What are the optimal types/schools of magic?

No, I just think that they are very inconsistent and arbitrary in what they do. Enchantment and Illusion are both ultimately mind influencing powers when you come down to it but are artificially divided even when they do similar things, abjuration does a lot of things under the very vague auspices of warding or defending against things, conjuration has become a bizarre grab bag with several direct damage elemental spells and fucking HEALING of all things now being conjuration spells.
It's just really weird and they can't seem to decide whether spells are divided by what they do or how they do it.

No, the divisions are just entirely arbitrary. For example, how is 'destroy stuff' not a subset of Transmutation? They're also either too broad, like Conjuration or too narrow like Necromancy.

Divine a best.

Divine magic is cool, especially if something is done to differentiate it from traditional spells. GURPS has a supplement that does this really well, and it's the only one I've seen that does playing a monotheist priest well. You more or less have freeform spells, but casting is actually prayer and is rolled as a reaction check vs your God. You can request as many miracles as you'd like but your patron generally won't like you needing to fall back on them too much/too often.

>It's just really weird and they can't seem to decide whether spells are divided by what they do or how they do it.

This is why I rather like World of Darkness and their spheres/arcana, since it is about what you are manipulating, not the end result. There are defensive spells (normally Abjuration) spells in every arcana, and usually some Evocation-y, and Divination-y ones too. It's not about what the end result is, it's about what you're manipulating to get it.

Most of them are self explanatory:
Death, Fate, Mind, Matter, Time, Forces, Life, Space

Spirit and Prime are a little more obscure and more tied into the setting, I'd say.

I like the way Dominions does it

8 Paths (4 Elemental and 4 Sorcerous):
Fire
Air
Water
Earth
Astral
Nature
Death
Blood

7 Schools:
Conjuration
Alteration
Evocation
Construction
Enchantment
Thaumaturgy
Blood

I have a fantasy world setting and I am really unsure of how to proceed in this end. Obviously I want there to be standard earth / fire / water / lightning shit, but then how far do I let magic go if I want it to be predominantly "natural" and not capable of changing the world vastly? I want it to be powerful and impactful, but not to the point where magic could solve world hunger, provide infinite Power and allow anyone to fly or teleport anywhere with minimal effort (or similar things that would completely change society)

Also, how do I limit magic lore wise - without strictly bringing in "mana" or similar?

Same. Mage's spheres are my go-to for magical classifications. Fairly evocative, simple, and give you a lot of room to work with. And I don't think Spirit and Prime are that difficult to adapt, personally. Most fantasy settings have some concept of spirits/a spirit world, souls, and summoner-type mages. Same for Prime. Generally if you have magic, you have magic, so it makes sense that you'd have magic that manipulates magic. WoD does have very specific ways it treats both of those things but I'd say they can be converted to other worlds without too much hassle.

Blood is a school and a path?

Blood magic, it usually falls within the confines of dark magic

This. It bothers me how in D&D divine casters have spell slots just like wizards, as if their god answers to a set amount of prayers daily.

There's a lot of ways to go with that. I personally go with a combination of
>Requires specific innate qualities and training for anything other than cantrip tier-stuff
>Magic is fragile, and permanent or significant workings require investiture of the mage's life force
>Magic warps nature, creating a lot of weird phenomena that tends to draw negative attention to the mage
>The major religion doesn't like magic for setting reasons, and can actively suppress it or cause it to turn on/collapse back on it's creator.

I'm familiar with the trope. I just thought it was weird it was an element AND a school.

It's just lazy. They've got weird mechanical subsystems for dozens of other inconsequential things, but they can't make miracles and nerd tricks different in the least?

Time magic is best magic

At the moment I have a few of those, more or less.

>Not everyone can use magic, ie. You have to be born with the "spark" so to speak to actually use it. The rate is around 10%, and of that 10% everyone will have varying levels of talent and ability to become good.
>Need to train to control it and become better (just like physical training)

However most places don't have problems with magic (though I suppose I could add that in) and magic doesn't necessarily cause unusual phenomena (although if you're shooting big rocks and fire and lightning it's obviously gonna cause damage)

Keeping in mind the magic system is more akin to eg. Bending than "say magic words and X happens", I guess I just need to make sure that down the track any form of magic will have a "why can't they do X" where X is a lore-breaking, setting breaking or gamebreaking power. I need to think more on this, and on what classes of magic can exist and which ones I should exclude...

