Grendel leaned into the tree, letting it take his weight until it moved and several branches overhead creaked alarmingly. He glanced up, trying to remember what Hansel taught him. Reddish, rough bark, leaves that were… leaf-shaped, not easy to identify like Oak or Maple or Hawthorne. Several very large, very dead branches just waiting to come down…
Elm, then. She might hate mankind, but he had never been human, and if a spiteful dryad was in her heartwood, she’d take one look at his night-black spiked fur and claws, and conclude he must hate them, too. As long as she didn’t interfere with the upcoming fight, he didn’t care.
He glanced over at the Hawthorne, where that dryad had drawn her thorny branches to conceal Hansel’s limp, mana-drained form. Haw loved humans, and that human there loved to tease Grendel that he was not so different, stiff and prickly as he was.
The witch was human, by all accounts, looking like a sweet little old lady. She’d moved into the cottage sitting on the nexus of ley-lines like a spider, too greedy to recognize the last witch’s salted ashes as the warning it was. If she’d waited for the lost and the abandoned, she might have preyed upon the humans for years… but she’d gotten too greedy and snatched a bunch at once.
He glanced up at the canopy again, feeling the pull of the crescent moon beyond. If they waited another day, the moon would hide her face entirely, and what would be done in the darkness there… no, it had to be today, and best done while the sun weakened things of the evil and the night.
He was a creature of the night, but damned if he’d be a creature of this particular evil. Hans had spent himself getting them through the outer defenses undetected, and had nothing left for the inner defenses…
But they’d both had a good look at the defenses on the way in. Pure magic, woven with spite and malice, deadly and attractive…
Magic users got so used to fighting other creatures of magic, they forgot that pure physical violence was an option. Just like the last lawyer he’d met, who was convinced he could explain away all his deeds, if he just found the right way to twist his story… He’d screamed most satisfyingly when gutted.
Grendel pitched his voice low and soft. “Rest, brother. I’ll be back before you know it.”
***
I couldn’t finish this story for the longest time, because my brain wanted to stop and work out a map of the woods, the lines of attack, the entire system of magic, the economics of being mercenaries in a fantasy world with 500 kingdoms, the languages and races…
When going through Michael Whelan’s art, I found one he did that was a cover for Patricia McKillip’s The Changeling Sea. (Note, the cover shown on amazon is not the Michael Whelan cover.) I had failed to get into the book when it first came out, but out of curiousity, I bought and read it… and it was beautiful, lyrical, and made absolutely no sense.
No, it made story-sense, dream-sense, but not a single lick of “power levels / spell slots / mana pool” like all of us D&D players are used to. I remember, now, Brandon Sanderson talking about the sliding scale of magic from hard to soft.
The harder it is, the more limitations and explanation it has, the more you can solve with it. The softer it is, the more it creates problems and the less it solves them.
I’m not sure my brain can work that way, but it’ll be an interesting experiment to rewrite this and try.
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “Hard Magic or Soft?”
Does Hansel have a sister named Gretel? [Crazy Grin]
Seriously, sounds like an interesting story (and story world).
Oh, I like characters that look monstrous but are actually good people. 😀
Yes, yes he does. That’s who sent the letter that pulled him and his partner back from being mercenaries far away.
I grew up reading “soft magic,” but I prefer to write hard magic. Probably because of my science-inclined background, thinking of magic like other energy makes more logical sense. Modern logic, not fairy-tale logic or other systems, I should specify.
I keep backing away from the “soft-n-fuzzy fairy tales” I started to write because of the problem of writing soft magic. It’s hard to suspend my disbelief! “There’s got to be a reason, and balances, and costs!” No, not in that sense.
You have to be convincing rhetorically so that the reader believes there are limits and costs and things without spelling them out.
It works best when the magic is not operated by a character whose point of view we share, or possibly by a character at all. Particularly when the character can not even steer it.
I like sciencing the magic, even though I recognize it’s ahistorical.
It’s hard to write good fairy tale logic.
I have two main magic systems. In the first it is made obvious that the main drawback is time. Time to study the symbols, time to draw the magic circle, and time to ‘activate’ it by meditation. It’s advantage is that it uses almost no internal power from the mage, and practically anyone can learn it — if they take the decade(s) to learn the underpinnings. The second system uses spoken words. Unlike the first, it is relatively simple and quick to learn and use. Just say the proper words in the proper form and you have your fireball or whatever. But its quickness comes at a cost. The power comes directly from the caster and can take a heavy toll. It nearly kills the main character who uses a transportation spell to get him and his friends out of a sticky situation.
