Tabletop Magic for Your Novel

Picture courtesy mmorpg-info.com

This past week, I've been worldbuilding for Beggar's Twin. One thing I never really did with my other two books was sit down and hammer out details of how the Magic works before I wrote the story. I ended up regretting that during every stage of the process - I didn't know how to describe it while I wrote my rough drafts, and it affected the plots during revision and made them take longer. Sure, I eventually got all the pieces figured out, but it slowed me down.

Beggar's Twin has a very complicated magic system - more complicated than any I've written thus far. Not only are there a number of different branches of magic, the casting style is singing-based, which creates a whole new set of issues. I knew I was going to have to do a bit more planning here in order to keep everything straight, so I sat down with my friend Eric (an avid tabletop gamer who paid a lot more attention to the rulebooks than I ever did) and hammered out some rules for the magic system as if it were a tabletop RPG.

Here's how we got started:

Background

First, I described to him the basic construction of the magic system. I'd like to point out that I already had the basics in mind. The following diagram is the division of magic: what type of magic it is, what effects it has, how it's categorized, who can have it, how many branches can they have. This is all information you need to know before you begin.

A few points of pertinent background information (and the notes and ideas they spawned) are as follows:

1. Each branch of magic resonates with a particular key. There are six branches of magic, and there doesn't appear to be a rhyme or reason for the particular key it's associated with. (There are probably professors at the University who devote their lives to finding significance in these keys, but in terms of the story, nobody knows.)

2. Sound is vibration, but not just any sound can be used for spellcasting - it has to be voice. However, I decided that outside sounds would certainly disturb the spellcasting, because of interference. (You know what that means for historical warfare? WAR GONGS.)

3. Given the above, Professors at the University will have something akin to giant tuning forks in a dissonant key to their area of teaching, so they can disrupt any student spells likely to go awry. All Magicsingers carry small ones to act as a pitch-pipe before singing.


After establishing the background information, Eric and I decided to work with the D20 system, since it's what I'm most familiar with. 


If this were to be a real tabletop game, I would probably spend ages and ages coming up with a whole bunch of spells for each branch of magic, plus a couple of spells that could be done with particular combinations like esper/divintion telepathy. This, however, is not something I'm concerned with working out before I write, so I'm skipping that part (for now).


Next, we started coming up with what's know in tabletop gaming as "Feats".

In the d20 System, a feat is one type of ability a character may gain through level progression. Feats are different from skills in that characters can vary in competency with skills, while feats typically provide set bonuses to or new ways to use existing abilities.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/feat#ixzz1xb4Cx7SP

Feats are all those special little quirks that make your unique magic system even cooler. In terms of narrative, they're what will help you show off your magic system in plot and interaction. Flaws are similar to feats, but hinder the character. Here are a few of mine:

Perfect Pitch: (this feat can only be taken at character creation) Your character will never have problems with pitch. +5 on all casting checks.


Resonance: (this feat can only be taken at character creation) Resonance occurs when the spirit is in perfect resonance with one branch of magic, allowing that person the ability to become more proficient in that magic quickly. It also cancels dissonance penalties for the target branch.

Dissonance: (this feat can only be taken at character creation) Dissonance occurs when the spirit is in a dissonant key to a particular branch of magic. Non spellcasters may take this feat without penalty and receive a +20 to Armor Class against the target magic. Spellcasters may use this as a flaw.

Focus: (GM awards this feat at any time) When a character has devoted significant academic study to his or her singing, they may be awarded focus, which allows the caster to subtract five points off all casting checks.


Tone Deaf: When a character is tone-deaf, he or she will have significant difficulty casting spells. No one likes to sit next to this character in class. -5 on all casting checks. -10 if another character is singing a spell in a different key.

Beautiful Voice: Teachers always say it doesn't matter how good your voice is, as long as you can sing on key...but spells always seem more effective when cast in a lovely voice. Teachers are also more likely to favor students whose voices don't inspire dogs to howl. +1 on all "damage" rolls.


Obivously, there's a lot more that goes into creating a tabletop game than just background, spells, and feats. This is, however, a really good start.


Do you play tabletop games? If your magic system were a tabletop game, what feats and flaws would you have? How would you use them in your story?

NaNo Possibility 2: The Beggar's Twin

When Procne was 15, her twin brother was burned for the crime of climbing into Altaevia—the society built into the second and third stories of the city-state, where nobles live with their artisan-class servants, above the furor of the streets. Since that day, Procne has broken as many rules as she can: she steals, she ignores the curfew, and she uses magic, which is forbidden to women, to keep the sick and dying alive...for a price. But the two commands she is too afraid to break are the ones that got her brother killed: never climb into Altaevia; never touch a Noble.

But when a Lady mistakenly drops her baby from a second-story scaffold, Procne can’t simply watch him die. She catches the injured child and uses magic in front of an entire parade to save his life. But rather than thanking her for rescuing the child, the Jade Guard—Altaevia’s masked, magic-shielded police officers—throw her in jail. But Procne is sentenced to slavery at the Magic University rather than death, and when a Master Magicsinger named Bayek forces her to dress as a boy and then begins to teach her magic, she knows there's something he desperately wants.

Procne soon learns that Bayek is one of two living people with Negravia—the branch of magic allowing a person to manipulate the relationship between spirit, body, and soul—and the other is Procne. Even more disturbing, however, is the fact that Procne has two souls: her own, and the soul of her twin brother, which she unknowingly bound to herself in a desperate attempt to save him. Now he is a hodios, a soul trapped between the realms of the living and dead, and before she can truly learn to control her magic, she must let go of the last connection to her brother.

To save a dying magic, Bayek is willing to face excommunication for teaching a girl. Procne is willing to risk death, but not because she cares about Negravia. For the first time, a commoner is being given a chance at power, and Procne is determined to use that power to bring down the system that killed her brother and made her an outcast.

**************

I honestly don't know how long this project will be. I had original concepts for this story back in middle school, but they were really vague and got totally swept out of the way when I went to high school and started creating characters like mad. Then in University, I wrote a version of this story for a class, and fleshed out quite a bit about the two characters Bayek and Procne, and some about Procne's twin Philius, and the basic structure of the world.

It was received in a very ho-hum fashion (unsurprising, considering the largely literary crowd, but that's a university advanced writing class for you), so I set it aside and went back to work on the Mark of Flight. Well, right after Raven finished telling me "you could do better" on "The Mark of Flight" (which prompted me to rewrite the whole damn book), she read my original 30-40 pages of Beggar's Twin, and slammed it down on the floor at my feet.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU WRITE THIS?" she said. "The world hooked me right away!"

And a fan was born. I started working on the magic system and developing more about the structure of the society and its conventions. When I got back to the US (and right as I was in the thick of writing HELLHOUND), Raven helped me develop some of the world, and let me know when something wasn't working (IE, the main romance, and why). In case you couldn't tell, she, Adryn, and Skrybbi are my springboards for almost everything.

So this past March, when Japan exploded and Adryn briefly came home, the three of us played around with some character concepts, and they helped me work on some of the different (literal) tiers of society. I'm especially excited about the revolutionary aspect of this book, and the emotional turmoil that results when the shit hits the fan (oh, you know it will).

INTERACT: Do you prefer single books, duologies, trilogies, or series?


READ THE OTHER POSSIBLITIES:


Roost
Act of Mirrors


*Art: Devil's Eye, by Yang Qi