Can magic be abused? In what ways could/would people exploit magic? How would a tyrant, evil mastermind, supervillain, megalomaniac, or someone with no morals use your magic system? Can charlatans and scam artists "bottle magic" (real or fake) and sell magic to people? Does easy access to magic increase petty crime (drug dealers, domestic violence, street gangs, etc)? If people can be born with magic, and some people have magic and others don't, are there breeding camps, slave rings, concentration camps, that imprison/enslave magic users to breed them and sell the babies as slaves to mega wealthy or build enslaved battle mages for evil governments?
My Answer:
The criminal underground is the centre stage of most settings in the series. So drug dealers, brothels, prostitutes, and street gangs are a constant theme seen in most novels. This is a thing I focused on a lot in my magic system, because my MC, Quaraun, is on the run from the law, and ends up as a drifter who goes from one scum infested gutter dive to the next, making friends with drug dealers (BoomFuzzy), gangsters (Wvoodell), and thieves (GhoulSpawn), all of whom use magic to not only commit crimes but also to elude the law.
* Can magic be abused?
Oh yes. Big time.
Abuse of magic is an over-arching theme of the entire series.
You got to remember that the 3 main characters are all super villain criminals on the run from the law, so the entire series is told from their point of view. You see, the world through the eyes of three mages who are abusing magic worse than probably anyone else on the planet.
* In what ways could/would people exploit magic?
Quaraun, for example, is incredibly arrogant and has egos out the wazoo. He has absolutely no issues whatsoever with using magic for frivolous things like making make up to enhance his beauty. Seemingly not a bad thing, until you realize the ingredients of such potions include the parts of rare and endangered creatures. Making eye shadow out of ground up pixie wings, making lipstick out of unicorn blood. That sort of thing. Quaraun is a drag queen, by the way, if you didn’t know that, so, he wears a LOT of make up. He’s very selfish and uses magic and uses magic to his own advantages for everything.
GhoulSpawn abuses time travel, where you see him constantly going back and forth in time to change events, but it’s never something like changing events to save people from doom. It’s always changing events to cover up this or that crime, done by one of his friends, usually with horrible side effects on a large scale, that he doesn’t bat an eye too.
BoomFuzzy is notorious for using magic to create enchanted food to drug people, whom he kills, cooks, and eats.
* How would a tyrant, evil mastermind, supervillain, megalomaniac, or someone with no morals use your magic system?
King Gwallmaiic used magic to “brain wash/hypnotize” an entire army into doing his bidding. Then marched across the planet, one by one, killing off every king in the Realm of Fae, until he was the last king left, at which point he crowned himself The King of the Faeries.
* Can charlatans and scam artists "bottle magic" (real or fake) and sell magic to people?
Yes. They can and do.
Large sections of the magic system caters around potions, so bottling magic is a thing. But scam artists will make watered down potions that don’t work as well, to trick people into coming back to buy “more potent versions” with each level of potency being more expensive than the last.
The worst scam artists will outright sell bottle water with food colouring in it. Not any time of a potion at all.
All lot of “Emperor’s New Clothes” style scam-artistry goes on in the Quaraun series.
* Does easy access to magic increase petty crime (drug dealers, domestic violence, street gangs, etc)?
It does, but on the other hand, magic is not that easy to access.
Out of 7 billion people on the planet, there are probably fewer than 50 mages total on the planet.
* If people can be born with magic, and some people have magic and others don't, are there breeding camps, slave rings, concentration camps, that imprison/enslave magic users to breed them and sell the babies as slaves to mega wealthy or build enslaved battle mages for evil governments?
This is a thing that shows up. Elves and Faeries are born with genetic magic, as is anyone with Elf or Fae blood in them. There rise up a few money hungry businessmen who get a hold of Faery-Iron and Anti-Magic cloth, and build a breeding farm, where they gather up genetic-mages into cages, like a puppy mile and force breed them, then sell the “magic babies” to wealthy families as slaves or pets.
Not much is done about these renegade groups because they are seen as doing a good thing by getting mages off the streets and under control.
In the novel Zebulon’s Captive, MC, Quaraun, ends up in one of these breeding farms and he’s far less than compliant. He fights the slave trading breeders every step of the way, and ends up severely crippled from the torture they do to try to tame him. Some of the most brutal, bloody, gory torture scenes of the entire series happen while Quaraun is imprisoned on Zebulon’s Elf Breeding Farm, where Humans treat the Elves like livestock.
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