How to Create a Magic System

What’s up, storytellers? I’m C. R. Rowenson and it’s time to talk about magic. I’ve built a lot of magic systems over the years, dozens of them, both on my own and while helping various authors build their own systems. And while going through

all of that, I discovered that there’s a seven stage process that everybody goes through when building their magic systems. Today, we’re going to look at each of the seven stages, give you a high level overview of what they are, why they’re important, and

then give you some quick details to tie it all together. So if you’ve never built a magic system, or if you’re wanting to build a new one and you don’t know where to start, or even if you’ve been building them awhile

and you just want to make sure that you’re hitting all the steps you can to do the best you can. This videos for you. Alright, let’s get started stage one inspiration. Before you start building and start creating your magic

system, you have to want to do it. It’s so important you need to make sure you know what that core concept that core visual the core driving force behind the creation of this magic system is. If you don’t know

why you’re doing it. You can end up kind of flailing and going all over the place when labs in various areas of the industry are trying to grow crystals for whatever purpose they actually start with a very tiny crystal from which they grow.

Everything else, and this actually helps them grow what they need at higher purites more quickly. That’s what your inspiration can be. It’s that tiny little mote, which, as a side note, is called a seed crystal, that tiny little seed crystal

is what everything grows around and we want to make sure that we have the same thing for our magic system. It will help keep everything more cohesive and in line, and that’s part of why the inspiration and your

seed crystal is so important. Also, a good seed crystal will help you build faster and who doesn’t want that? This seed crystal this point of inspiration can be anything and can come from anywhere. Pictures that you found on the Internet. A character concept, a

Just gripping emotional moment in your plot, even just your high level plot could work well for a seed crystal, or even just a specific area that you have a particular amount of expertise. Any of that can work as your

seat crystal, for example. Throughout this video I’m going to be referring to a magic system I built that I just called the viral magic system. Because, surprise surprise, it was about magical viruses. In my defense, I built the system years before covid

just wanted to put that out there. The seed crystal for that magic system was pretty straightforward. Viruses and magic, and that was pretty much it. Stage two idea generation. This is where you’re just recording and expanding on all of the ideas you

have for your magic system. You’re just going nuts. You’re writing down thoughts for magical effects, for limitations, for character moments, for themes, for concepts, for visuals, for conflict. For literally anything relating to your magic system. This is where you

just get a job down and go nuts, and it’s amazing. I love idea generation. At this point you pretty much want your brain to be like a rabbit on PCP running through a minefield. Except in this case, explosions are a good thing. Yeah, this seems

super obvious, right? I mean if you don’t have ideas, you can’t have a magic system, and that’s true. I want to bring this up here because a lot of people move on past this stage before they really should.

You want to have lots of ideas, lots of them. So many ideas, swarms of ideas, more ideas than any one story could handle, and there’s a very simple reason for this that I’m going to go over to. Our old buddy Thomas Edison when

he says if you want a great idea, have a lot of them. There are a lot of different ways that you can go about idea generation, and you can find any number of answers to this online. Just look up ideas for brainstorming

my personal favorite is mind mapping? That’s what I did for the viral magic system, and you can actually see how out of hand it got right here. This is a lot of time and a lot of stuff went in here that I didn’t

use, but that’s OK. ’cause that’s the point. If you’re enjoying this video so far, please hit that like button. It helps more than you know. Stage three alignment. No, I’m not talking about your true neutral sorcerer or your chaotic evil rogue.

