Ideas to help strengthen my magic system

[Calmseer he/him]

This is my first post on the 17th Shard forums. I am currently working on worldbuilding for my first attempt at writing a novel. I am hoping that my fellow Sanderson fans will be able to help me out in my endeavor. I welcome all opinions and ideas that can help me to write a better novel in the long run. 

 

Basically, I wanted to attempt to bring some new life to the elemental magic system. First off, my system has 7 elements: fire, water, earth, air, metal, wood, and aether. Every mage is limited to just one element, except in the case of aether where that mage would have access to the other six elements. 

Not everyone is capable of using magic, only those that descend from the elemental gods. To clarify the god of aether is the true god, and all the other gods are only aspects of the one god. This is why aether mages can use all of the elements. 

My cost for the magic system is moonlight. On my planet (which I still have to name) there are 6 moons of different colors (which correspond to the six colors I have assigned to the elements). For this reason magic either be used when the correct moon is in the sky, or by capturing the moonlight within the proper crystal. For example, emeralds would store the light of the green moon and all a wood mage to case magic. 

The limitations for my system are that the element must be present in order to manipulate it (no fireballs without fire). The amount of an element that a mage can manipulate varies, however, as a guideline you cannot manipulate more than your own body mass. Range also varies, but no more than a few arm lengths. 

A side effect of the magic is that the more a mage is exposed to their element, the more they become like it. The ultimate fate of any mage who uses their magic too much is to literally become their element (wood mages turn in to trees, earth mages become statues, etc.). 

I am toying with the idea of having there be elemental faeries in my world, and the reason that mages can manipulate the elements is because they manipulate the faeries who in turn control the elements. The only thing I am worried about is the similarities to the Sanderson's spren. 

 

I kind of want there to be uses for the magic other than Avatar-like bending abilities, but I am at a loss to relate the elements to other things. I was hoping I could get some suggestions. Also, as a point of clarification: wood, earth, and metal are constructive elements meaning they can build things and are primarily defensive, while water, wind, and fire are destructive (typical caster-type attacks) and they are primarily offensive.

 

Please let me know what you all think!

[Ashiok]

Seems extremely limiting/ limited, especially with things like fire and wood. Why/how would one be carrying them? You may want to consider pairing the moons and their respective elements, so mages can have a defensive or offensive element depending on which moon is in the sky/ what crystals they fill. 

How does one shoot a fireball when they can't manipulate their element past a few feet?

[A Joe in the Bush]

I recommend You Look at Jim Butcher's Furies Of Calderon Series. He has those six elements, just as you've described, and Each of them also has the Additional Things, Like Air/Wind lets you See Far away, or Long Distance Speaking. Wood also gives Camouflage. Water lets you change your Shape, over a Period of Time, and So on.

[Calmseer he/him]

Seems extremely limiting/ limited, especially with things like fire and wood. Why/how would one be carrying them? You may want to consider pairing the moons and their respective elements, so mages can have a defensive or offensive element depending on which moon is in the sky/ what crystals they fill. 

How does one shoot a fireball when they can't manipulate their element past a few feet?

I am hesitant to allow the conjuring of the elements from thin air. I am a fan of equivalent exchange, and I feel the limiting of especially the element fire would be a good twist to the typical elemental magic where fire is overpowered. I suppose that the fire mages could carry around gas and an ignition element. The wood mages could carry around seeds and the magic would be able to grow the plants quickly.

 

Hmm I did not think about that, I guess I would have to allow the mages to have a longer manipulation range. Pairings are also a good idea.

 

How about:

Fire/Metal

Wood/Water

Air/Earth

 

What about having the mages either have control of one element, a pairing, or be an aether mage? I don't necessarily think that the constructive elements would be limited because I envision the mages being able to form something similar to the atronachs in skyrim, but they would not have free roam (the mages would manipulate them like marionettes). 

 

I recommend You Look at Jim Butcher's Furies Of Calderon Series. He has those six elements, just as you've described, and Each of them also has the Additional Things, Like Air/Wind lets you See Far away, or Long Distance Speaking. Wood also gives Camouflage. Water lets you change your Shape, over a Period of Time, and So on.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely check it out!

