And thanks to Oren for asking the obvious question and fueling my train of thought. Divine magic is often more powerful/useful, but isnt always reliable. Most priests wouldnt be any more concerned with gods than the average person. Around this time Paint is able to be used freely until the children of White wage a war on the Blacks causing their power to be sealed away until further notice. But usually a person can only ever do one of those three (create, increase or decrease), and only do it for a certain energy type. Now, I havent seen anything about your system, apart from what youve written here, but one easy distinction to make would be to give the angelic side healing magic and the demonic side something like destruction or seduction. It is the rarest of the Primals to be connected to. Writing is given magical properties in many books, movies, and shows but the paper itself is rarely imbued with power. If you dont have enough power to spare, the spell fizzles. Everything is what she deems fair. I would take a step back from good and bad, first of all. Then use the answer to characterize all of your nature spirits. The thread is being used up at such a rate that the next generation may have none at all. You can also use that fickleness, maybe, and some other things this answer mentioned, to weave in logical limitations on emotion-based magic that will make it perhaps more palatable to your readersin fact, in ways directly related to the example of exhaustion. I love the way this discussion has blossomed! Characters ability to control/convert each type of energy goes from some skills which could be improved and basically limited by amount of energy which the character can control at any single spell. To the Avatar thing: the point is not using a scientific system for your magic. Not using items doesn't have to mean a magic wielder is always capable of wielding it though. Does it seem too unpredictable? And i aint going to be touching it ever again, so if you or anyone else finds some sort of use from it, have fun. A common mistake when building magic systems is to forget to include costs. Even with a teacher it takes years to become proficient. I wouldnt use categories of magic to add structure thats just adding more complexity. But it feels as if it all fits together, not least because Tolkien himself had a clear notion of what was going on. Old magics can occur without any intent. Most often, the source of magic itself comes in different types that create different effects. In my plant-based system, there could be a lineage with the biological adaptation to absorb the magical substance directly, without using the plant as an intermediary. When the nanites detect the presence of something within a host, the nanites become active, forcibly altering & rebuilding the subjects body from the inside out. When an earthbender is blocked by a mountain, we know that with enough effort, they could create a tunnel through it. Id especially suggest that, because your holy magic is used by priests, so it, too, is tied to the gods. They can only work through people that do their will voluntarily. You need to make your sub-types of magic logical parts of the main type of magic. Wizards arent included in this; as far as we know, you cant just simmer a wizard in a pot for a few days and end up with a magic potion. The water creatures, dryads and naiads, are rarer and more powerful (because water has been around for much longer). Or just feel ridiculous. Dispel | Spiritual | Fire | Creature and not to be messed with lightly, as they can have devastating effects. Moon magic is cyclic in its strength, strongest during a full moon and weakest during the new moon, and is also weak during the day. * When Jon Snow kills a white walker with Valyrian steel, it makes sense even though we havent been told that could happen. Some well-known examples of hard magic systems: In Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa, magic is like chemistry. All benders in Avatar, safe for the Avatar themselves, can only control one element, one source of power. Nature as a such comes in every now and then as well. sheer warp threads create plain physical structures such as a ball and weft webs can add fire and velocity to that ball. Hi there, I know this blog was posted a while ago but Ive only just found it and its exactly the kind of thing Ive been looking for, plus Ive seen more recent comments here so hopefully theyll be some people still interested. Whether with words, gestures, complicated rituals, or just pure thinking, the idea that someone can control reality with their mind is at the base of every magical system. The difference between the two is obvious as soon as you watch the show. When it comes to telepathy have you considered that connecting to another mind might simply mean making changes in their neural system (which runs on small amounts of electricity created by the body)? Interferers can make things happen because when they add energy to the system, it is concentrated in one place. A rational magic system is supposed to be understandable. What dangers does magic pose to the user, whether directly or because the use of magic is scorned or envied by society? Usually you can figure out if theyre alive, where they are, and how theyre doing; but its hard on your brain to process information for two people at once. Like it doesnt work on them or around them? There are medieval books detailing how to pluck a mandrake from the ground because it was thought that they screamed when unearthed and could kill everyone who heard the scream. Sorry about the comment length and the long worldbuilding paragraph. Conduits take magic energy from their surroundings, and Interferers take energy from Conduits to do magic by adding a bit of energy to the system (making a gust blow harder than it would, for example). Thanks again for the advice! Meanwhile, most people selected for magic by the nanites didnt know what was happening they might have been able to make better guesses than people now, but next to surviving the end of their world didnt devote a lot of thought to it. What do I do now? Relocating energy (in telekinesis or telepathy) is, however, less of a problem than dissolving a body and recreating it at another place, to its not the same as full teleportation. If you want to create a hard magic system, you need to create a specific logic that serves as the foundation for the entire system. If everybody is capable