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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kasoroth" data-source="post: 5517981" data-attributes="member: 6674342">I haven't read through the entire thread (only the first and last few pages), but I haven't noticed any mention of The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.  It takes a rather interesting approach to magic.  There are several basic types of magic:Alchemy, is basically what you would expect, except that many of the materials used are extremely toxic and dangerous to work with, so a moment of carelessness can easily lead to a painful death.Sympathy allows the user to link similar or related objects over a distance and transfer energy (heat or motion) from one to the other.  The efficiency of the transfer is related to how closely related the objects are.  Getting a drop of someone's blood lets you do some mean things to them and is strictly forbidden.  The interesting thing is that it seems to obey basic laws of thermodynamics, so the caster has to either expend their own body heat, resulting in hypothermia ("binder's chills"), or link to some external source of energy, such as a fire, with the risk of having some of that energy cooking them rather than doing whatever they're trying to do if their link is inefficient.Sygaldry is basically a "written" form of sympathy that establishes permanent sympathetic links through engraved runes.  this is often combined with more mundane elements to create more complicated "magic items", for example using energy stored in springs to deflect arrows through a sympathetic link.  As with alchemy, this sometimes involves working with dangerous and/or highly toxic materials.Naming seems to be the hardest to learn, and requires tapping into a deeper understanding of things at a subconscious level.  While the other forms of magic seem to be learned though normal academic teaching methods, naming functions on a more intuitive level.  It is harder to learn to use reliably, and though it seems more powerful, it is less practical for everyday use.Magical learning is restricted primarily to a single University, which generally imposes fairly strict rules about how magic should be used, and what magical items are allowed to be made for sale to the general population.  They don't want a popular uprising against mages, because as scary as it is that someone could boil your blood if they got a drop of it, it's still quicker to kill someone by knifing them in an alley.Magic is powerful, and quite frightening to those who lack it, but mages are far from invincible, especially if they are caught unprepared.  Part of a mage's power comes from keeping the non-mages from knowing the limits of what magic is capable of, and thus how to counter it.In general I like it when authors and DMs try to take the effects of magic into account when developing the cultural and political structures.  I also like it when magic itself is limited enough that it's possible to contemplate these political and cultural consequences and not simply be overwhelmed by magic eliminating any commonly understood real-world motivations.  If everyone automatically respawns on death like in an MMO, then fear of death (a pretty significant motivator for most people in most real-world cultures) goes away, and it becomes very hard to imagine what society would be like.-Kasoroth</blockquote>

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