Worldbuilding theory - magic, innovation, and when to stop worldbuilding
Let’s break down what you asked, because it’s really interesting!
You’ve identified a few challenges here:
- finding limits to a seemingly arbitrarily powerful magic system
- figuring out how a society innovates when they don’t need to understand things
- figuring out how magic functions
- deciding how much effort to spend on these questions
And while you asked these in the context of a specific Harry Potter fanfic, I’d like to answer them regarding fantasy worldbuilding more generally, because how you answer these questions makes a huge impact on your storytelling.
The Limits of Magic
At one point, someone on Tumblr asked Neil Gaiman: “do you think demons can be redeemed?”
He answered: “Only if you're making up a story in which demons can be redeemed. In any stories you make up in which demons are unredeemable they can't.”
It’s really tempting, as a writer, to get caught up in making worldbuilding that makes sense, all the way down. But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that you are, ultimately, a storyteller, not an engineer. If your story needs magic to have limits, then magic has limits! It has whatever limits are needed for your story.
There are a few typical ways to limit what magic can do:
- Strength of the caster (i.e. level 10 wizard can cast level 10 spells)
- Energy source (i.e. big spells make the wizard fall over and faint, or use up magic crystals)
- Imagination/belief/will of the caster (i.e. it works if you believe it will work)
- Available components (i.e. you need eye of newt and toe of frog)
- Precise methods (i.e. draw THESE runes in THIS arrangement)
- Affinities (i.e. water wizards do water magic)
Often, these are combined. In Star Wars, the mindset of the Jedi is clearly the most important factor, but there is also a strength differential between force users, and we tend to think that force use can wear them out. In Harry Potter, spells have precise methods to be followed, and generally rely on the caster using a particular tool (a wand) - but we also see exceptions to both of these. In The Witcher, witchers can cast particular charms with specific methods, but it uses up energy to do so; they also make potions using specific components and sell those components to other magic users. In Avatar: the Last Airbender, the benders have affinities, they have different strengths, and they are also limited or empowered by a combination of imagination and technique.
These limits also don’t have to be universal. Just as different magic users can have different affinities, they can have different methods. In Tamora Pierce’s ‘Circle of Magic’ series, academic mages draw strength from internal reserves and use precise methods, while ambient mages draw strength from their environment and are much more flexible - but are also limited by specific affinities.
Limits to magic are an important storytelling tool, because they provide challenges for your characters to overcome. If the magic system is limited by strength of the caster, the characters may need to either train to improve their strength, or build alliances to get around those limits. If the magic system requires an energy source, the characters often need to balance resources - deciding whether to use their energy now, or save it for later. If the magic system requires imagination or will, the characters need to train mentally to gain enlightenment, flexible thinking, or mental discipline. If the magic system is limited by available components, the characters may need to quest to get those components, or protect their precious resources from theft or damage. If the magic system requires precise methods, the characters often need to learn how to do the right spells in order to get the result they want. If the magic system is limited by affinities, the characters either need to think creatively to achieve results despite those limits, or build alliances to get the advantages of multiple affinities in one place.
All of these have implications for the kinds of stories you can tell, the kinds of characters you can tell them about, and the kinds of challenges those characters might face. In the Star Wars magic system, mental training is critical, which is perfect for a story about the kind of people the Jedi are. A Jedi is magically powerful because they are enlightened. In the Harry Potter magic system, knowing the right method is critical, which is perfect for a story about a school. A wizard is magically powerful because they know the right spell. In the Witcher magic system, having the right resources is critical, which is perfect for a story about freelancers trying to make a living in a hostile economy. A witcher is magically powerful when they have the right equipment. In the Avatar magic system, having the right allies is critical, which is perfect for a story about friendship and intercultural understanding. A group of benders is most magically powerful when they are diverse.
