[Storms of MAGIC] are quite unpredictable to everyone. They occur when the lumps of loose Magic and/or the BACKLASHES of major SPELLS get out of control. They can be very violent and may last for days, during which time the very fabric of existence quakes, MAGIC USERS become sick or fall over, coloured lights manifest, sparkling MISTS swirl, and animals and plants are flung for many leagues. The Rule is that these storms avoid major centres of population.
A Storm of Magic is a supernatural phenomenon in the form of a mass of uncontrolled, undirected magic sweeping across the world and causing random and perilous effects.
The things that happen during these storms can be almost anything, but are usually strange and always dangerous. Bizarre objects may fall from the sky instead of or alongside rain. Living creatures may mutate in random, strange, and terrifying ways. Geographic features may move or shift, rivers reverse course, and portions of the landscape rise into or be flung through the air. Signs and portents may burn in the heavens. Monsters may be drawn out of slumber and hidden lairs, and spirits, demons, and other immaterial creatures may burst into the physical world.
Relatively tame examples may simply pelt unfortunate characters with bizarre precipitation, spontaneous spells, and the like. Truly severe storms may send reality out to lunch altogether, and leave the land they strike utterly unrecognizable once they pass.
During a storm of magic, active spellcasting usually becomes either highly unstable or outright impossible. Commonly, magic may become difficult to shape or direct, and spells shift, mutate, or fly out of control even as they are cast. Alternatively, the abnormal abundance of magic may actually supercharge spells, making mages capable of much grander feats than they would normally be able to. Often, both of these things will be true at the same time.
This is often, although not always, related to Wild Magic. Under Wild Magic, magic itself is an active and sometimes alive or aware entity that is capable of manifesting on its own and without, or in spite of, human control. It is common for Wild Magic to produce Storms of Magic, sometimes as a conscious or unconscious backlash at controlling it and sometimes just because. However, Storms of Magic can very well manifest for other reasons, such as a side effect of some Cosmic Flaw or as a result of Power Incontinence, a Super-Power Meltdown, or an especially bad Magic Misfire, where it may not be anything to do with underlying magical forces but the power inherent in an individual now running out of his own control.
Sub-Trope of Weird Weather. Compare Vortex Barrier where a storm is deliberately conjured as a deterrent, and Weather-Control Machine and Weather Manipulation for conjuration of weather in general. Can overlap with Genius Loci, if the storm is either revealed or implied to be alive. Compare also to World-Wrecking Wave and Unholy Nuke. Not to be confused with Magic Missile Storm, which refers to spells consisting of a swarm of magical projectiles.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- A Darker Path: Sleeper's power manifests as a reality-warping storm that's confusing to look at directly because it's perceived by the optic nerve without going through the retina. Things inside tend to be twisted or disintegrated, especially anything that could conceivably threaten Sleeper. Atropos manages to chain short-distance teleports through it to deliver a message, but is severely buffeted; her clothes fizz and sparkle and are shredded, an icy cold stream where she briefly takes refuge is boiled into steam, and even fingers and toes and portions of her limbs stop existing as she makes her way to his real body. Her exit portal has to be closed so quickly that she loses her right arm, otherwise the storm would have spilled out and destroyed multiple city blocks.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: As seen in "Inhuman Waves", magic that's set loose into the world with a purpose but blocked from the person that was supposed to set its effect on, which happened with Sailor Mercury's magic when she tried to stop her transformation's Power Incontinence, just hangs around in the air, looking for a valid target, and possibly causing other changes along the way. In Sailor Mercury's case, she had locked the magic in a room, preventing it from finding a living being it could transform, so it just stuck around, swirling in the room, until someone unaware of the dangers opened the room, giving them Body Horror. Theoretically and proven in practice in "Trapped (first half)", such a storm of magic could have been bigger and affected more people, if a valid target was harder to find.
- Friends in Oz: At the beginning of the story, a magical tornado sweeps Jermaine up and pulls him into it as he's out for a walk in his neighborhood. The twister is magenta, pink, and red in color. Sparkles of white light surround its exterior and interior. He's thrown around so violently that he passes out. When he comes to, he's in Oz.
- Harmony Theory: The Everstorm is a storm made up of magic that has ravaged the land for centuries, with no one knowing where it came or how long it will last. It is also implied that the Everstorm is a sentient and malevolent entity.
