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Magical Society

An order, club, alliance, union, or other organisation comprised of people who can do magic. Names vary: it may be called the Mages' Guild, the Circle of Mages, the Conclave of Sorcerors, the Arcane Brotherhood, or whatever. A given setting may have one magical society, several, or none. Historical esoteric societies of any variety are often portrayed as these in Historical Fantasy or Urban Fantasy fiction.

Sometimes, a magical society exists for the benefit of its members, while other times, it is a structure created to control them (whether for benign purposes or otherwise). It could be both at once - by creating rules for themselves, mages may decrease the extent to which people consider them dangerous. It might be a loose support network which only comes together for specific issues, or it might be a rigid hierarchy that demands unity and obedience. A magical society may be responsible for keeping track of magic users, which might involve genealogy or even breeding programs if it's dealing with a Mage Species. It may also act as the Magic Police and/or enforce The Masquerade. Joining a magical society may be an obligation, a rare honour, or anything in between.

Some magical societies are politically powerful (perhaps even running the country), while others are persecuted. In either case, they might keep their existence a secret. There can be conflict between a magical society and other powers (The Government, The Church. ), between the society and people who are trying to practice magic outside it, and between members of the society itself (the issue of whether to allow Black Magic is a popular subject).

A magical society may be the ones behind a Wizarding School, especially if the society only exists because untrained magic-users are dangerous. Even if it doesn't have a school, it could be involved in setting up master-apprentice deals. In some settings, it's impossible to learn magic anywhere but one of these.

If a magical society has a headquarters, there's a fair chance it'll be a tower.

Possibly a kind of Weird Trade Union. An Outcast Refuge is a more mundane version.

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Examples:

• A Certain Magical Index: There are a number of magical and religious organizations that fall under this, ranging from smaller independent and semi-independent factions like the various Magic Cabals and the Amakusa Church (a Japanese Catholic-Christian sect with elements of traditional worship and ritual), all the way up to religious organizations like the Catholic Church or governing bodies such as the Royal Family of England.

• Godmothered: Eleanor is part of a society that meets in a castle where people train to be fairy godmothers.
• The Initiation of Sarah: The two rivaling sororities Alpha Nu Gamma and Pi Epsilon Delta are actually witch covens. The girls of Alpha Nu receive their magic from the Eternal Flame, while the girls from PED receive their magic from Mother Earth.

