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Thread: Thoughts on this Magical World?

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Hey guys, first of all, wow. You've clearly been busy since Christmas time. It sucks that my boarding school is so restrictive about internet access or I would be here working with you all. As it stands, I've only had a chance to skim through a few pages of your mad genius and wanted to make a post addressing something before I really get into it.

So to get started. Some of the newer thread participants need to reread the stickied posts at the beginning. This massive worldbuilding exercise we've been undertaking together already has a foundation that we are building on. Please don't suggest changing any underlying rules as that diminishes the work we've all done together within those constraints. That being said, if something seems inconsistent in the foundation rules feel free to bring it up. As xxXDragonbornHedgehogXxx pointed out last year, the requirement for wands is partially superfluous and wandless magic is a possibility. Thank you once again Hedge, that's been a huge hit with my group at school.

I know that MagicWiz and his buddies have really taken to the spell crafting aspect of the world and I wanted to give you an update on their work. Those spells you crafted have worked great in our playtesting and are regularly employed by my friends at school, though I might pull the Napalm spell out of play for balance issues.

More good news is that my mom found some more books in the attic. Seriously, the amount of effort that Mystery Writer put into the lore building for this world is astounding. It's like Tolkein level.

Anyway, these look like more textbooks, for Arithmancy and Ancient Runes as well as some notes for potions. Cursory glances this afternoon show that it should answer some of the questions that MagicWiz420 and potatologist had when they were trying to figure out the rules of spell crafting. What they've done so far has been amazing, so I'm sure that this will just make things better.

Similarly LadyClarice should be interested in how the ancient runes lore compares with her dissertation work and the latest arrays she worked up. Also, DarthNoob, I think I saw some loose potions notes on advanced reactions, this could be what you are missing to make what you've done so far all click together. I'll upload some scans as soon as I have a chance.

For those of you more interested in the story arcs we've been building I promise an update on where things have ended up for the political plotline as well as the magic school plot thread. I look forward to your analysis and where you think things are going to go from here.

I have lots more to tell you and A LOT of back posts to get through. I'll be on Discord tonight while I read through the old posts. I promise more updates on spellcrafting, new potions, herbology, and the results of our thoughts about a 13th use for dragon blood later. Looking forward to another summer with you guys.

RavenMudMage out.

Terry Cline, rising 6th year Ravenclaw muggleborn, sat back in his swivel chair after hitting post on his response. Terry had been surprised when Professor Longbottom came to his home in the summer of 2015 to tell him and his parents that he was a wizard. Not too surprised though. Terry had always known he was special. It was his dad's fault. That's what his mum used to say before they knew the truth. That his dad had filled his head with too much fantasy as a child and confused him about reality.

Terry's dad, Albert, was a geek. He loved sci-fi, fantasy, comics, and games of all sorts, and every Friday night for as long as Terry could remember, he sat at the dining table with his friends and wove magical tales of adventurers in the land of Claereon. Claereon was his father's homebrew rpg world, a land of danger and magic that Terry loved with all his heart.

When he was younger, he would sneak into the dining room after his mum had put him to bed to listen to the stories of warlocks and mages casting spells to fight demons and monsters and save the day. Deep down, he knew that he was like them. His mother thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and tried to ground him in reality. While his dad thought it was hilarious and called Terry his little magician.

As much as he loved Claereon, Terry knew that it wasn't where he belonged. He knew that he was special, that he had been the one to stop the car when it was sliding out of control, that he had refilled the milk jug, not been mistaken about how empty it was, that he had magically made his toy dragon breath fire not been playing with matches. No matter how special he was though, he wasn't like the magical people of Clareon.

So at age seven he had drawn his first map. It was rough, and done in crayon, but it was his world, with magical people like him in it. Over the years he developed the world a bit, and his dad even played a one shot in it with his buddies once. At age 10 he lied about his age when registering an account on and worldbuilding forum in order to share his work with others.

When he stepped into Hogwarts though, his world was flipped upside down. Yes this magical world was full of magical people like him, but it wasn't Claereon, and it wasn't his world either. It was fantastical and amazing, and hidden right under everyone's noses, but it was also a place of obscure magical rules, of quills and parchment, of blood prejudice and a bloody war not even 10 years past.

He was sorted into Ravenclaw, and spent the first two years of his time at Hogwarts fighting what seemed like a never ending battle to make sense of the endless rules, laws, circumstances, and mechanics that governed magic. Adding on Ancient Runes and Arithmancy in his third year only made things more complicated.

Why couldn't things be as simple and straightforward as in an RPG? With laid out rules that covered everything and made sense.