- Princess Tales: At the beginning of "Lost and Found," a massive magical storm suddenly materializes and moves through the area while Jermaine is out for a walk with Ariel and Melody. The clouds are black, blue, and purple. Colorful glowing lights appear around the clouds. Churning, sparkling mists manifest. Any animals, objects, people, and plants caught in the storm's path are transformed into monsters. Finally, parts of the ground are flung through the air. Jermaine is caught up in the force of the storm and sucked into it. After it dissipates, he's dropped into the Land of Faerie. Six months later, another magical storm appears and sucks Jermaine inside of it while he's in the Land of Faerie. After the storm disperses, he's dropped on the ground near Princess Academy.
Films — Live-Action
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: When a young wizard represses their magic due to physical or emotional abuse, the stored energy originates an Obscurus, an unstable, parasitic force that takes the form of a dark cloud. Once released, the Obscurus tends to target the source of the host's suffering, but in moments of extreme distress, it behaves chaotically and unpredictably. During the film's climax, Credence's Obscurus is unleashed and sweeps through New York, becoming a gigantic mass of smoke that devastates everything in its wake.
Literature
- The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: After a war between the kingdoms wipes out their noble castes and, with them, the controlled hasithara magic that was bound to their bloodlines, only the uncontrollable Wild Magic of visithara is left, which causes the formation of magic storms that do tremendous and frequently bizarre damage, such as melting people into inch-deep puddles, exploding livestock, and summoning monsters from other worlds. A partial restoration of hasithara manages to make the magic storms decrease, but it doesn't get rid of them entirely.
- The Bee Dungeon: Mana storms are usually short-lived, resulting from an accumulation of wild mana large enough to start creating more of itself, but inherently unstable, resulting in a variety of symptoms from mutating nearby creatures, to striking things with arcane bolts, to randomly casting spells, or even stranger things. If the storm grows large enough, it can even become a self-sustaining perpetual mana storm, which is both a large danger and opportunity, potentially strengthening or killing those who enter it. Belissar unlocks a perpetual mana storm as a random epic room feature, but has to think hard about how it could be used. It could certainly be an expensive but potent hazard for shades; he also speculates that the bees might be able to adapt to it as they have to the fairy grove, though Varilold cautions him that the process would have casualties. Added to a Fairy Grove, the storm causes trees to catch fire, freeze, grow rapidly, wither away, turn into bread, sprout legs and walk around, or simply explode. An abyssal trench, which normally is just dark cold water under high pressure, is churned up by the storm to produce random strong currents, whirlpools, hyper-dense water that shatters rocks and pulls the shrapnel into the current, magical darkness thick enough to block spells and exert physical force...
- The Black Company: The Plain of Fear is regularly plagued by "change storms", magical storms that transform everything caught in them into new, bizarre shapes, whether rocks or trees or animals. They return to their original forms after the storm passes, but while they're inside, all sorts of chaos becomes possible: prey turns into predators, people go insane, and so on. Change storms are said to be the dreams of the alien Physical God at the heart of the Plain, turning the world around it into something more like home.
- The Cosmere:
- The Cognitive Realm overlaying Sel has a perpetual storm of pure, mindless, inchoate Investiture created by the deaths of the planet's gods. This makes Sel almost inaccessible to Dimensional Travelers, but the storm's plasma-like energy can be — carefully — siphoned off as a sort of Mana Potion.
- The Stormlight Archive:
- The predominant weather pattern is the Highstorm that periodically sweeps the planet from east to west. It bridges the physical and spiritual realms, bringing Stormlight into the world and carrying the awareness of the godlike spirit called the Stormfather. Downplayed as the supernatural elements are much less important than the 600kmph winds to most people.
- In Words of Radiance, the singers successfully summon the Everstorm, an Evil Counterpart to the Highstorm. Its winds are less intense, but its lightning is more powerful and seems to have some level of intelligence guiding the aim. More importantly, it blows the wrong way around (from west to east) and carries the spirits of the demonic Fused (which can possess singer bodies as the storm passes over them).
- Heralds of Valdemar:
- The Gryphon trilogy (The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, and The Silver Gryphon) tells of the long-ago war between the archmages Urtho and Ma'ar. It ended in "the Cataclysm": a magical Doomsday Device destroyed every magical device and object in both realms, creating a wave of wild magic that swept across the world and left chaos in its wake - ruined circles of land, twisted and warped beasts and men, and worse. It took years for the pulses of wild magic to die away, and some of the affected areas remain tainted for centuries.
