Magic system help?

[GroundPetrel]

Hey all, 

I'm trying to cook up a magic system for my first proper attempt at a fantasy novel.  I'm just going to spew what I have here and hope someone wants to give advice?  

Background of the setting: 

Spoiler

• Two deities basically used this planet as a battleground.  There's the fascist god and the less evil god.  (less evil god tries to be good but is/was kind of a hot mess.  His shtick is free will, he's big on that, and social libertarianism)
• Less evil god used a bit of himself to give free will to the orc-esque beast-people the fascist god created, but the fascist god used the lengthy war and the less evil god's distraction to send minions to seduce the less evil god's human followers away.  
• Less evil god then self-sacrificed and "died" to imprison the fascist god.  
• Former not-orcs are called "screamers" or "shim" by humans; they have no name for their species but call their culture the Freed, or "Shim" (humans mistook this for a species name)

The magic system I have is basically this: 

Spoiler

• Most magic is elemental control.  It's powered by the "previous" one in the cycle. Overuse can range from accidentally killing yourself to deliberately going one winged angel for a dying super-attack.   It's also specifically based on personal gender identity rather than biological sex because I want the trans protagonist to be supernaturally validated.  
• Male human mages ("Art-Weavers") have geokinesis powered by body water--use too much and they dessicate and die.  
• Female human weavers have aerokinesis powered by body heat, use too much and they freeze.  
• Male shim weavers have pyrokinesis, they wear salt-based war paint because if they use too much their nervous systems shut down and their bones shatter and dissolve.  
• Female shim weavers have hydrokinesis, useful in their desert home, but it makes them short of breath--use too much and they can cause a local vacuum.  

But the deities have two specific magic systems associated with them.  

Spoiler

• Less evil god left behind a magic sword that's actually a piece of his body.  Holding it lets you fly and shoot lightning and surround yourself with a hurricane and stuff.  Overuse its power and you will fry and ascend to godhood by fusing with the god's power which is not good because most of him is keeping the evil god trapped.  
• The evil god ("the Bright Lord"/Ahriman) has a more versatile system based on runes, tattoos, and gestures that allows creation of limited forcefields as sort of stepping stones, hammerspace, limited teleportation, illusions, and long-range scrying through artifacts of the evil god's power.  
• The evil god also has seven minions with unique powers, detailed next.  

The evil god's minions are: 

Spoiler

• Pride--male human.  Has an aura of jingoistic pride and chauvinism.  Spend too long around him and you get high on ultranationalistic nastiness.  
• Lust--male human.  Kinda obvious.  Masquerades as an angelic saintlike figure who stands for chastity.  (the bad god has tricked the humans into worshipping him, he set himself up as a Judeo-Christian style fatherly being of light and his religion runs on glorifying violence and oppressing LGBT people and dissidence)  He's omni-attractive due to his powers, but has an androgynous/pretty-boy bishonen kind of appearance.  Likes to wheedle secrets out of queer people and use those against them.  Nasty POS who is righteously electrocuted in the end.  
• Envy--male shim.  Has tattoos that move as he casts magic, smart & experienced foes can recognize what he's casting.  Smarter than Lust.  Makes people envious.  Masquerades as a compassion saint/angel.  Co-Big Bad with Lust.  Escapes at the end but is badly injured.   Demonic figure in shim mythology, an evil traitor.  
• Wrath--female human.  Constantly healing so wears spiky armor embedded in her skin.  Cuts off her hands to stick glaive blades in her arms before fighting.  Hates her life, regrets joining the evil god's side millennia ago, and wants out--I kinda want to do a sequel and have her desire to die be a part of that?  
• Sloth--male human.  Obese slaver overlord archetype, but strong (like the Kingpin from Marvel Comics).  Spend more than like a minute around him and you want to pass out.   
• Greed--female human.  Old lady who makes you want to knife your buddy for peanuts just being around her.  
• Gluttony--female shim.  Will eat literally anything with teeth that can cut through anything.  Considered a category traitor in shim mythology for wanting to act like their pre-sentience monster-selves.  

