It's A Swiss Army Wand!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Been trying to work out a plausible timeline of magical progress in OGYAFEland. I like paralleling it to technological advancement--you know, magic carpets start out rather weak and tough to steer, and through the generations folks work steadily to improve them to carry more things faster and farther. It's rather fun to come up with incremental advances, rather than having fully-developed spells just ready-made throughout history.

Of course, this depends on all magic being more or less based on physical objects, which has been the idea all along. It contrasts nicely with the Impossible Magic some of my own characters demonstrate, it allows people to use magic like we use iPods now, without having the faintest idea how it works, it puts wizards in a spot similar to engineers and scientists, AND it means that I get to use a particularly blingy type of magic wand--since a wand in this world is a compact rod with several spell nodes affixed to it for easy access and use.*

And it certainly helps shape the history of this world.

I'm not sure how much of this will make it into the actual OGYAFE, but it's sure fun to mess with. Gotta enjoy backstorying.


*I've had a problem with wands ever since Harry Potter. How the heck do wizards figure out spells? Do they just stand in a field with a wand and a Portuguese dictionary and flap around until somebody explodes or something? Is magic like trying to figure out a cheat code to unlock a spell? Obviously it's not intuitive since you need to go to school to learn it, so they've got to be doing SOMETHING.

Comments

[redbird]

Somewhere in one of the Discworld books, Terry Pratchett has a bit about a research witch: one of the people who figures out exactly how much eye of newt to use, and whether dill would work instead (not exactly that, but that kind of thing).

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I remember that! I also seem to recall that Unseen University wizards discovered that Rite of AshKente on Discworld CAN be performed with three sticks and 4cc of mouse blood, but the older wizards still prefer to do it with eight wizards and drippy candles and incense and runes because otherwise it just isn't proper wizardry.

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

I like paralleling it to technological advancement
This leads me to wonder about security. The theory behind metal detectors is that most modern weapons have a lot of metal, and most other things don't, and
thus concealed weapons can be caught by a detector with a fairly low percentage of false hits.

But what do weaponized wands have in common that non-weaponized don't? Or is it just assumed that anyone might be carrying a weapon, and the only security is a bodyguard who watches for suspicious activity and who is close enough to act against it in a timely manner?

Do they just stand in a field with a wand and a Portuguese dictionary and flap around until somebody explodes or something?
I refer you to The Questing of Kedrigern. It's been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly the apprentice managed to create new spells by mis-remembering the ones he'd been taught. :)

[baroncognito.livejournal.com]

Harry Potter has a problem with wands because there's really two ways to approach wands.

The wand can serve as a focus, a crutch, you don't need it to cast magic, but it's easier to cast using it. Just like a conductor's baton.

Alternatively, the magic is in the wand and the person using the wand just needs to know the activation method. In that case, someone has made the wand and picked a certain way for it to be activated. That's the way wands work in 3.5 edition D&D. A person who doesn't know how to activate the wand has a 5% chance of being able to activate it without knowing how to do it. If she has activated the wand before, it goes up to a 25% chance of being able to activate it again. For a wand you've never used and have no idea of what it does, it is roughly waving your arms about and saying things a spellcaster might say. A wand is essentially a method of putting aside magic one day to use it later when you need it. (at least for casters) That's important because you can only do so much magic in a day.

In the Harry Potter Universe, people don't seem to be able to do magic without wands. There's magic in the people and magic in the wands, but one doesn't work without the other. Clearly it can't just be any stick, or half a wand would work as well as a wand. And how did magic work before the first wand was made?

For that matter, what's involved in making magic carpets? Why would the first ones start out weak? There's no clear accelerator or breaks, it makes just as much sense that the first carpets would just skid right out from underneath the rider at mach 5. The sonic booms only stopped when the carpet drained the energy reserves. Steering could be trouble, I suppose, but no more than getting the thing to slow down when you want it to. I suppose it depends upon the culture that's developing the carpet. If they're familiar with horses, they might expect to have the carpet react like a horse.

Hmmm... say you want the carpet to behave like a horse: Would you make it from horse hair? Would you skin the horse and use the horse brain in the tanning process using incantations to infuse the horsiness into the carpet as much as possible? Or are does the culture love horses too much to use them that way? Do you just keep the carpet around horses while enchanting it?

Or do they focus on the flying first? Are the carpets woven with birds and feathers, with gusts of wind? Do they throw carpets off towers and build designs off of the ones that take the longest to hit the ground?

Why carpets anyway? What's the history on Flying carpets? Who on Earth saw a carpet and thought? You know, I should write a story about one of these things flying. Was it something where someone developed a magic trick first ("You know, I think I can make one of these look like it's 4 feet off the ground with nothing supporting it") or did someone see a carpet flying around in a very strong breeze and think about riding around on it?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The idea for the Swiss Army wands specifically came from pretty much that same idea--that wands are tools with pre-set functions. In the Potterverse it seems to be the reverse of that. I'd understand better if they were more like programs--you know, the spell you speak opens a certain program. (Which would also explain why you'd want a language that isn't used every day, so's the wand isn't blasting out spells every time you say something.) But it seems like they just made some wands and are now trying to figure out what all they can do, which seems like building a computer and then trying to figure out what programs are already on it.

