Ironing out the "kinks" in Magic/psionics system.

In my Science/Space-Fantasy WIP, I\'ve hit a conceptual roadblock,two in fact. I\'m having trouble seeing both the full capabilities and the natural limits to my magic system.

The Magic system is broken in up into three tiers.

The first levels involve the conscious control of and the focusing of ones natural mental and physical abilities.

The next level up overtly supernatural abilities are unlocked as one learns to tap into and their psychic and somatic energies; most notable a kind of clairvoyance and intuitive-reactions.

The final level deals melding psychic and somatic energies into a unified power, this enables one to blur the lines between the physical and the spiritual.

The abilities that I came up with were:

telekinesis and generating radiance ( fire,light,lightning,).

Conjuration and Manipulation of ectoplasm.

Channeling power into an object to increase it\'s potential energy or just make it explode.

Physical augmentation to the point of transcending the normal limits of a begin\'s biology.

Alchemy and shape-shifting by rendering matter into a fluid and malleable state.

Teleportation translating matter into an\"ethereal\" state and flow around space at the speed of thought; this etherealization also includes dematerialization for easy storage.

Who determines the tiers? Is it some academy that will be super secret about the knowledge, or people who just made the observation and agreed that three tiers was the most convenient way to refer to it?

I think you've got a good system that, if you can just set those rules, then you can argue between the lines for whatever actual magic thing would be needed for the plot. That could be simpler than listing all the abilities. First Tier character can't focus. Second Tier character doesn't know that they're doing magic. Third Tier character fears casting from hit points. Everybody knows a Fireball spell (or whatever, up to you). Ancient tome of great power is re-discovered but they need so-and-so qualities to workably read it. Or they discovered a new application for so-and-so magic theory, but just like burr seeds have been sticking to clothes since the history of clothes, it took a particularly eccentric mind to connect the dots and invent the magic equivalent of Velcro.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel makes a big deal about the magic being scientific. So, a witch can't turn a human being into a frog because humans are physically more massive than a frog. It would either have to be a large frog or there are missing bits. However, because the mental experience is so common to people, what witches can do is borrow the mind of an animal and experience what the animal experiences in their own dream. Limitations include, the human form having to remain unconscious, the minds needing to negotiate so that you can't tell a hungry hawk whose mind you're borrowing to not eat that rabbit, and some remaining confusion as to what shape a person is when they return so the conscious witch in human form might crave raw rabbit after borrowing a hawk's mind.

edited 11th Jan '15 6:20:06 PM by Faemonic

The tiers are determined by what the natural progression of magical ability is for most people in the setting.

You start at tier one benign able to do things like focus through pain,or utilise the full power of your muscles. Then you reach tier two you can now project your life energy outwards. Tier three physical and spiritual energy have been combined and your doing blatantly supernatural things.

Tier three is "problematic" because i can't see what the full capabilities or limits feel like a natural outgrowth of the magics basic premise; converting spiritual energy into physical phenomenon and imposing quadi-spritual states on material things. The abilities list in the post are what I've been able to come up with, and a lot of that comes from the superpowers wiki's page on aether manipulation.

What's bu