Let's brainstorm practical application for magic outside of combat

A character in my WIP uses magic to make some money (think of those jugglers you sometimes see on the street, except replace the juggling with flashy spells).

I'm always amazed when teleportation magic comes up in a book and nobody ever suggests using it to move commodities or supplies around.

Chores. Child care. Agricultural labor. Manufacturing labor. Clerical work.

But in a world where magic is so easy to come by that you can use loads of it, it's a little boring. I prefer magic to have a high enough price that people aren't using it wipe their bottoms or whatever. My favorite system is in Lukyanenko's Night Watch series: every time the light side does something with magic, like save someone's life, the dark side is allowed to do something equally powerful but evil, like kill somebody. It really makes people think twice before using their magic.

gonovelgo said:

I'm always amazed when teleportation magic comes up in a book and nobody ever suggests using it to move commodities or supplies around.

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Psi rather than magic, but Anne McCaffrey's The Rowan series. They can fling ships from star system to star system. Her To Ride Pegasus stories are similar. Set in "present day", they're about how people with extraordinary psi abilities attempt to contribute to society.

In my fantasy universe, mages are essential to allow people to not live in caves. Storm wardens are needed to keep back wild magic storms. I've also got magical items which can provide heat, light, and basic refrigeration for food storage.

To try to ensure better harvests, avoid childbirth problems or defects in the baby, bring good luck - with things like finding a husband/wife.

Thomas_Anderson said:

I just thought it would be interesting to think up ways a witch or wizard could use their spells outside of combat.

To start off, super strength and leviations spells can be used to easily move furniture.

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I'd settle for something that would keep cats from barfing on furniture. It would have to be magic, because nothing else works.

Ursula LeGuin used magic ("mage-wind") to drive a sailboat when there was no regular wind.

caw

Kitty Pryde said:

My favorite system is in Lukyanenko's Night Watch series: every time the light side does something with magic, like save someone's life, the dark side is allowed to do something equally powerful but evil, like kill somebody. It really makes people think twice before using their magic.

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What would the dark side be allowed to do if the light side used magic to wipe their bottoms?

Must ... stop ... overactive ... imagination.

Thomas_Anderson said:

I just thought it would be interesting to think up ways a witch or wizard could use their spells outside of combat.

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Everything.
EVERYTHING.

This is impossible to answer without knowing the limitations of magic, what it can and can't do, and what cost of using it is. Because potentially, magic can be extremely world altering. And we don't have to talk about major stuff like levitation, teleportation or maybe weather manipulation. Even something that seems minor like divination is a total game changer. Even if it's just remote viewing, not predicting the future.
Heck, if you have an otherwise medieval technology, but magicians who can conjure up very hot magical fire you just boosted their metalworking by a few hundred years as soon as a blacksmith asks a magician to help with some experiments.

On the other hand, you can have a world run essentially by magic and those who use it. eg, magic used to facilitate just about everything : military defense, running mechanical instruments (to facilitate farming, smith work, milling etc...)

The downside of this is that the other elements of the story must be absolutely fabulous to capture the attention of the reader as it can easily get boring if everything is done by magic. Also, the role of ordinary people is greatly diminished since they are not needed so much. Hence this may have to be compensated with an increase in the number of people capable of using the magic.

Politics would also have to be thought out. Obviously the people capable of using the magic that drives the entire world would be immensely powerful politically.

Lots of gaps and holes to fill in. I personally like stories with just a faint touch of magic, but I'd be interested in reading a book like what I just described. The closes I've come to it is RJ's The Wheel of Time.

Thomas_Anderson said:

But is massive magic so much different from very high tech and soft sci fi? Such as Star Trek, where people can get more or less any material they desire from the replicators.

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Yes. StarTrek is not a good example because most stuff in StarTrek is not SciFi technology but just a bunch of bolognium.
But there are significant differences between magic and technology, such as for example that technology has to follow certain rules (called the laws of nature), has to be consistent, requires certain infrastructure, is usable based on access to it not innate charactersitics, is reproducable if you have the necessary information etc. etc.
None of this applies to magic. Some of these characteristics are similar for magic fuelled technology, and others are similar for ritualistic magic systems, but there are always significant differences between magic and technology. The often repeated statement that sufficiently improved technology is indistinguishable from magic is simply incorrect.

It would really depend on what rules you're placing on your magic system. Magic of the hand waving "I can do whatever I want" variety can be used pretty much anywhere for anything, though that's basically a giant Deus Ex Machina machine anyways.