The carpet example is one I've been using a lot. See, in this universe there is a set of subatomic particles that interact with consciousness, so that every substance could conceivably have a magical counterpart if those particles are present in the molecular structure. The trouble is working out which things do what, and how to use them. So people discover natural fibers that when processed a certain way respond to a person's will that they levitate. The carpets could be used to carry things, but since they're woven material they can't carry things that are too heavy. And it takes ages to perfect the treatment process so that the magic elements respond more readily to someone's will. And since this particular magic is powered by moonlight, you have to figure out how to get it to work during the day. It's all terribly fiddly and tricky and took thousands of years to improve to this point. Same goes for all other magics.

TL;DR WHY YES I AM A NERD THANKS FOR NOTICING

[baroncognito.livejournal.com]

Respond to a person's will? Which sense of "person" are you using? Could a cat, with sufficient willpower, use a flying carpet?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

"Will" is shorthand for a long process of being able to conceptualize what you want it to do and recognize that you can manipulate it. Animals could do some simple magical manipulation, but it's rather like tool use--rudimentary at best. They lack the imagination to get anything particularly complex.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Wands in Harry Potter are amplifiers, but very sophisticated and temperamental ones. It's possible to do wandless magic, but it requires a certain amount of power and a lot of concentration, so only very skilled wizards can do it. Wandlore goes back thousands of years, so presumably some early wizards figured out that body parts of certain creatures enhanced their power, encased these in wood, and the rest was trial and error. Ollivander is credited with advancing the art of wandmaking, so it's clearly still in progress.
As for making new spells, it seems to be a matter of spouting random Latinesque phrases, but since inventors of new spells are given some esteem for doing so, there may be more to it.

Incidentally, d'you know the Enchanted Forest Chronicles? It's got the carpet equivalent of the Alleged Car: it's spells (and threads) are worn thin, making it unreliable and hard to control.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem with Harry Potter Magic stems from the fact that their School System is based entirely on Rote Learning. There may actually be a system behind all this, that more advanced Wizards and Witches use when working on new Spells, but we certainly don't get to see any of it.

From some of the excerpts in Half Blood Prince, it seems like Snape was able to get some effects just from more or less random experimentation. shouting stuff and waving the wand around and seeing what happened.

One of the things that I do like about the Dresden Files is that Butcher put together a pretty good "system that is not a system", where basically anything can be accomplished through pure willpower, and what all the chants and tools do is help focus or amplify that willpower and take some of the load off.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* Oh, yes, I have a lot of things to say about the Hogwarts teaching styles.

I remember that Sectum Sempra bit from Half-Blood Prince. It was one of the things that raised more questions for me. (How'd he discover it? Did he wind up accidentally slicing his pet hamster in half one day or something? And how'd he figure out the counter curse?)

My other rule for magic is that this system only works in THIS universe. There are characters from "our" world, and when they get back here their wands don't work, because the elements can't exist here. Different laws of physics. Because my problem is that magic, y'know, isn't a thing. So I have to have alternate rules to account for it.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I think half the problem ends up being that Rowling went through that same Rote-based system, and never learned the systems behind any of the things she was taught, and so she didn't even consider the question of what the underlying system was like.

Dude. I like that idea of it only working in the one Universe, because it's actually a function of different laws of physics. I don't have any plans for writing Portal Fiction, but if I ever do, I may have to steal that from you.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Heh. You're welcome to use it!

In one of the books you'll meet a couple of scientists from Our World who are extremely annoyed about this. Especially when they find out that, in one universe, the Rule of Cool is a law of physics.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Yes, I imagine many OurWorld Scientists would be quite annoyed by that.

I'd kind of like to live in a Universe where the Rule of Cool was a Law of Physics, tho :D

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

You know, I think this thread really hits on a lot of the reasons for which I could never get into the Harry Potter universe, the more I think about it.
Maybe I've just been too easily influenced by some of what I've read about it elsewhere, but a way more "organic" system of magic to me would be based on correspondences that could be logically "extended" based on context, because of how sets of symbolic associations have evolved over time.
Like, for an "antidote" spell, if you can't get a monkey (who can these days?), get mercury, if you can't get mercury, get a snail: the "mercurial" symbol is just about "being able to go either way", like the monkey is halfway between humans and animals, mercury goes up and down with hot and cold, and the snail is hermaphroditic - extended from antidote itself being pretty much diluted venom, whose "halfway" nature between venom and the diluting fluid has positive effects.
Whatever the specifics, though, there should be a logic to it! You should be able to "deduce" a spell somehow, that's what makes it interesting.
Just, "do this, then this happens for some reason" seems more like an alternate kind of science without the validating "reality" vibe of science to it, without having any real "magic" to it either.