>Blood is a school and a path?
Blood works differently than the other kinds of magic so it gets its own school of research.

I'm not entirely understanding your issue. You seem to have a good idea what you want from magic and what limitations it has, so you seem to be set.

I guess my problem is I don't want to create this magic system only to have it exploited if that makes sense. That's why I want to refine it and make sure it has strong limitations. I'm monitoring this thread to maybe see what other people do in their magic systems for inspiration.

Just have clear limits to what mortals are able to do with magic. Many mages working together can achieve amazing feats, but no amount of them can simply turn off the sun, for example.

What system are you using for your campaign? That's a much greater limiting factor to overpoweredness than your magic system alone

>no amount of them can simply turn off the sun
Lame, dropped

Illusion and conjuration. You can make anything, fake anything, or more importantly mix it up so no one knows till too late..

I've recently started to really like the idea of most magic being illusion based. They'd work by messing with the senses and making ethereal illusions. Along with this form of magic, we'd also have Alchemy, various forms of divination and ways to commune with other-wordly/planar/dimensional/atemporal beings. The last one would only really be useful for insight and information.

It could really be an interesting setup.

>fucking HEALING of all things now being conjuration spells.

Used to be necromancy. I blame paladins.

Conjuration is supposed to be any time you draw from another plane, it's all summoning from or moving through planes, which is how healing ended up in it even though harm spells are not there and Evocation is almost exactly the same thing.

>Enchantment and Illusion are both ultimately mind influencing powers when you come down to it but are artificially divided even when they do similar things

Enchantment has the mind fucking in it, but it also has enchanting materials or people to be stronger/gooder at certain things. Using magic to directly control someone is clearly enchantment rather than illusion if you ask me. Illusion should just be fucking with senses, albeit fucking them so hard you can actually kill people with them because magic.

Necromancy is also weird because it covers basically everything a necromancer could do in fiction despite whether or not it should go somewhere else. Summoning bones from nothing, controlling/bolstering undead, cursing people, causing fear, drawing from the negative plane to hurt someone, turning skulls into security cameras, etc. Not that I'm complaining, because it lets me play a nearly-pure necromancer exactly how I want to.

It hasn't had non-mind affecting spells since 2nd edition, if not before. It's all mind control now. It really feels like it should be combined with illusion into some kind of mentalism school, especially since they're two of the weakest schools. Maybe throw divination in there too. Make it a decent combination, and it'd still be more thematically linked than Conjuration is.
Healing still makes no fucking sense to me as a conjuration. I get that it's "conjuring" the energy from the positive plane, but by that logic most evocations should be conjurations instead. It's retarded

The way they've handled necromancy is okay, but I think it's kind of goofy that it's basically nothing but a catch all for scary bad guy spells. Little lazy

>Enchantment has the mind fucking in it, but it also has enchanting materials or people to be stronger/gooder at certain things. Using magic to directly control someone is clearly enchantment rather than illusion if you ask me.
It's important to remember that enchant and enhance are different words. Magic Weapon is actually transmutation in 3.5 and 5e, I'm not sure what enchantment spells you are thinking of that affect materials.

Matter
Energy
Life
Death
Space
Time
Arcane

Forgot Spirit, faggit

The ones that don't admit brainlets like you for enrollment, pfft!
Nah I kid, it's Fire. Fire is the best school of magic.

Well shit I must have misremembered and assumed Magic Weapon and things like it were enchantment, but there's no material enchanting at all that I can see from a quick glance over PF spells, just loads of people enchanting.

That adds even more to the inconsistent and and arbitrary bit user was saying then.

To be fair it's an easy mistake to make, thinking weapon enchantment would be under the enchantment school

Well, if we go by the wider meaning of enchanted, anything subjected to magic, then more than half of the spell lists would go there. So either it should be kept more restricted (just people influence) or the schools become (even more) meaningless.

Yes, blood isn't real power, you don't manipulate the world with blood magic, you trade for it. Sometimes with lesser entities, sometimes with the natural forces themselves.

I love how dominions does magic.

My system has about the same and was born from a literal adaptation of dominions.

