How do write magic without making it a free out of jail card everytime tension is building up
How do write magic without making it a free out of jail card everytime tension is building up
How do write magic without making it a free out of jail card everytime tension is building up
Have the characters use it beforehand for something mundane. That way you can express that magic is a tool your characters use not that rarely
It's probably more believable in a "sorcery" sense where the character is a vessel for a more powerful entity.
Make it extremely dangerous/volatile with a high chance of killing or disfiguring the person using it, or backfiring and making everything worse.
You're channelling this unknown power, its boundaries are unclear, and mistakes are punished heavily.
Wild magic - magic is unreliable and often backfires
Blood magic - magic requires the sacrifice from the user or their companions in proportion to potency
Prophetic magic - the magician cannot control magic so much as he can arrange the conditions for something magical to occur (e.g. luring someone to stand in the spot where a lightning strikes moments later)
Antimagic - there are things in the your world that can completely negate magic
Vancian magic - magician can only do so much magic and then requires a period of rest
Jack Vance
You can't have magic in an otherwise mundane setting without letting it be the low-fantasy equivalent to a nuclear bomb. Even fairly minor (in high-fantasy terms) magic such as throwing fireballs or teleportation is, and ought to be, an incredibly powerful tool that kings will kill each other to control. If the world contains so many powerful and dangerous things that a wizard can just be a wizard, and not a kingdom's greatest military asset, then there is no room in said world for normal humans to be a significant part of your story.
By designing strict and clear rules and a system of how magic works, when it works, what magic can and cannot do, it's capabilities and limitations, before even coming up with any of the story. When writing a story implement magic according to the rules without any exceptions. Part of these rules may be exposed to the reader gradually by incorporating them into the story.
kingkiller does a good job of this framework, even if the story itself is plodding juvenile mary sue bullshit
you need to establish the limits of what your characters can do. Some ways that come to mind are:
- limit what magic can do (can't summon water in someones lungs for an insta kill)
- limit usability of magic (mana is scarse/spells require lots of ingredients)
- define your charatcers ability to use magic ("i can only transmute metals")
- situational nerfs (need to focus to cast/stress makes you unable)
and any combination of the above, but they need to be known to the reader(sometimes finding out about some of these in a crutial time can build tension)
Tie magic into the fact only some people can do it and even then it takes years of training (think meditation/mental fortitude/endurance training) to do it powerfully. Yes someone can cast fireballs, but doesn't mean they're fireproof or won't freak out when the fire gets out of control. There's still an element of tension because magic users can still do magic badly and have to be careful with their magic. In an emergency seconds count, so if they have to do some recitation/wand waving they're vulnerable to being disrupted between spellcasting.
Soft magic system: the magic has some kind of drawback or cost that carries its own risk of some kind or prevents it from being an infallible source to rely on (i.e. Gandalf not being there for the dwarves for a chunk of The Hobbit removing their out of jail card)
Hard magic system: Avoid treating it like Shonen powerup and instead something like an art form or a trade. Its only worth squat if youre a pro at it, it requires a certain set of internal or external circumstances to get it to work, a character is physically or mentally unable to use it, using it during the current circumstances has a very high price, etc. Alternatively, it IS a free out of jail card, thus making it a form of magic that everyone in the world is both afraid of and wants to control/seize for themselves
Fake and gay duality. Take Brando Sando’s wiener out of your mouth.
Some common tropes to avoid this problem.
1. Make it a wild, unknowable and risky source of power that humans/characters are generally shit at using.
2. Make it only usable via heavy sacrifice to some higher being and as such turn magic into a religious sort of thing that cannot be accessed without an outside assistant (demon, spirits, god, etc)
3. Simply don't let regular characters "use" magic, and make your magic a force of nature.
4. Stop writing genreslop altogether.
>muh logic based magic systems
Only extreme autists and D&D gays care about those
>muh non logic based magic systems
only bible and lotr gays care about those
>only bible and lotr CHADS care about those
FTFY
Gtfo
Make it work the same as it works in real life
Pretending to be an edgy schizo to have sex with arthoes?
Use it sparingly and always give it symbolic meaning.
>Every action must have an equal and opposite reaction.
Not with magic, energy and matter can be conjured out of nothing
In reality too. Do you even quantum mechanics?
