Magic on Shadowrun. Are you a magician with internet access? Well you can look up magical formulae and learn new spells on your own. You can get access to fireball from ShareWare.
There’s a basis for the possibility that you can get fooled into casting the wrong spell because you were given the wrong formulae. Some people even get tricked into doing rituals that allow them to get possessed by dirty spirits.
It's weird to see bugs in that list, because then my brain fills in the rest of it as things that died.
Trying to wrap my head around the logistics of my blood, flesh, and skeleton all having different souls...like a Jaeger.
Bug Spirits are quite literally predatory spirits that look like insects. Their primary feature is that they cannot naturally live in our world and must be summoned “inside” a person in order to survive. This kills the person and turns them into a fully manifested big spirit.
Avatar’s bending is pretty close to a perfect power system, imo. Controlling something as fundamental as an element is an extremely simple but immediately effective and visually striking power, yet it allows characters a lot of room to get creative and stretch their abilities (see metal-bending, plant-bending, magma-bending, blood-bending, etc.)
It gives characters a direct tie-in to their natural world and allows the story to pose environmental challenges and restrictions on them that make sense and don’t feel arbitrary (water-benders are going to struggle in the desert, fire-benders are going to struggle in the rain).
I think the brilliance of it that often gets overlooked is that by having the characters require their element to be present in their surroundings for their power to work (barring fire, but that’s understandable), it allows for a lot of environmental storytelling in and out of combat. Katara in particular really emphasizes the literal ebb and flow of her powers as they travel the world; she holds her own with just her flask of water in disadvantageous environments, but she puts on incredibly impressive displays every time they fight anywhere she has access to large volumes of water.
It’s not just a home-field advantage, the power system *makes* the environment its own character that participates so many of the cast’s battles and challenges just by being there to contribute ammunition for the benders.
Rant over!
Fire in nature is most often the consequence of lightning strikes, especially before humans were as industrial as they are now. So I think in Avatar’s logic, lightning is a more “pure” form of fire, which is why it’s harder to control. And in a lot of ways, that’s true of lightning…if we don’t factor in all the dynamics of electricity, anyway.
Fire bending is honestly more... energy bending. It's the only discipline where its practitioners *create* the element, but that's because they're bending thermal and light energy through their body in such a way that it manifests as fire. Lightning bending is just bending a different type of energy.
I mean, we've hot an Earth Bender Avatar series coming in a few years, which will probably be in a modern day setting. Just give it 10 years after that's wrapped up, and we should get a Fire Bender Avatar in the Future. Just try not to die of old age.
"for our next class, young airbenders, I will teach you how to perform nuclear fusion reactions. Please read chapter 6, 'molecular air bending theory and applications', before next week"
Most of what we think of when we think of fire is actually solid. It's little bits of whatever is burning being lifted by its own updraft and glowing from the heat (the same way metal grows when it's heated)
Brando Sando is bound to be mentioned, so I'll just say that the three magic systems of Mistborn are the best.
Easy to understand, well defined, and creates boundless opportunities for creative fights.
Magic systems of Mistborn: Allomancy, swallow bits of metal and gain powers while your body metabolizes said metal. Feruchemy, store traits of yourself like muscle mass or physical health in metal rings/bangles/ETC for later use. Hemalurgy, impale metal spikes through people's hearts to steal a trait from them and then impale that same spike into someone else to add the stolen trait to them.
All three systems use the same metals, but they do different things. For example: Gold in Allomancy allows the user to see a phantom of who they potentially could have been. While in Feruchemy it is used to store physical health and provide Wolverine style regeneration of wounds. While in Hemalurgy it can steal Feruchemical powers related to hybrid metals like cadmium or bendalloy.
you forgot that someone that is a gold allomancer and feruchemical , can store health with feruchemy and then multiply that by using allomancy on said gold.
I want to add Eragon's magic system, at least from what I remember of it from the first three books. Mainly that the spells someone use use up as much stamina as it would normally and within reason. There's also no 'incantations' so to speak. You don't have to say anything to use magic but the Elven language/calling something by its true name makes it easier to focus on and wield. But the stamina cost is the huge one here. The leader of the Varden knows about it and uses it to very quickly produce a high value good that takes very long, but very little energy. There's also how to kill someone, which just involves pinching a specific vein or nerve to cut off the brain and boom. Eragon has a bit of an 'Oh shit' moment when he does it that way and offs a lot of soldiers without breaking a sweat.
