Magic System Review, hopefully not too derivative...

[Darkarma he/him]

Hello hello, my first thread in here to make a statement that I’m an aspiring author. As such I pretty much have my magic system worked out but as you can see from the wall of text below that it has a lot of information to it and I’m in need of a second opinion on how dense it is and how best to simplify it for explanations. My two main characters are first person, one fulfilling the apprentice role and the second dominant character will be the teacher role. I expect I can explain much of this in my two first person perspective characters, one being the teacher and the other being the student among a group of students.

 

Any parts I need to expand and clarify on?

 

Second is I want to see how creative everyone can be and see how people can best abuse the system in new and unique ways I haven’t thought of… I’ll be providing some spoiled examples of some of what I’m thinking. See what you come up before seeing the examples so my preconceptions don’t influence you overly.

 

Cheers!

 

Note: Setting wise this story is roughly at a Renaissance/industrial revolution setting. The dominant culture is mostly japanese-ish  with a european secondary culture sort of. Not actual cultures but similar. This a second world fantasy.

 

Backbones of the Magic System

All matter is made up of three elements, Shards, Meta and Spirit. Reality itself reflects this while working with the natural physical laws of the universe (IE ours). The setting is made up of three plains of existence which form a spectrum in this order, the physical realm, the spiritual realm and conceptual realm.

 

First and foremost is the Shards, they are of the conceptual realm and if not bound to anything usually they will only be in the conceptual realm. They describe and control the form something takes, its very nature of existence. A shard can be the whole of something, a part of something or a small tiny aspect of it. Anything from the shape of a sword’s blade, to the color of paint, to the wood of a tree to the entire essence of what a gun is. Or it could be something fabricated from someone’s own imagination and given existence as a shard.

 

Shards come in three forms, True Shards, Common Shards and Folded Shards. A True Shard is something that can be folded, leaving you still with the true shard and a fragile folded shard copy of it. A common shard is much the same as a true shard except that it was extracted improperly and cannot be folded. A folded shard is a copy of a shard that exists as a whole and cannot be changed, if it is changed then it breaks and decays. Essentially the first two can be bent, but a folded shard is a ceramic that will chip and fracture under the slightly pressure.

 

Shards created from mind, concept shards, have a cost in that they are ideal materials that only live up to a person’s intention and general understanding of a person’s concept of the laws of physics. Something as simple as a Shape Shard can be used to transform an object without significantly violating the laws of physics if at all. But say if they try and create indestructible armor of a high density and yet also incredibly light weight? They may get exactly that but the closest thing to it the universe may consider radioactive… oops. A poor understanding of the laws of physics usually means a dead practitioner and thats if the shard is even stable once given a physical form.

 

Meta is the second aspect of the magic system and the universe, its the physical substance which is warped and controlled by a shard its connected to. Without a shard it is pure mass with no purpose and can only exist within the deepest portion of the physical realm.

 

Spirit is the energy that binds the shard and the meta together to make a physical object, portion there of or the whole. In essence spirit is supernatural glue energy which exists in a finite amount in non-living things. It also records the history of things and changes based on how it interacts.

 

Living spirits furthermore are linked to the spiritual barrier that exists in the spiritual realm. This link is necessary to counteract one’s own willpower to reshape reality. It works by being a permanent slightly limited infinite power source of spirit energy. Some confuse a living spirit for a soul but the two are entirely different things (a source of contention between several religions and practitioners). This link is also highly valuable as the more complex and/or intelligent something is the bigger and stronger of a link it has to the spiritual barrier, resulting in a larger source of energy to power the magic systems. This has leads to the minting of coins which hold the spirits of animals and in the more rare and valuable spirits of people. Most of the world that knows how practice this magic system has a currency that uses living spirits to monetize coins.

 

Decay is what happens when the magic system violates the natural laws of physics. If a shard is too abstract or an object is missing a vital component to keep it close to how reality works, the shards will decay unless the said object has a high amount of spirit energy to keep it glued together, or its supplied with a living spirit. Shards decay and change whenever they do not have enough spirit and are exposed to the physical realm’s influence. As such unstable objects require more spirit than stable ones otherwise you can end up with some truly weird results with partially decayed things such as iron that liquid at room temperature or water that freezes the hotter it gets but seldom will this last long as spiritual costs for decay gets exponentially more expensive.

 

Notes:

The universe/world/planet that the system and story takes place sits close to the spiritual barrier on the physical realm’s side of the spectrum; meaning that it has a low to high ratio of Shards to Meta naturally occur. This results there is a lot of space to store shards on things or people in a slave mode so it doesn’t affect the stability of an object nor will the shards normally be expressed physically. This lends itself to a lot of fun things in how the system can be abused.