• Bazil Broketail:
  • Argonath and Cunfshon witches have an overall organization, with individual orders within it they belong to.
  • Padmasan sorcerers are also members of a group, with ranks up to the Masters, while below them are Mesomasters.
  • The Order of Targhan are witches who use their skills in magic as assassins.
  • The Brotherhood of Culo are all (male) sorcerers with different abilitites.
  • One of the unspoken functions of Unseen University is to keep wizards tangled up in bureaucracy and academic politics, and to ensure that they can live comfortably without having to actually do very much. That way, they're not turning their magic on everyone else, and over the years since the university was founded, wizardry in general has become more sedate and inward-looking. Which makes the world a considerably safer place: it's noted that "there were still quite deep scars in old buildings that showed what happened when you had the other kind of wizard", and that in the old days, the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'.
  • Witches, by contrast, don't have the same level of organisation. They occasionally have big meetings, and some of them will clump together in groups of three to keep an eye on each other, but there isn't any formal leadership. (Informal leadership exists to an extent — it's noted that Granny Weatherwax is "the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn't have".) One short story deals with someone trying to set up a committee to make their big meeting more organised - it fails.
  • Harry Potter: The Wizarding World as a whole. They are organized in a bureaucratic government called the Ministry of Magic, and they have an extensive schooling system, of which Hogwarts is a part. The Order of the Phoenix meanwhile is something of a Secret Circle of Secrets within the larger magic community, and are formed to fight another example, their evil counterparts the Death Eaters.
  • The Iron Teeth: There are multiple mage guilds that control the production of crystals that mages use to cast spells. This gives them a monopoly on magic.
  • A few of John Langan's short stories set in the Fisherman universe, including "To See, To Be Seen" and "What is Lost, What is Given Away" feature the Friends of Borges, a ruthless occult research group. While its lower members are ordinary, if manipulative Muggles, its more advanced members are full-fledged sorcerers, capable of bending space and time as well as traveling between worlds through advanced, lovecraftian mathematics. Unlike like most examples, it's indicated to be a fairly new group, although other characters in the setting have stated there are/were older groups and civilizations that have risen, thrived, and fallen since the time of Greek mathematician Pythagoras.
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell introduces us to the Learned Society of York Magicians, a group of polite English gentlemen who sit around discussing magical writings and history, and who would never do anything so uncivilized as actually attempting to cast a spell or two. Many such societies exist around England, functioning as nice social clubs. Unfortunately for them, when a "practical" magician finally shows up, he turns out to be of a somewhat anti-social type.
  • Labyrinths of Echo had orders formed around every nascent magical tradition. There was an Age of the Orders when these were the main power players, allying, jostling, and fighting with others and leaving little real power to the monarchy until the Order of the Seven-Leaf, allied with the King, won the civil war, outlawing all other magical orders and use of magic above the weakest grades, since overdraining of magic in the World's Heart was about to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Magic, Inc. involves an attempt to create a non-profit association that would test and license magicians. It turns out to be a diabolical (literally) plot to take over control of all magic use in the U.S.
  • The Mortal Instruments: The Shadowhunters, complete with their own magically-concealed country located on the border of France and Germany. The Fair Folk likewise count for much the same reasons. Vampires and werewolves are a less organized variation, being organized into local clans and packs respectively, and they live within mundane cities. The warlocks are an aversion, being mostly free agents bound primarily by individual relationships.
  • The Old Kingdom: In Clariel, there is a group of Charter Mages in Belisaere which concerns itself with threats to the Kingdom, especially those of a magical nature. It includes Kargrin, a magic teacher; Gullaine, captain of the Royal Guard; Roban, a guard in the employ of the Goldsmiths' Guild; and Ader, a schoolmistress. All are current or former employees of the King, who no longer takes an interest in governing.
  • The Reluctant King: The Forces of Progress are a wizard organization Dr. Karadur belongs to, and work as a guild. Internally, they're divided into two factions with opposing philosophies: White (Altruists, who want to use magic in helping others) and Black (Benefactors, those that want this kept for themselves). They have yearly conclaves in the Goblin Tower of Metouro, which de Camp depicts as being like academic conferences.
  • The Riftwar Cycle: The Tsurani have the Assembly, which is officially outside the law and can do whatever it wants "for the good of the empire". One of the trilogies makes the struggle between magical and mundane authority a central issue.
  • Rivers of London:
    • The Folly, also known as the Society of the Wise. It's been through three main phases, and may be entering a fourth one. Originally it was an 18th century coffee house where a broad church of magic users swapped knowledge and ideas. Then it got formalised with a royal grant, which disenfranchised a lot of the less "respectable" practitioners, including all the female ones, and moved to its current location, which was largely a Smoky Gentlemen's Club. This lasted until an entire generation of British wizards were killed by the Ghostapo, leaving Thomas Nightingale as the only survivor. Since he was a police officer, the Folly became a magical police station. This continued into the books when Peter Grant became his apprentice and the only other officer assigned to the Folly. More recently, Peter, having discovered other magical traditions have survived that the Folly know little about, is trying to make it more of a broad church again.
    • These other traditions include the Sons of Wayland, an association of magical artificers, and the Society of the Rose, formed by the female practitioners rejected by the "establishment" version of the Folly. The Sons maintained connections with the Folly; the Society of the Rose, understandably enough, didn't.
    • The Scarlet Spires are the largest and most powerful school. They fairly openly run the nation of High Ainon. They are also the only school that dabbles in demon-summing.
