This part is going to be a bit embarrassing for me. When I first started writing Ascendance, I put no thought into the magic system. How it works. Is it balanced? Haha! No thoughts, empty head. I just sat down and wrote!
It was great to get things done and moving but I spent months trying to fix my mistakes and ended up giving up and shelving the story for later.
I messed up bad…bad enough to think that I wasn’t a writer, that I was terrible, and I nearly gave it up.
Nearly.
When I went back to it, I didn’t jump back into the story, I backtracked to other stories that I liked that had magic at work. I read, reread, studied, and made notes, ultimately this started a new obsession, reading books on writing, and taking my development seriously.
That’s right. I took myself back to my own school and started from the ground up. That’s where I got the ideas for Ascendance that transformed it into the story that I’m bringing to you all.
The core of what I began with is: why didn’t it work?
And believe me, there was a lot.
Because I had no established rules in my own head, I had consistency issues with how things happened.
My characters became so overpowered that I couldn’t write them to be believable, one of the most important aspects of a magic system, at least to me, is that there must be some elements that can be believable. It needs to be able to be anchored in reality at some point, otherwise, it’s too easy to become a throwaway distraction.
Though I liked the feel of the magic I had, there was no way of expanding on it and letting it be a prominent element of my story.
Because I hadn’t anchored it properly in believability, it was far too easy to lose control of it and become unbalanced. The characters just kept on piling power, collecting talismans, and ultimately it became so unwieldy it created plot holes and inconsistencies everywhere.
I understand that one of the core principles of writing fantasy is that there are fantastic elements to the world. However, depending on the type of magic or the type of story you’re working with, there needs to be consequences, limitations, and ultimately drawbacks to the user. A good magic system requires some kind of cost. Otherwise, your characters will never struggle, will never truly grow, learn their limitations, or be relatable.
It’s basically the Superman problem. Except for the extremely rare Kryptonite, there’s little to nothing that can harm Superman if he has Earth’s sun to power him.
I’m not saying you can’t make characters like that, but it makes it hard to keep a reader’s interest in your story if it’s just loaded with unlimited characters.
Some of the ways I started to balance Ascendance’s magic system was to introduce the following:
Using the magic had a cost.
Modifiers (talismans) though plenty were difficult to find a working resonance.
Gaining access to the Anima became an arbitrary, random process.
Using too much power had physical effects on the animagus.
Gaining more power becomes more and more dangerous and difficult as the animagus progresses.
Getting a grasp on what I wanted for my story helped me create a system that forced my characters to use more of their own intelligence than rely on pure power. It allowed me to keep things balanced, introduced a level of stakes that helped me deepen the lore of the world, and helped me keep control of the story while rooting the entire thing into something that people can relate to.
Some key takeaways:
Magic systems are tricky and do require significant thought behind them if you don’t want trouble.
Having costs that limit the characters helps keep the system and the story diverse and unique.
The author must obey the rules of the magic system harder than the characters (we’re there to enforce them after all)
The greater the power, the greater the stakes, and don’t be afraid to show your character struggling with the rules of the system.
That’s all for now, what are your thoughts? Comment below!
James B. Vest 