 

Also anyone sentient/sapient can learn the magic system, its however not an easy thing to do. Though it does require that one has a true real soul. This particular limiter is to prevent mass cloning of practitioners.

 

As mentioned before a living spirit is an infinite source of spirit energy (glue), but there is a limit on how much you can draw from it at any given moment. If too much is drawn then the link is damaged or even severed completely. Woe is the practitioner who uses their own spirit as they risk literally decaying or falling apart if they pull to much since that link usually is busy keeping their body whole and their shards’ identity accurate. Furthermore no mortal knows how to forge or reforge a link to the spiritual barrier, hence the economy.

 

Magic Systems:

 

Ousialurgy

Definition: Study of the Primary Substance

This particular practice is the process of learning to manipulate shards and spirits on a mental/instinctive level. Ousialurgists often have one or two true shards stored on their body which they fold into copies, also a few conceptual shards they can fold as well that do weird/unique things. From there they draw on a living spirit’s energy to pull meta from the deep physical realm and bind it to any shard they want.

 

Depending on the nature of the shard there may be other requirements to conjure such as having access to enough kinetic energy to give a molten gold shard its heat. Where as an ice shard of equal mass would requires less kinetic energy as its shard requires less heat. When dealing with folded shards its important to meet these requirements exactly, otherwise they will break and generating the needed heat involves the subsystem magic called rifting. IE the process of destroy an object to harvest its innate spirit energy or doing a direct matter to energy conversion.

 

Want to conjure a folded shard candle with a lit wick? An ousialurgist might keep a bar of lead handy and destroy a small amount of it to produce heat that the shard calls for. Non-folded shards, IE common shards and true shards do not require exactness but are harder to make and more expensive to buy. If you have say a true shard of molten gold and you want to conjure it, then you can choose to ignore the heat requirement and conjure it cold but in doing so you are changing that true/common shard to match perhaps permanently.

 

Shattering (an derivative of rifting and alchemy) is a process by which through physical touch an ousialurgist can break someone or something apart, stealing their shards or simply drawing out the spirit which holds a thing together. This has a caveat that it requires some level of understanding a thing and synchronizing one’s self to it. As you can expect gloves are a very common fashion statement and skin contact is a sign of trust between two peoples. Knowing something’s name also aids in the process but not as much as it would in other magic systems.

 

Seeing is believing, an ousialurgist has the unique capability of seeing deeply into something though they are limited by their own understanding. Doctors in particular use this ability to treat people medically. Look deeply enough and you can see someone’s DNA though given the level of understanding in this world they’d instead see hommuniculi or something similar instead. This seeing also extends to other acts of the magic system. Aether (Shards bound only to spirit with no meta) appears to be true magenta, an unreal color, usually. While Meta while being conjured often appears to be a swarm of blackness or whiteness or something else entirely, though it all depends on a person’s own expectations with how their mind fills in the gap for something impossible happening.

 

The process of conjuring is as such, build a spiritual energy charge, then pull on meta from the deep physical realm, bind the meta with spirit and then add the shard. The longer it takes to do this the more spirit energy you need as meta doesn't like to stick around without spirit holding it.

 

Folded shards are fragile because they are essentially solid single identity that represents a whole complex object right? Such as the name [Gun] representing the entire concept of a Gun. There's more to a Gun than its name right? Its not much to go on. Whats an practitioner to do? Simple, create a concept shard which alters its shape without actually altering the folded gun shard. This is known as  change shard which allows forces to act upon it and change it. There is a cost however that should the gun change to the point where its more than one piece like a piece snapping off it will still shatter and decay. But if you only plan on using the gun once and it has a strong enough ability warp due to a well made change shard you can use a folded gun as a gun.

 

One character concept I have going is built around this where he keeps a lot of low level living spirits around to constantly conjure, fire and replace the gun repeatedly to without ever having to reload. He reuses a lot of the meta from the previous gun to reconjure it. For all intents and purposes, the gun a four piece hybrid true shard/concept shard. One gun, one bullet and two change shards attached. Since concept shards can be folded same as a true shard, he can create his folded guns as a single package that can separate itself. The bullet's change shard is a very stiff one allowing for very little deformation on impact, the cost though is it hits anything nearly has hard as itself, it will instantly shatter and decay. He also has to pace himself as he can fire and replace so quickly he can risk overloading even several spirits working in tangent to supply him with spiritual energy.

