Monday, May 2, 2011

Magic Systems in Fantasy

Magic of some sort is a staple in Fantasy books. If you've read a lot of fantasy (and I'm assuming you have, or you probably wouldn't be reading this blog... No, wait! Don't leave!) you'll notice that there's always a system to the magic, certain rules that it has to follow. The literary reason for this is there would be no conflict, and thus no book if any and every problem could be solved in a *poof*.
Lots of writing sites talk in depth about this, so I want to outline the magic system that I'm using in A Wizard of Arade.

(By the way, if anyone reading this has a better idea for a title, please share it in the comments...)

Magic in the world of Arade isn't the same as the magic found in most fantasy books. Religion is a major part of the book,  and the magic system is tightly integrated into it.
A Wizard is someone that Ard (an analogy for God in the book) has given the ability to manipulate the natural world. (A person can also get power from evil-- that will come into play later in the book.) This ability is limited by two things: an individuals energy, and their knowledge about what they're manipulating. (If I did my job right, this is all explained in the book as part of the story..)

So in this case, if someone is very tired, or doesn't know how something works, they either can't use magic, or can only do very limited things with it.

Yes, I know, this an awfully sc-fi way of dealing with a magic system, but hey, I like sci-fi and fantasy. ;)

If any of this sounds interesting, you can read the first draft of the first chapter... there's a link over to the left.

Tomorrow (hopefully...) I'll talk about Christian Fantasy...

No comments:

Post a Comment