Alright, so this is a bit silly, but it’s one of those things I think about often enough that I’m writing about here lol.

Background

I’m fascinated by magic systems that seem to have some sort of underlying ruleset to them. I’ve been heavily influenced by magitech-like series such as A Certain Scientific Railgun, Ender’s Game, and The SCP wiki (especially works by djkaktus ), as well as more fantasy-esque works like Quiet & Antagonism (this one is very obscure but I love it so much it’s definitely worth a read) and Bone .

OK so maybe not all of these are all quite rule-based as I would like for a good example, but the point is that when I think of “magic,” I don’t immediately default to thinking about western wizard-style magic like DnD, LotR, Harry Potter, or magic from insert generic isekai fantasy here, or maybe a shonen fantasy’s magic system.

Narratively, a rule system sets up some extra hurdles the protagonists must work around, showing their perseverance, or some neat things they can exploit in unexpected ways, showing their cleverness. A good rule system allows for endless possibilities, even outside of what’s shown in the story. I like this because it gets me thinking, “how would I go about figuring that out?” which is very engaging.

What this has to do with real life

There are plenty of memes about it, but just think: electronics are basically magic. I’m taking an electronics class right now (18-310, Fundamentals of Semiconductor Devices), and a lot of the stuff we are learning just blows my mind how scientists were able to figure out in the first place. And yet, here we are: we have a model for exactly how little invisible """electrons""" move around inside materials carrying some intrinsic, quantized """charge""" and if you set things up just right we can, to borrow from the overly simple phrasing in the meme, “make sand think.” But this isn’t magic, it’s real! For everything we learn in this course, we can set up an experiment to test it! People already have!

To me, that’s the most awesome part; this world does have a “magic system” and I’m learning it right now. Sure it isn’t, “if I think hard enough, I can shoot a fireball out of my fingers,” but that’d be too easy and those are the lazy systems I hate anyways. You need to know a lot of math and physics and chemistry to do anything here, but that’s OK. All I can say is that I’m thankful to be around when so much has been figured out already, and we have the tools to figure so much more out too.

Aside

I would like to see more math used in magic systems. Math is so important in real science, after all. This has motivated me to start designing my own world/magic system, the both of which are still woefully incomplete. I hope to one day write a story using it, but who knows if that day will ever come lol.