/lit/ - Literature

make your magic system semen based.

Everyone can cast fireball but choppa off ur peeniz.

>>1988435
Meh. Extremely basic magic system design... It has to cost something. All engines consume fuel.

There are actually a plethora of articles written on the topic by fantasy writers and dungeon masters of various ilks.

Google would probably be quite helpful to you.

>>1988438
>>1988437
I thought /lit/ was a serious board.

Don't think Le Guin had them throwing fireballs in Earthsea.

I remember a D&D world called Dark Sun where magic was based on water, but it was a desert planet. So using it caused droughts.

I thought it was pretty cool.

>>1988439
we're talking about fictional magic systems here.

You want serious discussion, try discussing a serious topic.

Make a magic system where they can do incredible things but have it powered by a substance that is running out and they've come to a point where they can't do everything that they're used to... oh wait thats us now.

>>1988439
>he wants a serious discussion on making a magic system
Sorry we're not all deep thinkers like you are OP.

>>1988439

You don't come here much, do you?

Magic systems are overpowered - that's the point of them. Even a little bit of magic in a non-magical world brings power. Look at Gandalf: he never does anything that a Lvl2 Cleric couldn't do in D&D.

To reduce the power and spammability, magic should revolve around fiercely complex rituals and probably sacrifice - this keeps the wizards from being too chummy with the populace.

The magic in Conan and Fritz Leiber are both good examples of this - magic can really change the world, but it also takes ages, and really fucks you up. The Warhammer FRPG is also pretty cool for magic. You can do it, but you're going to end up insane, mutated, and probably burnt by the next group of villages you see.

You need this...if only for the spell names

http://www.freedungeons.com/rules/#magic

>>1988445
>>1988447
>mature novels for mature people such as myself xD

>>1988451

I used to play a bit of T&T back in the day - yeah oldfag, fuck you.

Anyway, those spell names used to encourage creativity and better role-playing. It was too embarrassing to say "I cast Zombie Zonk" (unless we were really, really high, which we usually were when we played this game, tbh). Instead, you'd say "I invoke Flammaride's Restitution of the Damned".

I often wondered if Terry Pratchett played T&T.

Ah, youth, where does it go?

>>1988446

Ooh, satire.

I think the Black Company series did magic fairly well. It was an ongoing presence but it wasn't exactly over-powered or ass-pullish, at all.

>take sci-fi novel
>replace faux-science with faux-mysticism
>replace robots with elves
>job done.

>>1988463

>>1988463
The Hell? Did you *read* the Black Company books?
Spoilers:
The Dominator altered the weather patterns to increase rainfall to erode the magical prison that entrapped him (a prison that took the combined might of dozens of super-powerful mages and the spirits of dead soldiers he had killed and a dragon in stasis, and demons, etc all blocking his powers) after he was *dead*. Years later it took all of the surviving wizards and a ton of luck to kill one of the Dominator's lieutenants when he was down to being just a brain in a skull.

In the Black Company Cook treated serious mages like nukes.

>>1988485
Hmm. You've got a point. I just never saw it that way. Sure, the powerful mages, especially the Taken, were unbelievably strong, but they weren't omnipotent and were able to be defeated (read: most the Taken in the first book, as well as Stormbringer, especially). Goblin and One-Eye's magic wasn't overwhelmingly powerful either, and treated as just essential helpful tools.

http://kschnee.xepher.net/cgi-bin/magic_system.py

Kingkiller Chronicles (The Name of the Wind) has a pretty cool magic system. Apart from the "real" magic, it is exactly what you want.

I personally like the magic in the Elric books (previous mention of Stormbringer tripped the association, I guess).

Elric actually physically needs some kind of alchemical magic herb shit to keep going, he's actually addicted to magic, but it does him no good.

He's also probably the most powerful magic user left in the world, other than maybe Theleb K'aarna, but most of the time it's not worth using magic, or the spells he has don't really work anymore since the fall of Melnibone. It's generally easier just to stab everyone to death and sort everything out afterwards.

My favourite magic system is elemental, but it basically comes from the earth. So whenever you use magic, the earth around you gives up its life to do your will. Some elements are more efficient at providing your magic with life such as fire and water, but the earth and associated things like trees and grass don't provide much.

e.g. you light a fire and cast a small spell drawing on its energy. The spell is cast and the fire goes out as you draw from it.

e.g. you're in the middle of no where and want to make it rain. You draw on energy from the earth. As you power your storm, the ground around you dries and cracks an plants shrivel and die.

Then there's also a secondary system which uses spirit magic, but it is powered at the expense of your own health. Using magic basically poisons your blood. It is possible to use blood magic to heal yourself and there are other methods, but it's really not good for you. If you use enough magic your blood can become instantly toxic and you die when your liver can't handle it in a few hours time.

involuntary magic

Equivalent Exchange, and the drawing of dormant magic in the air into a focused, alternate form of energy (like heat, light, kinetic energy or w/e).
Basically the Dresden Files system, plus any rules/limits/exceptions you want to include.
>Is the Dresden Files magic system any good?

Magical realism.

