What if I were to promise you that, ten years
from now, I would still remember you? That I would recall with perfect clarity the exact text of
the comment you left, your username, your avatar? Could be a nice thing to hear. Could, possibly,
make you feel quite special. Perhaps even change how you think of me. Maybe you weren’t expecting
that level of attention, especially from a “youtuber”, if you wanna call me that. But then
imagine those ten years pass, and contrary to my word, you have gone from my mind entirely. Quite
a different feeling then, right? You might never think of me in exactly the same way. It might
just make you want to step away from watching these videos, and I wouldn’t blame you at all.
A promise is a powerful thing. You don’t need me to tell you this, it’s a part of the fabric of
your world. People make promises to eachother, and although it’s only
intersocial, only psychological, only a word given from one person to another,
it matters. So much, that promises have found their way into the very stories you tell. To you,
they are more than profound—they are magical.
And I… would like to show you how.
So, let’s talk about promises… as a magic system.
If you’re enjoying Tale Foundry, don’t forget
that we have a whole community outside of Youtube! We do a lot of stuff on a lot of different
sites, but the best place to start is with our official Discord server. It’s open
to everyone, and it’s probably one of the nicer art communities on the internet. It
really feels like a big family of creatives!
I hope we’ll see you there!
The reason I’m thinking about all of this is because of a series of books I’ve been
reading. A… very big series of books. Then again, all of Brandon Sanderson’s books are big, which
is why I tend to stay a safe distance from them. This one is called The Stormlight Archive,
and of all the interesting things it does—and there are many—I was most captivated
by the way these books treat promises.
The world of Stormlight is one of ideals.
Here, mental concepts exist on another plane of reality in the form of living, thinking beings
called spren. They’re usually separate from the physical world, but under the right conditions
they manifest as mostly-harmless, sprite-like shadows of their true selves, each drawn to their
source. Battlefields are swarmed by the orange, rake-fingered hands of painspren, reaching toward
the wounds of the injured. Lovers are dusted with tiny flakes of crystalline snow, the worldly shape
of the passionspren, seeming to fall from nowhere at all. The wind or the fire or the rain might be
full of elemental spren; a ribbon of light dancing on the breeze, insectile shapes playing among the
coals, tiny gray figures weeping in the puddles. And people can draw out the spren, too. When you
become close enough to an ideal or a concept—when you spend enough time pursuing something like
justice or liberation—the spren associated with it might just notice you, and if it does there’s
a chance it finds its way to you and binds itself to you. So, you sort of acquire a cool magical
familiar who gives you the ability to do some vague magic-y things. Very nice. But the real
magic, the truly fantastical stuff—flight, teleportation, transformation, destruction? These
can only be unlocked through a promise. Make a true oath to your ideal—the very thing which
your spren embodies—and your spren will become more real than ever. You’ll become its anchor
in the physical world, and far from a mindless manifestation, it will cross over entirely, intact
and sentient, and able to give you access to its full suite of fabulous, reality-bending powers.
There’s… a lot in there. But the key thing that I find interesting is that this isn’t a bargain.
You’re not selling your soul to the devil, you’re not striking up a contract with a creature of the
fae. And yeah, those really interesting topics and we will make videos about those kind of promises
for sure, but I love the altruism of this. You’re just making a promise, and really expecting
nothing in return. And almost karmically, the magic responds to that. Elevates it. Your
promises literally change reality in this world.
And here’s the fun part: this is not actually
a new idea. Humans have been trying to do this with promises for ages. If you look back at the
Greek origin of formal oath-taking as a practice, you can see it. Oaths weren’t just commitments
you made to other people. They were more powerful than that, because you would invoke
a supernatural arbiter—that is, a God of some kind—to enforce your promise. The words “as god
is my witness” become a sort of binding magic. Now, should you break that promise, instead
of simply hurting someone else’s trust or their feelings, you’re calling down
the judgement of something divine.
But promises are complex and there are a
lot of other ways I can imagine mystifying them in our fiction. How might magic work
for a promise broken, or a promise kept? How might it affect the one making the
promise, and would that be different from how it would affect the one receiving it?
There’s a lot of room for the imagination to play here, but let me show you some of the
things people have come up with so far.
In the case of a promise kept, magic usually
becomes a sort of karmic reward. With no pressure from the outside, you’ve done the right moral
thing. Now, the universe will reward you for it.
The Stormlight Archive really plays with
this well, Spren drawing to you purely based on your devotion to your ideal. That’s
how you get all your cool high fantasy magic. But this doesn’t have to be about
unlocking cool, spectacular powers. Sometimes it’s simpler than that.
