McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Opinions and help with my magic system

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Aminar:
Well...  Could the fountain not replenish the ability to use magic?  So it keeps you alive but every time you spend magic that is time from your replenished life wherein you will be helpless without magic?  Could raise some fun questions...  I'm not entirely clear what kind of help your looking for but magic should always have a cost...  Your characters are paying a hefty cost, but at the same time they don't entirely pay that cost until much later...  It'll be a tough concept to keep balanced(as a D&D campaign I witnessed learned the hard way.

Quantus:
You can leave the mechanisms vague when you are staying within the lines.   If you keep to the established boundaries, in this case the notion that Magic uses up life force, then you can get away with not looking too close at the mechanism, because its just background to the story to be briefly mentioned and then you can move on.  But in this case a loophole, a way to break the normal rules, is a central point to the story, so your readers will be looking at it much closer, unless many such loopholes exist, and the fountain is just his personal path to it, at which point you can hide it all offscreen again.  That would play well with the vampire/succubus angle, if everybody /can/ replenish, but the MC happens to have a morally acceptable way to do it.  In that case it doesnt really give him a significant advantage in terms of power or scope, just a more palatable than average means. 

Now, that still leaves the explanation pretty open.  You can go Chi energy style, where its the base life force energy that the body uses to keep things pumping.  You can go more spiritual into a spirit/soul that is wounded and needs time to recover.  You can do the aging bit or not, have the fountain reverse his aging or just stall it.  It could be described as cellular damage that takes time to heal and also exponentially increases the odds of cancer developing, random or specific (ie all casters eventually get the same rare brain tumor), "shortening your life" in a less literal but more scientifically explainable way. 

I do agree with others who suggest limiting the access/benefits of the Fountain as much as possible, otherwise it takes all the balance out of your MC using magic.  One idea I had would be that the Fountain just stalls his natural aging, but does not actually replenish his magic life energy.  So the fountain keeps him from aging day to day, but every time he uses magic he ages a little anyway.  He can live 800 years, but needs to ration his magic use out, and eventually stop completely if he wants to stay alive.


0.02

Snowleopard:
"On a similar notion, a carrion eater. If people in your world have a fixed amount of life force, then some will probably die before it is used up, maybe they are murdered or die in an accident. Magic users might be able to suck the remaining life force out of those bodies and add them to their own. Would probably be more morally valid (that is, if they don't actually eat part of the body), but also not as powerful. Especially interesting, if some of the dead persons life will actually be mixed into the magic user and change his personality slightly."

You could do a riff on this with a magical version of the Resurrectionists - Burke and Hare.
People who set out to kill those, before their time, so that others might use up their life force.
A twist on that would be that the Resurrectionists can't use the life force because it won't work and/or go
to a person's murderer or maybe just a murder period.

Darkshore:
I'm still a little iffy on the whole fountain of youth bit, but that carrion eater idea is just plain awesome. My magic system is huge on costs so I may be a bit biased.

OZ:
I like this. I have always wondered what the difference is between a ghoul that eats dead bodies and a plain old cannibal. If a ghoul only eats fresh bodies that still retain residual magic, that would be a good definition of why they are supernatural creatures rather than just people with a strange diet.

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