Mages per Capita

While working on a setting for OpenQuest, I ran across a somewhat interesting problem: approximately how many people can use magic, relative to population?

“Medium” Magic

The “Referee’s Guidance” chapter contains a section on “Levels of Magic”, which determines roughly how many player characters and non-player characters will have magical abilities. For the setting in question, currently called Ysgard, I picked “Medium” magic, defined as follows:

Magic is available to the special, the blessed and the hero born. To the common man, its still a thing of wonder, but most heroic characters either have special powers that they were born with, that mark them out as heroes, or charms that they have learned from family members.

Advanced magic is still the preserve of priests, shamans and sorcerers, but they are now the leaders of organisations dedicated to teaching magic to talented pupils, and casting it on behalf of the commoners under their protection. [Newport 2023]

The other options are “None” (only a handful of NPCs have magic¹), “Low” (only PCs and rare NPCs have magic of some kind), and “High” (everyone has at least some magic).

However, this raises the question of how often the special, blessed, and hero-born occur in the population. Certainly all the player characters have magic, usually from OpenQuest’s Personal Magic system, but exactly how special are they? 1 in 10? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10,000?

Random Distribution

Let’s run with the 1 in 100 figure, mainly because I’d like the “barbarian” tribes in the setting to have at least one priest and one shaman apiece, plus a handful of acolytes, apprentices, and assorted heroes. Let’s also assume a full tribe consists of upward of 10,000 individuals, split into dozens of clans and bands of 100 to 200 members, about the size of an average village or nomadic group. This means that every band will have one or two people with magic on average.

Let’s say that one in ten of those magically gifted folks go on to become apprentice shamans or initiates of a religion, eventually becoming full shamans or priests. That means many bands may end up with no true shamans or priests to speak of. For that reason in my setting notes I posited either a magically gifted chief or “medicine man” would take over the religious and spiritual duties of a priest / shaman, using rituals and tribal lore to substitute for advanced magic².

A one-in-ten ratio would leave us with a priest and shaman per clan or band, with plenty of magical heroes.

Bloodlines

The foregoing assumes that magic is evenly distributed throughout the population. What if magic runs in families?

In that case, a handful of clans may have all the magical talent, with the other nine in ten clans (or ninety-nine out of a hundred) being, for lack of a better term, “mundanes”. All the heroes and most of the chiefs will come from those clans. The shamans and priests have a duty to reproduce in order to keep the bloodline going, or else they’re failing the tribe.

This is doubly true for another culture in the setting, the “civilized” Empire. In the Empire, all the higher noble families practice the more rational art of Sorcery; only lower nobles practice the disorganized mess of folk traditions and ad-hoc incantations called “Personal Magic”. The Empire therefore has a series of glass ceilings separating higher nobles (Counts, Dukes, and the imperial family) from lower nobles (Barons, Knights, and landed gentry), and separating nobility from peasantry.

On the other hand, I’m not so fond of stories of heroes being heroes by virtue of birth alone (*cough* Star Wars *cough*), and magical snobbery is one of the less pleasant aspects of the Empire. So let’s stick with at least some random element.

Wasted Potential?

That said, how efficient are shamans, priests and sorcerers at finding and training talented youngsters?

For that let’s turn to the third major culture of the setting, the Kingdoms. While they have a hereditary aristocracy like the Empire, the Kingdoms generally recognize talent. Their temples run weekly schools for commoners to train them in their religion … and to seek out the next generation of Initiates and Priests. The Kingdoms also have a lot of gods, and therefore a lot of temples, with the temples of each god in constant communication with each other. The nobility, too, will adopt a commoner into their extended families if they show specific talents, notably magic. A Personal Magic spell even allows its possessor to gauge the inherent magical power of a being within sight.

The “barbarian” culture, having less top-down structure, also seems likely to recognize talent and steer youngsters with promise onto a more productive path. Perhaps most tribesmen (and tribeswomen) follow their parents' profession, but excellent hunters may be steered into hunting, talented warriors may be steered into fighting, and potential users of magic may be steered into magic as a profession.

The Empire has far less upward mobility, but we can posit that users of Personal Magic may be willing to adopt talented commoners into their families, much like the Kingdom does. On the other hand, the Sorcery-using “higher” nobles may have the opposite problem: what to do with scions who lack the intelligence, magical potential, or discipline needed to master the complicated formulae of Sorcery. Maybe we can lean on the “bloodline” hypothesis to make this outcome less likely, but even the best breeding produces the occasional black sheep. (And too much crossbreeding can have other effects.)

Conclusions

At the end of this rambling essay, I suppose I’ve reached a few decisions:

1. The assumption of one out of a hundred people being magically gifted is not ideal. Perhaps something closer to 5% to 15% of the population is better. (According to the rules, everyone can potentially use magic but only a fraction of the population would begin with characteristics high enough to be considered “talented” with magic.)

2. Perhaps some magical talents run in families, but there are enough outliers that a culture cannot simply give up on entire families, castes, or categories of people.

3. Therefore, wise advanced magic users would continuously search for the next great student (or successor).

These assumptions reduce the need for ersatz shamans, wholly non-magical social castes, and player characters with a pre-determined “destiny” by virtue of birth. (No matter what the Empire may believe.) Perhaps this shifts my setting to “Medium-High Magic”, but players may find it more interesting to encounter that one-in-twenty to one-in-seven NPC with magic.

References

Newport, Newt. (2023). OpenQuest 3rd Edition, 2nd Printing, Version 1.2. D101 Games, Oldham, UK.