Urban fantasy is built on the concept of magic existing in modern world, hidden from the eyes of most people. It’s a great concept which leads to a lot of cool imagery and scenarios, but, well, it’s not really believable when you consider how our history would be different with magic around. Magic in many settings is capable of feats impossible even with modern science, and in many settings it was just as powerful (if not more powerful) in the past than it’s today, so it would stand to reason that mages would become our divine overlords back when the ruling class was just forming and cling to power ever since. Real priests, after all, typically had quite a lot of power in ancient societies, and they merely claimed they could bring forth miracles.

That’s just one example, but I hope it demonstrates the problem urban fantasy faces: how to keep our world mostly the way we know it, but with magic hidden in shadows?

I love urban fantasy genre, so I typically let it slide when a satisfactory answer isn’t provided, but still, it grates a bit every now and then.

So now I am composing a list of works that do provide good explanations for the secrecy of magic, or at least have interesting ideas on that front. The list is far from complete, of course, and you are welcome to provide your own examples, as well as examples of works that botch the justification for secrecy in a remarkable way.

(The list is presented in no particular order.)

Nasuverse

While it does have some problems with justifications when it comes to the Church, vampires or other supernatural creatures, magi, at least, are provided with a very good reason to hide: the dilution of mystery. Simply put, the more people know about inner workings of a given spell, the less powerful it becomes. The effect cannot be reversed. Thus, magi are very interested in keeping their craft as secret as possible, from the world at large and from other magi.

Some, of course, would ignore the slow decay of magic in pursuit of a more immediate agenda: you can hardly expect a court wizard to go into hiding so magic wouldn’t disappear quite as fast. The dilution of mystery doesn’t affect magi on immediate level, so you’d expect them to treat it as people today treat global warming: something that we sorta should try to prevent but not, you know, by changing our way of life in any significant way.

Here, however, is where the nature of magecraft comes to play. It’s a slow discipline. Generations can pass before a specific branch of magecraft would be able to see any practical use. To achieve results in this field requires borderline obsession that you are able to pass on your children. Thus, the best magi are people who place magecraft above everything else in their lives. Ad that gives them personal power, which they can apply to force everyone else to do what they want.

Or, in other words, the people who would make the issue their priority above other concerns are the ones who have the power to do something about it.

And while it’s said that modern magi often care less about magecraft and more about wordily matters, the structure put in place would carry them of a force of inertia. Coming out of hiding now, after centuries of secrecy, would cause far too many troubles for magi, threatening the position and power they have.

Thus, it’s easy to see why the Association has survived for so long.


Unknown Armies

One of my favorite TRPGs, which does a lot of interesting stuff with urban fantasy, including its approach to secrecy.

The secrecy is maintained by a combination of several factors. First, UA rejects the past. The old magic is dead and was dead for long enough to be forgotten. How it worked and what effect it had on the world isn’t addressed because it’s not important. UA is big on the theme of anticipation of a new millennium, so the approach fits. Plus, it allows us to just assume that the old magic functioned in a way that allowed the modern world to exist.

It also means that the new mages found themselves in a world that didn’t believe in magic anymore, and many found it was easier to allow it to remain that way because magic is born from madness and breeds madness. Adepts are not rational people. A young epideromancer doesn’t think, “With my power over flesh, I can become a world-renowned healer and make lots of money!” He thinks, “If I master the art of self-mutilation, I will achieve perfection!” Their goals and methods often if not most of the time run contrary to what society finds acceptable or at least not batshit crazy. They often find themselves operating outside of the law. Thus, they are not inclined to reveal themselves and make it easier to normal people to stop or, worse, help them.

Not that the latter is very likely. Magic in UA is unnatural. It exists thanks to the paradoxes of humanity, places in our psyche that we rarely visit. And when normal people encounter magic, they tend to react violently. Thus, revealing magic to them always carries a risk of being lynched.

Another factor is the Sleepers, a global organization dedicated to keeping magic a secret for they believe that revealing it would cause global panic, violence and potentially war. They actually aren’t all that powerful, consisting of only 170 members (and only 70 with magical powers), but they are very, very effective at making themselves look bigger than they are, and managed to successfully become the boogieman of occult underground. (It helps that a magic discipline closely associated with their founding members is all about information control and historical revisionism.)

There is also an implication that various government organizations and Vatican are in on the whole magic thing, but it’s not really elaborated upon in the game, so it’s up to GM to decide how big a role they play if any.

For all of this, the game says that the secrecy is still unlikely to survive for long. Two major cabals are gearing for a big war, which likely would reveal magic to the world at large.

