Cairn-ish Content: A justification for spellbook magic

This is a bit of an idle musing I wanted to put out into the world.

In Cairn, magic is generally carried out in three ways. (More like two and a half really.) You've got spellbooks, scrolls (that's the half), and relics. Today's thoughts are all about those spellbooks and scrolls.

Mechanical justification vs. diagetic justification

For good, very OSR flavored, gamey reasons, spells in Cairn are contained within a single spellbook that occupies a slot. Casting a spell requires some level of safety, holding the spellbook open in both hands, and filling another slot with Fatigue.

That's more than enough for a good time, and we don't have to think about it any harder. But, my brain is the sort that looks at this and says.... why though? I don't mean "why would you design it this way", the only reason needed for that is "it makes the game fun in the particular way we want it to be", but I do imagine some people with a stronger variant of my particular affliction will cry foul because nothing has been done to explain why magic would work this way within the fiction. ....so that's what I'm going to do.

(Disclaimer: I'm not going to try to explain everything about magic in Cairn. e.g. why might some spellbooks be sentient? Because. Maybe another day...)
(P.S.S. If you like what I've cooked up here, I'm not even necessarily saying you should tell your players any of this. But, if anyone ever asks "why does magic work this way", because they want to, you know, do some creative problem solving immersed in the fiction, then maybe it will help you to have this concept in your back pocket.)

Spellbooks as reality-programs

Let's presume that magic at it's most fundamental level is like programming reality. (This view of magic is a bit of meme among some RPG subcultures; my secret alter ego happens to work as a programmer by day, so this paradigm really gels with me!)

I don't want to assume you know things about programming and risk losing you, so let me briefly convey some relevant facts:

* programs are basically lists of instructions to move information around, and combine it into new information

* programming languages range from "high-level" (like Python) in which you can get quite a lot done in very few instructions to "low-level" (like Assembly) in which getting anything done at all requires several instructions

* high-level languages are typically implemented by translation ("compiling") into lower level languages. (Ultimately all that abstract higher-level intent has to be expressed in very tiny specific instructions that move bits around some microchips.)

One spell per spellbook

With that framing in mind then, let's say that the reason a spell requires an entire spellbook is that the "language" which spellbook magic is encoded in is a very "low-level" language. It takes a lot of setup and detail to get anything done. All those pages? Ya that's how long a simple reality-program has to be. And in these pseudo-medieval worlds where games like this typically take place, we frequently don't even have regular printing presses, much less the ability to print our spells on microchip-sized "spellbooks".

One Fatigue per casting

Continuing with our programming analogy, the fundamental components of a computer cannot run without electricity. Likewise, spellbooks need power to execute their programs. Luckily you're basically a fleshy, juicy, bio-battery. (Or, like, a soul-battery.) And much like how the most primitive computers used to fill a room and take a lot more power, spellbooks take a lot out of you.

Two hands on the book

A circuit is a loop. For electricity to move, the loop has to be closed. "Power" is not used by pooling electrons in one place, but by moving electrons through the circuit to generate heat and light and things like that. (I'm reaching beyond my expertise a little here; I'm a programmer, not an electrical engineer.).

Anyways, leveraging this notion, the bio-power that fuels magic has similar requirements. You spend your energy to "move" those spirit-electrons through one hand, into the spellbook-magic-maker-thing, and back into the other hand.

Reading the spell aloud

Of course, you don't really read the whole spell aloud. That would take quite a long time. Instead, spellbooks always include an incantation that "invokes" the reality-program contained within it's pages. (like typing a command directly into a terminal, or calling a function, if you're savvy) The words themself are insufficient of course--they're not the spell, and they're worthless without the connected program bound within the pages of the entire spellbook.

Casting under duress

Moving your bio-power or soul or whatever is a finnicky process. Without the proper focus and care, you risk pumping too much voltage into your spellbook, or short circuiting, or that sort of thing. That could mean your spellbook blowing up, or burning out your liver, or just using a lot more of your energy.

Scrolls

Ok, so how do scrolls get away with skipping all that hassle?

No inventory slot

Because it's basically a piece of paper in your pocket. Next question.