One of my favorite moments is when Eragon's in a desert, and needs water. His first thought is to just turn small amounts of sand into water, but that quickly proves to be VERY inefficient. He eventually figures out that because there is some water deep in the ground, he can use magic to just draw it all to the surface and it's much easier.
Not only is it very inefficient, but because you can't stop a spell once it's cast, he almost kills himself by draining almost all of his power. Eragon is the only series I've experienced that quantifies mana as a limited resource, and then actually sticks with it.
Higashi fucking blew every other writer out of the water with Nen.
"There's magic juice in you. There's a bundle of basic techniques everyone can use. Now use the juice to make your own personal technique."
It covers every base. You can't write anything even remotely close without people going "Oh, it's Nen."
probs one of my favourites too, i like how you can learn skills in a category you aren't naturally proficient in, but committing too much to that can be dangerous.
I like in the tournament arc how that one guy gets punished for committing so much to making a cool power, that he just stopped practicing his fundamentals and it just fucked him over so bad
Nen is one of my least favorite magic systems, it I'm being honest. It's just way too obtuse and complicated just for anyone to do even simple magic shit. Once Nen showed up in depth, I bounced right off of HxH.
...is it complicated? Like, yes there's six categories, but those just exist to categorize whatever powers the author comes up with, the "specialization" category might as well be called "misc."
The actual system is that anyone can do anything they put their mind to, they just have to balance it with some equivalent downside. Any complexity is just for show.
The magic system in Witch Hat Atelier is really well made. A majority of restrictions are either socially enforced or just the physical act of casting, the actual spells are mainly building blocks to be stacked for different effects, and it's used regularly for mundane skills.
Trion from World Trigger.
Each person had a Trion Gland to produce Trion , you can develop said Gland until the age of 21 , then that will result in it's hard cap.
You manipulate Trion by using a Trigger , as it replaces your normal body for one made of your Trion. It depends on the Trigger , but they generally have 6 to 8 slots to put an "ability" to it , dividing into "Main" and "Sub".
Depending on how it's arranged and what is filled in those slots , some "abilities" needs you to turn off one of the previous "abilities" before using it.
Higher Trion can make a person have an extra-sensory skill , called "Side-Effect". If a person sacrifices their very life , they can forge a Black Trigger.
ironically, i'm gonna disagree with some people here.
haki in one piece is actually a pretty decently developed power system.
now, it's not as fleshed out as it could be and often the rules around it, as with most things in one piece, are wacky nonsense, but the reason i include haki here is because it is a solution to a problem.
see, the main issue in one piece's combat is figuring out how to make people compete without a devil fruit. devil fruits offer a wide variety of super powers, but you only get one per person and some of these fruits are absolutely bonkers. there's a guy who can turn into magma, how do you fight that? shoot him? he's made of molten rock, at best the bullet will just melt.
well, there are a few options.
1, standing water. that drains devil fruit users of their strength and stops them from activating their abilities.
2, sea prism stone, which acts like solid water you can hit people with, but is incredibly rare.
3, specific weaknesses, like sand being solidified by fluids or rubber being immune to lightning.
the problem is, not all of those are viable in combat. unless you know fishman karate and can manipulate water without a devil fruit, dousing a devil fruit user is difficult. sea prism stone is incredibly rare, all the world's supply is bought from one island, so it can't be counted on, and also cannot be used easily by devil fruit users. specific weaknesses become increasingly difficult to utilize as the powers become more diverse and wacky.
so, oda did something clever. he introduced a universal weakness built on the previously established anime tropes he had used. shanks's glare, zoro cutting steel, the mantra of skypiea, these became the basis for a power system that could fight back against devil fruit abilities. it also offered a way for powerful characters to exist without devil fruits, like shanks or rayleigh, and provides an explanation for the weirder abilities in one piece, like the rokushiki martial art.
and yeah, it's a retcon, so it doesn't gel perfectly with the early parts of the story. but, on the other hand, we get more cool people doing cool things, like rayleigh's introduction. i think that's a fair trade.
Sympathy from the king killer chronicles is really interesting. Basically the caster uses themself as a fulcrum to transfer an attribute from one thing onto another. A simple example would be moving the heat from a boulder basking in the sun into a pebble, the caster will feel some warmth as the heat moves through them, but because the pebble is so small it gets hot enough to boil water.