In my fantasy world, the "magic" is an additional set of physical laws placed on the universe that are logically consistent, satisfy the laws of thermodynamics, etc. The only reason that it's "magic" instead of "made up science" is that 1) anyone can do it instinctively to varying degrees and 2) nobody knows exactly how it works (anymore). Because it's ubiquitous and isn't powerful enough to solve most problems on its own, it finds itself used in reasonably mundane situations by the average person. Speeding healing on wounds, boosting immune systems, keeping crops free of disease and speeding up growth, allowing for purer and stronger metals to be forged, and creating light and sound on demand.

Under such a system, uses by a society with better understanding of the principles would be a great big booster for technology. Material and information science, engineering, agriculture, and media would all see extensive usage of it to do things beyond what the technology would be able to handle on its own. A society with WWI era technology compared to today's science (as my precursor civilisation has) would nevertheless have an effective technology level of the modern day, complete with their own version of the internet, highly potent fuels, and rapidly approaching the capacity to put stuff in orbit.

On the flip side, there are pretty strict limits on what my magic system allows people to do. From a storytelling perspective that has it's ups and downs. On the upside, even though I'm stretching believability I'm still forced to take the hard route around problems since magic can't be used as a crutch. On the downside, even though I'm stretching believability I'm still forced to take the hard route around problems since magic can't be used as a crutch.

blacbird said:

I'd settle for something that would keep cats from barfing on furniture. It would have to be magic, because nothing else works.

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I totally agree with you there. My husband and I have seven cats and they take great delight in hacking on the carpet just as soon as I have vacuumed it. >_<

In my steampunk novel magic used to power machines (before someone invented the steam engine). And it's still used in lamps and a variety of timekeeping and navigating devices.

Lhun said:

Yes. StarTrek is not a good example because most stuff in StarTrek is not SciFi technology but just a bunch of bolognium.

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And the difference is . . . ?

caw

Presumably that the "Sci Fi technology" has some scientific basis and is speculative in nature, instead of the "Star trek" tech which is based entirely upon hand-wavium dynamics.

Apparently, some of the scripts for the show had writers doing their first drafts with lines like [insert techno-babble here].

IanMorrison said:

Presumably that the "Sci Fi technology" has some scientific basis and is speculative in nature, instead of the "Star trek" tech which is based entirely upon hand-wavium dynamics.

Apparently, some of the scripts for the show had writers doing their first drafts with lines like [insert techno-babble here].

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So . . . H.G. Wells' Time Machine, the ultimate grandfather of all SF tech, is which?

I agree with you about Star Trek, by the way, but I also appreciate that they knew it was technobabble, and had obvious fun with it. It's just that I'm having trouble thinking of many SF "technologies" that are any different. Arthur C. Clarke was probably the most scientifically-scrupulous of SF writers, and he kept what tech he mentioned in the realm of the maybe-plausible by human understanding. Still, in his greatest novel, Childhood's End, he had aliens arriving in immense ships, from somewhere in the void, without even attempting to explain how they did that.

Time machines, FTL travel and communication, interstellar voyaging, teleportation, telepathy, almost anything you can name as a meme in SF, is just about by definition, "technobabble". It's become such a staple of the genre that we interested readers innately accept all kinds of like nonsense, as long as the story is told well-enough.

caw

I think magic actually has way more non-combat applications than combat ones, it's mainly video games which create the impression that there is little or no magic outside combat. Magic is basically using mental or spirtual power to make something you want to happen, happen. So anything a person would want to happen is fair game for being accomplished with magic.

blacbird said:

So . . . H.G. Wells' Time Machine, the ultimate grandfather of all SF tech, is which?

I agree with you about Star Trek, by the way, but I also appreciate that they knew it was technobabble, and had obvious fun with it. It's just that I'm having trouble thinking of many SF "technologies" that are any different. Arthur C. Clarke was probably the most scientifically-scrupulous of SF writers, and he kept what tech he mentioned in the realm of the maybe-plausible by human understanding. Still, in his greatest novel, Childhood's End, he had aliens arriving in immense ships, from somewhere in the void, without even attempting to explain how they did that.

