plasmasnake1001 - Tumblr blog

plasmasnake1001 · 10 months

Text

Ranting about Magic

In fantasy settings, I both love and hate magic. Over time I've realized my taste and discovered I both love and hate things in conflicting ways. I’m mainly writing this out to just hear my own thoughts but would love to get other people's ideas and solutions. I’ll probably be writing a follow-up where I talked out my ideas for a magic system.

While I do enjoy magic as a weird thing we can’t comprehend, I also love it more as a tool. I don’t need to know every detail to use a chainsaw, but I need to understand it enough to get it to chop down a tree. I hate when magic is just generic fantasy magic. I love schools of magic, winds of magic, lores of magic, different magic sources, magic from the same materials, and all types of magic, just don’t copy elder scrolls when writing and designing magic for your settings.

Warhammer Fantasy / AoS

I love the Warhammer Fantasy Magic color wheel. The 8 lores of magic allow the user to do all types of things, each wind is its own magic system. A beast mage is wild and uses animal parts while a fire mage uses anything that relates to the 'firey aspect'. I really love it when a spell caster of one lore needs to do something the another might could do easily. It rewards good creativity and expression while also not letting every spell caster cast every spell.

But, that isn't how magic actually works. In the novels, a spell caster can cast any spell, colour be damned. Some spells (or cantrips) are colour-less and one of my favorite pieces of fluff mentions that whatever you're trying to cast, make it relate to your wind to fit better. On the tabletop, there are close to several hundred lores. Many of them don't really reflect the core 8, some could be seen as combinations or alterations, but many would be harder too. It just feels like the winds are only relevant when the story wants to remind you that Games Workshop has copyright over specific names for their magic.

Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

One of my favorite settings is Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. I could talk for hours about it, but something I love is that magic affects the world in all types of ways. I love that it explains the rules of how to create fire it alters air pressure which in turn could affect the town steam boiler causing it to explode. In game I love this so much, however, I feel it's too limiting in many ways. I don’t love the ‘magical’ vs ‘technological’ meter. If I’m a diviner, I can see the future, but how does this affect the train? A fire mage may overheat a train and cause problems, it should make guns deal more damage.

Magitek

Magiteck is basically the exact inverse of Arcanum (even though it uses steam-power like magic), I do like some Magitek systems, I think some can be good but it should never feel like “I have a magic window I can touch buttons on and things happen - please don’t call it a computer cause its not, that word doesn’t exist here.” A lot of them are bad, only a few have done it well. Speaking of both.

The Cosemere

I've also been a fan of the Cosmere for this past year. I really like how a lot of the magic systems work. Not all of it is perfect, and some of it can be a bit cheesy. But I really like the way the different magic systems interact, how some systems do the same thing but different, or some are just the exact same abilities. I love how many abilities are ‘you can do this one thing’ and seeing how the wielder comes up with more and more interesting ways to use magic. I also love some of the ‘science’ of it. Some forces work together, others apart.

This is also a personal one that I go back and forth on, but not a fan of magic that is just “learn the magic word, and do the spell, it's like computer scripting” especially if there aren’t limits on the words themselves.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time, but I could write a lot about what I dislike about the Cosemeres magic systems. This isn’t a ‘magic shouldn’t have rules’ rant but as someone who has read every book and enjoyed them dearly and is basically “if I wrote this magic, I would do X different for Y reasons.”

DnD Barbarians

This is just a weird personal one, but when I’m building a character. I always try to make one that can use that setting's magic. So I would never pick a barbarian or a fighter. I’ve seen some settings that do some cool stuff by giving them weird magic systems or abilities and that is something I would like to see more of.

In concussion

I don’t really know. This is longer than I wanted it to be. I really wrote this cause I just feel my Tumblr needs something and I have a writing degree I only use to grade papers and write emails, but I’ll probably be writing a follow-up later this week breaking down magic for a setting I am always working in. I’m sure if you read that you’ll find contradictions, inaccuracies, or things that seem to be copied directly from the examples above and maybe others I’m missing.

#warhammer #cosmere #Ars Arcanum #arcanum of steamworks and magick obscura #Magic #ttrpg #world building

9 notes · View notes