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Thaumatology project
Scope
The motivation behind building Thaumatology project
I want to build a world in which magic is a codifiable academic discipline built out of ongoing experimentation and debate by informed individuals and institutions. These people will study ancient languages, stories and mythologies, compare notes (or indeed keep them secret), and develop heuristics which allow them to replicate wonders. To that end I will need to create the stories they study, the histories of that study, and the social and intellectual contexts in which they study them.
These should be as varied as possible. Broadly speaking I hope to eventually have eight entirely separate traditions of magic interacting:
1 A system of runic/talisman-based magic drawn from a society of magic dwarfs interacting with a human society drawing on the Tolkienian 'Nameless North.'
2 A society of largely atheistic city-states in which thaumatologists piece together the magic of the half-forgotten mythology associated with an extinct, polytheistic religion.
3 An animist religion practised in different ways by different sectors of a diverse tribal society inhabiting a vast rainforest.
4 An extinct, world-girdling society whose wizardly aristocracy derived their position and powers from their capacity as the descendants of unions between humans and dragons.
5 A society whose wizardly establishment goes through a series of methodological changes as an animistic tribal society gives way to polytheism, then scripture-based monotheism.
6 A gothic society in which magic is forbidden by a repressive monotheistic theocracy which has long since lost touch with its legitimate numinous roots.
7 An extinct civilisation whose kings who sold their society out in order to achieve profane immortality via magical rituals - which went disastrously wrong.
8 A culture in which long-lived (not immortal) wizards manipulate the history and society of a broadly medievalist culture.
This is going to take a long time, and I don't know if I will ever manage it. I am currently using World Anvil to build up society number 2 as a test case.
The goal of the project
I am creating magic as an academic discipline, mostly for my own amusement, though should the project get sufficiently developed I may develop some RPG rules around it.
Theme
Genre
I want my world to be a very detailed but not otherwise exceptional genre-fantasy environment distinguished from things like the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk only in that magic and non-human characters are very rare, exceptional objects of study. A Song of Ice and Fire might be a good point of comparison.
Reader Experience
The world should feel as though there is a strong Mendleohnian subsurface. Magic is rare but stories of magic are everywhere and the audience should be actively engaged with the efforts by certain characters to reassemble these clues into a working academic system.
Reader Tone
What's being asked here is the level of Clutean thinning my world has undergone, and what effect this has on everyday life. In most places thinning has been considerable, but it is (again, in most places) far enough in the past that nobody much really notices it except for the thaumatologists, who regard it as a problem to be solved. Because these characters ought to be the focus of the setting, however, I'm going to have to put a considerable focus on the thinning, creating a setting which is rather darker than most of its inhabitants really appreciate.
Recurring Themes
The basic narrative matter of my story is the loss of magic and its recovery via the study of ancient traditions, languages, ruins, relics and stories. Ideally every article that goes into my world should contain at least a passing reference (and ideally a link) to such matters.
Thaumatology is, however, a broad-based discipline whose pursuers unpick the fabric of their and other cultures looking for the kernels of truth in old accounts of magic. Such clues and methodologies can be found anywhere, for those observant enough to notice them, and as such there are going to be articles about rather pedestrian matters and phenomena. This is an ideal petri dish for world-builder's disease to flourish in.
The
Magic will also be impressionistic; what one investigator can pick up, correlate with their existing knowledge, and get working will be completely lost on another. As such, although magic could be anywhere, it can't be everywhere. The big challenge here will be to keep the world artistically flawed; if magic is to be kept special, it can be anywhere, but it can't be everywhere, and even if the aforementioned ideal of having everything connected to magic is maintained (which seems a tall order)
Character Agency
The story of the world should focus on the thaumatologists, those actively involved in trying to assemble a working magical tradition. These characters will likely be fairly well-served in terms of material wellbeing (since they have the wherewithal to engage in esoteric academic research) but they will seldom be the movers and shakers of the world, and their ability to pursue their study will frequently be compromised by deficits of information and resources. Magic is a slow burn here, requiring years of study before any particular effects can be generated; only in the extinct, post-apocalyptic civilisations will wizards be magically powerful enough to dominate their societies.