Thoughts on Occulted Systems

So, based on a positive review, I buckled down and picked up a game I had been eying for awhile: Cultist Simulator. I am completely obsessed with it now, as it's absolutely the sort of game I've desperately wanted for a very long time, and it's devouring more of my free time than I should really allow.

But it did get me thinking about a perennial bugbear of mine, namely magic systems and a lot of my gripes of them.  Cultist Simulator helped me clarify what it is I actually want to see in such a game, or what I'd like to try to explore.

See, in Cultist Simulator, they explain nothing to you.  You have to experiment on your own and figure it all out, and it's pretty complicated stuff.  It's just random enough be uncertain if a failing result is a matter of a bad choice or if you've just gotten unlucky, though not so random that you feel like you couldn't guess.  There are systems that underly things that tend to have a surprising number of moving parts, and while the game (seems to) give you enough information to figure it out, though it's not obvious, and even if you think you know, there may still be some deeper thing to learn.  The fact that these various, abstract concepts have pretty obscure and symbolic names only makes it more fun (My character solved the riddle of the Stag's Door, which was about a queen who never was, and passed through it to become one of the Know.  Now he hungers for the minds of others. Until the Worms came for him).

In short, Cultist Simulator treats the Occult as a mystery to be investigated, which is something I feel a lot of magic systems lack.  Given that I'm thinking about this all the time right now, I thought I might as well right about it, to get it off my chest and maybe give you some ideas as well, dear reader.

Apprentice Consulting Occultist: What is Magic, Really?

I put up a patreon poll every month (when I remember to, anyway) and this time, I introduced no new elements, but brought up a bunch of old ones, and this one overwhelmingly. This will be a consulting occultist post, where I lay out some of my research into the worlds of the murky and the occult, and the most pressing question was: in the real world, in the real, and actual world, what is magic?

I've been slow in writing this post, not because I wasn't sure what to write, but I wasn't sure how to cut it down to something reasonable.  Do you want more research and quotes? Do you want deeper explanations? How long should I make this post?  The answer is, of course, that this is a rabbit hole without end, as can be seen from the occult section of any library, or the fact that Kenneth Hite has been writing about this my entire adult life. So I've chosen to focus on the barest of answers and analysis.  The idea is to give you a feeling for what the real world occult actually is, how it actually works, and how you should try to treat it when researching it yourself.

As for what the truth of the occult actually is\, you already know the answer to that.  It's...

Ken and Robin have a patreon

My dear and faithful readers, I haven't had the chance to get around to some of my favorite topics, like demonology or history or GURPS Cabal, but all of them have their roots in my misspent youth scrambling for whatever scraps of the Suppressed Transmission that I could get.  Kenneth Hite helped inspire many of my campaigns and I often quote him.

 At some point, I'll get around to my own Apprentice Consulting Occultist series. Lo and behold, on a great and joyous day, Kenneth Hite started a podcast with Robin Laws. Robin literally wrote the book on game-mastering and his excellence in tightly focused game design joins my pantheon of inspirations with Sirlin and Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun" for how I work on and design my own games or campaigns.

 So, if you like my stuff, I recommend listening to them on Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. And if you like their stuff, if I may finally get to the real point of this post, they've launched a patreon campaign. I've already bid my dollars in support of these giants of the RPG industry, and I encourage you to do the same. Thanks for your time, dear and faithful reader. I return you back to your regularly scheduled force sword duels.