Conjuration >ALL

That coat looks anime as fuck

I approve

Magic is magic. Whatever traditions or systems a world has or uses to justify, organize, or codify magic into varieties is only ever part of the whole. Also it's a fucking fool's errand because it's magic. Here is mine:

Celestial: Arcane, Outer, Deductive, Systematic, Logos.
Wizards, Sorcerers, Bards, Magi, Artificers
Alchemy, Astromancy, Constellations

Terrestrial: Natural, Liminal, Inductive, Intuitive, Pathos.
Witches, Warlocks, Druids, Rangers, Shamans
Herbalism, Geomancy, Ley Lines

Spiritual: Divine, Inner, Abductive, Dogmatic, Ethos.
Clerics, Priests, Paladins, Monks, Oracles
Mystery/Rites, Automancy, Hallowed Ground

That entire look is fucking phenomenal, save the "just in case there's an emergency breast feeding opportunity" zippers.

Otherwise, amazing.

Matter Magic (Periodic Table)
Soul Magic (Life/Death)
Arcane Magic (Cosmic shit)

Is it too contrarian to say "no types/schools"?

I kind of like the idea of magic just being "spells" and magic, sort of unique and singular. Imagine a spell where you take a handful of sand, say magic words and the sand turns into a glass blade. Then you slice your belly open and a warrior made of your guts comes out while you say more magic words. Then the gut-man can jump inside of other people's mouth while they sleep to control their bodies or can pick up a swords and fight, letting you control or kill others unless someone smashes the glass knife, in which case the gut man goes insane and tries to kill its creator.

In most systems, this spell would be incredibly convoluted or complex. Is it a transmutation, necromancy, mind-affecting, destruction, or summoning spell? What if its all of them? Instead, spells are singular bits of power and that is all.

I love elements, but especially elements that are expanded. Ars Magica is my favorite for having what is essentially all aspects of reality being "elemental" in a sense, or at least how I see it.

Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Plants, Images, Minds, Bodies (of intelligent races), Animals (mind & body) and Prime (magic itself).

I could easily see an elemental plane of all of these intersecting with the nexus plane; a more expanded and less classical 4 elemental system. Ars Magica is better for fantasy magic instead of MAGE which is better for modern day magic IMHO

Fire-Water
Eart-Air
Essence-Illusion
Destruction-Creation
Necromancy-Everything

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to call it the ready-to-wear collection, though.

>didn't expect to ever use a pdf of Gareth Pugh's 2011 collection on Veeky Forums of all places
Most of that collection is pretty awesome, obligatory shitty makeup aside. I'd buy some of the outfits if they were availiable for a even remotly reasonable price. Though I am really considering some of the wedges he makes.

Do like DnDs, TES schools and Wamhams winds.

>abjuration
>it protec
>not it destroy
>pleb

>Necromancy is also weird because it covers basically everything a necromancer could do in fiction despite whether or not it should go somewhere else. Summoning bones from nothing, controlling/bolstering undead, cursing people, causing fear, drawing from the negative plane to hurt someone, turning skulls into security cameras, etc. Not that I'm complaining, because it lets me play a nearly-pure necromancer exactly how I want to.

I hate how all encompassing Necromancy is and for my own purposes have tried to break up the various associated aspects of them.

For example. Necromancy at it's base is the understanding of the works of the soul and spirits and how to communicate and interact with them and how they interact with the world.

I feel this should be really what necromancers are all about honestly. From there you have healing derived from necromancy as many necromancers have studied the human body creating this branch which focuses on healing (and destroying) the body and also side longs with alchemy.

Finally, the act of animating things is the realm of golemancy where you inbue objects that have no will of their own with yours and animate and command it.

By combing this with necromancy you can figure out ways to inbue a soul into an object so you don't have to use your own spirit to do it. Keeping them under control is another matter. So yeah, a pile of skeletons to me is no different then a bone golem. The point at which something becomes undead is when a spirit possess it or if a spirit is forced to possess an object whether its flesh and bones or not.

Time magic is the most FORBIDDEN magic I can fucking think of. it's no joke. I cannot emphasise how outlawed that school would be in my Kingdom, more than necromancy, EVEN MORE THAN ELDRITCH.

they do seem quite arbitrary
I prefer them broken by source or energy that they manipulate rather than what they do

>I love how dominions does magic.

