Comments on: Writing Excuses Episode 15: Costs and Ramifications of Magic

By: Words and Coffee » Blog Archive » Writing Magic in Fantasy Fiction

Words and Coffee » Blog Archive » Writing Magic in Fantasy Fiction — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:14:16 +0000

[...] Writing Excuses podcasts (I recommend checking out their other podcasts as well): This week the Writing Excuses team [...]

By: Mrblah3

Mrblah3 — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:11:43 +0000

I’m late to the party, but im catching up!:P This chapter really helped me with a story im writing. At the start of my notes it was just they used their own magical, then physical energy, and if they used to much they died. Now i’ve kept that, but it also bleeds energy from around you. So things start to dull, rot e.t.c.. The more magic you use the worse the affects. Okay, bit of a tangent, but just to say thanks for writing excusesXD

By: Lisa

Lisa — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:25:43 +0000

one thing i thought of to do with my magic system was to make it a common factor in the book. If everyone has magic than its not really special anymore. This allowed my world to be more developed than it would have been otherwise AND give my characters all some fun talent.

By: Writing Magic in Fantasy Fiction « Words and Coffee

Writing Magic in Fantasy Fiction « Words and Coffee — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:29:48 +0000

[...] Writing Excuses podcasts (I recommend checking out their other podcasts as well): This week the Writing Excuses team [...]

By: Hadeen

Hadeen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:54:48 +0000

One hint which worked perfectly for me so far: When you are finished developing your magic system, write it down as a concept paper, go to your local RPG circle and give it to the most notorious powergamer/munchkin. These guys are geniuses in breaking magic systems to create omnipotent characters.

So even if your magic system doesn’t fail catastrophically you can still get some nice pointers on how your protagonists/villains in the story could exploit magic to give them an edge.

As mentioned in episode 14 – this is actually the most fun part: Establishing a ruleset the reader can relate to and then surprise him by an application he hadn’t considered yet.

By: John Brown - the author’s official site » Blog Archive » Inventing magic

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:33:47 +0000

[...] http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/05/18/writing-excuses-episode-15-costs-and-ramifications-of-magic... [...]

By: John Brown

John Brown — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:10:40 +0000

Late listening to this, but I want to say that I think the focus on limitations and ramifications excellent. However, I’ve found the word “cost” to ultimately be counterproductive because “cost” often leads people to think ONLY of magics where you trade x thing for y power. Blood, memories, vitality, years of life, etc. Magics that use fuel (cost things) are all great, but there are so many magics where there isn’t any cost.

For example, Heroes shows a lot of magic without cost. What does it cost Hiro to time travel? Nothing. It’s free. What about the painter? He can do it at will. The guy who goes invisible. The cheerleader who regenerates. Same with all the other characters there. What about the magic in Elantris? It costs nothing to draw the runes. What was consumed? Nothing. What about Orson Card’s Hatrack world? Alvin can doodlebug until doomsday. There’s no fuel required.

Some may say it’s semantics, but it’s not. It affects the paths taken in the invention of the magic. Don’t trust me, do a group magic brainstorm session where you ask this question and then another where you ask about limitations instead.

I’ve found that it’s more helpful to ask these questions.

–What is a cool power?
–What are the limitations to it? (Here we can use costs or MANY other types of limitations like genetics/bloodlines, intelligence, sources, morals, geography, times, etc.)
–What are the ramifications and conflicts of using it?

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:38:32 +0000

Pessimists unite!

Nah, that’ll never work…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:45:37 +0000

Hiya great podcast, I’m not sure whether anyone’s mentioned the Warhammer world in this thread before (I’m just popping on don’t have time to read ALL the other comments sorry) anyway the point is Warhammer is a war scale tactical tabletop game similar to D&D anyway the way they implementaed ramifications is with miscasts, basicly if you get the wrong role something bad happens to you, this ranges from not being able to cast magic for a while to having your head explode! Anyway what my point is, is that sometimes games CAN bring in good things like this (although I think it was probably brought in to expand gameplay rather than the universe.)

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:06:39 +0000

Find something anything that hits your muse and write but, do it “Originally”