I really liked NK Jemisin's Broken Earth series and how much went into make moving earth a function of the world.
Eragon, of all things. I liked how magic was treated as another form of energy, how it could be stored in objects for later use (giving swords a reason to have gems in them) and how your power depends on your vocabulary in the ancient language. In the first book, he fights with magic by summoning bigass blue fireballs, but by the end he's killing entire medeival platoons in battle by uttering a word and giving them brain embolisms. Also how death is a void and trying to raise the dead will kill even the most powerful sorceror.
Man there was so much good stuff in those books, its a shame the author is a dick and the movie was bad.
Evolve is a good way to put it, the books did a really good job of respecting their hard ground rules while still continuing to surprise you, like an opposite Harry Potter
Kingkiller Chronicle.
I like how it draws on actual European folk magic, and is written with a sort of mundane realism that makes it just feel like a normal part of the setting.
Discworld.
It is a flat, round-like-a-plate planet resting on the backs of four elephants, who themselves stand on the shell of a massive star turtle. If that sounds unreal, then it's because it very nearly is. The discworld occupies a set of dimensions right on the very edge of possibility. Magic wears against the disc's thin fabric of reality, and terrible unreal things will creep in at any opportunity. Thus, the most important thing any magic weilder must learn (if they hope to have a long career, anyways) is to not use magic wherever possible.
My favorite aspect of Discworld magic is Narrative Causality: basically, if it makes for a good story, it will happen.
"million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
I also like the concept of L-space.
Knowledge is power, thus:
BOOKS = KNOWLEDGE = POWER = ENERGY = MATTER
All libraries at all points of existence are connected.
Pretty much anything by Brandon Sanderson is great since hard magic systems and the inevitable D&D-esque exploration of how broken they can be is sorta his schtick.
Malazan is fantastic, and is probably one of the better "drawing on power from chaotic and potential malevolent alternate realities/gods/eldritch entities" out there.
My favorite is still channeling from Wheel of Time. It's the progenitor of modern hard magic systems in fantasy (like the aforementioned Sanderson stuff) and Robert Jordan's physics background comes out to play again and again through how it works. The interplay of the addictive rush of saidin combined with the sickening poison of the Taint, the AtLA-esque way of weaving different spells together with elemental threads, the mechanics of channeler-vs-channeler fights with combinations of shielding and random chaff attacks to disorient and distract your opponent, and of course the greatest spell ever created and both the cause of and solution to all of life's problems: balefire. Ever killed a motherfucker so hard they stopped existing retroactively?
True. Spirit's definitely the most used of the five (though it's the most useful for fighting other channelers cuz of shields and such), and I think the implication is that lightning is probably the best bang-for-your-buck attack since you're functionally just giving nature a push to kill something for you instead of having to generate a fireball wholesale of your own power.
Perrin: It's just a weave.
Egwene: egwene.exe has crashed. Would you like to reboot?
I'm a big fan of Vancian magic. Spells are basically the words of creation, but because they defy logic as soon as you speak them they vacate your logical mind like a dream. This also makes recording them difficult, and passing them down take years of effort, and with every passing decade more and more spells are lost permanently, with the world's wizards well aware of the fact that someday their entire profession will no longer exist.
It gets a bad rap because people think keeping track of spell slots in D&D is annoying, but it's a great way to convey a world where magic is on the decline.
I've had issues with Vancian systems, but when you put it that way, I think I can appreciate it more.
idk If it's my fav but the mechanics of surgebinding and stormlight usage in Stormlight Archive is cool; subsets of it like Adhesion and Gravitation lashing are as detailed as entire magick systems in other books and there's 12 of them
What I like is that while they seem to be different magic systems in his Cosmere meta-series, they are in fact the same and based on the same physical principles. So with a bit of knowledge you can combine them for weird effects.
So one character in Stormlight is running around looking like they're using a Radiant power when it's something completely different. Another is hacking the area's relative surplus of magic to avoid some complications caused by his homeworld's.
i like how stuff in the SCP universe works, literally shit just can do stuff and no one knows how or why and they just roll with it.
I love simple ones like the Tothbrush that deletes tooth plaque and certain inorganic matter from existence, and doesn't do anything else. Nobody knows how it works, it's technically an incredibly powerful tool/weapon, but they just keep it in a locker somewhere and it's fine.
I like soft magic systems, the softer the better, so my favorite examples are George Martin's ASOIAF, Joe Abercrombie's The First Law, and Glen Cook's Black Company. In these books, usually when magic happens it is something strange and typically horrifying that the viewpoint character can barely comprehend. It's not clear to me if magic in these settings has any rules at all or if it is all just narrative contrivance, but I don't mind either way.