- In the modern day, the Mage Storms trilogy documents how the Cataclysm rebounds and re-occurs in reverse, starting with weak pulses and building to a World-Wrecking Wave of uncontrolled magic.
- A Hero's War: High concentrations of any natural phenomenon can cause a build-up of corresponding magic, such as a swampy area giving rise to a green miasma that kills all life it touches. One of the more devastating manifestations, however, is when a large fire attracts a corresponding firestorm in the sky, raining flames down on the already burning area.
Then a soft glow shown down on them from above. A red glow, pure red like the colour of magical fire, a vast and diffuse magical signature accompanying the glow. In the clouds of smoke coming from the burning slums on the other side of the burning zone, tiny specks of red flakes were appearing in the sky and raining down onto the outskirts of the slums beyond.
- Rod Allbright Alien Adventures: Dimension X has "reality quakes" that inflict Randomized Transformations on anyone caught in them. The locals developed Voluntary Shapeshifting to adapt; visitors just need to hope they go back to normal afterwards.
"Is it permanent?" she screamed, waving her green tentacles in front of her face.
"Not usually," said Phil.
Then he split down the middle and began to melt. - Storm Thief: Probability Storms are tempests of a substance called "aether" that change whatever they touch. Their effects are essentially random in target and scope — storm effects can range from rearranging the local landscape to changing the color of someone's lipstick to shutting down a person's lungs.
- Sword of Truth: The Great Barrier is stated to be a whole line of such storms, unleashed during a Wizards' War three thousand years ago and held in place by a line of enchanted towers. The effects shown include illusions (both I Know What You Fear and Lotus-Eater Machine varieties), monsters with poisonous blood, and lightning bolts in places where two storms clash together.
- The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: Storms of magic happen occasionally as a very unpredictable and hazardous form of weather caused by loose magic or severe spell backlash. They usually strike well away from areas of dense settlement, which is good, because their effects are severe. When they rage, magic-users sicken, colored lights glow, mists swirl and churn, living creatures are flung for long distances, and the very fabric of reality quakes.
- Xanth: Xanth experiences Madness Storms near the source of the realm's magic. These usually result in the temporary enhancement or derangement of existing magic and perceptions, but stronger storms can cause temporary World of Chaos conditions in the area as the line between hallucination, illusion, and reality blurs.
Live-Action TV
- Misfits: The plot is set off by a mysterious storm that sweeps over inner-city London out of nowhere, giving superpowers to hundreds of people struck by its lightning. It's never given any kind of explanation and appears to be unique, though the last scene of the show implies a second storm might be brewing.
Tabletop Games
- Forgotten Realms: The Spellplague was a supernatural disaster that occurred when Mystra, the goddess of magic, died, causing the Weave to collapse and magic to destabilize and fall into a chaotic state. The event manifested as a wave of blue fire that swept across the world, raising or flattening mountains, pulling chunks of the landscape into the sky, causing portions of the world to be shunted into the parallel plane of Abeir, drawing parts of Toril into the main world in their place, or simply destroying whatever it passed over. Wizards across the world went mad, died, or lost their magic, while the wave's passing transformed large tracts of the setting into Plaguelands, areas of permanently destabilized reality and marked by surreal vistas, warped inhabitants, and unstable magical effects.
- Promethean: The Created: Firestorms are created when ambient Pyros reaches a critical mass, autocatalyzing into a brief storm of raw change that consumes the ambient Pyros. Despite the name, this does not necessarily take the form of literal flames (though that is far from unknown), but can also manifest as any number of violent phenomena, from windstorms or blizzards to more exotic effects like liquifying stone, rains of blood, or even madness and delirium.
- Rifts: Ley Line storms occur when an overabundance of magical energy forms in an area. During such a storm, Rifts to unknown dimensions can tear open, characters caught in the storm can find themselves floating in the air, or green slimy things might fall from the sky. Magic becomes very unpredictable, and creatures of magic have a real bad time inside one.
- Shadowrun: Mana storms are rare but very dangerous weather phenomena that cause spells to spontaneously discharge. Three permanent ones known as the Daoineann Draoidheil (Gaelic for "standing storms") formed around Tìr na nÓg — Ireland, as renamed by its new elven rulers — and magic cast in or near such a storm can run wildly out of control, possibly harming the spellcaster. Only elven followers of the Path of the Rígh are powerful enough to control and use such storms. There are also permanent mana storms in Sydney, Australia, and blocking Tibet off from the rest of the world.
