Is alchemy another force or simply based in real world science?
Sounds intriguing - you seem to have a pretty good idea of where you’re going with this magic system. In my case, like I told you earlier, magic used to be in abundance, pretty much disappeared since antiquity and is now slowly reappearing. It’s gptten to the point that it’s not omnipresent enough to be experienced by anyone, but common enough that it’s widely studied and used in academic circles, to the point that the words professor and Magus are interchangeable. Then there’s the monoliths that grant their users near infinite potential but come with a very high risk factor and are mainly taken over by the military. Alchemy, on the other hand, has been present since ancient times but is mostly confined to one culture and curiously, its power and intensity is unrelated to the magic flow I mentioned earlier.
I know the two rules I have in place for power balance comes from magic just being a serious energy burner both mentally and physically, so "normal" mages are limited by their physical limitations. The limits for reality warper really comes down to the imaginative limitations of the selected subjects that can use it. A more imaginative person may be able to tap into greater ability but be too physically weak to make it come to fruition, whereas the training regime for people with talent may limit their ability to comprehend anything beyond the four basic elements. The four higher elements are more concepts than physical forces, so it seems like a no-brainer some people, especially people well grounded in reality may have a more difficult time grasping them. In truth, you would have to be someone like Socrates who was physically buff and mentally open to be a real threat outside of the non-humans characters with magic. It probably says something that the only non-special magic user in the plot dies a quarter of the way into the plot.
Sounds pretty similar to what I have tbh
The source of magic in my world falls back into the cosmology of the setting, which becomes a big part of the plot in the later chapters. My issues stem from both he fact that magic is common place enough in the setting where people don't quite bat an eye to it, but is restricted for military and government purposes only and make it sound plausible. My other issue is that theoretically, the nature of the mechanics could make anyone a reality warper and I need to figure out more plausible solutions for the limitations of the resource. I have quite a few ideas now, but I need to write down the rules so I don't break them myself.
Oh man, I really need to figure something out when it comes to my magic system. I know where it comes from and I know how it fluctuates, I know there’s two main brands - vanilla magic and alchemy - but I honestly have no clue when it comes to how exactly it works.
Yeah, that's what the SB is for. Hammering out all of the details so you don't have to in the book proper. I need to explain how magic finally works and why only certain people have it, so I want to lay out the major mechanics in the SB so I can figure out an easy way to abridge it for a simple explanation.
Yeah, it does seem like it works like that - if anything, I am now constantlybonmersed in that world I created, so that’s cool. And yeah - handling exposition is also something I struggle with. You already know what it’s all about, but you know another person knows nothing, so there’s a tendency to either explain things inadequately or excessively. It’s sonething I hope can be dealt with in later drafts.
As I said, these books start small and then grow over time as you write more. The nice thing is that I often find the Story Bible will inspire me to write the main novel, so I often go back and forth between both. I'm actually thinking of starting back on the SB since my new chapter has me venturing into some uncharted territory with a character I rarely wrote, on the other hand, this chapter is also a bit of an info dump concerning certain metaphysical stuff that's been going on for a few chapters now and needs to be addressed. I figure I will do the full explanation in the SB and give an abridged version in the story proper. My main issue now is that I faintly remember writing this stuff down a few years ago in a notebook with the intention of transcribing it to the SB and now I can't remember what I did with it.
It is working for now and I hope it keeps working out. Interestingly, I actually started out with drawing a world map and will probably have to draw several more. The first one was the easiest, though, since it was a general outline of the continents - gonna need to go deeper into country borders later, which will be tricky. Though I still feel that I’m using broader stroke for the world for now, at least I got some terminology down