Lately I've been reading a short story collection called Sword and Sonnet. I can't give you a better description than the editors do: "Sword and Sonnet contains twenty-three fantasy and science fiction stories featuring women or non-binary battle poets." In each story the magic works differently, but it is always centered on words or poetry. In the first story of the collection a gunslinger works as a contract killer, but when they kill they get to know their targets, and inscribe on their bullet casing a word that will unmake them, wipe them from all living memory, including the gunslinger's. The gunslinger carries a coat woven with hundreds of casings, as some sort of penance. Probably my personal favorite so far, very mournful. There is another story, set in Heian Japan, where a lady of the court assassinates male poets and in so doing steals their words to use as her own. There is a story about a daughter of Haitian immigrants in a Haitian community in the south side of Chicago and she kills her father, who I think was also a demon or something? Anyway, a lot of interesting stuff in it so far.
Yeah it was a great choice by the editors to put that one first, very good stuff.
It's "Words In An Unfinished Poem" by A.C. Wise, though I don't believe it's been published independently of the Sword and Sonnet collection.
Here's an excerpt:
“I hear you can kill a man with a single word,” Emmett says.
There’s a click in Emmett’s throat, a sound of fear. He licks his lips, glancing to the bottle at the gunslinger’s elbow. The gunslinger nudges it forward. Unasked, the bartender materializes with a glass then silently returns to the bar.
“Not only men,” the gunslinger says. Emmett flinches, spilling whiskey as the mouth of the bottle skips across the rim of the glass. “And not just a word.” The gunslinger reaches into their pocket. Emmett’s chair jumps back until he sees the movement hasn’t resulted in a drawn gun. The gunslinger sets a single bullet casing in the center of the table.
All the hair on Emmett’s arms, the back of his neck, and even his thighs, stands on end. There’s a word etched onto the casing, the lettering scarce thicker than a spider’s web. Before he can read the word, the gunslinger covers the shell with their hand, disappears it into their pocket, and smiles. It is the most unsettling expression Emmett has ever seen.
“I’m writing a poem,” the gunslinger says. An explanation that sounds like a warning, a confession, and tastes of sorrow. To Emmett, it means nothing.
In The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross, "magic" is a branch of applied computation (mathematics), and computers can cast spells much more quickly and precisely than a human. Experienced sorcerers can run macros (cast spells) in their head, but it tends to cause Krantzberg-Godel Spongiform Encephalopathy with prolonged use. You also have to make sure your summoning circle is properly grounded, or else you might get possessed by a demon.
I don't necessarily have a favorite as I just love magic systems in general. Not sure if this qualifies, but Avatar: The last airbender has one that I am particularly fond of. It really feels like the characters have actual power over fire, water, etc rather than it's simply the material they shoot out of their fingertips.
I also like a lot of the subvariants too and how well-played some of the creativity is. For example, waterbending granting healing abilities. Water is also very flexible as it's shown to have the most ease of controlling multiple states of matter and almost flawlessly transitioning between the two.
It was also shown that firebenders are better described as heatbenders, as Iroh was shown to heat up some tea without use of any actual fire, and another firebender that I will not name since I don't want to spoil too much was shown to be able to cool stuff down in one episode. Makes sense with firebending governing the "element of power" energy is power.
Sandbanding can also sort of work like makeshift airbending, as some sandbenders used it to operate a sail. Hell, earthbending is incredibly diverse
Airbending, being the "element of freedom" definitely gives one plenty of mobility: air scooters, super speed, gliding, high jumps. Aang was shown to be incredibly agile.
Personally, I don't like how Korra over-explained bending and the avatar too much, as if I were to make a fantasy series with magic. I want to leave some as a mystery to well...make it magical. Despite being a leftist, and therefore having egalitarian leanings, I usually prefer when magic is treated like superpowers and is something that not everyone can do, it just makes the "muggles" in the team look more badass if they can pull their weight.
Not sure I can pick just one, but here are a few I really like that weren't mentioned elsewhere in this thread:
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Powder Mages: They can snort gunpowder as a performance-enhancing drug, burn gunpowder near them and redirect its energy however they like (one guy can fire two bullets at once, and burn powder on his person to adjust the trajectory of one of them in-flight). There are other types of magic in the series, but none as cool as powder mages, IMO. (Powder Mage trilogy by Brian McClellan)
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Cradle series: Magical martial arts, with various "aspects" (elements, essentially; e.g. fire, water, light, dreams, earth, shadow, life, blood, etc etc), plus magical crafting using techniques left by deceased magic-users. This magic system eventually merges with a "higher" one based on willpower and "authority" (power over reality, achieved by embodying a concept). Follows an underdog main character who embarks on a quest to become strong enough to save his homeland from disaster. This series is incredibly good, but be warned: it'sextremely addictive. (Cradle series by Will Wight; only available on Amazon, sadly, but the first 3 ebooks are free right now in US/Canada!)
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Without spoiling anything, the system that comes to be by the end of the Hyperion series is also really really cool.
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I don’t know where the series might go but Atlas Six is a dark academia/magic school where 6 of the best medians (wizards, witches) are enrolled into a “post doc” and they have to push their powers while navigating the magic rivalries. The magics are pretty interest and the plot was a page turner.
