Mana

Mana is an South Pacific word for what Americans would call "The Force."¹ The word shows up in a bunch of languages, so we're pretty sure the word comes from some Oceanic ur-language that predates the invention of boats.

Isn't it originally Jewish? You're thinking of "Manna," the Hebrew word for that edible stuff that God would leave all over the ground every morning so the runaway slaves wouldn't starve during their escape. Not the same.

When Larry Niven wrote his short story Not Long Before the End in 1969, he used the word "mana" for the limited resource that was the fuel for magical effects. He did it again in his novel The Magic Goes Away, and gamers have been using the term ever since to describe the contents of a limited pool of magic power.

Some Games That Use Mana

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• Magic: The Gathering players must drain territory they control ("tap") to fuel the magical effects described on the cards in their hands. Any excess mana causes damage to the controlling wizard. Recently removed.
• Microlite20 spellcasters must use their hit points to cast spells, alluding to them draining their own life force to create magical effects.
• Dungeons & Dragons, in any version that has psionics, has "Power Points" that are spent to create psychic supernatural effects.
  • There's also an optional rule in Unearthed Arcana to ditch the Vancian magic and use spell points instead, but nobody uses it because it just turns wizards and sorcerers into psions.
• World of Darkness uses it, but they call it different things for each of their games:

Game	old WoD	new WoD
Vampire	blood
Werewolf	gnosis	essence
Mage	quintessence	mana
Wraith	pathos	plasm
Changeling	glamour
Hunter	conviction	nothing, ha ha ha
Demon	faith	n/a
Promethean	n/a	pyros

• Palladium games (Fantasy, TMNT, Rifts, Heroes Unlimited) would use Inner Strength Points, or I.S.P. The exception was their horror game "Beyond the Supernatural," which called them Psychic Potential Energy, or P.P.E.

Footnotes

1. "The Force," before the midichlorian bullshit; I'm talking old-school Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, "size matters not" stuff, not the weeaboo shit where Yoda is bouncing around like an anime ninja on a Red Bull bender.