Unlocking the Secrets of Magical Worldbuilding
Dive into the enchanting world of magical systems from ancient myths to modern fantasies. Learn how to craft believable and captivating magic in your stories with Haly's 3-point secret structure!
Manic Monday: Worldbuilding Magic
Stories of magical worlds never go out of style. From the Gods of Mount Olympus to our favorite fairy tales of poisoned apples and gingerbread houses to our modern obsession with magical stories like The Dresden Files and The Bone Witch, we are enchanted by stories of mysterious powers and the people who wield them.
This popularity has given rise to what may seem like an endless and confusing assortment of ways to incorporate magic into your world. Is magic a teachable craft or are practitioners born with an innate ability? Does it require ingredients for potions, or esoteric incantations? What are the drawbacks and limitations? The possibilities go on and on!
The good news is, while incorporating magic into your worldbuilding does take some up-front planning, once you’ve done that work and established the rules of your magical game you get to spend the rest of the time playing with it!
Historical Foundations of Magic
When we look back at ancient civilizations, we can begin to see how magic was a part of their everyday lives. Greek mythology ascribed every aspect of nature to the magic of the gods; Zeus could turn himself into anything whenever his libido demanded it, and Hera was forever cursing this person or that because they “fell for” her husband’s rapacious hijinks!
And it doesn’t end there. The Egyptians, the Celts, the Norse, the Chinese, the Maya; almost every ancient people you can name had similar tales of great beings — gods — with the magical ability to do impossible things.
Folklore and fairy tales, too, are full of magic. Enchanted sleep, witches’ curses, animal transmutations, the evil eye, and consorting with the Devil are all common in the stories we were told as children and continue to pass on today. These stories provide us with a library of magical building blocks from which we can pick and choose the cornerstones of our own, unique magic systems!
The Secret Structure of Magic
Incorporating magic into your narratives in ways that are believable and satisfying, while still allowing you to magically accomplish your plot, requires thoughtful planning at the earliest stage possible. Ideally, the moment that you first think about introducing any sort of magic be it a spell, potion, creature, or power (like a God).
Fortunately, I’ve got a quick 3-point structure to help you flesh out the details of the magic in your world!
1. Establish the Rules
Will you have a hard or soft magic world?1 Is magic a learnable skill, or something you’re born with? Are spells cast with a spell book or does a spell caster need to spend hours at a cauldron brewing endless potions? Is magic tied to times of day, seasons, or the phase of the moon? How important are ingredients and what are they?
Make a list of 3-5 rules for the magic in your world. This is a good foundation and should give you plenty of room to fill in fabulous little details! And as you write your list, remember…
2. Maintain Balance
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you’re going to introduce magic — which, in theory, can do anything — then it has to have limitations. In The Lord of the Rings, only a very small number of people had access to magic, while in The Craft learning magic takes dedication and practice.
Balancing your magic is not about hard vs. soft; both styles of magic require balance. It’s about making sure that there are some sort of limits on what magic can do. After all, struggle is where story lives and if you remove all struggle, you remove all story.
If it helps, there’s an old supply adage that you can pick two: quick, cheap, good quality. That is, if you want it quick and cheap, you have to let quality slide. Likewise, if you want it quick and good quality, then it will be expensive.
3. Give it a Twist
Art is innovation and that includes writing about magic. It’s not enough to just digest and regurgitate what has come before us; that’s what AI does. We have to add our own unique flavor to it, our own little twist.
This comes from your own voice, your own perspective. It’s the little bit of your soul that breathes true life into your project.
Of Course I’ll Demonstrate
Alright, so right now I’m in a cozy mood, so let’s come up with a cozy magic system. Hot drinks are usually a part of any cozy setting. What’s more cozy than a hot cup of tea? Well, depending on your tastes and preferences, maybe a lot. But I think that we can all agree if I want to write a cozy fantasy series, including tea and cats certainly isn’t a wrong place to start!
Now, as we all know, cats are already magic, so I don’t need to explain them. Not that any mortal could define a cat’s powers. Cats are definitely a soft magic system. So that leaves me to develop the rules around magical tea. How might that look?
All magic is potions
The potions are made as teas
Collecting the ingredients at the proper phase of the moon is important
Recipes are closely guarded family secrets, kept as a sort of spell-book
Instead of a wand or broomstick, every witch or wizard has a magical teaspoon
Boom. That is a solid skeleton of a magic system! Not only will it support nearly any story I could want to tell, but it also gives me room to grow and flesh out the details of a robust and complex hard magic system if I want, or I can leave it where it is as a soft system.
Let’s look at how I did it.
I established the rules, obviously. “All magic is potions; the potions are made as teas.” Those are the rules, they shall not be broken.
Next, I made balance points: ingredients must be collected at the proper time of the moon. This imposes the limit of timing and primes us for other limits such as learning that “no amount of magic tea will bring the dead back to life, even if we wish it with all our blood and tears.”
Further limits are imposed on the secrecy of certain blends and recipes. Sure, there might be a recipe for a tea that mends a broken bone, but does your family know it? Is the person who has the recipe willing to share it? Can you acquire such strange ingredients for a foreign tea?
Finally, I give it my own twist by substituting the usual trappings of a witch or wizard for something unexpected but also fitting.
Tomorrow…
I hope this look under the hood at my secret structure for magic systems has been helpful and inspiring! Tomorrow, we’ll twist this topic and talk about how to craft conflict in a world with magic. From dueling wizards and creatures that use magic to hunt to dark sources of power and conflicting magical energies, magical fantasy opens the door to entirely unique stories and adventures!
Been a hot minute since I did a footnote!
The quick and dirty guide on hard vs. soft magic is this: Hard magic is a lot of rules, a very definitive structure to how magic works AND showing that structure to the audience. Dungeons & Dragons is an example of hard magic, as is A Discovery of Witches.
Soft magic is hand-wavey, it just works without the audience being bogged down with the details. This is most folklore and God-type magic, the “trust me, magic is like this” magic. Star Wars is the perfect example of soft magic, and an even more perfect example of the importance of knowing the rules first rather than trying to make them up later. Midi-chlorians can bite my ass.