Assumption: Magic's always been possible, theoretically.
Assumption: It's either never actually worked, or has only very, very rarely worked. The Hermetics et. al. were wasting their time.
Until recently. In the late 1940s, some people who built plastic models started developing abilities which could only honestly be called magical. They require the will and emotions of the users, and flatly violate physics. The weird part was who developed them: girls who had reached puberty, but not full physical maturity, and who built extremely detailed models, almost without exception. There were and are some boys as well, but it's definitely a female-dominated field.
The abilities of a given witch depend not simply on what general sort of thing she builds, but on what exact thing she was building when she experienced her awakening. The awakening is very similar for all witches (and warlocks): During a build, in a moment of extreme concentration, the witch's spirit seems to leave her body, travelling into the model, then into the actual thing being modelled (even if the thing never actually existed), then a burst of light washes out everything and she's back in her body, not having moved at all. But now, the young witch has powers. These powers start out fairly weak, but grow depending on how much time and effort is spent developing them and experimenting with them, refining the one specific model, developing its setting (where applicable) and so on. The witch does not consciously choose the model.
A witch's powers are always related at least somewhat to the model being made at the moment of waking: A battleship witch will be enormously tough, able to fire energy blasts, have exotic sensory capabilities similar to radio and radar, and can out-swim a dolphin. A race car witch can run at unbelievable speed, and might have an instinctive knowledge of ultra-high-performance driving. All machine witches have it in common that as long as they get enough fuel (food) and maintenance (medical care) they're inexhaustible and nearly ageless. There are also other sorts: geographical witches, zoological witches, and even botanical witches. They're rare, but they happen. One witch in the 1970s became overnight the world's greatest surgeon, engineer, diplomat, leader, and a few other things into the bargain. She'd been painting and assembling the Enterprise' bridge, including crew. Sadly, another young witch got her imagination caught by a Hallowe'en decoration. He potions are powerful, but she's coming down with all kinds of health problems from her cauldron's fumes. And pity the warlock who awakened to a garage kit of Harley Quinn...
So with this for a base, how might our setting look? Assume witches and warlocks are a very small percentage of the population, around one in five thousand. Warlocks only make up about a tenth of the magical population, and most magicians are relatively weak, at most on par with the model that caught their imagination to start with and often lower. Of course, that can still be pretty impressive.
How realistic do you want your cause & effect?
I think what would develop would depend a lot on the awareness of groups of people to what is happening, and the demographics and causes of who gets and discovers their powers.
Even one in 5000 girls means for every million population, 100 witches - are those just potential witches (since only those who do detailed plastic modeling will find their powers), or people who do find them?
Three very different possibilities (and these are just examples to show the importance of the above, and the range of possibilities):
A) Few if any people have done this before the 1940's. Almost everyone discovers magic by themselves as a child. The only magicians who know about each other find out due to having shown amazing powers in public, so they hear about each other, or by seeking out others who model, or sometimes by coincidence of both being modelers. In this situation, any groups or alliances will be small and relatively newly-formed. There probably won't be much if any powerful established witch societies, power structures, alliances or nasty groups. However, anyone who shows their powers publicly will get massive attention from non-magical world power structures wanting to understand, analyze, obtain, control, defend against, capitalize, etc etc. So the Cold War will have seen the search for and domination of known witches and warlocks, studying them, trying to create them, control them, and use them for whatever (probably covert) purposes, and to lure or assassinate the witches and warlocks of rival factions. Depending on how successful those mundane organizations have been in their awareness, detection, analysis, training and control of witches, it may be more or less clear to the public and to new witches that they need to hide their talents, and/or figure out how to defeat attempts to capture them.
B) If, though rarely, magic has been discovered sometimes in the past in powerful ways (ancient wax modelers? clay sculptors? Was Michaelangelo a warlock?), then some of them may still be alive, and/or there may be some powerful existing old groups hiding out, who have some developed understandings, ancient cultural influences, and power structures. Perhaps some of these groups are dedicated to their own goals and mutual support. Perhaps some of these groups look to locate and include new witches. Perhaps there are rivalries between groups. Perhaps some are aligned with mundane power structures, while other groups avoid them or even struggle against them, or secretly control them? Perhaps some groups see most of the new witches as threats to their own secrecy, and seek to absorb or silence/kill them before the mundane world realizes there is magic afoot. There could be many such groups, only a few, or only one.
