It is coming! Help me!
So I’m trying to hash out the magic system for my NaNo this year, and I know some of you folks are into that sort of thing, so if you’d like to help out, please, I would appreciate your input. :)
I’m basing it off of the sheer amount of heat that is available in EVERYTHING. As background that most of you probably already know, heat and energy is measured in calories and joules. I’m not too up on calorie-to-joule conversion, so I’ll work in calories to start off with.
A calorie should not be confused with a capital-C-Calorie, which is used to measure energy in food. A food Calorie is actually 1,000 calories, so often in science they are called kcals, for kilocalories.
It takes one calorie to heat one mL of water one degree Celsius.
A single blueberry is about 1 food calorie, or kcal, so 1,000 calories. If you could convert the energy in 5 blueberries completely with no loss, it would be enough to bring a shot glass of water (about 45mL) from frozen (0 degrees C) to boiling (100 degrees C). That’s quite a lot of energy in a blueberry.
Now, of course, you can’t convert energy completely. Some is always lost as heat to the environment, which is why your body temperature is about 98.6 degrees F and why starches and sugars and other plant-based foods give you more energy per gram than animal protein (food loses energy for every step of the food chain it goes through).
So this magic system is really all about converting raw energy in the form of heat into something useful.
First step is drawing in heat from the environment from the Ley Lines. I decided I wanted to have Ley Lines because dammit, Ley Lines are cool and it’s two extra words I can refer to whenever a character uses magic. The ley lines run everywhere, but they are concentrated in certain places and are larger and smaller depending on the flow of heat through the land. Thus, a river would correspond to a very large ley line, a lake would be a large node of a ley line, a volcano would be a GIANT node, and your average everyday rock would make a bit of a blip. (There is a great deal of heat in running or still water, even if the actual TEMPERATURE is low.)
Because energy transfer through everything is constantly happening, new ley lines are being created and broken. As you transfer heat from your ass to your chair, you are creating a ley line between your ass and the chair. As soon as that transfer stops, that particular ley line thread is broken. For this reason, maps of ley lines usually only contain constant nodes and lines.
A magi first begins by drawing heat from the ley line into their body. They don’t need contact with that ley line, but it helps and they get a better transfer. The human body contains a great deal of water, which, remember, is only heated one degree C for every calorie applied to each mL. This means that an average human male of about 70kg contains approximately 40L of water, which is 40,000mL. The resting body temperature of a human male is about 37 degrees C. 41 degrees C is a dangerous fever, which means that we have about, oh, 160,000 calories that we can play with.
In the grand scheme of things, this is NOT a lot of energy. It’s the energy in your average cookie. However, the MAGIC part of this magic system is that magi can convert ALL of the energy they have stored into work, instead of losing most of it as heat. Well, as long as they get rid of it, because while they hold that energy they ARE losing it as heat.
They do this by inscribing runes onto a medium, and then burning them. The runes have to be inscribed while they are holding the energy. Good magi can continue to draw in heat in measured amounts while they scribe. The more energy they want to release, and the more complicated the work they want to do, the longer and more complicated the runes become.
If they are scribing a particularly difficult spell (like, say, using the energy to create bonds with molecules in the air to “summon” bread into existence by basically using human-guided nanotechnology), they can store energy in the runes as they go in order to get to the energy threshold required.
(Of course, the magi don’t KNOW how they are doing these things, they just know they’re doing it. The alien race charged with protecting this particular planet are the ones who are finding out all these sciency things.)
Once the runes have been scribed, the magi uses their flint and steel (all magi wear flint stone rings on one hand and a glove with a steel plate on the palm on the other) to set the medium on fire. Usually the medium is paper. Sometimes it’s wood. It’s always flammable. (Paper mills do very well in this world.) Once the runes burn, that extra energy allows the runes to reach threshold and the spell happens. Or doesn’t, depending on the ineptitude of the magi casting it. (Why not just burn the runes to begin with, and skip all the drawing-in-heat? Because, um...well...it’s magic. The heat has to be directed a certain way? Or something? This is the kind of stuff I need help hashing out.)
(Also, why not just make some damn bread instead of going through all the trouble of summoning it? Well, making bread the TRADITIONAL way requires a lot of stuff to already be present. Like an oven. And flour. And if you're traveling, it's difficult to carry an oven with you. And if you've had a bad year for crops, wheat may be a bit scarce.)
