Magic System Guide for Fantasy Worldbuilding
About this template
Magic is one of the defining characteristics of the fantasy genre. A writer has unlimited possibilities to choose from when building their world and the magic that shapes it. Characters wielding fire or healing with a touch. Ancient sorcery or city witches. Demon magic or necromancy. Witch marks or superheroes.
This Notion template is designed to walk you through the process of creating your magic system, from choosing the types of powers, to figuring out how your magic is cast, the source of your magic, and how it will affect and interact with your culture, worldbuilding, and story as a whole. Each step includes an explanation, questions to help get you thinking, examples to give you ideas, space and prompts to brainstorm your thoughts, and lists of potential answers to the questions posed.
16 STEPS COVERING:
-->Feeling of Magic
-->Magic’s Theme
-->System Structure
-->Hard or Soft Systems
-->Source of Magic
-->Casting Magic
-->Spells & Abilities
-->Magic Users
-->Magical Rules
-->Magical Costs
-->Magical Weaknesses
-->Naming Your Magic
-->Magic & Culture
-->Magical World
-->Magical Artifacts & Weapons
-->Magic & Plot
In each of these steps, this template will help you in creating a unique, interesting, and fun system of magic. Open each step and work through the provided content, brainstorms, questions, and charts to build your system as you go. The system you create can then be organized on the streamlined and easy-to-navigate homepage for easy reference as you dive into writing and begin using your magic in your story. (Each final database or chart within the 16 steps is linked to a corresponding database or chart on the homepage, meaning that as you fill out the final answers in each step, they also appear on the homepage.)
TEMPLATE ALSO FEATURES
-->Detailed instruction to using the template
-->Amazing magical artwork including custom icons and full-size images
-->A spot to link to other pages like your writing dashboard or story homepage
-->Space to highlight important goals and record inspiration (favorite magic systems, quotes, or playlists)
-->A custom magic system I created as an example alongside each step to show possible answers to questions and how to use each final graph
-->Examples of published magic systems in fantasy literature (with a credited bibliography of references to published works)
-->And links to other magic, worldbuilding, and naming resources across the web
