TheEldritchGod
A Cloud Of Pure Spite And Eyes
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2021
- Messages
- 3,444
- Points
- 183
So, I've been trying to get this worked out in more detail, get down to the nitty-gritty, and I want to put it all in one spot.
You can most likely skip over this part.
Now that the basics are out of the way.
Okay. The important part
Types of Mana
One of the problems I was having was, 'How do I take a fundamental particle such as a unit of mana and allow it to do so many different things?' Originally, I thought about the periodic table, and how the number of protons determines the properties of an element, but that seemed... too mundane.
Then I came across some old pseudo-science about an attempt to explain atoms with knots.
Did you know there is a 'periodic table' of knots?
No. Really. There is a lot of science in knotted loops. If you take a springy material and loop it, it makes a circle. If you tie it into a knot, it'll spring into a certain shape, based on how many times it crosses itself, but you can always compress it back down to a circle, it just isn't stable like that.
Then I remembered Borromean rings.
A borromea ring is when three rings are interlinked, but if any one of them is removed, the other two are free.
And suddenly, I had a way to express my mana.
So, if all monads are 'loops' of some sort. Unlike normal protons and neutrons which are a combination of quarks that merge, monads instead become linked, like Borromean rings. That's where it starts. Now, there is no reason, each and every monad cannot be a 'knot' in and of itself. After all, a Borromean ring only needs to be linked at a single section of the loop. Each loop could be a rather complex knot, in and of itself.
Here is a crude example.
So, if we assume that certain 'knots' are only stable in certain configurations, but any knot can be compressed back down to a simple loop, then what you have is the capacity for High magic worlds having very complex knots in the loops of magic, whereas the more dark matter you have in the background, the more 'compressed' reality is, the higher clarity is, and thus highly complex magic 'collapses' down to simple rings, and thus becomes impossible to perform.
Thus this becomes my 'Periodic Table of Mana, where to manifest say, 'Elemental magic' is possible with very simple knots, and Cosmic-level magic requires the most complex of knots to pull off. So where someone might be able to brute force something with enough mana, if someone was rather skilled at magic, and the universe was permissive enough, one could make very complex 'knotted' monads in the mana particles to pull off complex magic, but with less energy.
Anyrate, I just wanted to get this all in one spot and invite some feedback. The Borromean ring and periodic table of knots is the new addition to my magic system. I wanted to get away from the Atomic Model and I think this works well on both a thematic level, as well a practical one.
If you read my madness this far, thanks.
You can most likely skip over this part.
WHAT IS "PHYSICS" IN FICTION?"
In fiction, we write stories based on reality, to some extent or another. It can follow reality very closely, like in a normal, slice-of-life romance, or it can have magic, super science, or spirits. It can even be really out there, like Flatland, a book about 2-dimensional life, and have very little do to with the laws of reality, as we know it.
However, by definition, every fictional story has FICTIONAL physics, because the book is... duh... fiction. You, the author, have to decide what rules you are keeping, and what rules you are throwing out. This is simple for most since most authors don't change physics much. Less is more, so most stories have a few changes, stated up front, and then the story tries to be "as normal" as possible from there. But maybe YOU are the exception.
I have developed a series of categories that I use for keeping my fictional setting's altered physics properly segregated so it is easier to keep track, thus avoiding emersion-breaking plot holes.
TERMS
Pataphysics - Imaginary Science (What we cannot conceive)
Metaphysics - Memetic Science (What we conceive)
Isophysics - Normal physics, but in the literary sense. (Objective reality)
Hypophysics - Quantum mechanics, but literary. (Subjective Reality)
Infraphysics - Null science (The science of nothing)
Paraphysics - An altered version of Meta, Iso, or Hypo.
EXAMPLES:
Pataphysics - Something completely alien to the human way of thought. This would be your neverborns or eldritch horrors of Lovecraftian origins. By definition, you cannot conceive Pataphysical concepts.
Metaphysics - This is thought. Pure concepts such as emotions, honor, philosophy, etc.
Para-metaphysics - It's where you take normal human thought and give it new rules that couldn't exist. The physical manifestation of thought would be a para-meta concept.
Isophysics - "Normal" physics, but the thing is, does "normal" physics really exist in writing? For example, 20 bad guys shoot SMGs at MC and nobody hits. This is Isophysics. Yes, it is POSSIBLE, but really, did that make sense? So, it isn't "physics", it's isophysics.
Para-Isophysics - You take physics and add new rules. This is most magic systems.
Hypophysics - Quantum mechanics, but again, literary. This gets a little fuzzy because TECHNICALLY, it should only be what is possible, but we don't know what is or isn't possible. On some level of reality, when you get small enough, perception changes reality. The act of observation alters what you observe. So this would be quantum mechanics as we understand it.
Para-Hypophysics - Quantum physics applied to macro objects. Again, this gets fuzzy. I put the line at "How hard is the Magic System/Super Science?" Para-Hypo is more sci-fi than Para-Iso, IMHO. It's more about how much justification you put into your altered physics. How closely do you "observe" your magic system? if you do a lot of hand waving, it's Para-iso. If you are very specific and detailed, chances are it should fall under para-hypo.
Infraphysics - The Science of NULL. This is a difficult concept to handle. It is the literary science of NOTHING. The absolute lowest end of concepts. Where we are dealing with the absence of everything. There might be a complete absence of matter/energy/thought, but even empty space has rules and permanence. So, if you are dealing with REALLY alien concepts about NOTHING, then you are dealing with Infraphysics.
You will note, that there are no Para versions of Pata or Infra physics. Why? Because it already IS as Para as we can get. There are no ALTERNATE versions of Pata or Infra physics because humans cannot even begin to conceptualize what is NORMAL for these versions of physics, much less what an alternate version of them would be.
IN PRACTICE:
Let's start with Isophysics:
You might say, why make up a new term? Just call it physics and be done with it. Why call it isophysics? Well, all isophysics falls under normal physics, but not all normal physics, falls under isophysics. What I mean is that isophysics are the rules of reality you, the author are KEEPING.
There was a new manga I read called Colorless. In this setting, it has most of the normal laws of physics. Buildings have foundations. People need to eat. Electricity works. That sort of this. All that would fall under isophysics. However, in this setting, there is no color, except for color that has been collected and harvested. This collected color has magical properties. So, under normal physics, there is a spectrum of color, but in this universe, there is not. The new and altered properties of color would fall under Para-Isophysics. Para-iso would be any normal laws of physics that you have changed or new laws that you have added. Typically, you would put most "normal" magic under para-iso.
However, if you are sticking with normal physics, but just pushing the boundary, it stays in Isophysics. Whenever you do something possible, but highly improbable, you should stick it under isophysics and keep an eye on it. Yes, luck exists, but if you use luck too much, it starts to move from isophysics to para-isophysics, and readers do not like it when you start making up powers on the fly to save your MC. It's a useful tool to keep track of "Possible, but improbable" events in your story. if you use them too much, you might want to consider going back to the start of the story and establishing that your MC is very lucky, or has a blessing from a leprechaun, or something, so it becomes easier for your reader to suspend disbelief.
