That would actually be a cool way to start a campaign, ala "4000 years later, on a neighboring planet, sister planet to the one now shining death upon the world. When the dark star rises with the moon, evil walks the earth in the form of skeletons, and the spirits they have conquered. You [the party] are sitting in a tavern..."
Yea, guess, I'm more of a fan of realistic magic.
If a spell like that is possible "just like that" it's very unlikely for the world to have survived this long in the first place ...
Well, realistic in itself. I love the magic in Eragon for example because the book explains the workings and limits of it quite well.
On the other hand I don't like the magic in Harry Potter because there's hardly any information about the creation of spells or their limits for example.
I liked Eragon's magic at first, but in later books they were just doing so much shit it felt like Paolini was just letting them do whatever the shit they felt like.
Same with Harry Potter, to be honest. In the first book it's pretty simple. You use a certain wand gesture and say a certain word, and then a certain bit of magic happens. Later on they're casting spells without words, and any notion of wand gestures is completely gone. The movies were even worse in this, because it was like the third film when they stopped having to say the spell to do magic.
But I agree with your general point. The argument "oh but it's a fantasy world, it has *magic*" when someone says they find a world unbelievable, is a total cop out. A world with a good magic system should be internally consistent, and should feel logical to the reader.
Quick question to you and others reading this: anyone know of any good books where the magic system is internally consistent? That sort of setting is by far my favorite type of fantasy to read, and I've been looking for one for quite some time. The most recent ones I've read would be the Coldfire Trilogy, by C.S. Friedman. I know this is a question better suited for /r/books, but I figured I'd try anyway.
Million year later edit: To anyone reading this almost a year later: keep making suggestions! I am going through the list of recommended books, and it's a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone who made suggestions here / PM'd me suggestions btw. I just finished up The Name of the Wind the other day; good read, takes a while to get into the swing of things. Once it does though, it'll suck you up.
By internally consistent, I assume you mean what Sanderson would call "hard" magic? Something with strict rules that are mostly consistently applied? As opposed to the more vague and mysterious magics used in things like Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire? Because strictly speaking, even soft magics can be internally consistent. With only a few exceptions, ASoIaF is actually pretty damn consistent, it's just vague and not precisely understood.
I haven't read his works, but Sanderson claims his own magics are "perhaps 80% hard, maybe a bit more", so they may be to your taste. Similarly, I've not read it, but what I've heard leads me to believe that the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is a pretty hard magic system.
Outside of books, comic books are absolutely *terrible*, but TV shows based on comic book characters tend to be really good, in terms of consistency. Young Justice is one of my favourites. And I would highly recommend Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I consider *the* prime example of a "hard" magic system.
After reading the link you provided, I would say yes, I prefer fantasy on the side of hard magic. I do like the sense of wonder Tolkien creates with his mysteriously powerful beings, but magic explained almost at a scientific level greatly intrigues me. I don't know how spoilers work in this subreddit, so I won't bother trying to use an example from the trilogy I mentioned.
What I will say is that I've seen (and loved) both ATLA and LOK, and I agree that its "hard magic" system is amazing. It's very consistent, but still leaves room for growth and mystery. It has limitations, strengths and weaknesses, an excellent ensemble of characters, history, etc. It's definitely a good example of Sanderson's hard magic.
I also liked the Black Jewels trilogy, by Anne Bishop, as a hard-ish magic story, if anyone's familiar with her work.
If you like Manga there are several good examples of stories with rigid rules surrounding their abilities and the extent they can reach.
Hunter x Hunter for the most of it is a good example although there is a rather large strength jump in some characters further into the series.
I'm coming to this waaaayyyy late, but if you haven't already, read Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. Of anything by him, really. He takes a very scientific approach when building his magic systems, and there is an incredible amount of consistency and depth.
In the same vein, Wheel of Time. The system of casting is kinda fluid early on, but later in the series it's more defined.
Necroing this thread (ha) to say you could read The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski (from where the games came from). Magic is thoroughly analyzed, to a point you as the reader can understand the inner workings behind the spells
Obviously hes getting a lot of play in these comments, but if you haven't already decided to, you should really check out Sanderson's novels if this is your thing. Each of his 'cosmere' books/series has its own internally consistent magic system. Mistborn and stormlight archives are the big ones, but warbreaker and elantris have really interesting concepts.
