I'm not even sure if this thing will go anywhere; I have a tendency to invent universes just for the hell of it. But inventing universes is fun, so I'll go with it anyway.

There used to be a whole big schpiel that I wrote about my story, but I decided to get rid of it and just ask for feedback on one small part of it. That part is my magic-subdivision system.

I have magic in my universe, and I want people to use it. However, I don't want everyone to use all of it; I want people to be restricted to certain types of spells. I've decided to do this division by elements, as in Earth Fire Air Water, but if someone has a better idea for how to divide them I'd love to hear it.

I'm also being complex in the 'flavors' of magic I have. No straight Platonic Solid work here, no. Instead, I'm combining two elements to form a flavor. For instance, what do you get when you combine Fire and Air? Well, the most obvious output is a mirage; it's made of hot air, right? Also, you tend to find mirages in the desert--and, let's face it, air and fire seem to be in profusion out in the Sahara. So I invented a flavor that draws its inspiration from the desert: The Veilmage. Mostly he gives you illusions, distractions, mirages, confusions, --hence the term 'veilmagic'--but he can also, on occasion, produce really nasty things like tornadoes and lightning strikes. Glaciermages and Lavamages work along similar lines and philosophies.

So okay. That takes care of the FA (fire-air), AW (air-water) and FE (fire-earth) combinations. But what about EW? Mudmagic? Yuck, I don't think so. ("My God, an orc! Quick! Fling mud at it!") And, even worse--what about FW and AE? Those are polar opposites! They aren't going to combine nicely.

The best I could come up with for FW was a Flaremage--on the assumption that, if you combined fire and water on a molecular level, you could get some neat atomic tricks and start doing really nasty things with radiation, light, etc. But that's stretching it a little, wouldn't you say?

The other thing I wanted to do was work in Gravity as a flavor of magic. I mean, think about it--it's basically The Force from Star Wars. Extraordinarily useful. I figured that EW could make Gravmagic--something to do with the mutable qualities of water being applied to density, certainly water does some interesting density tricks itself--but that seems a stretch too.

I think all this can work, but I really need some ideas. What do you folks think? Does it work? Does it seem interesting? Does it seem realistic? Any ideas for more flavors? Useful flavors. I ran the EA dilemma past a friend of mine and she said, "Canyonmagic." It's got earth and air simultaneously; it makes sense. But... "Fine," I replied, "you're facing a charging bull and all you have is a canyon. What do you do?" As you can see, not so good. Lavamagic ends up covering most techtonic disturbances anyway.

quote:

---

as in Earth Fire Air Water

---

I believe the Bhuddists have a fifth element: "the void," "nothing-ness," or what-have-you. (Anyone who has read Musashi's Book of Five Rings will recognize these as the five rings.)

quote:

---

Useful flavors?

---

Who says all magic has to be useful? Who says anything has to be useful? There are about 70 metals on the periodic table; perhaps five are produced in industrial quantities.

EW magic will probably be something only a handful of gray-bearded Professor-mages study at the ivory-tower universities, and if they didn't have tenure, they'd have been fired long ago to make room for a newly-granted Ph.D. (or whatever) with research grants from the Department of Defense to study improved fireballs, or grants from Ford to study improved road-paving (earth magic).

EW -- makes the ground something like quiksand. You don't have to throw mub-bolts. You don't have to throw dolts at all, if you ask me. Too D&D style for my taste, anymore.

FW -- boiling water. Someone is swiming in the river, and suddenly: "Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!" You get the point.

AE -- Now, that's a difficult one. Hmmmm... The only I can't think here is, make the stone more airy, so you can pass throught walls. Or make the air hard as stone --an invisible wall kind of thing.

Finaly, as Chad said, why not put some other elements in the mix, also. Void is a good one. Also, think: Life, Death, Travel, Change, Chaos, Law.... The possibilities are endlees. And intertaining.
I'm sure you'll get a kick out of that!

So in theory if a mage was able to use that 5th element in a spell... it would be one powerful spell. Just a thought

As for the flavors of your magic system. AE would seem to deal with sand storms, tornados, dust storms, dust devils, etc. Not a very wide area of magic, but all in all fairly powerful.

WF... um... boiling water attacks? But then again, one isn't required to force opposites together.