In Game of Thrones there is a massive wall of ice that separates the civilized world from the
dangers of the frozen north. A special group of guardsmen called The Night’s Watch man the wall
and sound out an alert if anything dangerous is threatening to breach it. These sworn guardsmen
have dedicated their lives to their duty, and they’re the only ones who can really pass
through it. Because far beneath the wall, there is a secret door made of living, ancient wood.
It has a wrinkled face and staring blind eyes, but it will nevertheless know when you’re
approaching and will ask who you are. If you’ve sworn your vows as a man of the Night’s Watch, you
can repeat them to the door and it will determine whether you speak the truth. If you do, it will
open its mouth wide and allow you through.
Sometimes the commitment itself is the
source of the magic. Paths may open, allies may be won, all manner of magics may
be worked if you will only honor your word.
Usually, the magic is only really there for the
one keeping the promise. Like I said, it tends to be a reward for their apparent morality. Plus, it
would seem weird for the person who received the promise to also get some kind of magical boon.
Isn’t it enough that someone kept their promise to you? Don’t you already benefit? It sort of
just seems like double-prizes at that point.
But I can think of a few situations where this
would actually make a lot of sense. Specifically, in the case of gods. I mean, devotion is a
sort of promise when you think about it, right? And the magic really just follows from there.
My two favorite examples of this are the books American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, and Small Gods,
by Terry Pratchett. The story of American Gods is full of withered, anemic deities, slowly dying
because very few people in the new world believe in them anymore. They scrabble at the leftover
scraps of devotion, sustaining themselves through cons, cunning, and coercion. There’s a goddess of
love who lures men back to her home and persuades them to become her willing sacrifices in the
bedroom, and that’s devotion enough for her. There are two gods of death who work in a morgue,
where people entrust their dead to them—again, devotion enough, but just barely. The book
Small Gods is a little different from that, but not much. It follows a once-great deity
who finds himself at the brink of annihilation. Why? Because no one truly believes in him
anymore. They believe in the institutions that sprung up around him, they believe the
motives that they invoke his name for, but not him. In this fragile state, he can only physically
manifest in the form of a lowly tortoise. Luckily, there is one person left who, despite the fact
that his god is now a tortoise, stays true. And that promise—that true devotion—is enough to help
this deity scrabble back into his former glory… with some caveats about how people worship him.
Stories with gods in them really are one of the few areas of fiction I can think of where
being the recipient of a kept promise causes anything magical at all. But I can see room for
other approaches, here. Like, maybe a situation where some kind of rumple-stiltskin-esque figure
extracts magical power just through getting people to make promises to it. Not from brokering a good
deal and stealing someone’s baby or whatever, just getting the promise from someone,
period. There’s power in that, and I would love to read some stories where
it was elevated to the level of magic.
But of course, a promise made is not
always a promise kept. And there are all sorts of stories about the magical
consequences of a breaking a promise.
The same way magic can be earned through honoring
your commitments, it might also be lost.
In the world of the Stormlight Archive,
this is a pretty traumatic process. I was describing earlier how, through the presence
of spren and your relationship to them, your promises can give you power? How committing fully
to an idea and honoring that commitment results in true magic? By the same token, a broken oath will
cause that power to weaken, or vanish altogether. You might go from a life of flying about as you
please, healing yourself without any need for medicine, to a lowly life on the ground. The magic
will leave you once again, and after living with it for so long, how do you return to normalcy? It
would be a painful transition, to say the least.
All of that makes sense. It’s immoral to break a
promise, so we can feel pretty good about dishing out consequences to the promise-breaker, right?
But it doesn’t have to be like that, does it? I can imagine some circumstances where a promise
made with the best of intentions turns out to be a bad thing for you, where the actual powerful
thing to do would be, for your own sake, to admit that you need to go back on your word.
I can see a good reason to want to wrap a hard decision like this in some kind of magic. I
can also see it as a sign that you are beyond empathy and compassion, which, while pretty
dark, is also a source of power, in a sense.
I could only really find one good example of a
magic system where it’s beneficial to you to break a promise, and that’s the Oathbreaker Paladin
subclass from Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. These are Paladins—warriors who have sworn oaths
to their gods, and received some power in return as long as they adhere to those oaths. But now,
they’ve decided to break their divine promises. And instead of just losing their
powers outright, like a vacuum, they’re inverted. Now instead of scaring undead
away with divine light, an oathbreaker paladin can seize control of them. Instead of channeling
the divinity of their god into tangible energy, they can channel their own dark
malice into something much crueler.
So although a broken promise feels like it
deserves a punishment, there is also a sort of subversive power in the willingness to do
it, regardless of the harm it might cause.
But we should also talk about how a broken
promise is harmful to the recipient, right? You make a promise to someone, and then break it.
