Magic

In this post we’ll discuss worldbuilding magic, looking at the types of magic systems that work for different worlds, and how you can implement a magic system of your own into your worldbuilding projects.

Hey everyone, my name is Matthew, at least according to the summoning ritual you’ve cast to bring me here, and this post is part of a series where I’ve been going through a science-adjacent worldbuilding process step-by-step. For today’s discussion, we’ll be taking a quick sidestep away from science, to talk about worldbuilding magic. However, while magic sits firmly in the realm of fiction, that doesn’t mean we can’t have structure for its worldbuilding process and use logical principles in its creation. Here we’ll be looking at concepts like ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ magic, ‘high’ and ‘low’ magic, before building our own magic system that we can use moving forward.

Magic, broadly speaking, refers to the invocation, manipulation, or manifestation of supernatural forces, beings, or entities, brought into the physical, natural world. Magic can either occur organically or be conducted deliberately through ritual, but in either case, for something to be considered magic, it must break or appear to break the otherwise established rules of our universe.

By very definition of magic being ‘law-breaking’, there are no rules for which types of magic you’d like to include in your world. Magic defies our real-world scientific reasoning and understanding, so when it comes to designing magic, the question is not whether you ‘can’ deviate from reality, but rather ‘when’ you should deviate from reality. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

In Harry Potter, the rules of our real-life world are deviated from almost immediately and regularly, from the stairs of Hogwarts moving with a mind of their own, to brooms and cars that can fly, with no explanation given beyond ‘it’s just magic’. In contrast, Fullmetal Alchemist’s magic system called ‘alchemy’ allows for the alteration of matter through energy, which is called transmutation. While alchemy still breaks our real-life universal laws, by deviating from reality further down the scientific line, Fullmetal Alchemist provides a magic system that makes more sense to many viewers, and many of the alchemical actions within the series can be reasonably explained with in-universe logic. This premise of things plausibly making sense in-universe is called verisimilitude.

However, you’re under no obligation to provide explanation for how your magic works, and to refer back to Harry Potter as an example, any inconsistencies in-universe are explained away with ‘because magic’. Verisimilitude in Harry Potter is maintained so long as a reader or viewer accepts that anything that doesn’t make sense is not going to be explained. If you are creating a system like this, you can implement effectively any magic you want and simply say “well it’s magic” to anyone who questions your creation.

But, if you’ve clicked on this video and are still watching, you’re probably looking for something more structured and tangible for the worldbuilding process. This is where the concepts of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ magic come in. What I’ve described in Harry Potter is a ‘soft’ magic system, where concepts like why some individuals can or can’t use magic, where the magic itself comes from, and perhaps most importantly, what the limitations of magics are for each individual, are not explained. This doesn’t necessarily mean that these rules are not present behind the scenes, but rather that they are not overtly shown or described and are therefore mysterious and unpredictable. By providing minimal or no explanation, your explanation can’t be ‘wrong’.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have ‘hard’ magic, where the system the magic comes from has clear rules and constraints that are outlined to the viewer, reader, or player, making things predictable. The audience of a hard magic system should understand what the rules and limits of magic are, and if there are any exceptions to the rules they should be outlined early. One of the most well-known hard magic systems is bending in Avatar: The Last Airbender. A waterbender can manipulate water and ice but not fire, and the only exception is the Avatar who can bend all four elements. The rules and limitations here are clear, and when a waterbender manipulates blood, the progression doesn’t break verisimilitude, but if a waterbender suddenly moved metal, this defies what would be predictable based on the rules, and the entire system falls apart.

Now that we’ve differentiated between hard and soft magic, the other important feature to determine before we can make our magic system is prevalence, which refers very simply to how much magic is present in your world, separated into the categories of ‘low magic’, ‘middle magic’, and ‘high magic’. In ‘low magic’ worlds, the supernatural tends to not play a huge role in shaping the world at large, with worlds designed using scientific forces like geology and climatology, rather than something supernatural like a deity being involved. Once ‘low magic’ worlds reach the point of designing cultures, magic and magic-users tend to be rare, often viewed with apprehension or even hostility, with powers that usually only influence things locally.