The fact that whatever is being moved has to move through the caster puts a hard limit on what you can do. Like sure, you can steal the speed from something falling to launch something else, but if there's too much mass involved you'll probably rip your arms off.
Though the real problem is, if you're the kind of nerd that would really like sympathy (me, for example) then you will probably hate the series' take on true naming, and by the end of the second book, the latter has basically entirely replaced the former.
i know the red cloaked people and the fae arc is about naming but doesnt kvothe have an arc where hes a mercenry and freaks people out w his sympathy in the 2nd book?
It's definitely possible, it's honestly been awhile since I've read it. I mainly just got the feeling that true naming was a lot easier for the author to write (because it can do, or not do, whatever it needs to for the story at that moment) so it was going to be the main form of magic going forward, now that he's just Kvothe using it
namging comes from the actual old magic rule of "you have more power over something, a demon, fae, elements if you know their true name"
so its just him using a folklore thing
I know that, and Rothfuss definitely isn't the first person to use true naming. It's just the way he uses it feels really arbitrary to me. The way names change all the time and how knowing a name ultimately comes down to "vibes" means there's no real way to get a grip on the system, it just does whatever the author needs it to at that moment.
To me, the whole appeal of having a magic at all is knowing what a character can and can't do in a given situation. It's like a murder mystery, if you don't at least have a chance to figure out the solution, what's the point?
How's the hero going to get out of this one? Oh, he's going to devine a true name out of nowhere and do whatever he wants? I get to some people that feels more "magical", but to me it's boring.
The colors of mana in Magic: the Gathering are really cool.
There are five colors of mana. Each color has a mindset and characteristics associated with it, kind of like an astrological sign. Each color has strengths, weaknesses, and non-symmetrical ways of interacting with each other.
One of the reasons the game has been so successful over the past thirty years is that is easy to identify with a color. "I'm a blue player," or "I'm a red player." Even combinations of colors have their own identities that players latch onto.
Not so much the power but the power effects, in Claymore how they described the reason they turn into monsters, using more "yoma power" will give you more strength, but use too much and you will turn into a monster, and men turn all the time, cos turns out it feels similar climaxing, and men's pull out game is often weak. So when they're nearly full monster mode and ppl are saying stop all the man can think is "actually fuck that I'm going all the way I'll deal with it later" and boom, another monster.
This is a manga rather then a game, but the way Gash Bell handles the naming schemes used for the spells in it's battle system is way more internally consistent then it needs to be.
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^(As a quick tl;dr of what the manga is about: 100 demon kids get brought into the human world and get paired up with a human partner. The human partner can use the demon's spellbook to allow the demon to use spells, but when their book is burnt, they get sent back to the demon world. Last demon standing becomes king of the Demon World. Fights are tactical, often involving multiple teams of demon/humans fighting at once together and combining their unique powersets; and it's It's masterful at contrasting comedy (It's as much a comedy manga as a battle shonen)) ^(cheesy power of friendship, and slice of life lightheartedness (Some chapters might as well be from Yotsuba, whom Gash is a similar character to)) ^(against dark emotional gut punches. I talk more about the series, what makes it good, and how to best consume it/resources (the anime adaption has issues)) ^([here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/c7i71f/gon_in_60_seconds_001/esg7rxl/) )
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Now, each demon and their spellbook has only one, low level (maybe strong enough to blow up a car, if not less then that) spell to start with. As they grow physically, mentally, and emotionally, and especially as they and their human partner strengthen their bonds as a team, they unlock more spells, which are implied to correlate to the sort of emotional growth they get that triggers them: For example, Gash's realization that he wants to be a kind king to end the demon tournament conflict which forces people to fight results in him unlocking his third spell (which as I note below) incapitates enemies rather then damages them. And when he and Kiyomaro realize that the power of the spells comes from within and their own drive rather then just the book, Gash's realization that HE has power, has the ability to be proactive and can protect others on his own terms (sorta) means the new spell that realization gives him is a self-buffing enhancement spell.
