Between the Boughs by Evergreen Games

(ttrpg) you are small and the world is magic

lately I've seen several blog posts thoughtfully rethinking the role of magic in ttrpgs. some I've enjoyed:

I've begun reflecting myself where and how I value magic in fiction. when it comes to "OSR-style" adventuring (which I'll qualify here as location-based, player-driven adventures with strong influence from early traditions and versions of D&D) I often find myself pushing at the boundaries of what magic is in the world or what relationship the players have to it.

once I ran a game of Mausritter with an improvised magic system: have your mouse nibble on something and say what you want to happen. I'll give you 1-3 d6 to roll based on how well it suits what it nibbles on + how appropriate of a solution it is to this situation, and we'll see what happens.

at first, of course, players wanted to use this system to solve every problem, though over time its cost and creative difficulty balanced it out somewhat. it helped that I started putting missed turns on the table. still, it remains that when you give someone a hammer everything else looks like a nail. when you give someone a puzzle they want to solve it! these rules served as (much more than the catch-all solution it may strike the reader as) a toy which defined much of the tone and texture of the game.

it did what I wanted, and I was mostly happy with it. I wanted to subtly signal to my players, who until then were more accustomed to 5e play, that they have a strong agency in the fiction and to invent and alter the world around them. I liked the idea of the world being full of magic and cool battle shonen-esque powers that would then mix and temper with the precarity, vulnerability and stakes of Mausritter. and indeed, all the antagonists and enemies had curious powers and tricks of their own.

it was good fun! it was messy and imperfect, but everyone was laughing and puzzling and engaged and I couldn't ask for anything more.

shortly after I began to be introduced to horror ttrpgs. it showed me an angle on the hobby I long needed but had yet to experience so forwardly. I liked the danger of OSR, I liked the feeling of danger and the way it made me think carefully. I liked the creativity, the urgency, the minimalism. but still, I cared more for character and otherwise narrative-focused experiences rather than procedural dungeon crawling to its own end.

when I tried horror games it was such an "aha!" in this way, and ever since I've had love and fascination for places where these two schools begin to meet, such as with Liminal Horror and Trophy.

I continued to realize many shared threads. as a player, I love feeling small, vulnerable, desperate and like I'm grasping around in the dark - there's a way to me where this tone of play reflects the act of playing a GM-directed TTRPG in and of itself that feels synchronistic. and as a GM, I love creating dark, tense and mysterious moods that drive dense and meaningful play.

at some point I realized... wait, isn't this all something fantasy fiction so often is, but with a different aesthetic? I don't mean fantasy ttrpgs (which are so often DND-influenced), but rather literature, myths, fairytales and so on. the kinds of stories where the world is magical, and that magic represents the vastness and unknowability of the world itself.

much of the horror we know today draws on the same storytelling roots but casts it in a more starkly dark, fatalistic and (often) modern tone. fairytales and myths are whimsical and humanistic just as often as they're tragic and macabre, and often interweave the two.

the kind of magic I love is the kind that represents exactly this. and I think, perhaps counter-intuitively, that sort of magic can only be diluted by assigning knowable rules or procedures to it. the act of rolling to cast magic missile is fundamentally un-magical*, and so even is gathering spell components and uttering a diegetic incantation (as cool as that is and as much as I'd love to participate in such a game.) or asking gods for favors.

* strictly using the goal/definition of "magic" I've described here

this kind of magic is surprising, abrupt, and changes one's concept of reality within the fiction. it can be as much a blessing as a source of terror, if not both. it is something one can only be at the mercy of, as one is at the mercy of a grand and strange world. this magic is not a metaphor for agency, it is a metaphor for vulnerability and fickle providence.

in practice, this kind of magic exists in the prep and the adventure design moreso than in the hands of the players. it's entirely rulings and fiction-driven. and when a player gets a chance to wield some of it for themselves, it remains a minor and fleeting blessing amidst the greater world that contains them.

I'm only at the start of exploring this path myself, but for an example of how it might look in play, you could check out my recent first published adventure, The Quaintest Quietest Cottage. (it's free and a short read! so I'm not selling you something.)

in the end, I'm not sure this is a productive addition to this wider discussion, but I hope it can serve for something. all the best! 🤍