Religion and Magic in Fate

I would agree wholeheartedly that in too many games (and the novels that they inspire) magic feels very mechanical and technological.  I would argue that magic in games is most interesting when it is designed not according to a paradigm of physics and engineering, but from religion and symbolism... not the mechanistic but the anthropologic direction (as magical thinking actually did).  This is certainly disputable by players of a more engineering bent who prefer a less ambiguous way of including magic in games, but each to their own.

So the designer questions for game magic commonly include

Design Questions
*1) why would I want to be anything but a magic user?*
*2) what can you do with magic?*
*3) what can you NOT do with magic?*

These are useful, but I think more engineering type questions for designing an RPG magic system.  I'm going to swipe and modify a different list of questions (credit to Jared Sorenson as due) to take magic away from a mechanistic paradigm, and back into a more mythopoeic paradigm.  The narrativist focus from indi games is certainly more at the front than the gamist approach from so many other games with ODD DNA.

Alternate Design Questions
*1) what is magic about?*
*2) how do I reflect that in this game?*
*3) what behavior does magic reward and punish?*

My aesthetic is largely influenced by texts older than a century and a half, or by modern studies of still existing pre-industrial cultures or practices kept discrete from the industrialized world.  When I look at texts that describe magic uninformed by modern mechanistic thinking, a few things stand out to me:

Observations
*1) magic is highly related to religion, but is not the same*
*2) with magic, size is (mostly) irrelevant*
*3) the prime driver of magic is not energy but rather meaning*
*4) pursuant to 3, symbolic connections are what shape magic effects; principles of sympathy and contagion explain this*
*5) magic goes against the natural order, as defined by the powers of the world


So I am going to offer a very loose answer to your question of preferred flavors of magic and how it affects characters in the game world with those assumptions in mind.

Why would anyone be anything but a magic user in this game?  I answer this by answering the question of what magic is about.  I assume a world in which people are not ambivalent about the notion that they are but small things in a much larger and more powerful world with more powerful and willful agents behind that world (gods, spirits, devils, etc.).  The forces are constrained by their natures, and are powerful, but not omnipotent, omnipresent, or omniscient.  The priests who commit their lives to understanding these forces are most adept at interacting and negotiating with them.  A priest invokes the gods through the legitimately proscribed rituals to get an expected result.

A magician however, may make use of the understanding of the nature and power of the gods, but without regard to the morally proscribed invocation of that power.  In actual history, very often cultures would separate what they did locally as legitimate because it was locally appropriate to their gods, but what the other folk beyond the mountains did was magic.  Even in their own societies, those who practiced something heterodox from normal ritual were considered sorcerers rather than priests.  So here is my answer to question 1 from the first two lists above:

_1) Magic is about an individual (i.e. player characters) invoking a desired outcome through a transaction with the greater powers behind the world.  As such, it is potentially more powerful than any outcome that a mortal could achieve alone.  On the other hand, this is a power that requires a great investment in years of discipline, study, sacrifice, and service to acquire, and as such, precludes the participation in or acquisition of other kinds of knowledge, experience, or ability that other characters might have.  Furthermore, there are obligations to the powers that be that other characters do not have to observe_

In Fate mechanical terms, I would say that means that a magician must commit aspects, stunts, and/or skills in order to have access to magic.  The level of power determines how much investment of other mechanical elements it costs for access.  This is of course mostly the assumption taken already.

My answer to question 2 from the first two lists above is this:

_2)  Magic can potentially do anything, from innocuous charms to repel mosquitoes or light campfires, to awesome effects like summoning a plague to devour the crops in a village or raising a tempest against the enemy fleet in the channel.  The cost depends on what is sacrificed in the magical transaction.  Effects in the interest of the powers are more readily achieved.
Rituals using symbolic connections to the powers are performed in order to accomplish the invocation of the power.  The more symbolic connections, and the more strongly symbolic they are, the more powerful the effect._

In Fate mechanical terms, the cost does _not_ have any specific limitation on number of uses per day, or slots, or cost in manna pool or fatigue as the common price for using magic; magic is not powered like a battery.  The amount of energy to burn down a castle is of no more import than that to light a candle where the powers behind the world are concerned.  What does matter is the _significance_ of the action.  Lighting a candle is of little significance to anyone but the user of the candle.  Burning down a city is highly significant to thousands.  As such, while a magician may very well be able to burn down a city, the magician will bear the burden of finding a way to pay for the loss of property and lives of thousands.  The cost may be a year of the magician's life for every life taken... or the blood sacrifice of no less than a king or queen to rain fire down on the city.

How to judge lesser effects?  I would offer that rituals are performed to establish the strength or legitimacy of the invocation, and each symbolic connection between the effect, and the subject/object of the effect increases efficacy.  Size or value of the components (material, verbal, somatic, focal) is only as significant as they are in the heart and mind of the magician.  For example, if an aspect or stunt is dedicated to a magic staff, or the power of the magician's voice, that thing should be more potent (say a +3 when used).  Otherwise performing rituals are essentially a challenge series of creating advantages to make significance of the objects used.  You want to raise a storm to wreck a ship; your breath blown ritually over a bowl of sea water is two elements.  Your breath might be of a basic similarity to wind, while sea water in the bowl is more powerfully symbolic of the sea itself.  If you collected the spray of a breaching whale (the Breath of the Leviathan) that is in itself worth a bonus as both wind and the water of the sea, and thus worth more.

Need to work more on writing up the details, but there is the concept.