‘Middle magic’ worlds are the next stage up, and while magic might still be rare, it is more pervasive both in the natural world and in culture. The world may follow a path that mimics natural selection, but a supernatural force might be responsible for creating the world itself and be influencing things from behind the scenes, steering the world in a particular direction. Unnatural biomes might be present, such as a grove infused with natural magic that allows it to grow lush even in arctic environments. Once cultures are established, magic and its uses tend to be known about by most people, even if they can’t use it themselves. In these settings, both heroes and villains can become quite powerful, able to affect things on a global scale.

Finally, ‘high magic’ worlds have magic almost everywhere, and the use of magic is involved in most facets of the worldbuilding process. It is likely that the world and its inhabitants were designed or at least influenced by something supernatural, and that scientific laws have taken a backseat to allow magic to work. In the highest magic worlds, just about everyone can use at least some magic, and the levels that magic can reach are cosmic in scope, with the actions of heroes and villains able to threaten reality itself.

Importantly, these three levels of prevalence don’t have to be ubiquitous in all elements of your worldbuilding, and you might mix-and-match them to best suit your project. One of my favourite combinations is in the Call of Cthulhu universe, where there are some ‘high magic’ entities that are cosmic level threats sleeping in the dark corners of the universe, with magic tomes and world-ending cults… but the average person is exceptionally mundane, and very much ‘low magic’. On the other end of the spectrum, superheroes exist in worlds where they themselves are exceptionally ‘high magic’ but the world around them is ‘low magic’. You can play with these settings to see what works for you and your world.

Low, middle, and high magic also tend to determine the ‘cost’ of magic. In many settings, magic is not ‘free’, but rather has a cost that the magic-user pays in order to use magic. In some settings, this is clearly defined, such as magic in Eragon draining the energy from the caster that it would take them to achieve their magical feat through mundane means, though in other settings, the cost of magic is less defined. Even a hard-magic setting like Avatar: The Last Airbender only vaguely references the cost of bending as a combination of willpower, talent, and raw physical exertion. Generally speaking, low magic settings tend to have higher or stricter costs for using magic, while higher magic settings allow individuals to cast magic more freely, limited only by their knowledge or talent.

So, with our distinctions between hard and soft magic, as well as low, medium, and high magics, we can start to make a magic system of our own. To begin with, it’s important to establish whether magic is naturally occurring or brought into the world through ritual, as well as deciding where our magic is coming from; its source, which as we determined earlier will be a supernatural force, being, or entity, or combination thereof. You might have your magic be naturally occurring because of a supernatural force like ‘the weave’ in Dungeons and Dragons, or have it come into your world exclusively through ritual, such as through the worship of something specific like a deity.

In the world of Locus that we’ve been creating across this series, the universe has for the most part followed the same metaphysical laws we have in real life, so introducing anything that would have already been present for what we’ve created so far, like a powerful deity, would mean we’d have to go back and adjust things. Of course, never be afraid to retroactively add something to your worldbuilding, but that isn’t what I’m going to do here. Instead, when we determined the physics of this universe way back at the beginning of the worldbuilding process, we established precedence for energy transference in and out of a parallel universe, through a process called Synthesis for incoming energy, and Severance for outgoing energy.

In addition, we’ve already designed some plants utilising Synthesis and Severance, so we can say that for Locus, Synthesis and Severance occur naturally. Let’s expand on this to say that a creature that consumes these magical florae can invoke their effects, and that creatures that are exposed in this way for many generations absorb some of their magical properties, able to use basic invocations at will. For example, creatures that consume plants that magically self-combust may be able to utilise the same effect to breathe fire, and by extension, a culture that has developed around that plant may have some individuals who can also invoke fire. Sapient creatures will also be able to use rituals to expand the prevalence of magic and allow for more varied effects. The source of this magic is a supernatural force, specifically the incoming and outgoing energy transfer between universes. For our in-universe magic-users, this force will be channelled either organically through traits that exist for their species, or deliberately through either consuming magical flora, using them as ritual reagents, or a combination thereof.

