2e Playtest stuff is available here.
Magic System design
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I’m unreasonably obsessed with categorizing things into 4 categories, so here’s some basic magic concepts based on tier (ability unlock rank) that I’m rolling with after what we’ve talked about and what I’ve read:
T1: Spells are raw, singular manifestations of the four categories of spells: Offense, Affect, Obtain, Support. Offense grants you an attack using your metaphysical stats and can affect abyssal creatures, Affect grants you prestidigitation-like effects or to do certain types of actions without tools, Obtain creates a small amount of a basic natural resource like water, dirt, rocks, etc., Support grants advantage on your target’s next physical roll
T2: Keywords are added on top of each category that expands what it does. Things like elements that cause minor ongoing effects on an attack or cause debuffs or enchantments for Offense, things like the grease spell or elemental manipulation, or a weapon enhancement spell to attack abyssal creatures on Affect, telekinetic and knowledge-oriented spells for Obtain, healing and ongoing buff effects for Support
T3: More powerful keywords are added that add extra targets to spells, allow casting over longer distances, buff lower leveled spells, summon creatures, and so on.
T4: Enhanced effects over T3, and is also the first tier you start unlocking things that have more lasting effects relating to your physical being having protection from the abyssal plane as well as sight effects into it, plus the ability to grant a dead creature whose soul hasn’t passed on the ability to reanimate their body
T5: Enhanced effects over T4, expanded combinations of keywords to create prismatic effects of lower level spells, and more focused spells that grant greater effects, such as actual physical resurrection
T6 & T7 I don’t have time to write up ideas
The key point of this is I’ll be creating keywords that you can combine in certain ways to create effects, and you can take this to describe what happens from there, with guidelines about the power of each level to scope what is expected to be presented out of it.
Because of the stacking advantage system, this opens up an easy way to buff a lot of spells: higher level = more advantage dice, which unlocks higher damage & effects by getting pairs of numbers.
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Late to the party, but here’s a link to my Fate Core hack and it’s magic system:
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My favourite magic system is the spells without levels stuff Brendan did with Wonder and Wickedness. The system is simple/straightforward, and all the spells are super evocative.
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My favorite magic system I’ve actually played with is a combination of two entries from the Fate Toolkit. In one, “magical” effects are so subtle that you’d be hard pressed to argue it’s not just confirmation bias; in Fate terms, they’re nothing more than an aspect with a free invocation, no more easily achieved than just spending a turn doing something perfectly mundane to get the same effect. When you combine this, however, with the magic system from the same book inspired by the Twenty Palaces novel series—i.e., summoning spells that bring creatures into this reality that are capable of gradually and subtly destroying the world—you get a great setup for people who’ve had a taste of power, but now want the good stuff.
I think the list of magic systems I am excited to try is way longer than the list of magic systems I have actually played with, though. Some of those include:
Wonder & Wickedness (as @funkaoshi notes) is a terrifically flavorful list of spells that can be easily slotted into a D&D-ish game. They’re level-less, but it might be more appropriate to say that they are all level 1, and can be scaled to be more powerful at higher levels.
Broodmother Sky Fortress includes a short piece on how every spellbook is a unique object in the world, and to learn the spells within it, you must accept the blasphemies it contains (e.g., “The corpses that left their graves during the Crucifixion (Matthew 27:52) still wander the world as the original undead”).
"Spells as partial ritual instructions" is a germ of an idea by @Michael_Prescott on G+, which I am dying to see developed further. You want to cast magic missile? Well, you know it requires a knife wrapped in wire, pointed at its target, with the magic word spoken aloud, but it might take some research to figure out what kind of knife and wire, or what that magic word is.
I wrote some more magic systems I’m eager to try on my blog a bit ago.
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One of my favorite magic systems is a card-based system, inspired by the one in the original Castle Falkenstein. It has these traits:
- Free form casting, not spell slots or list of spells and such
- Casting safely requires time
- Casting quickly is possible, but dangerous
The gist of it works with a single deck of cards. Each suit in the deck represents a type of magic. This could be, for example, the schools mentioned in the original post. For this example, lets say the schools are:
- earth = diamonds
- water = hearts
- fire = clubs
- air = spades
To cast a spell, you think up some effect you want, and assign it to whatever school seems like the most obvious match. Either the GM or whatever figures out a complexity for the thing you are trying to do.
You draw cards to build up power for the spell. How many cards you draw each turn depend on some trait, like your sorcery skill, or whatever.
The goal is to get cards of the right suit that equal or exceed the spell complexity. If you can do that, the spell goes off perfectly; however, you are allowed to cast the spell as soon as you have any combination of cards that sum to the complexity, if you want. If you do so, the nature of the suits actually used “pollute” the spell and cause side effects based on their corresponding school.
So, like, say you want to cast something boring, like a fireball. Say that is a complexity 15 (or whatever, just picking a number for the example). You can draw three cards each turn, say. You need 15 clubs to cast perfectly.
Say you draw 9♦, 2♣, 4♣ on your first turn. The sum of all the cards is 15, so you have just enough to cast the spell imperfectly. Do you do that and deal with the collateral effects, or to you keep weaving the spell do avoid them?
