Adapting Game Magic from the Literature of the Fantastic ◾ 279
made of pure ideas, mountains craed out of symbols, universes based on
alternate versions of reality. In the strongest game systems, magic ultimately
originates out of the planes and allows the magicians to voyage through
them. While on the one hand such a process is shamanic, it more closely
resembles the “lodge-based, hermetic” magic that Aaron Reid alludes to in
Secrets of the Magickal Grimoires. Elric’s rituals resemble what Reid calls
the “gating” rituals of the Golden Dawn Pentagram and Hexagram rituals,
designed to formally open the gateways to other dimensions. At the same
time, Elric’s magic is deeply psychedelic in the 1960s countercultural sense
of the word, in ...