Hey it's a pagan article of the day, two days in a row!
http://paganbloggers.com/critter/blog/2017/05/09/on-pagan-writing-styles/
This one is actually really relevant to the conversations with @literorrery et all last night!
@indi Yeah, this is exactly the kind of note I want to hit. The word I was looking for when I was trying to think of this before was "case study." Everyone's magical system is a case study in how to apply the theories of metamagic. Not every system will use every example, but here's three reasonably fleshed-out examples and how they do use the theories, as well as a bunch more places to go look for inspiration.
@literorrery Yes. Yesyesyes. 'Case study' nails it perfectly. The most useful books on magic that I ever read, personally, were SPECIFIC. They weren't MY specific, but they showed me how to get to my sort of specific.
I think (I was actually thinking this even before I got to the part of your message that mentioned it) that it'd be fascinating to have one tome that actually went out of its way to line up different specfic ways of doing something.
@literorrery That's actually the sort of thing that was on my mind when I said "Can I help?" last night; I want to see a book that has High Invocations of Celestial Spheres, and then, overleaf, cuddly interpersonal plushie-totem spiritwork. ;)
@indi This. Thisthisthisthis.
This is what I want. Absolutely.
@literorrery So, what's step 1?
Maybe a list of common magical operations that multiple folks independently write implementations of?
@indi I would say that, and the _briefest_ of nods towards "what problems magic systems are meant to address/explore." If this is longer than a page, we did it wrong, but an intro of "why this idea is important" (because it closes the gap between "anything can be a system" and "here's the book of All the Spells There Are" with little means from getting from A to B) I think will help establish what we're trying to accomplish.
@literorrery Yeah. I think one thing that's important, Design Pattern style, is to say 'this is the scenario where this is useful' rather than anchoring on specific terms.
Case-study: As a spirits-first practitioner, the focus lots of ceremonial paths put on 'banishing' makes me kinda twitchy. In general it often seems to be talking more about personal cleansing and alignment with the subject of focus, but, y'know, I think it's really useful to call that out.
@indi Exactly. Language is going to matter a lot, and we're going to need to find ways to explore these ideas that are value-neutral for most cases, but that will itself help show the "pattern" nature.