Metaphysics:
Metaphysics is anything that deals with concepts. This is the realm of memes. If you can imagine it, it falls under metaphysics. We all know what thought is, so I hope I don't have to clarify that. However, you might want to get whacky with your memetics, so that becomes Para-metaphysics. Typically, that would be your ghosts, your spirits, gods, that sort of thing. If you want magic that is based off summoning spirits and then the spirits do the magic, that's Para-metaphysics. If your magic has personalities, it's Para-meta. So if you are just dealing with "hard" magic, you'd stick with para-iso, but if you are dealing with praying for spells, summoning spirits, that sort of thing, then you are moving into para-meta.
Now the two do bleed from one into the other. This isn't a hard and fast set of rules. Remember, this is to help YOU, the author, keep track of how you are altering your fictional setting and the changes you are making to reality. So, while a summoned spirit would be Para-meta, the magic it casts could fall under para-iso. It's useful to think of it this way, so that when you are considering "What can my MC do?" you don't make the mistake of making a given power a Swiss army knife. LIMITATIONS ARE GOOD.
People like to see MCs challenged and then overcome those challenges. They also don't like "new" powers that just 'happen' when the situation needs it. If you need the MC to get out of trouble, see if he has an already established ability you can twist and use in a devious manner to save his ass, rather than make something new, or if you must, make sure it's at least adjacent to an established exception.
Pataphysics:
I didn't make up the name. Some French guy did. This is the physics of what we cannot think of. If you can imagine it, it's metaphysics. If you can't, it's pataphysics. A good example of pataphysics is a 4-dimensional hypercube. We are three-dimensional. We cannot see in four dimensions, so we cannot truly "conceive" of a hypercube. We can make a 3-dimensional shadow of one, but in the end, we are just seeing its shadow and trying to imagine what it might look like
(Actually, because the back of our eyes is effectively "flat", we are seeing a 2-dimensional image of a three-dimensional shadow, of a four-dimensional object. Funny that.)
This is pataphysics in a nutshell. It is where you cannot conceive of something, but you can observe how such a thing might interact with what you CAN conceive. So if you are trying to write about truly alien concepts, then it falls under pataphysics. Oddly enough, a good chunk of horror stories use pataphysics. Most physics we can understand, but the utterly alien tends to send chills up one's spine. We can understand some guy chanting and casting fireballs. It's hard to understand why someone, with tears of bubbling pitch streaming down their face, would open three of their seven mouths to chant the song that destroys the world.
Both involve chanting, one is a bit more disturbing.
Pataphysics doesn't have to be terrifying, however. Look at Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic. Magic has a colour that we cannot see unless you are a magic user yourself. it is the 8th color. This would be Pataphysical. It's just a nice, yet alien touch to the story. I also like the part where he describes an object as being so cold it is ANTI-BOILING the water around it. So if you want to add just a pinch of the alien to your story, consider googling prefixes and suffixes and then take some concepts from your story and just mix and match. See what you can come up with.
Hypophysics:
Hypophysics is another word for quantum physics. Again, it is the physics you are keeping, hence why we use this term instead of quantum physics. Hypophysics is about the rules that govern very small things as well as minute details. When you try to observe very small objects, it gets increasingly difficult the smaller it is. For example, you need a microscope to see single-cell organisms. To go smaller, you might use an electron microscope. However, an electron microscope works by shooting a stream of electrons at an object. There is a limit to how small you can go with this.
Let's say you are trying to look at a single proton. If you used an electron microscope, this would be like trying to find out what color a beach ball is in a totally dark room by firing a stream of billard balls at it, then observing where the eight-ball bounced off to. This is what they mean when they say that the act of observing an object changes the object.
On a quantum level, perception changes the object you are looking at. If you took a stream of photons, trying to detect packets of energy, you will find packets of energy. if you switch to detecting for waves instead of particles, you will CHANGE the particles into waves. So if you have a stream of light that you split into two, and you start detecting for particles on one, and waves on the other, you will get 50% and 50% each. However, if you put a detector that detects only waves before the splitter, it will change the beam into 100% waves and you will stop detecting particles.
What's strange, is that this can work in reverse, changing the photons retroactively one way or the other.
All sorts of strangeness occurs with quantum mechanics. Teleportation, tunneling, entanglement, and some REALLY strange stuff that seems to break the speed of light and conservation of matter and energy. However, it has limits. You can't walk through walls. You can't teleport a person.
But what if you COULD?
That's where Para-hypophysics comes in. If you are dealing with super-science instead of straight-up magic, then chances are you are dealing with para-hypophysics. When you want to break the speed of light, you might turn your MC into a macro-tachyon. You know what a sonic boom is, right? What if you want to break the light barrier? Would that be a "Luminal Boom"? What the hell would that even look like?
Para-hypophysics is like a scalpel, whereas Para-iso is more of a sledgehammer. The "science" of Star Trek is mostly straight-up magic when you think about it, but the writers (used to) put in a lot of effort to TRY and connect it to real-world physics. There is no reason you cannot mix and match. You see, while I'm mostly splitting it up by Fantasy being para-iso and Super Science being para-hypo, it's not quite that simple.
Para-hypo is more about how perception alters reality, and Para-iso is more about altered objective reality. A wizard just says, "By my will be done" and casts his spell. The scientist needs to justify what he is doing. He has to perceive how the magic works. He needs a full framework in his mind of all the steps. So a "hard" magic system would fall under Para-hypo, because you are getting down into the nitty gritty. Most very complex magic systems in a LitRPG would technically fall under para-hypo.
If you do a lot of hand-waving, or magic isn't that central to your story, you can keep most of it in Para-iso. However, if you plan on getting down into the details of how the system works, you are "Observing" it in great detail, then it's Para-hypo. Note, that this isn't a hard limit here. Again, these are just ways of keeping concepts subdivided so it is easier to keep track of how your setting works.
Infraphysics:
Finally, we get to the strangest of the categories. The physics of nothing. What is nothing? And I mean, Null, Not Zero, because zero is a number and therefore exists. I'm talking about Nul, where you don't even have a ZERO. What is empty space? Is the void actually something? If you had a box with a true vacuum in it, and no light or any form of radiation or bosons of any sort passed through, and you brought it down to absolute zero inside the box, is anything there?
Oddly enough, yes. If you could take something down to true absolute zero, the universe would force the temperature back up via virtual particles, thus creating energy. If you could keep harvesting it, you could achieve what is called, zero-point energy. Which is basically taking reality and dividing by zero and somehow getting a result.
Alas, since the conservation of matter and energy exists, you don't get it for free. What you are doing is converting reality into energy. Imagine that the world was on a grid, like most video games. You have to place things on the grid, or objects snap to the grid for placement. Zero Point energy would be like burning the grid ITSELF for fuel. In other words, using the very fabric of the universe for kindling. On paper, it sounds nice. I bet there would be some problems if we actually pulled it off.
If you are dealing with concepts like this, you are dealing with infraphysics. But it would also cover the use of "null" in general. Another example would be how you view magic working. In Forgotten Realms, magic works because of "The Weave", but the goddess Shar noticed that the weave left gaps. The weave casts a "shadow" between the threads of the weave. So the goddess of night used this "shadow weave" to set up an alternate power source for magic that allowed her to get around the goddess of magic's stranglehold on magic.
Perhaps you view magic as gathering mana and then releasing it. An alternate method might be to "dig a hole" in reality. To create a "mana vacuum" that then, due to thermodynamics, causes mana to flow into the "negative space", and thus a way of using the mana around you without "gathering" it. So if normal magic users gather magic into themselves and then use that to cast magic, this "vacuum magic" would be more about clawing a hole in reality, than stealing mana from sources around you to "fill up" the hole.
