Need help designing a magic system

[kroen]

I really like The Reckoner's series, and I always wanted to write a book where the magic system is superpowers. But unlike in The Reckoners where the powers are what Brandon calls "soft magic", I'd like to design a power system of "hard magic"; meaning supowerpowers that have defined rules and faux-physics governing them. Kind of like Allomancy, Feruchemy, Surgebinding, Awakening, etc. It's just that I have no idea how to go about it. I don't want it to be mutations like X-Men or Spiderman, but something more in-line with Superman (Earth's yellow sun and lower gravity than Krypton, etc.) and not just "more in-line" but something... more. I'd categorize Superman's powers as in between "soft" and "hard". What I want is hard. I've seen a lot of movies and TV shows depicting supwerpowers, but I'm not satisfied with any of their explantions as to how they work. I also don't want it to be a carbon copy of an existing magic system (so burning a resource to be able to fly and such is off-limits). Have any ideas? cause I'm desperate for some. Thanks.

Edited June 16, 2015 by kroen

[Quiver he/him]

Slight clarification: are you asking for more "hard" causes of super powers, or suggestions for super powers?

 

Either way, you might be interested in Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis.

[kroen]

Slight clarification: are you asking for more "hard" causes of super powers, or suggestions for super powers?

The former.

 

Either way, you might be interested in Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis.

The plot doesn't seem very interesting to me. Can you give me the gist of the causes for their powers?

[Moogle]

If you havent read it, Worm by Wildbow (only available on a Wordpress blog for the moment, unfortunately) does something like what you're asking for. It's probably still not as hard as you want, but Wildbow spent a decent amount of time on the origins of the powers, as well as some (mildly funky) metaphysics on how they worked.

 

It's also very long. I can summarize it if you'd like.

[kroen]

It's also very long. I can summarize it if you'd like.

That'd be nice, thanks.

[Moogle]

That'd be nice, thanks.

 

Worm spoilers, then:

The premise is essentially that a race of multi-dimensional beings (sometimes affectionally called space whales in the comments) are gathering and advancing their technology in preparation for the heat death of the universe, with the goal of restarting everything.

 

They head out, find populated worlds, and set up shop, flinging "shards" at the planet and generally promoting conflict to get their powers used most efficiently. At the end of the world, they gather the newly enhanced shards back up and head on their way, pseudo-mating by trading their shards with other of the beings. (One of the main plot points is that one of the pair of space whales on Earth just traded with another space whale for an improved future-seeing shard.)

 

These shards (each dealing with a specific 'technology', but is what we'd call a superpower) hook up to living beings, analyzing their brains in moments of great stress and working to give a limited superpower to the person.

 

The superpowers are varied - the main character, for example, can control bugs because they have the 'administration' shard (which, less limited, would in fact allow the control of the minds of anything, but that's what the shard latched on to). Other characters can create miniature suns (the safety measures put in place by the space whales also result in immunity to heat), teleport, enter a 'shadow state' where they can walk through walls or jump tens of feet in the air, create supertech (typically in a limited field), make impossible-to-block matter phasing shots and a hundred other things.

 

Most of the powers operate through the underlying rules of how the universe is multi-dimensional. The miniature sun person, for example, is just effectively letting through the energy of an alternate dimension's sun. The person phasing out of reality and walking through walls is entering another dimension (which results in gravity not affecting you as much). Not all the powers easily generalize to this - one character gets essentially perfect precognition, and obviously bug control is a little lacking in this regard. (That said, one of the precognition things is fluffed as by the person seeing all the dimensions at once, and the superpower is just being able to count and filter them really quickly. For example, you might ask "chances of me dying tomorrow?" and the person would be able to look at all the dimensions that branch from the current one where you exist and count the number where you end up dying and respond "80.1235%".

 

But what really separates Worm out from most other fiction is how the rules are set up for the powers, and then abused. Interactions with other powers forms the basis of many things done. Sort of like Compounding in the Mistborn series.

 

Worm's protagonists takes her incredibly limited power (controlling bugs) and gets a surprising amount of mileage out of it through clever bending of the rules. Creating super tough spider-silk armor, applying pepper spray to bug stingers, using her bugs as a radar system to essentially see everything within a mile of her are all things she figures out she can do.

