My world of Altearth has about two thousand years of history. Much of it is Earth history, so I'm already mostly done!
Magic enters, and Altearth diverges from Earth, in the late Roman Empire. Early on I decided that magic would have its own history, its own development. Structurally this is working really well for me. Early practitioners were "naturals" -- people who simply exercised powers without understanding much about how they worked, and with unpredictable results. This allowed quite a large body of lore to grow up around the practice of magic, since it seems mysterious.
Over the centuries, other kinds of magic appeared, including alchemy, astrology, and so on. Altearth's version of the Scientific Revolution is when people began to gain a scientific understanding of how magic worked, and a whole new set of practitioners arose based on their ability to manipulate phlogiston, aether and such. That's what gave birth to the Modern Age.
Has anyone else treated their magic system as something that evolved over time? If there have been published novels that employ this, I should be glad for the reference.
Magic enters, and Altearth diverges from Earth, in the late Roman Empire. Early on I decided that magic would have its own history, its own development. Structurally this is working really well for me. Early practitioners were "naturals" -- people who simply exercised powers without understanding much about how they worked, and with unpredictable results. This allowed quite a large body of lore to grow up around the practice of magic, since it seems mysterious.
Over the centuries, other kinds of magic appeared, including alchemy, astrology, and so on. Altearth's version of the Scientific Revolution is when people began to gain a scientific understanding of how magic worked, and a whole new set of practitioners arose based on their ability to manipulate phlogiston, aether and such. That's what gave birth to the Modern Age.
Has anyone else treated their magic system as something that evolved over time? If there have been published novels that employ this, I should be glad for the reference.