Ever checked out Ars Magica? Dominions was heavily inspired by that game.

If I had my druthers, Mysticism would be the skill in Elder Scrolls games that lead you down the path of uncovering the mysteries of the universe, with skill-checks to discern the secrets of the reality.

But then if I had my druthers, Skyrim would just be Fallout: New Vegas but set in the Elder Scrolls universe.

nut you can use it to feed your peasents better, as well as age your wines to perfection.

Time is quite literally, the best school of magic

>Obviously I want there to be standard earth / fire / water / lightning shit
Yeah, obviously, faggot.

>that magic where you recite certain words over and over and over and over for a long time to change weather and similar stuff
>that magic where you pretend to be something else, maybe put on a mask or something, and you become it, but not quite, just aspects of it, but in the limnal state it's pretty much the same
>that magic where you negotiate with spirits and offer stuff to them and they wash the dishes for you
>that magic where you create things, I mean you take tools and craft stuff from wood or porcelain or what have you, but also inscribe them with incantations and they turn out to be magical
>that magic where your mental discipline is just so great that you can go without food for weeks and then win an arm wrestling match with a guy twice bigger than you just because you really would like to win
>that magic where you can interpret signs and lines on the hand and cards and bird flight and lamb's intestines if that's your thing, and sometimes in your dreams you get to see what is going to happen
>that magic where you make people see what's not there, or just confuse the fuck out of them, but it's not really magic because you use all sorts of tricks, except the times when what you do can't really be explained by those tricks
>that magic where you boil herbs and eyes of amphibians and sulfur and the whole house stinks of this shit for days

If you had your druthers, would you constantly re-release Skyrim like Todd?

It's basically because the word enchanted in modern usage carries two meanings. On the one hand you have "enchanted" to mean someone who has been magically tricked to believe something untrue, and then you have the secondary meaning where "enchanted" means something that has been magically imbued, e.g. an enchanted ring.

The first meaning naturally overlaps with illusion, though I like to think that illusion tricks the senses, whereas enchantment tricks the mind directly. In non-magical terms, illusion is smoke and mirrors and special effects; enchantment is hypnosis and hallucinations.

The second meaning overlaps considerably with transmutation. Both in some way alter the properties of an object. But to my mind the difference is there. aAn enchanter might make a pair of sandals that lets the wearer fly. A transmuter will turn a person into a bird to achieve the same effect

Meme magic is the most powerful but requires too many casters and is too chaotic to be practical for questing.

Control the Elements
Control the People
Control Life

> dat filename.
You got me.

My setting is a parallel dichotomy. Jokingly referred to as "Tuning" and "Tracking."

>Tuning
Any magic which is utilized to make something work against its nature. i.e., destructive magic.

>Tracking
Any magic which is utilized to reinforce or return something to its nature. i.e., healing magic.

20 minutes.

Depends on setting

It bothers the shit out of me that Necromancy and Divination are separated since Necromancy is literally Divination through the dead.

What about something that works with its nature just faster/more, such as growing trees, vaporizing water into mist, increasing senses, etc?

Growing trees, specifically, would obviously be tracking. That is reinforcing their nature. Same with increasing sense. Stopping a tree from growing or letting someone taste color however would be tuning.

Vaporizing water into mist is an interesting case. A lot of that would be on environmental considerations. If the conditions aren't agreeable for mist then you would not be convincing the water to follow its nature to become mist. You can achieve this through either type of magic.

At it's heart, magic is just convincing something else to change through your own force of will. How you accomplish that is where you end up with different types of spells, but those would be literal schools with curricula.

So, if you attempt to Tune the water into mist where it otherwise would not want to be, you best be able to convince it that is its best course of action. Backfires from failed Tuning are much more violent than failed Tracking. Usually a failed tracking is just not successful. But failed Tuning? Instead of a calm mist you may get burning steam as now the water is pissed at you for trying to exert your will upon it and it burns half your face off. Or it could shut itself off from you and freeze a layer of ice everywhere near by because you either didn't ask nicely enough or it doesn't afraid of anything.

Kick ass magic system

I'm going to save that pdf, ty.

You have great taste btw, user.

Speaking with the dead, sure. Animating a corpse is not, however, divination in any sense of the imagination. Raising a skeletal or zombie servant has more in common with transmutation (animating the inanimate), while negative energy spells mostly associated with necromancy could be considered evocation (manipulation of energy).

