(UA) The Problem With Magick

[Markleford Friedman]

In the "What You Want" thread, I said, "Pornomancers are (mostly) on the
same path, yeah, so it works in this case."  However, this is somewhat of a
fallacy, if we're to believe other material in the book.

That's where the "mostly" factor comes in.  Supposedly, your "school of
magick" isn't a school, per se.  It's more of a domain.  The tricky bit that
comes up is that the practioners of these domains overlap in PRECISELY the
same areas.  But we can also practice the same school and belong to a
different faction. So, we're all different, yet exactly the same?  Huh?

How is it that two people on opposite sides of the globe can learn the same
"school" of magick, from different mentors even, and yet be bound by the
same "rules" and know the same exact rituals?  What I'm saying here is that
while I believe that magick is a very personal thing, the main UA book has
made it almost cookie-cutter: everyone in your school generates charges in
the same way, everyone has the same taboo, you have the same Formulas, etc. 
We do get Customized Blasts, but at 85% it seems a bit "late".

So, all Pornomancers follow the Naked Goddess?  I'd say, perhaps, that
"most" of them do (at best).  But remember, sex-magick has been big in the
world for centuries, perhaps millennia!  It's in cultures all over the
globe.  But is a practitioner of sex-magick in Tasmania is going to have to
reenact NG scenes to gain bigger charges?

Well, no, everyone is now saying "of course not!".  This doesn't make sense,
and the game wasn't written to be that constrictive (remember: "GM's say is
final!").  And Pornomancy is perhaps a bad example, as it seems that the
Sect of The Naked Goddess *is* a school in the strictest sense of the word;
I would contest that The Sect is highly ritualized, as they have canon to
follow.

But what about other schools?  Without a "videotape grail", or a patron
Ascendant to follow, other schools would see a mindboggling variance between
practitioners.  One reason for my problem here is that there is no
cosmological support behind these schools: there's no "patron god" or
"primal element/force" behind them.  This is wild, willworking talent made
reality.  As such, I'd figure that any such "school" (learning
organization/tradition) would tend to dillute, fragment, and tangent over
time, like an Nth generation photocopy.  (And we won't even get into the
fact that these "schools" had to come from *somewhere*, which means that
sometime in our past *someone* would have spontaneously developed magickal
ability, so why restrict it so that adept PCs can only learn from a
mentor?)  An adept will teach slightly different than his mentor did, adding
his own knowledge, background, experiences, and preferences to the mix. 
Let's call this "epistemological dillution" or something.

As I said, these sorts of magick seem like it should be very personal, so
I'd expect to see less similarity between two practitioners of the same
"school".  Picture for yourself a French Dipsomancer and a Japanese
Dipsomancer.  Considering their cultural differences (remember that adepts
start as members of a mundane society!), it's likely that they'd exhibit
magickal differences across the board: Formulas, Charging methods, taboo,
and Random domain.  I can easily see the Frenchman slipping into the
Pornomancy domain, and the Japanese businessman starts pulling off effects
like an Entropomancer.

And why not?  Practitioners of "real" (non-ritualized) magick are generally
individualists and iconoclasts; to lump them does not give them respect. 
"If it was an exact science, they wouldn't call it magick."  So true!  But
why, then, are we neatly compartmentalizing everything?

I believe that the 7 provided schools should have presented merely as
examples, rather than "this is the state of magick in the world today". 
These 7 schools of magick are pretty kick-ass and off-beat, but I can't see
them as being "THE dominant 7 styles" on the planet.  I could've taken it
better as, "here are 7 *examples*".  Yes, they're quite handy for
demonstrating charge-balancing between effects, and this helps out with the
process in "Creating New Schools".

Hyup.  It's all a presentation thing, I think.  Encouraging GMs and players
to use the school creation rules as their *first* course of action would
have been better, relegating the "example" schools to actually being
"schools" in the proper sense of the word, and building a cult or sect
around them (as with the case of Pornomancy and (to an oblique extent)
Mechanomancy).

I'm certainly using my GMs initiative and encouraging my players to make
their own individual "domains" unless they're *really* stumped (which I
don't see happening: if these players play an adept, they'll already have an
individual domain in mind).  In that case, I'll attach them to a specific
"pocket sect" that teaches according to "school" doctrine.

So, ummm, the magick rules aren't particularly "broken", but I hear a lot of
votes out there for "Yeah! give us more info on Dipsomancy!"  I'm simply
hoping to encourage other GMs to pursue all the options available to them.

Evaluate!  Imagine!  Create!

- m