D&D 5E [looking for ideas] Old folkloric magic and laws/principles of magic

[Yaarel]

Hummm, intriguing. D&D is also divisible in four tiers. Even for spells cast by spellcasters, there could be a progression. Spells level 1-3 are the one you can cast on your own, 5-6 require access to a power source of sort, 7-8 a power source and an meteorological, tidal, or astrological event of sort. 9th level spells require a sacrifice of something valuable on top.

This is a quote from an other thread.

Folkbelief also has big magic, like floating cities, a queen giving birth to a draconic serpent, a grave becoming a portal into the realm of the dead, a sleep-enchantment broken only by the kiss of true love, and so on.

For these kinds of story elements, use D&D rituals. Rituals can be almost anything. Rituals can have any effect and any requirement. Think of examples from folkbelief to determine the requirements of a ritual.

For example, in one story, monarchs lack an heir and resort to magic to conceive. Finding someone who knows how to do magic is the first use of magic. Eventually this mage tells them to go to their garden and pick one white rose and one red rose. If they eat the white rose, their heir will lead their citizens in a time of great wealth, and if they eat the red rose, the heir will become a great conqueror of many nations. Wanting the best for their citizens, the monarchs eat both. They give birth to a serpent, a dragon, as their heir. For D&D, these are series of rituals.

First ritual: find the mage who knows the answer.
Second ritual: do one or the other but not both
Third ritual: did both. Calamity ensues.
Fourth ritual: someone else found the (poetically just) ritual to save the heir.

They lived happily ever after.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Gemstones and plants have powers, you can find a good bit of info on.

Something you may want to think about is "Where does "Magic" come from?" Once you build that in your game, you can build your world myth on it.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Sympathetic magic is a common one, linking like to like so it is easier to scry on someone the more you have a connection to them such as a personal object of theirs same with the classic voodoo doll cursing someone using their image and something of theirs incorporated into the doll. AD&D used a bunch of sympathetic magic principles in material components even down to using puns for symbolic connections like a copper piece for detect thoughts being connected to a penny for your thoughts.

Also, each being in the universe has a True Name, a word or concept that sums up their essence, and knowing that name can give you the power to affect it.
(3.5 messed around with this a bit, but the implementation was horrible.)

(Perhaps everything (living creatures, rocks, trees, the air, etc.) has a true name, and part of learning magic is having to find out the true names of various things in order to cast spells involving them. Hell, maybe researching some new spell requires you to go on a quest to ask something its name and get permission to use it...)

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Start adding weaknesses to enemies. Some exist in the game but many have been removed. Remove ‘magic weapons’ caveat on the resistances of creatures so that they can go find cool items to hurt the creatures they are fighting. ‘Magic’ tends to make all need for lore redundant.

- iron hurts/repels fairies
-Silver hurts werewolves and devils and vampires
-Garlic and/or iron filings at the threshold of a door keep away evil spirits
-

 

[Voadam]

Mage the Ascension has neat magic concepts.

Magic is imposing your will upon reality.

Magic works according to the paradigm of your tradition, so wizard magic works by its own tradition and associations that are different from dreamspeaker shamanic magic traditions even when doing the same effect.

Multiple beings believing in the same direction is reinforcing so churches want followers and belief to support their world view paradigm for wielding power. Dominant traditions have significant power over defining parts of consensual reality, but powerful awakened magical individuals of any tradition have potent localized power.

Beings are fundamentally a pattern. A temporary transformation is just an artificial overlay on the pattern that will snap back to the natural pattern after the overlay is no longer in effect, a permanent transformation is a change in the being's natural pattern itself.