Impacts of Magic: Shelter

The next topic on the cards for my series of posts on the impacts of magic on worldbuilding is one which follows closely on from food on the basic essentials list: Shelter.

You've filled your belly, and now in your magical world you're looking for a place to rest, to get out of the sun, the wind, the rain, the cold.  To keep the monsters out.

Construction of an adequate shelter will have a large impact on your ability to be not eaten, not sunburned, not frozen.  Literally, to not die of exposure.

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 Materials

Where would the classic tale of The Three Little Pigs be with the introduction of magic?  The first little pig is a cautionary warning against taking the easy route, and is summarily eaten for choosing a building material which was in plentiful supply and simple to work with.  It just wasn't any use at keeping the local smooth-tongued wolf out.  Yet a quick spell could have transformed that house of spun straw into close-knitted Kevlar.

Unless transport is cheap and easy, buildings are generally constructed from material which is locally available.  Wood, stone, brick, mud and dung.  A little glass, if you've reached that point, but it's rare that we see any attempt to build with other materials, even in worlds of magic.  Ice occasionally shows up as an option, and the sylvan races like to tailor their trees to include living quarters, but other than the occasional mad wizard building their towers out of solid ruby, it's exceptionally rare to see any non-standard materials used in construction.

If you've awarded your world a truly galumptious amount of magic, what's to prevent you from building your house out of giant rose petals which retain their texture, but have the strength of titanium?  A must-have for the truly ostentatious mage (or faerie queen).

Construction Methods

A more likely use of magic is in the method of construction.  One of the reasons the pyramids are a wonder of the world is the sheer difficulty of transporting stone of that size and weight – even today it would take quite some doing, let alone when your primary transport is wooden rollers and slaves.  Levitation would certainly increase your ability to produce towering monuments.

Beyond assisting standard construction methodology, magic can add a lot of variety to your home building options.  Straightforward conjuration.  Growing your buildings from seeds.  Taking the Mickey Mouse route and having your broom do all the hard work.  Or enchanting giant arachnids to spin tents with the tensile strength of spider web.

Architecture

When you mix magic with both construction methods and building materials, you can produce buildings which would make a structural engineer sweat bullets.  Gravity-defying spires.  Bridges that cross mile-wide expanses without caring for little matters like pylons.  Huts on chicken legs which permit a nomadic lifestyle with all the luxuries of home.

It's relatively rare to see extravagantly soaring buildings in fantasy literature, even when there's an excess of magic.  The one exception is the floating city, which pops up quite regularly – but oddly enough is usually furnished with relatively ordinary buildings.

It's rare that a world is awarded sufficient magic to make magically-constructed buildings common.  But monuments and palaces would certainly benefit from the best which magic could do.  If you've given your mages enough pep to send half a mountain whizzing through the air, or produced an irritable little man to demonstrate the method of transforming straw into gold, then consider turning that magical ingenuity to the mundane but ever-so-important question of something to keep the rain off.

Impacts of Magic: Food

The next topic on the cards for my series of posts on the impacts of magic on worldbuilding is one which is a central concern of any living creature: Food

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Without food we die.  Food, the Harvest, is THE driving force of most cultures.  And there is no more obvious use of magic than to make sure the Harvest is bountiful.

Land's Health

Countless harvest-related magical rituals are found in our non-magical world - many of which are discussed in detail in Frazer's The Golden Bough.  Whether "country-wide" or covering a single valley, magic has long been called on to balance an ecosystem.  Water, when and where needed, in the right amounts.  Sunshine, not too harsh.  Insects of the right sort - bees - and not those which scour and devour - locusts.

The timely sacrifice of an animal - or person - to ensure the harvest is no longer common practice.  Nor do we attempt to bind the health of a country up in the body of an individual ruler (to be cosseted or killed as custom dictates).  Since we already had societies built up around the belief that these rituals worked, would it be a tangibly different world if the rituals had a true impact?

Failure to Kill

When sacrifice is not a matter of belief but a necessary component of harvest, then failure to sacrifice will result in an obviously linked failure of harvest.