 

Another person has the power to enhance the power of other capes, and another cape can force people to share their powers (so if you can use telekinesis, you become 3/4 as strong and another person gets half your power, or whatever - I forget the exact ratios). These two banded up and started gathering dozens of other capes and having them all share their powers. The power enhancement power resulted in only minimal losses, so long as the group stays together.

 

Worm is filled with a bunch of other things like this. This, in particular, is what I enjoyed about Mistborn's 'hard' magic system: you set up rules, and then explore how they can be used most effectively. Worm has this in spades.

[kroen]

Sounds intriguing. May have to give it a read.

 

I've come up with a rough idea for my magic, and I'd appreciate any and all criticism:

 

-Each person with a supowerpower only has one power.

-Using your power takes the same amount of energy/stamina as if you did the "regular" way.

-Few examples: If your power is flight, then hovering 100 meters about the ground would be just as exhausting as climbing a 100 meters worth of stairs; if your power is seeing through objects, then seeing through a wall 2 meters in front of you would drain you as if you've walked up to and behind the wall; if your power is telekinesis and you levitate a knife a meter from you, the toll on your body would be just as if you've walked a little, reached and hold the knife with your hand. If you try to say push a truck, you won't be able to unless you're able to do it with your bare hands.

 

This is idea is very rudimentary, but I already have a problem with it: It's basically the magic system from Eragon sans speaking in an ancient language. The twist in the Eragon books is that you can draw power from other living things as opposed to your own body. So say you want to lift a 1-ton rock. Well you can if draw the power of nearby plants and animals (likely killing them in the process) instead of from yourself.

 

My magic system differs in 2 major ways:

1. In Eragon, if you try to do something that's beyond the strength you can draw from yourself and/or other organisms, you die. With my system, you'll be as tired as if you've tried to push that 1-ton rock. You'd fail, but you'd be alive.

2. The twist. I don't want practitioners to draw from ther living things. I fiddled with the idea of having them draw from inanimate objects, but that doesn't really make sense.

 

Writing these lines I've come to sort of a breakthrough: A currency/trading system that's kind of a hybrid between Breath and Feruchemy. You can take a special object (to be thought of later) and invest your stamina in it, making you really tired and eventually making you fall asleep. You can then draw power from that object like from a metalmind, but unlike metalmind you can use another's stored stamina. In this way you can buy and sell stamina as you would do with Breath, but unlike Breath these objects can be taken from you by force/stolen.

 

There's still a lot to develop here. Just wanted to know if I'm on the right track or not.

Edited June 16, 2015 by kroen

[Lindel he/him]

I really like where this is going! Magic as currency has always been intriguing to me. The main question now is the nature of these stamina-batteries. Are the objects unique to each individual, or is there a universal "magic battery"? 

 

If your magic batteries are universal to all magic users, do they require a specific material, or is the shape of the object more important? What makes the nature of these objects important in your world? 

[kroen]

I was thinking universal batteries. After all, regardless of your power, stamina is stamina. And now that I think of it, I think the batteries should be something consumable, otherwise you could draw from batteries someone else is carrying (and just touching them doesn't cut it imo). And now it seems I've blended Epics, Allomancy, Feruchemy, Breath and Eragon's magic. Not sure how I feel about it.

[Lindel he/him]

Well, you know what they say. There aren't really any "original" ideas. We humans are very good at taking what we've experienced, and recombining it to create something unique. That's what art is, really. If you go about trying to invent a new color, or draw something that's unlike anything anyone's ever seen, you'll never succeed. The trick is taking bits and pieces from all kinds of sources, and putting your own spin on it. 

 

You don't think touch is enough to make the batteries difficult to steal, though? It's not exactly easy to take something from someone if they're trying to keep it away from you, especially if that something is full of energy that can enhance their magic. 

[kroen]

The reason I'm not a fun touching is because how then do I make the case that touching batteries work while touching living batteries (e.g. humans, animals, plants) doesn't? if you consume the battery, however, it can be said the stamina charge is a part of you like your innate stamina is.

