The Broken Prism is a book series by V. St. Clair, following the adventures of Hayden at the Wizarding School of Hogw- Mizzenwald, and his struggles with living in the shadow of his tyrannical father.
This series includes the following tropes:
- Functional Magic: Of the Inherent Gift and Device types. Magic can't be done without a focus and natural ability on the caster's part. Higher-quality foci can amplify a caster's power, but not remove the need for ability.
- Power Incontinence: Novice students are limited to low-quality foci because that limits the degree of mistakes they make. An inexperienced Wands student, for example, can still explode a room if they're using a level-3 wand.
- Power Limiter: In the form of quartz cylinders strapped to a person's wrist. Wizards convicted of a crime are forced to wear lead binders, which prevent them using magic entirely.
- Superpower Lottery: Most wizards specialize in one field (their 'major arcana'), are about average in most of the others, and awful at one. There are a few wizards capable of specializing in two arcana, but they invariably suck at everything else.
