What is the most interesting magic system you've seen? Not necessarily the best or the most functional but the one you thought was the coolest
What is the most interesting magic system you've seen...
Joseph Davis
Jason Campbell
Talislanta has a modular system based on 12 domains that you can modify as you cast the spell, allowing for differing parameters such as damage, range, area of effect, potency, etc.
Mason Lewis
Tal-magic is the best I've ever seen for preserving the mystery of magic and letting you just DO stuff with it while still having playable rules.
Michael Nelson
My fellow Archaen brother of indeterminate parentage!
Elijah Peterson
Spell makes you grab a handful of scrabble tiles and lets you write out something with them. It's pretty good, but requires a bit of arbitration on the part of the GM.
Brayden Howard
Either Unknown Armies or Sorcerer.
Daniel Jackson
picknabornal
Levi King
Pymary from Unsounded. Granted, it's not Veeky Forums
Elijah Moore
Ordinalism, a magic system from a quest over on Sufficient Velocity. It's a pretty neat system meant to create specialized wizards that have very iconic powers. At every level of progression along the Ordinal Spiral, a wizard gets a choice to learn one of two spells. The spells tend to be pretty versatile, so the fact that a wizard might know only a handful of spells isn't a huge problem. They're actually encouraged to learn even fewer, though. Upon gaining a level, an Ordinalist wizard can instead of learning a new spell elevate a previously-learned spell to the new level of power, gaining new traits that grants it approximately equal utility to the spells they could have learned. Furthermore, every spell slot a spell takes up grants it increased power on a quantitative scale, so a wizard can instead of learning a low level spell and saving its upgrade until they get really high, a wizard is encouraged to choose to upgrade it over and over again. As a result, most Ordinalists know only a third or so of the spells they could have learned, and some hyper-specialize and put every level into a single spell. For example, The Interchangeable Man has chosen Conjure as his spell for every level except the first (as Conjure is a second level spell), which combined with his Vitalist skills (another school of magic based around creating magical prosthetics) has turned him into an incredibly modular super-cyborg that can summon and banish parts as needed to rebuild himself to fit any role, up to an including becoming a city-sized doom mecha.
Mason Bennett
Sounds neat. Is there a tldr of it somewhere?
Gabriel Perry
Inb4 WoD Mage
Ryan Russell
I've been told Burning Wheel's Magic Burner system is good.
I've never actually played it or know how it works, but my friend ravs about it's "Planned Randomness"
Iunno. Does Veeky Forums want to confirm?
Joseph Gutierrez
the belgariads will and word easily
Ryder Allen
My own.
Isaac Taylor
Which is?
Samuel Harris
Sure, let me link to a few infoposts. There's more to be found in the quest itself, examples of uses of the spells, but these summarize them.
>forums.sufficientvelocity.com
That's an explanation of the mechanics and a rough description of the first seven ranks. Oh, wait, it doesn't explain Seeker, Shield or Terrascape (Teleport, too, but I figure that's intuitive). Seeker is homing energy bolts, Shield is energy shields, and both of them can be combined with other magic to give meta-magic effects based around their properties. Like, the Seeker metamagic for the Valor spell (which summons a powerful magical sword) lets the sword fly around and fight on its own, while the Shield metamagic makes it so that the sword can't harm anything the wielder doesn't want it to. Terrascape is for creating pocket dimensions, lots of weird physics stuff can go on in there. One of the villains has used it together with the Water and Air variants of the Elements form to create a dimension of living mist full of alchemical reagents that spawn dragons, it's crazy shit.
>forums.sufficientvelocity.com
And these are the next couple ranks, up to rank eleven. There are higher ones, but the protagonist never got that far before the quest was abandoned and I don't think it was ever explicitly stated what's above rank eleven.
Joshua Phillips
I now want an RPG that incorporates such a system.
Benjamin Gomez
Elaborate
Lucas Clark
It's complicated, but it boils down to a series of rhythmic hand motions which shape the energy that holds reality together, producing a "ripple" which causes the arcane effect at the cost of environmental stability.
Camden Watson
Don't lie, you didn't invent Naruto.
James Clark
Wait, that's Naruto's magic system? Fuck my life, I've never even seen the show and people think I've copied it.
