[Modern Fantasy] "Materials of creation" that could be opposed to magic?

[Ragitsu]

Hello everyone.

 

I'm working on formulating a list of materials that are anti-magic in nature. The common theme that ties them must be one of creation, be it literal or symbolic.

 

One such example thus far is very old iron...we're talking extremely prehistoric deposits that can be (radiocarbon?) dated back to the formation of the planet. If a room has walls constructed from such iron, magic cannot penetrate in or out. If a bullet forged of this iron encounters a magical force-field, it punches right through.

 

With that in mind, i'd love to hear other suggestions on materials that would suit my purpose.

[Chris Goodwin]

Elemental hydrogen.  The first element on the periodic table, it was the first one that came into existence.  

 

Clay.  Many myths have the gods creating humans out of clay.  

 

Material mined from the core of the world, which contains the heat of the planet's initial formation.  

 

Moon rocks, the moon having been created when one of the gods pulled a god-sized handful out of the earth and threw it into the sky in rage.  

 

Edited to add:  I strongly suggest taking a look at Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson, who combines science/engineering with magic all over the place.  

[Manic Typist]

Reproductive fluids. Seriously!

 

Pens, paintbrushes. Other tools used to make things.

[Chris Goodwin]

A lone astronomer, night after night, pores through the reams of data generated by the largest and most powerful radio telescope.  Hoping to find the echoes of the Word, the one uttered by God when He created the universe, in the cosmic background radiation dating back to the Big Bang; inscribing this Word into, for instance, a sword blade (or the circuit traces of a computer motherboard) would, in theory, grant the wielder a ridiculous amount of power...

[Old Man]

Gold, being immutable, has often been ascribed properties of immunity to magic.

 

Silver has been proven to slay magical creatures.

 

Other metals in Group 11 include copper and roentgenium.  The latter, if it weren't hopelessly radioactive and unstable, would be an extremely heavy metal with somewhat similar physical properties to gold.  Its magical properties are entirely unknown. 

[Outsider]

My old game I used the gold/silver/copper trio as disturbing magic, and being magically immutable.  A nice in game reason for them to be valuable, with their ratio of value being relative to just how much you needed for a given magic disruption effect.   I also had a rule that undisturbed natural stone worked the same way in sufficient thickness.   Mainly to keep castles in the game... tunneling really (ahem) undermines that, otherwise.

 

Another game I was in allowed natural gemstones to be spell receptacles.  

[Chris Goodwin]

I love the idea of combining the symbolic and the literal.  For instance, a vessel made of clay, fired in the heat of a birthing star.  Or the aforementioned Word, scribed into the blade of a sword forged from nickel-iron taken from the earth's core.

[IndianaJoe3]

I'm working on formulating a list of materials that are anti-magic in nature. The common theme that ties them must be one of creation, be it literal or symbolic.

 

Not exactly a material, but I can see magic working less well (or not at all) in art museums, research labs, and the patent office. 

[Chris Goodwin]

Not exactly a material, but I can see magic working less well (or not at all) in art museums, research labs, and the patent office. 

 

If I were running it, I'd specify that the older and more "potent" the creation, the more powerful the effect is.  For instance, a set of child's watercolors would affect magic a lot less (if at all) than would paintbrushes and palette used by Leonardo da Vinci.  It might also depend on its use; a carpenter's hammer used to smash windows would lose some of its anti-magic ability.  I'd also specify that mass produced items don't have any particular power until and unless they are used.  

 

Edit to add:  However, something like George Washington's axe would retain its symbolic connection to himself, even though the blade's been replaced three times and the handle twelve times over the years.  

[TheDarkness]

I always like the idea of sympathetic properties. So, for example, a particular substance or object might be utterly immune to certain types of magic, and sympathetic and aiding other types.

