One of the primary tenets of a good magic system is the existence of some sort of cost for that magic being used. There are numerous ways to do this, and I can’t list all of them here, but here are some main ways of doing this:
Finite resources: In this case, a character has a set amount of magic they can access, and there simply is no more magic that they can use. Generally in these cases magic is renewable and can be recharged through ritual, rest, or even just time. It can be written so a person can increase their magic reserves through practice, in the same way that a person can get more muscle, but you don’t have to go down that route.
Exhaustion/toll on the body: In this case, a person doesn’t necessarily have a finite amount of magic that they can theoretically use, but using magic draws from their own physical resources. This is often down in the form of exhausting a person, but you can also have it take any other sort of toll on a person’s body. This can also be done in conjunction with the finite resources, as with chakra in Naruto, where a person has x amount of chakra and the more they use, the more exhausted they get. You can either have automatic shut-off points (a person will pass out before they use enough to kill them) or make it so characters have to make sure they don’t actually kill themselves using too much magic.
Requires sacrifice: In this case, an internal or external sacrifice is required to do magic, or to do powerful magic. This is often used in ritual magic, in part because sacrifices generally take time, but if you can figure out how to make a sacrifice part of an immediate magic system, that can work to. A sacrifice in this case can be blood, a memory, a life, or whatever else you want to make it.
Requires outside object: In this case, the person has to have/be using some sort of outside object (a wand, a staff, an amulet, etc.) to do magic. This is more of a restriction than a cost, but you can have the object be limited-use only, where either the magic needs to be renewed after a certain amount of use or it’s burned through entirely.
Toll on the environment: In this case, the magic doesn’t pull from the person itself but from the environment amount them, taking a toll on that environment as it does. That toll can be pulling literal energy out of the air (making it colder), it can be killing plant- or animal-life around the person, it can be any number of things.
Opens one up to other things: In this case, magic opens one up to outside influences (the dark side, the forces of evil, etc.). I’ve seen it does as making a person more open to mental illness, but that’s something you want to be really careful about, especially if you don’t have a mental illness yourself. This one in particular can be tricky, but there are ways to make it work.
There are many other forms of costs for magic, and you don’t need to use any of these if they don’t work for your story, but they’re a jumping-off point to work from.
Tag: worldbuilding
FINALLY 👏 SOMEONE 👏 SAID 👏 IT. 👏 ALL OF IT. 👏ALL AT ONCE. 👏
(Thank you @fallingawkwardly for bringing this to my attention.)
Brandon Taylor is great.
while brandon taylor is p cool, actually stopping to address like half of these would bog your story down in some of the most fantastically pointless, reader unfriendly, and unnecessary detailing ever written since the silmarillion was slapped down on the intake desk at george allen & unwin, and amounts to little more than pedantic nerd-flexing, “how did they agree on a systematised measure of time”? are you KIDDING ME?? more like how the fuck could you possible convince your read that yes, it matters, please don’t go, just another 500 words on my in-universe ‘mathematics in the context of social sciences’ textbook that my illiterate character happened to be thumbing through. it’s important to work on your world building, obviously, but there is a pretty hard limit to what you need to show your reader, and when you cross that line, unless you happen to be the reincarnated soul of terry pratchett, it becomes flabby, boring, and distracting from the actual story. YES to getting rid of senseless misogynistic tropes and putting more effort into crafting your story, NO to including the fucking ancestral migrations of horses.
Nah. It wouldn’t bog the story down, in and of itself. You’re conflating two things: realism of setting with the writer’s ability to pull it off.
Lots of medieval European novels exist that depict the setting in a more realistic manner. They’re not the ones that get Game-of-Thrones popular, because much of the medieval European audience isn’t interested in realism; they want white supremacy and romanticized nobility and women depicted as chattel and so on. They come here for the fantasy of a world where they don’t have to depict Certain Non-White People as complex or interesting, or Certain Genders or Orientations as even existing, and where all problems can be solved by weird eugenics (”he carries the king’s blood, that automatically makes him more noble than the rest of us!”) and violence. But there’s an entire field – historical fiction – where realistic depictions of medieval Europe aren’t just common, they’re expected. Not everybody craves erasure and oversimplification.
But this is an entirely different matter from capability to write realistic medieval Europe. Any writer can do anything if they have the skill to pull it off. But doing this takes more effort than writing lazy, creepily racist settings that reinforce myths rather than facts. Historical fiction writers do research, for example. They don’t just set their last D&D session on paper. And good writers can make a story interesting about any character – not just the princes, or the farmboys destined to become princes, but maybe the egg woman whose protein keeps the village alive through the year without a summer. Maybe the merchant’s son who desperately needs to keep his scorned faith hidden while he’s off being apprenticed to another family. Maybe the traveler from Kathmandu who’s brought a load of goods (and maybe a mortarboard plow) from the East; she speaks ten languages and falls in love with a Saxon farmgirl. Depicting these stories doesn’t require an infodump, just some skill. And interest in doing something other than what’s been done a million times before.
So, okay, maybe you can’t write a medieval story that recognizes your characters won’t be riding any superfast Arabian-style horses called Shadowfax or whatever, because there’s no Arabia and/or your society’s been at war with them for 1000 years, put that mf on a plowhorse and tell him to do his best. But that doesn’t mean a good writer can’t manage it. And don’t pooh-pooh the idea of realism just because you don’t feel like trying it.
And! Knowing the answers to really nitpicky questions in your worldbuilding doesn’t absolutely mean your reader has to know. This can be painful because if you spent a ton of time building a realistic fantasy world then by God you want to tell your readers every detail, but if you can resist the urge to infodump about things that aren’t relevant to the story, your world will probably still feel richer and more real because you have a deeper understanding of it.
I'm a defeatist but I don't have to be 