In Defense of Hard Magic Systems
Why stories should explain magic. [Magic Systems, Part 1 of 3]
Hi, I’m Eric. I write (and write about) epic fantasy. In my essay on why “hard” and “soft” magic systems matter to storytelling, I mentioned that I would explore magic systems more fully sometime in the future.
It is now a time in the future. The time.
To help me with this, I’ve teamed up with Ian Dunmore of Dunmore Dispatch to co-write three pieces. Over the next three weeks (including today), we’re going to explain the relative advantages of hard and soft magic systems, and then unearth what it all means for storytelling.
You may want to read this initial explainer first, but here’s everything you need to know:
A hard magic system is one that is explained. The audience understands its rules, limits, costs, and abilities.
A soft magic system is one that is unexplained. The audience does not get a sense of how magic works, why it operates the way it does, or what is or isn’t possible.
These two terms are on a “spectrum of magical rigidity.” Every example is likely to have “harder” and “softer” elements, and will have both “hard” and “soft” in comparison to various examples. These are relative terms.
The mechanism for determining the “rigidity” of a system is exposition and narrative, NOT worldbuilding. A character’s (or the author’s) understanding of the magic may differ from the audience’s, but it is the audience’s understanding that matters here.
To start things off, we’re going to look at Hard Magic Systems, their advantages and their disadvantages. We’ll look at soft magic next time.
Let’s dive in.
The Advantages of Hard Magic
Hard magic systems are valuable because they establish expectations for the audience through understanding.
Let us repeat: this is about audience expectations; the emphasis here is on audience.
The World Wide Web is chock full of resources for fantasy writers, gameplay developers, and fans. It’s easier than ever to create secondary worlds brimming with opportunity.
It’s also easier than ever to lose track of the plot, and not just metaphorically.
The world, the characters, the magic, the prose… these are all important, but they are all profiles or components of the story. The reason why hard magic systems are ultimately valuable is not merely because they allow for disciplines or creative worlds, but because they serve the audience by serving the story.
So we’re not going to focus on how to create hard magic systems, we’re here to discuss the more important issue of how magic systems relate to their given stories.
So what can hard magic do for stories? Well…
Deus Ex Magica
One of the immediate advantages of the expectations management that results from hard magic is that it prevents the magic from looking like an arbitrary problem-solving tool. In a word, it prevents deus ex machinas.
Deus ex machina is a term hearkening back to ancient Greek theatre where no matter how convoluted a plot became you could be confident that at the conclusion a god would descend onto center stage (“ex machina,” from a crane) and make everything right (in a comedy, at least). All wrongs adjusted, all bruises healed, and someone gets married. Today, deus ex machinas (ex machinas for short) are moments when an unreckoned force enters the story at the climax and contrives an unforeseeable ending.
In case it’s not clear, for storytellers this is very bad and to be avoided.
Ex machinas effectively undo all the plotting and buildup that’s occurred up until that point by throwing out all the expectations and knowledge the audience has acquired. If a climax—or really any pivotal moment in a story—depends on a magical function to save or doom the day, that magic will feel like an ex machina unless the audience understands it.
In this case, that means the magic that moment depends on had better be hard.
Expecto Machinomun!
Harry Potter is a good example of this plot principle in action. The Prisoner of Azkaban spends time discussing the Expecto Patronum spell. The trouble is that not only is it a highly advanced spell, but it also requires the caster to tap into positive childhood memories.
Harry Potter is an orphan raised by a toxic, shrewish family who abused him from the first day of their guardianship. His list of positive childhood memories is woefully short and uncommonly murky.
Therefore when the story’s finale arrives and Harry finds himself in dire need of such a spell, the audience understands how difficult it will be for Harry in particular to make such a cast. In an otherwise soft magic storyworld1 like Harry Potter where spells can range from fixing shattered spectacles to literal time travel, setting this kind of parameter is critical for such an important moment. The Prisoner of Azkaban had to harden enough in order for the reader to understand the impact of this spell on the plot and the character.
Science, or Luck?
This dynamic works for villains, too. For example, the anime/manga Jujutsu Kaisen takes place in an alternate modern day where the magical currency (manna, magicka, etc.) is “cursed energy.” Sorcerers with the affinity each have their own “cursed technique” which is unique to them, ergo each character has their own hard magic system unto themselves.
