So I started with examples. Now let’s break it down to what all those elements have in common. Reverse-engineering. That way, we can find what base building blocks were used to make the structure. I didn’t come up with any of this–these are all based on my notes. I’m just putting them together into something coherent.
First, we have to define what magic is. Sorry to be pretentious, but you need to get your terms down to get a bead on what we’re talking about. IMO, magic is power. It’s the ability to do something you wouldn’t normally be able to do in real life. That means starting from some action or stimulus and resulting in some kind of response or effect. It’s non-scientific and non-physical, meaning that cause has no relation to effect. The consequence is some kind of multi-sensory realistic illusion, a teleportation, the creation/destruction of an object, or something else that’s not possible in the real world. Magic is questions with few answers, science is answers with few questions.
Now, how to create a magic system. When building, you should first build it up, then build it in. This reminds me of my software development classes, where they taught us “design from the top down, build from the bottom up.” What you end up with is a set of laws and rules that magic users have to abide by*, either because of “can’t” or “won’t/shouldn’t”. These rules should go hand in hand with the questions a reader is going to ask. Questions like where does the magic come from? What does the magic do? How is magic used? Who gets to use magic? When and how is magic not the answer?
*Good writing tip: Establish a rule, then break it. This introduces an element of intrigue and interests the reader in uncovering why the rule doesn’t hold up.
I don’t know if you need to answer this at the beginning or the end, but you should decide at some point: are you using a hard magic system or a soft magic system. Hard means that you’re using definite rules with limits and weaknesses. Soft magic has rules, but they’re flexible and not rigidly defined. Tolkien magic is soft magic–it’s not clear what the capabilities of the One Ring or Sauron are. Peter Jackson deleted a scene where Sauron actually came out during the battle of black gate. That would have confused the hell out of me–I thought he was dead.
A magic system has these elements: a source, a cost, and users.
SOURCE
Arguably, the most important element. Source defines everything that comes afterward. Your reader doesn’t necessarily have to know where the source of magic comes from, but you do. The two questions you have to answer are what it is and why it produces/generates magic? Sources can come from anywhere, but they tend to have commonalities:
- Nature-based: involves the elements of nature (fire, earth, air, and water), plants/fungi, alchemy, or weather.
- Divination-based: Related to gods and god-like beings. This is where you find your witch magic. Usually involves tarot cards, corpses, bones, phenology.
- Conjuring-based: Movement of objects and people around space and time, i.e., teleportation
- Psychic: Influencing the brain/mind. Reading it or writing it.
- Life and Death: You might call this necromancy, but it’s all related to making things alive and making things dead, and any iteration of the two combined.
- Anima/Creatures: Here you’ve got your vampires, dragons, unicorns, sirens, etc.
- Magitech: Sorcery combined with technology. Like Doom and Final Fantasy. You’ve got airships powered by air elementals. Mechromancer suits that absorb souls and increase ESP, ghosts that ferry messages on the internet. Personally, I think there’s an untapped well here.
- Eclectic: Beings that believe that magic is real and has an effect on the world as a result. This will be a more subtle, slipstream kind of magic. Less tangible. Kind of like Gabriel Garcia Marquez stuff.
- Uncommon: Everything else probably goes under here. Color magic (where you can manipulate light in the visible spectrum to create optical illusions), sound magic to dampen, amplify, or generate sounds, time, strength, speed, reaction, animal speech, and so on.
Some potential answers to “what is my source of magic”:
- Tied to the planet or ground/lifestream
- Life energy
- Elements
- Gods
- It’s energy that’s everywhere (e.g., the Force)
- Bloodlines
- Deals with gods
- Innate to people/people are demigods
- Emotions
- A crystal that orbits the Earth and occasionally crashes, causing pseudo-nuclear damage
COST (STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION)
Cost can be broken down into structure and function. In other words, the what and how.
What means the effect that it produces? Summon lightning? Zombies? Charm a spoon? Do laundry? Are there any consequences for doing the magic? Does using a certain school corrupt you like Gollum? Or give you horrible hallucinations or something else bad? Do the consequences change if you do the magic incorrectly?
How means how is it performed? What do you have to do to summon lightning, etc.? This is where there are a lot of options. Is it a nervous system trigger? An effort of will? Hand gestures? Do you order something to do something? A prayer? Wish very hard? Do you do a spell (i.e., written string of letters)? Do you need things to do the magic, like crystal balls or wands? Any rituals? Signs?
