In recent years, the rise of intricate, well-defined magic systems—exemplified by Brandon Sanderson’s work—has led many aspiring authors to believe that a detailed set of rules governing magical abilities is essential for crafting compelling fantasy. While Sanderson’s approach to magic has proven highly successful, not every fantasy story benefits from such a framework.
In fact, magic that retains an air of mystery, as seen in the works of authors like Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien, can be equally, if not more, effective in certain kinds of tales. Let’s explore why not every fantasy story needs a magic system and examine which kinds of stories systematized magic helps and hinders.
Brandon Sanderson is often credited with popularizing magic systems that resemble science with clearly established rules, limitations, and mechanics. In Mistborn, for example, the magic of Allomancy operates on a strict set of principles: Ingest metals, burn them for specific powers, and be limited by the kind and quantity of metal consumed. This transparency allows readers to anticipate outcomes, creating a puzzle of sorts that rewards careful attention.
So systematized magic can offer advantages. It empowers characters within the milieu of the story, ensuring that magic use feels logical and consistent. Readers who enjoy problem-solving or technical world building are often drawn to these systems, which allow magic to function like technology. In other words, each spell is subject to clear cause-and-effect relationships.
And such a structure can heighten tension during conflicts, since both protagonists and antagonists must work within the same constraints, making victory a matter of strategy as much as power. This approach works especially well in stories focused on conflict resolution, intrigue, or heists. Because the balance of power is crucial, and understanding the system can make the difference between life and death, it’s ideal for fantasy that thrives on manipulation of the environment and tight world building.
Related: How Does Your Magic Work?
Contrast the systematic approach with the worlds of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien. In the Hyborian Age and Middle-earth, magic is a less defined expression of the unknown, the mystical, or even the divine. Magic in Tolkien’s legendarium is rarely explained in-depth. Gandalf, for example, performs miraculous acts with no real explanation of the mechanics behind them. Likewise, Conan often encounters sorcerers whose power seems vast and unknowable–evoking the fear and awe of the unknown.
This more ambiguous form of magic serves a different storytelling purpose. By not providing all the answers, authors can maintain an atmosphere of unpredictability and wonder. Magic in these settings feels elemental, tied to forces beyond human understanding. And as such, it can add depth and a sense of timelessness to the world.
Mysterious magic works particularly well in epic tales, mythologies, or stories that emphasize the vastness and danger of the world. The pervasive mystery thickens the atmosphere by suggesting there are greater powers at work that even the most powerful characters do not fully grasp. It also serves to underline themes of fate, destiny, or the will of the gods, which highlights mankind’s smallness in the face of cosmic forces.
In these stories, magic is not a mere tool. It is a primeval manifestation or a theophany. Characters may tap into these forces, but they can never truly control them.
Related: Sanderson v Tolkien–Magic v Sacrament
So how do you, the author, decide which kind of magic to use in your fantasy world?
Let’s go over a few criteria:
Consider your story’s focus
If your tale is driven by a plot that involves intricate power dynamics, puzzles, or problem-solving, a systematized magic approach might suit it best. Sanderson’s style allows for characters to outmaneuver each other by exploiting the rules of magic, which can foster tightly controlled yet satisfying resolutions.
On the other hand, if your story leans toward the mythic or the epic, mysterious magic can add gravity to the proceedings. The mystical approach lends itself to tales in which the world’s forces are even bigger than your larger-than-life characters, preserving a sense of scale and wonder that rigid systems might diminish.
Think about your themes
Systematized magic best complements stories that revolve around knowledge, control, and mastery. If your themes hinge on realizing human potential, making scientific progress (Big Nerds With Wands), or working around limitations, consider magic-as-tech.
By contrast, mysterious magic better suits stories about faith, fate, and foreboding. If your themes include the limitations of human knowledge or divine or unknowable powers, then mystical magic will better support them.
What tone are you setting?
A well-defined magic system often sets a tone that appeals to readers’ intellects. They will try to figure out how your magic works and derive joy from watching characters exploit the system to overcome obstacles. Hence why systematized magic is a good fit for stories with a more grounded tone in worlds where the rules are meant to be understood.
Now, if your goal is to evoke wonder, awe, or even fear, a mysterious magic system will amplify those feelings. By leaving much unexplained, you generate an atmosphere in which magic feels otherworldly and potentially dangerous.
While systematized magic has gained popularity for its clarity and logical consistency, it’s important to remember that not every fantasy story requires that level of detail. Mysterious, unpredictable magic can be just as powerful a storytelling tool, especially in narratives focused on myth, destiny, or the awe-inspiring nature of the unknown.