One character named Haruta has a cursed technique involving the use of luck in mortal situations. In scenarios where Haruta would decidedly not survive, a single “charge” of cursed energy gets used up to bail him out of the fire in some improbable fashion. The charges manifest as violet markings underneath his eyes. They take time to refill, but he naturally has six.
This power is fully explained to the audience through a disembodied narrator in a “Just Eat the Raw Veggies” exposition delivery.
What’s especially interesting about this case though is that Haruta himself is unaware of the mechanics of his own cursed technique. He himself does not know that the reason he’s been spared from death over and over is due to this inherent and measurable magical ability!
It’s an understandable scenario; other sorcerers are able to suss out the parameters of their cursed techniques through training, but how exactly would Haruta do that? Who would experiment by putting themselves in a mortal situation when the only confirmation of success or failure is life or death?
The result is that he doesn’t know the limits of his own power. Haruta develops a walk-on-water personality, blithely diving into perilous situations and mocking those who can’t keep up. It makes for a fantastic and truly despicable villain, but if the audience wasn’t explicitly told how it all worked then it wouldn’t feel that way; on the contrary, it would feel arbitrary and ungratifying.
It also makes the direction of Haruta’s arc even more satisfying as we the audience know something he doesn’t. One could say that Haruta’s own magic system is hard unto the audience, but soft unto him, a fact he himself would certainly wish to be aware of as the arc continues and his lower eyelid markings start to vanish one-by-one.2
Preempting Uncomfortable Questions
As previously mentioned, much of the purpose of hard magic systems is expectations management. If a certain mechanic works in one place, why can’t it be used elsewhere in the same way? The author may very well have an explanation, but if the audience isn’t apprised of that explanation then the story might look arbitrary even if it isn’t from an internal standpoint.
You can’t “worldbuild” your way out of this. You have to exposit your way out.
This next example involves a franchise normally categorized as science fiction, but the process its writers went through applies directly to our discussion of hard magic systems. (Besides, the principles that surround magic systems are readily applicable to virtually any story.)
In early episodes of Star Trek, the intrepid crew would find themselves on a new planet each week. Unfortunately, the studio didn’t have the budget to feature a landing craft embarking and disembarking from each new setpiece.
The solution? A transporter! The crew and any object can be beamed down or up at will. A whole massive prop replaced by a sprinkle of fizzly special effects.
It took just a few episodes for the writers to realize the issue: their transporter solved basically every problem in the known universe.
Our heroes are in trouble? Beam them out! Not sure what’s down there? Beam a camera down! An enemy is holding them up? Beam away all their guns! Renegade ship on the horizon? Beam the enemy captain onto The Enterprise and arrest him! Heck, beam a 10ft diameter chunk of their hull away and watch the vacuum of space to the rest! Or why even run into them? Why do you even need a ship if you can beam yourself anywhere? If the issue is distance, then build a relay of beams to function like public transit. A crew member has cancer? Beam out the tumor!
It gets even crazier when you consider thermodynamics and the conservation of energy. Fully realized, any teleporter is a perpetual motion machine, and it doesn’t take much ingenuity at all to harness it to its greatest, world-breaking effect! And it’s not just Star Trek either. The Warcraft franchise. The Witcher series. Stargate. Any storyworld that employs portals will need to constrain this technology before it dominates the world.
In order to solve these issues, Star Trek’s “magic system” had to harden.3 It had to place definite and predictable parameters on itself in order for the audience to anticipate and understand why the transporter was or wasn’t solving the plot every episode. With proper handling of exposition, hard magic systems keep the story consistent unto its own devices.
Power Scaling
Another thing hard magic systems allow a storyteller to do is power scale their worlds. Most hard magic systems involve some degree of training or competency, and the hero’s advancement is often confirmed by a test or combat engagement toward the end of the story.
But! This only works if the magic system is constrained and the audience has a grasp on its general operation, i.e. if the magic system is hard. If the story opens with a scene of two masters slugging it out in the sky with a force to shatter moons and swallow stars, that doesn’t elicit shock and awe from most audiences above the age of seven. In fact, it will likely have the opposite effect, signaling to the audience that that kind of strength is commonplace and unspecial in this secondary world. The power scale has been blown in the opening. There’s nowhere to go from here.