But, I do not get into the details in my works. Just a bit of a training montage for each of them early on in the first book, and describing the effects later on when the magic is used. To make matters even more confusing, there are other forms depending on what alternate reality you are from. Except for our Earth, which has almost no magic so people from here can use whatever magic type they want, so long as they learn it.
I think all of my systems are hard magic. There are rules that must be followed, even if they are not spelled out to the nth degree.
In Winter’s Curse, I made the biggest obstacle time to study. This has more implications that are apparent at first.
You did a good job of describing Grendel, because when I went and looked at Whelan’s concept art for Changeling Sea, I found myself looking at a sea-based version of your Grendel 🙂
For magic (or psionics), I feel like it’s more important to explain what the specific players in your story can and can’t do than to have a unified theory of everything. We don’t have a theory of everything for physics, so why would they have one for magic?
I tend to write a blend. Some things are known and mundane. Other things are not, except for the basics. And some things operate on their own rules that are not readily apparent to anyone, they impact things (for good or ill) in their own fashion and you meddle with them at your peril.
For soft magic, it seems best to use from the perspective of someone who has no idea how it works, and to lean really heavily on myth magic.
“Ok, so this is kind of like a seance, just with a bunch of changes, since nobody’s dead, I think. And it’s going to be actions instead of talking, and some other things.”
“You ever done this before?”
“Hey, I read it in a book. I mean, not quite this. Look, no-one’s done anything like this before. I’m making up half of it as we go along, ok?”
“So, do you even know what’s going to happen?”
The witch paused, candle in hand. “… I don’t know what’s gonna happen even if this works. If it works, I’m gonna do whatever whoever did this did, ok? Just, promise me you won’t let me do anything I would like, ok?”
“I… You don’t have to do this.”
“You got a better idea? Though so. Besides, how often do you get to invent a brand-new spell? Now come on, let’s get this show on the road!”
“Um… How do I stop it?”
I need to get writing again…
“it was beautiful, lyrical, and made absolutely no sense.”
Honestly, that describes most of Patricia McKillips’ stuff 😀 I do enjoy her books, but I have to be in JUST the right mood for dreamlike, beautiful prose with not much in the way of character arc, plot, or solid worldbuilding. (Which, honestly, is why her swapping to Kinuko Y. Craft for her covers about twenty years ago worked great)
If I start reading a fantasy and it starts about stats, power levels and grinding to gain XP or casting spells over and over to strengthen them, my eyes glaze over. If I happen to open a LitRPG and a ‘window’ with missions and power levels opens in front of the MC, I’ll usually close the book.
If there’s a spectrum with Tolkien, Gene Wolfe’s New Sun and RE Howard on one end and D&D on the other, I go with Tolkien.
This is more my style:
P.S. Whenever somebody starts badgering me that I HAVE to read this or that LitRPG, my standing challenge is: “Fine. I’ll read your recommendation right now. I’ll put it on the top of my list, I’ll commit to finishing it, and I’ll write a review.
If you do the same with Dragonfly.
So far, no takers.
I’ve read a few LitRPG. The best seriously downplay the popups. I think the best is Dungeon Samurai, which puts the genre through the wringer.
I’m also enjoying one where the heroine is reborn as the villainess of a romance game, doomed in any path. This is a very popular trope, DESPITE most such games not having a villainess, and DESPITE most of the few that do having a path where the (game) heroine can befriend the villainess. This underscores how game tropes and story trope differ for good reason.
The only ones I’ve managed to read all the way through and like were Nick Cole’s Ctrl Alt Revolt and Soda Pop Soldier, and I’m not sure those count as LitRPG.
This was the one I was last recommended.
I read the sample, nebbish MC suddenly and inexplicably in a video game world. When the the pop up screen showed up, I was done. Issued my challenge, No response, moved on.
My challenge stands. Make a recommendation and I’ll pick it up and start reading right now. But I hope you like walking the songlines of the seraphim.
This guy has some interesting insights on high vs low fantasy, and it goes into hard vs soft magic systems, and what those systems mean for the type of story that follows. He explains it pretty well. I’d recommend giving it a listen.
He comes down pretty definitively on the side of “low fantasy” / “soft magic” he even makes a pretty good case that Tolkien should be considered “low fantasy” by his definition.
Nod, plenty of readers would agree that Tolkien’s works (mainly LofR) are low-fantasy.
That’s like saying Hal Clement’s works are not hard SF.