Ok ok, but if spells are these long programs, how do we get away with putting them on basically-a-piece-of-paper? Simple. A scroll is basically a link or reference to an existing spellbook. Using the scroll is like invoking the spellbook instructions remotely. (This comes with a fun implication: destroying the spellbook the scroll is linked to will break every scroll made from that spellbook!)

No fatigue (and one-time use)

Scrolls aren't cheap objects. They're not actually made of paper. Instead, they're crafted from highly specialized (and costly) materials. One of the properties of these materials is the ability to hold your magic-energy within the scroll like a battery! When the scroll is "activated" it burns that stored energy, and the release of energy fries the scrolls physical medium in the process.

Why can't we make more of these?

Simple really, the "technology" has been lost. There isn't really anybody around right now who understands how these things were made. (We're getting back into hand-waving territory, but in my mind spellbooks were all pretty much made by one guy. That's why the spells are all so weird, too, instead of being really bland obvious things like "shoot fireball". The guy was a quirky fellow. He liked making weird stuff. Geniuses are like that.) 

And not only do we not know how to write the actual programs, we don't have a great sense of how these pieces all fit together either--to make a program work, it's not enough to learn the language, you need the right hardware, too. Every part of a spellbook is important to make the final program work: the paper, the ink, the binding, it's all special, and in ways that are hard to detect (imagine trying to understand how a microchip works if no one knew how to make microscopes either.)

But... what if we could?

Obviously, you can do whatever you want at your own table. Even with the ideas I've just laid out, many of them are not categorical restrictions, they're more like snapshots of technology at a specific moment in time. Why didn't the hardware engineers of the 1950's just make smaller computers? For no other reason than because they hadn't figured out how to do it yet. 

Therefore, go crazy. Perhaps you want spellbooks to remain precious, but you want to let players make more scrolls. Fine. We still don't get all the intricacies of how spellbooks are made, but we've at least worked out the mechanics of scroll-making. (This is totally reasonable. It's not that different from knowing how to use a computer without knowing how it works.) It's still going to be expensive though. It's going to require extra-special materials, and it's going to require access to the spellbook you want the scroll to reference, and it's going to require some time and energy to "charge" the scroll battery.

You could even take this whole magic premise and imagine a far future (or far past) where all of this stuff is really well understood. Suddenly, spellbooks don't have to be lugged around anymore, and they're not that big either (maybe they're even microscopic) writing spells is easy, too, because we've figured out "higher level" magic languages that compile down into the raw universe-Assembler stuff. Maybe we work out how to write our (tiny) scrolls in materials that are more durable, too, so they don't have to burn up. Maybe they're so convenient we embed them in our skin to invoke them whenever we want, hassle free. Maybe we even figure out how to draw power from something other than ourselves, and charge up our magic straight from the magic power grid.

Of course, at this point we aren't really playing Cairn anymore.

One last thought, more of a tangent really

When I first thought about this whole concept, my first idea was just "spellbook is long program, scroll is reference to spellbook", and it occurred to me that with this paradigm it's actually pretty easy to get back to very mainstream, "spell slot" oriented RPG magic without really straying much from Cairn's rules. (The only real improvisation we have to do is "you can copy spells to scrolls given time, energy, and resources).

So, that other fantasy adventure game we all know, it's got spell slots right? And you have a certain number, and you keep spells in a book, and you have to have that book to do your casting, but not like, on you, you just have to "write the spells in the book" then you have to "prepare them" in order to be able to cast them that day.

Well, same thing: you have some spellbooks, which contain the spells you are able to "prepare", and "preparing" them just means creating a scroll with that spell, and because scrolls are "petty", they don't take up an inventory slot, and because scrolls don't cost Fatigue, you can cast magic without filling up more of your inventory slots. 

Congratulations, you have effectively simulated cast-on-demand, no-downsides, spell-slot-magic with only the slightest tweak to the spirit of Cairn (but not any actual "rules" changes). It's still a bit grittier and more expensive, but hey, maybe it will convince your stubborn brand-name-fantasy-game friends into playing Cairn with you.

(I promise, I'm not trying to break Cairn; I certainly don't intend to play this way)