In contrast, consider Luke Skywalker in The Emperor Strikes Back. Luke spends almost the entire movie training with Yoda, honing his body and mind, using The Force to move small boulders. Yoda shows him how far he has to go by lifting Luke’s entire ship out of the quag later on. Then when Luke leaves early and encounters Darth Vader — a true master of The Force — we know that Luke is in for it because we’ve been watching him struggle, and we’ve seen from Yoda what he should be able to do. Without that training regimen, we’d have no way of appreciating how hopelessly unprepared Luke is for this fight.
Luke’s training regimen did more than just exposit, of course. It also showed his character, explored narrative themes, and helped us get to know his Campbellian mentor, Yoda. But more to our point: it was essential to convey the power scale. Luke is here on the scale, Yoda’s there, and Vader is way up there! The Force’s magic system hardened through this effect. In the first movie it may have seemed able to do anything, but now it looks like it can only do some things with mastery, and Luke is not a master. Power scaling can make for some powerful storytelling.
Putting Magic in the Spotlight
All of the above underscores and even assumes a more central point of hard magic systems: if the main character(s) is doing a lot of magic, that story will work better if its magic behaves predictably. If it behaves predictably (to the audience), it is by definition hard magic.
Stories work better when you understand what the main characters are doing. If your main character will be doing a lot of magic, then there ought to be understanding. Ergo if you want to tell a story about wizards as main characters, the audience should understand the wizards’ magic.
The softer the magic, the less capable that magic will be as a tool for the heroes. It naturally follows that if you want your heroes to solve problems with magic, then you need your audience to understand that magic’s rules.
Hence: hard magic.
In short: what’s the biggest advantage of using hard magic in a narrative?
You can put the magic’s usage in the spotlight, let your characters play with it, use it to defeat the big bad guy in the finale, and do things that are generally very very cool.
Conclusion
There’s a lot more that could be said about a hard magic system’s advantages over a soft one, but we hope this has been a sufficient survey for now.
Next week, we’ll return with Soft Magic Systems (there’s a link below), and then we’ll turn to unpacking some of the larger narrative implications of it all.
Till then. Thanks for reading.
If you like what you’ve read here and want us to keep making stuff like this, you can help us do that by liking, commenting, or sharing this post. You can also see the rest of my writing on this page.
And if you’re not subscribed to Ian’s publication, Dunmore Dispatch, I highly recommend you check it out. He’s a hell of a storyteller, and I owe him quite a lot when it comes to how I think about narrative.
There should be a link at the bottom of this email/post, but you can also check out Ian’s stuff here 👇
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In Defense of Soft Magic Systems
Magic Systems, Part 2.
This week, Ian Dunmore and I are continuing our co-written exploration of so-called “hard” and “soft” magic systems.
Also, a special thanks to Marco.D.Blanco for his generous contribution of The Hunt of the Midnight Dryad for use in this series. Check out The Magic Lantern to see what Marco’s working on.
If you really liked this and want to support my work directly, consider becoming a Forgemaster by taking out a paid subscription. I offer my Forgemasters exclusive short stories, behind-the-scenes posts, and a direct voice in my creative process. Join below 👇
More on Harry Potter later. You could argue it’s hard or soft, but remember: relative terms. On a spectrum.
If it seems odd to say that a magic system is hard from the outside but soft from the inside, remember that it boils down to understanding. The "magic" of lightning was mysterious (soft) for millennia before the development of electromechanics (hard).
We recognize that what’s described above also fits the description for “hard sci fi.” There’s considerable overlap between the two terms—indeed, it might be argued they’re one and the same.
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Mmmm power scaling is so critical- the timing of introducing the "big bad" is key here. There's gotta be an exact calculation for how many times you can introduce an EVEN STRONGER boss a la Dragon Ball Z before the audience is bored and realizes there's probably 20 additional bosses after the current guy.
Good information worth keeping and using for story building. I believe I use something in-between for my fantasy world, though leaning more to the hard side now that I understand the concept better.