A witch's broom, also known as a flying broomstick, is a common symbol associated with witches and witchcraft. It is believed to be a mode of transportation used by witches to travel quickly and efficiently. The origins of this association can be traced back to medieval Europe, where witch trials and superstitions were prevalent. It was believed that witches possessed the ability to fly on broomsticks, often accompanied by their familiars or spirits. These broomsticks were not ordinary brooms used for cleaning, but rather magical objects that enabled witches to take to the skies. The concept of witches flying on broomsticks is deeply rooted in folklore and mythology.
[When using arcane magic such as that of a wizard,] the caster plucks directly at the strands of the Weave to create the desired effect. Whenever a magic effect is created, the threads of the Weave intertwine, twist, and fold to make the effect possible. When characters use divination spells such as detect magic or identify, they glimpse the Weave. A spell such as dispel magic smooths the Weave. Spells such as antimagic field rearrange the Weave so that magic flows around, rather than through, the area affected by the spell. And in places where the Weave is damaged or torn, magic works in unpredictable ways-or not at all. (PHB 205)
Other theories say that there s a source somewhere else - in the Astral Plane, perhaps - that fuels magic using some other means, possibilities ranging from the energy of a million suns to a dark ritual that captures unlucky souls to use as fuel before they make it to Kelemvor s judgement. Spells for locating objects, curses that take the wording of the curse into account, healing spells, and the infamous Wish all need to know what the intent of the spell is, or other information that may not even be available to the spellcaster.
The concept of witches flying on broomsticks is deeply rooted in folklore and mythology. It is said that witches would use a specific ointment or potion made from hallucinogenic herbs, applied to a wooden staff or broom handle. The witch would then straddle the broomstick, rubbing the ointment on her body or even ingesting it.
Magic as a Science - The Wizard's Guide to the College of Applied Physics
All know wizards as masters of the arcane - the exact kind of sages to know how to determine exactly what's going on on the exact opposite end of the world. Ask them the ins and outs of Prestidigitation, or how to create a bolt of fire, and they're sure to have the exact answer for you in moments - but ask them why it works, and it's waved away as purely one of the many aspects of "the Weave."
As a world gets more and more technologically advanced, it seems that their residents' understanding of spells themselves should grow - not merely how to make them work, but why they work in the first place. What is the Weave? What makes the difference between a Healing Word and a Vicious Mockery? Why is magic determined, in part, by our understanding of it?
To answer these questions, places of study have united forms of magic under the umbrella of Applied Physics, and it has flourished to the point where a mere department is not enough to contain them - entire colleges at the universities, and standalone campuses, dedicated purely to the study of what commoners might call "magic."
Why "Applied Physics"?
In our own world, we study a variety of sciences that help us determine how the world works and how to get the world to work for us. Physics is arguably one of the most fundamental of these disciplines, as its goal centers around discovering how and why the universe acts as it does - by studying the most minute elements that make up the universe, such as electrons, quarks, bosons, photons, etc., and determining how they interact with each other and the forces they emit. (Don't worry, I promise this won't become a lecture on quantum physics.) Over large scales, we tend to view these forces as "fields" - omnipresent constructs that constantly affect the workings of the world around them.
The Weave
What does the PHB have to say about the Weave?
Raw magic is the stuff of creation, the mute and mindless will of existence, permeating every bit of matter and present in every manifestation of energy throughout the multiverse. (PHB 205)
From the perspective of a physicist, magic is therefore a field. Like all fields, it exists everywhere, and like many fields it has a carrier - the Weave.
[When using arcane magic such as that of a wizard,] the caster plucks directly at the strands of the Weave to create the desired effect. Whenever a magic effect is created, the threads of the Weave intertwine, twist, and fold to make the effect possible. When characters use divination spells such as detect magic or identify, they glimpse the Weave. A spell such as dispel magic smooths the Weave. Spells such as antimagic field rearrange the Weave so that magic flows around, rather than through, the area affected by the spell. And in places where the Weave is damaged or torn, magic works in unpredictable ways-or not at all. (PHB 205)
How does a single field manage to create such varied effects?
The Weave (as a particle)
The particle that comprises the Weave must have several properties in order to manage all of these feats simultaneously:
- It must store information. Divination magic must be able to discover information, and that information has no means of travel other than through the Weave. (This, on its own, isn't particularly revolutionary - light can store lots of information, like this entire post! The amount of information the Weave must store is, however, rather extraordinary.)
- It must be intelligent. Spells for locating objects, curses that take the wording of the curse into account, healing spells, and the infamous Wish all need to know what the intent of the spell is, or other information that may not even be available to the spellcaster.
