What is Ether?

In this blog post, I talk about alchemy, elements of nature as hypothesized by alchemists, and I talk about apothecaries and their nonsense for a bit. In alchemy, ether is one of the five elements. Obviously, none of this is true, but in a period setting, people might believe it. The people in that period (setting) who have worked out the idea of alchemy might actually be honestly trying to describe some aspect of nature they have observed, or one they think they have observed, and they've just observed or described it very poorly. Such is a flaw in a pre-scientific method society. Let's explore this idea.

Alchemy is like chemistry for a less developed culture. Alchemy is a form of pre-chemistry where they still believe strongly in the supernatural. They realized they could mix crap and get other crap, and they must have wondered if they could mix something good. Maybe turn lead into gold or create an elixir that could grant eternal life. It seems fantastic now, but I'm sure it was mostly just a bunch of dudes in powdered wigs in secret labs slowly poisoning themselves with mercury which they called quicksilver. Some of them may have also believed they could create a person, and such a person would be called a homunculus. This belief surely came from observations of salamanders seemingly spawning from nowhere when they set a log in the woods on fire and then a bunch of salamanders scurry away from it which they then believed was somehow a sort of creation phenomenon and attributed it to the element of fire somehow. Like I said, pre-scientific method.

I mentioned five elements. What is an element, and what are the five elements? Why are their five? For our purposes, I think we can say that the word element means an essential, simple, basic part of something. A part of what? A part of anything and everything made of matter. Everything material is composed of elements. The five elements in alchemy are earth, water, air, fire, and ether. I think we have a grasp of the first four, but what about ether? The alchemists rightly identified air and fire as elements distinct elements and separate from a fifth. They probably identified the sun as fire like a candle or a torch, just on another scale. So, what might they have hypothesized or observed that was so odd that they created a fifth category? Spirits. Spirits are made of ether. I shit you not that I am not entirely making this up. A lot of what I'm saying comes from wikipedia articles I half-read a long time ago while farming ideas for RPGs, and as a consequence, I barely understand or remember it.

So ether is a basic, essential material that spirits are made of. Took us a long time to get here. Was it good for you? Let me put it another way. Ghosts are made out of ether. Phew. So far, this is kind of abstract. If we want to understand ether in a concrete manner, we need to be able to describe it with our five senses. What does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? What does it taste like? What does it sound like? Does it give off light? Does it emit heat? Does material pass through it or is it just displaced by material? Does it sound like a delicate whistle, bell, or chime? Does it have an effect on other matter, like how fire burns things? Does ether make plants grow? Does it poison people? Does it sparkle and leave dust behind? Does it leave a glowing slime residue like in the Ghostbusters movie? We could go on, and on, and on!

I think this concept is great because it's a bit ambiguous. We can describe it however we need to suit our setting and our magic system. It's basically magic, whatever THAT is, in its tangible, material form. Ether then becomes an object, a material resource that your characters can discover and fight over or pay for. You can probably make drinks out of it to recover your spent mana points, but when you do, you also vividly see the memories contained in the ether that belonged to the spirits who were once people, plants, or animals, then you forget it like a dream. Trippy.

It's important to note that alchemists really thought they were doing science. No matter how mystic alchemy may seem, the people researching alchemy did not think they were trying to do magic. Other people thought they were doing magic which is why alchemists were hunted like witches. Alchemists were people who lived in a time where the world was still mysterious to people, where people fully believed in the supernatural, and alchemists were just trying to figure things out, including the supernatural thins, and to define it in a way people that could understand. They got a lot wrong. That's not a disclaimer or an admonishment, it's just a fact.

While we're here, an apothecary is a totally different beast from an alchemist. While alchemists were just trying to figure shit out, apothecaries were charlatans hocking opium mixed with random herbs as a pseudo-remedy. If an apothecary sold a medicine called ether, it was probably nothing more potent than tea, or it was tea, or it was tea mixed with opium, or it was some mixture of water with some toxic chemical they didn't understand and opium. Just kidding, opium was probably in a lot of pseudo medicine, but not all pseudo medicine. Unlike apothecaries, alchemists didn't sell their strange concoctions.

