User:Spazalicious Chaos/The Book of Channeled Wonders(3.5e Sourcebook)/Introduction

What is Magic?
The best definition of magic I have ever heard of comes from Spiritual Enlightenment- The Damnedest Thing, in which Jed McKenna explains that if you do not understand how something works, it gets labeled as magic. Thus, non-programmers often treat the interwebs like it is voodoo, the fop that brings his car into the shop feels like he should watch the mystic mechanic in case what he is doing is just smoke and mirrors, people not initiated into the way of the gun act like guns are magic death sticks, etc.

But D&D is not usually a game of misperceptions. In D&D you can learn to make fire and ice appear from nowhere or to restore life to the lifeless, by means holy or profane. But that doesn't make it easier to understand. Sure, as a wizard you know that if you twist your fingers into knots and stare daggers at something while whispering a death wish in Draconic you can make it collapse into dust. But does he actually know what the hell happened? Did his mind separate every partical in the targets body? Did he ask some demon to burn it away? Is there a god who heard you and had a "that's my cue" response?

From here on in this book will assume that magic is a super force that actively defies explanation. Much like blind men feeling an elephant and trying to describe it after a quick grope, magic is a force so large, omnipotent and varied that you can only know part of it. To ask questions of magic is to find more questions and quite possibly get crushed by the sheer mass of it.

Origins of Magic
Magic as a super force is older than old. Modern big bang theory states that before electromagnitism, gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces were separate, they were a singular super force capable of breaking the light barrier. Magic is that super force on steriods, as it combines in addition matter, fate, time, strings and membranes from string theory, souls and spirits, and so on. This force exists in equilibrium most of the time, but it can be condensed, manipulated and collected like any of the other forces.

This writing assumes that the means to do such manipulation of this force lies within the spirit of the caster, and thus is based on a combination of insight, personal strength of will and sheer intellectual processing power. To work magic one needs a spirit (and lets assume eveything does) that has been properly trained (takes a character class) to both collect and focus the energies of magic (via the Concentraition skill) before refining and evoking the energy into a properly formated alteration of the world (a spell.)

By studying creature for whom this process occurs naturally, like dragons and beholders, various intelligent creatures have developed way to train their souls to do what was described above. While the first spells were mere floods of raw force that could kill the caster as easily as do what the caster intended, over time various magics were codified into strict and regimented spells that were predictable, easier to use and had only a slight chance of ripping the caster to shreds.