The Price of Magic
So often in all of the entertainment media (movies, tv shows, books, comic books, video games, etc.) when anyone with an aptitude for “magic” does something magical, they are conjuring the magic from… nothing. It just happens for them and the cost is negligible. They wiggle their fingers, utter a spell, wave a wand, etc. and the thing they want to happen happens. Sometimes there are screw-ups for magical effect. One of my favorite examples, even after all these decades, occurred during the adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s novel The Last Unicorn, where Schmendrick accidentally turns the tree into a… woman-tree. While he’s tied to it, no less. And guess where his face ends up? Hilarity. Without getting into spoilers with that one, his amateur grip on magic does have a cost–to someone else.
Dungeons and Dragons (DnD or D&D to you non-geeks out there, and referring to the tabletop role-playing-game) always had a method of keeping the game balanced by giving magic a cost. Either you had so many spells you could memorize a day, and when you used them up you had to rest to recover them. When video games came out, they used a “mana* pool” that would slowly replenish over time, or could be hastened to recover with the use of potions. Diablo was one of the first in my memory** that had a literally globe of the “blue stuff” that depletes when you have your character spam the bad guys with Blizzard or Fireball or what-have-you. Practically all of them make use of this “limited reserve” now.
But what does this mean for the writer? It’s a cheap cop-out when your characters can just “magic” their way out of anything. Being pursued by the Big Bad and ran out of spellpower? Just avoid him long enough to replenish your supply and you can teleport you and your friends to safety.
In other words, a cop-out, deus ex machina, conflict-killing boring non-story.
What if there was a different kind of cost? Two writers I can think of off the top of my head that approached this idea are Orson Scott Card and Holly Lisle.
Orson Scott Card postulates this very question in his book How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, sharing a story about a class he taught (if memory serves) where one student came up with “Blood” as the cost. Whose? was the next question, and that lead to some pretty interesting–if horrifying–costs. But those costs mean excellent conflict, that someone who craved power would do some pretty horrendous things, expending others’ blood, to get what they wanted.
Holly Lisle has several works that use this kind of cost-accounting, but the one that sticks out for me is Diplomacy of Wolves, first book in the series The Secret Texts. It’s the same kind of dire cost, using your own life force to power your magic (if you’re moral) or the life force of someone else (if you’re immoral), rather that the old DnD fallback of “this spell and its use are evil, this spell is good, this spell is neutral” blah blah blah***. I won’t go into details so as not to spoil the story if you haven’t read it, but the handling of the magic and its costs are irrevocably intertwined with the narrative.
Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be a good litmus test? If I could remove the magic part of my story or replace it with gadgets/science, is it really necessary for my story in the first place, or am I just using it as a cop-out because I can’t think of some other way to get my character out of their corner? I have to think this through all the time, and for the most part, I’ve come to prefer writing without the magic, although I’ve got one story I’m planning for that has a MASSIVE cost to use the “magic” and I am rubbing my hands together to get to writing it. But that one is going to be a little while in the writing, as I’m finishing up my Umbra series at the moment…
The TL;DR is this: if you want to write magic, in order to keep it from becoming a solve-all and blowing up your story, think long and hard about the cost, what and who powers it, and who or what pays that price. You never know, you may just come up with some seriously awesome conflicts to throw at your character.
*Not to be confused with “manna”, or “what is it?” which was the edible dew-residue substance from heaven, meant to be made into bread, that God gave to the Hebrews wandering in the desert meant to be gathered for six days out of the week, for sustenance. They got sick of it, and begged God for something else. And boy did He give something else to them… (Exodus 16 and Numbers 11)
**Seeing that my memory is what it is, if you can think of any earlier examples of how the “blue means mana” in a video game, let me know. I’m curious.
***Don’t get me wrong: I love DnD and have ever since Chainmail (I still have my copy, silver foil cover battered all to crap and black comb missing half of its teeth, original nerd players will understand), and I miss DMing, but a game mechanic is one thing, and a basis for good conflict in a novel or story is something else entirely.
