I’ve been thinking about magic systems lately.
A little bit for fun and a little bit because I potentially need to for an upcoming novel. Most of my knowledge comes from video games (usually RPGs), which are magic systems applied, but based around numbers and probabilities and statistics (mathmagic?).
Most use “fuel” or “mana meter” in the same way that HP is a rough representation of your health and consciousness. When it’s gone, your agency is removed and the result will likely be a game over. In the same way, not enough fuel for your magic, and you can’t do it. Or you can think of it like currency. The more you pay, the stronger a spell you can do. Magic: the Gathering is based around this concept. Half your cards are payment, the other half is what you spend that payment on.
Nearly every video game treats magic with a meter, but Final Fantasy especially comes to mind. But in those games, learning the spell takes some doing as well. Usually, you have to equip something to do the spell, and that means that someone else cannot have it (two people can’t wear a bracelet). This splits abilities among the party and makes tactics interesting. Sometimes this equipment has a strong role in the story, sometimes it doesn’t. In Final Fantasy IX, all you do is equip earrings or bracelets or crowns or whatever. When you wear them in a battle, they get “experience”. When it fills up, the spell is memorized (which means you can do it without equipment, so you can equip and learn something else). Final Fantasy VI is similar, but you equip “magicite” and that is relevant to the story. Each magicite represents a summonable creature, and the bad guys use it to gain power.
In Final Fantasy VII, you don’t equip clothing, but the spells themselves (materia) into your weapons and armor. Weak weapons have few slots, strong ones have many. And sometimes you can link two spells together for interesting combinations. For example, associate your armor with an elemental material and you can heal yourself by casting an offensive spell on yourself. But that’s all part of gameplay and strategy. You spend MP to execute the spell, like a gas tank or a battery.
In Final Fantasy VIII, it’s based on quantity. And you can equip a spell to your stats–strength, agility, defense. The more of that spell you have, the stronger that stat is. But if you use one of those spells, the stat goes down slightly. Which makes it so you don’t want to do spells, which seems antithetical to gaming. Also, you extract those quantities of spells from the ground or other monsters. But you cannot use magic unless you “junction a guardian force” (i.e., equip a summon). Does that mean all the human enemies have a GF junctioned? Can that little Galbadia soldier summon Ifrit if he wants?
Dungeons & Dragons is a hybrid between literature and gaming. Instead of points, there are “slots”. Slots are like containers you pour the spell into. Large spells have to go in large containers. Small spells go into small containers, but they can increase in strength if put into a large container. But that’s the gameplay mechanics part. The story part is about where the magic comes from, and that centers on classes. Once you use a “slot”, it’s used up until you take a rest.
Wizard is the most common magic-using class. It uses magic as described above, but the spells are gained from intense study. There are many spells to choose from, but a wizard can only memorize a few at a time. And there’s a quantity/quality proportion going on: many simple spells, few advanced spells.
Other magic-using classes have different sources. Clerics receive it from gods, who bless them and allow them to harness it to perform miracles. Druids use energy from nature. Sorcerers have innate magic, meaning they’re born with it. Sometimes they know where it comes from (like family history–either an event or genetics), sometimes they don’t. They are their own source. All they need to do is learn how to channel it. Warlocks gain magic by making a “pact” with an extraplanar entity, like an angel, demon, hag, etc. What the other side gets out of this deal, I don’t know. Bards get it from the “bardic arts,” meaning music, verse, and dance, whatever that means.
All magic in Dungeons and Dragons and the video games is “Vancian” magic. This means the spell is the spell. Its attributes or properties cannot be changed. For example, you can’t reshape a fireball to be smaller or larger, hotter or colder, streamlined, or split up. A fireball is a fireball is a fireball.
There isn’t as much material on making magic systems as I thought there would be. There’s no formula or algorithm or questionnaire to fill out. No flow chart for getting from source to spells to artifacts to characters and you end up with a scheme.
But there is no better source than other fantasy authors who are conscious of the magic they’re making, rather than the ones who put it in and use it when needed (soft magic) like Tolkien and Rowling.
Brandon Sanderson put forth three laws of magic systems when applied to stories. The most important is the first, which states, “The author’s ability to solve conflict satisfyingly is directly proportional to the reader’s understanding of how magic works.” In other words, the clearer that magic is to the reader, the better chance the author has of pulling something amazing off. That’s why it sucks so much when Gandalf randomly leaves so often. Because otherwise, Gandalf could unleash a magic nuke and wipe out the orcs.
One can forgive Tolkien for futzing/blurring the rules of magic, given he forged the path. The “system” in Lord of the Rings isn’t much of a system. The only ones who can do magic are gods and demigods (like Sauron and Gandalf) or elves, who have a smidgen of divine power in their blood. So it’s innate… unless you’ve got the One Ring. Maybe that’s part of the reason everyone wants it. It’s a way to have magic power without needing to be born a certain way.
But he set a trend for magic being pretty ambiguous in terms of limits. In Star Wars, you’ve got the Force, which seems to take nothing but concentration and focus. But you can exhaust yourself, even to the point of dying. The inventory of powers tends towards psionics, like mind control, telekinesis, and precognition. But what you can do with that power changes from movie to movie, and it is suffering from feature creep, because the writers keep using it as a deus ex. Dune is much the same, except you have to consume a drug to get your powers. Also, there are eugenics involved, and that gets a little icky.
In Harry Potter, magic doesn’t seem to have a cost or a source. Spells are like bullets–you point your wand at the target, say a word, and a little spark of light missiles out. But the skilled magician can also deflect the spell. Seems a little odd that magic’s limit is due to a physical property. If you aim a spell straight up, will gravity bring it back down?
The Owl House has one of my favorites. Magic is something you’re born with via a bile sac attached to the heart, but you do have to go to school to learn it. However, during the series, they come upon another magic system–glyphs. There’s some divine being called a Titan that shows these glyphs to individuals whom he favors. There are only four glyphs (light, ice, plant, fire), but they can be combined infinitely. But this means the more complex the spell, the more complex the glyph you have to draw. Also, glyphs disappear once used.
In Mistborn, you ingest metals. A small amount, I think, like a flake. Each metal grants a different temporary power. But who can use them is limited. Most can only use the power of one type of metal.
A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones seems to have “naturally occurring” magic, by which I mean there are magic things in the world, like dragons and druids. Normal humans can’t seem to create this stuff, but they can use it, like a dragonsteel sword or a beauty necklace. There are a few witches, but they’re treated much as we treat them in the real world, as outcasts who live in their covens and pass knowledge down through generations.
The Kingkiller Chronicle has a few different systems that co-exist. The one we’re most exposed to is sympathy, which is difficult to master. Then there’s alchemy, which involves using glyphs to glue things together. For example, you can make an “arrow magnet” to protect yourself against arrows, but it runs out of power after a while and cannot be restored. And then there’s naming, which is an ancient and not well-understood practice. But if you can do it, it gives you a great deal of power, much like that thing where knowing the demon’s name gives you control over it.
So, after analyzing these systems, there seem to be two things that are always consistent: a source and a cost. The greater the miracle, the higher the cost. We’ll explore that more, as well as the building blocks of a system, in part 2.
