[Torg] Introduction (Magic Axiom, 1 of 9)

[Jones Jasyn]

First, happy 20th anniversary to Torg and the List. I've only been here for 15 years, but that still marks me as one of the alte adlers of the List (behind Jim, Smooge, Saxon, et. al.). It's been a great 15 years with the List and a great 20 years with Torg.

When last we left our stalwart hero (uh, me), I'd become very ill and unable to continue the design and writing I'd previously been doing. It's been three years since the last update to Storm Knights; before then I was writing and posting about three sizable articles a quarter.

The good news, for me at least, is that in the last couple of weeks I've become well enough to read and write (at least some of the time), which I haven't been able to do for years. Of course, like all totally sane people with absolutely no obsessive hobbies at all, I immediately began working on my Torg material.

Further good news is that I left myself copious notes. (Really, like hundreds of them. Very detailed. We're talking gigabytes of text.) These notes, once I found them and sorted through them, have made it possible to begin much where I left off.

As of right now, the future looks promising. I'm not actually promising anything, but I would like to finish and post what material is suited for public consumption, when and as I can.

The first items on my list are my fleshed out, yet condensed axiom charts. As the title of this post may have revealed, the first axiom I've finished is the Magic axiom. So here it is.

As always, commentary and questions are very much welcome.

Introduction

When I first started the project that would become Storm Knights, the first goal was to devise complete axiom charts for Torg. This project has proven to be far more involved and far more complex than first imagined.

Of all the axioms, the Magic axiom has been the most difficult and arcane. Devising a complete Magic axiom has required untold hours of research and a fundamental rethinking of the principles behind Torg’s magic system. It's required studying magic (in its many manifestations) and discerning the commonalities behind varying systems of magic.

Magic, as a subject, covers a lot of territory: luck, omens, curses and fortunetelling, spellcasting and wishes, magical creatures, substances and lands. Much of the source material is contradictory and seemingly irreconcilable.

Yet inside all of the material there was a single common thread, a single concept that lay behind all (or nearly all) extant magics: magic in the real world, magic in fiction, and magic in roleplaying games. Behind these disparate and apparently irreconcilable forms of magic lay a single, shared assumption about what magic is.

That assumption, distilled down into a coherent and concrete principle, forms the core of the Magic axiom and of a revised magic system. It answers the question that has plagued so many: “What is magic?”

Jasyn Jones
jasynj (at) gmail (dot) com

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Check out my Torg webpage, Storm Knights:

darleyconsulting.com/games/stormknights/