Hello! Lately, I have been thinking a lot about a magic system for a tabletop RPG I would like to host in the future. I am starting from scratch, and I am trying to make it somewhat cryptic in the beginning so that players can slowly understand it over the course of many campaigns.
So far, I’ve looked through some systems already used in many fantasy worlds: elemental magic, dark and light, gravity, etc. It’s cool, but not all of them are really explainable. If a person from our world was randomly transported to that universe, they wouldn’t be able to properly handle the magic.
Therefore, I was thinking that the universe in which the action takes place has some form of new particle that is much more reactive to the environment. For example, drawing a rune with a material that attracts this new particle, you could perform various spells. However, this would be somewhat limiting and would suck the fun out of the action (yes, let me draw this huge magic circle during a fight with an ogre).
What magic systems have you read/seen and liked? How do you think those could be improved?
Maybe using magic involves travelling to and learning to navigate another, even more fantastical place? Such as spirit magic, or dream magic, or travelling to the land of the dead? I think it would be interesting if learning magic also involved getting to know the people of this other domain (such as acquiring a “spirit guide”, or making bargains, or learning a language even). Anything from Spirited Away to Hellraiser could serve as an inspiration
Interesting! I was hoping that the exposure to magic would make the players interact with various cultures. For example, a certain species/race is very good at a certain type of manipulating the magic, so they would be required to travel there in order to learn more.
I was also considering spirit magic! Using up your own spirit power would make an interesting magic limitation. Thanks for the suggestions! :)
There’s a cool idea in the Nasuverse called “Conceptual Weapons” - magical weapons that, rather than dealing direct damage, apply certain concepts to people to make them dead. For instance you have the Gae Bolg, a spear that “reverses cause and effect, determining that it has pierced through the heart and warping reality to fit that outcome”. So how do you avoid it? Since there’s no way to avoid your heart being pierced, you try to ensure that your heart being hit doesn’t kill you, one way or another. Or there’s the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, which allow you to see lines on people that you can trace to “apply the concept of death” to them, metaphorically taking their inevitable death in the future and bringing it into the present. A consequence of this is that it doesn’t work on immortal beings, since they have no death in the future. (it’s actually much more complicated than that, and too convoluted to explain here)
These are kind of OP examples but you get the point - this allows you to approach combat as a puzzle for the players to solve rather than a numbers game.
Jack Vance (namesake of Vancian magic) introduced two interesting concepts in his Dying Earth series. In earlier books magic was essentially invented by the ancient masters who were expert logicians and scientists. Each spell was essentially a proof of concept that a sequence of actions compelled reality to act in a certain way.
By the time of the first short stories in the Dying Earth series, mankind has long since deteriorated due to an overreliance on what is essentially magic to the layperson. Even the wily magicians of the modern time are only capable of rote learning a few arguments at a time; hence the fire and forget Vancian magic system of old D&D.
In later books, magicians have returned to near godly power. They’ve somehow found a link between djinn-like creatures capable of controlling portions of reality, and the rote rituals of old. They’ve learned to essentially cut out the middle-man and directly enslave these djinni to do their bidding.