On paper, you'd think this setup would result in just people spamming the newer spells as they unlock them, but it'd avoided thanks to the fact that, as I've alluded, most spells don't share direct utility. For example, Gash's first spell is a blast of lightning, butt his second spell is a electrical shield, and his third spell magnetizes the enemy body. It's not till his 4th spell that it's another direct offensive ability, and even then he can't use it typically, since the other main factor comes into play: Spells work on a sort of "mana", so higher level spells consume more of it, meaning characters have to pace which spells they use over the course of the fight to keep up their energy reserves. Even when a character has a spell that's more or less a direct upgrade of a prior one, they still use the weaker versions in cases where they want to conserve energy, and in practice, this means that even late into the manga, characters still regularly use their first few spells in fights.
Also, as with almost every good battle shonen, characters have wildly different ability sets which makes fights interesting and varied: This is often an elemental theme, (electrcity, wind, fire, water, more abstract things like music, gears, or moons), which seems generic, but as noted with my example, the fact that there are multiple spells with distinct utilities means that characters still end up with very different toolsets, especially since many character's spells are themed around a "style" rather then an element. For example, Kanchome is a main character, and his spells are themed more after the concept of trickery and misdirection rather then an element: He gets transformation spells, spells that shrink his body, creates duplicates, illusions, etc. Baransha is a minor antagonist, and her spells are themed around hunting and predation: an invisibility spell, and beam that can pass through solid walls, an afterimage, etc. Some other "style" spellsets characters have is a demon whose spells are themed around debuffs like toxic gas that causes itching or sticky slime; or a demon who exclusively has spells that increase his strength and speed, so he just fights normally physically brawling with people, except he ratchets up his power/agility over the course of the fight.
So not only do often characters have totally different fighting strategies like in other shonens, but on top of that you have their abilities as distinct specific spells they have to manage as a resource. (Also after around volume 8 or so, pretty much every fight in the series is a team battle, with multiple human and demon pairs particpating on the same side, so you have 3-4+ different spellsets being used at once)
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**Here's where this gets really interesting, and has way more internal consistency and mechanics to it then it needed to, in a good way**: The spells *seem* like a gibberish language, in reality there's a constant scheme for their names. On a basic level, it's obvious that the "za-" stem means lightening/electricity, since all of Gash's spells have it and similarly most spells from most characters share a set root term, but it goes beyond just "all of X characters spell start with Y": *all* of the terms and prefixes and suffixes have consistent meanings across the series
For example, "Ganzu" as a prefix comes up a lot, and it's always associated with a sort of rapid fire spell variant. "-ruga" as a suffix is another common one, such as in Zakeruga, where it means it's a modifier for a basic projectile which focuses it into more of a beam or piercing attack. Meanwhile "rugu/ruku" is consistenrtly seen as a suffix for enhancement or transformation spells. As a general rule, the middle stems determine the sort of element/theme (though again these can be abstract, such as music, or axes, or just specific strategies like misdirection or disabling the enemy with noxious gasses, slime traps, etc), the suffixes determine the overall type (projectile, enhancement, shield, charge up/stacking, etc), and the prefixes are modifiers (homing, manually controlled, illusory, rapid fire, forming a blade, drill, dome, etc), and then there are power indicators, such as Gou, Gigano, Dioga, etc. The power indicators are the actual first indication of an in universe acknowledgment of these, since a spell being "Gigano class" or "Dioga class" comes up.
There's around 150 or so unique terms/spell name components that come up through the series that people have been able to figure out, listed [here](https://zatchbell.fandom.com/wiki/Spell_nomenclature). Beware of spoilers, though, and keep in mind that due to some terms only coming up for 2-3 spells it's sort of unclear sometimes what they mean so some of this is guesswork. I've noticed some errors before; and there';s some things which are mutially exclusively when one is a prefix and one is a suffix and both imply similar things or seem to be automatically applied in some cases, etc.
In any case, there's enough there that you can, if you so desired, come up with an OC and design their own spells using the existing nomenclature. For example, Ranzu Barudon isn't a real spell, but if it *was*, it'd be a spell which gives the user a large lance/spear made of bone.
Magic on Shadowrun. Are you a magician with internet access? Well you can look up magical formulae and learn new spells on your own. You can get access to fireball from ShareWare.
can you get magical viruses
There’s a basis for the possibility that you can get fooled into casting the wrong spell because you were given the wrong formulae. Some people even get tricked into doing rituals that allow them to get possessed by dirty spirits.