Then there's the protagonists: 

Spoiler

• Mom (I have a name for her but I want to change it to something Kurmanji for in-story sociogeographical reasons): One-armed military veteran.  Chronic hero syndrome, badass, good swordswoman, but jaded and very VERY anti-war.   Adopted Ash off of a battlefield.  Has the cool sword and its powers, slowly turning into a god as she experiences the memories of the good god.  Trying to keep her daughter safe.  From the Borderlands, a "hick" region in a big mountain vale.  Lust tries to manipulate her into freeing the evil god.  
• Ash (short for Asher-eti-lani (from the Assyrian king Ashur-etil-ilani, "Ashur is the lord of the gods")--there's an in-universe reason for the Akkadian name when the humans mostly use Farsi, Kurmanji, or (for southerners and northern barbarians) kiSwahili or Germanic names and words): Shim, 10 years old (in human terms roughly 16; she's physically and not quite sexually mature, due to shim biology, but Shim don't do their adulthood rite until well into their 12th year), skilled archer, wants to find out more about her biological relatives.  Hotheaded but skilled teenager, basically.  Loves her mom but is jealous of the cool sword, which Envy deliberately exacerbates to drive the two emotionally apart.  Becomes friends with Boyfriend, who outs himself to her so they can share a chat about being outsiders.  Finds an amulet that lets her disguise herself as a human despite significant physical differences between the species; this was arranged by the bad guys, and Lust can spy through the amulet and manipulate it with his magic.  Devastated when the shim reject her, since she doesn't know their ways; this leaves her largely socially homeless.  
• Boyfriend: Trans male (passing,barely, as cis male) ex-lover/lover/fiance of Mom, father figure and would-be adoptive father to Ash.  Has earth control magic.  From a family from the southern realms who swore loyalty to the Midlander Overkings (i.e. he's black).  Kind, likes Ash, outs himself to bond with Ash at one point.  Has a Midlander (Farsi) name but his birth name (he changed both parts) was <kiSwahili girl's first name>--<modified Parthian noble surname>.  (Mom knows he's trans, they had sex once when they were travelling when Ash was a baby because they finally figured out how to feed Ash and the baby was out cold so they were lying next to each other watching the sky and got to talking and then kissing and then sex and then hugging and crying)

the plot is basically: 

Spoiler

1. Ash and her mom live in Small Town in Storming Nowhere, Borderlands; Ash was adopted off a battlefield after humans murdered shim civilians in a failed attempt at a genocidal war.  Ash is out hunting and is ambushed by a monster sent by the bad guys that herds her into a place where she finds the amulet.  
2. Ash's mom decides they need to go to Big City to figure out WTF this thing is, which she doubles down on after Northmen (Germanic-speaking white) mercenaries attack their house looking for her and Ash.  
3. On the way they're attacked by the monster in an old ruin, Ash's mom finds the cool sword and uses it, electrocuting the monster.  
4. They make it to Mid-Sized Trading Town, where they get a room.  Lust appears to Mom and tries to convince her she's a prophesied heroine.   this is BS and part of Envy and Lust's plan.  
5. On the boat to Big City, Envy appears to Ash and plays on her shaken emotional state.  He plans to make her think she's the real world savior and her mom is in thrall to evil.  
6. They make it to Big City and meet up with Boyfriend, who helped Mom feed and take care of Ash as they went home from the war 10 years ago (so he knows about Ash being a shim even though Ash is wearing the amulet all the time now); Mom and Boyfriend trust each other implicitly and talk like they've been married forever, which Ash picks up on and ships.  
7. Boyfriend knows a guy who deals with relics like the sword and amulet, but he's secretly working for Envy and supports the destined-hero narrative.  Mom has doubts but when she finds that the Overking is preparing to go into the Waste (desert between human and shim lands) to kill all the shim once and for all, she tries to stop him by flexing the prophecy hero status (she REALLY doesn't want another war).   But Pride is there incognito and ruins her plan so she has to book it.  
8. they cross the Waste and meet some shim who recognize the sword from their mythology.  A wise old shim spiritual leader gives Mom the low-down on the shim side of the story.  She's also getting more and more dreams of the distant backstory.  
9. They head out with a cranky human-hating shim as an escort to get to the place the evil saints say they have to get to to save the world, but the relic-sage guy betrays them on Lust's orders since Lust thinks they need an extra push.   He summons two Wrath-Born (zombies/golems) that are super tough to fight, the shim stays behind to lead the monsters off as the heroes book it.  
10. Mom gets a dream that reveals Lust in the past serving Ahriman (the evil god who the Bright Lord supposedly vanquished but actually the "Bright Lord" is Ahriman's alias he used to seduce humanity into evil and nationalism) and tries to low-key quiz Lust about it, he bullshits her but she's suspicious.  They make it to the end place.  
11. Boyfriend holds off a Wrath-Born that followed them.  Mom is about to at Lust's goading free Ahriman/the "Bright Lord" but she stops and asks "if this is all destiny, did Ash's mom have to die, then?"  And Lust doesn't answer to her satisfaction so she says "screw destiny" and stabs him in the face.  
12. obv. it doesn't work so easily because the bad guys came buffed with forcefield wards and stuff.  But the sword cuts through their magic really easily.  Ash goes for Envy as Mom beats 7 kinds of crap out of Lust.  Envy chokes out Ash with the amulet's chain but Boyfriend has some diamond dust he uses to cut through the chain, and the two of them tag-team Envy.  Mom mutual-kills with Lust and electrocutes him so thoroughly he burns to dust and she fuses with the sword and ascends to godhood.  
13. Ash and Boyfriend stumble out and Mom uses her brand-new powers she doesn't quite understand or have access to all of to lead some nearby shim to them to bail them out.  End is Mom watching the sunrise and trying to figure out how to protect her kid and lover.  