Say you cast: the spell is polluted by 9 points of diamonds (earth school), compared to only 6 points of clubs. So the GM (or whoever) has to come up with some vaguely earth-related side effect when you cast it. The imbalance is pretty bad, so maybe the result is harsh, like your leg gets turned to stone, or the targets of the fireball also get turned into living crystal, making them mostly immune to the fire. (On the other hand, you do have some clubs, so maybe it isn’t quite so bad.)
There are lots of variations to play with in this system. One is face cards. Do they count as 10 or zero? Or do they mean something else (say, attracting interest from the spirit world or something)?
Another is: you may wind up using only a few of the cards you drew. What do the “waste” cards mean? Anything? Can they be used to mitigate side effects? Make them worse?
Another is: do red/black matter?
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If you haven’t, take a look at Brennan Taylor’sMortal Coil It’s a fantasy system where you build magic system on the fly by bidding during play. It may be more fiddly than modern OSR stuff, but it’s a pretty fascinating take.
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I really like how it sets up the magic of the universe a lot! It also has me thinking better about the cost of doing magic, so you’ve given me a lot to mull over! Thanks, Jim.
I’m a big fan of Maze Rat’s system of generating spells, which randomly generates the spells name and lets the players fill in the details. You end up with something that almost certainly doesn’t make any sense, but you aren’t getting a new spell until you cast the one you have! It makes magic extremely powerful and extremely unreliable, which makes it a risky move to put all your eggs in that particular basket.
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The game I wrote for the Emotional Mecha Jam had a pretty flavorful Divine Magic system. The players are all clerics in holy mechs, and their magic is derived from months of ritual inscription of passages from their holy book onto the chassis of the mech. They each hold three spells that are completely used up when cast (the inscriptions are burnt off), but the spells are really powerful. I had fun writing the spell list. To quote:
Clerics spend months speaking prayer and liturgy over
their Blessed Engines, imbuing them with manuscripts:
inscriptions from the Word of Creation which, given
enough faith, can be used to unleash wild and powerful
magic from the divine. Choose 3 manuscripts to
inscribe on your Blessed Engine:
A word which binds an enemy to your will, a word
which halts time, a word that calls down lightning,
a word which banishes evil, a phrase which can
consume a soul, a song that rends metal, a hymn
that summons the Voice of Creation, a verse that
can crack the heavens, a passage which unleashes
holy fire, a catechism that can summon angelic aid,
a chord which spills blood
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When I’m done this book I really must get back to this game. 
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Yes please. 
Is this system intended for inclusion in ALM?
I created the spell system for my own games based on various spells sytems I liked from varios other games, including DCC RPG, Whitehack, Wonders & Wickdness and Beyond the Wall. It is its own thing, however.
I try to make sorcery powerful but dangerous to use. There are no spell levels, no preparation, but knowing spells is hard and you have to get more spells in adventures.
I am now pondering the creation of another spell system combining what I got with Beloch Strike’s Magic Words system, making a open-ended spell system but with some boundaries and guidelines. Characters will know specific words and can combine them to create spells.
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What are your favorite magic systems?
In no particular order: The Infernal playbook from Monsterhearts 2, The wizard stuff from World of Dungeons, and Demon Binding from Blades in the dark.
What makes it your favorite?
All of these systems are about the magician’s relationship to an intelligence that grants them power. At their best, they make it clear that the magician has an obligation to their power or that their power comes at a clear cost.
What systems do a good job of defining non-combat effects, as opposed to combat-oriented ones?
I feel like magic is most interesting in systems that don’t care overmuch about mechanically differentiating combat from the rest of the gameplay experience. If combat, and the effects of magic, are overly defined, it can make magic feel more like a tool or superpower, which robs it of some of its shine. This is purely personal preference.
That said, Blades in the Dark does have a distinction between the simple things characters can accomplish by Attuning vs the things that require Special Abilities (such as Tempest, the various Ghost X powers, and Demon Binding) vs things that require a Ritual.
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I’m another fan of the Wonder & Wickedness (and Marvels & Malisons) system. There’s something really nice about how evocative the spells themselves are as well as suggesting quite a few off-the-wall uses.
Something different that I did with my Quarrel & Fable (i.e. stole from Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!) is having the players memorise three-letter spellcodes and recall them during gameplay in order to cast the spell. On top of that, there’s a hp cost rather than spell-slots so it ties together nicely for weird and risky magic.
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What are your design goals?
A common goal in trad systems for magic is to make the player tasks feel similar to the character tasks. Examples: D&D’s “prepare spells in the morning” task forcing players to study their spells and choose, just like their characters do; Invisible Sun’s Maker Matrix feeling similar to planning out an enchantment formula; or Changeling: the Lost’s Pledge system actually involving speaking an oath.
Narrative systems tend to look for the sort of conflict or situation that the system wants to push, then make the magic system lean hard on that sort of conflict/situation.
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while I do not have an example game system in mind, i realy like the flavor of the magic shown in the Novarian book series by L. Sprague De Camp. where most fell magic entails complex ritual and rare reagents. most practitioners employ mesmerism, hypnosis, magician tricks, enchanted artifacts and familures for quick or sudden needs. but the main importance of a magic user in the spells he (and likely only he) knows. these spells have to be taught by a master or learned by research or dealings with otherplaner entities. this might seem pretty limiting compared to a lot of rpg magic systems but i think it makes the magic user more interesting and important.
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