Not every fantasy story needs a magic system. Ultimately, the type of magic you choose should serve your story’s focus, themes, and tone. And whether it operates like science or, well, magic; your magic should always serve the story you want to tell.
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This is not related to the post, but of far greater importance. I’ve been a sedevacantist for over a year now, & I was convinced by this website: vaticancatholic.com. I recently looked into evidence for the other side (that there is a valid currently reigning pope), and it’s been very encouraging, but I wanted to be sure. I sent an email about it to you a while ago, but you didn’t respond (which I totally understand, since you’re very busy.) So, I’ll ask now: what is the best argument against the sedevacantist position? Thank you for your time
Steering at-risk souls away from the Protestantism-with-extra-steps that is sedevacantism is so important, I’ll allow this OT discussion.
Re: your original email, a thorough search failed to turn it up, so score one for the spam filter.
As it is, you’ve set me quite a challenge; not because sedevacantism is hard to disprove, but because we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to good disproofs.
We could really just skim the site you referenced, see that their position hinges on the post-Vatican II hierarchy turning apostate, and then note that the site’s writers don’t understand what apostasy is. None of the Vatican II Council Fathers, to my knowledge, publicly and explicitly repudiated Christianity, which is what apostasy a fide requires. So much for the Great Apostasy theory.
But as for positive refutations of sedevacantism itself, three words: extinction of jurisdiction.
If Piux XII was the last valid pope, there are now no valid cardinals and therefore no licit way to elect another valid pope ever. That eventually means no valid orders at all, and no valid Eucharist or sacramental confession. And the Church would be reduced to just laypeople reading Scripture and hearing theology lectures with no Mass.
So like I said, Protestantism with extra steps.
For the sake of your eternal soul, renounce the perfidious errors you’ve fallen in with and return to the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.
I’ve found the mark of a successful mysterious magic system is if a fan immediately knows it would be right or wrong if the magic is used to accomplish such-and such a thing in such-and-such a way.
There are rules. They might not necessarily be spelled out, but you know them instinctively.
On a side-note, I don’t have anything against Sanderson personally – by all accounts he’s a decent guy and undeniably a hard worker who’s done a lot for independent creators and deserves all his success – but as a lover of mysterious magic I’ve come to feel about him the same way a lot of people feel about Alan Moore and the influence Watchmen exerted on superhero stories, to the point where everything became Watchmen.
Sanderson himself, I’ve got no issue with but the Cult of Sanderson can be annoying.
Kind of like an awesome rock band that’s attracted a large contingent of insufferable fans.
As I look at that schematic of one of Sanderson’s magic systems, two things occur to me. First, it reminds me of a skill tree in a CRPG with no table top back-end, like Sacred. I realize on closer inspection it is might actually a schematic of relationships between types and schools of magic, but I’ll come back to that. Second, the names of the groups remind me of factions in Planescape. Putting those two observations together, I wonder whether there is a tendency among some authors to build magic systems which feel like they belong in role playing games because they learned about magic systems from RPGs.
I’m given to understand he was inspired by the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X.
Sanderson’s intricate magic systems work great when you want your protagonists to be able to use magic to solve problems.
If the rules are ill defined, if at all, it’s not very satisfying when The Wizard waves his wand and all the bad guys implode. It feels cheap and ad hoc, destroying any sense of tension (and this is part of the reason why Gandalf doesn’t just snap his fingers and fix all the Fellowship’s problems.)
Thus, the similarity to skills in tabletop gaming and RPG video games makes sense, because using magic is an integral part of those for the players.
This is also why superheroes have clearly defined abilities and limits. The Force in Star Wars, Ninjutsu in Naruto, magic in Dragon Quest, the X-Men’s superpowers, just to name a handful of off-the-cuff examples; they’re all kind of the same thing, fantastical abilities with fairly static limitations and scope that are generally understood by the viewer. It’s just that Sanderson really dialed up the complexity of the whole thing. To use a musical analogy, The Stormlight Archive is to The Lord Of The Rings what Dream Theater is to The Beatles.
However, mysterious magic is awesome when it’s wielded by the bad guys, for much the same reasons explained in the OP. Vague magic is great for creating conflict because it can raise the stakes for our comparatively normal heroes, making a grasp of it beyond their – and our – grasp. Mysterious magic makes for fun conflict, but it’s hard to use it to resolve conflicts in a satisfying manner.