This is how I handle it:

Necromancy: Manipulating the soul and all of its extensions including the subtle bodies

Enchantment: Making things do what they wouldnt normally or even logically do

Abjuration: Spells that manipulate the framework of other spells

Transmutation: Same as default

Divinitation: Manipulating perception

Conjuration: Manipulating timespace

Evocation: Creating stuff out of "nothing"

To explain apparent discrepancies or inconsistencios I refer to three rules

1) Magic schools are more dependent on each other than it appears:

For example simply shooting a fireball is an evocation, however even that fireball needed a bit of enchantment for it to not burn the hand of its caster upon being fired, "Fireball" is still largely an evocation spell but truly "pure" spells are basically non-existant, there are some spells that more obviously combine more than one school of magic and are generally harder to master

2) Two apparently identical effects can be achieved through different schools:

For example healing wounds can be achieved by accelerating natural healing in the area by channeling the vital force (necromancy) or transporting positive energy onto the body (conjuration)

3) Schools can become so intertwined that the end product can be impossible to trace to a single school:

A lich for example will probably need to go through processes that involve all schools in his transition towards lichdom, not just necromancy

Flesh golems tell the future?

This

Time magic is the most overpowered type of magic there is, at least when it comes to tampering with the past or alternate timelines.

Only Wish magic is more dangerous than it.

Depends on the restrictions in place for time magic.

But the more shit you can do like redo current major events, save/load at will, permanently change history, call other versions of yourself to help you, etc. the closer you become to being completely unstoppable and possibly a god.

Everyone in fiction with even incredibly limited time fuckery seems to punch way above their weight class once they figure out what they are doing, as long as they are actually trying. From nerdy girl with a heart defect to soldier #76820 and dumbfuck NEET.

Glad to be of service.
It's a shame that after 2011 Pugh produced mostly garbage. Through 2010/11 the guy was on fire, but I've liked barely any of his designs since then.
Currently eyeing these, but, damn if the price isn't steep for something I'd barely ever get to wear.

>Any magic which is utilized to reinforce or return something to its nature. i.e., healing magic.

I'd argue healing magic would be against the target's nature in your system, since being broken is the nature of whatever you're trying to heal. Am I wrong?

nibbas he meant -mancy literally means to git some insight on the future stuff through means of whatever-, in this case corpses so yall misuse the word and git smug while being wrong

Magic based on a fire/water/earth/air elemental system is shit. SHIT.

So, if I want to throw a fireball, what school of magic would that be?

I dunno. Destruction? Arcane? Depends on the setting.

Take a broken bone. Freshly broken not but moments ago. How long has that bone been in a broken state relative to how long was it unbroken prior to the break? Being injured is inherently opposed to your nature.

So having an injury healed is tracking. Trying to fix scars or a a birth defect or a long healed broken bone would be tuning, because there is enough real changing in their nature.

A bone doesn’t want to be broken, so convincing it to go back to being unbroken is easier than a bone which has already healed.

This. I enjoy and play DnD but the magic classification is pretty bad.

I always treat a setting's systems of magic as a rough "this is the best we currently understand things to work." Certain common spells are what many people can reliably reproduce if you specifically perform this ritual or call upon that energy and so on. Meanwhile many inherently magical creatures don't have to study or understand shit, it comes naturally, as easy as walking and talking.

Where's this gif from?

Alteration instead of Abjuration
Voodoo/Witchcraft instead of Necromancy
Rest of the DND schools

German magic

This whole line looks like a fashion designer discovering comics. I'm okay with it, but it all looks like stuff I've seen before.

>snow
>ice cream
>sand
>rainbow
>redhead
For the major ones.

>calling boom boom is better than giving it a nature
That's sooo wrong.

depends on the setting

Time and mind control, no magic breaks any kind of world faster than those two as with a little creativity you can basically solve every problem thrown at you using one of those two, even better if you have both... You are basically a god then.

I could fucking ROCK that jacket the dude in the third picture is wearing, goddamn.
Replace the pants with something tight with gold accents, fucking hell.
How much does this stuff run?

The Devil is a Part Timer

It's good but don't expect much of that.

nice collection, would watch with my bf