Magic in my Setting

What is magic? Seriously, have you ever thought about that? How do you make fire appear spontaneously with your bare hands? Maybe you're thinking, roll a d20, add some numbers, deduct resources, call it a day. If that works for you that's fine, but what I want to know is what is it like for your character's perspective. I think D&D has odd things like spell components which no one uses because the people who wrote all those spells back in the day were inspired by a type of fantasy that that's not in style anymore. Modern fantasy treats magic more like a superpower rather than some weird thing with odd rituals. Take three hairs from a monkey that were cut with golden scissors and a wishbone from a white rabbit that was killed on a Tuesday afternoon, chalk a pentagram on the ground, stand in it, spin around three times chanting "there's no place like yo' mama's bosom" and boom, you can expel a cloud of purple bees from your ass for 10 seconds. I wish I read more old fashioned fantasy and fairy tales. It was probably cooler than that.

So, when I try to envision magic in my setting, I come up with two kinds of magic: Miracles from god (or the divine) and forbidden knowledge that comes from something old with an e that corrupts and taints and changes a person. In other words in my game, there is faith based magic and their is forbidden knowledge based magic.

For clerics and "divine spellcasters," you have to be of the faith. That's a prerequisite. You may be ordained like a full-fledged priest or maybe just chosen by god like Joan of Arc. Further, from the perspective of the cleric, they do not cast spells, they perform miracles. One who has faith in god and who serves that god speaks a prayer to their god, and god either does or doesn't answer the prayer. A god may answer the prayer by giving that person a spark of the divine for just a moment, or their body becomes like a conduit of the divine, and god performs a miracle through them.

I repeat this because I think it's important within the setting: Faith based magic requires a person be aligned with a god, to have faith in a god, and serve that god. Clerics serve their god. If the god acted when the cleric chose, then it would be god acting as the servant to the cleric. Failing to live by the rules of god, brief moments of doubt, fleeting impure thoughts; these are troublesome things to a servant of god. Should a cleric fall short of that god's standards at any point, god may be offended and withhold power from that servant until the servant performs some act of penance. A servant may simply not be able to perform a miracle because the servant's desire for a miracle does not fit gods' divine plan, so god denies the miracle. Sometimes, prayers aren't answered and miracles don't happen. Perhaps god thinks "I will not heal this person for they are cruel and wicked" or perhaps for a moment god wasn't listening. God's are complicated and mysterious. 

Mages on the other hand are very different. They have had an encounter with something that they do not fully understand but it changed something in them, something in their way of perceiving, of thinking. An encounter with the supernatural has altered their fundamental worldview such that they cannot go back to they way they were. Mages carry a burden, and this burden is knowledge of some unspeakable cosmic truth. It could be knowledge of the divine, it could be that we are all just transient guests in this life, that we're all made from the same space dust, or that we are just dumb animals on a mote of dust hurdling through space and time and that everything can be gone in a flash. Perhaps they discover that we are all just dreams and that the dreamer is malevolent, cosmic horror. This is what forbidden knowledge is. 

Wherever forbidden knowledge came to that mage, the ordinary world has lost it's appeal, value, or meaning. Mages are people who have become seekers of the extraordinary. Whatever it is that they now can't unknow has had a realization. It may either torment them, possibly driving them to madness, or it may inspire them. Perhaps they realize that life is meaningless, and that realization takes away the joy and beauty that was once there. For some, that's liberating. For others, perhaps its infuriating. Perhaps the mage instead realizes that because there is no greater meaning in the universe that a person therefore must give it meaning, and that is empowering. Either way, whatever this person realizes after their encounter with something supernatural, they find they don't have the ability to recall it very vividly like a fading dream, but they do know they had that experience. They also know that if they speak of it, no one will understand them, except someone else who has had the same experience, another mage. Mages who try to relate forbidden knowledge to ordinary people will be shunned or worse. A witch hunt is just the consequence of a mob of people whose minds are not prepared for forbidden knowledge.

A mage does not go to magic school to become a better mage. What academic setting exists to teach people how to defy the order of nature? IN WHAT WORLD DO YOU LIVE? Instead, one must go seeking another encounter with the supernatural. One is driven to it. It's in them like an urge, a need. A splinter in their mind. The pursuit of it becomes an obsession. They can't sleep. They can't eat. They can't think of anything else. They've tasted something grandiose, and they want more. They want to know the rest the secrets. Only the rest of it will stop the ache of that splinter.