As for earth and water... um... permafrost comes to mind. Possibly something to do with glaciers (yeah, they're water but they are so huge that they might as well be land, etc). In fact... what about plants? Plants need earth and water to grow, so using those two elements a mage might be able to control plant growth.

Just a randomized

The eastern elements, I believe, include metal and wood in their list, and are slightly more interesting, but mostly because the story would then have a more eastern flair (I'd think).

There's always the D&D breakdown, though I don't think you can use that. But it's something to think of springing from. They breakdown like this:

Abjuration: protection spells
Conjuration: pretty straight forward
Divination: also straight forward
Enchantment: again, pretty plain
Evocation: manipulation of energy
Illusion: straight forward
Necromancy: maniupulation of powers of death
Transmutation: making something into something else.

Mage: the Ascension, another roleplaying game, breaks things down into spheres of magic: Correspondence, Entropy, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Prime, Spirit, and Time.

Changeling: the Dreaming (dealing with faerie magic) breaks magic down into Arts and Realms. The Arts, or types of magic, are: Chicanery (deception, guile), Legerdemain (sleight of hand, illusion), Primal (nature), Soothsay (divination), Sovereign (domination), Wayfare (travel), to name a few. The Realms, or targets for the magic, are: Actor (mortals), Nature, Fae (magical creatures), Prop (objects made by humans), Scene (area effects), and Time (delaying of effects).

Most roleplaying games have their own systems - I'd suggest flipping through a few of them. Mage and Changeling are good - but so are others by that company (White Wolf Game Studio) such as Vampire, Wraith, Werewolf, and Hunter. Each has its own unique system of magic, with its own breakdown.

Maybe breaking things down into senses? Sight, touch, and hearing magics being dominant, with taste and smell magics being less used. Maybe having a taste magician be the protagonist, striving to compete?

I dunno. I just always groan when I hear about elemental wizards or sorecerors - almost as much as others groan about FTL travel.

knife: Low "magic" threshold, most humans have enough expertise and skill to fashion a servicable knife. Unlimited uses, versitile and durable. Can easily be used covertly. The downside is that it provides only a relatively small advantage over an unarmed opponent, and can often be countered by improvised defenses.

grenade: Intermediate "magic" threshold, many humans have the necessary skill and knowledge to create a hand thrown bomb. Very powerful, a single grenade can disable or kill multiple opponents simulaneously, and can successfully overcome even many advanced defenses (armor, bunkers, etc.) when used properly. On the other hand, it is a single use item, and is almost as dangerous to the user as to the target. Construction requires access to chemicals that may not be easily available. It is impposible to use covertly.

Handgun: Easiest usage, just point and fire. Can be constructed to fire multiple shots, and be reloadable so as to provide indefinite (but not infinite) use. Intermediate power, each shot will typically disable or kill only a single individual, but has exceptional range. Some drawbacks are notable, most important being exceptionally high technical resources and skill, giving it one of the highest "magic" thresholds of a basic weapon. Covert use requires additional technology. Sensitive to use conditions, handguns jam and misfire much more than knives or grenades.

The practical costs and requirements of casting spells will be of more immediate importance to the story, and therefore of much greater interest to the reader, than any examination of the theoretical divisions of your magical theory. For this reason, the reader will more likely detect and decry inconsistancies in how the magic is used than your explaination of how it is theoretically organized.

Also, thinking about the practical cost of magic is good because it allows you to determine whether it is actually plausible that magic would be used for any particular purpose by comparing the cost to a non-magical or less-magical approach to achieving a similar effect (which in turn is a good way of covering any "holes" in your overall theory, by simply making the magical approach to be too costly in practice).

Of course, all this only counts if one of your main POV characters is a magic user. In LOTR, very little of the magic is ever seen from the POV of the magic user, so we get very little feel for any of the pragmatic or theoretical details. We can imagine that Gandalf requires a mixture of careful preparation and innate magical ability to do most of what he does, but actually very little is revealed in the text (one exeption is the seeing stones or palantir, which are themselves elaborate construction that require great mental discipline to master--as we learn from Gandalf and Aragorn).

Mage the Ascension's magic system is set on very good ideas, and is very well thought-out. What can you take from it without buying a $30 book?