Some things to note:
My magic-using characters Aren’t Quite Human. I may make their bodies able to withstand much higher temperatures to allow them to store more energy.
They are transferring the energy from the ley lines to whatever they are doing. In theory, they are depleting the ley lines, but since the energy on the planet is constantly replenished by the sun at a far, FAR greater rate than it is being used, the ley lines never “run out.”
My main “OH MY SHIT this is a problem” theme is that the caring alien race that is watching over my main characters’ planet and not interfering with their quaint ways has detected that this planet’s sun is going through a particularly active period, and is likely to be going through some large solar emissions which will overtax the ley lines of the planet. The ley lines of course have a buffer, and the aliens are going to break galactic noninterference laws and do some planetary shielding, but unless they get a LOT of magi willing to be inscribing a LOT of spells and absorbing a LOT of heat for the next few months whenever a solar mass emission hits the planet, there could be Problems.
I, ah, kind of need help figuring out what these Problems will BE. A coronal mass ejection from the sun would totally paralyze US with our dependency on communication and electricity, but the sort of society I’ve got in mind for this planet is rather more...organic than that. But the overload of the ley lines HAS to do SOMETHING, otherwise the kings and emperors won’t allow the magi to go through the entire population of their kingdoms to find people with the skill to manipulate heat and Save the World. I suppose I could put this planet around a red giant binary star system that is capable of massive coronal mass ejections that would bathe the whole planet in extinction-causing X-rays, but that isn’t the kind of cataclysmic effect I’m going for (being cooked to death in an instant is far less dramatic, and uses far fewer words, than volcanoes and fire from the sky and the sun being blocked out and slow starvation, because SPOILER ALERT the magi aren’t going to be able to do all that much after all, which I have just discovered myself, so I think I just spoiled my own novel for me).
So. Ley lines overloading needs to do something dramatic. Something cataclysmic. Something that will eat up at LEAST ten thousand words.
And any additional feedback, things to add, questions that will make me think about it and fill things in, etc. about my magic system would be AWESOME.
This was about 1,400 words. It took me an hour at work. This job is going to be SO AWESOME for writing a NaNo.
I’m basing it off of the sheer amount of heat that is available in EVERYTHING. As background that most of you probably already know, heat and energy is measured in calories and joules. I’m not too up on calorie-to-joule conversion, so I’ll work in calories to start off with.
A calorie should not be confused with a capital-C-Calorie, which is used to measure energy in food. A food Calorie is actually 1,000 calories, so often in science they are called kcals, for kilocalories.
It takes one calorie to heat one mL of water one degree Celsius.
A single blueberry is about 1 food calorie, or kcal, so 1,000 calories. If you could convert the energy in 5 blueberries completely with no loss, it would be enough to bring a shot glass of water (about 45mL) from frozen (0 degrees C) to boiling (100 degrees C). That’s quite a lot of energy in a blueberry.
Now, of course, you can’t convert energy completely. Some is always lost as heat to the environment, which is why your body temperature is about 98.6 degrees F and why starches and sugars and other plant-based foods give you more energy per gram than animal protein (food loses energy for every step of the food chain it goes through).
So this magic system is really all about converting raw energy in the form of heat into something useful.
First step is drawing in heat from the environment from the Ley Lines. I decided I wanted to have Ley Lines because dammit, Ley Lines are cool and it’s two extra words I can refer to whenever a character uses magic. The ley lines run everywhere, but they are concentrated in certain places and are larger and smaller depending on the flow of heat through the land. Thus, a river would correspond to a very large ley line, a lake would be a large node of a ley line, a volcano would be a GIANT node, and your average everyday rock would make a bit of a blip. (There is a great deal of heat in running or still water, even if the actual TEMPERATURE is low.)
Because energy transfer through everything is constantly happening, new ley lines are being created and broken. As you transfer heat from your ass to your chair, you are creating a ley line between your ass and the chair. As soon as that transfer stops, that particular ley line thread is broken. For this reason, maps of ley lines usually only contain constant nodes and lines.