Infraphysics is a hard concept to tackle. It's the exact opposite of Pataphysics. At least pataphysics allows you to infer what you cannot conceive by observing how the inconceivable interacts with the conceivable. With infraphysics, you literally have NOTHING TO WORK WITH. It is more of "the edge of the map" than a concept that you would use for organizing the laws of your fictional setting, but if you are the sort who likes to play around with "Things Man Was Never Ment To Know", then this category is definately somewhere on your "To Do" list for things to play with.
CONCLUSION:
Think of these categories as just the way to order things so that when you are considering adding in a new power, or exception to the laws of physics, you can properly compare it to the other exceptions you have already added and say to yourself, "Does this add anything to the story, or is there a better way to do this? Have I changed too much, or does this fit in with what I'm doing?
For example, if your story is a romance where the magic system revolves around summoning sexy nymphs and fluttering faeries to cast spells and do magic, it wouldn't make much sense to have the Villain use laser blasters and robots. Now summoning spirits to shoot lightning bolts, or binding them into corpses to create an undead army, that fits much better.
In fiction, we write stories based on reality, to some extent or another. It can follow reality very closely, like in a normal, slice-of-life romance, or it can have magic, super science, or spirits. It can even be really out there, like Flatland, a book about 2-dimensional life, and have very little do to with the laws of reality, as we know it.
However, by definition, every fictional story has FICTIONAL physics, because the book is... duh... fiction. You, the author, have to decide what rules you are keeping, and what rules you are throwing out. This is simple for most since most authors don't change physics much. Less is more, so most stories have a few changes, stated up front, and then the story tries to be "as normal" as possible from there. But maybe YOU are the exception.
I have developed a series of categories that I use for keeping my fictional setting's altered physics properly segregated so it is easier to keep track, thus avoiding emersion-breaking plot holes.
TERMS
Pataphysics - Imaginary Science (What we cannot conceive)
Metaphysics - Memetic Science (What we conceive)
Isophysics - Normal physics, but in the literary sense. (Objective reality)
Hypophysics - Quantum mechanics, but literary. (Subjective Reality)
Infraphysics - Null science (The science of nothing)
Paraphysics - An altered version of Meta, Iso, or Hypo.
EXAMPLES:
Pataphysics - Something completely alien to the human way of thought. This would be your neverborns or eldritch horrors of Lovecraftian origins. By definition, you cannot conceive Pataphysical concepts.
Metaphysics - This is thought. Pure concepts such as emotions, honor, philosophy, etc.
Para-metaphysics - It's where you take normal human thought and give it new rules that couldn't exist. The physical manifestation of thought would be a para-meta concept.
Isophysics - "Normal" physics, but the thing is, does "normal" physics really exist in writing? For example, 20 bad guys shoot SMGs at MC and nobody hits. This is Isophysics. Yes, it is POSSIBLE, but really, did that make sense? So, it isn't "physics", it's isophysics.
Para-Isophysics - You take physics and add new rules. This is most magic systems.
Hypophysics - Quantum mechanics, but again, literary. This gets a little fuzzy because TECHNICALLY, it should only be what is possible, but we don't know what is or isn't possible. On some level of reality, when you get small enough, perception changes reality. The act of observation alters what you observe. So this would be quantum mechanics as we understand it.
Para-Hypophysics - Quantum physics applied to macro objects. Again, this gets fuzzy. I put the line at "How hard is the Magic System/Super Science?" Para-Hypo is more sci-fi than Para-Iso, IMHO. It's more about how much justification you put into your altered physics. How closely do you "observe" your magic system? if you do a lot of hand waving, it's Para-iso. If you are very specific and detailed, chances are it should fall under para-hypo.
Infraphysics - The Science of NULL. This is a difficult concept to handle. It is the literary science of NOTHING. The absolute lowest end of concepts. Where we are dealing with the absence of everything. There might be a complete absence of matter/energy/thought, but even empty space has rules and permanence. So, if you are dealing with REALLY alien concepts about NOTHING, then you are dealing with Infraphysics.
You will note, that there are no Para versions of Pata or Infra physics. Why? Because it already IS as Para as we can get. There are no ALTERNATE versions of Pata or Infra physics because humans cannot even begin to conceptualize what is NORMAL for these versions of physics, much less what an alternate version of them would be.
IN PRACTICE:
Let's start with Isophysics:
You might say, why make up a new term? Just call it physics and be done with it. Why call it isophysics? Well, all isophysics falls under normal physics, but not all normal physics, falls under isophysics. What I mean is that isophysics are the rules of reality you, the author are KEEPING.
There was a new manga I read called Colorless. In this setting, it has most of the normal laws of physics. Buildings have foundations. People need to eat. Electricity works. That sort of this. All that would fall under isophysics. However, in this setting, there is no color, except for color that has been collected and harvested. This collected color has magical properties. So, under normal physics, there is a spectrum of color, but in this universe, there is not. The new and altered properties of color would fall under Para-Isophysics. Para-iso would be any normal laws of physics that you have changed or new laws that you have added. Typically, you would put most "normal" magic under para-iso.
However, if you are sticking with normal physics, but just pushing the boundary, it stays in Isophysics. Whenever you do something possible, but highly improbable, you should stick it under isophysics and keep an eye on it. Yes, luck exists, but if you use luck too much, it starts to move from isophysics to para-isophysics, and readers do not like it when you start making up powers on the fly to save your MC. It's a useful tool to keep track of "Possible, but improbable" events in your story. if you use them too much, you might want to consider going back to the start of the story and establishing that your MC is very lucky, or has a blessing from a leprechaun, or something, so it becomes easier for your reader to suspend disbelief.
Metaphysics:
Metaphysics is anything that deals with concepts. This is the realm of memes. If you can imagine it, it falls under metaphysics. We all know what thought is, so I hope I don't have to clarify that. However, you might want to get whacky with your memetics, so that becomes Para-metaphysics. Typically, that would be your ghosts, your spirits, gods, that sort of thing. If you want magic that is based off summoning spirits and then the spirits do the magic, that's Para-metaphysics. If your magic has personalities, it's Para-meta. So if you are just dealing with "hard" magic, you'd stick with para-iso, but if you are dealing with praying for spells, summoning spirits, that sort of thing, then you are moving into para-meta.
Now the two do bleed from one into the other. This isn't a hard and fast set of rules. Remember, this is to help YOU, the author, keep track of how you are altering your fictional setting and the changes you are making to reality. So, while a summoned spirit would be Para-meta, the magic it casts could fall under para-iso. It's useful to think of it this way, so that when you are considering "What can my MC do?" you don't make the mistake of making a given power a Swiss army knife. LIMITATIONS ARE GOOD.
People like to see MCs challenged and then overcome those challenges. They also don't like "new" powers that just 'happen' when the situation needs it. If you need the MC to get out of trouble, see if he has an already established ability you can twist and use in a devious manner to save his ass, rather than make something new, or if you must, make sure it's at least adjacent to an established exception.