Edited June 16, 2015 by kroen

[kroen]

Some powers and how they work within my system:

 

Flight: Energy is the same as walking. Flying up is the same as if you could walk up.

Teleportation: Energy is the same as walking to where you're teleporting, except it's instantaneous. If there's water between your location and the target location, energy includes swimming. Obviously you won't be able to teleport really far unless you have massive stores of energy.

Telekinesis: Energy is the same as actually holding the target object or person.

Regeneration: Energy is the amount your body would have used to naturally heal, except it's instantaneous. It's possible to heal injuries that wouldn't normally have healed if you have enough energy.

Super Strength: You won't be able to do anything with this power unless you have more enegy than your body can produce.

Super Speed: Same as super strength.

Super Vision: Ability to see through solid objects. Energy is the same as actually walking behind the target object.

Night Vision: Does nothing without extra energy.

Thermal Vision: Does nothing without extra energy.

Altertness: Negates the need to sleep. You basically swap alterness now to be more alert later. Only useful if you can store it in the appropriate medium.

 

There are dozens of more options, but I think you get the gist. Rule of thumb is: If your power is to do something the human body is incapable of (like looking through opaque objects), it always takes more energy than your body can produce. (Flying is special in that it has less to do with your body and more to do with gravity.)

Edited June 16, 2015 by kroen

[Moogle]

A possible problem is that the energy required to do certain powerful things is very low. Slicing something in half by moving a micrometer's worth of atoms with telekinesis would not require much energy. Making actual-real-world-energy the limiting resource may result in certain things you don't want if you want to keep the power levels of people below the level of world-shattering.

[Young Bard he/him]

Have you done any wordbuilding yet? It might be useful to know the world your characters will be in before you make any locked decisions.

 

E.g. Brandon Sanderson made emeralds the most valuable gem, as they can be Soulcast into food.

[Adamir he/him]

What I'm curious about is how non-physical powers would come into effect this way.

 

• Mind-reading; it wouldn't be that logical if it took the same amount of energy as beating the information out of your target. How would the magic even know? This might just have to be a power that uses the exact same amount of stamina as if you were in the target's position trying to remember the thought. A bit overpowered, but that's the only logical way I can think about it.

 

• Precognition; a possible suggestion would be if your brain slows down - and by that, I mean the speed of your thoughts slow down - to a similar extent as to how far ahead you look. For example, trying to tell the future ten minutes ahead would make time around you appear to go faster from your perspective by a fraction of the amount you are trying to look per second. This would encourage seers to use their powers in short bursts - say, just two seconds at a time, at most, or you will quickly catch up to the time you were looking at.

[Haelbarde he/him]

This makes me think of the Belgariad (a series by David Eddings - aspects of the Inheritance Cycle's magic system work in a similar way). I think Intent is going to have an effect. There are efficient ways of doing something, and then there are inefficient ways of doing something. If it depended on how the magic user thought about the spell (as in, what particular action they thought they were replacing by using magic), how powerful they get could really depend on how they understand the physics behind how things work. 

[VladJunior]

I like your superpowers system and how you limit the powers to one ability. That is slightly different than a system I am working with. I am writing a story that uses a magic system that incorporates energy transfer from dark energy and virtual particles (which are present all around us). Some humans have the ability in the story to gather the dark energy and then manipulate it into producing physical or mental effects. In order to use more of the energy, they can transfer some into make-shift "batteries" and then use the energy all at once later on. Gathering and using the dark energy has a cost - it ages the users cells and, depending on how much and how powerful the magic, it can create an aging bubble around the user that impacts all other living things within that bubble (metal and rock is not effected, which is why some metals can store the dark energy and be used as "batteries").

 

One thought on your system would be to have each "battery" storage be different depending upon the super hero power. For instance, if you have the power to fly, but it takes loads of energy, maybe the hero walks around storing power into sugar crystals and then, when she needs it, chugs a large sugar water in order to gather the energy to fly. But knowing your power and knowing how and what to store the energy into could be a source of conflict or confusion or lack of knowledge that impacts the plot of the book.  Just a thought.