of wielding magic they will likely use it for everything, from war to daily life, but if only a portion of the population can wield it it means magic will be handled differently by those who can and those who can't wield it. However, if were shown the hero struggling more in fights as a result of exhaustion after using said ability (e.g. :). Im on my first crack of trying to writing and my magic system feels too simple to me and not sure if its good enough and would like a little insight. The biggest limitation is the training. Magic systems can even serve as a vehicle for theme, exploring topics such as power, privilege, oppression, and greed. Not that hard to extrapolate. A person can use their mental conviction to create any of these energy forms by channeling the Ether (Breaking the law of Conservation- Something from Nothing). For example, a tree nymph can make a leaf tornado appear, but cant work with other materials. So I would greatly appreciate some constructive feedback back. Paint can be collected from the surrounding area into your body and be channelled through your bloodstream. Will have to give it some thought. I love it. Eventually, after many long and cold nights, Mother returns the sunlight and the heat, for even in just anger she cannot maintain an imbalance. You can make it mysterious just by hiding how it operates. There are two types of magic systems: hard magic systems and soft magic systems. However, as we are all well aware humanity and its constructs are fragile things and some event happens that upsets the norm; war, a terrorist attack on these factories, solar flare, etc Regardless this event causes a change within these factories, the main computer systems get a little bit fried, perhaps even gain a modicum of self-awareness. And they were given this power, making them enhanced. If by the end of your story the hero has reached twice or more times the power of the strongest person at the beginning of the story, how come nobody ever reached that same level? Paint is everything and everywhere. Cant help but feel its lacking in creativity and complexity, but thats for another day. All three should work together to create the magic system. It is an epic drama that, year by year, is played out before humanity. Maybe the mad mage could be a catalyst for that, tampering in magic that drives off spirits (or becoming one herself? The cycle of plants harnessing sunlight and Mother taking it back everyday is no longer considered a mystery, but an accepted fact of life. As an example, look at the Force the way its used in the first few Star Wars movies (episodes 4-6 nowadays). For instance: a person who has long hair could pluck a strand and send paint through it causing it to straiten making a weapon hard to see or maybe if you can use paint on something you arent touching you could carry a bag of sand around and channel paint into it giving you the power to manipulate it a will. Awesome, thanks! The brain does use relatively weak energy for thinking, so that would not reach far. We were ripped out of the (literal) fabric of reality, shaped into a forbidden-to-visit pocket dimension. It depends on how you build up your magic system. If there are no downsides to using magic, your protagonists might soon become overpowered, able to solve any problem with the wave of a wand. It sounds like youre going the scientific route with energy. Theres no balance, nothing to sacrifice for the use of magic. Because there is no sunlight and no heat, the water is frozen and white, and blankets the ground. Ive found this post while looking any information about making own magic system for an cRPG. The size of those continental plates and their placement on the planet would be an arbitrary effect of nature, and so the magic they generate might reflect those arbitrary characteristics. For this reason, it is particularly dangerous to withhold kinetic energy and should be redistributed as soon as possible else you risk dismemberment from energy escaping randomly). Do you want to bring in some elemental control? It would foreshadow his powers at the end of the story, when he faces off against Voldemort controlling all types of magic. ;). Prime / Mana worked a little differently, in that each rune slot had a certain number of Mana-Points that could be applied, up to a value equal to the Players skill/level. The steps of rituals are based on hearsay, so its hard to know whats actually necessary. For just one example, Magoroh Maruyama describes several different possible paradigms of science, which Robert A. Freitas Jr. mentions in the book Xenology in relation to extraterrestrial minds. For example, you can create a magic system that has very clear rules for your protagonist but only vague rules for your antagonist. Overusing their magic can cause them physical harm. Following is a list of all the abilities that can be generated by the Abilities Generator. They already have enough problems with inter-house violence. With so many spec fic books, its not unusual to have such coincidences. ( ): So you already know that unraveling a knot has the opposite effect as weaving one. Thelema, Goetia, Gematria, Thaumaturgy, Alchemy, Hermeticism? A system where the only users of this magic are at first the cultists until the Heroes learn it out of necessity and self-defence, and accepting the price that it separates them farther from the group consensus of reality which is the measure by which society defines sanity, and that in fact belonging to a species of animal as social as humans are means that diverging too far from your species in the way you perceive and experience reality carries certain risks and costs to it, more or less well understood to tradition and to the majority of systems of magic because what most of these theories agree on is that the more minds believe that something is So, the more difficult it is for one individual Mind to impose a different understanding than what the Many agree on EVEN IN THE PERSONAL REALITY the putative magician themselves inhabits, and CERTAINLY if they have to use the force of their personality, belief and magic to convince other individuals that what THE MAGICIAN believes as fact is in actual good and honest coin Really So in the shared consense reality they all co-inhabit by reason of their shared belief that they do in fact have at least some things in common in their universes, enough to make a Reality of and enforce/defend it by the power of your shared beliefs.