Trusted with Its True Name

A pamphlet detailing an ethical approach to LeGuinian magic for fantasy games and stories.

Magic systems are more than rules and lore. They have political potential.

Magic systems inform how we understand the world around us.

Is the world full of things to be manipulated? To be exploited?

To exploit the world, we must first reduce it to a level of importance below us.

How would we justify exploiting things that have their own will?

Magic systems that center the user and their will over others create hierarchies and rifts between the user and the world, between living beings and dead things, between people and non-people. The real world and its hierarchies and economic systems inform our thinking in this way, so understandably that mode of thought would bleed into our make-believe worlds.

But what if a magic system didn’t reduce, but instead gave the world agency, and forced us to relate to the things around us, consider their desires, logic, and rights, and confront the consequences of our actions?

It would make the world more alive.

This magic system was conceived by Ursula K. Le Guin in her young adult novel A Wizard of Earthsea, in which magic power comes from being recognized and truly known for who one is—by their true name. 

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