- It must be able to interact with everything else, when it wishes to. The type of magic used in creating illusions is clearly different from the type of magic used in conjuring objects, yet they both work off the same base Weave and are effected the same way by Counterspell. Magic manages to affect every other form of particle in some way, shape, or form, but only when under direction, which leads into
- Must be programmable. In the context of a single spell, Programmed Illusion and others clearly demonstrate that the type of information the Weave stores is long-term memory (and very complicated memory at that). This is somewhat a subset of 1), but it's distinct in that it can also store the information on what a spell actually means.
- Must have energy. Evocation is the most obvious example of why the particulate Weave must store a lot of energy, but conjuration of objects might very well be the raw form of energy turning into matter, and such an effect would therefore consume enormous amounts of energy. Perhaps this is why some scholars consider the Weave to be powered by the goddess Mystra - after all, a goddess would be more than able to provide as much energy as she wanted. Other theories say that there's a source somewhere else - in the Astral Plane, perhaps - that fuels magic using some other means, possibilities ranging from the energy of a million suns to a dark ritual that captures unlucky souls to use as fuel before they make it to Kelemvor's judgement.
With these five attributes, we can pull together an idea of what magic truly is.
The Basic Operations of the Weave
The Applied physicist's method of analyzing a spell is by breaking it down into a list of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of basic operations, working together in concert to supply the world with the wizard's desired effect. Such a list is nearly impossible to complete in its entirety, due to the inane levels of complexity crafted by the world's smartest individuals over multiple millennia in what amounts to the world's least documented and most heavily optimized codebase, in a programming language familiar to none but the gods that created it.
A well-known subject among wizards is therefore the process of extracting the information on a certain spell into a physical medium like their spellbooks, the process itself using a few spells that are quite useful. Throughout their day, adventuring wizards tend to use a streamlined version of these spells that doesn't imprint onto physical media, which combined they know as Detect Magic.
A few of these operations extracted from these spells tend to be easier to understand - the operations to increase entropy (in the form of heat), to decrease it (in the form of cold), to interact (specifically with photons for light-based events or electrons for lightning-based events), to memorize, to report memorized information, to name a few. Others, however, are considered components of active research - how does the Weave particulate exactly communicate with itself? What allows any number of mind-reading effects to truly occur?
Application of these effects requires working within the confines of remnants of programmed code accidentally left behind by wizards of ages long past, which inevitably means there are inane restrictions left behind. Why exactly does Suggestion require the suggestion to sound reasonable? If you figure out where in the spell exactly that restriction takes place, maybe you've managed to figure out how to turn Suggestion into Geas.
Enough about pure worldbuilding. How does this affect my game?
I get it, I get it. Have a couple of ideas to put into your game:
| d4 | Event or Hook |
|---|---|
| 1 | The local university hosts an introductory seminar on applied physics. Attendees make an intelligence roll of DC 15, and if successful randomly learn one of the possible effects of Prestidigitation. If the attendee already knows Prestidigitation, they're asked to tutor another attendee (giving them advantage on the roll). |
| 2 | A sage asks the party to collect a piece of rock where a powerful spell was once cast. She's confident that with the bits of Weave still within the rock from that long ago, she can extract information on the spell to determine how it works. |
| 3 | A laboratory has become entirely unusable due to the Weave getting 'stuck' on one of these elementary operations. A strong magic emanates from an item in the room, causing surges of fire, ice, or lightning that have attracted elementals of a similar type. |
| 4 | The party is sent by one of the professors at the College to find an ancient spellbook that supposedly explains how exactly a common spell was created from the ground up. They think that with that guide, they could start to create much more in the way of magical effects, and afterwards might be willing to enchant one of the party's items using techniques stolen from the book combined with modern understanding of the makeup of spells. |
How does a single field manage to create such varied effects?
This would result in a sensation of flying, hallucinations, and an altered state of consciousness. The name "witch's broom" comes from the fact that these magical objects were predominantly associated with witches. The broomstick itself is typically made of sturdy wood, such as birch or ash, and the bristles were traditionally made from natural materials, such as twigs or straw. In modern times, the witch's broom has become a prominent symbol of witches and witchcraft, often depicted in popular culture and media. It is commonly associated with the image of a witch flying across the night sky, silhouetted against the moon. This iconic symbolism has been perpetuated in literature, movies, and Halloween decorations. Although the concept of witches using broomsticks as a means of transportation is often portrayed as fictional and exaggerated, the association between witches and broomsticks remains firmly ingrained in our collective imagination. The witch's broom has become an enduring symbol of the supernatural and the mystical, representing the magical powers and abilities attributed to witches throughout history..
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