Pataphysics:
I didn't make up the name. Some French guy did. This is the physics of what we cannot think of. If you can imagine it, it's metaphysics. If you can't, it's pataphysics. A good example of pataphysics is a 4-dimensional hypercube. We are three-dimensional. We cannot see in four dimensions, so we cannot truly "conceive" of a hypercube. We can make a 3-dimensional shadow of one, but in the end, we are just seeing its shadow and trying to imagine what it might look like
(Actually, because the back of our eyes is effectively "flat", we are seeing a 2-dimensional image of a three-dimensional shadow, of a four-dimensional object. Funny that.)
This is pataphysics in a nutshell. It is where you cannot conceive of something, but you can observe how such a thing might interact with what you CAN conceive. So if you are trying to write about truly alien concepts, then it falls under pataphysics. Oddly enough, a good chunk of horror stories use pataphysics. Most physics we can understand, but the utterly alien tends to send chills up one's spine. We can understand some guy chanting and casting fireballs. It's hard to understand why someone, with tears of bubbling pitch streaming down their face, would open three of their seven mouths to chant the song that destroys the world.
Both involve chanting, one is a bit more disturbing.
Pataphysics doesn't have to be terrifying, however. Look at Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic. Magic has a colour that we cannot see unless you are a magic user yourself. it is the 8th color. This would be Pataphysical. It's just a nice, yet alien touch to the story. I also like the part where he describes an object as being so cold it is ANTI-BOILING the water around it. So if you want to add just a pinch of the alien to your story, consider googling prefixes and suffixes and then take some concepts from your story and just mix and match. See what you can come up with.
Hypophysics:
Hypophysics is another word for quantum physics. Again, it is the physics you are keeping, hence why we use this term instead of quantum physics. Hypophysics is about the rules that govern very small things as well as minute details. When you try to observe very small objects, it gets increasingly difficult the smaller it is. For example, you need a microscope to see single-cell organisms. To go smaller, you might use an electron microscope. However, an electron microscope works by shooting a stream of electrons at an object. There is a limit to how small you can go with this.
Let's say you are trying to look at a single proton. If you used an electron microscope, this would be like trying to find out what color a beach ball is in a totally dark room by firing a stream of billard balls at it, then observing where the eight-ball bounced off to. This is what they mean when they say that the act of observing an object changes the object.
On a quantum level, perception changes the object you are looking at. If you took a stream of photons, trying to detect packets of energy, you will find packets of energy. if you switch to detecting for waves instead of particles, you will CHANGE the particles into waves. So if you have a stream of light that you split into two, and you start detecting for particles on one, and waves on the other, you will get 50% and 50% each. However, if you put a detector that detects only waves before the splitter, it will change the beam into 100% waves and you will stop detecting particles.
What's strange, is that this can work in reverse, changing the photons retroactively one way or the other.
All sorts of strangeness occurs with quantum mechanics. Teleportation, tunneling, entanglement, and some REALLY strange stuff that seems to break the speed of light and conservation of matter and energy. However, it has limits. You can't walk through walls. You can't teleport a person.
But what if you COULD?
That's where Para-hypophysics comes in. If you are dealing with super-science instead of straight-up magic, then chances are you are dealing with para-hypophysics. When you want to break the speed of light, you might turn your MC into a macro-tachyon. You know what a sonic boom is, right? What if you want to break the light barrier? Would that be a "Luminal Boom"? What the hell would that even look like?
Para-hypophysics is like a scalpel, whereas Para-iso is more of a sledgehammer. The "science" of Star Trek is mostly straight-up magic when you think about it, but the writers (used to) put in a lot of effort to TRY and connect it to real-world physics. There is no reason you cannot mix and match. You see, while I'm mostly splitting it up by Fantasy being para-iso and Super Science being para-hypo, it's not quite that simple.
Para-hypo is more about how perception alters reality, and Para-iso is more about altered objective reality. A wizard just says, "By my will be done" and casts his spell. The scientist needs to justify what he is doing. He has to perceive how the magic works. He needs a full framework in his mind of all the steps. So a "hard" magic system would fall under Para-hypo, because you are getting down into the nitty gritty. Most very complex magic systems in a LitRPG would technically fall under para-hypo.
If you do a lot of hand-waving, or magic isn't that central to your story, you can keep most of it in Para-iso. However, if you plan on getting down into the details of how the system works, you are "Observing" it in great detail, then it's Para-hypo. Note, that this isn't a hard limit here. Again, these are just ways of keeping concepts subdivided so it is easier to keep track of how your setting works.
Infraphysics:
Finally, we get to the strangest of the categories. The physics of nothing. What is nothing? And I mean, Null, Not Zero, because zero is a number and therefore exists. I'm talking about Nul, where you don't even have a ZERO. What is empty space? Is the void actually something? If you had a box with a true vacuum in it, and no light or any form of radiation or bosons of any sort passed through, and you brought it down to absolute zero inside the box, is anything there?
Oddly enough, yes. If you could take something down to true absolute zero, the universe would force the temperature back up via virtual particles, thus creating energy. If you could keep harvesting it, you could achieve what is called, zero-point energy. Which is basically taking reality and dividing by zero and somehow getting a result.
Alas, since the conservation of matter and energy exists, you don't get it for free. What you are doing is converting reality into energy. Imagine that the world was on a grid, like most video games. You have to place things on the grid, or objects snap to the grid for placement. Zero Point energy would be like burning the grid ITSELF for fuel. In other words, using the very fabric of the universe for kindling. On paper, it sounds nice. I bet there would be some problems if we actually pulled it off.
If you are dealing with concepts like this, you are dealing with infraphysics. But it would also cover the use of "null" in general. Another example would be how you view magic working. In Forgotten Realms, magic works because of "The Weave", but the goddess Shar noticed that the weave left gaps. The weave casts a "shadow" between the threads of the weave. So the goddess of night used this "shadow weave" to set up an alternate power source for magic that allowed her to get around the goddess of magic's stranglehold on magic.
Perhaps you view magic as gathering mana and then releasing it. An alternate method might be to "dig a hole" in reality. To create a "mana vacuum" that then, due to thermodynamics, causes mana to flow into the "negative space", and thus a way of using the mana around you without "gathering" it. So if normal magic users gather magic into themselves and then use that to cast magic, this "vacuum magic" would be more about clawing a hole in reality, than stealing mana from sources around you to "fill up" the hole.
Infraphysics is a hard concept to tackle. It's the exact opposite of Pataphysics. At least pataphysics allows you to infer what you cannot conceive by observing how the inconceivable interacts with the conceivable. With infraphysics, you literally have NOTHING TO WORK WITH. It is more of "the edge of the map" than a concept that you would use for organizing the laws of your fictional setting, but if you are the sort who likes to play around with "Things Man Was Never Ment To Know", then this category is definately somewhere on your "To Do" list for things to play with.
CONCLUSION:
Think of these categories as just the way to order things so that when you are considering adding in a new power, or exception to the laws of physics, you can properly compare it to the other exceptions you have already added and say to yourself, "Does this add anything to the story, or is there a better way to do this? Have I changed too much, or does this fit in with what I'm doing?
For example, if your story is a romance where the magic system revolves around summoning sexy nymphs and fluttering faeries to cast spells and do magic, it wouldn't make much sense to have the Villain use laser blasters and robots. Now summoning spirits to shoot lightning bolts, or binding them into corpses to create an undead army, that fits much better.
Now that the basics are out of the way.