Mental magic. You know unbelievable spells but the more powerful the magic you use the stupider it renders you. Very slow recovery time.so you could make bread and feel like you had a six pack but make a house and your practically autistic for months (or longer).

1. Become a rationalist
2. Disregard "Magic" and mysticism. Write within another genre.
3. Profit?

Why is fire spam particularly worrisome for you? There's way more irritating or overpowered shit than that you could do.

Read wikipedia on particle and quantum physics, and base your system on a fictional particle that alters an objects physical relation to the four forces.

use heat, not fire. Fire is a result of heat, and heat can be caused by friction. If a magician can cause friction in mid-air, that would be quite sometime. Super-heat the air.

The Young Wizards series had an OK system that was fairly similar to LeGuin's.

no mention of eragon yet?

Any form of telekinesis is overpowered.

It takes a tiny force to block an artery in somebody's brain and cause unconsciousness or death. A person who can do that can kill billions of people with a single thought.

Alright OP if you're still here I am willing to have an indepth discussion about this. First of all, do you want the system to be usable with or complementing active combat? Or a separate action that requires more focus?

Same problem with you OP. What's worse is that I've established a distinction between arcanists that study and utilize arcane essence and people that acquire it through some different means. I have no fucking idea how I'm going to make this work.

You just have to sit down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and make a diagram. Doing it with a friend will provide maximum brainstorming.

OP check out the "magic system" in the novels of Tim Powers. Namely: On Stranger Tides, The Anubis Gates and Last Call. Subtle, dangerous, cool, and no fireballs.

>>1990634
There was a system (or even a "system") in Anubis Gates? Guess I should re-read it one of these days, considering it's one of my favourites and I obviously don't remember squat.

>>1990645

I'm not sure if i'd call it a system tbh. He never really outlines all the rules (like Dresden Files), but you pick up bits and pieces along the way. The whole thing is still very shrouded but you're left with the impression that magic is very hard and exceptionally dangerous.

>read Frazer's unabridged golden bough.
>Problem solved.

http://www.scribd.com/collections/2327292/Golden-Bough

Make it like DBZ. Where it takes a lot of "energy" to do the stronger moves and it exhausts them physically if they do. Or you can do like Harry Potter where it's affected by the emotion they put into it. Or Fullmetal Alchemist where you have to draw the special symbol before you can do it.

Combine all of them.

Make it like real life where it takes days of preparation and meditation to successfully execute a spell, even after 45 years of practice.

>>1990678

Alright. I chuckled a bit at the real life bit.

>>1988495

Make it so that the reader is totally unconcerned with the rules of your magical system because they're already enthralled by your book's themes, characters, and plot development

anyone with half a brain and some fucking dedication can practically do magic. it's not the potential arcane force that creates OP shit in in fantasy but the people who use their lives to study it. compare to the real world. any field of anything is full of faggot cunts with their retard beliefs arguing and politicizing. this prevents almost all real progress done by anyone but a single person alone and quiet. we have religion and god doesn't even fucking exist.

in a fantasy world your people believe in gods who are real and practice arts that work and fight enemies that are actually evil. that is why everything gets so fucking easy.

you have to be a master like tolkien to make it work or you have to do what everyone before him did and give your characters some more personality flaws. or you can do what you're doing now and tone it down. basically the magic of good fantasy is that the magic is not in gandalf's powers but in the fact that he is gandalf. that's why 99% of the genre sucks, not everyone can write for gandalf.

Heres a system Im using in my stories right now.

Magical energy is the power behind all life.
You have to drain life from others or take it to fuel your magic, or you can use your own.

The extraction rituals are extremely inefficient and you only get like 1/1000th of the beings full energy. If you want to do really powerful magic you have to use your own life force.

Having to murder in order to gain power isnt boring, and more powerful spells require you either murder a fuckton of people or drain away your own life energy.

Hows that for serious consequences?

>>1990719
Also another possibility is that you can be "loaned" life force from various demonic sources. With the understanding tha you will pay them back, with interest.

>>1990719
you have to think of the consequences of mechanics like these. once you have enough people linked it'll be an unopposable power. once you can kill with a thought it becomes very important that someone else can kill you with his or everyone's fucked. also, it's just faggy in practice.

personally i like it when magic's unexplained. give it to a couple mages and don't have them explain to to anyone.

>>1990719
you have to think of the consequences of mechanics like these. after you have enough people linked it'll be an unopposable power. once you can kill with a thought it becomes very important that someone else can kill you with his or everyone's fucked. also, it's just faggy in practice.

personally i like it when magic's unexplained. give it to a couple mages and never have them explain the mechanics.

>after you have enough people linked it'll be an unopposable power

What do you mean by linked?

>once you can kill with a thought it becomes very important that someone else can kill you with his or everyone's fucked. also, it's just faggy in practice.

Id go with the rule that it takes more energy to kill someone with magic than is currently in their possession.

So two people going full force at each other and with no outside energy sources would just drain themselves to death.

Two guys could team up on one guy but theyd both be half drained. Thats half of your god damn life span gone to kill one guy

>>1990742
yes what i said, it's just fucking faggy in practice.

the other point was that having enough of people makes you niggercocks powerful cause you can kill someone without any real cost.

read everything brandon sanderson ever wrote

he's the "magic-system" guy


I really can't give you any better advice.