[Swimmingly he/him]

What about having mages highly specialized within their fields - a talent for one particular use of power. So, for example, a fire mage might be really good at accelerating fire such that he can turn a piece of wood into ash, a giant ember, charcoal, or smoke in an instant but really sucks at throwing fireballs, or a water mage who can extract oxygen from water and breathe it with great precision, but not be able to do more than make ripples in terms of macroscopic manipulation.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Methinks that people are underestimating the power of the system. Swimmingly's specialization/limitation idea might just be strictly necessary if you don't want these guys to be seriously OP. One key component to recognizing this OP-ness is not thinking of these mages as "squishy wizards" but as warriors who happen to have some magical powers.
 
Let's take a few minutes to think and come up with some HPMOR-style over analysis that will make these powers a bit more clear. I'm sure that a few hours or days of thought could do far better:

 

Note: I'm sticking to the few-meter radius throughout here, and it's still pretty impressive what the elements can do.
 
Water:
 
Hello blood. Goodbye enemies within an X foot radius. Or, better yet, bloodbend them and you'll be outdoing those puny metal/earth mages with their hard-made statues.
 
Other applications:
 
Control you're own body/blood. Heal/staunch wounds, move your body incredibly fast/powerfully at the speed of thought rather than the speed of nerve transmission (stole this idea unashamedly from "Godspeed" in Hunter x Hunter), fly through the air.
 
Water shield: Have a shell of water around your body attacking enemies and blocking attacks.
 
Wield water weapons: Water held under appropriate pressure can cut steel. Easily. Either you could swing about water jets as weapons or you could enhance more mundane weapons by essentially making them into chainsaws.

 

And of course water is in basically everything, so you'll not be too likely to run out of it completely at any point.
 
Earth:
 
Holy hell what can't they do. EVERYTHING in Generic Medieval Fantasy Society B is made of earth or stone. Tear down buildings. Tear out the ground beneath your enemies' feet. Make the ground shoot up and perforate said enemies. Surround yourself with a buzzsaw of flying rocks/sand. Defend yourself. Encase yourself in sand or rocks as continually replenishing armor and go like a green golem on everyone.
 
This last is potentially even the better version of self-bloodbending from the water side, as you're protected in addition to being able to move your body about crazy-fast in response to your thoughts or the like. Also flying, once again.
 
Presumably this includes control over stones of even the precious or semi-precious variety, so also hello magebreaker. You could easily steal/destroy the power storages of enemy mages.
 
Ever seen Gaara in Naruto? He's the guy who controls sand. Albeit he can do it from greater range than you have, but he's scary-awesome. Crushing enemies, protecting himself, traversing terrain, the works.
 
Air:
 
Air also, can cut things at high enough pressure. Actually, take it as a rule that everything can cut things if you increase the pressure enough. MINDBLADES AIRBLADES!
 
Also just about everything Aang does in Avatar. That holds for all the elements here that have correspondents in that show, obviously, (for instance, Earth can probably manipulate Metal a bit), but airbending in particular was always a fairly close-range skill.
 
So, to summarize: flying, cutting stuff, tripping up enemies, deflecting attacks, empowering projectile attacks, etc.
 
Also getting back into creepy land, people kind of need air to live. They carry it around in their lungs. Anyone gets in range and you can either suffocate them if you're feeling nice or you can blow up their lungs.

 

Can kind of maybe get power armor if they compress air around them or the like.
 
Metal:

 

Remember how terrible it was to be wearing metal around a mistborn? Remember that time Magneto used a pair of ball bearings to massacre an entire prison designed to keep him in? METAL.

 

We get the same-old "wreath yourself in your element and have a power-suited field day", we get the vast majority of enemy weapons being either useless or deadly to those wielding them, we get Magneto-style flight, we get whirling blades of death... It's a slightly more limited Earth, essentially, except that it has that nice "kill your enemies with their own weapons" effect.

 

EDIT: Also perfectly "forged" metal armor for you and all your pals, at the very least.

 

Wood:

 

Now you said this was constructive, so we can't have too much fun with wooden floors or door or hilts or ornaments or... As I said, we can't have too much fun with them.

 

I'm going to assume that "wood" is all plants and not just wood-producing ones, though.