 

Alchemy

This is a bit more steriotypical formulaic magic system with a secondary witch’s potion cauldron. Alchemy is more or less the ability invest one’s will in something symbolic and distill is it and other physical properties into a ‘spell’. From that its expected that its much more time intensive but essentially its the parent of Ousialurgy as this magic system can do everything its child can better but at the cost of time and needing less mobile resources. Things like the extraction of true and common shards from an object or capturing its core shard (the whole thing) are easier to do with alchemy where doing all by mind can produce messy or poor results.

 

Investing one’s will in alchemaic formula also allows for a practitioner to set up things like delayed effect, store the shard of something big on something small along with enough spirit to conjure meta for it during reassembly.

 

Subsystems:

Note: I’m lacking a greek based scientific name for Rifting and Spiritbinding. Any thoughts anyone can offer?

Rifting

This is the process of taking an item and converting from matter to energy… sort of. That’s the simplest explanation. If a shard requires heat or electricity the ousialurgist or alchemist must get it from somewhere, they however cannot draw it directly from ambient environment. Instead they capture it when they rip the spirit free from matter and then channel its potential. Essentially the same process that makes a nuclear bomb go boom, however as with everything understanding still is key, the less a person knows about the material they are using and the less they know about how physics works the more inefficient they become and the less energy they get back which is bound up by the Spirit of the thing.

Rifting is also the means by which a person can avoid using living spirits as a source of spiritual glue or even drawing upon meta. Instead of conjuring, they can do a quick swap of the shards from one item to another however this rather messy and can have unfortunate consequences.

Weavers are people who focus solely on rifting as a method of ‘spelling’. Things like heat or force blasts, some particularly talents folks are even able to create small bolts of lightning. They make use of on the fly concept shard creations which they bind to the object as they destroy it.

 

Spiritbinding

For those who work solely with living spirits and don’t bother with the physical side of things, a spiritbinder, draws the historical aspects of spirit energy’s glue. By infusing an object or person with spirit, they infect what’s already there and effectively rewrite it. The more spirit they use the stronger more long lasting the effect though against a living spirit its only effective for so long unless its bound by another living spirit.

Some examples I have for what this does is things like sleep spells, especially for surgical operations. It can also be used to augment what a person sees for illusions. This can be especially useful for also hiding messages in things as well though only non-living objects will do if its not time sensitive. Most people versed in spiritbinding can read/rewrite the history of an object, a person or complex organism is more difficult since its muddled by free will and self perception.

Edited June 2, 2014 by Darkarma

[Kurkistan he/him]

Thought #1 from improperly "physic-ed" Shards: World-destroying weapon of death. "The opposite of this 1 meter cubed block of lead" == antimatter enough to destroy the planet, I would think.

 

On cloning: Watch where you walk here. You may have to get all philosophical on us and define the true nature of the soul and its interaction with consciousness/intelligence if you're going to have "people who are clones and thus aren't really people" walking around.

 

Alchemy abuse time:

 

By golly gosh we just won the war. Any war. Just to be clear: I can take a 1000 ton block of TNT, "capture it's core shard" so that the block goes away and I can now recreate it at will without any effort or additional costs, and then go about recreating it whenever and wherever I like?

 

Question to make this more scary: Can this stuff be triggered at range? Like can I attach the core shard of a stick of TNT to a bullet and then have explosive rounds?

 

EDIT: Read your spoiler. So yes. Please tell me why there are any major government buildings left standing in any country that has engaged in warfare with another since the advent of fire.

 

"Rifting":

 

You have an understanding of just how much energy this is, right? An ingot of lead will be enough to level a country, by my understanding. Where does all that extra energy go when these guys are inefficiently demolishing blocks of it at a time to light candles?

Edited June 2, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Swimmingly he/him]

I would make sure that this system is describable in a dumbed-down format, too. For example, you might have characters who understand it as "conjuring things". They won't understand the intricacies - they will understand that an angry mage is pulling knives from the air and hurling them face-wards. A good example of this is to read the Malazan books - the magic there functions entirely differently for everybody, but that's just a result of the facets of perception of an incredibly detailed system.

[Darkarma he/him]

World ending shard... hm, Anti-matter yeah I have to think on that one. But loosely I'd say the person would have to have a concept of what anti-matter is on a more fundemental level before they try to create a concept shard of it. Otherwise if they tried to make lead that's different or opposite of normal lead, they'd probably end up with something still along the same lines of what they already see around them.