It’s especially effective when this antagonistic magic is not of the superpower variety, but of more realistic types: necromancy, summoning demons, cursing people, and so on. Harry Potter, for all of its many flaws, is one of the few popular fantasy works (to my knowledge) to blur the lines between these, but it never takes it in a real thought-provoking direction: for instance, wizards concluding that magic is destroying them and making everything worse, prompting them to voluntarily give it up. Rowling chaotically flip-flops between powerful chaotic magic creating conflict, but heroes using it to solve problems as the plot demands. In a time where the Sandersonian model of fictional magic is waxing full, Rowling’s approach seems rather dated and clunky.
I think we’re overdue for fantastical stories that re-evaluate the whole concept of magic according to its traditional definition and uses in paganism as a force of evil that can’t be wielded safely. This older, more mysterious magic works especially well for suspense or horror stories, and even moreso for ones with a Christian worldview underpinning it.
As was pointed out on Twitter, Glen Cook managed to have mysterious magic without sacrificing tension by making the single viewpoint character ignorant in its ways. He just knows that magic users vary in skill and power, but it’s enough to justify a wizard saying, “I can’t get us out of this one. The other caster is out of my league.”
Another anime example is Slayers. That series leverages the fact that sorcerers get their powers from demons better than many Western examples I’ve seen. One episode even shows the main heroine’s spell fizzling against a demon-god because he’s the one who grants the spell, and as he himself explains “I’m not going to help you defeat me.”
How would you rate the magic system of Dragonball and and Fate/X?
Anime seems to have both a very lose yet very defined magic system. On a scale of Howard-to-Vance how would you rate it?
1) Dragon Ball doesn’t have a magic system. There are magic users like Garlic Jr. and Babidi, whose powers definitely tip the scales on the mystical end. Most characters’ powers come from intensive physical training, which Toriyama steadfastly resisted quantifying. The only counterpoint is the scouters, which he introduced to show that power levels were BS to begin with.
2) Whose fat ex?
(Really hoping I didn’t miss the joke and explain something that didn’t need explanation)
I think he’s talking about the Fate series, called Fate/x because they typically have titles in the format “Fate/other words”, such as Fate/stay night, Fate/hollow ataraxia, or Fate/Zero. I myself only know a little about it, but it involves summoning the incarnations of various legendary heroes to participate in a reoccurring battle royale for control of the Holy Grail, which grants wishes but is actually inhabited by Angra Mainyu, the evil god from Zoroastrianism.
Elaborating on what I wrote above, I get the impression that while Fate has specific roles that summoned heroes must fill (there must always be an Archer, a Mage, a Berserker, etc) it’s pretty soft about how exactly its powers work. I wouldn’t be surprised if little thought were given to the details of the magic system, because the series spawned from an erotic visual novel that somehow became popular for other reasons (they later re-released the original game in a cleaned-up form when the series got popular).
While I’m here, I’d also like to point out one of the most interesting magic systems I’ve seen: Cultist Simulator. Most videogames that feature magic use systems magic, for the obvious reason that if the player can control and use it then it has to be understandable. Cultist Sim, however, manages to make a thoroughly eerie and vague magic system playable without truly compromising its mystery. You start out as a clueless Cultist, knowing literally nothing about mysticism, and nothing at all is explained to you. You gradually find arcane tomes that, when read, give vague backstory and sometimes hints about how certain rituals work. Even when you finally find the formula for a magic ritual, you will probably have to experiment by throwing every item and power source you have into every possible slot that the ritual contains, hoping against hope that something happens. Even when you fully understand the game mechanics, if you step back a bit and think about it from an in-universe point of view, you are essentially performing an esoteric ritual, probably recapitulating some mythical event, in a secret place using very specific ingredients and the assistance of acolytes. Heck, one of the key ingredients that can be used are “Influences”, which are completely intangible, representing feelings or moods (you can only keep them for a limited time before they disappear). To give you an idea of how un-organised this is, here’s some examples of Rites that can be used:
Rite of the Watchman’s Sorrow
“This rite recalls the loss of the Watchman, who walks the house which has no walls. (Light goes before him and shadow behind. He must not see you.) The instrument of power is used to summon him to take his sacrifice: precious knowledge from the root of your thoughts. The assistant must speak the words that anchor your sanity, so choose someone you trust.”
Rite of the Rebel Striving
“This rite enacts a teaching of the Forge of Days: the artisan may achieve their highest goal only by destroying their most precious tool. The Lionsmith knew this when he shattered his sword before the Colonel. So my assistant must destroy a chosen instrument.”
Rite of the Beast’s Division
“The assistant’s name is taken from them in a place, or on an occasion, of power; and they are divided into nine parts. They used to be hunted like an animal, too, but times changed.”