>>1990748
Let me put what you just said in to perspective.

"Your magic system sucks because if 100 Wizards ganged up on 1 Wizard they could kick his ass."

One of the things I've considered interesting as far as magic themes that is not done often but has always been neat when it was is going into how the specific "spark" that makes someone a mage or a more powerful mage propagates. Most books treat it as some sort of essentially random anomaly that just pops up and which can be directed with training or more lamely destiny divine gift sort of thing. A few books have had magic as purely a learning thing. I think there's a lot more that can be done there as who gets this huge power has a lot of implications for the societies these worlds are in. If it requires say immense training, time and rare books it can be a much more centralized, controlled and harnessed power that allows for big empire. If powerful wizards are mostly cropping up among the poor repressed masses and there isn't some system to cull them and train them from birth empires start getting destroyed. How it crops up and who has it, is it a little bit for a lot of people or once in ten generations does one person become a god are all cool things that I don't see explored enough in fantasy even though they have to have some implicit idea of how it works.

Something I've considered writing a bit about is having a world where the prevalence and power of mages waxes and wanes on lets say a 200 year cycle. This could make for some very neat generational conflict in a novel where the old generation of mages and kings are weak and desperately trying to control a society where each new generation is more powerful than the last, or in a waning cycle the oldest mages would be far stronger than the new blood to an extent that you had a true gerontocracy and ancient mages were like demigods.

>>1990763
that would inevitably imply that mages would be killed or brought near extermination out of fear in a cycle where magic was weak enough to make them vulnerable

>>1990755
here's an example, Biochroma, the magical system in his free novel Warbreaker

Basically, every person is born with one Breath. People can collect Breaths from others and use them basically like mana points. At certain threshold levels (again, very RPG-like), Breath collectors achieve stages of Heightening that give them certain powers. Those powers revolve around animating dead or nonliving things, like ribbons or corpses. That's the "Bio" part of BioChroma.

The "Chroma" part comes from a somewhat unnecessary side effect of using Breath. Anything with Breath (including people) becomes more colorful; stuff enough Breath into something, and it will even cause surrounding objects to shimmer. By contrast, sucking all of the Breath out of something causes it to turn gray. I don't think the color aspect of BioChroma is really essential at all, except that it gives Sanderson a convenient physical manifestation of an otherwise invisible magic system.

>>1990764

Maybe, depends who you have in power during the thing or if you have the spark as genetic or random. You could play it more with a fearful populace trying to wipe out the weak emerging mages driven by dark shadows of a war between dead gods. You could also do more of a desperate power struggle between young princes out from the yoke of powerful mage empires and a residual set of old wizards trying to hold power and the loyalty of the weak new generation of mages.

Point is I think there is a lot of cool stuff to be done with it and I've only seen a bit here and there. I think its one of these things where the heroes journey or the standard fantasy arc is actually the important thing in most books so the actual origins and implications of the magic are usually just not explored ala Harry Potter. They should though.

>>1990756

>>1990769
your ideea about magic going away and coming back is also present in LOTR (with the elves leaving middle earth and it becoming more like our earth) or numerous other examples, only it's happening alot faster instead of taking ages

OP magic system doesn't have to include summoning elements from nothing, it could be something simple with a set of rules like allamancy in Mistborn

Personally, I'd suggest against developing a really complicated magical system. If you must use magic, let it be just "pow, wham, shit catches fire" magic. Otherwise you're going to get too deeply embroiled in it, and it will be boring as hell.

Anyone else think Christopher Paolini's magic system is superior in every way to every other? I'm not saying the Inheritance cycle isn't a complete shitstorm of faggotry in every possible way, but in this particular area, I can actually give the author some praise. It's unbelievably well structured and adamantly solid for the most part, incidentally borrowing heavily from science. Does no one else think this?

Take this to /tg/. Fa/tg/uys are smarter than /lit/izens by far.

>>1992281
explain, how does his system work?

>>1992413

Not the guy you're responding to, and I vaguely remember it from reading the books in junior high, but basically you can store magic in gems and casting spells takes the same effort as performing the actual tasks, the main advantage being the time saved.

Magic should be overpowered, it also should be mysterious and unexplainable.

Only issue is so long as you don't have everyone and their brother running around throwing Fireballs and lightening bolts like snowballs in winter shit will be fine.

Gandalf is a good example, best magician in anything ever.

Bumping.

>>1988435
>a) is not over-powered
Have some omniscient authority come and hunt people down if they abuse magic.
>b) doesn't allow fire spam
Same as a). Or have magic depend on limited resources
>c) is not boring as shit
Limited resources would force you to use magic only when necessary or at climactic moments
>d) has serious consequences
And you want this to be interesting?

>The Warhammer FRPG is also pretty cool for magic. You can do it, but you're going to end up insane, mutated, and probably burnt by the next group of villages you see.

If you are a PC. If you are an actual character in the setting, you probably can blow up small armies and is one of the most feared and respected individuals within your faction. WHFRP traditionally includes a staggering amount of player hate and disempowerement, for not entirely clear reasons.