Next, we need to determine whether our magic system is going to be hard or soft. Seeing as we are designing Locus with science in mind, creating a logical hard magic system makes more sense. So, with a hard magic system we need to create limitations and rules that are clear and predictable. To do this, let’s outline the plants we’ve created so far that utilise Synthesis and Severance. To keep things logical, we want to start to categorise, and keeping in theme with our science-adjacent world, we can place our magical effects into five categories; those that affect thermodynamics, mass, photonics, electromagnetism, and biology. We can then split our five categories in half, with Synthesis increasing their effects, while Severance decreases their effects. Importantly, we can see from our table that we have some gaps, but this is perfectly okay! Even though we haven’t made something that fits the slot for increasing gravitational energy, it’s not super difficult to predict what it will do, which is the EXACT point of a hard system, that it is predictable.

Now we need to determine whether our world will be a low, middle, or high magic setting. Locus easily fits the mould for a low magic setting, as so far, we’ve created everything through science rather than magic. With this in mind, we can come to a couple of expectations: firstly, that magical flora will be uncommon and special, and secondly that magic users will be rare. While we determined earlier that a culture may have innate magic users after having been exposed to magical flora for many generations, the number of magic users is likely to be limited, require training, or perhaps both. I particularly like the idea of a greater number of people able to use very basic magic, with advanced use requiring training, so let’s say that roughly 1 out of 100 individuals within a magic-exposed culture can use magic innately, but that to cast more than very basic invocations requires dedicated training. Innate magical ability won’t be required to learn how to use magic, but it certainly would help.

Finally, we need to establish a limitation on how much magic an individual can use. As Locus is a mostly low-magic setting, the cost is likely to be higher, and more severe. Rather than placing a hard limitation on magic use though, I prefer the more middle-magic idea of magic-users able to use magic based on their levels of knowledge and expertise, with the amount of incoming or outgoing energy scaling with the level of complexity of an incantation. Basic innate magic will be straightforward but not able to manipulate much, while advanced ritual magic will be complicated and manipulate far higher amounts of energy. Rather than an explicit ‘cost’ for magic, let’s establish a consequence instead.

When we created Synthesis and Severance way back when we determined the physics of this world, we stipulated that the two universes’ flow of energy back and forth was related to their spacetime, and we can think of magic as the ties between the universes, with higher levels of synthesis and severance drawing the two universes closer together. Let’s say that if too much magic is used at a point in spacetime, the divide between the two universes becomes too thin, which causes otherworldly beings called ‘breachers’ to come forth into the physical realm. Breachers manifest as forces of pure Synthesis or Severance, of creation or entropy, depending on how the balance has been affected in an area, and are likely to be unfeeling vessels of extreme behaviour, akin to what we would consider a demon or even a biblical angel to be like.

We’ll design breachers more thoroughly down the line, but for now, they provide an effective ‘cost’ for our magic-users on Locus. How much magic is required to bring about a breacher is going to be fluid, based on factors such as how thin the veil was in the first place, or the skill or sloppiness of the magic-user, and while skilled magic-users would be able to roughly determine how safe a casting will be, the risk should always be there to keep the hubris of mages on Locus in check.

So, to recap, magic refers to happenings that break or appear to break the rules of the universe. Magic can be separated into ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ magic, where soft magic refers to unexplained and mysterious magic, while hard magic refers to more clearly defined and predictable magic. Settings tend to fall into ‘low’, ‘middle’, or ‘high’ magic, referring to the prevalence of magic, though there are no rules for how magic should or should not be implemented, and you can mix and match these settings to produce a magic system that best fits your world.

Join me next time when we’ll return back to a more realism-based approach to worldbuilding and look at religion, looking at how religions are founded, evolve over time, and the cultural impacts that they have. And until next time… stay awesome!