What we’re talking about here is the ways that your magic system aligns and connects with your story and all of the elements within it, because you want them to be supporting each other, not damaging each other. So this stage is all about figuring out what

your magic needs to be. As a side note, you might be able to do this stage first, and if you can do it. Me pesonally, I can’t. I need to have some ideas as to what the magic could be before I can really

tie it to the story and figure out what I need it to be. So why is alignment important? Well, you need the sights on your rifle to be properly aligned, otherwise it’s pretty hard to hit the target, right? It’s the same thing with

your magic system. We want to deliver a certain type of experience both to the characters and to the audience. It can be tricky to do that if we aren’t making sure that things are properly lined up so that when

we take the shot it goes where we want. And like I said, you want all of this working together because when they are all aligned you get something that is far greater than the sum of its parts. With the viral magic system

that was for a story that I wanted, heavy elements of horror, I knew I had a character. I wanted a character that was immuno compromised which tied in heavily with how the Magic system works and the specific story I had in

mind was for a prisoner that was playing a long-con and using this magic to get an edge to pull information out of their interrogators. And that’s what I kind of focused on to make sure everything was in line and pointing where I wanted it to go.

Stage four definition. This stage is what most people think of when they actually talk about creating a magic system. I mean before we looked at what it could be, we looked at what it needs to be. This is where you dig into

what it actually is. You look at the effects that you’re going to include. This is where you hammer out how it ties into the world, how it can connect with your characters, how it’s perceived, how it fits into everything, and

actually just defining its nature and what it does and frankly, how it do. For the viral magic system it came down to a couple of key things that I needed to identify. I focused in on I needed three to five affects for

the story that I wanted to build, and that was it. Had a whole bunch of other ideas, but I just needed the three to five. I also wanted to know how it fit into the world so I knew that they were pseudo-natural.

They behaved like viruses exactly like the rest of the viruses in the world. Aside from the magical powers effect. And they were also very new to the world. And in terms of types of magic systems, I was really shooting

for something that was a soft-rational system. Those were the main elements I really needed to define at this stage. I did a lot more than that, but those were the key pieces. Stage five restrictions. We now know what are magic

needs to be an we know what it is. It’s equally important that we spend some time learning and understanding what it isn’t. This pertains to what the Magic can’t do as well as what we don’t want it to be. There’s an

article online called Sanderson’s Second Law of Magic that I highly recommend you read. In it Brandon Sanderson talks at length about how the limitations are actually the more interesting part of the magic system, and that is true.

I also think that just defining the scope. And the boundaries of your magic, and literally what you want it to be is also important, because that can keep you in line as you’re going through the rest of your story to

stop you from spreading in directions that you didn’t necessarily intend or didn’t necessarily want to begin with. Now limitations can take place on any number of levels. This can be character level limitations, actual system limitations, or even just world limitations. It’s really

up to you how you want to do this. If you’re at a loss for what to do with limitations and you just want some more guidance. I wrote a workbook called Restrictions May Apply exactly for this purpose,

in it you’ll find a lot of information walking you through what limitations are, what they can be as well as 15 exercises to take you step by step through the process. Of building limitations for your magic and catching those most important pieces

of where your system can break and where you need them, so check it out. I think you’re going to like it. With the viral magic system, I had a whole bunch of limitations as some of them were at the system

level, like because they were viruses. If you had the magic, you also had the virus, which meant you were sick and you felt like garbage. In fact, you felt the worst when your magic was at its most powerful. Not to mention that

you know you could die, so some pretty big drawbacks there, but you also didn’t have much control over the effects. The nature of them was mostly a persistent magical phenomenon that happened around the user. So that was just limitations from the system.

I also put limitations on some of the specific effects. One of them I just called it the portal strain. It would allow people, oh man I love this one. It would allow you to teleport through pools of your own blood. I’m a terrible person,

but the main drawback there is you had to have enough blood in order to create these portals, and you had to get the blood in both places to move from one to the other. There were a whole bunch of limitations that fit into that.

