Monday’s here again, so we have a new Fantasy with Friends prompt to consider! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is all about magic systems:
What are some of your favorite magical systems in fantasy? Do you like magic to be explained in detail or to be a bit vague? Do you think magic should have a “cost” or not?
Let’s set the general rules first, I think: for me, it depends a bit on how important the magic is to the plot. If the main character doesn’t have magic, and magic exists in the world but not as something they need to access or understand, to me it’s fine (even better, sometimes) if the magic is a bit vague. It’s there to give flavour, and when magical things happen, in a limited POV narrative it makes sense for the character/s to potentially not know very much about it. Sometimes even when a character does use magic (like using magical items, or using magic on an instinctive level), it makes sense for them to not understand: I don’t totally understand why my PC works, but I can use it!
What bothers me is when magic is repeatedly used to solve problems without any indication of what the limits are. Obviously an author can set any limits they want and make the magic system as convenient as they please, but it works best for me when the rules and constraints are introduced early on, before magic gets used as a solution. It’s much more convincing if we know a thief-mage can unlock a plot-relevant door by smearing blood on it and murmuring an enchantment beforehand, rather than at the moment the thief gets to the locked door — even if that is shown to us by the thief-mage doing that to some other, less consequential door earlier in the story.
And while I don’t think magic always necessarily needs to have a cost, to keep tension and the ability to suspend disbelief in the narrative you do definitely need it to have limits. Maybe the limit is that the thief-mage can only work the spell once a day, or during certain phases of the moon. Maybe it’s not just a little blood, maybe the spell consumes two pints and you definitely don’t want to work it again for a good while. Maybe it only works once per door. These kind of constraints can give you the drama your story needs: on the way back, the door’s been relocked, the moon’s set, the thief-mage is way too low to do another blood donation, there’s no other door they can open instead… now how will they get out? What if they use someone else’s blood, does that work?
(These are all my own examples, by the way — I’m not saying they’re great, they’re just here to illustrate my points!)
I think The Lord of the Rings is a good example of where we don’t get clearly defined limitations on magic, but it’s clear that Gandalf can’t just do whatever he wants. He works within a framework, and we know that, so we’re not shocked when he can’t simply teleport out of the Mines of Moria — even though he’s a powerful wizard, and we can believe other amazing feats of him. Likewise Galadriel: we don’t know exactly what she can do, but we believe that she can’t just make Frodo invisible to Sauron. This also works in part because Gandalf and Galadriel aren’t the main characters, so we don’t need to be able to follow their decisions exactly in the same way as we need to understand Frodo’s mind and limitations.
For something with clearer boundaries, I quite like the world of Daniel M. Ford’s The Warden. I can’t say I’ve bothered to memorise the types of magic or even which types Aelis can use, but the fact that the clear delineations exist show me that she does have boundaries. We see her tire, we see her spells fail, and we know that no matter how powerful she is, she can still die. The fact that she’s so competent in multiple forms of magic is where the story sometimes strains belief a little… but because she’s within a system, and because things sometimes come as a struggle, we can accept that we probably have a fair idea of what she can do and what kind of foe might stretch her limits.
I’d be hard-pressed to really name favourite magic systems, because there are so many fun ones and so many of them draw from very similar ideas (without being carbon copies, because what authors do with it depends on the needs of the plot). I think I tend to enjoy things that are a unique take on something familiar: Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes, for example, in which the main character tells fortunes… but endeavours only to tell small ones, ones with little impact. The fact that some small things (such as telling someone “you will give your daughter a kitten”) turn out to have large meanings is one of the joys of that book, to me.
I definitely also enjoy stories where there are multiple forms of magic, like in the aforementioned The Warden. In a world where someone can be skilled at alchemy but useless at divination or amazing at battle magic but unable to so much as mend a pot, there are loads of ways for magic to provide as much friction as it does a way forward.
Another type of magic I liked is where you have to understand something deeply in order to be able to use magic on it —Â A Wizard of Earthsea comes to mind, where Le Guin has someone explain why a mage can’t simply quiet the whole sea: you have to name what you want to change by its true name, and the sea has many names, many parts. A mage who turns themself into a dolphin can indeed swim vast distances, but at risk of losing their true self and even their name. Ged’s first master, Ogion, doesn’t even do “small” magics like shunting a cloud aside, because he knows that every change he makes can have unforeseen consequences.
I could go on for days, so I’ll stop here!
