Trauma as a Magic System

Comments · 771

• TH

  @TheTaleFoundry · 9 months ago · pinned

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• JU

  @JulianLopez-rt6kp · 9 months ago

  Magic is usually tied to emotions.<br><br>It makes sense that trauma would affect magic; all that pain and suffering is a tidal wave of emotion.

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• DF

  @DFTBA221B · 9 months ago

  &quot;Ten spears go to battle,&quot; he whispered, &quot;and nine shatter. Did the war forge the one that remained? No, Amaram. All the war did was identify the spear that would not break.&quot;<br>-Kaladin Stormblessed

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• QR

  @qrowbranwen1864 · 9 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po_Y27FHiGo&amp;t=13">0:13</a> &quot;He cries out in Aang-uish&quot;.... I&apos;ll see myself out

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• MY

  @mysticmoth1111 · 9 months ago

  Matilda is another good story about magic manifesting from trauma.

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• RY

  @RyeCantDie · 9 months ago

  This happened to me bro. My trauma gave me the power of making puns at inappropriate moments

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• NU

  @nuckyducky · 9 months ago

  Finally, a magic system that resonates with my childhood.

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• CA

  @cale0176 · 9 months ago

  I&apos;ve always seen trauma as power not from the trauma itself but from overcoming it. No one understands the fear and power of a flame better than one who has been burned, and they must face that fear each time they tap back into that fire.

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• AL

  @alkatron768 · 9 months ago

  Magic, Madness and Sadness.

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• IS

  @isomeme · 9 months ago

  One of my favorite things about <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> is that it subverts this formula. In any other fantasy novel, at the climax the terribly traumatized Frodo would have drawn on some untapped well of magical power to overcome the influence of the Ring and drop it into the lava. Tolkien instead allows him to fail, leaving it to divine providence (enabled by previous acts of mercy) to guide Gollum into accidentally destroying the Ring instead. And after the quest is done, Frodo&apos;s trauma lingers on. In the end, he sails into the West to escape from it, an act which is disturbingly easy to see as an obscured and romanticized taking of his own life. Tolkien experienced the horrors of the trenches in WWI, and tried to convey his trauma through his writing ever after.

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• BR

  @brianmurphie7501 · 9 months ago

  Because in the real world, trauma mostly just breaks people. The fantasy of magic allows for the notiom that there is at least some sort of benefit from the horrible experiences. Some sort of control in an indifferent universe.

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• YM

  @Ymryrth · 9 months ago (edited)

  I love how the developers of the Project Moon games handle this. In their dystopian sci-fi setting from the second game onwards there is a phenomenon known as distortions, basically due to immense shock or trauma a person starts hearing a voice and based on the conversation, they change into a monsterous form reflecting their trauma. These distortions have strange and various powers that give a nice contrast to the other crazy technology of the setting. Also most of the time they manage to hold onto chunks of their personality. My descriptions are definitly undersellsing how impactful the stories and boss fights are in the games. If you like mangemant sims, turn-based combat or dekbuilders and don&apos;t mind big difficulty spikes, feel free to look into it.<br><br><br><br>There is also the &quot;good&quot; version of this called E.G.O. which has a similar process but a distortion happens when rejecting reality, giving up/in or fleeing form the trauma (as I understand) while manifesting ones E.G.O. is about confronting it no matter how hard it is. An E.G.O. is basically a persons psyche manifesting into armor/weapon or tool.

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