>>3527
Well, the short answer is that it’s will/awakened state of consciousness-based and freeform under a heavy, heavy series of nerfs.
The long answer is that in the beginning, a fat little man called the Creator made the entire Discworld using eight spells, and that’s why the number 8 has massive significance in Discworld magic (even though it’s still the seventh son of a seventh son who becomes a Sourcerer. More on that later). For a while, magic ran wild and men rose to challenge the gods. Shit went haywire with days running backwards, night being the same thing as day, and holes were nearly punched in reality. This made the Old High Ones (cosmic beings. One, Azrael, is described as the Death of Universe. He is the thing of which the Death of the Discworld is a mere fleck of, and he owns a clock that tells time what it is) decide to nerf everyone involved. The gods were bidden to dwell on the great mountain Dunmanifestin, and magic was quelled to the point that instead of being living FONTS of it, there is just a vaguely defined set amount being constantly reused on the Disc. In addition to that, the wizards started self-policing. Mainly by setting up universities where they have nothing to do but eat big dinners, argue with each other and invent increasingly convoluted titles. It’s…not clear what witches (yes those are a thing, more on that later) were doing during the wizarding war.
I’m bringing up all this backstory because I need you understand that the first few paragraphs will be explaining what can be done with magic
under multiple increments of nerfs levelled against the setting and enforced by wizarding culture.
So to start with, in the early books wizards had a vaguely-defined series of “levels” to spells in expanding order of potency. They could do basically anything you can imagine a conventional wizard doing-levitate, throw fireballs, enchant brooms to fly, turn people into frogs on line of sight. I think the biggest show of “conventional wizard magic” in the series is the Dean loading up on spells in his pockets that he uses to demolish an angry sentient shopping mall. They all have names like Marvolo’s Marvelous Fizzingbottom and the system is never explained in earnest so I’m going to describe the actually cool shit: Using scry and die tactics to magically launch an arrow at anyone scried with magic on the Disc, a blast that erases someone from time itself (yes they have off-brand Balefire), mend broken bones, inverting someone’s personal gravity, summon nano-demons to separate mixed substances (like say, sift out all the salt from a bucket of salt water), improvise a hangover cure so powerful it can cure a God of Hangovers from having hangovers for a while, summoning a dragon (on the Discworld, dragons are extradimensional predators evolved to eat magic. Normally they’re “just” giant flying firebreathing reptiles but theoretically with sufficient magic you can define a form and behaviour for one; the tourist Twoflower manifested his own dragon in a high-magic region, and he wasn’t even a wizard), binding Death into a circle (it does not indefinitely war him off, if anything it gives him more of a reason to pay attention), and enchanting a sympathetic bond to all the teeth collected by the Tooth Fairy to muck around with anthropomorphic personifications. Like say, kill the equivalent of Santa Claus.
Later in the series when they use magic regularly enough that they stop pretending levels and reagents matter (well, reagents…kind of matter, but not as much as previously thought. You don’t need mouse blood and eight wizards for the Rite of AshKente for example, you just need a fresh egg) the wizards clarify that magic is mostly “moving things around”, as in there is a Conservation of Matter, Energy and Magic at work in conventional wizard spells (and presumably effects that seemingly defied this previously were just…moving things around really cleverly). This is demonstrated when the wizards teleport one of their own to another continent in exchange for teleporting an equivalent amount of matter back to the ritual circle, and enchanting a carriage with the concept of the horse so that it burns up vegetation to gain the velocity needed to fly. Magic is also indicated to be behind the creation of golems-which on the Discworld, are basically Terminators as long as the sheet of paper in their head is secure. Most impressively, magic can be used to construct a self-aware spell called Hex that is functionally sufficiently analysed magic indistinguishable from an actual AI even though it’s consciousness is housed in skulls and circles and an ant farm and a thing that goes “parp”. MORE ON THIS LATER.