How hungry is the land?  Does it require the sacrifice of animals, of maidens, of kings?  How would you feel as this year/month/week's designated sacrifice, knowing that if you run, if you escape, the harvest will fail?  The rivers will dry?  The rains will not come?

And if you're the executioner?  The person with the grim, horrible duty to take life in order to preserve it?  Are you the one who chooses who dies?  Do you choose people with family, who will perhaps be more willing to die to ensure others eat?  Or do you opt for the unwanted, in hopes that you're less hated by the living?

The important thing to remember is that these are not optional acts.  There will have been occasions in the past when the chosen sacrifice has not been delivered, and the consequences have been catastrophic.  What kind of society will be built up around the necessity of death?  Will it be one of fear and distrust, dominated by who chooses?  Will it be random choice?  Could it be considered an honour?  Could people actually compete to be the one who dies so others live?

Worse still, will there be pressure to sacrifice more, hoping to bring about a better harvest?  Where lives are being spent not to prevent hunger, but to gain wealth?  The social dynamic of a world tied to a sacrifice harvest are never likely to be pretty.

Failure to Protect

The inversion of the sacrifice model is the investment of the health of the land in the body of an individual/ruler.  Although these are sometimes also killed (particularly when they age and health begins to break down), the impetus here is to ensure absolute protection.

This, of course, can lead to protecting the invested person from life.  High walls, seclusion, strictures on what can be touched, what can be eaten, what can be done.

In a world where the virtue of the land is invested in an individual, you could starve a kingdom with a single assassination.  But, though this is one of my favourite tropes and I use it in a serious way, I often think of the story which could be written if it was used comedically.

Instead of killing the invested individual, how much more entertaining to mess with their diet?  An invested Queen with a love of super-spicy curry could lead to extra-tasty cheese.  But what about too many prunes?  An excess of stodge?  What would happen to the harvest if the focus of all the land's virtues had chicken pox?  Acne?  Gas?

Assisted Husbandry

Instead of the large amount of magic and risk involved with bonding lives with the land's health, a more practical use for magic is to simply refine agriculture.  Divinations could give understanding of the intricacies of crop rotation, or track down the best way to combat pests.  Special forges could produce high-quality ploughs.  Jobbing magicians would provide wards against wolves or charm goats to eat only the weeds while leaving the crops.  And then there's Shaping.

Shaping is an invention of mine, changing the nature of something "beyond the blood" - in other words, genetic manipulation in a fantasy setting, which is the basis of the Fair in the world of Champion of the Rose.  The Fair trade their genetically modified plants, and gave as a gift a modified form of a grain-crop which was so productive and resistant to diseases and pests that it dramatically increased general quality of life world-wide.

The advantage of Shaping is that the need for magic, for the involvement of mages, is only at the creation.  After that you have a plant or animal which can be spread and reproduced without further input from the mage.

Of course, in the grand tradition of almost every story about genetic manipulation, Shaping has a tendency to Go Wrong.

Preservation

In addition to producing food, one of the largest challenges of the pre-industrial world was preserving that food.  Salt, honey and cloves were valuable not only for their taste benefits, but for their ability to extend the Use By date of the harvest.

An obvious use for magic is refrigeration (and gives me some grand images of icicle-encrusted cargo ships floating down steamy tropical rivers) and just as the village baker's oven was once put to the use of entire villages, it's easy to picture a communal enchanted icehouse where food is preserved.

Preservation leads to a more stable food supply, rather than feast and famine cycles, and portable refrigeration allows for a greater variety of food.  If, that is, your world didn't already have a system of portals making world-wide trade quicker and easier than anything science can currently provide.  Your pleasure-loving ruler might regularly dine on a Meal of the Seasons, starting with Spring Lamb from the valley hidden between the three tallest mountains on the far side of the world.

Fantastical Food

And the Meal of the Seasons leads nicely into Fantastical Food, by which I mean food production or food which is magical.  Apple Pie Trees.  Gingerbread Men that try to escape.  Sweets which are an entire meal in a single all-day sucker.  Cornucopias are a traditional example of FF (with variants such as tablecloths which can be spread once a day for a full meal, or a handkerchief which will always give you lunch).   Fountains of Youth or Love or Genderbending also fall into this area.