 

For example, Lee Harvey Oswald's magic bullet might be utterly resistant to magic that seeks to reveal the truth, but sympathetic to multiple attacks.(A reference that comes up in an actual game I'm running, not fantasy, but the character who mentions it is an enchantress who works with items, but they must be sympathetic to what she seeks to do with them. So, Uri's skull acts as an entangle that effects all in LOS as long as she is monologuing, Edward Morrow's glasses give enhanced senses as long as the user intends to use them to reveal the truth to the world, a knife used to kill Caesar teleports her behind an enemy, etc.)

 

I'm confused why art would be anti-magic. I would think constructs of the imagination would be sympathetic, but I may be coming at this from a different angle and missing a cool explanation.

[Lawnmower Boy]

The classic here is "needfire," fire set without steel and flint (or, in one tradition, struck out of a cold anvil by a smith), and used for various ritual purposes, including setting sacrificial fires (India), and purifying the sheep before they go out to pasture. Also, in Paul Edwin Zimmer's Dark Border books, it is the physical manifestation of the magic-psionics-superscience of the Children of Hastur.

 

Others include "noon-forged steel," in that one dude's attempt to do Harry Potter better (well-research bibliographic references courtesy of yours truly!), meteoric iron, and clothing made of textiles woven without knots (I think? Is that a thing? Or is it seams?), and unbleached. That last is from Tim Power's recent books, and actually features as something that would-be magic users (well, actually, living avatars, but details, details) have to wear to be eligible to cast spells, but it's easy enough to turn around. 

[Chris Goodwin]

I'm confused why art would be anti-magic. I would think constructs of the imagination would be sympathetic, but I may be coming at this from a different angle and missing a cool explanation.

The OP sez...

 

I'm working on formulating a list of materials that are anti-magic in nature. The common theme that ties them must be one of creation, be it literal or symbolic.

It depends on how @Ragitsu wants to interpret it; I've been assuming cosmological creation, but the symbolic part could even extend to paintbrushes and chisels.  I myself like the idea of more sympathetic, "flavors" of materials myself; like for instance clay, while symbolically being related to creation (in the case of both people creating art out of clay and in the myths of gods creating humans out of clay) would be especially useful for spells of creation.  But in the spirit of the original post, that's where I'm coming from.  

 

As a GM, I would tend to interpret it as requiring more "oomph"; so, an ordinary chisel wouldn't necessarily inherently be anti-magic; the chisel Michelangelo used to carve David would be, a little bit (though it could also be used as a magical tool, for creating stone golems and such), and the chisel used by the ancient god Ur-Hasham* to carve the first humans out of clay would have all the oomph, especially when wielded with a hammer forged out of nickel-iron from the core of the earth.  A different GM could decide that "oomph" is Active Points worth of a sympathetic effect rather than just anti-magic.  

 

* Made up by me, as far as I know, to use as an example here.

[Mzimwi]

I briefly worked on a world that was centered around the endless war between Faerie and Goblins. The Fey had magic, the Goblins psionics. The third clade was hybrids (humans, chimps, ogres, cherubs) - they had magnetism, because iron poisoned fey and blocked magic, while magnetic fields scrambled psi.

[Chris Goodwin]

In the aforementioned Operation Chaos, the age of goetics (their name for the science that is magic) came about when they learned how to degauss iron of its anti-magic effects.  

[Chris Goodwin]

It also depends on what exactly magic is in Ragitsu's world.  It could be that it is opposed somehow to the forces of Creation -- maybe it's fundamental chaos, in opposition to order; maybe it's a loophole in the fundamental laws of physics; or something else.  Whatever it is, the act of cosmological creation, whether literal or symbolic, is opposed to magic and therefore shuts it down.  

[TheDarkness]

It also depends on what exactly magic is in Ragitsu's world.  It could be that it is opposed somehow to the forces of Creation -- maybe it's fundamental chaos, in opposition to order; maybe it's a loophole in the fundamental laws of physics; or something else.  Whatever it is, the act of cosmological creation, whether literal or symbolic, is opposed to magic and therefore shuts it down.

Cool thinking!