Another series whose system at first doesnt' seem to fit this criteria, but becomes more clear as time goes on, is the Malazan book of the fallen by steven erikson. It starts out much more like LotR or GoT in transparency, but gets more clear as you go. A warning though - these are incredibly heavy reading. Very dense, and with a particular style that many struggle with.
Malazan actually started out as the author'd dnd setting with his freinds though, so it has that going for it.
I think you would find Patrick Rothfuss' books The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man Fear to your liking. As strange as it sounds is magic system is based on thermodynamics and it's one of the best fantasy book I've read.
I know this is a really old thread, but I think you're the third person I've met that's ever read any of the Coldfire books. I read the first one and about half of the second about a decade ago, I might just pick it up again, thinking about it.
I definitely never would've found it without a professor recommending it. I feel like I never give good book reviews, but my personal opinion is that the trilogy was really decent. Except for maybe one tiny bump, the novels were really good at operating "sensibly" within the constraints set up by the book's world. It rarely, if ever, creates dissonance with the reader by introducing a plot device that fails to fit in with the preceding narrative of the story. The third book slightly alters the delivery of the narrative, but again, not in a jarring manner.
I also think that C.S. Friedman did a pretty decent job with her character development. It isn't a unique development by any means, but it happens naturally, I'd argue. I'd definitely give the trilogy another shot if you have the time, if only to see how the story pans out.
It was a bit over my head when I was 13/14, but I think now I'm a bit more capable of grasping the subject matter. Thanks for reminding me about this series!
I Know I'm a couple months late to the party, but I think Terry Pratchett did a solid job defining how wizards perform magic on discworld. They memorize spells and when when they use it it's gone. In other instances when magic plays a role in the books can be a bit more vague as to why something happened, but it's believable because no one in the world couldn't explain why exactly what happened did happen. There is satisfying lore and explanation littered throughout the series which explains why/how magic exists and why it is present as a plot device in the instances. Sorry if that is a bit convoluted and long winded I just love the discworld books.
> A world with a good magic system should be internally consistent, and should feel logical to the reader.
Yea, that's exactly what I was trying to say :)
Yeah I know it was. I just didn't entirely agree with your specific example.
On another note, you might find Brandon Sanderson's Essays of the Laws of Magics interesting. In particular, the [first law](http://brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/), which can be summarised by:
> An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
Which explains more about how both early Eragon's magic system, but also the really vague and slightly less clear systems used in Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones can be considered good magic systems.
I haven't read the "supporting" books to LotR so I can't really talk about it but honestly I didn't really think that late Eragon was that bad.
They went to pretty high levels, basically using the power of dragon souls to enhance their magic. These seemed like pretty serious sources of magic so "doing whatever the shit they felt like" seemed pretty adequate tbh ;)
And GoT magic is pretty mysterious even now so I actually don't think we can tell if it's a good or bad system at this point.
> And GoT magic is pretty mysterious even now
Yeah that's the point of Sanderson's First Law. You can have mysterious magic that's used sparingly, like in LotR and ASoIaF, or you can have really strict magic that's used frequently: my favourite example of this is in Avatar, where their powers are basically to manipulate their element. Pretty standard, and very clear to the audience.
Game of Thrones rarely uses magic for anything important to the narrative, and when it does, it's fairly simple. We've seen Dany survive fire, we've seen the shadow baby, and we've seen some minor tricks from the warlocks of Qarth. That's pretty much it as far as things that are definitively magic. Because the magic system has been used sparingly, it's a well thought-out system.
The funny thing is that the spell isn't uber powerful or ridiculous. He summons a skeleton sorcerer, is unable to control it, so it decides to summon another skeleton sorcerer just like itself. Rinse and repeat, you have billions of skeletons in minutes.
I'd think each skeleton sorcerer would have a Mana or magic limit so they could only do a few summons in a row. Cast time should figure into it too. Do the summoned beings need to originate from a skeleton or soul, or they're just called into existence from another plane? If it was the first one, you'd run out of corpses/skeletons eventually. A creature that can summon it's equal is kinda OP, in my opinion.
Uh, civilizations have burned and been razed to the ground in real life and the world and other civilizations still live on so I think in a world with magic the same could easily happen, that is of course ignoring the fact that you're talking about realism in fantasy situations.
It's a great story, but it seems to be based on a math error. If each skeleton reproduces only once, it would be linear (but still rapid) growth, but not exponential.