    • The Imperial Saik work as Court Mages for the Nansur Imperium.
    • The Mysunsai are mercenary sorcerers who hire themselves to the highest bidder and are generally looked down upon by other Schools as lesser sorcerers.
    • The Mandate are sworn to watch for the return of the Consult and are the only school to practice the powerful form of sorcery called the Gnosis. They're simultaneously envied for the Gnosis and ridiculed for their seemingly pointless mission by the other Schools.
    • The Cishaurim are the only school of sorcery among the Fanim, a minority religion in Earwa. They are an enigmatic school who use a branch of sorcery called the Psukhe that is not recognizable as magic by other sorcerers. They also pluck out their eyes and see instead through snake familiars.
    • Later, one of the protagonists sets up another group called the Asha'man, which consists of men (while all modern Aes Sedai are women). It works a bit differently.
    • As the series progresses, several more are introduced.
      • The Kin are composed of women who, for whatever reason, flunked out of the Aes Sedai, though they keep their heads down and most people aren't aware of their existence. The Aes Sedai know about them and always have, and say nothing because the Kin are pretty much their model for non-Aes Sedai channellers and because they're very good at picking up runaways. That being said, they had absolutely no idea how many of the Kin there were, or other peculiarities, such as how old they could become without the Oath Rod .
      • The Aiel Wise Ones and Sea Folk Windfinders are partial examples, as while both groups recruit all channelers from among their respective peoples, they also have non-channeling members.
      • The Asha'man of the Black Tower are the male counterparets of the Aes Sedai
      • It's also worth noting that in the Age of Legends, there were both male and female Aes Sedai, with the White Tower essentially being formed from a fusion of the remaining factions of female Aes Sedai in the Westerlands, and they were implied to be politically powerful even before the War of the Shadow put them in charge.
      • The mysterious empire of Shara hosts a secretive cabal of channelers called the Ayyad, who are officially subservient to the monarchy but are in fact the true power behind the throne and ally themselves with the Shadow at the Last Battle .
      Live-Action TV
      • The Wheel of Time (2021):
        • The Aes Sedai are a group of channelers (those able to use the One Power) who recruit women all over the region, across many countries. Male channelers on the other hand are hunted down to "gentle" as otherwise they'll go dangerously insane.
        • On a smaller scale, the town of Emond's Field also has female channelers they call Wisdoms, passing down their practice from mistress to apprentice.
        Pinball
        • Capcom's Pinball Magic has the player's magic skills being tested by The Society of Masters, a group of magicians and mystics: Nostradamus, a Shaman, The Great Hansen, Mr. Mystique, Kenzo, Jadugar, and their leader, Matra Magna.
        Tabletop Games
        • Ars Magica: The Order of Hermes is the main one in the game, including the most powerful and numerous of magic users in Mythic Europe. Within the order itself are several more distinct magical societies, including the houses of the Order, mystery cults (four of which are also houses), leagues, and various individual magical traditions. There are still societies of magical traditions that exist outside the Order as well, some in Mythic Europe and some without. Likely the largest of these is the Order of Suleiman in the Mythic Middle East. Some magical societies have members both within and without of the Order of Hermes, but these tend to be relatively small groups.
        • Castle Falkenstein: Most wizards are members of Orders, which provide magickal training and access to Lorebooks. Since each Order has control over its own Lore, which Order(s) a character belongs to will pretty much determine which specific spells they can cast.
        • Dungeons & Dragons
          • Dragonlance:
            • The Orders of High Sorcery. Created directly by the three gods of magic, they have almost total authority in all magical matters, and being a practicing wizard of substantial power without joining (and thereby being subject to the Orders' regulations) is a crime punishable by death. There are three Orders, White, Red, and Black, each with their own distinct philosophy in magic; representatives of all three sit on the Conclave, which governs all magical matters on Krynn.
            • Later in the timeline, other magical organizations (such as the Grey Knights of the Thorn, a subgroup of the Dark Knights of Takhisis/Neraka) start springing up which are powerful enough to exist independently of the Orders, as do other forms of magic-users such as mystics and primal sorcerers whose magic doesn't come from the moon gods and therefore lies outside the Orders' jurisdiction.
            • Mage: The Ascension features the Council of Nine, the ruling body of the nine major magical Traditions, which themselves range from mentalist martial artists to Hermetics to enlightened scientists to pagans to reality hackers to shamans to monotheistic heretics to ecstatic seers to reincarnationists. And then there are the many other Crafts that exist beyond them.
              • It also has the Technocratic Union and its five Conventions - Iteration X (engineers and inventors), the Progenitors (biologists and geneticists), the Syndicate (financiers and economists), Void Engineers (explorers), and the New World Order (masters of information and its control). However, many members of the Union see what they do as Enlightened Science, not magic.
              • The 20th anniversary edition introduces the Disparate Alliance, a group of Crafts who informally joined up around the millennium to take down the Technocracy and the Nephandi, the fallen mages. The Alliance comprises djinn-binders, African high ritualists, Western alchemists, the Knights Templar, Middle Eastern mystics, vodouists, xenophobic Chinese high ritualists, Gothic street kids, Polynesian wizard-priests and pagan feminists. (There's a reason the Alliance is informal - they're still trying to figure out how the hell they're going to work together.)
              Video Games
              • Arknights: The nation of Leithanien places a heavy emphasis on study and usage of Originium Arts, with even the lowest of Leithanien citizen able to use basic Arts - to the point that if a Leithanien is unable to use Arts, they are treated as an anomaly rather than the norm like other nations.