Magic Is Memes is Life
On a fundamental level, life itself is just self-replicating order in a universe where entropy is constantly increasing. However, in localized pockets of the universe, entropy can be defeated and pushed back by order. That order is life. Everything that is living carries with it information. That information is, at a root level, the instructions on how to self-replicate.
So we must break down types of Information as far as life is concerned.
Genetic Memes - This is the memory that a lifeform gets from its DNA when it is created. This set of information can range from how to eat to how to stand for foals. All the basic things your body does without you having to think about are Genetic memes
Programmed Memes - These are things that happen from explicit experiences where the life form develops a reaction to stimuli. For example, if you touch fire, it burns you, and you yank your hand away. That is a genetic meme. However, the fear you get from seeing fire from this experience is learned. Walking is a programmed meme. You do not think about every toe when you take a step. You don't think about how to adjust your walk when climbing stairs. These are a sequence of memes programmed into a subroutine that is usually triggered by stimuli.
Self-Determination Memes - Then we come to self-awareness. With the advent of the frontal lobe, humans abandoned genetic memory, for the most part, and decided that it is far better to be modular. Sure, we are far weaker as babies than most animals, but after the training period is over, we adapt quite nicely to most environments. This happens by learning how to self-program. While most creatures learn by experiencing the real world, people with self-determination can program themselves with fake memories.
Dreams, or just using your imagination, can "feel" real and can become a "real" experience, thus allowing a person to basically "teach" themselves things from fake experiences. We know TV shows aren't real, but watching a scary movie can give you an irrational fear of monsters that don't exist. This is the fundamental difference between Animals and Self-aware creatures. The ability to modify your own "programs" without outside input.
On a fundamental level, life itself is just self-replicating order in a universe where entropy is constantly increasing. However, in localized pockets of the universe, entropy can be defeated and pushed back by order. That order is life. Everything that is living carries with it information. That information is, at a root level, the instructions on how to self-replicate.
So we must break down types of Information as far as life is concerned.
Genetic Memes - This is the memory that a lifeform gets from its DNA when it is created. This set of information can range from how to eat to how to stand for foals. All the basic things your body does without you having to think about are Genetic memes
Programmed Memes - These are things that happen from explicit experiences where the life form develops a reaction to stimuli. For example, if you touch fire, it burns you, and you yank your hand away. That is a genetic meme. However, the fear you get from seeing fire from this experience is learned. Walking is a programmed meme. You do not think about every toe when you take a step. You don't think about how to adjust your walk when climbing stairs. These are a sequence of memes programmed into a subroutine that is usually triggered by stimuli.
Self-Determination Memes - Then we come to self-awareness. With the advent of the frontal lobe, humans abandoned genetic memory, for the most part, and decided that it is far better to be modular. Sure, we are far weaker as babies than most animals, but after the training period is over, we adapt quite nicely to most environments. This happens by learning how to self-program. While most creatures learn by experiencing the real world, people with self-determination can program themselves with fake memories.
Dreams, or just using your imagination, can "feel" real and can become a "real" experience, thus allowing a person to basically "teach" themselves things from fake experiences. We know TV shows aren't real, but watching a scary movie can give you an irrational fear of monsters that don't exist. This is the fundamental difference between Animals and Self-aware creatures. The ability to modify your own "programs" without outside input.
Memes can be broken down by the layers of complexity
1. Monads - There are 6 types of this fundamental memetic particle: Up, Down, Angelic, Demonic, Weird, and Top. FYI, Top is the particle that is required for a human soul.
2. Metatron - Typically you have 3 monads come together. A Typical Metatron is Two up and one down, or two down and one up. This is 'basic' memetic material. However, 'complex' Metatrons have one up, one down, and then one of the other 4 types to form an individual Metatron or the smallest 'free form' memetic particle. These 'complex' metatrons are found normally in 'intelligent memetic matter' and are required for self-awareness.
3. Neological- A bit more broad which could be an individual letter of the alphabet, a word, or a phrase, but whatever it is, it is a singular concept that could be boiled down to 'one thing'. It's more complex than that, but I'm just going over the basics. You need a cluster of Metatrons to make a Neological.
4. Eidolon - A cluster of neologisms makes up an eidolon. This is a memetic concept that cannot be expressed in a single 'thing'. It would best to think of it as an experience. An individual 'memory', if you will. It comes in two flavors 'Explicit', which is a 'real' memory, usually something you personally experienced. The second is 'implicit', which is something you 'created'. One cannot experience 'capitalism', but one can 'conceptualize' capitalism. You infer the concept of capitalism from your 'explicit' experiences to create the 'implied/implicit' memory of what capitalism is. Furthermore, it isn't 'just' the words that make up the concept, but how you FEEL about the concept. Each Eidolon for each person would be different for each person. My Eidolon for capitalism would be different from a Socialist's Eidolon for capitalism.
Yes, Capitalism is a single word. So the word Capitalism is a neological, but my life 'experience' with capitalism in total would be my Eidolon of Capitalism
5. Memeplex - This is a collection of Eidolons that forms up a mutually supporting and self-sustaining memetic 'life form'. However, it's a bit more complex than that, since this this the top layer of the chain. For example, an individual is a memeplex. You could say that it is their 'soul'. However, An individual does not exist in a vacuum. They are part of other memeplexes.
Your Church would be a memeplex, and the religion your church practices would be a memeplex. The line where YOU end and something else begins, from a conceptual/memetic point of view is difficult to understand, because, well, we're down here in the muck. It's sort of like an individual bacteria trying to understand the petri dish.
1. Monads - There are 6 types of this fundamental memetic particle: Up, Down, Angelic, Demonic, Weird, and Top. FYI, Top is the particle that is required for a human soul.
2. Metatron - Typically you have 3 monads come together. A Typical Metatron is Two up and one down, or two down and one up. This is 'basic' memetic material. However, 'complex' Metatrons have one up, one down, and then one of the other 4 types to form an individual Metatron or the smallest 'free form' memetic particle. These 'complex' metatrons are found normally in 'intelligent memetic matter' and are required for self-awareness.
3. Neological- A bit more broad which could be an individual letter of the alphabet, a word, or a phrase, but whatever it is, it is a singular concept that could be boiled down to 'one thing'. It's more complex than that, but I'm just going over the basics. You need a cluster of Metatrons to make a Neological.
4. Eidolon - A cluster of neologisms makes up an eidolon. This is a memetic concept that cannot be expressed in a single 'thing'. It would best to think of it as an experience. An individual 'memory', if you will. It comes in two flavors 'Explicit', which is a 'real' memory, usually something you personally experienced. The second is 'implicit', which is something you 'created'. One cannot experience 'capitalism', but one can 'conceptualize' capitalism. You infer the concept of capitalism from your 'explicit' experiences to create the 'implied/implicit' memory of what capitalism is. Furthermore, it isn't 'just' the words that make up the concept, but how you FEEL about the concept. Each Eidolon for each person would be different for each person. My Eidolon for capitalism would be different from a Socialist's Eidolon for capitalism.
Yes, Capitalism is a single word. So the word Capitalism is a neological, but my life 'experience' with capitalism in total would be my Eidolon of Capitalism
5. Memeplex - This is a collection of Eidolons that forms up a mutually supporting and self-sustaining memetic 'life form'. However, it's a bit more complex than that, since this this the top layer of the chain. For example, an individual is a memeplex. You could say that it is their 'soul'. However, An individual does not exist in a vacuum. They are part of other memeplexes.