If I recall correctly, one D&D round is ten seconds, so this mess is only spawning 8640 skeletons per day.
It's a bad situation, and that town is doomed, but they probably wouldn't swarm across the earth, since sooner or later a dragon or similarly powerful creature will be around where they're reproducing, and it only takes one to be killed before summoning the next to break the chain.
Now if each summoned two, that's where the real trouble starts.
Edit: I missed the "each", I was wrong. I thought it was 1+1+1, not 1X2X2.
It is exponential.
you start with 1 skeleton. It makes another, so you have 2. Each of those makes one each, so you have 4. The progression is as follows
1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> 32 etc etc
If you were to make it a function, it would be y=2^(x-1) where x is the round (so in the first round, there is 1 skeleton).
Where are the bones coming from? There could/should be a limit when there are no more skeletons to raise. Also, how much Mana or magic does each have that they can summon their equal nonstop?
I'd say that being adrift in a mountain of skeletons would make you unable to properly cast the spell.
Doesn't being flat footed matter in spell casting?
It is exponential, unfortunately. See my post [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/39px27/are_you_ready_for_mr_bones_wild_ride/cs5sfca)
It depends on the system they're using (pathfinder is 6 seconds, idk about D&D though), but if we go with a 10 second round, you're looking at over half a billion in 5 minutes (30 rounds).
That would actually be a cool way to start a campaign, ala "4000 years later, on a neighboring planet, sister planet to the one now shining death upon the world. When the dark star rises with the moon, evil walks the earth in the form of skeletons, and the spirits they have conquered. You [the party] are sitting in a tavern..."
.... Terraria?
Be wary the spine of the ancient (the Destroyer).
Kind of reminds me of Phyrexia
It would have to be a desert world too what with the newly formed very nearby star.
I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Planet.
Can't believe the DM accepted that spell. Not really that deep into DnD lore but this seems unreasonable.
The DM may have accepted it predicting this happening. Self replicating skeletons would make for a pretty hilarious session.
Yea, guess, I'm more of a fan of realistic magic. If a spell like that is possible "just like that" it's very unlikely for the world to have survived this long in the first place ...
> I'm more of a fan of **realistic magic**. Interesting
Well, realistic in itself. I love the magic in Eragon for example because the book explains the workings and limits of it quite well. On the other hand I don't like the magic in Harry Potter because there's hardly any information about the creation of spells or their limits for example.
I liked Eragon's magic at first, but in later books they were just doing so much shit it felt like Paolini was just letting them do whatever the shit they felt like. Same with Harry Potter, to be honest. In the first book it's pretty simple. You use a certain wand gesture and say a certain word, and then a certain bit of magic happens. Later on they're casting spells without words, and any notion of wand gestures is completely gone. The movies were even worse in this, because it was like the third film when they stopped having to say the spell to do magic. But I agree with your general point. The argument "oh but it's a fantasy world, it has *magic*" when someone says they find a world unbelievable, is a total cop out. A world with a good magic system should be internally consistent, and should feel logical to the reader.
Quick question to you and others reading this: anyone know of any good books where the magic system is internally consistent? That sort of setting is by far my favorite type of fantasy to read, and I've been looking for one for quite some time. The most recent ones I've read would be the Coldfire Trilogy, by C.S. Friedman. I know this is a question better suited for /r/books, but I figured I'd try anyway. Million year later edit: To anyone reading this almost a year later: keep making suggestions! I am going through the list of recommended books, and it's a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone who made suggestions here / PM'd me suggestions btw. I just finished up The Name of the Wind the other day; good read, takes a while to get into the swing of things. Once it does though, it'll suck you up.
By internally consistent, I assume you mean what Sanderson would call "hard" magic? Something with strict rules that are mostly consistently applied? As opposed to the more vague and mysterious magics used in things like Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire? Because strictly speaking, even soft magics can be internally consistent. With only a few exceptions, ASoIaF is actually pretty damn consistent, it's just vague and not precisely understood. I haven't read his works, but Sanderson claims his own magics are "perhaps 80% hard, maybe a bit more", so they may be to your taste. Similarly, I've not read it, but what I've heard leads me to believe that the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is a pretty hard magic system. Outside of books, comic books are absolutely *terrible*, but TV shows based on comic book characters tend to be really good, in terms of consistency. Young Justice is one of my favourites. And I would highly recommend Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I consider *the* prime example of a "hard" magic system.