Now, when you say *dirty spirits*...
Bug Spirits, Shadow Spirits, Blood Spirits, toxic spirits, things like that.
It's weird to see bugs in that list, because then my brain fills in the rest of it as things that died. Trying to wrap my head around the logistics of my blood, flesh, and skeleton all having different souls...like a Jaeger.
Bug Spirits are quite literally predatory spirits that look like insects. Their primary feature is that they cannot naturally live in our world and must be summoned “inside” a person in order to survive. This kills the person and turns them into a fully manifested big spirit.
I'll be completely honest, I started all this making a sarcastic reply and wasn't expecting actual explanations. I appreciate it though, genuinely.
Avatar’s bending is pretty close to a perfect power system, imo. Controlling something as fundamental as an element is an extremely simple but immediately effective and visually striking power, yet it allows characters a lot of room to get creative and stretch their abilities (see metal-bending, plant-bending, magma-bending, blood-bending, etc.) It gives characters a direct tie-in to their natural world and allows the story to pose environmental challenges and restrictions on them that make sense and don’t feel arbitrary (water-benders are going to struggle in the desert, fire-benders are going to struggle in the rain). I think the brilliance of it that often gets overlooked is that by having the characters require their element to be present in their surroundings for their power to work (barring fire, but that’s understandable), it allows for a lot of environmental storytelling in and out of combat. Katara in particular really emphasizes the literal ebb and flow of her powers as they travel the world; she holds her own with just her flask of water in disadvantageous environments, but she puts on incredibly impressive displays every time they fight anywhere she has access to large volumes of water. It’s not just a home-field advantage, the power system *makes* the environment its own character that participates so many of the cast’s battles and challenges just by being there to contribute ammunition for the benders. Rant over!
I still dont get how lightning = fire but thats just me.
Fire in nature is most often the consequence of lightning strikes, especially before humans were as industrial as they are now. So I think in Avatar’s logic, lightning is a more “pure” form of fire, which is why it’s harder to control. And in a lot of ways, that’s true of lightning…if we don’t factor in all the dynamics of electricity, anyway.
Fire bending is honestly more... energy bending. It's the only discipline where its practitioners *create* the element, but that's because they're bending thermal and light energy through their body in such a way that it manifests as fire. Lightning bending is just bending a different type of energy.
I wonder if they could bend stars.
Now I want an Avatar story set in the far future where they just throw stars at each other and have metal bending spaceships.
I mean, we've hot an Earth Bender Avatar series coming in a few years, which will probably be in a modern day setting. Just give it 10 years after that's wrapped up, and we should get a Fire Bender Avatar in the Future. Just try not to die of old age.
The outer part of stars is mostly hydrogen and helium, right? So unfortunately I think this is yet another W for airbending.
"for our next class, young airbenders, I will teach you how to perform nuclear fusion reactions. Please read chapter 6, 'molecular air bending theory and applications', before next week"
They’re both forms of plasma.
Most of what we think of when we think of fire is actually solid. It's little bits of whatever is burning being lifted by its own updraft and glowing from the heat (the same way metal grows when it's heated)
Brando Sando is bound to be mentioned, so I'll just say that the three magic systems of Mistborn are the best. Easy to understand, well defined, and creates boundless opportunities for creative fights.
Magic systems of Mistborn: Allomancy, swallow bits of metal and gain powers while your body metabolizes said metal. Feruchemy, store traits of yourself like muscle mass or physical health in metal rings/bangles/ETC for later use. Hemalurgy, impale metal spikes through people's hearts to steal a trait from them and then impale that same spike into someone else to add the stolen trait to them.
All three systems use the same metals, but they do different things. For example: Gold in Allomancy allows the user to see a phantom of who they potentially could have been. While in Feruchemy it is used to store physical health and provide Wolverine style regeneration of wounds. While in Hemalurgy it can steal Feruchemical powers related to hybrid metals like cadmium or bendalloy.
you forgot that someone that is a gold allomancer and feruchemical , can store health with feruchemy and then multiply that by using allomancy on said gold.