 

Thoughts anyone???

[Thaidakar the Ghostblood he/him]

okay, first off what if you built up powers possible with the seven minions, like seven swords for each of them, and characters get them to destroy them, if this messes with your story I am fine with that, and the seven swords are the only things able to destroy them, another thing is what if there was this order of warriors who seek to take over the world free of both sides.

[Frustration he/him]

Not magic system but please turn down the metaphors, it feels more like a political statement than a story.

 

[GroundPetrel]

5 hours ago, Thaidakar the Ghostblood said:

okay, first off what if you built up powers possible with the seven minions, like seven swords for each of them, and characters get them to destroy them, if this messes with your story I am fine with that, and the seven swords are the only things able to destroy them, another thing is what if there was this order of warriors who seek to take over the world free of both sides.

I really want the seven sins to be really tough to beat, no talisman or special weapon or whatever to kill them.  At most the god-sword can mess with their powers a bit because of its origin.  These guys are the immortal elite goon squad of an evil god, they have to be ridiculously tough and powerful as well as versatile.  Currently I have Lust using hammerspace storage to hold swords, tossing out translucent forcefields he can step on when fighting a flying foe, and using magic shields Envy gave him; Envy has short-range teleportation, summons metal flechettes to throw, stuff like that.  He also survives getting his neck slit long enough to do a contingency teleport and presumably patch himself up.  Lust only gets killed after being impaled, electrocuted, and then hit with so much more wattage on top of that he burns to ash.  Wrath should be physically near-invincible.  Stuff like that.  

I do kinda like the idea of somebody not liking this god-war stuff, maybe there's a third species who were the world's natives and are pissed that this divine clusterfrakas got  imported to their backyard?  But that's kinda beyond the scope of the immediate 'bad guys want to trick good people into doing bad with a fake Campbellian hero-prophecy story' narrative.  

[+ILuvHats he/him]

Do you intend your elemental magic to be a soft system like Avatar, or do you want it to be a hard system? If you're imagining it at as a soft system, I don't have much to offer, though I will say I really like the concept of elemental manipulation being powered by adjacent elements. If you instead want it to be hard, I can totally offer you some ideas.

For your general worldbuilding, I'll have to echo Frustration's comment. Your character concepts, your ideas of gods, and your cultural relations are all single-mindedly guided by your political views. There's nothing wrong with letting your political beliefs influence your writing. Write what you're passionate about, and if you're passionate about your political views, you should definitely incorporate them into your stories. Hell, there's nothing inherently wrong with being politically didactic, though such stories can be very divisive. However, politics becomes a problem in writing when you oversimplify the issues, their origin, or reality without meaning to (allegorical tales are an example of intentionally simplifying issues to make a fundamental truth more obvious). Based on the outline you shared, which I admit may not be comprehensive in its descriptions, it feels like your story is expressing that "progressive = good, conservative = bad," and this idea is so pervasive that your world feels black-and-white and lacking in depth. 

I'm not saying you need to overhaul your story. There are a lot of things I like, such as your protagonists, especially the Boyfriend because let's face it, we need more transgender  characters in fiction. But I do have a few recommendations for adding nuance to your world and plot.

