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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kipling" data-source="post: 1342665" data-attributes="member: 14955">A friend and I once bashed out a magic system for superheroes which was based on the idea that all superheroes are magic, whether they know it or not, and that they each have a totem spirit. Sometimes it's obvious -- Batman = bats, Spider-man = spiders -- sometimes it's not; the totem spirit can be something archetypal (such as Superman).He combined that with a different magic mechanic (that rulers of countries controlled the source of magic for each country, in that it was a gem of some kind, so one kingdom had rubies, another had diamonds, and so on. When the king wanted to grant magic to someone, the recipient had to have a gem of the appropriate type, which the king would then invest with a portion of the kingdom's magic, and tied it to fealty to the king. Size and quality of the gem determined how much of the kingdom's magic it could hold.Because the superheroes were the only ones with magic not politically aligned, they became a kind of vigilante force, able to act on repressive regimes.Of course, he threw in other things (elves, for example, were neat freaks, the kind who worried about where each leaf fell in their forest), and we had quite a lot of fun. The nature of the magic systems, however, meant that it always had a political edge to it.</blockquote>