Time machines, FTL travel and communication, interstellar voyaging, teleportation, telepathy, almost anything you can name as a meme in SF, is just about by definition, "technobabble". It's become such a staple of the genre that we interested readers innately accept all kinds of like nonsense, as long as the story is told well-enough.

caw

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We're getting a little off topic here, but yeah, that time machine is a black box plot device, not a plausible piece of technology. For all intents and purposes it is magic. On the opposite end of the spectrum would be a hard sci fi story where everything is an extrapolation of current technological progress. I'd say that it's a spectrum between the two extremes, instead of a binary yes/no.

Also keep in mind that I'm not disparaging it seriously. The time machine you mention is a completely implausible device that doesn't even attempt to explain itself, yet it serves as a fascinating way to examine a topic--time travel--that we wouldn't otherwise be able to examine. Same thing with FTL travel and all sorts of nonsense stuff we gloss over when we read sci fi.

You know, come to think of it, magic is really just technology on the opposite side of hard sci-fi.

Of course, that doesn't mean we give it a free pass. When it's on the far end of the unbelievable spectrum, it becomes obvious as a plot device, but the more "realistic" it is, the more self-consistent and believable it must be. Once you get into things like hard sci-fi, you damned well better be able to explain why your spacecraft powered by a fusion torch is able to burn as much fuel as it is without making a pit stop. If your ship is pulling 12 times the speed of light with artificial gravity on board and fighting aliens that look like us with wrinkled foreheads, you're already playing fast and loose with the specifics so we'll probably give you a pass on the rest.

Whenever I utilize magic I tend to think of it as being restrained by it introducing entropy to the local area. In other words I treat magic as a finite resource that slowly regenerates in a given location. It's sort of like how a refridgerator can cool down a small location by pumping heat to the surrounding area. Supposing that the heat can't really escape easily, eventually after a bit the refridgerator is going to struggle to keep the small chamber cold.

So the ability of a mage to do anything in my world is directly proportional to how much magic is available for him/her to use in the ambient area, and the greatest mages aren't necessarily those who can use a lot of magic and do a lot with it, but those who can recover trace amounts. Because of the scarcity of magic and its inherent value, its use is very strictly regulated and controlled by different kingdoms.

Lhun said:

The often repeated statement that sufficiently improved technology is indistinguishable from magic is simply incorrect.

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I always thought that statement referred to the perspective of someone who does not know how something works. Turning on a desk lamp might as well be magic to someone not aware of electricity. Same with a television; to a non-scientific mind, it might as well be little people inside a box.

gonovelgo said:

I'm always amazed when teleportation magic comes up in a book and nobody ever suggests using it to move commodities or supplies around.

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Slightly tangential to the thread, but have you read Charles Stross' The Family Trade? The titular Family can teleport between our modern-era world and their own medieval-era world. Since the medieval-era world doesn't have pesky border controls or narcotics agents, the Family teleports real-world drugs into there and shifts them across the continent in safety before teleporting them back into a different real-world place. And since the modern-era world has super fast transport, the Family makes use of that to shift goods from the medieval world. It's a pretty fascinating application of teleportation, although I prefer Stross' Laundry stuff.

I don't understand the idea that magic is mainly used for combat. Unless your world is at war you don't spend that much time fighting for your life. This is why, while I think lightsabers are cool, I wouldn't want one. Seriously, how many things in an average day do I need to cut through that require anything sharper than a butter-knife? Obviously if I was a lumberjack I'd probably think differently though...

But dude. It's magic. If I could use magic I would love to be able to change my hair (colour, cut, style) entirely through magic. It would be great. Or to be able to magically clean myself and brush my teeth in a burst of sparkles - I'd never need to bear stripping for a shower before dawn on a frigid morning. It's magic, it can do anything except whatever limits YOU YOURSELF AS THE WRITER put on it.

Healing
Repairing the home/clothes
Communication
Preserving and examining memories
Practical jokes
Creating light in darkness
Murder
Law enforcement
Starting a fire/putting out a fire
Raising loved ones from the dead
Turning sand into gold
Creating food
Sports (think Quidditch)
Moving

As said above, magic has more non-combat purposes than it does combat.

Because there are only so many ways you can think of to effectively kill someone. Fireballs, lightning, heating up the weapon to red hot, and that kind of thing. But the other apps are always open to individual usage.

Lhun said:

What would the dark side be allowed to do if the light side used magic to wipe their bottoms?

Must ... stop ... overactive ... imagination.

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Maybe un-wipe your bottom to give you an intensely evil rash? Or un-wipe a babies bottom to annoy everyone in the room with his screams of butt pain.