1. Magic and the SCP Wiki
Ever since its inception, the SCP Wiki and fantasy have been inherently intertwined. Though initially the Wiki's fantastical elements took the form closer to a horror-oriented approach, over time its world morphed into a much more explicitly magical setting. A setting that today can be more described as "urban fantasy" than outright "horror" — and magic and urban fantasy are as inseparable as it gets. Magic, thaumaturgy, and the occult at large have since become staple backbones of the generally agreed-upon canon of the basic SCP setting; today, it is hard to imagine a Wiki that isn't populated by all kinds of wizards, witches, and spell-casters.
Nowadays, the SCP Wiki and magic are more entangled together than they ever have been. Because of this, any writer coming onto the modern Wiki is inherently going to need to operate in a setting that is sooner or later going to rub against magic. Between that and the at-the-time-of-writing eighteen years worth of magical history and evolution on the site, it can be a lot. But I think it is very much worth it for any author active here to understand just how magic has engrained itself onto the Wiki — and how to make sure your own interpretation ends up serving the story you want to tell instead of going against it.
2. Magic, at large
Handily for us, Google defines magic as
the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.
so of course, it is hard not to see how — or indeed why — it has crept so heavily into the larger mythos of the SCP Wiki, gradually turning from ill-defined paranormal forces to a more-or-less coherent system. But how do you make that magic, that thing you cannot fully outrun on the Wiki, not dull — and how do you make it so that it actively enriches your story?
Here's a hardline truth that we have to accept first: all good stories are, fundamentally, about something. This is a topic better handled by an author far more talented and experienced than me in another essay, but the tl;dr of that is that every truly great story has something to say beneath all that plot and characters. But stories do not exist in a vacuum, and neither does their world — the former without the latter is dull nonsense, and the latter without the former is mental masturbation.
I mention this because a lot of authors end up crafting their world — and especially their magic — as a secondary afterthought or as an entity wholly separate from the story they want to tell, and the characters they want to inhabit those stories. As it should be obvious by now, the best stories do the exact opposite. A well-crafted magic system should enrich the themes most fundamental to the story's plot, and work as a parallel — or contrast, where necessary, but we'll get to that later — to the motifs at large.
But it's easy to just say that; what the hell does it actually mean? Well, here's some well-known examples, picked intentionally because it's so much easier to explain what I mean based on stuff everybody's already familiar with.
At its core, Frank Herbert's Dune is a story about colonialism. It's a story about empire, about the exploitation of natives, about cultural appropriation. Its magic is the spice, a substance that grants the user all kinds of mental processes unavailable to the sober human mind, such as clairvoyance, which the whole intergalactic empire is dependent upon to exist. But here's the kicker: the only way that spice can be harvested is through a brutal extraction process that not only disrupts the natural environment of its only home planet, but also insults the traditions of the indigenous Fremen, thus depriving them of a resource that is thoroughly engrained in their culture and disrespecting every single one of their beliefs — beliefs which the primary non-indiginous benefactors of the spice, the Bene Gesserit, actively meddle in so as to make the imperial harvest of the spice easier.
Dune is a masterclass at tying its world to its themes. You can clearly see how every single aspect of the spice is thematically relevant to the story and its main point: that imperialism, particularly of the colonial variety, sucks. It is impossible to discuss the spice without immediately realizing that how it is harvested, where it originates, who uses it, and how they use it somehow reflects the larger thematic core of the story.
But Dune's magic isn't great just because it is relevant — it is also great because it isn't an afterthought. As an inseparable part of the novel's world, every single major player in the story is somehow affected by its existence. Spice is not merely a magical resource, but also an active architect of culture(s): it allows the Bene Gesserit to cultivate its legacy of matriarchal humanism by giving them access to the memory and consciousness of their predecessors; it permits the Guild Navigators to find paths around the stars, connecting the whole of human civilization together; and most importantly of all, between acting as a part of their cuisine, their religious rituals, and even their craftsmanship, it makes the Fremen who they are. The point is: spice permanently alters the cultures it comes into contact with. Good magic should do the same — as a reader, you should feel that magic is truly part of the world that it inhabits, and there's nothing more lively inside a world than its many cultures.