Perhaps you shouldn't be using the standard RPG "elements." Elements apply to matter, and fire is energy, and as such is nowhere on the periodic table. Of course you're having trouble combining water and fire, fire is energy and water is matter! (And for something interesting I learned in high school chemistry, water is the end result of combustion, or what fire produces when it completes it's process).

There is, at least in my mind, a large disparity between how many different styles of magic there are, and how many books incorporate magic. I always love to see fresh ideas that have been well thought out, such as the Fae in C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy.

There are many avenues to creating a logical system of magic, from changing certain scientific rules to having the aid of God, and it is well worth the effort for how much it can aid to a story, if not making a story in itself.

They break the cliche mold (if only by making a new mold for themselves) and can break you from standard fantasy stock that has been regurgitated too often over the years.

The people who say don't look to roleplaying games more than likely say the same about comic books. But if you look at the work of Neil Gaiman, or Warren Ellis, or Peter David, you see that there are some really good gems there. And lots of comic writers go on to write fantasy or science fiction novels (like Gaiman) and there are roleplaying game writers who go on to write novels too (and not just those based around the game).

I write freelance for roleplaying games, and I can tell you that there really isn't much there having to do with plot. It's mostly setting and character and background - systems. The stock roleplaying plots are not actually in the books, but are the stories created by 13-16 year olds who use those systems. More mature gamers create more mature stories (and, no, "mature gamer" is not an oxymoron... it's just a rarity)

It can actually be very insightful to flip through roleplaying game books. You can see how a world has been created from the ground up, and how all the new concepts are forced to interact with one another and work in concert. (I wouldn't suggest the D&D corebooks for this).

Having worked as an editor for RPG's, I found that the world creation and continuity of these books can be very complex and takes a hell of a lot of work to "get right" so to speak.

If anything, flipping through an RPG will give you another "world" construct other than Tolkien's (so long as it's not a D&D book) - which fantasy writers far too often adopt as their own. You can see how a new idea is extrapolated to the nth degree.

quote:

---

I believe the Bhuddists have a fifth element: "the void," "nothing-ness," or what-have-you.

---

quote:

---

Who says all magic has to be useful? Who says anything has to be useful? There are about 70 metals on the periodic table; perhaps five are produced in industrial quantities.

---

quote:

---

FW -- boiling water. Someone is swiming in the river, and suddenly: "Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!" You get the point.

---

quote:

---

AE -- Now, that's a difficult one. Hmmmm... The only I can't think here is, make the stone more airy, so you can pass throught walls. Or make the air hard as stone --an invisible wall kind of thing.

---

quote:

---

Also, think: Life, Death, Travel, Change, Chaos, Law....

---

And I do like Life/Death magic, except I don't see what that magic would do. Besides allow you to bring back people from the dead. Or kill them outright. Which works just fine in a game, obviously, but seems a bit too cheap for written work. (I've been wondering that about Harry Potter--what stopped You-Know-Who from just walking around using the Green Death Curse on everyone he met, seeing as magic in the HP universe just doesn't seem to cost anything?)

quote:

---

...AE would seem to deal with sand storms, tornados, dust storms, dust devils, etc. Not a very wide area of magic, but all in all fairly powerful.

---

quote:

---

Plants need earth and water to grow, so using those two elements a mage might be able to control plant growth.

---

Re FlyingCow: Yeah, I think the Chinese breakdown is Earth Air Fire Wood and Metal.

I'd need to modify it, but I think the Mage: Ascension system is quite interesting. I think I can get something out of that. Thank you.

I don't remember what White Wolf's magic is off the top of my head (the RPG I was in didn't USE magic) but I think it was Fire Ice Lightning Earth Air Gravity Shadow Light or something like that.

For the record: I once tried to make a magic system based off celestial bodies--IE, Sunmagic, Earthmagic, Moonmagic, etc--but I realized that most celestial bodies have something to do with light, and you can only get so many variations out of that, so I gave it up. Maybe I ought to look into it again.

Magic based on senses: Impractical, but brilliant.

re Survivor: Yeah, I know. It depends partially on how I want magic to work, IE the action-reaction sequence that causes the mudball to fly at the orc, and while I've got some ideas I don't have specifics yet. But rest assured, I will figure out the costs and benefits of magic.

re cesare: Yeah, it was thinking like that that gave me the Matter-Energy magic system. Unfortunately it got too complex for me. For what it's worth, I consider Water and Air to have claim on BOTH matter and energy, since we often find both in movement in nature--and since, in order for them to be practical magic forces, they had BETTER be moving in some way!