- Warhammer:
- Warhammer: Normally, magic enters the world as eight coloured Winds that blow from the Realm of Chaos and across the material plane. Occasionally, in response to supernatural disturbances or for no apparent reason whatsoever, these winds can churn themselves into terrible storms. The resulting Storms of Magic pass randomly across the face of the world, producing supernatural and unnatural precipitations, causing random bizarre phenomena and omens, supercharging spells, drawing monsters from their lairs, and permitting the entrance of demons into the material world.
- Warhammer 40,000: Warp Storms occur when turbulences or disturbances in the Warp, a dimension that serves both as hyperspace and as a psychically reactive immaterial plane, become strong enough to be noticed from realspace. At best, they cause faster-than-light travel to become impossible in the affected area. At worst, they can break through into the material universe entirely, warping physical laws and allowing demonic entities to enter reality, and leaving behind scourged and barren worlds when they finally die back down.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Necroquake that Nagash unleashed at the start of 2nd edition; its primary purpose was to inundate the realms with Death magic, causing a setting-wide undead apocalypse, but it also drastically affected magic across the realms. This was mainly used to explain the existence of the newly-introduced Endless Spells, magic spells that persist once cast, come to life, and roam the lands at random killing whatever they come across.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Supernatural weather is a hazard of the Chaos Wastes, the Grim Up North near where magic flows into the world. Sometimes it's just a Rain of Blood or frogs; other times the winds bring insanity or random Magic Misfires.
Video Games
- Arcane Odyssey: The Dark Sea is peppered with these following an event known as the "Wrath of the Gods", infusing already catastrophic weather anomalies with the various Elemental Powers of the setting. Glass falling as hail and tornadoes imbued with plasma are a common sight.
- Elona: The Etherwind is a powerful storm charged with Ether. It manifests as a tempest threaded with fog and lights, and contact with it will mutate the player character. Divine weather-changing doesn't work on the Etherwind but just makes it even more chaotic.
- King's Quest: Mask of Eternity: The titular MacGuffin is a keystone to the maintenance of reality. As such, when the villain tries to take it and it breaks apart, a magical storm covers the land with different effects in different places. In Daventry, it turns everyone to stone with the exception of hero Connor (he was holding a piece of the Mask to protect him) and a wizard (who's only half stone because he wasn't able to finish his protection spell in time).
- Total War: Warhammer II: The plot involves four factions seeking control over the Great Vortex, a storm of magic that drains excess magic to hinder the daemons of Chaos from invading the mortal realm. The High Elves and the Lizardmen want to stabilize the Vortex to maintain peace in the world, while the Dark Elves and the Skavens seek the power of the Vortex for their own nefarious purposes.
- Warframe: Void Fissures, and their Void Storm counterparts on Railjack missions, are the result of energy from the Void leaking into the Origin System. This results in two things: firstly, enemies on that node become Corrupted, and secondly, it is possible to open relics on that node. There are six tiers of Fissure — five correspond to a specific type of relic, and the sixth, Omnia, can open any relic.
Webcomics
- Aurora (2019): The Storm of Magic is a perpetual, stationary storm divided into six sectors, each dominated by one of the six elemental winds raging out of control. As far as is known, this has been so since before recorded history began. Each of its parts is utterly uninhabitable as a result — the fire-dominated part is an unstable volcanic wasteland, the water-dominated one is a rain-lashed, restlessly roiling lake, the lightning-dominated one is a lightning-blasted desert, the wind-dominated one is a wind-scoured waste of unstable rock formations, the stone-dominated one is a landscape of constantly shifting, "hungry" earth, and the life-dominated one is a tangled morass of uncontrollably mutating life.
- Daughter of the Lilies: Magic storms are masses of wild magic
in the form of churning, colorful clouds. Their passage can cause a variety of unpredictable effects, all extremely dangerous. At a distance, they only amplify existing magic, but direct exposure can cause things like mass disappearances, mutations of living creatures, or dramatic alterations of geography. Anti-Magic obsidian storm shelters are often built in high-risk areas. When Thistle is caught in one, it causes a dream-like deluge of colorful rain, surreal visions, and mutating plants and landscape features.
Lyra: Orrig, have you seen any?
Orrig: Yes. Many.
Lyra: Were they cool? What happened?
Orrig: People died. Or disappeared. Or changed. - El Goonish Shive: Discussed. Apparently, the side effect of a system of magic where all the rules are at their most human-friendly would be massive storms of chaos magic.