Your Church would be a memeplex, and the religion your church practices would be a memeplex. The line where YOU end and something else begins, from a conceptual/memetic point of view is difficult to understand, because, well, we're down here in the muck. It's sort of like an individual bacteria trying to understand the petri dish.
To understand magic, we must understand Monads, which are the building blocks of memes. There are six. Note, there are processes where monads can change from one form to another.
Down - This Monad is the "smallest" of the monads, but it also has the most potential energy absorption. When an up monad is "used up" it will change to a "down" monad.
Up - This monad is heavier than the down monad, giving magic its weight.
Demonic - This is the first 'evolved' Monad. They are the monads necessary for the creation of demons. They appear when depleted mana pools in areas. The Up monads seek other up monads and if enough depleted mana arrives in an area, An Up monad will steal an up monad from depleted mana and this results in a three-down mana unit that is unstable. It collapses into a Demon Monad.
When enough demonic monads accumulate in an area, they often crystalize into a 'demon heart' and form the core of a demonic creature. This article is one Demon Monad, one Up Monad, and one Down Monad. Demonic creatures are adapt at using Depleted Mana as a power source. Ironically, this process has a by-product of creating Normal Mana as a byproduct. In a way, it is part of the ecological life cycle of mana. Normal life processes rarely produce enough depleted mana to cause this phenomenon. But excessive magic use does.
The more magic a civilization uses, the more demonic monads will result as a 'waste product'.
Angelic - The next level of monad is the Angelic monad. This much heavier monad is produced when too much base mana is concentrated in an area. The primary cause of this is faith. Up Monads naturally are attracted to one another, but this is overwritten by the tendency for them to bond with a down monad. This creates a 'low energy' state where it exists as free-form mana. The concentration of too much mana in one location eventually is enough to overcome this and the down monad is kicked out, resulting in a three up monad configuration which is unstable. It immediately collapses into an angelic monad.
The normal configuration is one Angelic, one Up, and one Down. These do not have physical manifestations, like demonic monads, but instead 'rise' to the metaphysical plane. Through this process, Angelic Monads become metaphysical creatures that exist as pure memetic beings.
Weird - In terms of density, Weird Monads contain more energy than either Angelic or Demonic energy. They are the fundamental unit of time itself. There is no time, in a typical sense. The universe has a baseline 'rate of change', but there is no 'universal' time. There is only the universal, omnipresent, now. However, local 'time' can be altered with 'weird monads'. Time itself is a fungible resource.
While there are ways to speed up or slow down 'time', these do not require access to weird monads. Traveling through time, or reversing time, does. However, it can only be done in a localized area. The changes only affect the 'bubble' in which the change happens. Traveling into the future past the point of 'now' is possible, but anything that happens there often is pointless, because it hasn't happened yet and is easily changed. Going into the past is more difficult because it changes things going forward, but only so far. The more you try to change, or the further back you go, the more energy you need for each alteration or trip.
Furthermore, a change in one universe/bubble cannot affect anything that has already left the area of influence. So If I go back in time and kill my great-grandmother, I'm 'outside' the influence, and thus, while there is a world where I was never born, I still exist. This results in what is called, 'Meanwhiles' and 'Neverborns'. These 'artifacts' and leftovers are created by the use of Weird Monads. Without enough weird monads, attempts at changing the past or other such nonsense can cause a localized collapse. When this happens, anything being supported outside its normal 'now' vanishes and returns to 'the universal now'.
This can have horrifying consequences as this means you are no longer 'outside' the changes you caused. A man who kills his great-grandmother, but doesn't return to 'now' in time, will return to a present where he is dead.
While Weird monads cover 'time' as a localized phenomenon, they can combine with both an up and down monad to become the meme particle that is the foundation of the Fae. Alas, in this setting, we are in the twilight of the cosmos, and 'time' is running out. The fae have, for the most part, vanished. The few left behind, or that chose to stay behind were often hunted down and harvested for their Weird monads to be used for the creation of such horrific weapons as unfurcators and Chronobombards.
Where did the fae go?
Spoilers.
Few understand Weird Monads enough to attempt to create more, much less succeed. While the number of weird monads was not fixed at the creation of the cosmos, it is important to know that it is far easier to 'use up' a weird monad than it is to make one.
Top - The Top Monad is the monad of souls. It takes one Top, one Up, and one Down monad to make the meme that is a human soul. This monad has the most energy of any monad. It is, in a way, infectious. A top monad absorbs other monads and concentrates them, turning other monads into more Top monads. The physical manifestation of this is known as DNA.
There are eight types of DNA The standard A-T and G-C pairs that we all know about. Sometimes it's T-A and C-G because the order matters. But in this setting, this is just the 'base code' of life. Everything has these. Top monads manifest as the other four nucleotides. S-B and P-Z. In total, this is called the Hachimjo, or the eight letters of life.
If the pairs begin with S more than B, you gain those nucleotides through violence. Pairs that start with B more than S means you gained that pair by more peaceful means. P-Z pairs that start with P are gained by causing increased order, and Z-P pairs indicate you gained them by causing increased entropy.
Basically, this is the genetic manifestation of gaining experience points.
For this reason, Top Monads are the most easily created, high-energy concentrated form of memetic energy that is available. The process by which Top Monads 'reproduce' also creates an excess of mana in the process. Depending on the human's circumstances, this can lean towards more base mana or depleted mana. This is why angelic monad beings (gods) encourage human worship because it is a constant source of energy. Conversely, this is why demonic creatures tend to torture humans, as their suffering creates depleted mana that they can harvest for their own needs.
In short, Angelic are for Gods and Angels. Demonic for Demons and Things-That-Should-Not-Be, Weird are your Fae, and Top are "mortal" soul monads.
Now, this results in some interesting outcomes.
Normal animals don't have Top monads or much. There is a 'threshold' where you get an actual full 'soul'. This is the point where a soul gives off more mana than it consumes to survive. Most animals are below this threshold, SIGNIFICANTLY. Life on most planets is a net drain on the mana produced. This can be overcome by having increasing amounts of 'baseline DNA'.
If you think of DNA as the 'instructions on how to build this thing', in most universes you don't need much. There is often so much free-floating mana, that life doesn't need to get that complex. So in a high magic world, you can have a bunny rabbit with only a few hundred genes. However, there is a problem. Magic is a subjective thing. Magic does not do well in areas with high levels of clarity.
What I mean is, imagine you projected an image of a person from a projector onto a wall. The further away from the wall, the more fuzzy the image, and the larger it gets. Assume the projected image of the person was "alive". To the projected person, everything feels the same. There is no change, regardless of the distance of the projector from the wall. However, there is less clarity/resolution. If you put a piece of paper in front of the lens, you would get a very small, but very crisp picture.
The universe is a projection onto a backdrop. However, there are materials that can pass between the projector and the backdrop. This material is called Dark Matter. The more dark matter, the more clarity, the less wiggle room in the universe, and the less magic you have. Get too much dark matter, magic dies and life isn't possible.
These areas are called the Dark Matter Reefs.
In a normal, base-level magical world, the average human would have about two thousand genes and a hundred and fifty million pairs of base DNA pairs. In this setting, the 'real' world slowly drifted into the Dark Matter Reefs, but because it was at an angle, life had time to adapt. In comparison, a human of this world has twenty thousand genes and three billion pairs. To those who study this sort of thing, It's like someone wrote a description of what a human was and included a dictionary to define every single word they used.