Mage: the Awakening

Word of Darkness games are typically at least not bad when it comes to justifyiing secrecy, but I’ve read M:Aw recently, so I am going to talk about it.

This game, much like UA, relies on a combination of factors to explain the secrecy. First, there is the nature of magic. Due to the world being fallen and removed from supernal realms by Abyss, which hates magic, “vulgar” spells (that is, spells that are obviously supernatural in origin and can’t be explained away as a weird coincidence. A fireball thrown from mage’s hands as opposed to a lighting striking someone during a heavy storm.) is hard to cast in general, harder still in the presence of normal people and can potentially summon Cthulhu. Thus, mages are typically not eager to try and disguise their workings as natural phenomena.

Secondly, normal people have hard time dealing with magic. Often witnessing it results in a psychotic break, and there is a good chance they would forget about magic soon afterwards.

Thirdly, similar to Nasuverse, it is believed that merely talking with normal people about magic diminishes it bit by bit, so mages are forbidden from doing so.

And then there are Seers of the Throne, a powerful organization dedicated to keeping humanity ignorant and controlled, for their inhuman masters command it.

Those factors combined do explain how magic could remain mostly hidden from humanity for millennia of its existence.

Pact

This web-novel has a rather creative reason for maintaining secrecy. Whether it’s satisfactory is hard to tell for me, but it certainly warrants an examination.

The gist of it is that, due to ancient oaths, “innocent” (that is, untouched by or ignorant of supernatural) people are protected from the worst of what magic can do. And supernatural creatures themselves are not allowed to show themselves openly.

Thus, keeping people in the dark about the true nature of the world actually protects them. The protection isn’t absolute, there are plenty of examples of some monster devouring an innocent human under the right circumstances, but without it, it would have been much worse.

Bringing someone into the secret world also carries a karmic weight: you become partly responsible for what will happen to them. So if they come to harm from supernatural sources, the universe would fuck you.

Thus, the secrecy is both practical and beneficial.

Little Fears

This game is more horror than urban fantasy. There are no secret societies or people with supernatural powers to be found, but the way supernatural stuff is separated from mundane is interesting.

Basically, there are various monsters hunting children, but adults can’t see them. Neither can they remember their own encounters with monsters when they were kids. Sure, they can still see the signs left behind by monsters: gouges on the floor, creepy writings on the walls or what have you, but they would be explained away as a work of animals or humans. Thus, even when they do believe children are in danger (and monsters are typically good at subtlety), any protections they attempt to give children would be futile against the real threat.

More, quite a few monsters can control adults to one degree or another, so more often than not adults become a part of the problem.

Among children, there is no secrecy. They know about the danger and openly share a few things that work against monsters. Until they reach a certain age or succumb to monsters’ influence, at which point they forget about the danger and become powerless against it.

Persona 3*

The setup here is nice.

Firstly, the whole deal with Shadows and such is a recent development. The shadow world has probably existed for as long as humanity itself has, but normally it’s disconnected from the normal world, thus rendering questions about the past moot. It’s possible there were other incidents like the game plot before, but we can safely assume that they went down in a way that didn’t impact history much.

Secondly, all supernatural stuff happens during the Dark Hour, and hour that takes place during midnight each day which normal people can’t perceive on account of being transformed into coffins for its duration. Only a few people can enter the Dark Hour, chosen seemingly at random, and only those with Personae can fight monsters lurking within.

Thirdly, the secrecy isn’t absolute. Local police is semi-aware of weird stuff going on and helps the protagonists on occasion, while they help the police to locate people missing due to the supernatural.

Finally, the organization the protagonists are working for has its own reasons to keep everything secret.

So, revealing the secret would be mostly futile and potentially dangerous to people who can do anything about it.

So, that’s it for now. I hope the examples presented here demonstrate various ways in which the concept of secret magic coexisting with the modern mundane world can be implemented without stretching the suspension of disbelief.

Again, more examples of works with neat ideas and embarrassing failures are welcome.

*But not 4. I seriously loath the plot setup in P4. I mean, seriously, the MC lives with a detective who works on murder case connected to the shadow world, thus giving the MC all the reason to inform the detective about what’s really going on. And he has a way to prove that the supernatural stuff exist. It would take the MC one minute to say, “Hey, Uncle, check this out!” and put his hand inside a TV. Sure, some persuasion may be needed afterwards, but seriously, there isn’t much you can object to someone capable of putting their hand inside your TV.

But no, it’s “let’s keep this stuff secret for no fucking reason even though we know a killer is using it to commit murders.”