The Price Of Magical Powers

[Tessar]

I like the idea of magic that involves some kind of price or danger, and the price/danger rises with the "potency" of the magical ability. Although it changed over time, I like/liked the Wheel of Time setting. There were clear dangers, both immediate and long-term.

I am working on a setting, and I have a couple of thoughts I'd like some feedback on.

Prophets

Only women are prophets, and they can see possible futures with potential crossroads where things could change. They bring on these "foretellings" by giving birth, and the "fuel" for the foretelling is the life-force of the baby.

The price for the women is obvious. They're constantly pregnant (they're revered, but also somewhat like slaves), but they cannot "keep" any child regardless of whether they want to or not. It's also dangerous because, aside from the risks of a regular birth, the foretelling takes a lot out of them.

There is also (for the potential storyline) one male prophet. His mother was murdered in the middle of giving birth, right before she could begin the foretelling, and her son survived. After a while (maybe 15-20 years) the child experienced a foretelling and it killed a random prophet.

The "price" for this guy is that now all of the female prophets want him dead (along with the Emperor, who loses a prophet every time the guy has a foretelling), and he is angry so he keeps finding ways to bring on foretellings to kill them off. He has fled to one of the border kingdoms where he is hiding. His foretellings are more powerful because he is (usually) taking two lives when he foretells: the female prophet and any baby she is carrying.

Magic

Magic is outlawed within the Empire because of a necromancer who almost destroyed the Empire, and also because the Church declares it as a blaspheme. Meaning every noble house with any power at all has a coterie of wizards, but the whole thing is kept secret and the discovery of a trained wizard working for you could be the end of your noble house. Magic is more common in non-Empire territory, but still viewed with great suspicion.

Magic is dangerous to the user because accessing more than a small piece of your strength is actually opening a connection to somewhere else. No one really knows where the power comes from, except that if you draw more than a little of your strength you start to feel "wind," and you hear whispering voices. The more you draw, the stronger you feel the wind, and the voices get louder and louder. Wizards who draw too much strength too frequently end up going insane, and sometimes wizards just die, or vanish. The theory is that it's possible to be bodily "drawn" into the other place if you open yourself too much, but no one wants to test the theory.

Wizards can tell if someone nearby is drawing on the power because they can faintly hear the wind, although not the whispering. I'm thinking that in some cases, where a lot of power is being drawn, the wind actually begins to affect the wizard drawing it, and the things directly touching them. Like you can see their hair/clothing moving in the wind, but nothing else around them is moving.

There's also a danger because another wizard can strip you completely of your powers by killing you and "sucking" your strength out of you. It can be done without killing if one of the wizards is super weak and the other is immensely powerful, but that's rare. But that's why, if you're a very weak wizard, it's usually not such a good idea to let other wizards know you can use magic... or you have to find a way to bluff them into thinking you're very strong.

There's also a big thing about not letting other wizards, even your friends, know exactly how powerful you are. It can sort of be guessed by what you can do without triggering the "wind," but that's just a rough guess (often wrong) that another wizard can make. There is a lot of bluffing and powerplay among wizards for status, all within the confines of trying not to be caught using magic.


Clerics

The big secret of the Church within the Empire (although not in the lands outside the Empire--a minority of the territory) is that it has magic users. If a young priest/priestess is discovered to have some sort of magical ability, they are given a kind of training that ties their abilities up in knots so that they can only access a small portion of it, and only through intense meditation... i.e. prayer. The portion they can access only reaches the limits of what they can do without triggering the "wind," so no one can tell they're using magic.

People don't know why, but sometimes miraculous cures do occur when you're under the care of a priest(ess), and it's because there is some minor magic at work. The priests and priestesses don't realize that they're magic users, they think it's just the work of prayer.

Although it's been hushed up almost completely, the necromancer who almost destroyed the Empire (several hundred years back) was actually a super powerful Cleric who accidentally broke through the "barriers" of his training (because he was so powerful) and accessed his full strength. Wizards and Clerics (who know the secret) still debate whether it was just insanity brought on by the sudden access of his powers, or whether he was actually possessed by something on the "other side."




One storyline idea that I'm sort of liking, but not too sure about, has to do with twin brothers (or maybe a brother and a sister) who were born within the Empire. Their mother and father are in the Emperor's coterie, and they are two of the most powerful. The twins would have been incredibly powerful each in their own right, but the Mother draws too much power during her pregnancy and triggers a reaction in the babies. One of the twins involuntarily pulls the magical power from the other one, and that makes him powerful enough to draw the strength from the mother. When the father rushes to her side, sensing something wrong, the baby draws the father's power in too when he touches the mother.

It turns out that one of the prophets foretold the possibility of that happening, and so the Emperor found a way to make it happen so that he could have a super-powered wizard. He tries to keep the one twin and get rid of the other, but (drawing on the other storyline) because of the male prophet having a foretelling about the twins, both of the boys are saved and they're taken into hiding.

Because he is so immensely powerful, the one twin is actually slowly being drawn into the "other place," and is going insane regardless of whether he draws on his powers or not. Then, when he does draw on his powers very strongly during an attempt to overthrow the Emperor (the twins get involved with a rebel kingdom), the wizard twin unleashes a demon into the world.

Then some other twists happen, but that's the basic idea. The storyline is about the two boys, or a boy and a girl, and their relationship/outlook on life. The one twin has no magical powers whatsoever (or maybe, in a twist of irony, he/she has just a tiny, tiny amount of ability left... so little that he/she's considered worthless) and the other one is so powerful that it's slowly driving him/her insane.




Another idea I had for a sort of similar storyline involves people making deals with demons for some magical abilities. But a lot of times the price is something directly related to the ability, and often comes with sort of a hook.

A couple of ideas:

Someone who gains the ability to heal other people (so that he could save his wife), but the downside is that he can only use his power using blood from someone that he has just killed. So he becomes a healer in the employ of the Emperor, and if someone needs to be healed the Emperor has a prisoner or criminal dragged up from the dungeon for the guy to kill.

Someone who can tell when anyone is watching him or someone that he focuses on. So he is employed by the Emperor to sense spies and assassins, but he becomes so paranoid (because he can ALWAYS feel someone watching either him or the Emperor) that he leads a horrible life.

Someone who gains the ability to (roughly) communicate with animals, but she loses the ability to see, speak, or hear for herself, so she must constantly be in contact with the creatures around her. She eventually starts to actually be taken over by the animals instead of the other way around. As her powers "grow" they actually sort of turn around till she ends up becoming kind of a weird "forest spirit," that is mentally part animal, part human.