Once you have a concept for your magic system, it’s time to populate it with spells. Each spell should mesh with your concept exactly. If it doesn’t, then you either need to change your spell or the system that it’s supposed to fit into. Resist the urge to put something in without a good reason. Trust me, it will annoy your readers or players if there’s something in there that’s out of place.
I like to start my spell creation with the effect in mind. What does the spell actually do for the caster? It could be offensive, defensive, utilitarian, movement, or anything you imagine within your system concept. Are those effects very specific (I can create a 20′ diameter ball of flame anywhere within 100 yards of me) or pretty loose (I can make fire! Check THIS out).
From this point on , I’m going to use one of Blake Heira’s go to spells, called Voice of Morn, as an example of how this works.. This spell tells Blake when someone is lying or telling the truth. Definitely useful for an investigator who interrogates people for a living.
Once you have an idea of what the spell does, you need to come up with those limitations that give the spell some flavor, remembering Sanderson’s 2nd law. This means coming up with requirements, costs, weaknesses, and specifics for the spell. In my magic system, Blake needs his divining rod. He simply cannot cast without it. He also needs to say special words, use special gestures, and be able to hear. These make up the requirements for the spell. The cost for the spell is if he messes up in his casting, which typically does things like render him deaf or cause him some sort of physical pain. Weaknesses include needing sufficient energy to cast and maintain the spell and having divination magic around him to use. If he doesn’t have both of these things, he can’t cast, no matter how hard he tries. The spell only detects if people are lying or not. If they believe what they are saying is true, it will register as true, even if they are simply wrong. The same goes if someone believes they are lying, but it turns out that what they said is actually true. Questions are neither true nor false, so the spell won’t give him any information if the subject phrases what they say as a question. If more than one person is talking at the same time, there’s no way to know who is lying.
If your spell system has some sort of power levels, you’ll then need to figure out where your spell fits into that scheme. If this is for a game, you’ll use this to help balance magic versus other types of skills. You don’t want your magic users to overshadow all the other kinds of characters, nor do you want them to be useless anchors most of the time with brief moments of something cool. In the Divination arcanum, Voice of Morn is in the 2nd circle, which means that you have to be well versed in Divination to learn it.
Finally, although you might do this really early in your creation process, you need a name for your spell. Divination in my setting is taught formally by the Church of Morn, the god of justice. Therefore, religious sounding names make a lot of sense. Voice of Morn gives a glimpse of what the spell is about without being as boring as “Detect Lies”, even though that really all it is. Names can be tricky, but suggestions include using someone’s name (Tokalb’s Telling), complicated synonyms (Espy Distortions), or perhaps describes the implement used (Stone of Telling). You could use something like Detect Lies if you have a reasonable explanation for doing so that enhances your world building (for example, Alchemy is illegal in many parts of my world. Naming things after people was a good way to get them arrested or worse, so they named their potions and creations in a very generic way to keep their inventor’s secret). There’s no right or wrong way to name your spells, although I’d always err on the side of awesome.
Once this is done, congratulations, you’ve created your first spell. Now, you just have to do that again and again until you’ve created however many spells you feel are necessary to complete your spell system concept. For me, that meant 21 spells for Divination as an arcanum. That doesn’t sound like very many, but I have 26 arcana, each with at least 15 spells (one has 65 spells). It’s all up to you and your concept.
Next week, I’ll be doing a writing update. See you next Thursday!