Speaking of cultures, here's another example that immediately comes to mind: Avatar: The Last Airbender. The cultures of the four nations and the actual four styles of bending are mirrors of one another. The Air Nomads are like the wind they control: they are a nomadic bunch that avoid forming attachments and generally just drift through the world with a pacifist attitude; the Fire Nation is violent and brutal — it consumes everything it touches, but through that violence and the global availability of its fire it is also a hub of industrial development; the Earth Kingdom is stoic, almost passive in its uncompromising stance — it secludes itself inside tall walls and large cities, hoping to wait out the storm; the Water Tribes meanwhile practice a harmonic coexistence that ultimately brings all of its folk as together a single people.
You get the point — just like with Dune, here too is magic absolutely inseparable from the many cultures that do practice it. In that way, the story is again reinforced by the inclusion of magic, and thanks to it, the themes that the writers want to explore with each nation are made stronger and far more apparent.
3. Soft magic
Right, but that's all fine and dandy, but how do I know what kind of magic would suit my story? What traits should it have to reflect what I want to say? And how does any of that relate to the SCP Wiki?
Generally speaking, people who like labels have come up with two types of magic that you can put any system into: soft and hard magic. It's a distinction I personally do not find to be all that useful, but for the needs of literary analysis it can definitely prove handy. Hard magic has well-defined rules that it generally does not break, whereas soft magic is far more ambiguous in its limits, often to the point of not having them at all. We'll focus on the latter first.
By virtue of being nebulous in its approach to consistency, soft magic is most often found in settings that value a more traditional, fairytale-like kind of magic. Those stories like to play with the characters — and the reader — not having an all-encompassing grasp on the arcane. Both are children grappling at forces well beyond their understanding. It's a useful thematic backbone to have in all kinds of stories; here's a few examples.
The Trashfire canon is, by and large, a collection of stories about a chaotic world violently opposing rigid structures that emergent fascism attempts to impose upon it. It's about how muddled life gets when opposite ideologies clash and about what a terrible mess the weight of the entire human history is upon a contemporary person — and about how to live in that increasingly chaotic world regardless. Its magic and its paranormal elements are therefore just as messy as the setting they inhabit. They lack a clear origin and refuse categorization; all labels humans try to put upon either are arbitrary and merely descriptions of their small parts that do not describe the whole; that which we know as "Normalcy" is nonsense that needs to accept contradictory truths to justify its own bigoted, racist existence.
It's not difficult to draw parallels between how the Trashfire handles magic and the core tenets of opposing fascism through a very primal, humanist type of anarchism.
From 120's Archives, if you'll forgive me for self-indulging for a second, does something similar. Though it does not go to such extreme lengths as the Trashfire, it too intentionally plays around with not having truly well-defined rules. This is similarly intentional. F120A is primarily about how the relentless wheel of progress eclipses any single civilization, concept, or ideology. By employing a far less rigid kind of magic, it plays with a fairytale-like tone that brings home the many hypersyncretic, mythological parts of its setting. The world is a big, magic mess — so of course the labels humans force upon it are of no all-encompassing consequence. We are only here as visitors to this world, after all; we too, in time, shall fade.
But not every single soft magic has to be an obvious parallel to the rest of a story's world. George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is tremendously grounded and realistic in its worldbuilding. Its world is a vast and sprawling reflection of real life feudalism, complete with such gems as more than sixteen different guys all named Aegon Targaryen.1 But its magic is anything but grounded — it is a traditional, larger-than-life kind of occult that even those who practice it barely make heads or tails of. By not being like the rest of its world, ASOIAF's magic acts as a contrast to all those hundreds of years of detailed history. After all, the last thing the reader would want in a medieval-inspired world after making it through many, many pages of realistic history is a fully comprehensive magic system. It'd muddle things down, terribly so.
But its magic doesn't just help the reader not catch a headache — it also stays thematically relevant. At its core, ASOIAF handles themes of human hubris and just how little all our petty squabbles mean against nature. So of course its magic is incomprehensible to humans. In the grand totality of it all, we are but a drop in an ocean — and the great arcane powers care little for who the man wearing the crown is, at the end of the day.
4. Hard magic
Hard magic is different. It has well-defined limits and rules, and thus is more akin to a science than a mystical force of the occult. It lends itself to the kinds of fantasy that veer very close to science fiction, both aesthetically and thematically. This, similarly, can be tremendously useful to have in all kinds of stories.