• Be careful how you write your protagonists in a society which is definitely set before the equivalent of the European High Middle Ages, based on the lack of gunpowder. While the protagonists are all outsiders, their perspectives shouldn't only be antagonistically reactive to the dominant culture. How has the dominant culture influenced their views subconsciously to align with popular ideology? Basically, make sure your protagonists don't feel like modern progressives set in the age of antiquity.
• I'd consider characterizing your gods in a more primal, archetypal way. Basing the deities purely on political concepts feels odd because such systems are very human in origin, filled with biases that aren't fundamental in nature. You can still achieve a very similar setting by narrowing the core of who Ahriman is such that his beliefs, motivation, and then interference in the world would result in a fascist society. This prevents the cosmology of your entire universe from feeling directly inspired by real world politics.
• Since your viewpoint characters are such complete outsiders to general human society, your plot could benefit from a major character that's a sympathetic and understandable insider. I'm not saying you need to advocate for fascism, but the story will feel less monochrome if it doesn't feel like every indirect supporter of the fascist human society is pure, villainous scum. 
• In a similar vein, I'd think through the basis of the human-shim war. In its current state, it's a blanket-statement genocidal war motivated by a society being... evil. While ethnic prejudice is a common factor in historical wars, it was rarely the sole driving factor. Often, it was more of an excuse to motivate individual citizens to fight for resources, which is usually the real reason wars start. What historical war do you want your fictional war to mirror? Do you want your human civilization to reflect European colonialism, driven by rapidly accelerating technological advances which led to depleted natural resources, increased competition within Europe, Darwinism, and the ability to expand due to said tech advances? Is your human society like the Islamic caliphates, formed through a combination of religious warfare and cultural absorption through conversion, both made possible by a coherent and unifying ideology merging religion and politics in a way that Medieval Catholicism could only envy? If it's a largely race-based bloodbath you want, Nazism and Imperial Japan are the quintessential examples. WW2 Japan was a product of simultaneously adopting foreign technology while retaining a high degree of cultural isolation, enabling the formation of a nationalist state on a resource barren island that literally required expansion to maintain its current trajectory. And if any war was completely race-driven, it's WW2 Germany. But even the Nazi state has a nuanced origin that can be traced to the Treaty of Versaille, which unjustly placed almost all of the blame for WW1 on Germany, leading to sanctions which economically ruined the nation and creating the domestic suffering and hatred needed for a doctrine like Nazism to take hold. Wow this bullet point ended up long. Just think through your war more, lol.

Edit: Bear in mind my recommendations are just that; recommendations. I don't want to tell you how to tell your story. At the very least, I just hope you understand why I think your world needs to be developed more. 

Edited June 13, 2021 by ILuvHats

[GroundPetrel]

22 minutes ago, ILuvHats said:

Do you intend your elemental magic to be a soft system like Avatar, or do you want it to be a hard system? If you're imagining it at as a soft system, I don't have much to offer, though I will say I really like the concept of elemental manipulation being powered by adjacent elements. If you instead want it to be hard, I can totally offer you some ideas.

For your general worldbuilding, I'll have to echo Frustration's comment. Your character concepts, your ideas of gods, and your cultural relations are all single-mindedly guided by your political views. There's nothing wrong with letting your political beliefs influence your writing. Write what you're passionate about, and if you're passionate about your political views, you should definitely incorporate them into your stories. Hell, there's nothing inherently wrong with being politically didactic, though such stories can be very divisive. However, politics becomes a problem in writing when you oversimplify the issues, their origin, or reality without meaning to (allegorical tales are an example of intentionally simplifying issues to make a fundamental truth more obvious). Based on the outline you shared, which I admit may not be comprehensive in its descriptions, it feels like your story is expressing that "progressive = good, conservative = bad," and this idea is so pervasive that your world feels black-and-white and lacking in depth. 

I'm not saying you need to overhaul your story. There are a lot of things I like, such as your protagonists, especially the Boyfriend because let's face it, we need more transgender  characters in fiction. But I do have a few recommendations for adding nuance to your world and plot.