 

I'm picturing this as still usable in the oppositional/sympathetic framework. In a world where magic is chaos given temporary form, the creation, a magical act, creates an order, the object. The first act is sympathetic, the object is in opposition. Interesting. The tools, like the brush, are used to make an order, an unmagical mundane, out of the chaos of creative magic. This raises interesting possibilities for builds. A chisel that alters and solidifies magic it faces into harmless, pleasing effects, for example...

 

See, this is totally why I asked, I could not wrap my brain around the concept of a creative product resisting magic(I didn't do a proper build, needed to buy more brain stretching, perhaps with brain barrier at a low level, as I already spent too many points on KS: obtusity).

 

Thanks, Chris!

[Ragitsu]

Using a painting of a rabbit (a la Albrecht Durer) to deflect a magical arrow is an amusing thought.

[TheDarkness]

Using a painting of a rabbit (a la Albrecht Durer) to deflect a magical arrow is an amusing thought.

Player 1: I knew I should have brought my Matisse. Always bring the Matisse!

 

GM: Well, you're already encumbered.

 

Player 2: Someone always has to bring the H.R. Giger...

 

Player 1: I swear, someday, the Giger will save all our butts...

 

Player 2: Oh, yeah, we're always facing people who summon insectoid xenomorphs...[/i]

 

Player 3: Damnit, I've got half a body and a bench floating over a pegasus, need a hand...

 

Player 1: I think this is a job for Dali...

[mhd]

Hmm, for me it would be more intuitive to associate creation with magic, not opposed to it. So something new would be very magical. The aforementioned ancient iron deposits would've been "created" a very long time ago, long enough for magic to have drained out of it.

 

So you need something symbolically or actually old to counter magic.

 

Of course this is the reason why Russia went back to their old hymn. They switched in the early 90s, but after hearing some dangerous reports from their magic storage facilities in Siberia...

 

It's also the reason why the Habsburg dynasty was becoming increasingly resistant to healing magic, resulting in birth defects that couldn't be countered.

 

The destruction of ancient sites in the middle east is something to be worried about, as is changing the voting laws in Great Britain!

 

The yearly druid assemblies at stonehenge? They actually try to counter the magic draining effect it has by now. An insidious plan, as that would mean that the Stone of Scone might soon be more powerful in its antimagics, leading to a new rise of Scotland that can't be prevented by the True Order of English Magicians.

[TheDarkness]

I actually got thinking about this earlier. If we accept the sympathetic/antagonistic relationship of objects to magic, then the proliferation of objects makes magic less universally applicable, then the result would naturally be magic seeming to disappear from life as man-made objects became more numerous. Essentially, with the advent of organized society, magic is hardly able to manifest in centers of population, and after the industrial age, never seen except with few witnesses.

 

It's an interestingly flexible theory.

[Markdoc]

I actually got thinking about this earlier. If we accept the sympathetic/antagonistic relationship of objects to magic, then the proliferation of objects makes magic less universally applicable, then the result would naturally be magic seeming to disappear from life as man-made objects became more numerous. Essentially, with the advent of organized society, magic is hardly able to manifest in centers of population, and after the industrial age, never seen except with few witnesses.

 

It's an interestingly flexible theory.

 

I mentioned Tim Powers and his "iron is antithical to magic" schtick in some of his novels in another thread on this forum. The idea was that with increasing industrialisation, iron became ubiquitous - in Europe, flakes and specks of iron impregnate the air and the water, so magic in those areas is too diffused to be useful. That means magic only survives in a few "primitive" areas, at sea (well away from the coasts) and in hidden areas (deep caves, the centres of huge forests or mountain chains, etc). You could easily use the same idea with other anti-magic artifacts or materials.

 

cheers, Mark

[Cancer]

On the other hand, meteoritic iron ... known long before humans knew how to smelt the metal from ore ... could be either intensely magical or anti-magical depending on how cosmology works. (In my worlds, it's the anti-magical.)

[Ragitsu]

In this campaign, magic is more of an artificial creative force. Geological deposits intimately tied to the planet's formation, well-used tools, things conceived by innate human imagination, spermatozoa, etc, radiate naturalness.