The Third Law canon is more often than not about how reality can ultimately be understood, described, and categorized. Given enough time and effort, humanity can and will put forth theories and frameworks that explain why things are the way they are; the wizards that populate its world are more akin to scientists and inventors than classical tower-dwelling, beard-wearing spellcasters. They thrive off of technological advancement, and often believe in transhumanist ideals. TL's magic reflects those themes down to the T; the occult can be studied, made into predictable models, and exploited for mankind's gain. It has set rules that are impossible to cross and foreseeable consequences that must be learned and mitigated. Through that, TL embraces its science-centric approach to storytelling, welcoming magic into the pantheon of sciences right from the woods of fairytale inconsistency.
Admonition presents the reader with a similar world, but for wholly different reasons. Its magic is stripped of almost all mystery and is presented to the reader as a science not in the process of being understood, but one that has already been learned and exploited. Its runes are forged into circuits, its mystical energies refined into electricity — its spells are used to solve technical problems on an industrial scale. This is all because Admonition is fundamentally about an ultra-fascist, ultra-expansionist, and maximalist Foundation that knows no limits it will not cross to widen its control. Hubris is its second name — so of course it grinds down every single piece of wonder and magic out of the world into something it can utilize for its own gain.
The last piece of media I'll mention is the golden child of hard magic — Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist.2 FMA's alchemy has a set of rules so rigid that if you try to break them, the universe itself quite literally goes out of its way to punish you. Any attempt at circumventing the basic laws of equivalent exchange is always met with the magic either looping back around to making sense again or it whiplashing back in your face. In a way, FMA is the opposite of ASOIAF. Though its story is also set in a political setting ripe with plots and intrigue, because it is not as heavy as that of ASOIAF, it can afford to have magic that is also grounded and realistic. That and because, at the end of the day, FMA is a story about what it means to be human against rigid hierarchies and regimes; about what really matters in times where all that the greats of this world seem to value is power — all motifs that are very easy to contrast with the unwavering set of alchemical rules.
5. New York City is on fire
Indulge me in a short side-tangent for a moment — I promise it's going somewhere.
By and large, the SCP Wiki and its mythos are a byproduct of the post-9/11 American cultural zeitgeist. It is not difficult to draw the parallels between the conspiratorial paranoia that engulfed the USA — a country whose citizens, to this day, remain the most significant portion of the English Wiki's userbase — and elements of the Foundation's world, particularly early on. Of course, this isn't to say the Wiki is a direct product of the Two Towers falling,3 but it is hard not to see similarities between common elements of the conspiratorial panic that the median American citizen felt in the early-to-late 2000s and emergent SCP mythos. However inadvertently, the fear of an ill-defined but grand mystical truth being shielded from the public by an evil elite over time morphed in the heads of the early authors into the Veil of Normalcy, the dread of the apparently satanic United Nations intervening on US soil became the Global Occult Coalition, the entirety of the nightmare that is the American prison system became the D-Class, and so on.
I mention all of this because, however inadvertently that was done, that there is a very good example of how to tailor your magical mythos appropriately to the story you want to tell and the themes you want to grapple with. Of course, there are only so many articles in that exact vein that you can tell without boring your audience to death, and thus the Wiki has eventually evolved and grown, but for the many pieces that that strategy worked, it worked exceptionally well. The hardline thematic backbone of a conspiratorial, arguably villainous Foundation whose modus operandi evades the median person in both morals found its perfect partner and support in an obstructed, unclear set of rules by which the paranormal played. The plot of the larger early Foundation mythos was propped up by a very thematically appropriate magic — one that made no sense at all, but one that stayed consistent in that nonsense — and vice versa.
All of this is to say: however unconscious the inclusion of those themes into the "magic system" of the early Wiki might've been, it still remains a very, very good example of an effective and appropriate fantasy mythos — one that very quickly became a viral phenomenon. The themes were clear, and they were only made stronger by how it crafted its own fantasy.
6. What to get away from all this
Obviously, there isn't any single right or wrong way to storytell. If anything, we authors love breaking rules — but it is important to first understand what those rules are and where they come from to do so well. I hope that this brief examination helped you better realize why certain pieces of media do what they do — and how you can replicate their success for your own gain.
If there is one thing I'd like you to get out of this whole thing, it's this:
Examine what themes you want to focus on with your story and craft your magic accordingly as either a constant or an intentional backbone of said thematic core, whatever is actually necessary for the story; whatever you do, remember you should not create a magic system in a vacuum in respect to the rest of your world and plot.