              • Book of Mages: The Dark Times: The Clans are training organizations that define the different types of magic, differing in style of dress, Theme Naming, the appearance of their magic bolts, and in the special spells taught to advanced mages. Also, mages as a whole form a very loose society, bound together by the Great Mage, who rules over all mages, and by the institution of the Book of Mages, a Who's Who that ranks the 100 most powerful mages in the world.
              • Dark Souls has the Dragon College of Vinheim. You only hear about it from lore and meet a couple of members, but it's effectively a city state of magic run by the higher ups at the college. Then there is Seath the Dragon and his Channelers, who you fight in game.
              • Dragon Age: The Circle of Magi basically exists because the religious authorities don't trust mages and want them under control. Mages have varying opinions about this - some of them agree wholeheartedly, some of them think it's better than the alternative, and some of them want an end to it. The religious authorities have special warriors floating around the Circle's tower to put down anyone who is too proactive in their membership of the latter category. There is a semi-secret alternative organisation, the Mages' Collective, which attempts to defy the regulation imposed on the Circle while still (sometimes) maintaining its own ethical codes.
              • The Elder Scrolls
                • The Mages Guild is a preeminent one throughout the series. It is a professional organization for the magically inclined with a presence across all of Tamriel at their height. The Guild offers training and magical services in dedication to the study and application of Magicka. The Guild also played a major part in codifying and popularizing the "Eight Schools" of magic in Tamriel. The Guild exists in Arena but is not joinable, only offering magical service. In Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, the Mages Guild is joinable with the opportunity for the Player Character to rise to the rank of Arch-Mage. However, in the 200 year Time Skip between Oblivion and Skyrim, the Guild collapses due to years of infighting as well as Tamriel's distrust of anything magical following the Oblivion Crisis. It is replaced by several groups including the Synod (which focuses on recovering magical artifacts) and the College of Whispers (which focuses more on the pure study of magic as well as summoning Daedra). Regional Magical Societies (usually crossing over with being Wizarding Schools) are also prevalent, such as the College of Winterhold (which is joinable in Skyrim).
                • The Order of the Black Worm is another more secretive and morally questionable Magical Society founded by Mannimarco, the King of Worms, the first Lich, and, after the events of Daggerfall, the God of Worms. The Order focuses more on the darker aspects of magic, including Soul-Trapping sapient souls and Necromancy. They are extreme rivals to the Mages Guild and, after the Mages Guild formally banned its members from practicing Necromancy (it had previously been tolerated within the limits of the law though frowned upon), many former members flocked to the Order. The Order serves as the main villain in Oblivion's Mages Guild questline.
                • The Psijic Order is the oldest monastic order in Tamriel, being founded not long after the ancient Aldmer first came to Tamriel. Though usually benevolent, they are a much more secretive and selective Magical Society. Through thousands of years of intensive study in the nature of magic, they have become able to utilize it in ways the rest of Tamriel is unable to match. Their many magical feats include making their home island disappear without a trace (twice), summoning a storm to swallow the Maomer fleet whole, using various forms of teleportation and Astral Projection, Telepathy, and there are even reports that they possess a limited form of clairvoyance and sight into future events. Both the Mages Guild and the Order of the Black Worm were founded by former Psijics (Galerion and Mannimarco, respectively), who disagreed with the Order's policies. (Galerion believed magic should be open to all citizens of Tamriel, while Mannimarco's practice of The Dark Arts got him kicked out.) Though mentioned heavily in background lore, they don't make an appearance in-game until Skyrim's College of Winterhold storyline, where they act as a Mysterious Backer to the Dragonborn and then confiscate the Eye of Magnus while declaring that The World Is Not Ready for it .
                • Kingdom of Loathing: The League of Chef-Magi is the guild that organizes the Pastamancers and Saucerors. It's also where they learn new spells.
                • Warcraft:
                  • The Kirin Tor. Not the only magical group as there used to be a rival group in Stormwind and the trolls have their own arcane traditions but definitely the most prominent. When they became an independent faction in the second expansion of World of Warcraft mage player characters (regardless of race) start out with a slightly higher reputation than non-mage characters.
                  • The Blood Elves, but that was pretty much their Magical Society in of itself. The Night Elves also had a Magical Society, the Highbourne. They returned as an explanation for the Night Elf Mage class in the third expansion pack.
                  Visual Novels
                  • Nasuverse: The Mage Association is both this and a Wizarding School. It's presently at an uncomfortable truce with The Church, at war with vampires, is riddled with inter-branch rivalry — most notably between the "Three Great Branches" Atlas, Sea of Estray, and Clock Tower — and the headquarters itself, Clock Tower, is peppered with rivalry between factions of noble magi. And that's not counting the actions it takes against individual outsiders and other magical organizations outside of Europe.
                  Webcomics
                  • El Goonish Shive: The paranormal division of the FBI is composed of magic users including multiple wizards and at least one seer.
                  • The Order of the Stick: Parodied when the Order are trying to track down the powerful illusionist Gerard Draketooth, and V tries the local Mage's Guild, only to find "they were less of a 'guild', and more of a collection of dilettantes who meet every Tuesday over lunch to discuss how 'totally awesome' it would be to learn 2nd-level spells. Obviously, our epic-level illusionist does not consult them on his ventures forth."
                  Real Life
                  • Several Esoteric groups and societies have existed for many centuries and some of them claim to study magic in real life. To name a few: Rosicrucians, Neo-Gnostics, Theosophists, Thelemites, Setians, La Veyans, members of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Dragon Rouge, etc. Most of these groups have a closed membership.
                  • Galicia in Spain has been called the "Land of the Witches" due to its culture that relates to witches.