Anyway, let’s talk about witchcraft. Wizard magic is formalised, stratified and as I said it’s genuinely ambiguous how much of it is genuinely invoking magic and how much if limiters. Witch magic is a lot more intuitive and subtle. Most of the time. To cut through a lot of plot: Most of the time witches don’t even do magic, they help out villages, and when they do they use an elevated state of consciousness and willworking to move things around. Common witch magic includes boiling a cauldron to interrogate demons, “riding” (astral projection. Usually on animals, done with great care. Once memorably, on a whole swarm of bees. Similar principles have been used to astral projection into Death’s domain and once again by the same exceptional practitioner, to resist a vampire’s bite AND force the vampires to become more like the witch from drinking her blood), sympathetic effects to hurt people with voodoo dolls OR burn the voodoo doll someone is trying to mess with you through, the construction of a dreamcatcher-like focus to ensnare a being of pure consciousness then enforce the concept of death on it, walking through fire unscathed or remotely transferring the heat of a burning bonfire to melt snow (yes, this is the same principle of magic being fundamentally “moving things around”. MORE ON THIS LATER) and taking out someone’s pain as a small ball of awfulness you can fling at someone else. In general it’s more localised and subtle, but also much more efficient and practical. Most of the time. A whole coven (three witches) once boiled a cauldron to accelerate time by years over a whole kingdom, and an evil fairy godmother (subtype of witch) once used a bunch of mirrors facing each other as a magical power boost that let her bend the wills and forms of entire kingdoms. There was also a voodoo lady (again, type of witch) who turned the man she had a fling with into a god using the goodwill of his nation. He promptly drove off the aforementioned fairy godmother in direct conflict, walking through heavy duty magic like a water hose.
We will now get to The Really Good Shit.
See, the thing about magic is that not only did it have this ultra powerful primal form, but it ALSO fundamentally runs on something like quantum mechanics. More on-look you get the idea, I’m going to talk about Sourcery, the original form of magic, to glaze nu-magic later. So we’ve seen one (1) Sourcerer. Wizards aren’t allowed to marry because the seventh son of a wizard’s seventh son bypasses the magic nerf and becomes a font of new magic. The example Sourcerer buffed other wizards by his mere presence into being able to launch intercontinental ballistic spells, raised towers to the sky with a gesture and can use normal spells so much better than other wizards he cast what was diminished to a two-foot wide pretty garden into a perfect pocket dimension paradise. Other Sourcerers are mainly remembered by the legacies left by them on the Disc: The Balefire spell was invented by one, there are these wandering shops that sell things like the nigh-indestructible, everything-fighting Luggage, and one invented Discworld orcs as his personal army. Bred from men, apparently. Discworld orcs are supersoldiers with inhuman intelligence, enough strength to lift an anvil and enough endurance to just kinda sleep off injuries that would kill a man. Did I mention the Sourcerer just kind of caught ALL the gods of the Discworld in a pokeball in seconds? Either the gods were nerfed a lot more than assumed, or the only reason there was any kind of war was because humans were more interested in fighting each other.
Back to the modern day and Hex. So, the thing about magic is that it can be quantified to particles-Thaums. This is the key that lets Hex, say, take a spell for looking for a single book and cast it thousands of times per second. At one point the wizards split a thaum in a process similar to nuclear fission, and the result was enough magical energy to blast their university to the moon. Instead, Hex funnelled it all into creating
an entire universe without magic confined to a globe on the wizards’ shelf. They even develop more spells to subtly interfere with it-time travel, a tangible suit, actually visiting the place. Esk, the Disc’s first female wizard, used a similar principle to massacre Dungeon Dimensioners. Dungeon Dimensioners are physically frail eldritch horrors that can get very, very big and strong when gorging on magic; the Sourcerer above had to run from them. Esk however killed them in droves by NOT using magic in a very pointed way that basically starved them to death. Later she shows the ability to casually time travel thanks to knowledge from her boyfriend, Wizard Stephen Hawking. They speculate whether or not this IS sourcery. It’s not confirmed either way. But the principle is there: Humans can, in fact, tap into the quantum bullshit aspect of Discworld magic if they’re smart enough.
TLDR how much bang you get out of Discworld magic is a skill issue. Make no mistake, it has limits: The most obvious ones that things wrought with magic and things evolved to eat magic get REALLY efficient at doing so, and that getting spells wrong has a tendency to backfire so hard one of the most gifted wizards much prefers to just hit something with a big stick rather than risk the backlash of anything crazier. But if you do get it right, you shit on Exalted sorcery. Magic, wielded correctly, effectively lets you exit the Discworld setting as a xianxia entity who skips all the long, arduous steps of cultivating. That’s literally what’s hinted to have happened to all the surviving Sourcerers back in the day by the way, they just got too powerful for the world, and made their own perfect pocket dimensions to go live in.
Also I am Shard