Lincoln Diaz
I think he's shit posting. Then agian, I haven't watched naruto since I was 13 but I'm 90% sure Chakra doesn't hold reality together, isn't arcane in nature, and doesn't warp reality.
Like I'm pretty sure they mention Chakra is fucking genetic in nature at one point.
Noah Anderson
I'm mostly memeing at you. Naruto magic works off of series of hand motions, which I'm shapes chi/chakra or somethiing in order to produce magical effects. Some of the more powerful techniques can be seen as "at the cost of environmental stability" because they're huge Dragon Ball Z attacks that tear up the environment and shit.
Eli Martinez
If we're going out of Veeky Forums, I like the Second Apocalypse's sorcery almost as much as I like Unsounded's pymary.
Sorcery makes the world change to suit what you say. Skillful use of language and expression is paramount, and the better you understand the pure meaning of what you're saying, the stronger your spells are. There are different types of sorcery that focus on things like logic and mathematics, creativity and metaphor, or passion and instinct. It sucks that the author only describes the end visuals instead of, you know, the use of language used to cast the spells.
Parker Phillips
AD&D Vancian Magic
Ryder Smith
I never got much further than the start of the first book but the magic system from the Abhorsen series seems pretty cool. There's a few different forms of necromancy that are used to summon different types of revenant back from an afterlife (which is a river with different gates that a deceased soul passes through) using bells and magic symbols.
Logan Reyes
How the magic system works is that the world is essentially bound by the streams of divinity, the will of the Demiurge who maintains the solidity of the dreamscape of reality, and the rapid forming of specific motions can destabilize the stream, causing a metaphysical ripple which causes a temporary localized shift in the dreamscape, i.e magic, but the constant use of magic can lead to the formation of a sort of ripple domino effect, which causes a massive chain reaction, a devastating sorcery storm capable of bringing ruin to as much as an entire region and leaving a cloud of mutating chaotic energy behind for years to come, depending on the power of the magic used. It's a relief to hear that you're memeing and the only real similarity is the rapid hand motions involved.
Ryan Parker
I like the lore from Dark Souls.
>sorcery manipulates souls, souls are money and power, financiomancy that makes crystals
>fire sorcery exists, but usually people use pyromancy, which is straight up demonic power
>miracles are stories about a god doing some cool shit that you remember so good you replicate it
Daniel Scott
>naruto magic
The human body in this world has an extra organ system: the chakra circulatory system. It has nodes along it that govern its flow, and 8 super nodes that keep you from killing yourself from using your full power all the time.
Those with innate talent for it can manipulate chakra for a variety of effects.
>taijutsu
Keep the chakra in your body and use it to supercharge your martial arts. You can be Bruce Lee and WATAW your way through a bunch of looks with ease, or be Pai Mei and explode hearts with your fingers by pumping chakra into people’s chakra nodes. If you’re willing to do the work (and can find someone who both knows and is willing to teach you) you can bypass your own super node limiters to achieve ever-increasing heights of power. Opening all eight is straight-up matter-day DBZ levels of speed and power for about 10 minutes, then your body incinerates itself.
>genjutsu
Illusions! Either by making an intangible physical image, or futzing with someone’s mind and making then hallucinate. The sky’s the limit on imagery.
>ninjutsu
Push chakra out of your body, give it form. Funnel it into specially-made weapons, do weird shit like size-change and mind control and shadow-control, and of course the standard elemental techniques.
>kinjutsu
Forbidden techniques: either because they are superweapons, or they are actively harmful to the user, or performing them means doing heinous things first. Whichever way, teaching them is extremely regulated.
>kekkei genkai
Abilities possessed only by those with specific genetic code. Sometimes possessed by every member of a family, sometimes only some of them, sometimes only one particular freak of nature.
Christian Cook
The Stormlight Archive's magic in Brandon Sanderson's latest book series. Major spoilers though if you have interest in reading it. It's called Surgebinding. Surgebinders essentially have a spirit companion that lets them harness "stormlight", some kind of magical energy that shows up in a storm that revolves around the planet. Depending on the type of spirit they possess, surgebinders have two of a host of magical powers. Some of these powers include control over gravity, light, and friction. They're implemented in pretty concrete yet creative ways. Definitely one of my favorites.