                  The society of magical

                  In sum. A useful 40-page compendium of eco-fantastic samples bolted to 100 pages of unnecessary hyper-rational 'worldbuilding' - too many earth science lectures, not enough inspiration or (ironically) magic.

                  I happily picked up a copy of this 2004 book on eBay a few weeks ago, excited by its family resemblance to the strong 2003 sister supplement A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe. The goal of MS:EC is to provide a rational basis for magical world-design, just as MMS:WE served as a kind of social studies textbook and encyclopedia for generic D&D-style fantasy settings. Unfortunately, the worldbuilding book really is a pseudoscholarly worldbuilding book - which is to say you get more or less what you're paying for, and it's just not worth the time or money.

                  Indeed, of the four books in XRP's Magical Society series, the entries written primarily by Suzi Yee (Ecology and Culture and 2006's Silk Road) share a key flaw - the near-absence of magic from their treatment of the titular 'magical society' - which the two volumes by Joseph Browning (Western Europe and the 2005 Beast Builder) handily avoid. Maybe that's as much a function of the books' specific subjects as of their respective authors.

                  There's also a deeper conceptual problem with these worldbuilding books, which should be kept separate from the other criticisms, as it resides not in their execution but with the very idea of 'rational' FRPG worldbuilding. That discussion is for elsewhere, though I hint at it below.

                  Presentation first. MS:EC is undistinguished (the sidebars, in particular, are poorly laid out), but that's par for the course in RPG books. I have no eye for visual design in any case.

                  The editing and proofreading, however, are atrocious. While it doesn't share the embarrassing cut'n'pasted duplicate passages of Silk Road, the world-design book is full of typos, homophone errors, and (most surprising) consistent misspellings - e.g. 'artic' for 'arctic' in a geology book! Seeing 'Antarctica' spelled both correctly and incorrectly on a single page is always a bad sign. The textual imprecision and sloppiness are extra frustrating given the book's 'scientific' approach to its material - you can't credibly write a pseudoscholarly introduction to 'microscopic magiotrophs' ('organisms that can produce organic material from magical energy alone') in a volume that's put together like a high school yearbook.

                  Rational, scientific worldbuilding? MS:EC aims to introduce basic concepts in earth science, geography, ecology, and anthropology for use in designing magical worlds, specifically more-or-less standard D&D 3e campaign settings. The book steps the reader through basic 'worldbuilding' processes: laying out continents and landforms, mapping weather patterns and climate zones, apportioning plant life, outlining food webs, and dispersing the various standard intelligent races (dwarves, orcs, humans, et al.) throughout the world. Between these brief demonstrations are dozens of pages of stuff like this:

                  These two chains are easily represented thusly. The grazing chain is light/magic > autrotrophs/magiotrophs > herbivores > carnivores > top carnivores. The detrital chain is detritus/magic > microsaprophages/magiotrophs > microbial grazers > microbial predators> top detrital predators. There are many other relationships occurring at the same time that cannot be explained simply, but better seen pictorially.

                  But most relationships in nature are not simple, straight-line food chains. Numerous food chains interlink into complex food webs, with all links leading from producers through an array of primary and secondary consumers. Interestingly enough, food webs (once unraveled) rarely exceed four links because every new layer adds another level of energy transfer inefficiency. Highly productive ecosystems rarely support more links, termed trophic levels. They usually support more species and have more complex webs instead of longer ones. The few land-based ecosystems that exceed four links usually stress magic as a primary energy source. Food webs are usually shorter in fluctuating environments (temperature, moisture, salinity) and longer in environments that have more stable conditions. Highly stratified environments, like forests or pelagic water columns, have longer food webs than poorly stratified environments, like grassland, tundra, and stream bottoms. The widest food webs (those with the greatest number of herbivores) tend to be the shortest while narrow food webs have the greatest fraction of top carnivores. More complex food webs are actually less stable than shorter ones and are easiest to disrupt. Generalist species most easily invade simple food webs while specialists, capable of exploiting a restricted source of energy, are best able to invade a complex food web.

