Thaumatology

The Study of Magic

This is surely poppycock, you're no doubt thinking. How could one rationally and sanely develop a study of magic? Well, the answer is by deciding what kind of magic we're working with. I'm not talking about sorcery from the heart, or chants involving cute rhymes about frog eyes, or even the frog eyes themselves. What interests me is what wizards mumble when they prepare to cast those spells that it takes years of their lives to prepare. What the heck could be taking them so long?

The conclusion hit me somewhere between Lingua Romana Perligata (an idea that came to me independently—natural-language programming) and the description of magic schools in 3^e Player's Handbook. The reason wizards take so long to research spells is because magic, in addition to being ancient and obscure in nature, must be some kind of programming. A heavy, painful kind of programming spoken on the fly, like someone toggling in register values on the front panel of a mainframe at the speed of sound, or typing a script directly into an interpreter. This explains why there's so much reuse of obscure spells, how they can be of such wildly differing lengths, and why it's so hard: the universe doesn't recognise compiler languages or even assembly, it only recognises machine code, probably designed by whoever built the universe—take your pick of gods.

If that made no sense, you may want to start with the introduction.

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