 

What we do have, though, is a world where everyone is wearing plant-fiber clothing and wielding weapons likely incorporating at least some wood into their design. If worst comes to worst, you can just have all the enemies around you grow trees out of their clothes.

 

In a projectile-launching sense, depending on how much you hate physics today, you could launch wooden arrow shafts and grow them into logs on the way out. Or drop them and violate the nature of inertia a little less by instead just ignoring the nature of potential energy.

 

And of course hard-wood armor that's perfectly grown around your body,. Too bad we can't actively control the wood, or everyone but Fire (and maybe Air) would be getting power armor.

 

EDIT: This might be the most passively ally-helping, though, as all your friends could also have such armor.

 

Fire:
 
Ironically enough, you might have overdone it by seeking to limit fire here. The few-arms-length limit is... limiting. Throwing fireballs from within your radius at people outside of it (as well as blocking enemy attacks of that kind) seems the only thing to do without killing yourself.
 
Now if by "fire" you actually mean heat... now we're cooking with gas! (pun entirely intended and yes I cackled evilly as I wrote it )
 
What can't you do with heat? Redirect the heat of a torch into the middle of someone's brain, redirect the heat from their heart into basically anywhere else, freeze blood, freeze the ground, freeze water and metal and stone...

 

If you have to redirect it rather than just sucking it out, it could be a useful limitation on fire mages that they can't just walk around freezing everything because the heat all has to go somewhere within a few arm's lengths of them.

 

On that note, fire mages being able to redirect heat would allow some more fun "human torch" situations where they wreath themselves (or allies, but that would require quite a bit of trust and a lot of care not to get out of range) in fire and redirect the heat from their bodies outward.
 
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So, looking at them, my intuition is to rank Water first, closely followed by Earth and Metal, with Air not far behind. Fire loses out big time if it's still just Fire, but probably sneaks ahead of at least Air otherwise. Problem with air is a lot of it's utility lies on the fringes of what's plausible for it (like compressing it down to 1000 psi or something), while the more solid elements always have "just bash someone with it" potential inherent to them.

 

Wood gets dead last if it's not able to manipulate. Possibly takes it's place in the Water/Earth/Metal trifecta of scary-awesome if it can manipulate (think "clothing tearing its wearer apart"), but still probably as the fourth member of the group even then.

 

EDIT: Oops, I forgot that you said Earth and Metal were also constructive...  I may have gotten carried away. Eh, still, at least even in the worst case Metal mages can essentially disarm their opposition and wield highly modular weapons themselves.

 

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Now the moonlight/crystal cost obviously puts some limit on these things, especially the more large-scale or long-scale things. But still. A single water mage could wipe out a thousand men in a dozen seconds by yanking their blood out.
 
I'm actually not sure about your side-effect. Why must we have a side effect? I know it's a tried-and-true method of "saving" magic for important uses, but what this tells us is that you want this magic to be rare/used sparingly. If you do that, though, you'll have less time to showcase something that you're likely going to be proud of and want to show off and you'll also be heavily constrained in how "hard" your magic can be, as you'll have less opportunity for applications to emerge organically from the plot.
 
Also, to counter my "no one would ever use their magic with this side-effect" complaint, nothing is new under the sun, and Brent Week's Black Prism books do a fair job of building a society that revolves to some extent around a magic where every mage has a strict upper limit on how much magic they can use in their life, and then goes insane after breaking it.
 
On the atronachs: Is their control strictly limited to the "few arms length" limit?
 
Thoughts on aether mages: Why? Is it a worldbuilding thing? Do they get some special limitation? Is an aether mage the main villain?
 
Author's note: I am not a psychopath, I'm just very a little creative.

 

---

 

Of course, I may simply have grossly misunderstood the nature of your magic system and assumed less/more control than you want to give in any of the sub-categories. Your comment on manipulating creations suggested a general ability to manipulate the elements though.