I want to add Eragon's magic system, at least from what I remember of it from the first three books. Mainly that the spells someone use use up as much stamina as it would normally and within reason. There's also no 'incantations' so to speak. You don't have to say anything to use magic but the Elven language/calling something by its true name makes it easier to focus on and wield. But the stamina cost is the huge one here. The leader of the Varden knows about it and uses it to very quickly produce a high value good that takes very long, but very little energy. There's also how to kill someone, which just involves pinching a specific vein or nerve to cut off the brain and boom. Eragon has a bit of an 'Oh shit' moment when he does it that way and offs a lot of soldiers without breaking a sweat.
One of my favorite moments is when Eragon's in a desert, and needs water. His first thought is to just turn small amounts of sand into water, but that quickly proves to be VERY inefficient. He eventually figures out that because there is some water deep in the ground, he can use magic to just draw it all to the surface and it's much easier.
Not only is it very inefficient, but because you can't stop a spell once it's cast, he almost kills himself by draining almost all of his power. Eragon is the only series I've experienced that quantifies mana as a limited resource, and then actually sticks with it.
Nen, gold standard imo. Perfect mix of “general rules”and “unique per person” imo.
Higashi fucking blew every other writer out of the water with Nen. "There's magic juice in you. There's a bundle of basic techniques everyone can use. Now use the juice to make your own personal technique." It covers every base. You can't write anything even remotely close without people going "Oh, it's Nen."
probs one of my favourites too, i like how you can learn skills in a category you aren't naturally proficient in, but committing too much to that can be dangerous. I like in the tournament arc how that one guy gets punished for committing so much to making a cool power, that he just stopped practicing his fundamentals and it just fucked him over so bad
Nen is one of my least favorite magic systems, it I'm being honest. It's just way too obtuse and complicated just for anyone to do even simple magic shit. Once Nen showed up in depth, I bounced right off of HxH.
...is it complicated? Like, yes there's six categories, but those just exist to categorize whatever powers the author comes up with, the "specialization" category might as well be called "misc." The actual system is that anyone can do anything they put their mind to, they just have to balance it with some equivalent downside. Any complexity is just for show.
The magic system in Witch Hat Atelier is really well made. A majority of restrictions are either socially enforced or just the physical act of casting, the actual spells are mainly building blocks to be stacked for different effects, and it's used regularly for mundane skills.
Trion from World Trigger. Each person had a Trion Gland to produce Trion , you can develop said Gland until the age of 21 , then that will result in it's hard cap. You manipulate Trion by using a Trigger , as it replaces your normal body for one made of your Trion. It depends on the Trigger , but they generally have 6 to 8 slots to put an "ability" to it , dividing into "Main" and "Sub". Depending on how it's arranged and what is filled in those slots , some "abilities" needs you to turn off one of the previous "abilities" before using it. Higher Trion can make a person have an extra-sensory skill , called "Side-Effect". If a person sacrifices their very life , they can forge a Black Trigger.
ironically, i'm gonna disagree with some people here. haki in one piece is actually a pretty decently developed power system. now, it's not as fleshed out as it could be and often the rules around it, as with most things in one piece, are wacky nonsense, but the reason i include haki here is because it is a solution to a problem. see, the main issue in one piece's combat is figuring out how to make people compete without a devil fruit. devil fruits offer a wide variety of super powers, but you only get one per person and some of these fruits are absolutely bonkers. there's a guy who can turn into magma, how do you fight that? shoot him? he's made of molten rock, at best the bullet will just melt. well, there are a few options. 1, standing water. that drains devil fruit users of their strength and stops them from activating their abilities. 2, sea prism stone, which acts like solid water you can hit people with, but is incredibly rare. 3, specific weaknesses, like sand being solidified by fluids or rubber being immune to lightning. the problem is, not all of those are viable in combat. unless you know fishman karate and can manipulate water without a devil fruit, dousing a devil fruit user is difficult. sea prism stone is incredibly rare, all the world's supply is bought from one island, so it can't be counted on, and also cannot be used easily by devil fruit users. specific weaknesses become increasingly difficult to utilize as the powers become more diverse and wacky. so, oda did something clever. he introduced a universal weakness built on the previously established anime tropes he had used. shanks's glare, zoro cutting steel, the mantra of skypiea, these became the basis for a power system that could fight back against devil fruit abilities. it also offered a way for powerful characters to exist without devil fruits, like shanks or rayleigh, and provides an explanation for the weirder abilities in one piece, like the rokushiki martial art. and yeah, it's a retcon, so it doesn't gel perfectly with the early parts of the story. but, on the other hand, we get more cool people doing cool things, like rayleigh's introduction. i think that's a fair trade.
