'm skipping that part (for now).


Next, we started coming up with what's know in tabletop gaming as "Feats".

In the d20 System, a feat is one type of ability a character may gain through level progression. Feats are different from skills in that characters can vary in competency with skills, while feats typically provide set bonuses to or new ways to use existing abilities.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/feat#ixzz1xb4Cx7SP

Feats are all those special little quirks that make your unique magic system even cooler. In terms of narrative, they're what will help you show off your magic system in plot and interaction. Flaws are similar to feats, but hinder the character. Here are a few of mine:

Perfect Pitch: (this feat can only be taken at character creation) Your character will never have problems with pitch. +5 on all casting checks.


Resonance: (this feat can only be taken at character creation) Resonance occurs when the spirit is in perfect resonance with one branch of magic, allowing that person the ability to become more proficient in that magic quickly. It also cancels dissonance penalties for the target branch.

Dissonance: (this feat can only be taken at character creation) Dissonance occurs when the spirit is in a dissonant key to a particular branch of magic. Non spellcasters may take this feat without penalty and receive a +20 to Armor Class against the target magic. Spellcasters may use this as a flaw.

Focus: (GM awards this feat at any time) When a character has devoted significant academic study to his or her singing, they may be awarded focus, which allows the caster to subtract five points off all casting checks.


Tone Deaf: When a character is tone-deaf, he or she will have significant difficulty casting spells. No one likes to sit next to this character in class. -5 on all casting checks. -10 if another character is singing a spell in a different key.

Beautiful Voice: Teachers always say it doesn't matter how good your voice is, as long as you can sing on key...but spells always seem more effective when cast in a lovely voice. Teachers are also more likely to favor students whose voices don't inspire dogs to howl. +1 on all "damage" rolls.


Obivously, there's a lot more that goes into creating a tabletop game than just background, spells, and feats. This is, however, a really good start.


Do you play tabletop games? If your magic system were a tabletop game, what feats and flaws would you have? How would you use them in your story?

George Lucas - The Phantom Audience

I've been a Star Wars fan since I was a little girl. In middle school, one of my walls was a collage of posters, pictures, and fan-art, I had a one-foot model of the Millenium Falcon suspended from my ceiling, and enough extended universe books to build a desk.

Recently, George Lucas announced that he was stepping back from making feature films because of the negative reaction he continues to receive from fans about alterations he's made to the Star Wars films. The Guardian cited a NY Times interview with Lucas, in which he said the following:

"On the internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I'm saying: 'Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.'" 

"Why would I make any more," Lucas says, "when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?"

[Insert appropriate joke about going to the Toshi station to pick up power converters here]

After my initial eye-roll, I had two reactions:

1. Lucas, as the creator, has the power to do whatever he wants with his franchise, but should have been prepared for a negative backlash.

2. Lucas's reaction to audience backlash suggests that he views his audience as witnesses rather than collaborators.

As a creator, I find Lucas's reaction both understandable and problematic. I understand the desire to go back, to tweak things and try to make them more like what you see in your head, but once a work has made an impact on society, the time to make changes has passed.

I'm a firm subscriber to the belief that art belongs to the audience, not the creator. It's is going to be true no matter how much the author wants to control, revise, or retract the original work, because experiencing art is personal, and what we come to understand through that experience weaves itself into our ideas of who we are and where we fit into the world. Both parties come out of it changed, having created the experience inside their heads as something meaningful and indicative of self, even if it's as simple as "Anakin is way more annoying than Luke -- I didn't think that was possible".

While a work of art reflects the audience more than the artist, it is also important not to take the artist entirely out of the equation. Art is the product of the ideas and values of the artist, and an audience resonates with the evidence of those ideas and values, even if their interpretations are completely different. Intention has nothing to do with it. They may want to know what the artist "meant", but only because they have already decided what the work means to them, and want to find out how they compare, and where that places them in the scheme of society/morality/the bright center of the universe.