Edited May 31, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Swimmingly he/him]

One way to do would be to have the gems represent discrete quanta of energy use - make fine and sustained use impossible by forcing every use of power to be a single big, impressive effect. So, no guiding arrow shafts or wooden power armour, but you can make a redwood tree sprout to full-size in a millisecond. An earth mage could rip a huge band of earth for a castle upwards with a single charge of moonlight, but he couldn't add crenelations or towers. That way, battling mages with huge power reserves would be launching bands of power back and forth, but as soon as they run out, they're screwed. This would make hiring mages essential for an army, as they could counteract the other by precisely cancelling it out, and joining a large organization essential for any mage that wanted to have access to charged moonlight crystals. It would put mages at a level above all others, as well, allowing you to answer the "why don't they use magic for everything?" question with, "the same reason we don't use explosives for everything".

[Calmseer he/him]

Ugh, guys you have me really torn. I really like Kurkistan's creative uses for the elements, however, I am afraid of the OP-ness ruining the world for the non-mages. While I want the magic to have a strong presence in my world, I do not want it to overrun it.

 

Swimmingly, your limitation idea is brilliant. It perfectly limits the potential for god-like feats while still allowing a little room for a slightly extended mage fight by only using small magical feats. 

 

My idea for the major plot is to have the big baddy be an aether mage. The aether mages are unique because they attain their source from the sun, and thus are allowed almost constant magic during daylight hours. I think for this reason, the aether mage would probably be the ruler of the world. 

[Calmseer he/him]

Also what about the faerie idea? Not needed? Is just the moonlight from the gods enough for the magic system?

[Kurkistan he/him]

To turn you more towards the light side Swimmingly's side, I thought of some more murderous uses for even the "constructive" elements! (really wish we had the Inquisitor-smiley's from SteelMinistry...)

 

So the basic idea for the constructive elements is you take a bit of a material and make more of it, magically, yes? So a pebble can be made into a boulder or the like?

 

Well, that gets more/less evil depending on how much exactly they can increase the mass by.

 

You see, everything has trace amounts of just about everything else in it (okay, not everything). So food and water and air are all going to have some seeds and trace minerals and metals. So if you can make things 100 orders of magnitude bigger, well... kaboom from the inside for everyone you don't like.

 

Failing that degree of spectacularness, you could still damage by making first-sized lumps of stuff spontaneously grow inside basically any/every part of your enemies. Or even golf-ball sized lumps. You'll almost certainly be taking out the heart/brain, no matter what (ooo, and trace elements + precise control + <any element> == body-bending, actually...) as long as you get something the size of a pea to grow in the right place.

 

Failing that you might be able to get your mages to aerosolize their elements and/or poison the water/food supply with larger doses and get the job done that way.

 

----

 

As to the faerie idea, I hadn't given it much thought yet. Let's nail down the bare nature of the magic system first, I think.

 

EDIT: Nvm, I'll just post a new post.

Edited May 31, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Swimmingly he/him]

What about a sixth element - shadow? If the aether is the sun, the mortal elements are the moon, then the final element could be derived derived from that between - what if you've got a power that can only be charged when both the sun and a moon are in the sky, or at dusk when the atmosphere has filtered the sun's power? Also, you could put something in there about how the moons filter the power of the aether so mortal mages can use it, but an aether mage can filter it himself, leaving open the possibility that things other than the moons and mages can filter the magic.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Actually, something did occur to me about the faeries. Have you ever read the Bartimaeus books? It's kind of in line with your faerie idea. The bare bones of it is that all magic in that world is through the control/manipulation of demons summoned/enslaved from another realm by "wizards". The wizards don't actually have any innate powers, they just figured out how to draw the pentagrams right and a few names of demons to summon.
 
So if you have a magic rod of death that shoots lightning, it actually has a pretty powerful demon very carefully (they'll eat your face off if you make a mistake) imprisoned in it.
 
So it could be that "mages" are just people who captured the appropriate faerie. You could even have some nice class division (as happened in Bartimaeus) going on in that anyone can technically be a mage, but the costs of entry are prohibitive: if you can't pay to go to college afford all those precious/semi-precious gems and don't have anyone to teach you the rituals, then you can't be a mage. The population could be more or less aware of how simple the process is depending on how you want to play it.
 
This also makes the "cost" viable (to me, at least) again, in that it seems more natural that merging with an elemental entity will do nasty things to you. You could make it both more and less constraining this way too, in that maybe mages can hold onto individual faeries (and so have access to their powers) as long as they want, but the simple act of possessing their powers is causing the transformation. So the normal mage will only "bond" for as long as is strictly necessary and then spend the rest of their time as a muggle. They could even switch out what kind of power they get, potentially.
 