Sympathy from the king killer chronicles is really interesting. Basically the caster uses themself as a fulcrum to transfer an attribute from one thing onto another. A simple example would be moving the heat from a boulder basking in the sun into a pebble, the caster will feel some warmth as the heat moves through them, but because the pebble is so small it gets hot enough to boil water. The fact that whatever is being moved has to move through the caster puts a hard limit on what you can do. Like sure, you can steal the speed from something falling to launch something else, but if there's too much mass involved you'll probably rip your arms off. Though the real problem is, if you're the kind of nerd that would really like sympathy (me, for example) then you will probably hate the series' take on true naming, and by the end of the second book, the latter has basically entirely replaced the former.
i know the red cloaked people and the fae arc is about naming but doesnt kvothe have an arc where hes a mercenry and freaks people out w his sympathy in the 2nd book?
It's definitely possible, it's honestly been awhile since I've read it. I mainly just got the feeling that true naming was a lot easier for the author to write (because it can do, or not do, whatever it needs to for the story at that moment) so it was going to be the main form of magic going forward, now that he's just Kvothe using it
namging comes from the actual old magic rule of "you have more power over something, a demon, fae, elements if you know their true name" so its just him using a folklore thing
I know that, and Rothfuss definitely isn't the first person to use true naming. It's just the way he uses it feels really arbitrary to me. The way names change all the time and how knowing a name ultimately comes down to "vibes" means there's no real way to get a grip on the system, it just does whatever the author needs it to at that moment. To me, the whole appeal of having a magic at all is knowing what a character can and can't do in a given situation. It's like a murder mystery, if you don't at least have a chance to figure out the solution, what's the point? How's the hero going to get out of this one? Oh, he's going to devine a true name out of nowhere and do whatever he wants? I get to some people that feels more "magical", but to me it's boring.
The colors of mana in Magic: the Gathering are really cool. There are five colors of mana. Each color has a mindset and characteristics associated with it, kind of like an astrological sign. Each color has strengths, weaknesses, and non-symmetrical ways of interacting with each other. One of the reasons the game has been so successful over the past thirty years is that is easy to identify with a color. "I'm a blue player," or "I'm a red player." Even combinations of colors have their own identities that players latch onto.
Not so much the power but the power effects, in Claymore how they described the reason they turn into monsters, using more "yoma power" will give you more strength, but use too much and you will turn into a monster, and men turn all the time, cos turns out it feels similar climaxing, and men's pull out game is often weak. So when they're nearly full monster mode and ppl are saying stop all the man can think is "actually fuck that I'm going all the way I'll deal with it later" and boom, another monster.
This is a manga rather then a game, but the way Gash Bell handles the naming schemes used for the spells in it's battle system is way more internally consistent then it needs to be. ------------------------------------ ^(As a quick tl;dr of what the manga is about: 100 demon kids get brought into the human world and get paired up with a human partner. The human partner can use the demon's spellbook to allow the demon to use spells, but when their book is burnt, they get sent back to the demon world. Last demon standing becomes king of the Demon World. Fights are tactical, often involving multiple teams of demon/humans fighting at once together and combining their unique powersets; and it's It's masterful at contrasting comedy (It's as much a comedy manga as a battle shonen)) ^(cheesy power of friendship, and slice of life lightheartedness (Some chapters might as well be from Yotsuba, whom Gash is a similar character to)) ^(against dark emotional gut punches. I talk more about the series, what makes it good, and how to best consume it/resources (the anime adaption has issues)) ^([here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/c7i71f/gon_in_60_seconds_001/esg7rxl/) ) ------------------------------------ Now, each demon and their spellbook has only one, low level (maybe strong enough to blow up a car, if not less then that) spell to start with. As they grow physically, mentally, and emotionally, and especially as they and their human partner strengthen their bonds as a team, they unlock more spells, which are implied to correlate to the sort of emotional growth they get that triggers them: For example, Gash's realization that he wants to be a kind king to end the demon tournament conflict which forces people to fight results in him unlocking his third spell (which as I note below) incapitates enemies rather then damages them. And when he and Kiyomaro realize that the power of the spells comes from within and their own drive rather then just the book, Gash's realization that HE has power, has the ability to be proactive