Anyway. If I didn't respond to you directly it doesn't mean I didn't read your replies, it just means I didn't have anything specific to say back. I DID read everybody's and I want to say THANK YOU to everyone. This is more feedback on magic than I've ever gotten in my life. *grins*

But, I go back to the basic idea for setting up magic---stay by your rules, make it have a cost, and don't all of sudden have someone whip out their magic pen and blot out the whole army about to run them down, unless you have established this early on. Just as in any writing, avoid plot convenience---and or errr convenience magic.

Basically, inside the justice zone of this futuristic correctional facility whatever you try to do to someone else actually happens to you, rather than them ('tis supposedly a method of rehabilitating criminals, though the details of operation are sketchy).

I'm not suggesting that, exactly. But say that you could establish an empathic bond with an attacker? Benefit, your attacker can't kill you without commiting suicide. Drawbacks: you can't kill him either for the same reason, if he's willing to die he can still take you out, you are forced to have empathy with someone that hates you, and so on and so forth.

The point is that you can make magic that has a basic symmetry of effect, such that the magical effect is both benefit and cost. In "The Curse of Chalion" Bujould uses a type of magic called, appropriately enough, Death magic (or Death miracle) in which you can pray and offer sacrifice to the god of unnatural death, and he'll send a demon to take both you and your target off to damnation (if you're worthy, a concept that boggles the mind, or mine, at least). Or there is the healing magic that requires the healer to give up part of his or her (typically her, in my experience [literary, not actual]) health to save another.

E&W lifemagic -- since these are the dominant elements in living things, E&W lets you call forth or alter lifeforms, except where fire is needed. This basically means you can perform any biological process that does not require ATP. Simple E&W spells include healing wounds and calling forth algea; these spells are widely known. More complex spells allow healing of all manner of ailments, save old age, depression, and exhaustion but require extraordinary concentration and knowledge of biolore.

W&A fogmagic -- named after the simpler combination of these two. Even a mere initiate in the study of W&A can summon dense fogs to confound enemies. Those who know something of meteorology may summon all manner of clouds (save lightening and tornados, whose strength requires fire). More advanced practicioners of W&A can put air into water, making them extraordinary swimmers and allowing them to rescue drowning victims by hyper-oxyginating the water within their lungs. According to legend, a truly great wizard can oxyginate another man's very blood at need.

A&F lighteningmagic -- Those skilled in A&F can summon lightening at need (though not clouds). The more skilled can summon all manner of electrical effects, most of them useless outside of a technological society. According to legend, it is possible to use this magic to restart the heart of a man recently diseased.

F&E lavamagic -- This includes all manner of geological events, save those requiring water. Indeed, this magic tends to fail in the presence of water (philosophers cannot explain this, but it does tend to give balance, as F&E would otherwise be too powerful).

F&W steammagic -- Since these are opposites, the magic is especially powerful, and difficult to master. A master of F&W can perform phase-changes on water at will, and therefore the magic has great destructive powers. Only the greatest wizards can boil or freeze an enemies blood within him, but many times in history, such a wizard has indeed arisen and become a great emporer. It is notable that practitioners of F&W tend to be evil, but it not universally so. Part of the reason for this may be that a magic with so many military applications attracts evil folk, but there are many accounts of honorable men and women studying the magic and gradually becoming cruel and dishonest. This is not well understood.

E&A dustmagic -- being the product of opposites, this is an extraordinarily powerful magic and extraordinarily difficult to master, so that only a handful of wizards ever have progressed beyond its beginnings. It is fundamentally creative, and some philosophers believe it is the magic of humanity (for humans are part earth (the body) and part air (the soul), and ancient texts declare that humans are made of dust), but no wizard since the ages of legend has shown these powers. It is said that this magic has a secret name given by those few who understood it, but its common name "dustmagic" was given mainly by frustrated wizard who managed at most to create a few beautiful images out of dust motes. The unimpressive name may have been given in resentment of the magic's refusal to be mastered by those who sought it. Interestingly, all who did master it were reputed saintly in disposition, but they were too few and too long ago for much to be known of this.

