I thought of something while listening to this podcast while working on a Magic System for my own work. Maybe this is a new can of worms; maybe it just restates something someone else said somewhere else multiple time or maybe I’m completely off-base, but I’d like to mention it anyway, I think there is a Third Law of Magic with a Corollary. I want to mention it because it’s how I’m approaching my Magic System and Worldbuilding.

Sanderson’s First Law: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic

Sanderson’s Second Law/Taylor’s First Law: Magic doesn’t happen in a static white box. (I would word this, “Magic doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” but anyway).

Proposed Third Law: A character’s ability to solve conflict with magic and its impact on the world around it are directly proportional to how well the character understands said magic.

Corollary: A character’s ability to solve conflict with magic and its impact on the world around it are not proportional to how the character chooses to use said magic

Explanation: Magical ability almost never comes with an instruction manual (like the Handbook For The Recently Deceased). Throwing that first spell did not also give Harry Potter a book entitled, “How to Use Magic”. Using The Force to help blow up the Death Star did not also teach Luke how to pull Star Destroyers out of the sky. Vin would have never learned how to use the other metal abilities… you get the point.

Even if a Magic system exists and functions in a world, its biggest limiter is the people using it. When building a Magic system, think about how people learn to use it and how much they can learn about it on their own.

Is it User-friendly? How much of a learning curve does it have? How much of the system can a character learn about on their own without instruction? Does gaining magic automatically conjure a handbook for the recently ensorcled?

Let’s say your magic system is represented by a desktop computer loaded with all the fixings. Even if the character figures out how use word pad, the computer by itself doesn’t mean the character will figure out on their own how to code in C#.

Another way to look at it: Throwing a Baseball is easy. Throwing a fastball is hard and if you try and figure out on your own you may just end up with serious injuries.

Also, how well known is the Magic in the society(The Second Law)? If so, it comes to the corollary:

Corollary: A character’s ability to solve conflict with magic and its impact on the world around it are not proportional to how the character chooses to use said magic

If Wizards choose to use their Magic to affect every facet of life, say goodbye to the faux medieval world and welcome Magepunk. If Fireballs & Lightning Bolts exist in a world of knights on horses without any real defense against it or restrictions on its use, the mass formation battle between the Knightly Army and the Wizard Army will look like less like the Battle of Gondor and more like the Battle of the Somme.

If Wizards choose to stay in their little towers, then the Magic system affects nothing outside of that tower. If the local religions deem Magic to be the stuff of demons, devils and ultimate evil(Even if it isn’t) that Wizard won’t make an impact on the world, being too busy getting burned at the stake.

When making a Magic system, ask if there are any social limits on its use. Is Magic a sacrilege or a sign of divinity? Is it fashionable or the sign of eccentricity? Is it illegal to turn lead into gold or are people doing it and gaming the system? Are people abandoning its use or pushing its boundaries?

I hope this line of thought somehow contributes and I look to forward to more podcasts on writing.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire does break this rule, with laws of magic showing up with no prior hints at all (slightly justified in that Harry himself had no idea this would happen, but it’s still not following Sanderson’s Law).

The podcast did make me realize that I need to quantify my magic system a bit more thoroughly, but since my main character cannot cast magic, I’m not in that big a hurry.

But more important than praise, I want to ask, do you any advice for how I can introduce and explain a magic system without having an apprentice character?

P.S. I know Dr. Who is not a book, but it was the first thing that came to mind. And I’m referring to the newer Dr. Who series, I’m not going to apologize for being born in the late 80′s. I also google searched Gandalf to make sure I spelled it right, for fear of the wrath that would come if I made a typo.

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.