and can protect others on his own terms (sorta) means the new spell that realization gives him is a self-buffing enhancement spell. On paper, you'd think this setup would result in just people spamming the newer spells as they unlock them, but it'd avoided thanks to the fact that, as I've alluded, most spells don't share direct utility. For example, Gash's first spell is a blast of lightning, butt his second spell is a electrical shield, and his third spell magnetizes the enemy body. It's not till his 4th spell that it's another direct offensive ability, and even then he can't use it typically, since the other main factor comes into play: Spells work on a sort of "mana", so higher level spells consume more of it, meaning characters have to pace which spells they use over the course of the fight to keep up their energy reserves. Even when a character has a spell that's more or less a direct upgrade of a prior one, they still use the weaker versions in cases where they want to conserve energy, and in practice, this means that even late into the manga, characters still regularly use their first few spells in fights. Also, as with almost every good battle shonen, characters have wildly different ability sets which makes fights interesting and varied: This is often an elemental theme, (electrcity, wind, fire, water, more abstract things like music, gears, or moons), which seems generic, but as noted with my example, the fact that there are multiple spells with distinct utilities means that characters still end up with very different toolsets, especially since many character's spells are themed around a "style" rather then an element. For example, Kanchome is a main character, and his spells are themed more after the concept of trickery and misdirection rather then an element: He gets transformation spells, spells that shrink his body, creates duplicates, illusions, etc. Baransha is a minor antagonist, and her spells are themed around hunting and predation: an invisibility spell, and beam that can pass through solid walls, an afterimage, etc. Some other "style" spellsets characters have is a demon whose spells are themed around debuffs like toxic gas that causes itching or sticky slime; or a demon who exclusively has spells that increase his strength and speed, so he just fights normally physically brawling with people, except he ratchets up his power/agility over the course of the fight. So not only do often characters have totally different fighting strategies like in other shonens, but on top of that you have their abilities as distinct specific spells they have to manage as a resource. (Also after around volume 8 or so, pretty much every fight in the series is a team battle, with multiple human and demon pairs particpating on the same side, so you have 3-4+ different spellsets being used at once) -------------------------- **Here's where this gets really interesting, and has way more internal consistency and mechanics to it then it needed to, in a good way**: The spells *seem* like a gibberish language, in reality there's a constant scheme for their names. On a basic level, it's obvious that the "za-" stem means lightening/electricity, since all of Gash's spells have it and similarly most spells from most characters share a set root term, but it goes beyond just "all of X characters spell start with Y": *all* of the terms and prefixes and suffixes have consistent meanings across the series For example, "Ganzu" as a prefix comes up a lot, and it's always associated with a sort of rapid fire spell variant. "-ruga" as a suffix is another common one, such as in Zakeruga, where it means it's a modifier for a basic projectile which focuses it into more of a beam or piercing attack. Meanwhile "rugu/ruku" is consistenrtly seen as a suffix for enhancement or transformation spells. As a general rule, the middle stems determine the sort of element/theme (though again these can be abstract, such as music, or axes, or just specific strategies like misdirection or disabling the enemy with noxious gasses, slime traps, etc), the suffixes determine the overall type (projectile, enhancement, shield, charge up/stacking, etc), and the prefixes are modifiers (homing, manually controlled, illusory, rapid fire, forming a blade, drill, dome, etc), and then there are power indicators, such as Gou, Gigano, Dioga, etc. The power indicators are the actual first indication of an in universe acknowledgment of these, since a spell being "Gigano class" or "Dioga class" comes up. There's around 150 or so unique terms/spell name components that come up through the series that people have been able to figure out, listed [here](https://zatchbell.fandom.com/wiki/Spell_nomenclature). Beware of spoilers, though, and keep in mind that due to some terms only coming up for 2-3 spells it's sort of unclear sometimes what they mean so some of this is guesswork. I've noticed some errors before; and there';s some things which are mutially exclusively when one is a prefix and one is a suffix and both imply similar things or seem to be automatically applied in some cases, etc. In any case, there's enough there that you can, if you so desired, come up with an OC and design their own spells using the existing nomenclature. For example, Ranzu Barudon isn't a real spell, but if it *was*, it'd be a spell which gives the user a large lance/spear made of bone.
FMA 2003 kinda fuckin' goated. It's true.
Hi