Unknown Armies: Home brewed magic systems?

[john at tynes.com]

This comes from rec.games.frp.misc. I thought it was kinda neat, and figured you 
guys might like to take a look at it. I'm not sure if this fellow is on the 
list.

Rev

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Subject: Re: Unknown Armies: Home brewed magic systems?
From: neelk at alum.mit.edu (Neelakantan Krishnaswami)
Date: 1999/02/18
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
In article <neume001.919177242 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>, neume001 at maroon.tc.umn.edu (Craig J Neumeier) wrote:
>But if it's a true UA magick system, not just using their rules 
>skeleton, it has to be based on a fundamental paradox.  Where's
>the symbolic tension in music?

Let me see if I can do this...

Music in the modern world is normally used to communicate emotion
and subjective; pop songs and film scores are obvious of course, but 
even the most overintellectualized atonalist compositions aim to create
a disorienting and exciting soundscape.

If we want a UA-style musical magic system (sorry, I can't bear to 
spell it with a k) then we need to find some way of cutting the 
magician off from the emotional vitality inherent music. 

Now we need a bit of rationalization for this. The ancient Pythagoreans 
saw music, geometry, and mysticism as one: perhaps Pythagoras was a
sorcerer who heard the sounds of the statosphere and realized that  
it was a gigantic resonant cavity? With the proper set of sounds the
world of magic could be controlled, with the real world following
shortly after. And recall that the ancient Hindus held that it was 
the sound of the Vedas being recited that created and sustained the
universe -- perhaps they too heard the echos and dreamed of power.

The modern song-mage doesn't waste his time with the useless mystic
symbolism and extended ritual that characterized the ancients, however.
He knows that every pattern in the real world sets up a rythym in the
statosphere -- and by playing notes at the appropriate resonant 
frequencies he can alter the statosphere and create a corresponding
change in the real world.

What this means is that by playing the right (i.e., alien and disturbing)
forms of music, the song-mage can disrupt patterns in the real world.
Routines are disrupted -- perhaps the password isn't changed as per policy,
new regulations are issued to a bureacracy, or a guard decides that there's
no need to check that particular section of the perimeter. Or maybe, just
maybe, it's a heartbeat that starts skipping beats. There's no need for 
messy symbolism or consecrated instruments; a child's toy drum is just as 
capable of manipulating reality as the finest Stradavarius. 

The price? Nothing much -- just that once you start writing the music 
of the spheres you can never again listen to or play ordinary music. If 
you do, then you will waste your charges tapping out the rythyms of
the song into the statosphere. And it won't do anything, being just
the sort of emotional response that 6 billion other humans do every 
day.


Neel


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