I'm occasionally tempted to see sneak these into my seriousmagicworlds to see whether I can maintain the tone of the Deep Moral Issues after discovering the (Lashings of) Ginger Beer Fountain.

How you use magic can completely change the tone of the world you build, and if you've included a generous dash of magic, take the time to consider how this will impact the kind of food your characters will eat, and why it doesn't always have to be Stew.

Impacts of Magic: Women

When creating my worlds some of the primary questions I start with are:

1. Does magic exist?
2. What can it do?
3. What will it change?

What will it change is the thing which fascinates me.  It's so central to the process of my novel-writing, that I'm embarking on a series of posts about the impacts of magic, exploring magic and worldbuilding.  For the purposes of this exercise, the answer to (1) is Yes and (2) is Lots!

The first topic on the cards is one which is of primary interest to me: Women.

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What does the existence of  bountiful, working magic mean to women?

Babies

Using magic to get a baby is at least as old as Rapunzel, but magic's key benefit is the avoidance of babies.  Whether charmed necklaces, potions, or useful cantrips, effective, readily obtainable birth control can bring about a fundamental shift in the world's society, primarily because the threat of an unplanned pregnancy will no longer hang over "non-committed" sex.  Additionally, couples might choose to delay children, to spend more time consolidating wealth or pursuing careers and interests.

And, of course, magic offers the possibility of not only safer childbirth, or safer abortion, but can toss out all those doubts concerning paternity.  Where does that leave that insistence on virgin brides?  A quick divination before the marriage vows to confirm that there's no baby on the way (or if there is, then the groom was involved), then it's time for the ceremony!

Will birth control necessarily bring about a sexually free society?  Of course not.  But the chances are much higher, and when building that high-magic fantasy world, it's worth taking the time to ask "why not?" and follow through which rules and symbols (that hymen veil, for instance) will be absent or altered as a result.

Strength

Women are not measurably less intelligent than men, or less perceptive, or less agile.  They share the same number of limbs, the same senses, the same ability to walk upright, to pick up tools and use them.  Yet women, through broad stretches of history and across multiple cultures, have been reduced to chattel - property passed from father to husband.

Why?

At its most simplified, this power imbalance comes down the fact that men are physically stronger than women.  If you ever see any cartoon about caveman courtship, it will involve a woman being dragged back to the cave by her hair.  While, arguably, women are less aggressive than men due to lower testosterone levels, there's a difference between being less aggressive and accepting without protest no property rights, no voting rights, no ability to say No.

Now add working magic to that caveman courtship.  Back in prehistory days, we'd expect a fairly simplified form of magic, perhaps a matter of will and emotion.  Are you really going to risk dragging sexycavegirl99 around by her hair if, when she's driven and desperate and frightened enough, she can make you burst into flame?  Suddenly gender equality hits the negotiating table.

Of course, it's not just a question of mating rituals.  A woman who can detonate boulders when she's riled would likely have some interesting approaches to hunting mammoths.  If you're having a war, do you send the women to cower in the caverns beneath the fort when they can call lightning down on your enemies?  And not to forget the Buffy Summers Effect - just because you tower over the pint-sized blonde doesn't mean she won't have some inborn ability to kick you down the street when you try to drag her into a convenient alley.

Again, no guarantee.  The society which forms around women who can overcome inferiority of strength with an equalizer such as guardian spirits will not necessarily be any less inclined to call them chattel.  But the odds are better, and when you're putting your world together, and you decide how your magic works, you have to ask: if women can do THIS, why do they allow THAT?

Other

There's a great many more things which will impact on women in a world of actual, working magic, although I think Babies and Strength are the pivotal alterations.  I called this section "Other" because it's common to discuss woman's role as "The Other", and there's always a bunch of people who work from the "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" point of view - believing that men and women are too fundamentally different to ever really understand each other, to ever really step into each other's shoes and KNOW what it is to be a man, to be a woman, to be Other.

Add magic.