🎤 Kienna Shaw on Your Magic Circle

Kienna: At their very core, magic circles are created and maintained through the power of belief. By believing that the magic circle exists and that its rules (physical, metaphysical, and social) are true while within it, the participants of the game enforce the boundaries and fuel the magic of play and imagination.

There are many ways that TTRPGs encourage and maintain belief in the magic circle. The game's rules define how the participants can interact with and shape the game world while settings help create a foundation of shared assumptions that keeps things consistent with the magic circle's logic. Artifacts like game books, props, sets, and costumes can transform a mundane physical space into a magical one. The act of role-playing itself invites participants to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in a secondary reality that is separate from our real one.

Asa: Yes! And when roleplaying we place ourselves in that secondary reality more fully than with fiction or drama, for example, where we may "roletake" — or imagine ourselves in a character's position but have no agency. It's a more vulnerable position, I think. And that takes me to my next question, which is about safety in these situations.

Asa: In Your Magic Circle, you define 5 core truths about the circle's magic: the magic creates play, preserves safety, stays within the circle, can transcend time and space, and affects only those who agree to it. What is it about magic circles that preserve safety?

Kienna: Because magic circles are created and maintained with intention (someone has to come up with the magic circle's rules and the participants have to agree that they are true while within its bounds), there's also an opportunity to be intentional about how to handle harm and safety. There can be rules about what content will appear in the magic circle, what risky behaviours are invited into the circle, and what guidelines there are to handling unexpected harm.

Of course, in practice, there's a lot of nuance and complications. Not everyone creating a magic circle will be intentional about how to handle risk and harm. An event might happen that isn't covered by the current rules. The bounds of the magic circle and its participants can shift in unexpected ways. Emotional bleed can make its way into and out of the magic circle.

For the sake of Your Magic Circle's simplicity, I wrote in my sentiment about safety as a rule. It's not meant to be a rule that applies to all magic circles, but it will for the ones created in Your Magic Circle. Intentionally thinking about what "the magic circle preserves safety" means - and therefore how it's applied in play - is an important exercise on its own. What the answer looks like for a person's specific magic circle will be different depending on the many other components that went into the magic circle's creation.

Asa: A good example of what you're discussing, I think, is what you did for DIE RPG, which asks players to discuss tone, inter-party conflict, content, and more as part of "preparing the magic circle." I would hazard a guess that a lot of people see this section of DIE as critically important, and I personally appreciate how it's framed!

Kienna: Thanks for the kind words on the work Lauren and I did for the DIE RPG! Funnily enough, we didn't initially approach it as a form of the magic circle creation, but as a pre-game questionnaire. Through talking with Grant and Kieron we realized that because DIE is already so meta as a game about TTRPGs, we would be able to take an informal part of the game procedure (making the magic circle) and make it a formal ritual.

Asa: You just alluded to the bounds of the magic circle shifting in unexpected ways. And in the Changing the Circle section of Your Magic Circle, you invite players to make the magic circle bigger or smaller. Can you give an example of how this works in practice? And when it may be desirable?

Kienna: There's two different ways that we can look at the changing size of a magic circle: physically and conceptually.

If the game is taking place in a specific real-world location, then we can literally expand or shrink its borders to take up more or less physical space. So if the definition of the magic circle's boundaries includes "this specific room in the house", then you could expand the magic circle to include "the hallway outside". This is helpful not only for the obvious benefit of having more space to play in, but also for instances where the game would benefit from having participants move between distinct spaces (like games with location-specific elements) or having places for in-game privacy and breakout roleplay moments (like games with hidden roles or player-character secrets).

Resizing a magic circle conceptually is more about changing its scope. Making it bigger is not only about the physical space it takes up, but also expanding the topics, the rules, the roles, the number of participants, the core beliefs, and many other components that are part of the magic circle. In doing so you can grow the game world in meaningfully different ways. Meanwhile, you may want to make it smaller by cutting down some extraneous rules, redefining roles, or limiting the number of participants, making for a more focused or intimate experience.

Asa: In the same section, you also invite players to turn the borders permeable or impenetrable. How might someone, something, or a character cross the borders of this circle?

Kienna: To cross the borders into the magic circle is to enter its metaphysical space, and therefore be beholden to its rules and understandings of its boundaries. Real-world people cross the border when they want to engage with the magic circle or when they're ready to stop participating in play (temporarily or permanently). Objects or places can enter or be excluded from the magic circle at any time, as long as the participants agree that the item/place exists and has specific meaning attached to it. Characters are an interesting one to think about! I can think of a few ways that characters can cross the borders of magic circles: through cross-play, emotional bleed, and out-of-game character exploration.

Cross-play is the act of bringing in a character from one magic circle into another, either transforming the character to adhere to the magic circle's rules or finding ways to adjust the magic circle's rules to allow for that character to exist unchanged. Here, a character exits the borders of one magic circle and enters another, though the player can decide if it's quite literally the same continued existence for that character (in which case there's almost a meta-magic circle drawn around the character itself) or simply a different version of them.

After especially intense roleplay moments within the magic circle, I may take that character and their feelings with me even after the game session is done. In that way, the character is also crossing the borders of the magic circle to effect change outside its boundaries through emotional bleed.

And then there are ways in which characters can exit magic circles and enter entirely new contexts! Independent roleplay, theory crafting, fanfiction, playlist crafting, and good old daydreaming are ways that characters cross the border of the magic circle to grow, change, or take on new meaning.

Asa: These are great examples, and I like how you frame bleed as a form of crossing the magic circle.

Asa: This is likely my last question for you! I enjoy how Your Magic Circle invites us to think about game design as a game in its own right, and very subtly, I think that you invite players to make a magic circle within the magic circle that you have created — a game-within-a-game. Can you say, what insights do you think we can gather by thinking about game design as a game in itself?

Kienna: At the end of the day, designing and playing games overlap more than people think! Designing TTRPGs and playing TTRPGs both rest on a foundation of intentionality, rituals, and collaboration. We play these games by intentionally following or creating a new set of rituals (often in the form of rules) while collaborating between other people at the table and/or with the text of the game. We create these games by being intentional about what rituals we craft or encourage within our design, and in the process we open the doors for players to bring their own experiences and interpretations during play.

Incorporating play into the design process (either through playtesting or thinking about game design as a game itself) is a way for us designers to remember that we don't exist solely in the design mines or in the clouds of theory. We make things for playing games by playing games. Besides, it's fun, so why not try it out when you get stuck during design?

Asa: That's a great note to end on!