Races in The Series
- "Some years ago, I was working on a fantasy series called Death Gate with Margaret Weis. We needed two competing systems of magic that made sense. I remembered a saying of my old friend, Jeff Grubb. He defined quantum physics as "figures, figures, figures, figures, figures ... and then God does something ... figures, figures, figures, figures, figures." So, in order to create a believable pair of magic systems, I researched what amounted to Newtonian versus Quantum mechanics and, later, competing visions of quantum theory. I read popular science books regarding Relativity, quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, parallel universes and chaos theory. The results were a wonderful and sensible pair of magic systems that made sense because they were modeled on quantum and chaos theories."
- — Tracy Hickman, Hickman Newsletter #115
Drawing on these inspirations, Weis and Hickman set up the Patryns and Sartan as opposing pairs in many respects including the magical, and they portrayed the "mensch" races as having lesser (or no) magical abilities. The highest level of magic takes the form of this Patryn and Sartan "rune magic," which alters reality based on possibility and whose operation is influenced by the aforementioned theories. The elves and humans use "physical" and "spiritual" magic of less potency, that operates directly on the world around it.
Read more about this topic: The Death Gate Cycle
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