The Blade is Binding: Magic, Violence, and Permanence

Art by Arthur Rackham

This is going to be a bit more of a rambling post because all of the other irons I've got in the fire, cookpots that I've got on the backburner  or frogs that I've got in the cookpot or basically just things that I'm still working on, okay? have been viciously resisting me and none of them are in a place that I'm satisfied with yet. 

With that said, I was recently diagnosed with mid to late stage lyme disease, which made the past few months of fatigue, malaise, pain, cloudy mind etc make a lot more sense and also means that I've been spending a lot more time (well, more time than usual) puttering around the apartment. In the course of this puttering, I stumbled across a children's chapter book on my bookshelf: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which, after I bemusedly read it, turned out to be yes, as precocious and pretentious and flowery and silly as the title might suggest but also really very excellent and a good bit more accomplished than I was expecting. What struck me most was the sheer imagination of it: the author, Catherynne M. Valante uses adjectives like they're about to be banished from the earth (you might argue that this would not be a bad thing and I would fight you tooth and nail) but her wildly purple prose is really really effective at putting images in your head, very clear, weird, lovely and sometimes awful images. 

This isn't a book review though (although I guess it was a little bit), and all this preamble is mainly to say that there was a particular line in the book which really struck me, and, because my brain is broken, I immediately wanted to see if it was gameable. 

The line was as follows:

 "that was magic, which could be undone, and this was scissors, which could not." 

Now, this line takes place after the main character lost her all her hair in a traumatic magical experience that turned her into a tree person, and then regained it once she was returned to her normal form. She then finds herself unable to make a raft without rope, so she takes a pair of scissors and cuts her hair off, but not before considering what it means to do so, which is where that above line comes in. 

What makes this line so interesting to me is that it strikes me as a very simple way to make a very clear dichotomy between magic users and more martial classes while maintaining the relevance and "special feeling" of each. Let's face it, in the DIY/Artpunk/OSR scene there are way more ways that people have made using magic really cool and neat and dangerous and bizarre and awful and beautiful than there are ways that people have done the same for swinging swords. Nobody plays GLOG to be a fighter: you're in it for the wizards. Furthermore, I don't think the solution is to make fighters into "sword wizards" or give them special stances or whatever: that's all well and good, but it makes the class feel like something else, something divorced from the the brutally simple tranquility of just fucking shit up. 

Okay, so, finally, what I'm getting at is this: I'm imagining a game where magic, all magic, and the effects of all magic, can be reversed. This lends itself most easily to a fairytale type game (obviously, this came from a story about fairyland), but I think the potential is there outside of that genre, honestly. The "better" (or higher level, or more rare, or whatever) the spell, the more difficult its effects are to reverse. So on paper that's simple enough. Wouldn't even have to change spell systems (though if you're not using Wonder and Wickedness then what are you even doing (hopefully enjoying yourself have a nice day/week/month/year/life)), just take every spell as it comes up and declare what undoes it. 

On the other hand, things done by mundane means, wounds given by steel blades, coins stolen with trained hands: those things stay done, or wounded, or stolen. Wizards might raise a pleasure dome from the sea of milk in a single night, but it's gone as soon as sunlight touches it. You do something by your own hand, by the sweat of your own brow? That's going to leave a mark. 

The more I think about it, the more I'm realizing that this has the ability to really influence a world/campaign when given a bit more thought: for example, just healing a wound done by Fireball could become a quest in and of itself, depending on what undoes the magic. What something a little  easier? Maybe burning a wound caused by magic flame with a candle undoes the injury. Or maybe when you kill the caster who caused you such pain, your wounds fade as though in a dream. 

Healing magic becomes potentially a lot stranger as well: perhaps the caster imprisons your wounds in a trinket: so long as you wear that ring, your gut stays sewn up, but when your lord asks for the ring as a token of your affection, you might find yourself holding in your intestines with a silk handkerchief and looking to be excused. 

There's also a lot of potential to make magic a lot more unique to the caster, or spells more unique in general: you know that last time your arm got sliced off by a conjured blade you had to drink molten steel with the grey folk, but that was a spell cast by the Countess of Ecstasy, and this wound was dealt by Vorb the Benevolent: better hope they've got a copy of The Spells of Vorb at the nearest library (hey, any reason to get your players to go to libraries more and thus get a chance to use The Stygian Library is something to rejoice at imo). 

Magic users would inevitably end up with enemies questing after them to find out how to fix their transfigured friend or their disintegrated arm, which not only is fun, but gives fighters a clear benefit: if you kill someone with a sword, they're not too likely to get up again, but kill someone with a spell and you know it's only a matter of time before a lark sings at midnight and they're back with a vengeance. 

There's obviously a lot more to this than just the implications for damage dealing/healing spells, but I think other spells are a bit more easier to wrap your head around: things created by spells last until certain conditions are met, doors opened by spells lock after a certain time, summons dissipate when specific things are done to them, etc. I would suggest getting rid of spell duration altogether and just making spells with shorter durations easier to undo/more likely to be undone. Maybe Haste ends when you blink, or when you stay in one place for more than a second. 

Anyway, this is just a bit of babble that I think could possibly turn into something a bit more meaningful if given a bit more time/effort by me or anyone who cares to try it. Hopefully it was at least interesting, and if nothing else, do check out The Girl Who Circumnavigated  Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, it's got a lot to offer.