Good alternative to "spells" or "cantrips"?

[Ria13]

@MaelduinTamhlacht

Oh, no, there’s always a civil service to collect taxes and organise things like sewerage, power, message-carrying, schooling, etc.

as I said, they live in a post-scarcity, post-(magical) Singularity society and they have no government. no govenrment means no taxes and no institutionalized schooling. (most civilizations in the real world historiclaly have not had formal schooling, for that matter.) grunt work gets done by artifically created spirits and automata. if you want to convey a message, you can send it yourself magically, though you could also get one of the various sorts of created beings (spirits and automata) to do it. I haven’t finalized this but they might have their own verion of the internet. I don’t know whether I want to include such a thing, though.

imagine magic-working as ubiquitious as literacy or numeracy and you have an idea of how things work.

[Ria13]

@Kevitec57

Unimagical, dependant on all that’s redundant. Then again, big corporates would be the same, implementing AI driven spells to rotting wooden wands. Era-on-era they’d shed old wizards and appoint novices at a fraction of the cost who can only cast in emojis.

bolding added. okay, not sure how much of that you meant facietously. with that said, I think you’ve pictured a world a bit like or paralell to ours which diverged, when my setting never had much similarity to ours and doesn’t in the fictional “present”. so, no corporations.

I do have magic-free real world counterpart cultures. they’ve never taken up magic, which they consider dangerous and/or morally wrong. at least one of them has undergone an industrial revolution, though. the magic people don’t care about this, one way or another.

[Dain]

Not sure I understand exactly where your going… but consider this… If your readers don’t know what the term is – and it’s not clearly defined as conlang in the way its introduced – it might not be of much value.

This project sounds a bit like the mythos created around the upper world of Metropolis where the affluent treat ‘work’ as an even more file epitaph as the f-bomb is to English speakers. If you were to invest such emotion into the words of effort already in the language you might find a better touchstone with your readers.

Now that I’ve bloviated all over your topic, let me see if I can suggest some things that are magic-adjacent but not ‘cantrip’ or ‘spell’

Rite or ritual == emphasis is usually on cultural or ceremonial performances, but works for magic.

Ceremony == similar to the above, at the risk of being self-referencing.

Journey == not the movement of goods or people between two places but the movng of the mind or energies between two tasks. Similar to how drum-circles are used to help in shamanistic rites to indude an out-of-body type experience.

Magic is one of those topics… Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic, thing is, any sufficiently advanced and used magic is indistinguishable from industry. JK Rowling’s work in the Potterverse is a clear example of the later.

Sadly, my mind is refusing to summon forth the details, but I have the echo of a book (or series) in which all household needs are met by having the correct seeds, and that by planting the seeds in the household garden all things needed are grow, including things like food, pots, pans, clothing, tools, etc al. Then the MC discovers a very old seed that grows weapons and things change for the worse. Think about how one might try to explain a 3D printer to an aboriginal that never knew electric light? Ursula K Legwuin’s The Dispossessed also comes to mind.

I do hope you find the word you need, even if it isn’t the word your looking for. (That and I suspect that treating ‘w-o-r-k’ as the KING swear word would serve well.)

[MaelduinTamhlacht]

So, if I understand you, all of the things normally done by government aren’t there at all? There are no roads, for instance, no sewerage (piping to take what is flushed from your toilet or goes down the drain from your washing, etc)?

[Ria13]

@MaelduinTamhlacht

So, if I understand you, all of the things normally done by government aren’t there at all?
There are no roads, for instance, no sewerage (piping to take what is flushed from your toilet or goes down the drain from your washing, etc)?

roads, yes, but you don’t need to have govenrments for those. also, just becuase they don’t have a government now doesn’t mean that governments haven’t existed in the past. I have a road system set up by an ancient no-longer existant civilization. it has certain magical properties.

as far as the other stuff, think bigger. why would you have to have sewage if you had magic? why would you need sinks and drains? why would you need toilets? (you also might choose not to have the bodily functions toilets deal with you.) or even to wash things?

building on what I said before, don’t imagine the current with different means. inagine a different world. trying to do something new here. as I think I said, I have a lot of trouble doing it.

[MaelduinTamhlacht]

If they’re being used, roads need work to keep them usable.
Oh, sure, a different world, but do people not shit there?

[Ria13]

@MaelduinTamhlacht

If they’re being used, roads need work to keep them usable,

as I said, magical roads.

Oh, sure, a different world, but do people not shit there?

I addressed this in the post you replied to, they can choose never to do it.

[Ria13]

@Dain

This project sounds a bit like the mythos created around the upper world of Metropolis where the affluent treat ‘work’ as an even more file epitaph as the f-bomb is to English speakers. If you were to invest such emotion into the words of effort already in the language you might find a better touchstone with your readers…

I have seen the 1920s film Metroopolis a few times and don’t remember that detail. do you mean the recent movie Megalopolis?

since posting the question I’ve come up with a good(ish) alternative to “spell”, but thanks!

the story/book with the seeds that grow things. that sounds like a good one. I’d like to find the one you mean.

Think about how one might try to explain a 3D printer to an aboriginal that never knew electric light?

more or less the situation here, yes,

and you could use The Dispossessed by Le Guin as a touchstone, too. I do find *The Dispossessed simplistic, though. to me it seems like America capitalist monoculture planet versus kibbutz anarchist monoculture with Le Guin thinking of the latter way of life as better. for one thing, the latter have higher ideals.