Worldbuilding urban fantasy - how come mages are not ruling the world

[Oversleep]

So I've been doing some worldbuilding for my Soulsmiths and one person I've bounced my ideas off asked why no mage ever has gone and straight up took power? They're pretty powerful since the discovery of Soulsmithing and that have been around at least since Middle Ages.

Once there were two brilliant Soulsmiths at war who reverse-engineered vampires and werewolves, respectively. So there has been some war but I imagine it to be rather secret war. Maybe a few cities has been killed off and written off as "plague". How to make it fit with the premise that mages did not took over countries? Those two could do that if they were not fighting each other.

So far I've only patched it up with assigning the task of enforcing the Masquerade to the secret organization of assassins but that feels... well, patched up.

Why no mage ever just went and showed off his magic and took the power and ruled ever after? If the answer is "other mages stopped him" then the question changes to "why no group of mages ever took the power". I'm not sure about some Magic Council enforcing that; either they're already ruling the world or the question "why no one has gone rogue" arises. And so on, and so on.

Alternatively: how about "nobody knows how things went back then" and just drop the whole issue altogether?

[Hemalurgic Headshot]

8 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

Alternatively: how about "nobody knows how things went back then" and just drop the whole issue altogether?

Yes. The Void-- history is lost. No one knows, we started with a blank slate and made a masterpiece. Why look to what is not there? Let us look to our glorious future.

[The Honey Badger]

In the book The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch (excellent series btw), the reasoning for the bondsmagi or the overpowered wizards of the time not taking over the world is that, Why would you want to make yourself king of the ants? You gain almost nothing from being in control of powerless beings. Basically the wizards are so powerful and have everything they want, ruling regular people would be too much of a hassle and almost meaningless to them. I don't know if something along these lines would help your story, and I don't know how relevant human society is to the mages. But that reasoning made a lot of sense to me as to why an ultra powerful group of people wouldn't want to take control of the world. Happy Worldbuilding!

[ZenBossanova]

In Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, the White Council is too busy with more important matters. What would ruling the world do for them anyway? They are already wizards. Power and status have more to do with your magical power and knowledge.

[Edgedancer]

Well, there's two qestions rolled into one here, depending on your definition of rule. One is actually setting up the government, in which case, yeah that can be a pretty big hassle. The second is revealing themselves and more or less letting the current government in charge but forcing it to give the mages legal immunitiy for just about everything so they can just take whatever they want whenever they want. That one essentially comes down to wheter or not enough of them think that they're both powerful enough to essentially win a war against humanity as a whole, at which point numbers would become a pretty big factor, and unscrupulously enough to actually commit to that war.

Alternatively, some kind of outside force holding them back from going full megalomania.

[The One Who Connects]

Not sure if I can speak for the middle ages time, but one of the things that always gets mentioned in Harry Potter lore is that the Wizarding World keeps itself hidden out of fear. A shotgun has better odds of being immediately lethal than a fireball, sniper rifles out-range the killing curse, almost no spells in Harry Potter seem to be capable of killing multiple people at once like muggle bombs/missiles are... It's a larger scale version of the "We didn't invade the USA because they've got a shotgun hiding behind every blade of grass" analogy from the past.

I don't know what tech level your normal human society is at, but if it's reached the point where tech beats magic then no mages are taking control in the open.

All else fails, you could go the infighting route. If you are willing to kill the competition to seize the throne, there will always be others willing to do the same. Taking the "King" title and setting yourself above the others just paints a target on your back, so most of your Mages have become smart enough not to do that.

[Tristan]

For the same reason that good people don't rule the real world. (Ba-dum tss)

[Oversleep]

9 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

I don't know what tech level your normal human society is at, but if it's reached the point where tech beats magic then no mages are taking control in the open.

It's about 2020. So at best it's Twenty Minutes into the Future thing. Damnation, I already feel we're living in the future.
Anyway, the thing is, magic is superior to technology. I mean, an average Soulsmith could take on a modern unit of military without much problems and in the past one could defeat way more enemies because they didn't have bullets. Regeneration is taxing.

On the other hand, the magical prowess goes hand in hand with technological progress - there's a rumour going on that Soulsmiths are behind computers' origin since magic is similar to algorithmics. It's so much easier to teach someone magic today than it was in Middle Ages.

9 hours ago, Tristan said:

For the same reason that good people don't rule the real world. (Ba-dum tss)

You're assuming mages are good...?

On 5.05.2017 at 5:50 AM, The Honey Badger said:

Why would you want to make yourself king of the ants? You gain almost nothing from being in control of powerless beings.

I always had problems with those kinds of explanation because I always thought "Surely there must have been someone who didn't think that way".

On 5.05.2017 at 7:36 AM, ZenBossanova said:

the White Council is too busy with more important matters. What would ruling the world do for them anyway?

I'm only at Summer Knight so I just started to get to know the White Council. I figure I could make an organization of mages which enforced Masquerade - they're gonna be gone by the time plot rolls around, every mage was wiped off the face of the Earth five years ago so if I'm starting everything from the scratch it doesn't matter if there was some organization or not.

I'm doing a "nobody knows what was earlier" kind of thing anyway but sooner or later some ancient being which knew things back then will roll around so I don't want to invent on spot then.

[kenod]

Maybe they did rule the countries, but did it from the shadows. Ruling a country directly makes other magic users focus on you, especially if you did some morally questionable stuff to take power, or suppress the peasants. You could just as easily take control of some puppet rulers. If they peasants decide to rise up because of the poor living conditions, they'll kill you puppet ruler, but you can just start over with the next one. Take care with how you do it and the other magic users will never do anything against you, making it a much more attractive option. If most countries had these shadow rulers, it would also make sense as to why they never reveal the masquerade, as it could cause the peasants of their own country to notice them. After a couple of centuries, it is common sense among magic users that anyone who tries to break the masquerade gets assassinated by their fellow magic users. Skip forward to modern times, and this has resulted in special organizations that enforce this, and as their moral standards progressed, these organizations basically become the magic law enforcement.

[Oversleep]

13 hours ago, kenod said:

Skip forward to modern times, and this has resulted in special organizations that enforce this, and as their moral standards progressed, these organizations basically become the magic law enforcement.

Actually in modern times a wandering cosmic power came to Earth and told all living mages that it will take them off the Earth in a month. It was benevolent, so it did gave them that month to find new potential mages and initiate them.

Then all the old ones disappeared as they was told. The plot starts five years later when the new mages are trying to organize themselves.

I wanted to do a story of how all these magic organizations would came to be so that cosmic power is actually not relevant and without any bearing on the story (although one has to wonder what it needed all these magic users for... some cosmic war? it could be interesting one day...).

[Just another guyn]

Using the first Sanderson law of magic, it could influence the mages ability to magic in the first place if the try to take control... maybe people making some sort of connection to your identity when they learn about you that grants them access to some of your power or something, so while quiet manipulation is still an option, being in the public eye can disable your magic, or worse let others control you or something.

 

or the magic can only be used by someone who doesn't have certain personality traits that would let them rule publicly. Maybe it makes them all shy when around non mages, or possibly the magic itself erases memories associated with mages by non mages.

Edited May 10, 2017 by Just another guyn