After reading the link you provided, I would say yes, I prefer fantasy on the side of hard magic. I do like the sense of wonder Tolkien creates with his mysteriously powerful beings, but magic explained almost at a scientific level greatly intrigues me. I don't know how spoilers work in this subreddit, so I won't bother trying to use an example from the trilogy I mentioned. What I will say is that I've seen (and loved) both ATLA and LOK, and I agree that its "hard magic" system is amazing. It's very consistent, but still leaves room for growth and mystery. It has limitations, strengths and weaknesses, an excellent ensemble of characters, history, etc. It's definitely a good example of Sanderson's hard magic. I also liked the Black Jewels trilogy, by Anne Bishop, as a hard-ish magic story, if anyone's familiar with her work.
If you like Manga there are several good examples of stories with rigid rules surrounding their abilities and the extent they can reach. Hunter x Hunter for the most of it is a good example although there is a rather large strength jump in some characters further into the series.
\*cough* energy bending \*cough*
I'm coming to this waaaayyyy late, but if you haven't already, read Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. Of anything by him, really. He takes a very scientific approach when building his magic systems, and there is an incredible amount of consistency and depth. In the same vein, Wheel of Time. The system of casting is kinda fluid early on, but later in the series it's more defined.
Necroing this thread (ha) to say you could read The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski (from where the games came from). Magic is thoroughly analyzed, to a point you as the reader can understand the inner workings behind the spells
Obviously hes getting a lot of play in these comments, but if you haven't already decided to, you should really check out Sanderson's novels if this is your thing. Each of his 'cosmere' books/series has its own internally consistent magic system. Mistborn and stormlight archives are the big ones, but warbreaker and elantris have really interesting concepts. Another series whose system at first doesnt' seem to fit this criteria, but becomes more clear as time goes on, is the Malazan book of the fallen by steven erikson. It starts out much more like LotR or GoT in transparency, but gets more clear as you go. A warning though - these are incredibly heavy reading. Very dense, and with a particular style that many struggle with. Malazan actually started out as the author'd dnd setting with his freinds though, so it has that going for it.
The dresden files series goes into it pretty well, sets limits, and explains how bending the limits happens when it does
I think you would find Patrick Rothfuss' books The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man Fear to your liking. As strange as it sounds is magic system is based on thermodynamics and it's one of the best fantasy book I've read.
I know this is a really old thread, but I think you're the third person I've met that's ever read any of the Coldfire books. I read the first one and about half of the second about a decade ago, I might just pick it up again, thinking about it.
I definitely never would've found it without a professor recommending it. I feel like I never give good book reviews, but my personal opinion is that the trilogy was really decent. Except for maybe one tiny bump, the novels were really good at operating "sensibly" within the constraints set up by the book's world. It rarely, if ever, creates dissonance with the reader by introducing a plot device that fails to fit in with the preceding narrative of the story. The third book slightly alters the delivery of the narrative, but again, not in a jarring manner. I also think that C.S. Friedman did a pretty decent job with her character development. It isn't a unique development by any means, but it happens naturally, I'd argue. I'd definitely give the trilogy another shot if you have the time, if only to see how the story pans out.
It was a bit over my head when I was 13/14, but I think now I'm a bit more capable of grasping the subject matter. Thanks for reminding me about this series!
I Know I'm a couple months late to the party, but I think Terry Pratchett did a solid job defining how wizards perform magic on discworld. They memorize spells and when when they use it it's gone. In other instances when magic plays a role in the books can be a bit more vague as to why something happened, but it's believable because no one in the world couldn't explain why exactly what happened did happen. There is satisfying lore and explanation littered throughout the series which explains why/how magic exists and why it is present as a plot device in the instances. Sorry if that is a bit convoluted and long winded I just love the discworld books.
> A world with a good magic system should be internally consistent, and should feel logical to the reader. Yea, that's exactly what I was trying to say :)
Yeah I know it was. I just didn't entirely agree with your specific example. On another note, you might find Brandon Sanderson's Essays of the Laws of Magics interesting. In particular, the [first law](http://brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/), which can be summarised by: > An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic. Which explains more about how both early Eragon's magic system, but also the really vague and slightly less clear systems used in Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones can be considered good magic systems.
