All I know about magic systems, I learned from the Outer Gods

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OK: magic systems. I love them so so so much. They have rewarded this love by making me totally insane, like one of those people who get a glimpse of Yog-Sothoth and start gibbering about how it's the key and the gate. I'm writing this blog post from an asylum and having my accomplice smuggle it out.

The first thing I understood when I made eye contact with Yog-Sothoth is that everything is a magic system. D&D classes? Magic system. Laser guns? Also a magic system. Immovable rods, superpowers, pokemon, mecha, they're all magic systems.

The second thing I learned is that there's no such thing as a magic system. The world just works in a way that lets you throw fireballs. On earth I can do it with gunpowder and a long fuse; in fourhumourslandia I could summon a ball of unfinished aether and yell at it until my choleric temperament converted it to elemental fire.

(That sort of thing tends to be possible in our fictional worlds because we like including some sort of entertaining supramundane bullshit. You shouldn't be "making a magic system", you should be coming up with cooler supramundane bullshit, which need not necessarily have anything to do with "magic" or "wizards").

Then Yog-Sothoth turned me around and said: Whisperling, your supramundane bullshit must serve the needs of your game. Suppose you want to run a game about sky pirates. This game must take place in a setting where there is such a thing as a sky pirate adventure, and it would be fun if that setting were to have fantastical elements relevant to the sky pirate lifestyle.

Like this

There are many viable sky pirate settings. In some, people have saber duels on the upper deck of a zeppelin. In others, dogfighters in one-man airplanes gun down enemy necromancers. Your job is to choose amongst them and form a specific vision of the world you want to create.  

While keeping hold of that vision (but not too stubbornly, let it evolve over time), you can flesh out the details of your world, and by extension the details of any fantastical elements you wish to include.  
  
Perhaps you could compile a set of setting-appropriate classes for players to choose between. Musketeer, Pilot, Berserker, Tattooist, Visionary. Or if your setting is flexible enough to accomodate any of the million classes out there, you could let your players bring whichever they like. That's a perfectly acceptable solution. Remember the first lesson of Yog-Sothoth, that classes are actually a magic system.  
  
But I hail from the forum game mines, where we have neither classes nor systems! I believe those things are boring, that extradiagetic advancement is the devil, and that I will like my sky pirates better if I do something else instead! Of course, I still want characters to have badass special abilities. Wouldn't be much of a sky pirate game otherwise.  
  
My preference is to come up with supramundane bullshit that exists within the world, that the players can diegetically use to do cool stuff in the same way they could diegetically use a knife for stabbing.  
  
Let's say that there is a substance made of concentrated malice, and instead of bullets guns shoot 'hexes' made out of this malice stuff. And you can use malice for other things, too.

• Malice responds to your grudges.
• If you whisper to it every day and bind it in paper curse talismans inscribed with the name of your enemy, you can shape it into a curse that pursues its target like a living thing and makes their life hell.
• If you wear a hex cartridge in your breast pocket, you can take its malice into your heart and grow it by killing people you hate, and this will make you stronger and faster and more spiteful.  

  
Maybe there are magic tattoos that you can get by making a bargain with spirits of the air.  

• Every tattoo has a unique ability. There are whole books of the things, but the spirits will only give you one, and you have to know which image to ask for.  
• Your tattoo is stronger when you impress the spirits. They love drama and narrative and big personalities. But their favor is fickle, and if they lose interest it will not last.  
• As the cost of this bargain, if someone with a magic tattoo stays on the ground too long they'll start to wither away.  
• If you win the attention of a specific spirit, usually by playing into its favorite tropes, you can speak with it and make further bets and bargains. Spirits can manifest as wind-animals with thunderstorm bodies and hailstone teeth.  

 
Anyway, you can go on like this for a while, and then whether it's a "magic system" or not, you've got a bunch of fun setting-appropriate toys to play with. IMO having this bespoke stuff for each game is much more interesting than saying "eh, it's a kitchen sink, anything goes" or shoving the same old D&D magic into everything.  
  