C) If most new witches tend to stumble upon their own powers, then there might be a sudden public awareness of what's going on. In that case, society would need to adapt rather than having the governments secretly scoop the known ones up. The governments would still try to recruit them and develop new ones etc, but society would also need to adapt and change. People would start trying intentionally to develop magic powers. Teachers would emerge to try to help, or at least get paid for trying. Laws would need to adapt. Parents and society would need to adapt to some young girls being more powerful or otherwise capable than their parents and teachers and possibly the police. Competition structures would need to adapt or at least exclude (sports, gambling, testing, etc). Corporations would start thinking how to exploit them. Social power dynamics would be turned around and inside out. Since the girls are more powerful than the boys, this would accelerate and do things to the women's movement. New power organizations and power structures would appear, and likely different social/political/legal classes based on magical power, strength, and type, and possibly by personality as well.
Oh, and in any case, there is the potential to turn economics inside-out as well, or at least develop a new separate economy, since in many cases magic may have exclusive abilities. Some witches, and especially organizations of them, may not want or need money in the same way other people do, and may be interested in other things.
Moderately realistic. The 1 in 5,000 figure is for the population as a whole. There might have been witches and warlocks earlier in history, but if so they were vanishingly rare. So A) and C) both fit with the concept I have in mind, but not B).
I'm not saying you're wrong about economics, but I will say I don't follow the reasoning. Why would witches not need or want money? They'll still want things they either can't make themselves or don't want to, same as with anyone else.
Sounds like an interesting idea ... but isn't it better to call male witches "wizards" instead?
I mean, I have the impression "warlock" (used to) mean "oathbreaker"?
Quote from: Catelf;876779Sounds like an interesting idea ... but isn't it better to call male witches "wizards" instead?
I mean, I have the impression "warlock" (used to) mean "oathbreaker"?
It has two different derivations: The Icelandic "waerlog," meaning "weird songs" or "spells," and the Germanic "vaerlogr," meaning "oathbreaker," one who breaks faith with God.
How many girls in the 1940s made plastic models? I'm guessing you could count them on two hands. I mean, besides the obvious, there weren't even that many plastic models available.
http://www.oldmodelkits.com/blog/plastic-model-kit-history/early-plastic-model-kit-development-in-the-usa/
Hell, I'd even say that might be the case by the 1960s, when plastic models became really popular. Growing up in the 1970s, I was fairly big into them and I can't recall any girls that were.
I mean, just the subject matter - ships and cars aren't exactly popular subjects among women.
IMHO, something more likely would be Hostess products giving kids mutant powers. They used to always run ads in comic books where various super heroes would use hostess goods to fight crime. Fruit pies, twinkies, and so on.
A few random thoughts.
First off, this isn't really a "magic system," however much magic may be the in-game explanation behind it all. It's a supers game, and for some reason I have the Wild Cards setting stuck in my head, where a lot of people get whackily different abilities of wildly differing power, number and scope.
Secondly, "most magicians are relatively weak." What does that translate to, exactly? That nine "warship" witches out of ten are strong, tough and fast (on a par with a Spiderman, say), but only very few are Hulk-level behemoths?
Thirdly, I expect a lot of witches have petty or unrecognizable powers; what powers does one gain from a Barbie doll, for instance, other than great fashion sense and hair that never needs to be straightened?
Fourthly, when's your starting date? If the campaign's set in 1960, governments might just be figuring out the paradigm. If it's set in 2016, everyone knows, and either damn near every little girl has Godzilla and Space Battleship Yamato models jammed into their hands, or governments have banned plastic models except under controlled conditions of their choosing.
And that leads to finally -- if this is a known, ongoing, longstanding phenomenon, governments will control it or collapse trying. This has always been a huge disconnect for me and "realistic" supers settings, because given the paroxysms our societies go through over terrorism -- executed by mere mortals, largely on shoestring budgets, with conventional and often asymmetrical weapons -- they would go absolutely stark raving bugfuck over the percentage of Jihadistan's 50 million population who were superhuman.
Barbies aren't kits. But if Mattel put one out, and some girl built and clicked with it, the Barbie Witch would actually be pretty scary. Barbie is basically an empty vessel onto which girls project their imaginations and fantasies, which is why there are so many different professional Barbies. So the Barbie Witch dresses the part, and becomes the part. Infantry Barbie, Fighter Pilot Barbie, Doctor Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Scuba Diver Barbie, Race Driver Barbie, Gymnast Barbie, and those are just off the top of my head.
