…from the January, 2011 issue
Gonna be a fairly busy day today: Job searching, other job related stuff, housekeeping, cooking, dog daddying, garden stuff…and much of that in the crappy air and the 100+ degree heat. WHEW!
Fall Fantasy Series, Part 3 or 4: Magical Mystery Tour
So, one of the questions that popped into my head when deconstructing the typical D&Desque fantasy world was “How did the first magical spells come about?”
Think about it…it’s very doubtful that the first person ever to cast, say, Fireball, said to himself, “Hey, I think I’ll cast a Fireball spell”. No, I think what happened is that, once magic enters a world, the magically adept folks find themselves occasionally causing strange shit to happen and they don’t know exactly why. Perhaps they do it in a moment of desperation (“Holy crap! Those guys are gonna kill me if I don’t figure out how to stop them”) or need (“Dying…of..thist. Need…water!”) or some other strong drive or emotion. You need water…you think about it…you suddenly see it appear.
Then, in an attempt to replicate the strange happening, the proto-mage concentrates while standing or moving in a way similar to what he was doing earlier. Poof, it happens again. Like any other sort of endeavor, it becomes easier with practice. Next thing you know, this person can create a gallon of water any time he likes. Before long, other proto-mages are calling his spell “Bob’s Water Summoning” and offering to trade spells with him.
Pretty soon, ol’ Bob knows “Sally’s Friendly Breeze”, “Jake’s Firestarter” and “Michelle’s Invisible Shield”. Bob (and Sally, Jake & Michelle) is a mage.
People being what they are, these newly minted mages start trying to manipulate the raw magical power inside themselves to cause other strange shit to happen. These new spells might be related to earlier spells (“Bob’s Mini Rainstorm”) or they might be completely new (“Sally’s Splendid Inebriation”). Most likely, this early spell development would take a long time and not be without danger (“George’s Grizzly Bear Summons”), but eventually, you’d have mages wandering about your fantasy world.
The Dociverse Blog 
I go through a very similar process whenever I design a new fantasy campaign. I don’t have a single list of questions, but typical ones include:
What is the nature of the world/planes/etc?
What are the gods and what can they do?
What is the nature of magic?
What is the nature of good and evil?
Thinking about your world, it does sound like there should possibly still be wild mages (proto mages) running around out there. Obviously, those who teach magic try to break their students of that sort of thing early on…which might imply that wizards are a pretty tightly wound batch of folks who are taught to never let any emotions out. Stoics?
One thought for my current world I’m building is to embrace a bit of the chaos vs order that seems prevalent in the 4e setting. The old world crafted by the primordials and the gods, and back in the day it was much more raw, unpredictable and changing. So back then, spontaneous magical effects (casters) probably did exist, but these days, the stuff of the universe is more fixed. So spells still work, but every mage isn’t capable of ripping the raw energies of the universe asunder and bending it to their whims.
Brainstorming on “where magic came from?”, the other answer that often makes sense is that it was taught by the gods/demons/outsiders of unusual size. Or stolen from them. It doesn’t explain how the gods understand magic, but that’s not always a question that needs answering.
Spells as ‘spirits’ is another common approach. I have a fireball spell because I made a pact with a fire spirit, or bound one to my service.
As far as ‘clerical’ magic goes, a couple of campaigns ago, I’d sort of assumed a background where religious ritual gained in sophistication and helped define the gods, or grant a clearer vision of the gods. Early shamans did blood rituals to somewhat indistinct god-spirits, but the later temples had more sophisticated magics to accomplish the same thing. You could almost assume a “tech level” for magic in that world. High TL casters weren’t strictly more powerful, but they were definitely more sophisticated or more capable of sophisticated spells.
Taking that idea and running with it in another direction, one question that’s always come to mind for a D&D game is “Is there a difference between the ‘witch doctor’ Wizard of the White Rider Barbarians tribe and the learned Wizard of the Celestial Tower?” Insert your own names for the groups, but the idea is that both are Wizards (the class), but might have access to different magic feats so that there’s a significant color difference between the two styles of magic. Or in 4e, likely the witch doctors are probably just a monster anyway, so make it all up separate of any PC class.
That sort of discussion fits reasonably well with your setup. Early primitive casters discovered a few different things they could do and exchanged or hoarded that knowledge. Later casters (the ‘Greeks’) actually studied the spells themselves rather than just trading existing effects, learning how to break them down and reason out or craft new spells in a more rigorous fashion.
Anyway, I love brainstorming, so hopefully that helps. :)