In Episode 80 of Rabbit Hole of Research, Joe, Nick, Georgia, and Mary welcome author B.L. Mostyn (Heroes of Another Age) to the Basement Studio to discuss the costs of magical systems.
We discuss the physics, biology, politics, and ecology behind magic systems, fantastical creatures, and the power structures that sustain them. We ask the questions worldbuilders sometimes skip: How does your magical system really work (is it consistent), how many Big Macs to make fire balls and shape shift, and who’s controlling access and should they?
Special Note: The episode is being released during a rough week in NWI and Chicagoland, and the show notes may be shorter than normal. On August 11th, tornadoes and a derecho tore through the area causing major damage. At the Basement Studio: two maple trees were ripped out of the ground in the front parkway, and the cottonwood’s canopy in the back garden was shredded (luckily everything missed the house) but we did lose power.
As of this episode's release, the power is still out: latest restoration estimates is between tomorrow and the end of August. The Rabbit Hole family is safe. We appreciate your check-ins, patience and your support, and will keep you updated. Stay safe, stay curious, and we love y'all!
Check out more from B.L. Mostyn:
website: blmostyn.com
newsletter signup: blmostyn.com/newsletter-signup
Heroes of Another Age — Amazon link: a.co/d/0323LFhh (paperback, audiobook & kindle)
Georgia and Jim’s Touch of Noir 2027 Wall Calendar —
12 months of all-original art by Jim and Georgia; orders are open now, with mailing expected in September
Check out what the RHR crew is creating:
Joe:
Named by the Guild Literary Complex as one of the 35 Writers to Watch!
Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories Anthology featuring a story by Joe!
Joe’s Sci-fi physiological thriller Novel: Will You Still Love Me If I Become Someone Else?
Joe’s Rom-Com Novella: Tomorrow May Be Too Late
Future Events to Hang with the Crew:
Podcast Cross-Appearances
Joe on GoIndieNow: 21grams with Joe Compton talking about villains.
RHR Crew on This Podcast Will Change Your Life with Ben Tanzer
Events & Conventions:
Dragon Con — Atlanta, GA (September 3-7, 2026) - Joe attending as Professional
Joe will be reading on Zoom: Words // Friends Aug 26th @7pm CST / 8pm EST
Register for free zoom link here: http://tinyurl.com/wordsfriendsummer
It’s Science for Weirdos
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We discussed these questions on the episode and now want to Hear From You (leave a comment):
If you could have one magical power, what would it be, and what would you be willing to pay for it?
Hard magic or soft magic (Hard: systems with strict rules and consequences, or Soft: a little extra splash of Handwavium in your magic?
What’s your favorite magic system or fantastical creature?
Drop your thoughts in the comments. We read them all, and your ideas often shape future episodes.
Future Episodes
Episode 82: Climate Change and Data Centers
Guest: David Pincus, PhD
Episode 84: ET
Guest: Chris Guzman (@theboxinggloveartist)
Episode 86: Disability in Horror
Guest: Grace Daly (Bram Stoker nominee)
For more stuff (Images, Episode Highlights, events, etc), subscribe to our Substack newsletter!
Show Notes & Fun facts
Stuff crew said they’d put in shownotes
The bird Kevin from Up — it’s based on a real animal (the Himalayan monal)
By AJIT HOTA - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57993244 
Kevin: Pixar: https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Kevin
Books:
Heroes of Another Age — B.L. Mostyn
The Power — Naomi Alderman
The Wheel of Time series — Robert Jordan
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams (Babel fish)
The Magicians — Lev Grossman
Mistborn Saga — Brandon Sanderson
Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons — Dr. Ernest Drake (Dugald Steer)
Movies/TV:
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
The Flight of Dragons (1982)
Up (Pixar) — the bird Kevin; discussed as based on a real mountain pheasant
The Power (TV series, Amazon) — unfortunately it was cancelled after season one
The Flight of Dragons (1982 animated film)
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Comics:
Sex Criminals — Matt Fraction & Chip Kidd (Orgasms stop time, go check it out)
Fun Facts to Impress Your Friends With:
The bombardier beetle is nature’s fire-breather. It stores two separate chemicals — hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide — in its abdomen, combines them on demand, and ejects a boiling toxic spray at 100°C.
Dragon flight has a real chemistry solution. The 1982 animated film The Flight of Dragons proposed dragons ate limestone, combined it with stomach acid to generate hydrogen gas, and fly like blimps. Hydrogen is also highly flammable, which may explain fire-breathing. But accidents happen, even though the physics can work, remember the Hindenburg disaster.
Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from your mother. When sperm fertilizes an egg, the paternal mitochondria are actively destroyed during travel to the egg. The maternally supplied egg provides all the energy infrastructure for new life. This means certain inherited traits, including susceptibility to some diseases, follow a strictly maternal line, or a fantastical magic system could be tied to the mother’s bloodline.
Kleiber’s Law says big animals burn less energy per pound than small ones — metabolic rate scales to body mass to the power of 3/4, not 1:1. A dragon-sized reptile with a slow metabolism, like a crocodile, could theoretically survive on one massive meal and go dormant for months. One dragon per mountain range isn’t fantasy, as discussed in episode, it’s actually the ecologically sound population density for an apex predator that size.
The Australian military once lost a war to emus — and Joe thinks this may explain the dragon mythology. In 1932, the Royal Australian Artillery deployed machine guns against 20,000 emus invading Western Australian farmland. The emus won. They split into small groups, scattered under fire, and the military operation was abandoned after 1,000 confirmed kills, not emus but the soldiers. The commanding officer noted the birds moved with the "invulnerability of tanks." Now consider Joe’s point: an emu stands six feet tall, runs at 30 mph, and has clawed feet capable of disemboweling any human that stands in its way. If medieval soldiers encountered a flock of emu and a few barely survived, they were not going home to say they got decimated by flightless birds. They were going to describe a magnificent beast with terrible claws. And like a game of telephone, this is how Emu becomes a Dragon.
Episode Highlights
00:00 — Basement Roll Call: Joe, Nick, Georgia, and Mary welcome author B.L. Mostyn to the Basement Studio.
03:26 — Checklist For Magic Systems: Joe walks through his framework for interrogating any fictional power system — energy source, physiology, ecology, economy, politics, and failure modes.
05:58 — Defining Magic And Science: B.L. offers her definition of magic as anything we don’t fully understand, and the crew explores where science ends and magic begins.
12:44 — Scale Access And Wonder: The crew debates what makes something feel magical versus merely impressive — is it scale, rarity, or just not knowing what’s in someone’s hand?
17:33 — High Low Soft Hard Magic: B.L. breaks down the spectrum from high to low magic and soft to hard magic.
24:56 — Heroes Of Another Age Magic: B.L. walks through her elemental magic system — gods, elementals, a cycle of power flowing through all living things, and why humans in her world cast magic wrong and damage the world around them.
28:31 — Species Politics And Fear: B.L.’s eight-species world has dragons, elves, Nokin, dwarves, and humans — each with a different relationship to magic, and humans fearing it most because nobody taught them correctly.
34:46 — Dragon Ecology And Flight: Joe and B.L. work through the biology of dragons — territorial range, volcanic nesting, slow metabolism, centuries-long growth from house-cat size to full dinosaur scale.
41:19 — Magic Powered Dragon Flight: B.L. explains how her dragons use ambient air energy rather than wings to fly, drawing on the kinetic energy already moving through the atmosphere…but at what cost.
43:24 — Handwavium And World Logic: The crew agrees a little handwavium is okay. what matters is internal consistency, not scientific accuracy down to the gram.
43:55 — Emus As Dragon Origins: Joe floats his theory that medieval dragon lore may have started with soldiers encountering flocks of emus and surviving just barely to tell a different Handwavium tale.
47:33 — Real World Fire Breathing: The bombardier beetle is nature’s fire-breather, and the crew discusses how a dragon could realistically generate flame using hydrogen gas.
49:50 — Costs And Morality Of Magic: B.L. raises the ethical dimension — what are you willing to pay, and what are you willing to take from someone else? Dark magic as externalized cost.
51:12 — Jedi Force Power Politics: Joe makes the case that the Jedi industrialized the Force, and asks whether the dark side was really just a competing school of thought that got framed as evil by the victors.
53:50 — Hereditary Magic Genetics: Nick asks whether magic passes to offspring, leading Joe to explain mitochondrial DNA, maternal inheritance, and epigenetic tagging.
56:25 — The Power Matriarchy Magic: Joe recommends Naomi Alderman’s The Power.
59:25 — Magic War Crimes Fallout: Nick asks B.L. whether magic can constitute a war crime in her world — boiling seas, mass extinction, and whether the environmental cost of catastrophic magic becomes its own deterrent.
01:02:13 — Pick Your Power And Costs: The crew goes around the table — B.L. picks shapeshifting, Mary, universal language comprehension, Nick, airbending, Joe, telepathy/telekinesis, Georgia, after pondering for awhile, picks stopping time.
01:10:23 — Time Stop Comic Tangent: Joe recommends Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction.
01:11:28 — Books Cons And Farewell: B.L. plugs Heroes of Another Age, and the crew signs off.
“Stay curious, stay safe… Love Y’all!”
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