This also allows for many different classes of mages: those who hold onto power all the time despite the costs because power=awesome or paranoia, those who focus exclusively on one or two elements (let's just say you can only bond one at once, and that the aether-evil-guy has found a special faery or something) while others are more "jack of all trades master of none", etc.

Edited May 31, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Swimmingly he/him]

What if you can only ever bind a single elemental, kind of like the Spiritshadows in the Seven Towers? That way, you could have specialized elementals with less power but more efficient how they use it, big, flashy yet stupid elementals that require tight control to do anything but bash things, etc.? Remember, magic should be good for more than bashing people especially hard. If magic allows you to hear everyone in a building, you're an excellent spy. If you can move at sixty miles an hour in water, you can be a great courier. Someone who's immune to the heat of fire and can direct, amplify, and control heat in a fire is going to be an excellent smith, likewise to someone who can feed air in to where ever it's needed.

[Kurkistan he/him]

I like that idea, Swimmingly. Though it seems this is moving away from your "only use magic in bursts" model.

 

You could break the elementals/power-usages into two basic types, I suppose: enhancers or manipulators. So the elemental that lets you move really fast in water is changing how you're moving through the world (enhancing how you can interact with stuff), while the one that lets you control air flow is one that doesn't really change you so much as something else in the world.

 

Maybe even move away from anything that allows for external control, if we really want "binding" with these elementals to be thematically strong? So any time you bind with an elemental its changing you, rather than giving you the ability to just flat-out change other things. That might become too limited, though.

[PorridgeBrick he/him]

I kind of want there to be uses for the magic other than Avatar-like bending abilities, but I am at a loss to relate the elements to other things. I was hoping I could get some suggestions. Also, as a point of clarification: wood, earth, and metal are constructive elements meaning they can build things and are primarily defensive, while water, wind, and fire are destructive (typical caster-type attacks) and they are primarily offensive.

Hmm, this gives me an idea. Basically, what this boils down to here is that wood, earth, and metal can be produced but not manipulated, and air, water, and fire can be manipulated but not produced. I think this gives a nice symmetry to the magic system. What if Aether allowed you to both produce and manipulate something? Essentially, you would be able to create something that simulates one of the six normal elements, and then manipulate it to your heart's content. With this idea though, I think you would need to restrict Aether to one of six pseudo elements– so Aether-Metal could create and manipulate weird, magical matter that simulates metal and disappears when you're done with it, Aether-Water strange magic liquid that again disappears, etc. And now you have twelve elements. IMO, I prefer this to having Aether just be the Mistborn of the system.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Or maybe Aether could be as simple as "you get everything, but flipped"? So Mr. Evil Aether can produce air, water, and fire and manipulate wood, earth, and metal, but not do the normal stuff? That might be too much for the reader, though, as (as you say), that essentially gives the Aether-born a new magic system to play with.

Edited June 1, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Calmseer he/him]

I like that idea, Swimmingly. Though it seems this is moving away from your "only use magic in bursts" model.

 

You could break the elementals/power-usages into two basic types, I suppose: enhancers or manipulators. So the elemental that lets you move really fast in water is changing how you're moving through the world (enhancing how you can interact with stuff), while the one that lets you control air flow is one that doesn't really change you so much as something else in the world.

 

Maybe even move away from anything that allows for external control, if we really want "binding" with these elementals to be thematically strong? So any time you bind with an elemental its changing you, rather than giving you the ability to just flat-out change other things. That might become too limited, though.

I really like the idea of separating the mages into enhancers and manipulators. Going back to my desire to find other uses for the elements, I think the enhancer route would be a great possibility. So for example, an air manipulator will be be able to do air-bender-type things, while an air enhancer would be able to hear really well or something (idk I would have to figure it out). Potentially the enhancers would have powers similar to the pewter arm, tin eye powers in Mistborn. 

