Thoughts on the Gentleman Magician of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
I recently read the excellent Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. For those who haven't read it, it's an excellent and extremely charming alternate history set in England around the time Napoleonic War, featuring some gentleman magicians (the eponymous Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) who are involved in the return of magic to England.
This post will contain some spoilers, but I'll try to avoid them where possible.
“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
I want to make a Gentleman Magician class for GLOG, but it turned out to be Pretty Hard™. There's a couple reasons for that, and to understand why, let's look at what they can do. Here's a small collection of feats of magic we see in the book:
- Scrying via a pool of water (often, but not always, in a silver bowl).
- Locating (as an extension of scrying).
- Traveling through mirrors. Swapping physical objects with their immaterial reflections.
- Illusions, mostly of a more dramatic nature (dragons of fire, etc.).
- Massive object manifestation (temporarily conjuring roads large enough to move large groups along).
- Piercing and resisting illusions and mental enchantments.
- Turning people into animals.
- Repositioning things on a massive scale (map-level) over a massive range (transporting cities from one place to another, repositioning rivers, moving buildings and mountains). Not seen applied to individuals.
- Entering other realms/dimensions.
- Large-scale weather manipulation. Described as particularly easy, even to whip up pretty severe storms.
- Conjuring and communicating with fey creatures (done more rarely).
- Giant earthen hands to grab things and catch enemies.
- Turning a sandbar to a collection of magical horses.
- Creating magical labyrinths that cannot be navigated.
So what do we see? They're very, very powerful, but a lot of their power is large-scale. Presumably, they can do smaller-scale things, but that's not what we mostly observe.
One of the classic refrains of the casters versus martial situation that particularly plagues 3.5/Pathfinder but is present in many RPGs is that "martials and casters both have power in combat, but casters also have narrative power".
The gentleman magicians possess extraordinary narrative power - and presumably combat power, though a gentleman would never kill a man by magic. We do, at a few points, see some demonstrations of exceptional combat power, or at least the potential for it. Additionally, the things they can do, they do quite reliably.
This is, intrinsically, hard to do in GLOG - the closest thing is perhaps Skerples' sorcerer. However, the sorcerer is more of an "improv" class. The gentleman magicians - one of them in particular - display some ability to create new effects on the fly, but mostly by riffing on techniques they already learned (from books).
Basically, what I've got so far as objectives for the class are:
- Emphasize powerful, narrative-scale magic.
- Lower general combat effectiveness, especially for directly harming enemies. In all likelihood, the class will be forbidden from killing by magic.
- "Spells known" as broad effects. Related effects can also be performed, but have a chance of failure.
- Learning new effects via study or application.
- Emphasize the gentleman-scholar aspect.
If I ever figure it out, I'll post some more, but for now I thought I'd get my current thoughts out there.
Also, final note - really do give Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell a read. It's fantastic.
PS: I don't know if the BBC show is any good.
