In the Anita Blake series, for instance, Laurell K. Hamilton spends a lot of time clearly defining the “magic” that the vampires, werewolves, and necromancers are capable of. She adheres to them very closely. Then without warning she’ll totally break those rules. The result of this is both the reader and characters going “No way!!”

It’s an odd but really powerful effect. When you place rules on magic to the point at which they become totally explainable and commonplace, much like the rules of gravity or physics, breaking them makes the magic *really* feel like magic. Unexplainable magic.

Of course, she is always sure to explain exactly what happened after the fact, and those rules *do* carry on to each subsequent book, thus making even that “magic” commonplace. Only to break it again in a further book, etc. In becomes a bit redundant after a bit, but the initial effect is very powerful.

As a side note, I call this the “Dragon Ball Z magic system”. Those familiar with the anime probably know what I’m talking about.

How does the rss feed work so I can get updated on your blog?

Karl notes the Deryni novels as an example of a Hard magic system. It’s indicated, however, that the “hard” magic of the deryni needn’t follow the fairly “psionic” rules that it does. In particular, there are magic artifacts of past ages, which seem to follow a much more “sorcerous” paradigm, particularly the cubes and the altar. There’s lingering wonder working in from the fact that there are rules, and they are followed…but it’s pretty clear that they’re incomplete, just one way of making the “magic” work.

I recommend the reading of the comics “The Books of Magic,” and its three sequels that bear the same title, with “Summonings,” “Bindings,” and “Reckonings.” Some information on them can be found a this wikipedia article.

Sadly, my copies are in new jersey, or I’d be able to reference them more directly.

The particular feature I want to call to attention is that the primary PoV character, Timothy Hunter, is a mage in what I think would be classified as a “soft” magic system. It’s unclear what he can do, and what the limits of his power are — and even to those who “know” how magic works in the world, he has a distressing tendency to break the rules (From “Reckonings,” paraphrasing Leah: You can’t do that. You can make golems, and you can unmake them, but nobody’s ever remade a golem before.)

One of the latter three actually lists the “rule of magic” that dominates the Books of Magic explicitly: for every external change, there is an equivalent internal change. This is probably another view on your statement about the costs of limitations of magic. I think you might view this as the engine that fuels the conflict.

The series follows, in it’s magic, my own pet definition of what makes Fantasy Fantasy: internal, emotional, and metaphorical truths are transformed into external, physical, and literal truths. Tim’s relationship to his father, to Molly, to the strange people he encounters, and to himself change and grow, and his magic changes and grows with and because of them.

In an odd twist, I might state that, although there aren’t any hard and fast rules limiting what Tim can do (and there are often very interesting ways in which he screws up) the reader still has a sense of the sort of places where magic will work, and what sorts of effects it will have, intuitively — through emotional identification with Tim, and observing the personalities of the characters. Magic is an outflow of meaning, and follows the narrative of the story in intuitive ways.

I’d also like to point out the RPG system Nobilis, ref here, which has limited, very general rules, with an endless outlay of specifics to combine the effects of “Rules” and “Wonder” — there are five different type of miracles that can be performed (Divinations, Preservations, Creations, Destructions, Transformations) and a Greater and Lesser varriant of each, but each noble has their own Estate, which they can (preserve/create/destroy/transform/divine from), meaning that each Noble has a distinct set of powers all their own. It’s a playstyle that favor success strongly, focusing not on the difficulty of actions, but on the ramifications of different ways of solving them — a nice example of a mostly soft system in an RPG.

http://mbarker.livejournal.com/70426.html

And one more to go.

In the case of Aslan (note: it’s been a while since I read the books…) we don’t know the Deep Magic rules that he does (not until after the fact), but we do trust him IMPLICITLY. We believe him to be as close to all-knowing and all-powerful as characters come in Narnia. When he agrees to exchange himself for Peter, we don’t know how he will make this come out for the best, but we believe that it will because Aslan=Always Right is one rule we know.

For all that, Aslan isn’t a perspective character, so he’s ALLOWED to break Sanderson’s first law.

One of the things I always liked about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (of all books) was Aslan’s description of the “Deep Magic” which the Witch didn’t fully understand, and which prevented Aslan from STAYING DEAD (because he was making a sacrifice for someone else) — sure, in terms of the book it was all analogous for a Judeo-Christian Theological concept, but in terms of a story it hinted at rules that governed very powerful events and something like that could conceivably allow an author to have the best of both worlds…