Cairn-ish Content: A justification for spellbook magic, take 2

I'm pleased with my previous take on Spellbook magic.

...yet, at the same time, something inside me says it's too detailed. Or perhaps, too "hard"; Brandon Sanderson is famous for (if not inventing the idea) popularizing the idea of "hard" vs "soft" magic systems.

The explanations I proposed before definitely constitute a hard magic system. There's nothing strictly wrong with that, of course, it's just that everything else about Cairn is so pro-abstraction. Other things in Cairn feel "soft". 

Mind you, this isn't a criticism; Cairn is quite practical--the focus is on good gameplay. But my motivation was to come up with a sort of coherent understanding of magic. I think I definitely did that (or at least about 80% of it), I just, y'know, wanted to do it again.

In part to hew closer to the "spirit" of Cairn, but also, in part, to demonstrate that these things are malleable, and one person's explanation need not be another's.

Magic as soul-stuff

My previous explanation begins with the spellbook, and addressing why we need all those pages for a single spell. It assumed that spell-instructions are just very verbose--"reality programs are very complex".

This time, I want to start somewhere else: consider monster magic.

Now, under my previous paradigm, we could argue that monster magic is still represented as a reality program. We could say that through very natural-selection-y processes, monsters have more or less encoded that reality magic into their DNA or body structure in one way or another.

But let's toss that, and assume that monsters simply are magical. The implicitly magical qualities of the universe just gather more densely around these magical creatures, like magical "nodes". Therefore, magic is "found" concentrated in things. Creatures. Plants. Crystals. That sort of thing.

Now, how does magic get into spellbooks? Well, set aside why it must be a book for a moment, and focus on the idea that magic has been "captured" in a physical object. Essentially where I'm going with this is: if you want to produce a spellbook, you need to kind of squeeze the magical essence out of a magical-entity like you squeeze the juice out of an orange. The jury is out on whether this is necessarily fatal to the entity involved, but really, the possibilities are kind of endless. Consider:

• Every spellbook originates with some type of magical entity out there. This is a creative prompt! Go through the whole list of spellbooks and now you can dream up some entity that embodies that magic.
• If the process is non-fatal, you may have beings out there who've more or less had their magic stolen to be captured in spellbooks. That might render them simply non-magical, or it might render them downright mundane--like a unicorn that has become merely a horse and yearns to return to their former glory.
• This generates an interesting plot-hook/moral dillemma: do we claim the spellbook to increase our own power, or do we try to find a way to return this power to it's original owner?
• If the process is fatal, you can keep your magic, but we can still dream up an interesting villain in the present (or deep past) who runs around slurping up magical things to make these spellbooks. We need not understand all the finer mechanics involved to grasp the high-level method and the threat this villain poses/posed.
• Considering Liches in the Cairn Bestiary prominently carry spellbooks and are canonically old, they'd fill this role very well
• It can also be both: non-fatal extraction could simply be a much more advanced/costly procedure.
• There may be more ethical variants on this practice as well: perhaps a person or being near death would voluntarily (or even accidentally) imbue part or all of their soul into a prospective magical object

For the sake of interest, we might suppose that all things are magical to one degree or another, and therefore all things have the potential to be processed into a magic object. This could account for some of the weirder or apparently "useless" effects: the creatures that were "juiced" were not particularly awe-inspiring.

Gritty-but-not-too-gritty-details

Ok, so why a book?

Perhaps because the particular materials of spellbooks are nice and "absorptive" of soul-stuff. This comes with a fun idea: spellbooks need not all be the same size, because "bigger" or more powerful souls may require more pages. E.g. the number of pages in a book are it's storage capacity, and bigger, more powerful spells may require greater capacity. We could imagine, for example, a particularly large tome (dare I say, a "bulky" one) which carries some particularly powerful magic inside.

Fatigue

The magic is encoded by the soul-stuff, but perhaps it still requires a "spark" to coax it out to be expressed in the real world. So, the book contains the concept of the magical expression, but it still does not provide the energy to replicate that effect in the world. That's where you come in, and it's tiring.

