Magic Systems✨
How to design them and use them to maximize your story's theme and character development
Ciao 🍝
Three Laws of Magic ✨
A recipe for your magic system 🪄
Resources/fact check 📋
1. Ciao 🍝
Hello there! Lyssa is still bingeing Emily in Paris but she also had pasta for dinner and is precisely 25% Italian, so she’s now an expert on Italy, too. Once again, ask her anything.
Speaking of Italy, isn’t it a magical place? And speaking of MAGIC, today’s topic is magic systems! From considerations while designing a memorable one to using it to maximize your world building, character development, and themes, we’ve got you covered. Let’s put on our magician hats (get that bunny out of there first) and jump in!
2. Three Laws of Magic ✨
Anna put on her teacher shoes this week and walked us through some of her favorite resources for magic systems, starting with Brandon Sanderson’s three rules (which he unironically coined “Sanderson’s Laws of Magic”). Fret not, dear reader: what he lacks in creative blog post naming, he more than compensates for in excellent advice. Let’s take a look at his rules.
The author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands the magic system. Magic systems are one of the few areas in writing fiction where we actually recommend you not making your readers do the work. Get the rules up there, front and center. Make them easy to digest (while also, of course, interesting). If magic is going to be the solution to your story’s problem, you best be certain that your readers fully grasp how magic works in your world, and that you’re using the already established rules and limits to magic. Otherwise, your characters’ victories won’t feel earned, and the reader will feel ripped off.
Magical limitations > Magical powers. Sanderson makes the case that interesting magic is not what its wielders CAN do, it’s what they CAN’T do. In other words, magic’s limits. Magic’s weaknesses. Superman isn’t compelling because he can fly; he’s compelling bc kryptonite is his weakness, and that’s INTERESTING. We have more to say below on how to be thoughtful about your magic system’s limitations (and why there should be plenty), but for now, keep in mind that an omnipowerful main character leads to a predictable story with little tension. An omnipowerful villain, however, has our attention— but they have to have some kryptonite of their own, or you don’t have something for your main characters to strive for over the course of your story.
Expand what your magic system already has BEFORE you add something new. Sanderson explains this so well, I’m gonna quote him on it:
“Often, the best storytelling happens when a thoughtful writer changes one or two things about what we know, then extrapolates purposefully through all of the ramifications of that change. A brilliant magic system for a book is less often one with a thousand different powers and abilities—and is more often a magic system with relatively few powers that the author has considered in depth.”
Frankly, this proves true beyond magic systems. It is better to use what (and who) you already have in your story, rather than to add brand new elements. Think of it as ingredients. Would you prefer to serve your readers a meal of one hundred mild ingredients? Or craft your meal from ten hand-selected, deep flavored, bold ingredients whose precise growing location you have studied?
3. A recipe for your magic system
Anna’s next fav resource for magic system design comes from Doug Landsborough over at dabble writer.com. Don’t worry, even though you could probably tempt Anna into your creepy white van with darkly tinted windows with any craft advice labelled a “recipe,” this one’s really good.
A source of magic: Where does magic come from?
Abilities: What can magic do, and how does it serve your plot?
Cost: What does it cost to do magic? What does it take?
Limitations: What can your magic do or not do? Bonus points for considering why these limits exist.
Users: Who can use magic in your world? Why?
Extra details, added to taste: Here at TTS, we recommend using the considerations from our worldbuilding discussion. Give extra consideration to character description, plot advancement, and theme exploration. We get into those quite a bit on this week’s episode.
4. resources/fact check 📋
Here’s the Sanderson post and the Dabble post we discuss this week.
And this week’s related TTS topics are…
That’s all for today! Thanks for listening and/or reading!
So much to think about!!! I’m playing around with a two-tiered magic system, where some people gain magic through years of study while others are born to magical bloodlines with immortal ancestors. The cost is always a stumbling block for me though, I was so thoroughly enamored with wizards like Gandalf and Merlin in my formative years it’s hard for me to get away from the allure of that type.
I’m playing around with the idea of the cost being related to free will... That if you earn your magic through years of study you have complete control over it, but if you’re born with magic you inherited from an immortal ancestor the magic has a will of its own and the more you use it the harder it is to resist. Not sure if that cost is high enough, or if I need to add additional problems 🤔