What happens to them? Their trust is damaged, their expectations and hopes are
shattered. Not a very pleasant experience. That’s enough to go through on its own, so we
don’t tend to pile on magical ramifications too. It wouldn’t seem fair, would it?
Well, there are few examples that point to the contrary.
I mentioned how in the world of The Stormlight Archive when you break your oaths you
lose your powers? Well, that’s only half of it. The reason you lose your powers is because your
spren—the physical incarnation of your ideal, the otherworldly companion who chose you and
who granted you your new, magical life—is dying. They require you to adhere to your ideal.
That’s what anchors them in the physical world. And if you break that promise once they’re here,
they become less real. They fade into catatonic, lifeless forms known as dead-eyes. It’s
certainly one of the saddest things in the story, very much the feeling of watching a loved
one suffer because of your choices.
There’s another really interesting example
of this dynamic in Jim Butcher’s book series, The Dresden Files. It’s an urban fantasy setting
where some attempt at formalizing magic has been made. There’s a council of wizards who
presides over magic-users by and large, making sure none of them misuse their craft. A
mage who goes astray and begins using black magic is typically put to a swift death, unless a member
of this council speaks up on their behalf. If they want to give the offending mage a second chance,
they take that mage’s fate upon themself. Now, if their charge missteps again,
both of them will be put to death instead of just the offending mage. It’s a promise
made on someone else’s behalf, and you suffer the consequences alongside them if they break it.
They call this arrangement the Doom of Damocles.
Both of these examples really feel so
tragic to me. If you care about a person, one of the worst consequences of breaking
a promise to them is watching the ways in which is hurts them. And we can imagine stories
where that pain becomes a magical force which physically harms them as well—the dying
of the spren, the doom of Damocles.
I can imagine the opposite of this as well,
although I haven’t really found any examples of it. It’s easy to believe benevolent
magical forces might rally to the aid of someone who’s had a promise to them broken.
Maybe a lover has proven disloyal to you, and a goddess of love sees it, and takes it
upon themselves to punish the one who hurt you. Maybe you’re an orphan whose parents broke their
promise to care for you, and the fae creature who live in the nearby wilderness decide to give you
the good life you missed out on, showering you with their riches and their adoration.
Promises matter. And like all things that matter, it’s a joy to see how and when they manifest in
our fiction; the ways in which our fantasies raise them up. This was something that really struck
me about The Stormlight Archive: promises are so important in that world, they literally
make the abstract real. And this is how we feel about promises in reality too; they are to
us untapped potential, and someone willing to fulfill it. We showed you a few of the ways we’ve
seen this explored in fantasy, but there are so many more possibilities. I’d love to hear what
other ideas you can come up with in the comments!
Of course, it’s not always that easy, is it? We
talk about making stuff up on this show like it’s just a thing everyone does super effortlessly. But
then, really, how do you just build a world? It’s a whole skillset, something we sort of have to
learn to do. And that can be really daunting.
Thankfully, I’ve found something that makes
this whole process incredibly simple.
There’s this amazing 12-part video series
that gives you pretty much all the skills you need to get past your blocks and fears, and
start your worldbuilding project. It’s called “Creating Unique and Powerful Worlds”, hosted by
many-time author and professor, Lincoln Michael. As you move through the course, you’ll learn
about things like how to begin your new world, what the ripple effects of that starting
idea will be like across your world, how to create themes within your world, how to create
characters to experience the world you’ve made, and then finally, how to put all of these things
together. The prospect of making an entire world can be really paralyzing, but it doesn’t have to
be. This course will absolutely help you bring the size of the task down to something you
can really understand and manage. I can say from experience that it is so liberating just
to have a roadmap for a project like this!
And, thanks to our sponsor, skillshare,
you can actually watch it the whole series for free. This is what skillshare
is all about, after all: providing a platform for creatives to stand up and
share their skills with the community. And the community there is big. People
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After talking to them about it, it seems like
the people over at Skillshare can see why we’re so excited about that Worldbuilding class we were
mentioning earlier, so they’ve decided to give you the opportunity to experience it—and any other
skillshare class that catches your interest—for free. Until the end of February, the first
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Once you’ve watched through this worldbuilding
course, please, please come back to tell us the impact it’s had on you as a writer. I
cannot wait to hear the success stories!
And… that’s it for this video! There’s
usually a few weeks between uploads, so if you want more Tale foundry in
the mean-time, come join our community! We have a discord server that’s basically
like a big family of creatives—a lot of love, there. We also run writing groups on Twitch
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Until then, thanks for watching,
and keep making stuff up!
I’ll see you… next time.
Bye!