This also means that humans in the 'real' world are under a tremendous amount of 'pressure' to stay alive. They may not be able to use magic, but they have, over time, built up a massive amount of resistance and thus have very compressed and concentrated 'souls'. Humans don't gain more 'experience' DNA on earth, because of the pressure. People don't level up. However, take a human out of this environment and put him in a typical magic-rich environment. His DNA 'expands' rapidly and he becomes a magic sponge.
Think of taking your average Kryptonian and dropping him into a yellow sun.
Down - This Monad is the "smallest" of the monads, but it also has the most potential energy absorption. When an up monad is "used up" it will change to a "down" monad.
Up - This monad is heavier than the down monad, giving magic its weight.
Demonic - This is the first 'evolved' Monad. They are the monads necessary for the creation of demons. They appear when depleted mana pools in areas. The Up monads seek other up monads and if enough depleted mana arrives in an area, An Up monad will steal an up monad from depleted mana and this results in a three-down mana unit that is unstable. It collapses into a Demon Monad.
When enough demonic monads accumulate in an area, they often crystalize into a 'demon heart' and form the core of a demonic creature. This article is one Demon Monad, one Up Monad, and one Down Monad. Demonic creatures are adapt at using Depleted Mana as a power source. Ironically, this process has a by-product of creating Normal Mana as a byproduct. In a way, it is part of the ecological life cycle of mana. Normal life processes rarely produce enough depleted mana to cause this phenomenon. But excessive magic use does.
The more magic a civilization uses, the more demonic monads will result as a 'waste product'.
Angelic - The next level of monad is the Angelic monad. This much heavier monad is produced when too much base mana is concentrated in an area. The primary cause of this is faith. Up Monads naturally are attracted to one another, but this is overwritten by the tendency for them to bond with a down monad. This creates a 'low energy' state where it exists as free-form mana. The concentration of too much mana in one location eventually is enough to overcome this and the down monad is kicked out, resulting in a three up monad configuration which is unstable. It immediately collapses into an angelic monad.
The normal configuration is one Angelic, one Up, and one Down. These do not have physical manifestations, like demonic monads, but instead 'rise' to the metaphysical plane. Through this process, Angelic Monads become metaphysical creatures that exist as pure memetic beings.
Weird - In terms of density, Weird Monads contain more energy than either Angelic or Demonic energy. They are the fundamental unit of time itself. There is no time, in a typical sense. The universe has a baseline 'rate of change', but there is no 'universal' time. There is only the universal, omnipresent, now. However, local 'time' can be altered with 'weird monads'. Time itself is a fungible resource.
While there are ways to speed up or slow down 'time', these do not require access to weird monads. Traveling through time, or reversing time, does. However, it can only be done in a localized area. The changes only affect the 'bubble' in which the change happens. Traveling into the future past the point of 'now' is possible, but anything that happens there often is pointless, because it hasn't happened yet and is easily changed. Going into the past is more difficult because it changes things going forward, but only so far. The more you try to change, or the further back you go, the more energy you need for each alteration or trip.
Furthermore, a change in one universe/bubble cannot affect anything that has already left the area of influence. So If I go back in time and kill my great-grandmother, I'm 'outside' the influence, and thus, while there is a world where I was never born, I still exist. This results in what is called, 'Meanwhiles' and 'Neverborns'. These 'artifacts' and leftovers are created by the use of Weird Monads. Without enough weird monads, attempts at changing the past or other such nonsense can cause a localized collapse. When this happens, anything being supported outside its normal 'now' vanishes and returns to 'the universal now'.
This can have horrifying consequences as this means you are no longer 'outside' the changes you caused. A man who kills his great-grandmother, but doesn't return to 'now' in time, will return to a present where he is dead.
While Weird monads cover 'time' as a localized phenomenon, they can combine with both an up and down monad to become the meme particle that is the foundation of the Fae. Alas, in this setting, we are in the twilight of the cosmos, and 'time' is running out. The fae have, for the most part, vanished. The few left behind, or that chose to stay behind were often hunted down and harvested for their Weird monads to be used for the creation of such horrific weapons as unfurcators and Chronobombards.
Where did the fae go?
Spoilers.
Few understand Weird Monads enough to attempt to create more, much less succeed. While the number of weird monads was not fixed at the creation of the cosmos, it is important to know that it is far easier to 'use up' a weird monad than it is to make one.
Top - The Top Monad is the monad of souls. It takes one Top, one Up, and one Down monad to make the meme that is a human soul. This monad has the most energy of any monad. It is, in a way, infectious. A top monad absorbs other monads and concentrates them, turning other monads into more Top monads. The physical manifestation of this is known as DNA.
There are eight types of DNA The standard A-T and G-C pairs that we all know about. Sometimes it's T-A and C-G because the order matters. But in this setting, this is just the 'base code' of life. Everything has these. Top monads manifest as the other four nucleotides. S-B and P-Z. In total, this is called the Hachimjo, or the eight letters of life.
If the pairs begin with S more than B, you gain those nucleotides through violence. Pairs that start with B more than S means you gained that pair by more peaceful means. P-Z pairs that start with P are gained by causing increased order, and Z-P pairs indicate you gained them by causing increased entropy.
Basically, this is the genetic manifestation of gaining experience points.
For this reason, Top Monads are the most easily created, high-energy concentrated form of memetic energy that is available. The process by which Top Monads 'reproduce' also creates an excess of mana in the process. Depending on the human's circumstances, this can lean towards more base mana or depleted mana. This is why angelic monad beings (gods) encourage human worship because it is a constant source of energy. Conversely, this is why demonic creatures tend to torture humans, as their suffering creates depleted mana that they can harvest for their own needs.
In short, Angelic are for Gods and Angels. Demonic for Demons and Things-That-Should-Not-Be, Weird are your Fae, and Top are "mortal" soul monads.
Now, this results in some interesting outcomes.
Normal animals don't have Top monads or much. There is a 'threshold' where you get an actual full 'soul'. This is the point where a soul gives off more mana than it consumes to survive. Most animals are below this threshold, SIGNIFICANTLY. Life on most planets is a net drain on the mana produced. This can be overcome by having increasing amounts of 'baseline DNA'.
If you think of DNA as the 'instructions on how to build this thing', in most universes you don't need much. There is often so much free-floating mana, that life doesn't need to get that complex. So in a high magic world, you can have a bunny rabbit with only a few hundred genes. However, there is a problem. Magic is a subjective thing. Magic does not do well in areas with high levels of clarity.
What I mean is, imagine you projected an image of a person from a projector onto a wall. The further away from the wall, the more fuzzy the image, and the larger it gets. Assume the projected image of the person was "alive". To the projected person, everything feels the same. There is no change, regardless of the distance of the projector from the wall. However, there is less clarity/resolution. If you put a piece of paper in front of the lens, you would get a very small, but very crisp picture.
The universe is a projection onto a backdrop. However, there are materials that can pass between the projector and the backdrop. This material is called Dark Matter. The more dark matter, the more clarity, the less wiggle room in the universe, and the less magic you have. Get too much dark matter, magic dies and life isn't possible.
These areas are called the Dark Matter Reefs.