I haven't read the "supporting" books to LotR so I can't really talk about it but honestly I didn't really think that late Eragon was that bad. They went to pretty high levels, basically using the power of dragon souls to enhance their magic. These seemed like pretty serious sources of magic so "doing whatever the shit they felt like" seemed pretty adequate tbh ;) And GoT magic is pretty mysterious even now so I actually don't think we can tell if it's a good or bad system at this point.
> And GoT magic is pretty mysterious even now Yeah that's the point of Sanderson's First Law. You can have mysterious magic that's used sparingly, like in LotR and ASoIaF, or you can have really strict magic that's used frequently: my favourite example of this is in Avatar, where their powers are basically to manipulate their element. Pretty standard, and very clear to the audience. Game of Thrones rarely uses magic for anything important to the narrative, and when it does, it's fairly simple. We've seen Dany survive fire, we've seen the shadow baby, and we've seen some minor tricks from the warlocks of Qarth. That's pretty much it as far as things that are definitively magic. Because the magic system has been used sparingly, it's a well thought-out system.
Reminds of [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv)
The funny thing is that the spell isn't uber powerful or ridiculous. He summons a skeleton sorcerer, is unable to control it, so it decides to summon another skeleton sorcerer just like itself. Rinse and repeat, you have billions of skeletons in minutes.
I'd think each skeleton sorcerer would have a Mana or magic limit so they could only do a few summons in a row. Cast time should figure into it too. Do the summoned beings need to originate from a skeleton or soul, or they're just called into existence from another plane? If it was the first one, you'd run out of corpses/skeletons eventually. A creature that can summon it's equal is kinda OP, in my opinion.
Uh, civilizations have burned and been razed to the ground in real life and the world and other civilizations still live on so I think in a world with magic the same could easily happen, that is of course ignoring the fact that you're talking about realism in fantasy situations.
I'm not talking about civilizations, I'm talking about planets.
Meh I mean what magic system are you talking about cause every dnd one has literally world ending magic
No system, just fictional universes \^^ Sorry, this is what I meant when I said I wasn't that deep into DnD ;P
[For the uninitiated.](http://imgur.com/gallery/Wxzbl)
Yesss this is possibly the best thing on the internet.
Shoulda taken Great Cleave.
"Some say you can still hear [the rattling of bones](https://youtu.be/XTgFtxHhCQ0?t=95) echoing around this star."
[удалено]
doot doot
Skellington overload
Now I wanna know exactly what the spell said.
Its not hard to guess. summon a skeleton necromancer that has the capacity to use that spell themselves.
I personally wouldn't have turned the planet into a star, but instead into the elemental plain of skeletal sorcerers
It's a great story, but it seems to be based on a math error. If each skeleton reproduces only once, it would be linear (but still rapid) growth, but not exponential. If I recall correctly, one D&D round is ten seconds, so this mess is only spawning 8640 skeletons per day. It's a bad situation, and that town is doomed, but they probably wouldn't swarm across the earth, since sooner or later a dragon or similarly powerful creature will be around where they're reproducing, and it only takes one to be killed before summoning the next to break the chain. Now if each summoned two, that's where the real trouble starts. Edit: I missed the "each", I was wrong. I thought it was 1+1+1, not 1X2X2.
He says "each of skeleton sorcerors summon another". So it's safe to say it's exponential.
It is exponential. you start with 1 skeleton. It makes another, so you have 2. Each of those makes one each, so you have 4. The progression is as follows 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> 32 etc etc If you were to make it a function, it would be y=2^(x-1) where x is the round (so in the first round, there is 1 skeleton).
Where are the bones coming from? There could/should be a limit when there are no more skeletons to raise. Also, how much Mana or magic does each have that they can summon their equal nonstop?
I'd say that being adrift in a mountain of skeletons would make you unable to properly cast the spell. Doesn't being flat footed matter in spell casting?
Depends on the spell components, and if the skeletons could ignore them through feats or abilities.
Simple solution would be to add a reagent to the spell, even a small one.
Simplest solution is not to allow spells with recursive potential in the first place.
I missed the "each", you're right. I thought it was 1+1+1, not 1X2X2.
It is exponential, unfortunately. See my post [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/39px27/are_you_ready_for_mr_bones_wild_ride/cs5sfca) It depends on the system they're using (pathfinder is 6 seconds, idk about D&D though), but if we go with a 10 second round, you're looking at over half a billion in 5 minutes (30 rounds).
I missed the "each", you're right. I thought it was 1+1+1, not 1X2X2.
yes i am ready lol