Whether the intention and interpretation turn out to be the same is irrelevant. For example, no matter how many times Tolkein stated that The Lord of the Rings was not meant as a Christian allegory, the audience member who interprets it that way isn't wrong. He sees the parallels in his own minds, and those parallels become part of the meaning of The Lord of the Rings for him, part of his experience. It has somehow strengthened or created pathways of thinking about the world in relation to something that matters to him.

Respect of an audience's reaction is valuable to an artist as well, because it allows her to grow and reevaluate herself. By deciding whether the interpretation of the audience is or isn't what she intended, an artist can create her own meaning and understanding of self through the reaction.

Unfortunately, Lucas didn't get the chance to visit the Vader-cave on Dagobah for a little self-reflection. In a 2004 interview, he said: 

[T]o me, [the original version of the trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. 

Whoa. Stop the Bantha.

Deriding fans for falling in love with something you created, even if you see it as incomplete, is rude enough to inspire Force-lightning. If there's anything Lucas should try to take back, it's that. Let's pretend the fans shot first.

To claim that the original version of the trilogy no longer exists is to say that this whole collaborative sub-culture built around the works, and the meanings derived from the experience of it, are invalid. To Lucas, the film may have been "half completed", but it was released to the public - with or without his permission - and millions fell in love.

He often claimed to have been disappointed, and yet something kept him going after A New Hope, and I doubt it was the desire to keep producing "half completed" films.

Image from nakedglitter on tumblr

When John Green wrote Looking for Alaska, I'm sure he was proud of it. Later on, however, he stated that he no longer agreed with what he'd set out to write in that book, particularly because some fans pointed out the unfair treatment of a female character. Rather than going back and making changes, however, Green used that change in philosophy to grow as an artist. He wrote another book -- Paper Towns -- in order to reexamine the parts of Looking for Alaska he no longer agreed with.

And that, in my opinion, is how it should be done.

Once a work of art has moved into the public view, it ceases to belong to the artist because each member of the audience develops his or her own unique version -- it becomes a collaboration. The audience gives the work meaning, rates its significance, and uses it to make more art and more communication and facilitate more development of self. Art doesn't just reflect one or the other, artist or audience -- it's a set of facing mirrors that reflect each other indefinitely.

Rather than treating his audience as collaborators, involved in an ongoing process of development, and allowing the original Star Wars trilogy to remain as it originally was, he treated his audience as witnesses to his inability to move on.

Further reading: Flavorwire's Open Thread on George Lucas.

AND TO PROVE that art inspires collaboration and dialoge and change and art, I've written the following song, using the music of YouTuber gunnarolla, as a tribute to George Lucas.

When Tomorrow Comes

Song my friend Dai and I wrote, while I was in Japan.

You can donate to Japan's disaster relief at the following websites: http://ow.ly/4ddkE, http://ow.ly/4ddkF,http://ow.ly/4ddkG, http://ow.ly/4ddkH

When Tomorrow Comes
By SAKURAN
Lyrics,Vocals,Piano: L. Scribe Harris 
Guitar,Music,Backing Vocals: Daisuke Sakurai

waiting for morning, and the shadows in my room
are concealing all the memories
I reach out my hand, groping for comprehension
of the solid hole where there used to be dreams

there are no more chances, just this unfurling life
and I gave too much just to give up tonight

When tomorrow comes, It'll be okay
When tomorrow comes, I won't worry anymore
When tomorrow comes, I won't be alone
When tomorrow comes--just another day

My thoughts are all uncensored and the voices in my head
are telling me who I'll never be
Is it okay to pretend until I can make it for real
Or is it just one more useless lie to believe

These doubts have paralysed me and I ask myself, "Why?
Am I so scared of falling, I've forgotten how to fly?"

When tomorrow comes, It'll be okay
When tomorrow comes, I won't worry anymore
When tomorrow comes, I won't be alone
When tomorrow comes...

I open my eyes, look into the light
let it illuminate every corner of my life
scattered everywhere, regrets too shameful to bear
but I am standing here now because I've been there

When tomorrow comes
When tomorrow comes
When tomorrow comes
When tomorrow comes...

Just another day, after day, after day, after day

Just another day...

Just another day.