 

 

On cloning: Watch where you walk here. You may have to get all philosophical on us and define the true nature of the soul and its interaction with consciousness/intelligence if you're going to have "people who are clones and thus aren't really people" walking around.

Mostly these aren't true to life clones but closer to animated flesh with a living spirit powering it. If they were build clones anything like how science would have it done I'd say soul. But the process they use magic to create bodies and bodies parts... not so much.

 

 

By golly gosh we just won the war. Any war. Just to be clear: I can take a 1000 ton block of TNT, "capture it's core shard" so that the block goes away and I can now recreate it at will without any effort or additional costs, and then go about recreating it whenever and wherever I like?

Yes and no. If you have the core shard all you need is enough spirit to conjure it again or a living spirit to create a constant source for reproduction value. However when you fold it to make copies so you can have many blocks of TNT, those folded copies function as single solid unit only, if it changes in any significant way, it will shatter and decay. You can of course add a change shard to it which gives it some flexibility but that concept shard only works so long as the object remains a single unit as well. If you were to detonate the modified TNT block, you at most get a detonation equal to the amount of air displacement that the TNT can generate before it breaks into more than one piece and then subsequently winking out of existence.

 

However the lines your thinking on is why I based economy on spirits rather than rare metals and such. If you have core shards of something simple enough say like gunpowder or gold that already behaves like a single unit both in reality and in the mind or at least mostly in the mind... You can create your own conceptual quantity shard and add it on to the core shards for the base materials each. Then its just a matter of bisecting it physically, store one as a back up and continue duping the other half until you have enough requisite materials.

 

Things that behave like fluids fall under this so sands and the like are not hard, but things like rice which in the human mind is much more solid and considers it a bite at a time becomes much harder if not impossible to do not even counting the nature of rice being a seed pod. As such food still is not a completely unlimited resource.

 

On remote detonation... I'm still thinking about it but probably not (yet), you could do with alchemy something like a proximity detonation.

 

 

You have an understanding of just how much energy this is, right? An ingot of lead will be enough to level a country, by my understanding. Where does all that extra energy go when these guys are inefficiently demolishing blocks of it at a time to light candles?

I do. And best I've figured, they are burning the material but most of it isn't actually used so it flits back into the dimensional void that is the physical and spiritual realms. Potentially if you say had Einstein as a rifter... and I do mean Einstein, the results would be as you described. Right now though to get close to any real working level of super blasts they need to first discover atomic theory.

 

 

 

Question to make this more scary: Can this stuff be triggered at range? Like can I attach the core shard of a stick of TNT to a bullet and then have explosive rounds?

I like your thinking. You could do it with alchemy which is just plain weird in a lot of ways as in this example you'd end up with a bullet that is same size but has the mass of the TNT, how stable something like that is I have no ideas but I wouldn't want to use combustion to launch it. But simply attaching a core shard to a bullet would be like using a Bullet as USB drive and loading it up with the blueprints for TNT. THe blueprints do nothing until you build it.

 

 

I would make sure that this system is describable in a dumbed-down format, too.

That's part of the reason why I'm here is trying to see how to best simplify the language so I can give dialogue rather than a textbook.

 

I should note that getting a education in alchemy, ousialurgy or both to the level described is also almost obscene in its expense which is part of a plot point. Anyone can learn it but if you don't want to figure out 500+ years worth of research yourself there are certain costs involved.

Edited June 3, 2014 by Darkarma

[Kurkistan he/him]

On antimatter: My main concern wasn't that someone would do it on purpose, but by accident. I was writing in reference to your example of someone saying "get me some light and dense armor" and getting radioactivity, despite not even having a concept of radioactivity.

 

---

 

Ah, so shards "weigh" the proper amount. That complicates things a tad, but still not too much for a little mild terrorism.

 

Scenario: I am an entity with a lot of resources and a burning desire to see the enemy capital be blown up. I get a bunch of different blocks of TNT and make core shards of each of them. I hid these in pebbles and have agents smuggle these (heavy, but still movable) pebbles into the basement of the enemy capital. Then another agent de-shards all the TNT so it's back the way it was and lights the fuse. All their base are belong to me.

 

So I'll ask again: Why are any major and even moderately accessible government buildings left standing after a war?

[Darkarma he/him]

Ah, weight would only be a factor if you were say using alchemy to create explosive bullets since your essentially fusing to objects together. But if you are simply attaching shards (which without meta have no mass thus no weight either beyond the object their attached to) to another object for storage purposes, then its just a matter of conjuring it back into reality and yeah you can make big boom.

 

But yeah I see your point.