[DShomshak]

Some of this is preempted by recent posts, but whatever. (I compose long posts offline, then post when I get the chance.)

 

Ragitsu's original post leaves some ambiguity about what is meant by “creation.” It could mean “making stuff,” but the example seems to mean, “primordial.” I’ll follow the latter trail.

 

First off, AFAIK the only primordial, “unforged” iron accessible on the Earth’s surface is meteoric. All the iron from the Earth’s formation either sank into the core or combined chemically (mostly oxides or sulfides) – iron is quite reactive. Iron in the core is not going to make it back up to the surface. Nobody’s going to obtain it excapt by magic (there are thousands of kilometers of magma in the way), which perhaps defeats the idea of it as a magic-quelling substance.

 

Meteoric iron, however, has many symbolic attributes that make it an excellent supernatural material. Before people figured out how to smelt it, iron was very rare and precious. One ancient piece of jewelry consists of a bit of meteoric iron set in gold like a jewel. Ancient peoples also knew perfectly well that it fell from the sky, associating it with the gods: The Sumerian word for iron translates as “Star Stone.” The Greek word, sideros, likewise encodes the association with the stars. As a sacred and otherworldly material, you could have meteoric iron be anti-magical as easily as magical: It’s too pure and powerful, and so disrupts the lesser magic of mortals.

 

Even forged iron is an emblem of power, both mortal and supernatural. For a long time, the smelting process never actually melted the iron: The ore slowly became a spongy mass called a “bloom,” still contaminated with slag that had to be hammered out. Iron-smelting cultures saw the furnace as a magical womb in which the generative process of nature was accelerated by human art, the dead stone of the ore growing into the “live” bloom of the iron.

 

Iron is the metal of war and raw, brutal power. Homer contrasted “democratic iron” with the bronze of the aristocracy, but armies equipped with iron weapons and armor defeated the lordly heroes armed with bronze. It is the metal of Will and the ultimate dominance of killing those who stand against you.

 

Modern science adds to the metaphysical symbolism. Once nuclear fusion reaches iron, it consumes energy instead of producing it. Most stars never reach this stage, but iron is the absolute limit. When massive stars accumulate too much iron in their cores, they collaps and explode as supernovas. One such supernova triggered the collapse of the nebula that birthed the Solar System, while seeding it with iron: From destruction comes new creation. That iron, molten and churning in the Earth’s core, creates the magnetic field that protects the Earth’s atmosphere. So iron is the death of stars, the foundation of the world, and the shield against the excessive power of the Sun.

 

Back in the late Renaissance/early Enlightenment, early economists argued about the true nature of wealth and value. Traditionalists argued for gold. Their arguments ranged from the practical (as a malleable and chemically inert substance of limited supply, it had the right properties for money) to the explicitly magical (it attracts beneficial Solar energies). Others argued that value came from utility and used iron, the metal of industry, as their exemplar. The value of gold, they said, was an illusion. [This argument got tangled up with other arguments, notably including geocentrism vs. heliocentrism. If you’re interested, see Eileen Reeves, “As Good As Gold: The Mobile Earth and Early Modern Economics,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 62 (1999).]

 

You might incorporate this opposition into a magical system. You could make magic an act of deceit, a way of tricking or finessing the world into conforming to mortal will. Gold is the material expression of this illusion and can be used to power spells. Iron is the metal of hard reality. It reifies the primordial power that orders the world, from the cosmic cycles or creation and destruction to the direct, kill-or-be-killed reality of war.

 

If you don’t want to get quite so symbolic, or get a bit less obvious, the First Material of the Solar System – the first solid material, anyway – is still meteoric. Carbonaceous chondrites are compacted space dust, not yet smelted into other rocks. Until a magus obtains a sample of a comet, it’s the closest you can get to the unprocessed raw material of the Earth and other worlds.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Ragitsu]

I am fond of the idea of gold as protection against transmutation. Now there's finally a reason to be decked out in bling besides showing off one's deep pockets.