                  That's more or less the terminological/conceptual level of the whole book. To be sure, there's interesting material in there - you could build a whole semester of college on the ramifications of 'food webs (once unraveled) rarely exceed four links because every new layer adds another level of energy transfer inefficiency.' The information itself is certainly accessible, and for a geek who preferred to read his Dungeon Masters Guide during high school Biology class, I suppose it's a decent refresher.

                  But the quoted passage, which can reasonably stand in for 90% of the book, has two problems: soul-deadening prose and (more importantly) total irrelevance to the project of fantasy 'worldbuilding.'

                  The alt-textbook approach poorly serves this material. To the extent that fantasy 'worldbuilding' is important or useful (see below), it's about inspiration rather than exhaustive description, and this style just takes all the fun out of the project. Yee provides a few narratorial flourishes to break up the ongoing lecture - MS:EC is nominally a first-person account by a young worldbuilding 'godling,' though you'd be forgiven for forgetting that frame - but the book gives a strong whiff of 'cribbed from my old textbooks.' It didn't have to go that way; anyone who cites Jared Diamond in the bibliography must understand the importance of zesty popular presentation.

                  Still, in a field dominated by a legion of Gygax-imitators, awkward prose is nothing new. The bigger problem is that these ~300 words about food webs aren't going to help anyone design a fantasy world! Gameworlds are for gaming in, but MS:EC treats worldbuilding as an end in itself, with the goal of producing a map that's essentially earth with kobolds. Indeed, Yee's sole sample world is just that; there's little to distinguish her creation from a relabeled map of our planet.

                  Which raises the question of why you'd go through all this trouble with 'pelagic water columns' and climatic zones and the per-pound cost of caraway seeds to 'create your fantasy world,' when you could just file the serial numbers off of earth (or Mars, or. ), spread around a few generic fantasy names, and skip right to the actual gaming part.

                  So there's our problem: MS:EC provides too much unnecessary detail and too little magic for a task that's supposed to be evocative and story-generative. Speaking of which.

                  Where's the magic in my magical society? If you accept the premise of the book - that the core of 'worldbuilding' really is exhaustive geo-level description of a nonexistent physical location - then this title is probably exciting. A rigorous treatment of magical ecology? Sounds swell. But my biggest disappointment with MS:EC is with the thinness of its magical coverage.

                  MS:EC proposes a multiverse 'parasitic upon the body magic,' which is a kind of sentient magical fluid-flow that exists in parallel with the flows of physical energy. This is a cool, evocative idea, pitched at just the right level of hand-wavey story-science. The book then lightly skims the surface of that idea for a tiny percentage of its 160 pages. Instead of throwing off exciting notions about how your homebrew magical world might work, MS:EC is content to treat magic as just another energy resource - think of real-time strategy video games with their totally abstract energy tokens. The initial treatment of the subject, 'The Inner Workings of Magic,' covers just five pages. Then it's back to biomes and botany and a little bit of human culture.

                  Yee fails to provide a fully integrated magical ecology. Instead you get passages like this:

                  The typical storm giant is either a hunter/gatherer or an agriculturalist. The staple of their diet is magic-heavy vegetation farmed from any number of wild highly magical fungi. With hunting, they supplement their diet with top-level predators, who have the most concentrated magic in their tissue. The magic they consume from these two sources supports their physically impossible size and frame while powering their supernatural abilities and spell-like abilities. Storm giants can live on low-magic foods like bread and cheese, but given enough time they develop physical problems from magic deficiency. Without ingesting magic through their food, they perish from magic starvation, just like humans do when they don�t get their required nutrition from their food. Many creatures survive in a state of magical starvation for a long time, but other creatures may not hold out for long. Each organism has a different metabolism which influences how long they can go without eating food containing enough magic to stave off physical difficulties.