• Be careful how you write your protagonists in a society which is definitely set before the equivalent of the European High Middle Ages, based on the lack of gunpowder. While the protagonists are all outsiders, their perspectives shouldn't only be antagonistically reactive to the dominant culture. How has the dominant culture influenced their views subconsciously to align with popular ideology? Basically, make sure your protagonists don't feel like modern progressives set in the age of antiquity.
• I'd consider characterizing your gods in a more primal, archetypal way. Basing the deities purely on political concepts feels odd because such systems are very human in origin, filled with biases that aren't fundamental in nature. You can still achieve a very similar setting by narrowing the core of who Ahriman is such that his beliefs, motivation, and then interference in the world would result in a fascist society. This prevents the cosmology of your entire universe from feeling directly inspired by real world politics.
• Since your viewpoint characters are such complete outsiders to general human society, your plot could benefit from a major character that's a sympathetic and understandable insider. I'm not saying you need to advocate for fascism, but the story will feel less monochrome if it doesn't feel like every indirect supporter of the fascist human society is pure, villainous scum. 
• In a similar vein, I'd think through the basis of the human-shim war. In its current state, it's a blanket-statement genocidal war motivated by a society being... evil. While ethnic prejudice is a common factor in historical wars, it was rarely the sole driving factor. Often, it was more of an excuse to motivate individual citizens to fight for resources, which is usually the real reason wars start. What historical war do you want your fictional war to mirror? Do you want your human civilization to reflect European colonialism, driven by rapidly accelerating technological advances which led to depleted natural resources, increased competition within Europe, Darwinism, and the ability to expand due to said tech advances? Is your human society like the Islamic caliphates, formed through a combination of religious warfare and cultural absorption through conversion, both made possible by a coherent and unifying ideology merging religion and politics in a way that Medieval Catholicism could only envy? If it's a largely race-based bloodbath you want, Nazism and Imperial Japan are the quintessential examples. WW2 Japan was a product of simultaneously adopting foreign technology while retaining a high degree of cultural isolation, enabling the formation of a nationalist state on a resource barren island that literally required expansion to maintain its current trajectory. And if any war was completely race-driven, it's WW2 Germany. But even the Nazi state has a nuanced origin that can be traced to the Treaty of Versaille, which unjustly placed almost all of the blame for WW1 on Germany, leading to sanctions which economically ruined the nation and creating the domestic suffering and hatred needed for a doctrine like Nazism to take hold. Wow this bullet point ended up long. Just think through your war more, lol.

Edit: Bear in mind my recommendations are just that; recommendations. I don't want to tell you how to tell your story. At the very least, I just hope you understand why I think your world needs to be developed more. 

The good god/evil god thing is built into the concept.   The bad-guy god deliberately evokes European Christian heavenly-father concepts in his good-guy disguise, and Envy and Lust use illusions to appear as angelic and helpful figures (Lust uses white robes and a halo effect, Envy adopts the "wise old sage" persona) throughout the story.  The shim who are mostly decent people look like scary animals.  The bad deity basically convinced the humans through his servants that the good deity was weak and incapable of winning the forever war that was going on, and what do you know, there just so happened to be this shining new hero-figure who totally wasn't the bad deity in a disguise who showed the human armies the way to Glorious Victory against the retreating minions of darkness (who were retreating because the good deity had just given them sentience through the sacrifice of part of his being and was super distracted). 

(also, history buff here--the Treaty of Versailles contributed to German political instability, the rise of the Nazis specifically (as opposed to the other right-wing groups; the Communists had their big chance in 1918 and failed for a number of reasons including jumping the gun, which resulted in their discrediting for much of the Weimar period) depended much more on Hindenburg doing a coup in Prussia that significantly weakened what Weimar institutions were still functional, then giving Hitler high office after the non-Nazi right wing parties got their butts kicked in an election due to not getting much done.  Hindenburg basically laid all the ground work, without him and the Enabling Act Hitler wouldn't have been able to consolidate power as he did.  WW2 Japan was the consequence of a LOT of different things including a period of extreme political instability and military radicalization that was enabled by the military elite during the early 1930s--AKA the "government by assassination" period where junior officers were literally murdering PMs for not being rabidly racist and imperialist enough.  The decision to attack America was heavily influenced by the Russo-Japanese war, blatant racism on the part of the idiots in charge, and Tojo looking at Japan's war-footing military productivity vs. America's peace-footing military productivity and saying "ha, we produce 50% more guns and tanks than these pathetic fools, we'll totally thrash them!" because Tojo was kinda a moron that way.  Showa-era Japan was an elephant of a clusterfrakas.)

