This idea was part of the 2025 game jam ideas project.
The old man's magic
⭐ One of my favorite ideas from this project.
The world used to have lots of magic in it. Every living thing had a little bit of magic in it. People, animals. Plants. You tend to inherit it from your parents, the school of magic that you were from. You could study to gain more magic abilities and enhance your skills. Everyone had a little bit of magic in them.
This is how it worked for millennia until a person was born with a new magic ability that never existed before. He could consume (other person loses their powers permanently) other people's powers and make it his own.
As you can imagine a world filled with magic users can be a dangerous place. This man's parents were killed accidentally by the misuse of magic.
He wasn't a good man or a bad man. He didn't thirst for power or control, but he believed if other people had magic powers then there would be more "accidents" like the one that killed his family. So he decided to absorb all the magic in the world.
First was invulnerability, then immortality. After that everything else was an eventuality.
People born from parents that didn't have magic anymore, didn't inherit the magic trait.
After a few generations, people forgot what magic felt like.
The man didn't age, couldn't be hurt and lived forever. He didn't interfere with humanity's troubles except for the big occasions, earthquakes, wars, etc. He mostly kept to himself in his homeland and refused any audience from people seeking him.
When he did leave his home, his magic powers are overflowing. Everything he interacted with regained some magic power. Then he would have to go through the process of trying to reabsorb (clean up) that magic power before it had a chance to propagate outward. It was like the magic wanted to propagate, wants to escape.
While the man didn't age, time still wore on his mind. Man should not live a thousand years. The man was becoming irrational, erratic, arbitrary with how he used his powers.
On one of the Old man's excursions into the world, there was an "accident" that killed a young boy's family (cycle repeats). He was close to the accident when it happened and some of the old man's magic leaked into this young boy.
The power that this young boy gained was the inability to have his magic powers stripped from him by the old man, thus can gain new powers. Thus when the old man cleaned up after himself to absorb all the leaked magic, he got to keep his new powers.
The story is a standard hero's journey. This young boy is forced to go on a journey to defeat the old man, but in doing so he releases magic back into the world.
After every interaction with the old man, more magic leaks into the young boy.
The old man isn't evil, just lived too long, even wishes for death but is afraid of what a world of magic would be. He has been fighting the spread of magic too long, it had to have been worth it. His life's purpose must mean something.
In the end the Old man makes the choice to (secretly) help the young boy defeat himself even though he knows that he is effectively immortal, then just fades away.