                  Magic-rich ley lines also feed into null termini. These magic flows are hard to understand, but the gods of magic explain that most null termini aren�t really devoid of magic, per se. Over 90% of null termini are actually magic-rich termini with an overabundance of microscopic magiotrophs, happily eating a vast percentage of the magic in the terminus. One would think that this would lead to a great population crash, but it appears most microscopic magiotrophs self-regulate their population to such a degree that the population is almost completely stable. In other words, just the right amount of magic comes out to feed all the magiotrophs, and there�s nothing left to manipulate.

                  That's as deep as the treatment of magic goes: mana = carbs++. The book has the dubious distinction of making the imaginative game of fantastic invention seem like a homework assignment. I don't think this approach offers any advantage to the budding Game Master beyond, say, the half-baked fantastic 'naturalism' of early D&D, or the snazzy worldmaking algorithm of GURPS Space, or the austere elegance and rigorous story-centrism of Mouse Guard's mythical woodlands. Bad enough that millions of geek kids grew up thinking Toril and Greyhawk were swell worldbuilding models; MS:EC wants you to go a step further and recalculate those worlds from first principles. Which would be OK if it offered a compelling reason to do so.

                  'You can convince yourself that the D&D 3e world-model sort of makes sense' is not a good reason to buy or read a book. Nor to take up roleplaying, by the way.

                  But then there's the good part. Now, having said all this, the last 40 pages of the book are absolutely splendid. It's presented as a grab bag of geological, botanical, and animal features for your fantasy world, drawn from earth and fantasy. Finally the book hits just the right balance of forebrain-tickling detail and Gameable Coolness:

                  Spy Grass: A small flowering plant, not much different than a dandelion, spy grass is the bane of secrecy. Spy Grass has developed an unusual survival method; it telepathically scans a passing creature�s mind to learn of the �best location� for its growth and reproduction. The spy grass then slowly moves to that location at a speed of six inches a day. For those who can communicate with plants, spy grass provides additional information. If the communicator can sway the plant from its normal unfriendly attitude to friendly or better, the person gains a window into the minds of those who have passed by within 10ft. of the plant. This provides the person with knowledge of who (or what) has passed in the past week and, if the spy grasses [sic] attitude is helpful, the person gains access to a single train of thought of every scanned creature. This memory could be important or trivial. Identifying spy grass requires a DC 20 knowledge (nature) check or a spot check of DC 25 to notice the plant has moved and then a DC 15 knowledge (nature) check. Spy grass is a magically dependent plant that needs magic, sunlight, water, air, and soil to survive. Spy grass is found in temperate and tropical environments where grass or flowers are found.

                  These speckled deer ('Bountiful Deer' or 'deer of plenty') radiate a constant plant growth effect where they roam and tend to have a territory of several hundred square miles. During their migrations, most of the land in the area is under a plant growth enrichment effect for only a few days, but mating grounds benefit the most (almost a full month). Deer of plenty use the overgrowth aspect of plant growth to avoid predators.

                  It doesn't leap off the page or anything, but that's just the kind of stuff that inspires a reader/player to go off and imagine the hell out of her own fantasy world. Deer that invert the food web, enriching their environment/food source so as to perpetuate their species? Grass that migrates a few inches a day toward better purchase in the ground? Yes, that's exactly what this book could've been offering from the very beginning. Best of all, you don't even need all the semi-scientific background rationale to use those two organisms in your own campaign world - they need only be consistent with themselves. If you're playing RPGs to satisfy your compulsive need to order your thoughts, you're probably bringing somebody down; the patchwork approach of the MS:EC Appendix is just the antidote.

                  The right response to a book like this should be 'Huh, that's cool. but what if we tried. ' MS:EC suppresses that response by working hard to provide justification for the clich�s of D&D-style fantasy without illuminating narrative/ludic possibilities beyond. Maddeningly, the 'using this book' section explains why:

                  The two ecology sections explain what�s on your map. They add depth to your creation. The explanation of predator-prey relationships gives you knowledge to create some truly unusual monstrous challenges for your PCs while providing information on how food webs and energy flows. These ideas will be fully expanded upon in our forthcoming book, A Magical Society: Aggressive Ecologies (2005), but you can start working on your strange and dangerous environments right now.

                  [. ]

                  However, to get the most out of this book we recommend you do a little additional work. Although we�ve tried to synthesize large amounts of complex information into a quick and useful gaming resource, we realize that one of the most powerful ways to reach your players and to get them deeply into your game is through visual aids. Unfortunately, we simply can�t provide visuals for the hundreds of unique things in this book, but there is one place where images of all these things are accessible: the Internet. Jump online and look up any of the entries in our appendix, and you�ll find breathtaking imagery that�s only a print button away from entering your world.

