I loved the Susanna Clarke’s massive novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell maybe a little too much. The television adaptation was amazing.
What I liked most about it was that the main society of magicians in the book couldn’t actually do magic. They knew almost everything there was to know about magic, except for the performance of same.
So the disruption to their society by some people who actually, yes, could perform magic was seismic in scope.
There’s been other books that tried to categorize magic. Lyndon Hardy’s Master of Five Magics books, Heinlein’s Magic, Inc, even Dungeons & Dragon’s various classifications of magic users: sorcerer, warlock, illusionist…
Squaredle doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with magic. It’s a daily word puzzle. Players try to find words in a grid by tracing them with their fingers. When they discover all the words in the puzzle that also appear on the secret master list of legal words, they win. There’s also words that are actual words but are not on the secret master list; those are bonus words. Then there’s words that are not on the secret master list, nor on the secret bonus word list but are nonetheless words. These are NOT ON THE LIST AND NOW YOU LOSE.
So many secrets.
I do this puzzle every morning, and sometimes my mind wanders a bit. We’re tracing words on a phone screen with our fingers, but what if the puzzle was in the air before us, and we were tracing with a wand?
That’s when I realized how Squaredle explains how magic works.
Let’s consider the performing of magic as tracing out all the secret words within a grid of letters (but let’s say these are words of a magical vocabulary, using mysterious glyphs).
Magic, Squaredle magic, would be magically summoning a particular puzzle, and then solving it. Anyone can summon a particular puzzle by saying the words. How do we know these words to summon the puzzle?
Sorcerers can see magic all around them. Their world is filled with grids; they don’t have to summon them at all, they are always there. But they can read the magic and understand how to tell others how to summon them. If it’s a grid they’ve seen before, they know the effects. Otherwise they have to… experiment. Wild magic.
Warlocks can only see grids tossed up by their patrons. They need to cast a spell — they silently commune with their patron, who gives them what they feel is appropriate for the situation.
Wizards can cast the grids the Sorcerers teach them. It’s Wizards who figure out the magic glyphs and arcane vocabulary. Without their extensive research, magic would be almost useless. They can scribe the exact movements necessary to complete the grid in the shortest time and to maximum effect in spells, that they can then copy, share and sell. All magic users are customers for wizards.
Mages cannot see magic. They can summon a grid, but they can’t see it. However, they are very skilled at tracing the patterns revealed in Wizard scrolls. Through skill and practice, they can cast magic the equal of any Wizard, if they have a spell scroll to cast from.
The reason for this? If I’m ever running a game again, I’m going to print out spells for the magic users to cast. Not every time; but for a particularly important encounter, having to cast a spell in this way while the battle is happening in real time would be… a lot of fun, I think.
So there you have it. Squaredle-based magic.
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