The easiest way to get frustrated with a magical system is to look for limits of one type when it actually has limits of some other type. The question you asked was in the context of Harry Potter, where magic can seem arbitrarily powerful. The trick is that magic in Harry Potter can do almost anything…if you know how. In story after story, knowing the right spell or potion is essential - and the characters actually do spend a fair amount of effort on learning them! We get fairly long sequences devoted to practicing essential spells or making essential potions, and then once those are added to the repertoire, they continue to be useful to the characters long afterwards. While the movies do quite a lot of miscellaneous wand-directed telekinesis, most of the plot-relevant magic by the protagonists was learned on screen. (In fact, book by book, it’s fairly easy to identify the most important spell because of these practice sequences: wingardium leviosa, expelliarmus, expecto patronum, accio, occlumency, apparition. In the seventh book, Harry triumphs because of enlightenment, not a spell, and they leave the learning sequences behind at the same time they leave the school.) As far as Harry Potter is concerned, a wizard could presumably turn the universe into a tea kettle - but only if they knew the method.
How Innovation Happens
At a fundamental level, people raised in a modern Western context learn that things happen because of real, consistent cause-and-effect chains. That a consistent cause will produce a consistent effect by a consistent process, and that we are capable of learning what these effects and processes are through observation. We don’t really think about the fact that we think this; it’s just how the world works.
We also grow up with the idea that effective design requires knowing how something works. That we can make planes fly because we understand aerodynamics. That we can make plastics because we understand molecular structures. That we can create effective medicine because we understand cellular biology.
But this isn’t entirely true. There’s actually a lot of things that we don’t understand, and we do anyway. For example, we know a lot about how humans think at the level of what they experience, but we know very little about how it works neurologically. The brain is still mostly a black box, where inputs go in and outputs come out, and something mysterious happens in the middle. Even in medicine, there are things we absolutely don’t understand. We don’t know how paracetamol works. We know that it reduces fever and muffles pain, but we don’t know the mechanism. And it’s one of the most widely used medicines we have.
Ultimately, while the questions ‘how’ and ‘why’ are important, ‘what if’ is just as powerful.
Often, the question of ‘how’ comes afterwards. We try something new, it has a result, and then we speculate and theorise about why it did that. Those theories inform the next thing we try, and then whatever happens helps us adjust our theories. Scientific theory isn’t the reality of how things happen; it’s a proposed explanation of how things happen. And the very bedrock of the scientific method is the assumption that we get the explanations wrong. We are constantly iterating our way towards a more accurate explanation of how the world works, but it is only ever more accurate.
And yet, we come up with technological innovations anyway. Steel was invented more than a thousand years before the molecular chemistry that could explain how carbon strengthened the iron. Siege engines used counterweights to throw stones in precise arcs more than a thousand years before gravity could describe why those stones fell where they did. Magnetic compasses were used for navigation centuries before we could describe magnetic fields. Humans around the world have spent thousands of years selectively breeding plants and animals, and it’s only in the last century and a half that we’ve had the genetic theory to explain how traits are passed down. How do you innovate when you can solve problems without understanding how it works? You find problems to solve, and then once you’ve solved them, you find new ones.
The biggest drivers of innovation aren’t scientific. They’re economic and military (which is also economic). People look for a way to get something that costs less (in resources or effort) or produces a more valuable result (in aesthetics or efficacy). They also look for ways to display wealth and status that are recognised by their community. Something new is usually rarer and may take more effort, so is therefore higher status to display. The richest adopt it, then demand from the middle class drives a search for more affordable methods, until the technology filters down to the lowest classes, by which point, the richest have moved on to something else. When fabric becomes cheap, quality tailoring is more fashionable than abundant skirts. When tailoring becomes cheap, keeping up with the ‘right’ styles shows you’re one of the ‘right’ people. When fast fashion becomes cheap, wearing high quality, ‘timeless’ garments shows that you have class. And so the cycle continues on.
So how does this work in a magical context? Very similarly. People come up with ideas, try methods to achieve them, and adjust their methods until they get something they want. Scholars may theorise how those methods work, and those scholars may be wrong. But as long as consistent causes produce consistent effects (given a consistent environment), then people will continue to come up with new ways to do things.