A witch's powers, at start, aren't very strong. A battleship witch, for example, would be about to create an attack about as powerful as a rifle, bounce a pistol round, swim at ten knots (twice the human record), and might be able to listen in on radio transmissions. Later, she could become tougher, stronger, faster, able to launch more powerful attacks, and develop the ability to both send and receive radio signals, which would also allow her to learn to use radio transmissions as a form of echolocation.
Quote from: Whitewings;876920A witch's powers, at start, aren't very strong. A battleship witch, for example, would be about to create an attack about as powerful as a rifle, bounce a pistol round, swim at ten knots (twice the human record), and might be able to listen in on radio transmissions. Later, she could become tougher, stronger, faster, able to launch more powerful attacks, and develop the ability to both send and receive radio signals, which would also allow her to learn to use radio transmissions as a form of echolocation.
What causes a witch to improve? Is this a known or predictable quantity? (Or more along the lines of "get XP?")
Quote from: Ravenswing;876927What causes a witch to improve? Is this a known or predictable quantity? (Or more along the lines of "get XP?")
Practice, refining the touchstone model, learning more about the real thing, creating backstory for an unreal thing. Damage to or destruction of the touchstone model doesn't affect a witch's powers, though it does make the "refining" method difficult or impossible. And is a very good way to get the witch right righteous ticked.
Quote from: Whitewings;876775...
I'm not saying you're wrong about economics, but I will say I don't follow the reasoning. Why would witches not need or want money? They'll still want things they either can't make themselves or don't want to, same as with anyone else.
It depends on their specific abilities and how they end up relating to the mundane culture and (mundane or magical) powers that be. But the abilities you gave as examples sounded unique and powerful, giving either the ability to evade and/or overpower most mundane law enforcement, or more importantly, the ability to do things others can't in the same way, or do more or better than others. It means they have superior and extremely rare or even unique talents, which in many cases can't be exactly reproduced by some other goods & services in the mundane economies, unless/until the mundanes learn to train and compel witches.
So when there is an independent group that has unique and strong powers, it can create its own separate economy, or at least its own market, and certainly its own power arena.
Examples:
Anyone who can use any skill to nearly effortlessly provide something to others who can't do that, but do greatly value whatever that is, can generate more mundane wealth than they need. However their abilities also may also mean they don't need some things that mundanes do. But if they want something that involves another witch's powers, and that witch also can make money trivially, then they may need to trade in something other than the money that's overabundant to both of them (and so relatively low value to both of them).
A group of or including witches may similarly be able to easily provide for its own mundane needs, either by participating in the economy or by using its powers to one way or another have most of those handled. But since it has collected these witches, it probably has a lot of interest in using such powers, so that's going to be the rarest resource, and mundane money may not be very relevant to however it ends up developing trade conventions for magic services, since it and many other witches may not have much need for mundane money.
Some witches may have more or less difficulty generating effortless mundane money. For some it may be really hard, especially if it's an A) situation where secrecy is wanted, or a C) situation where there are many witches. But anyone with superpowers will tend, I think, to be approached frequently with competing propositions by others.
The more witches get together to help each other, the less dependent on the mundane community/economy they'll be, and for power-oriented people, the more reason there is so combine and control access to their talents. And then there's the industrial powermonger mindset, which is going to want to understand, develop and exploit these new-found powers in whatever ways it can think of.
I can see that. Yes, among themselves I can easily imagine witch clubs not much using money or needing it.
Quote from: Whitewings;876920Barbies aren't kits. But if Mattel put one out, and some girl built and clicked with it, the Barbie Witch would actually be pretty scary. Barbie is basically an empty vessel onto which girls project their imaginations and fantasies, which is why there are so many different professional Barbies. So the Barbie Witch dresses the part, and becomes the part. Infantry Barbie, Fighter Pilot Barbie, Doctor Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Scuba Diver Barbie, Race Driver Barbie, Gymnast Barbie, and those are just off the top of my head.
My first thought was Barbie-Witch, so that makes sense to me.
If the witch develops abilities depending on what is in the model, then she could add things to the model to get new abilities.
Other people could also add/remove things to change the witch's ability, so the model should be locked away.
It might be fun for the model to be on show for the abilities to work, allowing people to work out what is happening. This also means that a rival could hide the model away to remove the witch's powers, or even destroy it completely.