To that end, you must consider how this information is communicated to others. How does the knowledge pass down? How does anyone know “the rules”? Experimentation? Are there documents? Who/what makes the rules?
MAGIC USERS
Okay, so now we get to our “characters”, or at least their templates. Another clump of questions to ask yourself here. What is the hierarchy of magic users (is there one)? Is magic special/rare or common? Are there trained professionals with years of experience?
How does the culture view magic? Is it taboo or universally accepted? Are magic users revered or reviled? Does the type of magic matter? Related to the above, is there a governing body establishing the rule of magic to make sure there isn’t anarchy?
And most important–who gets to use magic? Do you have to be a “chosen one”? Who or what does the choosing? In Lord of the Rings, you have to be a demigod (like Gandalf) or descended from one (like elves). Or are there bloodlines and subspecies like in Harry Potter? Maybe magic manifests over time, like puberty. Can non-humans do it? Can my dog do magic?
ITEMS
Magic items aren’t necessary, but I think we all like the artifacts and equipment too much to leave them out. They can add flavor to story details or act as maguffins. Many of the same questions for magic users apply to the items. What is the item? What does it do? What does it look like? Who made it? How does it work–is it one-time or reusable? How many of these are there? Is it a special, rare thing or a dime-a-dozen? And most importantly, why is it in the story? Did you put it in as a quick fix to the plot?
LIMITATIONS
Without limits, you don’t have a system. You just have arbitrary rules that don’t matter, like how in Dragon Ball Z, there was this thing about using devices to measure an opponent’s “power” and its purpose was just to seem impressive when characters broke those supposed limits of that power (that’s how we got “it’s over nine thousand!“)
What is an exciting plot all about? Keeping the stakes high. If your characters can solve every problem with magic, why don’t they? If you have healing magic, why does death mean anything? No one would be afraid.
These limits have to be reasonable, logical consequences of nature and magic’s mechanisms. Having a thing where goblins cannot enter coffee shops because they have a weakness to coffee doesn’t make sense unless you make it so the god of coffee hates them, or maybe the god of coffee hates the god of goblins, or coffee blocks their connection to magic.
They also have to be respected. Magic users need to abide by these rules; otherwise, what’s the point of having them? If you have your water mages casting fire magic at the climax, the reader is definitely going to feel cheated. Gods don’t get a free pass either. I know the term “god” is supposed to mean omnipotent, but even the Christian God has limits. Good people are suffering, bad people are getting away with stuff, children are dying of cancer. Either He can’t, won’t, or doesn’t do anything about it. All options are equally terrifying.
Some examples of limitations:
Exhaustion of the body and/or soul. We see this all the time in movies. It’s like casting magic makes them run a marathon. It’s very visually appealing to see the good wizard reach up with his wand, sweat on his brow, wringing out that last bit of energy, going the distance, and cast that last little spell that does the bad guy in before he executes his evil plan. Although you see this more in stories about psionics.
Finite Amount of magic power. Also known as the mana meter. Often used as a game mechanic rather than a storytelling element.
Complexity related to strength. The bigger a spell is, the more complex it is to execute. Making flowers appear out of your sleeve is nothing. Moving a mountain is going to take some days of meditation, planning, ritual circle drawing, etc.
Exotic materials necessary. You could heal this guy’s wounds… if you had a blue diamond, which is only found in the caves of the dreaded black dragon. Good for adding plot coupons to thicken a story’s length. Or maybe magic is really picky. You’ve got to say the spell exactly right or have the right ingredients (like computer code).
Senses. You can only manipulate what you sense around you, like how Nightcrawler can only teleport to where he can see. (Which is what makes it amazing when he risks it all and teleports sight unseen–see why we have limits?) This can lead to some interesting tricks when it comes to taste and smell.
Range. Another game mechanic, your magic can only affect things within a certain distance. That could be within touch, sight, or some other distance. Or maybe you have to be within range of something related to your element, like a lake for water or a volcano for fire or just within the sphere of influence of the giant crystal that grants magic power.
Whims of a higher power. Maybe the gods won’t let you do everything you want to do. They’re funny like that.