For storytelling purposes, you can make your society high innovation or low innovation, that whole spectrum has historical precedent. You can also decide whether your protagonists are in proximity to that innovation or not. Experimenters could be considered impractical radicals compared to the tried-and-true methods, or they could be abstracted and theory-focused scholars trying to understand the universe, or they could be businessmen selling the next big thing, or they could be embedded in their communities, slowly refining their methods to be as smooth and efficient as possible. Your protagonists could hear about them as people far away that have nothing to do with us, or could go to them with problems to solve, or could buy the latest manual with the newest innovations to try at home. Those innovations could be practical, reliable, expensive, dangerous, effective, or useless. They can be easily transferable, or embedded in a specific context.
The key thing is that human society is very, very rarely static. Even when the cultural narrative is that they do things the way they always have, there are usually some changes happening, if only in the goods that are being traded from neighbouring groups. (And, on that note, you should also expect some degree of different practices between neighbouring groups.)
How Magic Works: A Case Study
As an author, it’s helpful to have a vague idea of how magic actually works, but it actually doesn’t need to be super detailed. As discussed above, ‘what’ can be more important than ‘how’. What you really need to know is:
- What kinds of results you can get
- What kinds of inputs are required (e.g. spells, energy)
- What can go wrong
How those inputs lead to the results can be a black box to you, as long as they’re reasonably consistent. They can even be surprising and counter-to-expectations sometimes, as long as the characters are also surprised by the unexpected result.
But let’s say you’re in a fandom context, and you’re trying to get to grips with a canon magical system. Here are some of the things to look for:
- Who can do magic?
- Do people who do magic carry special supplies?
- Are there kinds of magic that are common?
- Is there forbidden magic? Why do they say it is forbidden?
- Is there ‘impossible’ magic? Why do they think it’s impossible?
- Is there easier and harder magic? What’s the difference?
- Is magic divided into types? What is different about these?
- Do people in universe have a theory of magic?
- How does magic connect to religious beliefs and practices?
- How does magic connect to the economy?
Let’s take Star Wars as an example.
Who can do magic? Jedi, Sith, people who are ‘strong in the force’. They have innate capacity, but training allows them to do specific things with it. Not everyone has this ability.
Do people who do magic carry special supplies? Magic users often have a lightsaber, but a lightsaber is not necessary for most kinds of magic use.
Are there kinds of magic that are common? Enhanced acrobatics, moving things without touching them, and enhanced intuition. We also see mind tricks fairly often.
Is there forbidden magic? Why is it forbidden? ‘Using the Dark Side’ is forbidden to the Jedi. This is mostly about the method, not the outcome. It is forbidden because it is corrupting.
Is there impossible magic? What makes it impossible? Bringing back the dead. However, philosophically, the limits of the force are the limits of the practitioner. ‘All things are possible in the force’.
Is there easier and harder magic? What’s the difference? Force users are able to do more complex tasks more reliably once they are trained (like deflecting blasters blindfolded). Moving things without touching them seems like a fairly easy skill, but gets harder with increased scale and precision. Lightning is presumably very difficult.
Is magic divided into types? What is different about these? There is the ‘light side’ and the ‘dark side’, which refer to the state of mind of the user. We also have a distinction in some of the canon material between the ‘living’ and the ‘unifying’ force, with the ‘living’ force affecting living creatures, and the ‘unifying’ force being more connected to non-living things and to seeing the future. These are blurry categories, and Jedi can do both.
Do people in universe have a theory of magic? Midichlorians have something to do with whether people can use the force, and the force is an energy that is everywhere and in everything. The force is something that is difficult to understand because it is so vast, and has some kind of ‘will’ of its own.
How does magic connect to religious beliefs and practices? The main magic users - Jedi - are a religious group. While their belief in the force is practical as well as religious, this is historically normal. Up until the modern period, religion was not a ‘theory’ people chose to believe in: it was the standard explanation of how the world works. Jedi religious practices are simultaneously about enhancing their spiritual connection to the force and about enhancing their ability to use the force.
How does magic connect to the economy? The main magic users - Jedi - are nominally disconnected from the economy, and magic does not appear to be something traded between individuals. We do not see Jedi buying passage on a ship by loading cargo with the force. However, Jedi services are purchased by governments. The Jedi as a group are funded by the Republic Senate, and members of the Republic Senate can then make requests of the Jedi to provide services. (Jedi who do not exist as part of the Temple-Senate relationship have a relatively similar sponsorship model: a community who supports a Jedi to live in their area is likely to benefit from the Jedi doing whatever they think is right, and may be able to request assistance.) This is not a direct money-for-magic relationship, but it is an economic one.