You might want to tie some mechanics to these toys, as appropriate. Maybe shaping malice requires a lot of skill, and your ruleset tells you to roll for difficult and risky things. So when making a curse you could require a CHA roll to prevent it from rebounding back on you because it hates everyone and everything.  
  
Finally, know ye this: magic systems like being connected. If you can take two or three or four and let them interlock with each other, the result is often better than the sum of its parts. 

 

 

Behold, an air spirit! (Actually an underwater panther).

Anyway, after Yog-Sothoth beamed all these ideas into my brain and was about to leave, I said: "Wait! Please! When people talk about magic systems, don't they want a single unified structure that explains how all magic works? I have to give them something, or they'll eat me alive!"

Okay, Yog Sothoth thought at me, we can get into that. When you're creating a magic system you're walking a tightrope between abstraction and specificity. On one hand, there's generic fantasy magic that's 100% vibes. On the other hand, there's Brandon Sanderson circa mistborn, or the MU spell list.

Yes, this is the soft magic/hard magic binary, but you can't just collapse an entire system down to "soft" or "hard". You need to pay attention to how you're navigating abstraction and specificity in your creative process and know how to use each to best effect.

One of the reasons people tie themselves in knots trying to create a Unified Theory of Magic is that they start with the idea of generic soft magic that can do anything, and then try to come up with hard rules that emulate it. That can't be done, 2+2 cannot equal red. Then they sit there mumbling things like "magic is programming" or "the rules of my magic system are that it can't do resurrection or time travel", because they don't have any way to bridge the gap.

There are other approaches that work better. Here's an incomplete list:

• Accept abstraction, but add evocative details or bits of mechanical definition where they provide the maximum toyetic benefit. Spells are critters. You have an affinity for Bones and can attempt to cast any bone-related spell.
• Just go 100% hard magic and write allomancy 2.0 or MU spell list 200.0. (Fun fact: usually these systems still have to be powered by an abstract force that just has specific rules about how it manifests).
• Use hard magic that can be leveraged to create more complicated effects. If you wanted to actually execute the "magic is programming" concept instead of using it to convince yourself that your soft magic system is hard, you could make a set of basic functions (think printfire()) that casters build into real spells using control flow.
• Add a layer of GM interpretation to let rules do abstract or unpredictable things. Ex: fuse two items and get an output that combines the properties of both.

The common thread is that you're using abstraction and specificity in strategic ways, instead of fumbling around trying to make one act exactly like the other. The other common thread is that you have to pick something and commit, you can't just go in circles contemplating aesthetics forever. That way lies madness.

Speaking of madness, Yog Sothoth was still hovering there, and now it was examining me contemplatively. Maybe we have gotten ahead of ourselves, it said. Let's take a step back. What makes a magic system good? 

"Well," I argued, "There are the obvious things. Is it pleasing for players to interact with? Is it good for the GM to run? Does its presence invite extrapolation and creativity?"

Yog Sothoth gazed at me and said: That response is correct but over-general. You could ask those questions about any element of your game, and they would trivially be applicable to each. What makes something a good magic system, rather than good encumbrance rules or a good candlestick?

"Well, we've been over this, if encumbrance rules and candlesticks are also magic systems-"

Yog-Sothoth writhed unimpressedly.

"Okay, okay, fine. As I understand it, the characteristic features of a magic system are its flexibility and the depth to which it can be explored. They're what distinguishes it from something like a magic item or a superpower. These aren't unbreakable rules, but classically, a magic item does one thing and that's pretty much it. A magic system is built to be capable of lots of things, and it's rewarding for players to spend time experimenting with its mechanics to do them."

The divine presence gestured for me to continue.

"But I still say candlesticks are a magic system. Like, you can light them on fire and they provide illumination. Then you can use them to light other things on fire. And they burn down eventually because the fire consumes the wax as fuel. That's about as mechanically rich as some magic systems."

Yog Sothoth looked at me, aghast, and said: You have learned too well. And it threw me back to earth.

Now, could someone please get me out of this padded room?