Anyway the political situation is that basically, there's some poor white tribes in the north, who get used as mercenaries sometimes by the rich state in the middle of the human lands; the Midlands are united under one state, which has historically had very weak central government and was dominated by feuding satraps with a fig-leaf of loyalty to the Overkings who relatively recently consolidated power.   Think an extended period of disorder somewhere between the Sengoku Jidai and the Diadochi period in terms of chaos, but with intermittent extended periods of peace.  The state religion is fairly authoritarian and socially intolerant (women's rights are pretty good though because female mages are needed for military service).  The Borderlands are a sparsely populated region whose dominant ethnic group is basically the "hick" relatives of the dominant, cosmopolitan Midlanders; they are extremely clannish, where anybody who's born into the group is accepted, even if they look really weird, but outsiders are mistrusted for years even if vouched for by an insider.  They're on the far side of the Midlands from the main war zone and don't give a damn about it.  Ash is basically accepted at home because her mom grew up in the little town, and brought Ash home when Ash was like a month old, and anyway Ash is a good hunter which is valuable to the community.  The Midlander empire is looking for room to grow and started exploring the Waste to see if there was anything economically viable to extract there, and ran into the shim who were coming in from the other side.  Due to the influence of the Seven conflict broke out, and a bunch of important nobles died, the church started portraying the shim as savage monsters who it was OK to kill (like the typical concept of orcs--the idea here is that the beast-people with prehensile tails and clawed feet and snouts with saber teeth and no external ears are actually pretty decent folks led by generally decent people while the human leaders are the real monsters).  

The shim have a semi-nomadic pastoral and hunter society, due to physical sexual dimorphism (males have clawed hands, females have more dextrous nailed hands) females are more often leaders and a male shim elder notes that his position as lore-keeper is considered unusual.  They have a strong oral tradition and their society revolves around an oath they developed to the good deity--the good deity is basically all about freedom but the irony is shim society is very traditional and conservative and the ritual adulthood rite is very important to them.   

I'm trying to build out an arc in the middle where a human officer (high noble rank but low military rank which is unusual, doubly so due to his sterling record) is sent to chase down the good guys because of the fallout of Mom's failed attempt to stop the Overking from doing a punitive expedition, catches up to them, and points out just how suspiciously convenient the whole situation is, then lets them go and orders his men to say they failed, which sparks Mom's reconsideration of the entire situation (she had been trying to ignore the visions when they showed the granting of sentience to the shim which upset Ash a lot when Mom told her group about the vision), eventually leading to her figuring out that Lust is messing with her head.  

Ash is basically a wide-eyed kid going to the big city and then on an adventure and a lot of her stuff is being messed up by the experience--when mercenaries attack her mother's house and she kills some of them she's basically nonfunctional while her mom gets to removing the bodies, and Envy picks her apart over the course of the story and builds it up to a crisis point.  I'm really worried about this character arc because Mom's character arc came together relatively easily IMO and this one relies on emotional stuff to make Ash believable.  Boyfriend was raised in the not-terribly-trans-friendly Midlander society and while he's disillusioned from it he's also surprised by alternatives he encounters.  

The main Midlander human society is basically meant to be an imperialist hegemonic regime with a stratified society and entrenched aristocracy that venerates warfare and absolute rule.  They have Middle Persian sounding names and use terms like "cataphract"  instead of "knight" but there are elements of absolutist France there too.  There's an impoverished mercenary recruitment ground of white people to the north and countries of black people to the south that are hard to conquer for geographic reasons (rugged terrain, very unfriendly to Midlander militaries) so are mostly let be as long as they don't try to mess with the status quo.  

Oh and I'm trying to show cultural differences through in-universe legends and fairy tales; Midlander stories are all about young noble heroes heroically slaying many foes and conquering vast realms, while Borderlander stories are all about the importance of taking care of family and friends and have a lot more of a freewheeling ethos with all sorts of wacky gender and sexuality hijinks.  Shim stories are all about men who are strong defenders of the clan and women who are wise and stern leaders and both types of protagonist killing mind-controlling villains and justly punishing voluntary traitors and oathbreakers.  Midlander society has an honor concept but it's very external and authoritarian, shim honor concepts are more internally focused to a point.  

Elemental manipulation's drawback is basically the key plot-relevant bit; it otherwise shares the general traits of being based on gestures and movements with ATLA.  The important part is that the more you use it the more it takes out of you so Boyfriend is constantly having to take a drink of water to replenish himself.  After he and Ash beat Envy (after he already took out a zombie golem thing), he's basically suffering severe dehydration and has to be half-carried out to the horses where he soon has trouble staying conscious.  He isn't even about big flashy moves either, his two best tricks are using a controlled pile of dust to snake it inside something's armor and then rip it apart from the inside, and turning the ground to quicksand before solidifying it again.