                  'Aggressive Ecologies' became the Beast Builder, which is a much more immediately useful book than this one - indeed, it's the book Ecology and Culture should have been. That last paragraph is the best advice in the whole book: if you're going to draw inspiration from earth, instead of reverse-engineering Gaia, just go look at stuff. The art of sorcerous evocation known as 'storytelling' - or 'DMing,' or even 'subcreation' - reasonably starts not with the Arduous Biologic Calculus but with wonder, with big open questions and a What If. impulse, which are the first casualties of the too-familiar traditional 'rationalist' approach to fantasy worldbuilding. This book is way, way too preoccupied with the mundane. It's not a geology textbook (despite appearances) and it's mostly not a work of fantasy (despite appearances).

                  As such, I can't recommend it. (Better idea: read S. John Ross's Uresia and reread Dune, which is an actual ecological fantasy.) But the last 40 pages are worth a look, as are the other books in the series.

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                  Old magic society reveals some magicians' secrets to conjure new recruits

                  It is said that magicians never reveal their tricks. Now a secret society is exposing what's hidden up their sleeves in an attempt to draw in new members.

                  ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

                  Salem, Mass., is where Harry Houdini famously escaped from a jail cell in 1906, and at least since then, the town has attracted magicians. Lately, enrollment in Salem's historic magic society has been dwindling, so members are pulling up their sleeves in search of new recruits. WBUR's Andrea Shea has more.

                  ANDREA SHEA, BYLINE: You don't see this every day. Nearly a dozen magicians of all ages are packed into a room, armed with rubber bands, props, a cute, brown rabbit and more than a few dog-eared decks of cards.

                  BILL JENSON: I have a trick right here I can show you if you're interested in seeing. I have four kings here. Name any one of those four kings.

                  SHEA: Bill Jenson's Houdini-emblazoned tie may or may not play a part in his sleight of hand.

                  JENSON: That's what they call close-up magic. You do it right under people's noses.

                  SHEA: Jenson is president of the Society of American Magicians Witch City assembly. He's a retired postal worker and a hobbyist magician. Other society members are professionals.

                  JENSON: We have some people that are clowns. We have some people that do balloons, bubbles.

                  SHEA: The National Society of American Magicians is the world's oldest magic organization. In the early 1900s, it boomed under Harry Houdini's leadership. Salem's chapter was founded 50 years ago, but membership has been disappearing. The club blames the pandemic, shuttered magic shops and YouTube, where a lot of newbies go to learn tricks. Now the magicians are holding events like this to woo and wow recruits.

                  JENSON: You don't want to expose all your secrets, but you want to give them a little taste of something so that maybe they'll come back another time. And then as you move up into the group, we have people who do everything from just a basic card trick to sawing somebody in half.

                  SHEA: That sounds intriguing to the one young recruit who shows up.

                  WILL MCGLAUGHLIN: I just think I should saw someone in half in my life.

                  SHEA: Will McGlaughlin is here with his dad. He's 12 years old.

                  WILL: I started doing magic because I was looking at Dan Rhodes on YouTube Shorts. And I just saw one of his tricks, and I slowed the video down. And I decided to do some of them on my own.

                  SHEA: Now he's surrounded.

                  PETER JACKSON: So, Will, you know how to shuffle a deck of cards?

                  WILL: Not that good.

                  JACKSON: Well, that's OK. This is a good learning experience. There's a Pharaoh shuffle, an overhand shuffle, an underhand shuffle. There's the show-off behind-the-back shuffle.

                  KALI MOULTON: I have you shuffle the deck, or I shuffle the deck. It doesn't matter. I don't need to know what that card is. I want to know what this card is on the bottom. That's my card.

                  STEPHEN SILVA: That's five years of practice, guys. Come on.

                  UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: There you go.

                  SILVA: Look. Thank you. Thank you.

                  SHEA: That's 39-year-old career magician Stephen Silva. He grew up in Salem and learned tricks at magic shops. He recently rejoined the society to help keep it alive.

                  SILVA: There are magicians that have come up that have thought of things that may be kind of exclusive or underground, and so in order to see some of those things, you have to come out and meet new people and learn new magic.

                  SHEA: Well, Will McGlaughlin is game and says, yes, he'll join the magicians' youth program.

                  WILL: Well, I did like all the magic tricks, and I'm still wondering how some of them are done.

                  SHEA: While the magic society only nabbed one new member at this event, its magicians believe more will materialize for the next month. For NPR News, I'm Andrea Shea.

                  Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

                  NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

                  

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