Stage 6: testing. As much as I love idea generation this stage. This stage is my favorite because what you get to do at this point is you take everything that you’ve built. And you just play with it. You just go

in as many different random directions as you can, see how far you can take it. See what breaks, what is theoretically possible that you don’t want to be possible, and you just put it through the wringer. Stress, test it, drop it, throw it around, and

see what happens. Aside from it being fun, this is a very important stage, because the last thing we want is to introduce major plot holes to our story. By adding in our magic. And I’m sure you can think of a few stories or systems

where this has happened. You know the story was alright, then they put in the magic and now there’s this giant gaping plot hole that a dragon could fly through. We don’t want that. So it’s important that you test it,

find those holes, find those cracks, and Patch them up before anybody else sees them. While you’re testing your system. There are a couple of areas that you want to pay particular attention to, and one is, if anything in the

system would trivialize the plot that you’re putting in another one is if it would let your characters become God-like either because they become Omnipotent with unlimited power, omnipresent being everywhere at once, or omniscient. Being able to know. All things at all times.

Those all tend to be problems. It can work with. Your antagonist. It’s especially a problem if your protagonist gets there, it gets boring. Also, you want to watch for paths to unlimited wealth. Those are some things to keep your eyes out for.

Let’s go back to the viral magic system for a second. Specifically the portal strain. All you needed was pools of the infected blood and anybody and anything could be teleported from one to another. I started testing the system and I found a a terrible

and gruesome and horrifying loophole that could be exploited. I realized that as written there wasn’t a reason that people couldn’t. Take someone with the strain. And just harvest their blood. Just keep perpetually re infecting them and just save up gallons and pints.

Saving up all the blood they need to just create massive massive portals. Now I looked at that to see what problems that might cause an added some restrictions made it more difficult to work. In the end I left it there because

It’s so amazing, but I did put in a lot of things to make it more difficult for them to get there, and that’s what you want to watch out for, and that’s what you want to do with your testing.

Find it, break it, fix it. Stage seven iteration. Come on. Don’t look at me like that. Gotta go back, you gotta do it again. I’m sorry, OK, you don’t necessarily need to go back into the entire thing over

again, but you do need to revisit some of the previous stages. ’cause, let’s face it, nothing is perfect on the first try. It’s just not as much as we want our first draft to be flawless. It’s not, it’s just not, and

your magic system won’t be either. So iteration is probably the most important stage and a lot of people skip it. So don’t do that. Take some time, go back, go through the other parts and revisit some things and see how you can make it better.

You can go about iteration pretty much any way you want. If you wanted to, you could go from start to finish. Again, just even with the exact diagrams and flowcharts, an word clouds that you had before and just expand on them.

You can do that. You can also jump to specific stages and fix things that didn’t feel right, or that you moved past because you wanted to keep going, and also you may have found a number of problems, especially

in stage six with the testing that you’re not quite sure how to fix, you can go back and iterate just to solve that problem. Iteration is a powerful tool for you to use any way that you need to make your system better.

For the viral magic system. The most important pieces of iteration for me were the alignment and the definition. I had all of this stuff and I had to make sure that it actually still worked for my story and there

were a number of things that weren’t. They weren’t going to do what I needed, so that was where I really kind of dug in, both with the alignment and. The definition to hone in on specifically what I needed. That’s where I picked

my three to five strains that I wanted in the story. There you go. There’s the seven stages you got it. You have inspiration, idea, generation, alignment, definition, restrictions, testing, and iteration. That’s what you need to create a magic system.

And like I said, everybody that I’ve worked with and everybody that I have watched goes through these seven stages. Whether they know it or not. I do want to throw in that you don’t have to go through them in that order.

This is the order that works best for me. So find the way that works best for you, and it may change from system to system, but whatever you do, just make sure that you’re hitting all seven of the stages and you should be good.

I have a lot more to talk about with the stages of magic and how to build your magic systems, so comment below and let me know which of these stages you want to hear more about or if there’s something specific that you’re struggling with

an in the meantime. This is Seamus. And he wants you to like this video and subscribe to my channel. And if you don’t, he’s going to be very sad pupper. In that right buddy? He’s devastated. Thanks so much for watching and

Keep building and stay awesome.