Helping Authors Build Marvelous Magic Systems One Stage at a Time
Congratulations! You’ve generated oodles of ideas and optimized alignment, and you’re finally ready to start defining your magic system. Stage 3 is where your magic system should start taking on shape, becoming more awesome and more unique with every step. This stage is also massive, so we’re just going to take it one piece at a time.
That starts today as we take a closer look at the basics of magic system variables, what they are and how they affect your magic.
You might already know, but let’s review what limitations are and some of their many forms. From there we can discuss exactly why you need them and end the day in perfect, harmonious agreement regarding limitations and their importance.
3 Big Reasons to Use Subject Matter Expertise in Your Magic Welcome back! This is Part II of our little discussion on using Subject Matter Expertise with your magic. A couple posts back we took a look at this topic, discussing in broad terms some of the ways it can help you, how other authors have used it, and how to use it yourself. Today we’re going to take a
How to Make Building Magic Easy with Subject Matter Expertise Even with everything we’ve discussed in the 4 Stages of Building Marvelous Magic, building a new system is always a bit daunting. Experience helps. It helps a lot. But that sense of dread and overwhelm doesn’t ever go away completely… at least it never has for me. Fortunately, there are still a couple of things you can do to make
Maybe you’re the one who broke it, or maybe someone else pointed it out to you. Either way, you’ve put a lot of work has gone into your magic system, and the last thing we want is for it to stay broken. We need to fix it. Fast.
“Why break my system?” you ask. Simple. Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no magic system survives contact with your readers.
Building Marvelous Magic Stage 3: Defining Your System Maybe you woke up this morning with a brand new magic system bursting from your skull. Or maybe you’ve been working on a specific system for years and just want it to be the best it can be. Then again, maybe you have a kick-ass story and the only thing missing is some equally kick-ass magic. Regardless of the origin,