I've found myself repeatedly falling into the trap of creating a world for the world's sake. This in and of itself is not a problem, but the inevitable pitfall is that you start telling a story about the world, and not about the characters.

Especially in relation to magic and magic systems, I find that the first place people go with magical ability is to its use in battle and self-defense sorts of situations. It's the classic trap of RPG thinking, which among the more creative people seems to be a rather frequent occurrence. I've caught myself doing the same things often. And while RPGs are fun, they're not terribly interesting.

So. What about E/W magic? Think erosion, one of the most powerful (albeit slow-working) forces in the world. Think of the massive force of a landslide. And remember the QUALITIES of the elements, not just the elements themselves. What kind of nifty things could you do if you made earth flow LIKE water. It wouldn't even have to be wet, just water-like. Or what if you could make water completely solid, like the earth. A lot of cool places for that to go.

E/A . . . Think of sandblasting, and how quickly that eats things away. Or what if somebody could breathe dirt? You could maybe have people swimming (quite literally) through the sand. That might have a LOT of creative places to go. The other possibility of E/A magic is illusion. Solid seeming things that have no substance to them. Or perhaps creating things that didn't exist before . . . pulling them 'from thin air'. A lot of things you could do there.

And finally F/W. What if water FUELED fire instead of putting it out. How about jets of steam . . . read the part in Hunt for Red October where they talk about searching for steam leaks with a broom, so that they wouldn't get limbs cut off by the steam jets. How about something as simple as underwater fires? Or what if fire could FLOW like water? That one's a bit tougher, but there's still a lot of possibilities.

And remember to think of the mundane possibilities as well as the useful ones. Maybe there are things that could be just fun in each school of magic, as well as merely useful.

As to use of magic for attack and defense purposes, it depends on what kind of story you're telling (and it is very much a "hack and slash" roleplaying mentality... really the mentality that gives rpg's a bad reputation). A character who is incredibly strong will use that physical ability in a fight - as will a character who's exceptionally smart or cunning (Ender v. Bonzo). Magic users would do the same, playing to their strengths.

But that's only if you're writing a story that involves some sort of battle-like conflict. Insert magic into a detective story, and you have fantastical ways of gathering information and identifying friends and enemies. Insert magic into a coming of age story, and you have a whole new series of complications to puberty... voice changes, facial hair, and friends turning to stone when you get angry, or bursting into flames.

The story has to be strong, has to have something that draws the reader. That's the most important. Science fiction can rely upon a unique idea, or an interesting twist to science far more easily than a fantasy story can rely upon a similar facet to magic. Hard fantasy doesn't exist the way hard sf does - just because you find a new way to cast a spell doesn't carry the story in its own right (where often, finding a new way to accomplish some scientific feat will carry a story).

World creation stories, milieu stories, aren't just new ways of casting magic, or new realms of magic. How does society develop because of this new reality... economics, politics, education, coming of age, crime, justice, communication, etc? That's what makes a real, fresh, fulfilling world (read Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion for a great example of world creation).

Like someone said, "why only magic for combat?"

Consider Air-Earth magic: Build a gothic cathedral that will support its own weight WITHOUT flying butresses. The Earth magic is the stone, the air magic the keeping it from collapsing.

I tend not to mess with magic at all, unless I'm intentionally going for some aggressively "unnatural" result (although magic of varying sorts tends to turn up more frequently in my more, ah, "substance-assisted" work). It's just been so done to death it's hard to come up with something fresh, ya know?

Anyway, on a whim after reading this thread, I ran "mixing elements" through Google, and http://www.kenaz.com/notes/elements.htm is one of the hits it brought back. Some stuff there you might find useful (was interesting to me anyhow), here's some that's relevant to your particular Q's, maybe it'll open up some possibilities:

Earth and Water
These two elements are very compatible, as earth needs water in order to be fertilized for growth of its fruits. The proportions are important. Too much water results in mud, and too much Earth will completely absorb the Water, giving it no life of its own. On the other hand, too little water will result in a desert, i.e., a dry and unfeeling individual.

Fire and Water
These elements are antithetical as Fire turns Water to steam and Water puts out Fire.