Equivalent exchange, a.k.a. the Full Metal Alchemist route. You can’t get something for nothing. Maybe you can only magic things that already exist, but you can’t conjure things out of thin air or transmute something into something totally different.
Blockers. Maybe the magic of one person blocks another, and you have to eliminate that person to get your magic on. This also applies to objects. You can’t teleport to a place with anti-teleport mines. This is also a good way to stop flyers from ruining everything. Magic: the Gathering uses this in its rock-paper-scissors system.
Trial and error. This is good if you want to portray ancient civilizations, but it’s also a common and cliché way to add limits to magic power. How often have we seen an apprentice wizard poring over books, trying to figure out how the ancient Smoogs used to make plants grow? Or the young student getting something wrong and making the feather fly into the professor’s ass. Although its common, there are lots of entertainment opportunities.
Inheritance. You’ve got to be part of the bloodline of magic users (how the ancestors got THEIR powers is another matter).
And of course, it’s easy to mix and match all of these. Brandon Sanderson said that he’s more interested in what your magic can’t do than what it can’t. He created allomancy, which is powered by a god. To do magic, you have to eat a flake of metal. There are only sixteen metals that grant powers (on a one-to-one basis). It’s temporary (like digestion). The more metal you eat, the magic will burn quicker, but stronger. And physics still applies–the heavier a thing is, the more strength metal you need to eat to lift it.
SANDERSON’S LAWS
So I already referred to one law (the second). It’s important to know the difference between weaknesses and limitations. Superman’s weaknesses are his adherence to his moral code (internal) and kryptonite (external). His limitations are things like the fact that his X-ray vision can see through everything except lead. If you put on the One Ring, the Ringwraiths can see you. That’s a weakness. In Harry Potter, you shouldn’t use magic to bring people back from the dead and shouldn’t cast any of those unforgivable curses (don’t kill someone, torture someone, or force-command someone). Those are limitations.
Both these need to be clear to the reader. Your story will lack tension if no one can tell who has the upper hand in a fight. That’s the first law–an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands that magic. In other words, the more consistent the rules are, the less deus ex machina it seems when magic is used to overcome obstacles.
And the third is that you should expand on what you already have before adding something new. Better to prioritize quality over quantity, or depth over breadth. You want to create worlds that, while perhaps small in scale, feel “alive” with characters and systems that become more compelling the more the readers delve into them. To do this, extrapolate. Ask those “what happens when…?” questions. “What happens when a wizard converts to Christianity?” “What happens to warfare when magic can create food out of thin air?” “What happens to gender dynamics if magic causes the men who use it to go insane?” And so on.
His last law, the zeroth law (which means it takes precedence over all other laws): always err on the side of what is awesome.
PITFALLS
Extrapolating also helps make sure all your bases are covered. Take your rules to their logical conclusions. If you’ve got water mages and the planet is 70% water, then wouldn’t water mages be overpowered? Does your story require that your magic users require line of sight to affect something? Does that mean blind people can’t use magic?
Do not solve everything with some magic thing pulled out of your ass. Don’t add new powers because you need them to get to a certain point in the plot. You can’t give vampires the power of sunlight manipulation if sunlight is their weakness.
People seem to get angry if you don’t abide by the laws of physics. I don’t blame them. Physics is like the fundamental magic rules of our own universe. They’re ingrained in our blood. Generations upon generations have watched water become ice and fire burn wood. We know air is more than just oxygen. But physics are defied all the time. People get inches close to lava, but as long as you don’t touch it, you’re fine. No such thing as convection. Noises in space. If you disappear/teleport, there’s no implosion of air into the vacuumed space. So I don’t know what to tell you here. I know I feel smarter when I read real science, but you also don’t want to bog your rules down in it such that the plot lags, because everyone has to clean up after a teleport. At least don’t change the rules once you set them.
CONCLUSION
A lot of work goes into a magic system. You can put in just a smattering or as much juice as you want. I don’t think J.K. Rowling spent much time thinking about how magic works when she created Harry Potter. Seems like, if she did, the climax wouldn’t involve people shooting magic bullets at each other. A little weird.
But if you end up making something too complex, you’ve made a game, not a story. And readers don’t like reading technical manuals.
And within all of this, you’ve got to come up with something compelling and original. I don’t envy anyone who decides to create a magic system. They’ve got their work cut out for them.