Two-handed casting

I like someone's comment to the effect of "I just figured it was a big book, so I'd need to hold it in both hands". That works, and I appreciate the charm of it's frankness. But, if you tire of the sort of argument that might unfold in which someone starts carrying a lectern to hold the book for them or similar shenanigans, we can more or less borrow the previous take's idea that a firm physical connection to the book is required to move soul-stuff such that a spell can be cast.

Casting under duress

Similar justification as before: in as much as soul-power is moving and a connection to the book is needed, disruption of that process or that connection can lead to terrible consequences.

Reading the book

So, if a spell is kind of "trapped" in a book, and not actually "written" in any form, what are you reading? I'd like to think that the pages of the book are, in fact, completely blank, and what you are invoking is the name of the soul in the book. This could lead to fun roleplay in which learning the name of a spellbook takes some effort in communing with the book. It also plays nicely with the semi-sentience of spellbooks: for one, they're "intelligent" because there's a piece of a living soul in there, for another, that sentience may wish to be expressed, and therefore readily reveal it's nature to any who hold the book. Or you could randomly generate how cooperative a spellbooks personality is. Many possibilities!

Personalities/effects

In 2e, all spellbooks have quirky characterisics. Some of that is explained by the soul imbuing the book with a mind, but the rest could be seen as a "leak" in the book. When it was first made, the integrity of the book was sound, and so it appeared as only an empty book; over time, as soul-stuff has been pushed and pulled around through usage, the characteristics of the magic "protrude" from the book, like dangling threads on a garment. (I would have gone with something like this under my programming-magic paradigm; the "bits of reality" you're playing with rub off and "stick" to the book)

Or, there aren't quite enough pages in this book, so it's pushing up against it's "soul capacity" as it were, causing this "leak" of it's nature (like a drippy sponge).

Scrolls

So what are scrolls now? I think there are two possibilities. One is similar to my previous take: a scroll is tied to the original spellbook, perhaps again by an alchemical process of soul-mixing to combine your soul-energy with the magic-nature of the book and store it in a scroll (once more, made of a special and rare material ideal to the purpose).

The second might be more interesting: the scroll is a page ripped from the book. It still requires some of your energy to be invested with the energy for it's normal function--perhaps a side-effect of the unusual process required to actually tear out the page from this semi-living entity--but it comes with a tantalizing side effect: the books overall potency is gradually diminished. Eventually, the spell weakens until there is no book left to speak of. In the meantime, who knows what kind of side-effects that could have? Weaker spells, more chaotic spells, more risk of side-effects, total combustion?

Relics

Under the reality programming paradigm, I would probably have said that relics are just very ingenious encoding's into objects, with clever mechanisms for storing "charges" and things of that sort.

This soul-stuff paradigm makes this even easier though: Relics are souls trapped in, or "solidified" into, objects. (This is, in fact, much more in line with the historical sense of the word "relic"). 

In any RPG system, I like playing with the idea that magical objects carry a degree of sentience, want to be used, and therefore readily reveal their nature/use to people (because sometimes, you just don't have time or inclincation to make players be little scientists to work out how their new toys operate), but within this paradigm, that principle becomes obvious.

Referring back to the idea that all things are "magical" in some sense or another, relics with particularly silly or simple abilities may have come from individuals with quaint and "mundane" dispositions.

Potions

I like potion magic! I particularly like the incentive for gathering components and monster guts and things like that. 

My magic-as-programming paradigm is perhaps a bit harder to square with that, but it's downright simple with this soul-stuff concept. Magical beings have magic not just concentrated within themselves, but within parts of themselves. For example, a dragon has magic concentrated in their gut, allowing the production of fire. A prospective spellbook crafter could potentially make that "Fireball" book from just the gut--so long as it's sufficiently fresh and intact, but for the more rugged and improvisational sorts, potion making is probably a cheaper and less complex method for capturing a bit of magic.

Of course, while a potion is potent, it should probably have a shelf-life, too. Or at least particular storage needs to preserve it's power (the soul only clings to these physical trappings for so long!

Conclusion

Anyways, I hope that's interesting. At the end of the day, you don't need any of this! Or maybe these two perspectives on magic will inspire you to come up with something completely different! Cairn is great, and you should do what works for you.