A magi first begins by drawing heat from the ley line into their body. They don’t need contact with that ley line, but it helps and they get a better transfer. The human body contains a great deal of water, which, remember, is only heated one degree C for every calorie applied to each mL. This means that an average human male of about 70kg contains approximately 40L of water, which is 40,000mL. The resting body temperature of a human male is about 37 degrees C. 41 degrees C is a dangerous fever, which means that we have about, oh, 160,000 calories that we can play with.
In the grand scheme of things, this is NOT a lot of energy. It’s the energy in your average cookie. However, the MAGIC part of this magic system is that magi can convert ALL of the energy they have stored into work, instead of losing most of it as heat. Well, as long as they get rid of it, because while they hold that energy they ARE losing it as heat.
They do this by inscribing runes onto a medium, and then burning them. The runes have to be inscribed while they are holding the energy. Good magi can continue to draw in heat in measured amounts while they scribe. The more energy they want to release, and the more complicated the work they want to do, the longer and more complicated the runes become.
If they are scribing a particularly difficult spell (like, say, using the energy to create bonds with molecules in the air to “summon” bread into existence by basically using human-guided nanotechnology), they can store energy in the runes as they go in order to get to the energy threshold required.
(Of course, the magi don’t KNOW how they are doing these things, they just know they’re doing it. The alien race charged with protecting this particular planet are the ones who are finding out all these sciency things.)
Once the runes have been scribed, the magi uses their flint and steel (all magi wear flint stone rings on one hand and a glove with a steel plate on the palm on the other) to set the medium on fire. Usually the medium is paper. Sometimes it’s wood. It’s always flammable. (Paper mills do very well in this world.) Once the runes burn, that extra energy allows the runes to reach threshold and the spell happens. Or doesn’t, depending on the ineptitude of the magi casting it. (Why not just burn the runes to begin with, and skip all the drawing-in-heat? Because, um...well...it’s magic. The heat has to be directed a certain way? Or something? This is the kind of stuff I need help hashing out.)
(Also, why not just make some damn bread instead of going through all the trouble of summoning it? Well, making bread the TRADITIONAL way requires a lot of stuff to already be present. Like an oven. And flour. And if you're traveling, it's difficult to carry an oven with you. And if you've had a bad year for crops, wheat may be a bit scarce.)
Some things to note:
My magic-using characters Aren’t Quite Human. I may make their bodies able to withstand much higher temperatures to allow them to store more energy.
They are transferring the energy from the ley lines to whatever they are doing. In theory, they are depleting the ley lines, but since the energy on the planet is constantly replenished by the sun at a far, FAR greater rate than it is being used, the ley lines never “run out.”
My main “OH MY SHIT this is a problem” theme is that the caring alien race that is watching over my main characters’ planet and not interfering with their quaint ways has detected that this planet’s sun is going through a particularly active period, and is likely to be going through some large solar emissions which will overtax the ley lines of the planet. The ley lines of course have a buffer, and the aliens are going to break galactic noninterference laws and do some planetary shielding, but unless they get a LOT of magi willing to be inscribing a LOT of spells and absorbing a LOT of heat for the next few months whenever a solar mass emission hits the planet, there could be Problems.
I, ah, kind of need help figuring out what these Problems will BE. A coronal mass ejection from the sun would totally paralyze US with our dependency on communication and electricity, but the sort of society I’ve got in mind for this planet is rather more...organic than that. But the overload of the ley lines HAS to do SOMETHING, otherwise the kings and emperors won’t allow the magi to go through the entire population of their kingdoms to find people with the skill to manipulate heat and Save the World. I suppose I could put this planet around a red giant binary star system that is capable of massive coronal mass ejections that would bathe the whole planet in extinction-causing X-rays, but that isn’t the kind of cataclysmic effect I’m going for (being cooked to death in an instant is far less dramatic, and uses far fewer words, than volcanoes and fire from the sky and the sun being blocked out and slow starvation, because SPOILER ALERT the magi aren’t going to be able to do all that much after all, which I have just discovered myself, so I think I just spoiled my own novel for me).
So. Ley lines overloading needs to do something dramatic. Something cataclysmic. Something that will eat up at LEAST ten thousand words.
And any additional feedback, things to add, questions that will make me think about it and fill things in, etc. about my magic system would be AWESOME.
This was about 1,400 words. It took me an hour at work. This job is going to be SO AWESOME for writing a NaNo.