To a cleric, a spell is a prayer to a god, and the god answers that prayer by acting through the cleric to perform a miracle. The cleric momentarily becomes a conduit for the divine. That is a cleric spell. To a mage, a spell is a piece of code of the universe they have put into writing. As I've alluded previously, the human mind cannot fully comprehend magic. Like looking at the code of the matrix. A mage who has seen that code can't recall it better than a dream, and they might spend months scribbling the same mad symbols into the dirt over and over until the symbols are just right. Some mages fill journals full of one odd sentence that looks like part math part poem over and over and over with slight changes in each iteration. To cast a spell, you speak the code and exert your will onto the fabric of the universe. Sometimes, the universe bends; You've hacked the universe and changed something in nature. The universe blinks then rights itself. It's difficult to do. You don't always pull it off. Maybe you spoke the code wrong, maybe you forgot a part of the gesture. Have you ever dreamed you were flying, then you started falling, and you tried to save yourself by willing yourself to fly again, and you just couldn't?

Not everyone recognizes magic. An ordinary person doesn't know quite what it is, but when they look at it they instinctually know they're looking at something they shouldn't be looking at. It is unsettling! There is a sensation of dread! Ordinary people who don't have forbidden knowledge, who do not know what you know, they either see magic and understand it to be something blasphemous, or in an act of self-preservation, to preserve their world view, their mind fools itself into thinking it saw something else instead. They may have seen you hurl a fireball, but they remember you doing something clever with a torch or a molotov instead. Like some primal defense mechanism of the human mind, the ordinary person who attempts to read magic rejects the knowledge in the spell and they simply fail to understand it, though they may still be disturbed by it. Mages can understand their own written interpretation of that code, but not necessarily another mages' interpretation of some other part of the code. Mage spells are too complicated for a human brain to retain; Mages must keep their spells in writing, and they must read it to cast the spell. By reading this code aloud, the words and sounds that the mage utters are alien and otherworldly, but people around them don't comprehend it as such. As the mind of the ordinary person rejects the written spell, so too does their mind reject the spoken spell. The ordinary person thinks they hear something different. Some people think they hear Latin, some people think they hear mad gibberish.

You're probably thinking "Joshua, you've presented two different, incompatible realities as a single setting. How do you reconcile a setting where clerics who serve a divine god can perform miracles by praying, and also where mages can speak blasphemous words that causes nature to blink, and while nature blinks a silent storm rains smokeless fire?" My answer to you is this: confirm none of it objectively within the setting, or out of the setting. Leave it mysterious. Maybe the mage and the cleric are just the same thing? Maybe the cleric is someone with greater exposure to forbidden knowledge but simultaneously is unaware and shielded from mental disturbance by a delusion that it comes from a good god and it therefore is sanctified. Maybe the mage simply doesn't realize they serve a god who is more a mystery than the one the cleric serves. Maybe the mage serves the same god, but that god doesn't allow the mage to know who he serves. Maybe the mage is a god and doesn't know. Allow different hypotheses and permit imagination to do its thing. This is what wonder is, this is what mysteriousness is. I think its got a definite charm to it. As it happens, I'm not religious, I don't think that the world is flat, or that it's secretly controlled by the illuminati or lizard people or space aliens, but I am a little bit fascinated by the idea that we're living in a simulation. I think that idea has influenced my idea of spellcasting more than anything. Take that for what it's worth.

Homebrew Sanity Checks for 5e D&D

From the Referee's Guide for Lamentations of the Flame Princess by James Edward Raggi IV:

"...Referees should refrain from imposing any sort of fear or sanity rules upon Player Characters...and it is but a cheap effect to try to simulate fear by rolling a die and saying, "You're scared stiff!"... In a game where character death and/or failure are forever possible, then players will respect things that are supposed to be fearsome within the game. They won’t need to be poked with any rule, because they will know that if their characters act rashly or nonchalantly towards the supernatural, the supernatural will kill them."

    Much of modern media makes the fantastic and the horrifying mundane. If your RPG system is such that a Game Master cannot threaten their players with a knife because they're not scared of d4 damage, then you're playing an RPG that has trivialized knife wounds. A game like D&D 5e is not the system for horror. 

The Mechanic:

    If you really want to make a fear mechanic for D&D 5e, then let the Wisdom score represent the sanity stat. On a failed Sanity Save, players take 1d4 Wisdom damage. If a character's Wisdom score is reduced to 0, they become irreversibly insane and are retired. The mounting penalties to their Wisdom modifier for their divination spells, medicine, survival, animal handling, perception and insight checks represent the ever-increasing faltering of their skills due to their waning sanity. Characters can only recover lost Wisdom by resting in a place of safety such as traveler's inn in a well-protected city at a rate of 1 Wisdom point per night. The inn, lodge, or home they rest in must at minimum be Comfortable on the standard of living scale presented in Chapter 5 of the PHB.