 

Now I am really confused about the faeries because I don't know if I want the mages to have innate abilities or be manipulators. I have read the Bartimeaus trilogy btw. It was one of my favorite series growing up

[Calmseer he/him]

Hmm, this gives me an idea. Basically, what this boils down to here is that wood, earth, and metal can be produced but not manipulated, and air, water, and fire can be manipulated but not produced. I think this gives a nice symmetry to the magic system. What if Aether allowed you to both produce and manipulate something? Essentially, you would be able to create something that simulates one of the six normal elements, and then manipulate it to your heart's content. With this idea though, I think you would need to restrict Aether to one of six pseudo elements– so Aether-Metal could create and manipulate weird, magical matter that simulates metal and disappears when you're done with it, Aether-Water strange magic liquid that again disappears, etc. And now you have twelve elements. IMO, I prefer this to having Aether just be the Mistborn of the system.

I like the potential of this. Theoretically the aether mages would be really rare and therefore wouldn't completely unbalance the system. 

As a point of clarification, are you saying that the aether mage would create "aether" which would stimulate the element and allow the mage to manipulate as they please? What exactly do you picture the aether mage being able to do that the normal mage cannot?

 

My head is spinning trying to sort all of this out lol. 

[PorridgeBrick he/him]

Maybe enhancers could kinda be like taking the essence of an element into yourself? For air, you become like the wind: fast, agile, light on your feet. Water, you flow, becoming graceful, better coordinated. Fire, you are filled with boundless energy. Earth, you are gifted with incredible strength. Metal, you are tough and resilient. Wood, you... become green and photosynthesize?

[Calmseer he/him]

Maybe enhancers could kinda be like taking the essence of an element into yourself? For air, you become like the wind: fast, agile, light on your feet. Water, you flow, becoming graceful, better coordinated. Fire, you are filled with boundless energy. Earth, you are gifted with incredible strength. Metal, you are tough and resilient. Wood, you... become green and photosynthesize?

I was thinking something on the lines of that too! And yeah, wood is definitely hard to come up with :/ Do youhave any suggestions to better distinguish water and air, and also metal, wood, and earth? Also, what exactly would boundless energy do to a person? Like infinite running? No enhancements to physical capabilities, you can just do them for longer?

[PorridgeBrick he/him]

Well, with air, you're much faster, and you're light as if you're storing Feruchemical iron. But your coordination isn't improved at all. Water just makes you much more skillful, dextrous, graceful, flexible. Earth is just muscular strength– you punch way harder than everyone else. Metal by contrast, only allows you to endure more. If you get slashed up, bruised, you're still not dead. And yeah, boundless energy basically means you never get tired.

Anyways, to your earlier question I missed about my ideas on Aether. Yes, an Aether mage creates Aether, which can magically mimic one of the elements. It grants much more flexibility. Take fire: under this system, normal fire users could manipulate any fire they want, but they cannot create it. Aether mages can shape their Aether however, and spontaneously create fire that they can then manipulate– thus, flinging fireballs around whenever they want. Normal Metal mages can produce any metal they want, but they cannot manipulate it. Aether Metal, however, can be manipulated, allowing for the use of all that crazy stuff Kurk was talking about– Metal armor, spinning razor blades through the air, etc.

Edited June 1, 2014 by PorridgeBrick

[Ashiok]

Maybe people are born with a guardian, and when they come of age, they see their guardian in their dream, and are asked to pay a highly specific price for power (magical or nonmagical). If they agree, the guardian grants them proportionate power. The Aether mage paid two prices or something?

That way you can have guardians grant non elemental things such as luck. Also, the price for strong power could be huge.

[Curiosity he/him]

Well, what if we had Substance elements and Force elements?

 

Substance:

 

Earth

Water

Fire

 

Force

 

Fire (heat)

Metal (electricity)

Wood (life)

[Calmseer he/him]

Maybe people are born with a guardian, and when they come of age, they see their guardian in their dream, and are asked to pay a highly specific price for power (magical or nonmagical). If they agree, the guardian grants them proportionate power. The Aether mage paid two prices or something?

That way you can have guardians grant non elemental things such as luck. Also, the price for strong power could be huge.

 I think this is gold for another (separate) novel. The idea of paying a cost to attain a magic of equal proportion is brilliant. Sorta like the game Soul Sacrifice for PS Vita.

[Ashiok]

If I knew how to write a novel, that would be the one I wrote... Because I like the idea of price tags.