Have technologically superior rape aliens who have nuclear bombs and space lasers as antagonists.
Define limtis. Define what it can and can't do. Your guy who uses fire? Have him just use fire. Don't have him comprehend fire = energy and then dab his way into manipulating molecules or using ice powers by just doing fire but moronic or some moronic comic tier shit.
Have it cost shit, make it require some form of training. Actually respect that cost. Don't pull
>Muh willpower
Unless its at a super pivotal moment, leads to some relevalation or there's a punishment for it.
There was a book I read ages ago about some girl who had ice and fire magic which just let her walk over the story with no real effort, casually destroying any and all challenges, outpowering the entire cast casually.
Her brother on the other hand had a shitty form of blood magic which slowly killed him to use.
The bad guy had totem magic or some shit like that.
Bad guys stuff took ages to set up but was strong, brothers was barely useable. Both of their powers felt reasonable and like they couldn't trivialize the story.
Hers could. Any part of the story focussing on her was entirely forgetable; I only actually remember what her brother went through. But even then, I wouldn't say her system was bad; her being so far above everyone else is why I remember her brother's struggles so clearly.
Just copy magic system from another (successful) book, change a few minor things so it appers new and then use it in your story.
This too.
Look at how many magic systems are just stolen from xianxia or how xianxia itself later on started to steal western magic
Make it like classical mythology. You don’t use magic, magic uses you.
Don't use it to resolve tension
All fantasy RPGs do it some how. Download a rulebook and find out.
Make it super hard, the exertion of casting a spell visibly exhausts the caster, have them make decisions about using magic, fighting or fleeing depending on their previous exertions. I remember one of those books they wrote in the video game oblivion where to exhausted mages are transporting an artifact or something and they've both got just one spell left for the day and it's super psychological if they betray each other or work together to the end. The tension only worked because they can't just fling fire, they have very limited resource to use on magic.
The problem is that you, and many other fantasy writers, are thinking of magic as a tool or a weapon. Choosing between whether your wizard character shoots electricity or fireballs is like deciding whether your knight uses swords or clubs. In doing this, you have made the supernatural mundane. Magic is not a tool, but a very strange kind of science that is not objective and empirical, but rather subjective and narrative-based.
The god Odin in norse mythology wields the powers of necromancy, but he doesn't use it to raise an army of zombie thralls. Instead, it's a device norse poets used to allow Odin to talk with the resurrected dead and learn their supernatural wisdom. It makes for the purpose of the story. The dead straddle both the mundane world and the supernatural world, and thus are superhumanly intelligent. This makes sense in the context of the story, but it doesn't jive with norse myth as a whole which generally doesn't recognize the existence of souls as independent things from the body. But it doesn't have to jive for the whole system, just the one story.
The second you decide that magic needs to be consistent and knowable regardless of how this interacts with the moment-to-moment storytelling, you have turned it into a musket that shoots pretty colors, rather than magic.
well said
>How do write magic
You shouldn't. All fantasy is shit. Write horror instead. The supernatural elements can be researched thoroughly by looking at folklore, religions, mythology, and legends.
>old man yells at genre
Use magic to build up tension instead.
Make it require preparation and forethought.
Oh you charged up your ruby for offensive damage but now you need to heal a wound? Tough shit, you don't have anything that can do it.
Think more Dungeons and Dragons, not Harry Potter.
Why would you want to make your story obey game mechanics, when game mechanics are intended as a more convenient way to simplify complex, nuanced information? Stories don't need to be massively simplified to be understood the way a game does, because a story is purely text-based and has the freedom to go into as much detail as it wants.
>Limit your magic don't give it an instant kill with no blowback
Harry potter's killing curse was a horrible thing to have in your series.
make it all a big ambiguous mystery box then die before having to reveal how it works
When writing be sure to annotate the character's MP (mana points) remaining after ever action.
Write about supernatural phenomena in a rather costumbrist or idyllic way. Say the fairies dance, the shadow of something moves on its own, the wind whispers words, the mage does a fireworks display, use the magic as tools for obstacles.
If you DO intend to make it a free out of jail card, which seems to be what you're suggesting, have it take a toll on the user or his companions, or have it become an uncontrollable force. That way it will not be a free out of jail card but a pay fine out of jail card.