When he came home that summer it was with an idea simmering in the back of his head that was either mad, or genius. He created a new account on RPG Worldbuilding and spun his tale. A collection of notes and rough drafts found in a chest in the basement of a new home, some kind of mix between the work of an unpublished author and a manic gamemaster that they ended up calling the Mystery Writer. A homebrew world taking place here on Earth, with a magical society hiding in plain sight.

His first post was just to see if anyone was interested. He laid out some of the basics of the magical world with specifics edited out. How it was hidden from normal people, how magic was done with wands and incantations, potions brewed with magical ingredients, secondary schools teaching the youth how to perform magic in an established setting.

He couldn't sleep that night. Certain that every tap of the wind blown branch against his window was a ministry owl informing him that he had broken the statute of secrecy and was being expelled. The letter never came, but the forum responses did.

It was only a few people at first, Hedgehog, potato, MagicWiz, but they found the details he had provided fascinating, and wanted to help him flesh out the world more. So he posted, again and again. Uploading scans of textbook pages when he could, and typing up edited information when he needed to. Gamps Laws of Transfiguration, Wand Movement charts, potion ingredient interaction tables.

People ate it up and they wanted more. More than mechanics, they wanted worldbuilding. So he gave them history (edited of course). Hogwarts founders, statute of secrecy, ministry of magic, and magical wars. They wanted plot lines so he gave them current events, political maneuvering, the ongoing blood prejudice issues, the fight for creatures rights led by war hero Hermione Granger, the strange common strange occurrences at Hogwarts.

The year before they had moved a lot of the discussion to chat services at the request of RPG Worldbuilding moderators due to the high post volume. Now they had about 18 core active people as well as dozens of occasional posters working to "flesh out the worldbuilding" of the magical world that they didn't know was real.

Terry leaned forward to close the lid to his laptop and got up to get ready for dinner. He waved his hand to open his trunk and unpack the clothes from his trunk that he would actually consider wearing in the muggle world. Wandless magic was such a shock to the pureblood witches and wizards at school but it felt so natural that Terry still had a hard time understanding their difficulty with it.

DragonbornHedgehog had pointed it out early on, the inconsistency between the magical history of wands, accidental magic, and some of the "scenes" that Terry had described in Mystery Writers notes. The wand was a tool, but had become a crutch to the magical world to the point that they didn't think about magic without it.

What was the saying? If you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail? Wands were the hammer, but they were a damn good one that could treat most problems as if they were nails with no problem. The thing was, not every problem was a nail, and not every nail needed a hammer to push in.

It had even been a shock to Terry when he worked out how to move and affect things intentionally without using his wand. A mere three years in the magical world and he had already started to accept that things just were the way everyone said they were.

Realizing that that was absolutely not true was like opening the flood gates. That first summer he had started asking people to think of new applications of magic within the rules that they had laid out. Splinter chats and threads had popped up, little self contained teams treating the world building exercise like a puzzle and attacking the questions with vigor.

Potatologist had already proposed over a dozen spells that he had worked out. To Terry's surprise he had found some of them in the Library when he was back at Hogwarts, but not all of them.

DarthNoob was a software engineer and had been working on a python script in his free time to process over the reaction tables from the potion textbook along with the known recipes to generate an algorithm that could predict potion affect based off of ingredients and brewing process.

The first program had worked for the basic potions but didn't include any of the more complex processes or reactions that they were dealing with in OWL level potions. Even then it was able to generate a couple of first year level potions that Terry hadn't been able to find any reference to.

The liquid starlight potion, or Aerendil potion as the forum had named it had been Terry's first publication. A first year level potion that generated hours of soft, comforting, light when agitated. As far as he knew it was mostly used by house witches to make night lights for their children, though if a few first years made it for themselves no one said anything.

The defensive runic array that LadyClarice had constructed using the third and fourth year texts would have been his second, if Gringotts hadn't approached him to buy it out. He felt a little bad taking the money without being able to share it, but couldn't think of a way to send it to an anonymous person on the internet without explaining where it came from.

As he finished unpacking and settling into his room, Terry thought through the dozens of spells, potions, and runic arrays he had tested at Hogwarts since Christmas, and the dozens more that were sure to be waiting for him in those unread posts. It was beginning to feel a little out of control to be honest. How could he introduce all of these discoveries without coming across as some kind of prodigy. A prodigy lacking the skills to back up the title.

He heard his father calling him and bounded down the stairs. To see two foreign magicals standing in the entryway.

"Terry Cline? We're from the ICW, and we'd like to ask you a few questions."