What sort of ‘rules’ does that produce about how the magic works?
- Magic is always done by an individual person
- Most people can’t do magic
- (Therefore:) Magic can’t be mechanised or mass produced
- Individual magic users can be better or worse at magic, and at particular kinds of magic
- (Therefore:) Training and cooperation is important to getting things done
- Magic can move things and sense things
- Magic can’t turn one thing into something else
- Magic users are affected by the ‘will’ of the force, and this may affect their actions
- Magic doesn’t get exactly the same result every time
- Objects (mostly) do not have inherent magic, and cannot be made magical. (Kyber crystals are an exception.)
- Magic is not ‘purchasable’, and is not considered in discrete units.
A Jedi turning an enemy droid into a chicken wouldn’t work. A Jedi crushing an enemy droid, throwing an enemy droid, or blocking an enemy droid works perfectly. A factory relying on the force wouldn’t work. An explorer relying on Jedi intuition might.
So, in this case study, what are our inputs, outputs, and potential disasters?
- Inputs: energy from the magic user and the force; attention and mental focus of a skilled magic user
- Outputs: kinetic energy, directed movement, knowledge, persuasion
- What could go wrong: not enough energy (object doesn’t move enough or person isn’t persuaded), not enough precision (object moves in the wrong way or is damaged, intuition is interpreted wrongly), force wants something else (unexpected outcome).
You can see that this is enough to work with for a story, even without a more detailed mechanism.
When Do You Stop Worldbuilding?
I’ve spent nearly three thousand words now talking about worldbuilding, and anyone who reads my fic knows that I love playing with it. But how do I decide how ‘deep’ to go? Or to put it another way, when do I stop?
When it doesn’t matter to the story, or I’m not having fun anymore.
The thing is that stories don’t need nearly as much worldbuilding as they seem like they do. And they often have less worldbuilding than they appear to.
Ursula Vernon, writing about worldbuilding, once said:
“You don’t want to drag the world in and put it on the dissecting table—that way lies Silmarillion-esque prologues—you just want them to catch a glimpse of it, like an okapi’s butt in the rainforest, and go “Whoa. There’s a really big animal over there, isn’t there?” while it glides away into the shadows…And the truth, of course, is that for me (and I’d guess for many of us) there’s no okapi there at all, it’s basically a big striped butt on a stick that the writer is waving through the undergrowth.” (https://ursulav.livejournal.com/1536076.html)
You can give the impression of so much worldbuilding with just a hint. In one of my Star Trek fanfics (in progress, not published yet), there’s a throwaway line where Spock is critiquing a history book, and says, “It barely discusses the Ascent to Gol, or the Refusal, or the Declaration of Night.” Do I know what these three events are? No. But it definitely sounds like I’ve got a whole historical timeline tucked away in my back pocket. This kind of throwaway reference is exactly how ordinary people in the real world talk about common knowledge, and it gives the impression that there is knowledge backing up the reference.
If I come up with a magical or technical thing I want to work when it probably shouldn’t, there’s an easy fix for that. “You’re trying to meld the Thingamy with the Gidget? That’s impossible!” says Character A. “Ah,” says Character B, “but if I use the Jabberwocky Principle, then I can treat the Gidget as a Momerath, and we’ve been melding Momeraths and Thingamys for decades.” Do I need to explain the Jabberwocky Principle, or what a Momerath is? Nope. I just need to give the impression that the problem has been solved according to something that makes sense in universe.
I do worldbuilding in detail because I genuinely enjoy it, and because it’s a fun way to try to combine my knowledge of different topics. I know quite a bit about history, linguistics, ecology, historical crafts… Figuring out how things could work, from a given premise and with given restrictions, is fun for me. Quite simply, I like research. When I decide I’m not interested, I maneuver the story so that the bit I’m not interested in is out of focus or off-screen. It’s a bit of storytelling sleight-of-hand that I recommend to everyone.