In a normal, base-level magical world, the average human would have about two thousand genes and a hundred and fifty million pairs of base DNA pairs. In this setting, the 'real' world slowly drifted into the Dark Matter Reefs, but because it was at an angle, life had time to adapt. In comparison, a human of this world has twenty thousand genes and three billion pairs. To those who study this sort of thing, It's like someone wrote a description of what a human was and included a dictionary to define every single word they used.
This also means that humans in the 'real' world are under a tremendous amount of 'pressure' to stay alive. They may not be able to use magic, but they have, over time, built up a massive amount of resistance and thus have very compressed and concentrated 'souls'. Humans don't gain more 'experience' DNA on earth, because of the pressure. People don't level up. However, take a human out of this environment and put him in a typical magic-rich environment. His DNA 'expands' rapidly and he becomes a magic sponge.
Think of taking your average Kryptonian and dropping him into a yellow sun.
I have broken down Magic into four categories for purposes of definition
Aura - Aura magic is anything that just affects the user. This is the simplest and most basic form of magic because it is the hardest to perceive. If you think about it, if someone trains their body enough, they can do things reflexively, 'Without thinking about it', and thus not even observe the magic they are doing to themselves. Since magic works best when not observed, this is the first form of magic to manifest, or if you are sliding into a dark matter reef, the last form of magic to go.
Elemental - Elemental magic is magic based around a single element. Why typically this is based on the classics, Air, fire, earth water, there is no reason you couldn't have elemental magic based on plastic, time, or feet. While such forms of magic would be weird, they could exist. However, it usually forms around what people 'think' of as an 'element'. This form of magic is the first form of Overt magic and usually centers around a single concept. Then the user can expand out from that point, with the further and further you get from the central concept, the more difficult it gets and the more mana you need to burn. However, this can be overcome with skill and/or brute force.
For example, I could be a water elementalist, but 'blood' is beyond me. However, making Steam or ice could be possible, but a lot harder than just water.
Framework - A framework is typically much looser than an elemental form of magic. It might be 'Divine Spellcaster' or 'Batman's Belt of Gadgets'. Typically classic spell casters like mages and clerics fall under this banner, but you can also get 'weird science' guys like Iron Man who do the same thing with 'nanites'. However, every single thing needs to be worked out ahead of time. There is a 'science' to the magic, which needs to be worked out. You need to build the gadget, learn the spell, grow the crystals to power the nanites, or whatever the framework is built around. A Weird science boy cannot learn spells, but he could make a raygun that does the same thing as a spell. So, while the powers are the same, we're talking about different special effects
Cosmic - This is basically, do anything, sort of. You typically have some sort of theme, like, Green Lantern has his ring and will construct. Or Doctor Who can build just about anything he needs at any point in time on the fly. Cosmic is like a framework, but the training wheels have come off. No longer do you need to 'learn a spell' before you can cast it, you can just work out the 'formula' in your head and cast away. Needless to say, this sort of magic requires the most magically permissive of worlds, or someone VERY SKILLED, or with a METRIC TON of mana to brute force the effect.
That last example is often what happens when you have a 'Wish'. It's often a one-time-use Cosmic Pool.
Aura - Aura magic is anything that just affects the user. This is the simplest and most basic form of magic because it is the hardest to perceive. If you think about it, if someone trains their body enough, they can do things reflexively, 'Without thinking about it', and thus not even observe the magic they are doing to themselves. Since magic works best when not observed, this is the first form of magic to manifest, or if you are sliding into a dark matter reef, the last form of magic to go.
Elemental - Elemental magic is magic based around a single element. Why typically this is based on the classics, Air, fire, earth water, there is no reason you couldn't have elemental magic based on plastic, time, or feet. While such forms of magic would be weird, they could exist. However, it usually forms around what people 'think' of as an 'element'. This form of magic is the first form of Overt magic and usually centers around a single concept. Then the user can expand out from that point, with the further and further you get from the central concept, the more difficult it gets and the more mana you need to burn. However, this can be overcome with skill and/or brute force.
For example, I could be a water elementalist, but 'blood' is beyond me. However, making Steam or ice could be possible, but a lot harder than just water.
Framework - A framework is typically much looser than an elemental form of magic. It might be 'Divine Spellcaster' or 'Batman's Belt of Gadgets'. Typically classic spell casters like mages and clerics fall under this banner, but you can also get 'weird science' guys like Iron Man who do the same thing with 'nanites'. However, every single thing needs to be worked out ahead of time. There is a 'science' to the magic, which needs to be worked out. You need to build the gadget, learn the spell, grow the crystals to power the nanites, or whatever the framework is built around. A Weird science boy cannot learn spells, but he could make a raygun that does the same thing as a spell. So, while the powers are the same, we're talking about different special effects
Cosmic - This is basically, do anything, sort of. You typically have some sort of theme, like, Green Lantern has his ring and will construct. Or Doctor Who can build just about anything he needs at any point in time on the fly. Cosmic is like a framework, but the training wheels have come off. No longer do you need to 'learn a spell' before you can cast it, you can just work out the 'formula' in your head and cast away. Needless to say, this sort of magic requires the most magically permissive of worlds, or someone VERY SKILLED, or with a METRIC TON of mana to brute force the effect.
That last example is often what happens when you have a 'Wish'. It's often a one-time-use Cosmic Pool.
Okay. The important part
Types of Mana
One of the problems I was having was, 'How do I take a fundamental particle such as a unit of mana and allow it to do so many different things?' Originally, I thought about the periodic table, and how the number of protons determines the properties of an element, but that seemed... too mundane.
Then I came across some old pseudo-science about an attempt to explain atoms with knots.
Did you know there is a 'periodic table' of knots?
No. Really. There is a lot of science in knotted loops. If you take a springy material and loop it, it makes a circle. If you tie it into a knot, it'll spring into a certain shape, based on how many times it crosses itself, but you can always compress it back down to a circle, it just isn't stable like that.
Then I remembered Borromean rings.
A borromea ring is when three rings are interlinked, but if any one of them is removed, the other two are free.
And suddenly, I had a way to express my mana.
So, if all monads are 'loops' of some sort. Unlike normal protons and neutrons which are a combination of quarks that merge, monads instead become linked, like Borromean rings. That's where it starts. Now, there is no reason, each and every monad cannot be a 'knot' in and of itself. After all, a Borromean ring only needs to be linked at a single section of the loop. Each loop could be a rather complex knot, in and of itself.
Here is a crude example.
So, if we assume that certain 'knots' are only stable in certain configurations, but any knot can be compressed back down to a simple loop, then what you have is the capacity for High magic worlds having very complex knots in the loops of magic, whereas the more dark matter you have in the background, the more 'compressed' reality is, the higher clarity is, and thus highly complex magic 'collapses' down to simple rings, and thus becomes impossible to perform.
Thus this becomes my 'Periodic Table of Mana, where to manifest say, 'Elemental magic' is possible with very simple knots, and Cosmic-level magic requires the most complex of knots to pull off. So where someone might be able to brute force something with enough mana, if someone was rather skilled at magic, and the universe was permissive enough, one could make very complex 'knotted' monads in the mana particles to pull off complex magic, but with less energy.
Anyrate, I just wanted to get this all in one spot and invite some feedback. The Borromean ring and periodic table of knots is the new addition to my magic system. I wanted to get away from the Atomic Model and I think this works well on both a thematic level, as well a practical one.
If you read my madness this far, thanks.
Last edited:
