Magic System Design History and Theory: Edge of the Woods

Hey, everyone.

With Edge of the Woods just over a month from launch (it’s out on September 12^th on Kindle and Audible, not sure on paperbacks/hardcovers yet), I thought it’d be a good time to talk about it a little bit. It’s also been a while since I’ve done a post on writing progression fantasy and magic systems, so that felt like a good angle to discuss this one.

Cover art by the absolutely phenomenal Daniel Kamarudin.

Fair warning that this post is very heavy on game history and theory. If you’re not interested in that sort of thing, this might be boring and you might want to skip it.

This is also going to get into a bunch of how magic works for Edge of the Woods, which some readers might prefer to experience for the first time through the story itself. If you want to go into the story blind, skip this blog until after you’ve read the book.

With that said, let’s get into it.

Book Overview

Edge of the Woods is the first book in a new series (The Lost Edge) that follows Lien (or “Edge”), a young swordsman growing up in a primeval forest among the fae. As he grows, he hones his skills and seeks answers to his hidden heritage, a mysterious seal on his right hand, and his dreams of a shattered sword.

This has some overlap with my Arcane Ascension Universe books. It’s designed as a new potential entry point for readers — in fact, it may be my new preferred entry point, but we’ll see what readers think. My suspicion is that readers will prefer this book to my others if they want a very strongly progression focused narrative, or if they prefer the more serious writing style of my War of Broken Mirrors books, but with a single central protagonist that is starting from childhood.

History and Influences

My clearest inspirations for this book aren’t far from what I’ve drawn from in the past — the aesthetics of the story are notably reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda, but with a hard leaning into the Kokiri Forest and Lost Woods aesthetics for this part of the setting. There’s also some clear inspiration from Peter Pan, as well as other myths and legends that involve the fae.

Outside of Lien’s forest home, the aesthetics of the continent as a whole still have clear Zelda influences, but with arguably stronger influences from Dragon Quest and Octopath Traveler. There’s a lot of overlap here with what I did in How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps, but played straight, rather than parodied. In specific, you’ll see a lot of classic tropes that derive from these types of stories, like a Demon King analogue that was sealed away hundreds of years in the past by a legendary party of adventurers

Perhaps the most important element of this from the perspective of the magic system is that the story’s magic system is designed to resemble the parallel progression systems found in “Job Class” systems.

For those that aren’t familiar, early role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons introduced the idea of “character classes” representing a character’s core role in a story (e.g. Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief) and numeric levels representing a character’s expertise in that profession. As the game evolved, systems were introduced for multi-classing (someone with multiple classes, like a Fighter/Mage) and dual classing (a character giving up their original class and switching to a different class later in life.

Multi-classed characters would have separate levels for each class simultaneously, splitting their experience between classes. For example, a multi-classed character might be a 5^th level Warrior and 4^th Level Wizard, since different classes required different amounts of experience to advance.

A dual classed character, on the other hand, would have a single level at any given time; when they dropped a class, their level would “start over” at 1 while they began to advance in the new class. When their new level exceeded their old level, they’d regain some of their abilities from the original class, gaining the ability to be a fully-realized “dual classed” character. Notably, they could not change back to their original class to advance it further — once they switched, they were locked out of the original class.

A character in early Dungeons and Dragons could only be multi-classed or dual classed, not both. Specifically, non-human characters like elves could only be multi-classed. Human characters could only be dual classed.

In the early days of video gaming, some games introduced advanced character classes that a character could switch to later on in their career.

In the PC gaming space, an early example would be the powerful Lord class in the Wizardry franchise (which may have inspired the similarly-named Lord classes in Fire Emblem due to Wizardry’s lingering influence in the Japanese market). The Bard’s Tale franchise had several as well, such as the Sorcerer and Wizard classes, which required multiple levels in previous spellcasting classes to unlock.

This concept eventually migrated into console games, eventually resulting in the ability to change classes in Dragon Quest 3. This feature — as well as the inclusion of the Sage, the first advanced class for the franchise — was a major influence for future console RPGs. Functionally, this worked most similarly to the dual classing in Dungeons and Dragons (with level starting over at 1), but the characters did not regain their old abilities at a certain level — rather, they simply kept half of their stats (health, mana, etc.) and the spells they’d gained from leveling up in a previous class. This version of the system was more forgiving than the D&D version and future Dragon Quest games (from 5 onward) expanded the system further. The overall influence of Dragon Quest in Japanese gaming cannot be overstated, and without Dragon Quest 3’s inclusion of class changes, we may never have seen the next major evolution of this system — the famous Job Class system of Final Fantasy 5.

Final Fantasy 5’s Job Class system involves some individually simple innovations:

• Characters have both an overall character level and levels for their individual character classes.
• New character classes are unlocked through progressing the story and encountering magical crystals that grant new potential powers to the cast.
• Once a character unlocks a specific class, they can switch back and forth from it freely without influencing their overall character level. Their class-specific level (“Job Level”) is stored separately, meaning that someone can be a Level 20 character that is a Level 5 wizard, switch to being a level 1 Fighter, then back to a Level 5 Wizard later without losing any progress on their main level or their wizard class.
• Jobs come with specific abilities that can be “equipped” even when set to another class. For example, someone could be currently set to a wizard class, but have a fighter skill they unlocked by gaining Fighter levels “equipped” to it. There are a limited number of “slots” for these equipped abilities from other jobs.

These aren’t necessarily the first places any of these features were used, but they’re the first place I’m aware of when there they were implemented together. This created a coherent feel of exploring and gathering new powers over the game — something I loved, and that influenced many future titles.

I’ve mentioned in the past that Arcane Ascension drew from Job Class systems for influence on the attunements, and that’s true — specifically, I heavily drew from the “asterisks” in Bravely Default, where classes were tangibly available in the setting, well-known, and had major influences on society. crystal marks represented an “older magic” more reminiscent of the Dragon Quest 3 and Final Fantasy 5 Job Class systems.

I think I was largely successful in capturing the “feel” of a Japanese RPG class system with attunements and crystal marks, but there were major elements of it that I didn’t emulate for that system due to how complex it would be and the ripple effects on world building: separate job/character levels, unlocking more job classes over time, and swapping freely between them.

For Arcane Ascension, the ability to travel, collect more jobs, and swap freely between them would have undermined much of the core tension for the main character (where he’s “stuck” with an attunement that isn’t considered appropriate for his family and social class). Similarly, limiting the ability to switch between classes means the location they are obtained is much more important and helps define elements of society (e.g. Valia having Enchanters and Summoners makes enchantments and summoned monsters more common than they are in Dalenos). As such, I think those choices made sense in terms of how I wanted to handle the narrative for that specific story.

But as a writer and a reader, I love the feeling of freedom provided by classic Job Class systems, and I wanted to take a stab at trying that concept again in a setting where it wouldn’t be detrimental to the arcs of the characters.

So, for Edge of the Woods, I went all in this time, and designed a magic system that would allow for the kind of flexibility involved in both older Job Class systems like Final Fantasy 5 and various evolutions of it that have appeared in future titles like Octopath Traveler.

General Design Considerations

One of the fundamentals of a class-based system is to give a character a clear and concise power set designed for a specific archetype. In a story where characters are locked into a specific class or two, this makes it easier to make specialists in certain areas, which helps to keep individual characters relevant. This helps to prevent the “Superman problem” of a single character with so many abilities that other characters can become irrelevant.

When designing a Job Class style system, I wanted to make sure to allow for the flexibility to explore the world and gain new classes and powers, but still have logical design elements that prevent the Superman Problem from occurring.

This led to the identification of several elements I found critical for the implementation of the system.

Core Character Level

One critical element of Job Class style system is that there is an “overall” character level that persists outside of the character’s job-specific levels. I chose to define this first and use it as the overall foundation of the system.

I also knew ahead of time that this story would deal heavily with themes of exploration and the development of heavily-personalized character powers. As such, I wanted this system to allow for a little more personalization and freedom than the previously established systems, but with some clear limitations and downsides that would make it clear that the system wasn’t just a direct upgrade from the power sets on other continents.

Certain story elements on how human bodies work and magic work have already been established in this universe have already been established in my other books. In order to make a new magic system, I needed to be consistent with these elements, but find ways to explore them in different ways.

In the attunements system for Arcane Ascension, I identified that there were certain parts of a person’s internal “essence structure” can be used to harness power. (This was teased way back in the second War of Broken Mirrors book as well, but not explored in detail.) Attunements linked to these points in the body manifested their abilities slightly differently, but the reasons for these differences aren’t really explored, nor are the specific details of the underlying theory behind how the points themselves — or the connections between them — work.

Way back in my role-playing games before creating the novels, I had a parallel system to dominion sorcery called essence sorcery. While dominion sorcery represented classical magic of drawing from the planes, essence sorcery was drawing power entirely from the inner self, making it more flexible, but more costly. Effectively, this led to essence sorcerers feeling much like classical qi-based martial artists in books, media, and RPGs. I’d written lore on these essence-controlling points in the body for my RPG (called “Crown Points” back then), but I hadn’t expanded on it much. To me, this was a logical route to explore for a system that directly interacted with these points of power within the body.

This became the foundation for what would become the overall Core Character Level system — the overall power of essence in the various points in a person’s body. This would grow more complex as I worked on the system further, as discussed below.

Different Essence Types

Within the overall setting, essence (sometimes called mana) the raw power utilized for any form of magic. There are a set number of “base” types of mana, each of which corresponds to a plane of existence, such as the Plane of Fire or Water. It’s also established that these can be combined to make new essence types (e.g. Fire + Air to make Lightning). Most of the existing discussion in the books only covers two essence type combinations.

I knew early on that I wanted to make my main character a sword specialist. This is for narrative reasons that will be clearer in the book, but overall, it was a hugely important character point. I already have a number of sword wielding protagonists. For story reasons, it was important that this character feel similar to Keras, but different enough that their skill sets wouldn’t feel identical.

When originally designing Keras’ power set for my tabletop games and LARPs, I decided against giving him “sword magic” early on, since sword didn’t feel like an element or fundamental building block of the universe. Instead, I relied on things that felt conceptually appropriate for a sword-wielding mage, like metal magic and a personally-tailored form of annihilating magic tailored toward “cutting”. I think these worked out pretty well for cool character moments, but for Edge, I really wanted to lean into the “sword” side of things directly — in part out of regret for not going all-in on that concept for Keras, but also as a way of distinguishing their skill sets.

I’ve also read a lot of other books with magic swordsmen — they’re extremely common in Chinese and Japanese fiction — but for the most part, “sword magic” usually translates to very basic and repetitive concepts, like “use sword to cut things at a distance”, “use something that isn’t a sword as a sword”, and “cut through improbable things”. I decided to lean into these things as fundamentals of my character’s skill set, but also to expand on it in ways that I felt would allow for “sword magic” to be more interesting than just a repetition of what had been done a thousand times before.

So, in order to make this make sense, I worked on a few different elements I found important:

• Firstly, I wanted to make sure there was a way to make this work organically within my system. There wasn’t a “Plane of Swords” to serve as a power source for essence. I had already established the existence of composite essence types, however, I’d stuck with relatively basic ones from combining to things. In order to make “sword essence” make sense, I decided the most organic way to handle this was to allow for essence sorcerers to find and utilize essence that that involves much larger combinations of core essence types to create more esoteric results.
  • Another critical component of making “sword essence” work was figuring out how to make a human concept like “swords” that doesn’t inherently exist in nature make sense as an essence type. For this, I decided on a combination of already-existing essence types within the system that could be conceivably be used to assign a “purpose” to something, and then found ways to combine these with physical essence types to create a broad category of “tool” essence, which could then be combined further to make things like “weapon essence”, and then combined even further to make something like “sword essence”.
  • I had to decide early on that this kind of thing was so complicated that I would not get into a lot of detail about every individual essence type’s full composition in the story. Instead, I’d show how these types of essence types could be collected and utilized, and any detailed esoteric theory on their composition would only be handled when narratively necessary.
• Next, I wanted to make sure it was functionally different from what Keras was already doing. There could (and should) be some overlap between Lien’s skill set and Keras’, but I wanted there to be enough of a difference that that the characters would read differently and their combat strategies would be notably different.
  • One critical component of this was making sure I didn’t give Lien access to Keras’ base magic types (metal, fire, and stone). This in itself would limit Lien’s options.
  • Lien also doesn’t start out with the magic sword that Keras does, which also changes their combat strategies. Lien does work toward getting magic swords, but this plays out very differently, and I’ll avoid spoiling that here.
  • Since I wanted to lean into the “swords” side of Lien’s magic, I needed to define what I wanted sword magic to do that Keras couldn’t already do (or couldn’t do quite as easily).

That last point led to defining a core concept behind the system as a whole — “aspects” or “subtypes” of each type of essence. Aspects define the various ways that a type of essence can be utilized. People who have access to an essence type don’t know their available aspects immediately — these must be learned through research and experimentation, which is a major focus in this book. (For those already familiar with dominion sorcery, aspects are the essence sorcery equivalent of “keys”, which have been mentioned since the earliest books, but haven’t been talked about in a lot of detail.)

Once I’d defined the core concept of aspects, I broke it down into subcategories that could be easily conceptualized and allow for different levels of specialization even for people with the same essence type.

Form aspects represent different ways an essence type can manifest. For example, stone essence would have form essences like “granite” and “slate”. Metal would have things like “iron” and “steel”.

Features aspects represent individual properties of that essence type. For example, stone might have a “hardness” aspect and a “brittleness” aspect. Metal might have a “luster” aspect.

Function aspects represent things an essence type can do. For example, metal might have a “magnetism” aspect.

These all can overlap with each other – they aren’t hard categories — but the idea was to define some clear ways that each essence type could be utilized in diverse and interesting ways.

For example, a character like Lien with sword essence might focus on something like cutting aspected sword essence — a type of function that focuses on cleaving through things — but learn other aspects like parrying-aspected essence, piercing-aspected essence, or an aspect dedicated to specific sword type, like greatsword-aspected sword essence. Different sword essence wielders who specialize differently could have vastly different overall combat styles as they build techniques from their aspects as component parts.

By creating this system, my hope was to create the possibility for a sword-focused character to utilize his sword and magic in creative and interesting ways — and also to allow for other characters in the same setting to learn unique and interesting magic types they can lean into to define their role in the world and the story.

Dianis Points and the Body

Next, I began with rectifying what I felt was an underutilized element in the Arcane Ascension system — I decided to make the individual points in the body more important. In Arcane Ascension, an attunement’s location influences the easiest way to cast spells, but it’s possible to work around it and learn other ways to cast spells anyway — that, to me, wasn’t enough to make the differences stand out.

So, when working on this system, I started by mapping out the essence-holding points (called “Dianis Points”) in the body and assigning functions to each of the Dianis Points that would feel like they all have unique and interesting functions.

After exploring several ideas, I arrived at the conclusion that the best way to make this flexible and interesting was to define a basic feature for each Dianis Point, then have the point function differently depending on which specific type of essence that was used to build it.

This resulted in the following structure:

• Heart Point (chest): Influences the power of all other Dianis Points based on the type of essence in the point.
• Viewing Point (forehead): Modifies your perception based on the type of essence in the point.
• Breathing Point (throat): Allows you to gather essence based on the type of essence in the point.
• Sword Point (dominant hand): Influences your striking power and offense magic based on the type of essence in the point.
• Shield Point (off-hand): Provides you with passive defense based onthe type of essence in the point.
• Advancing Point (dominant foot): Provides you with speed or mobility based onthe type of essence in the point.
• Retreating Point (other foot): Provides you with stealth and concealment abilities based on the type of essence in the point.

(Thanks to Kritta for the awesome art for this body chart.)

By allowing for different body locations to have different powers when interacting with different essence types, I created new avenues of specialization — as well as a fundamental component of the overall system that would be used to interact with the later development of the “Job Class” side of the system.

Levels

Once I had these fundamental components, I was able to build a core progression system around the development of one or more Dianis Points with essence. Without getting into excessive detail here (too late, I know), I had some critical points to fulfill with this overall level system:

Make it Memorable

First, I wanted to make the system more intuitive and easier to remember than the one in Arcane Ascension.

To do this, I broke the system down into smaller segments, each of which has a clear progression scheme that’s easy to remember.

For example, the first three levels are grouped together as representing the color red and the element of fire. The titles I went with are Candle (Level 1), Torch (Level 2), and Bonfire (and Level 3). Each represents a “larger” fire in the title.  Later levels are grouped similarly, with a major theme for each three levels. This also can be seen as paralleling the style of level structure many Chinese xianxia-style progression systems use.

Make it Consistent

Each segment of three levels in the system follows a similar structure in terms of the requirements to advance from level-to-level, as well as the benefits to advance. This makes it feel more coherent and easier to remember.

I also decided to make it compatible with the system in Arcane Ascension in some ways to allow some elements from one to make it easier to remember the other and enhance the overall feeling of coherence and consistency. To meet this requirement, I kept the colors the same as the “rainbow” progression in Arcane Ascension, but broke it down slightly differently.

Make it Coherent

I identified early on how much relative power I wanted to have each level represent. The intent here was to figure out early on how much I wanted each character to be able to potentially “punch up” against higher-level characters. This gets a little bit more complex with elements outside of the level system itself being able to influence combat, but the idea was to have a coherent foundation for what might the basic expectations are for how strong someone at one level is relative to another.

I also had to figure out how much power I wanted to come from advancement within a level, versus how much should come right when someone advances from one level to the next. In Arcane Ascension, virtually all of a character’s power increases are incremental, which means there are very few “moments of awesome” when a character gains a level. This was intentional, and it feels more organic, but it also means you don’t get the moments of excitement when someone finally reaches their next power threshold.

In this case, I decided to split the difference — there are ways to gain considerable power while in the leveling process, but moving from one level to the next always provides a clear, instant, and meaningful power boost.

(For those of you who like math, each level is about a fifty-percent to seventy-five percent increase in attributes relevant to the essence types used by the character. The latter part of that is important; much like in Arcane Ascension, a low-level fighter might still be able to punch out a high-level wizard with his guard down, since the wizard isn’t going to be gaining that much durability from their levels alone. It gets more complicated when the wizard might have abilities from other classes, though, or any number of other defenses…we’ll get to some of that below, but other elements I’ll save for the novels.)

Make it Cool

One element I think could have been handled in Arcane Ascension is that certain levels felt much more important than others. That’s still true to some degree in the new system, but in ways that are much more deliberate (the levels that transition from each set of three to the next are more impactful), but I also wanted every individual level to have a very clear benefit that sets it apart and makes it feel awesome for characters to advance to that level.

Class Levels

With the foundations of a core character level system established, I also needed to establish how I was going to deal with a separate class level system.

One of my core goals was to capture the feeling of exploring to unlock new classes in games like Final Fantasy 5 and Octopath Traveler. To allow for this, I expanded on the pre-existing concept of Gateway Crystals and Crystal Shrines.

On the continent of Dania where this story takes place, rather than granting a simple type of crystal mark as in Arcane Ascension, the crystals present instead can grant Destiny Marks. Destiny Marks allow a character connect with alternate forms of themselves that have taken different paths in life, unlocking skills and abilities from their alternate selves.

(Some of you are going to note some obvious similarities between this and Will Wight’s new series. Will and I both laughed about this — we traded our first drafts of the books to each of these new series with each other on the same day, but he released his book a lot faster. We tend to write very similar ideas; in my cases, the “powered by alternate selves” idea was largely inspired by the many versions of Link from Zelda, the dark version of Cecil in Final Fantasy 4, and the various versions of Emiya Shiro in the Fate franchise, especially Heaven’s Feel. I suspect Will drew from Fate as an inspiration, too, as we both enjoy the series.)

Anyway, the idea is that each Destiny Mark represents the nascent potential for someone to have specific powers if they take a certain path — and by gaining a certain mark, like a Warrior or Wizard mark, you can tap into that potential without actually living that entire lifetime. Once you have a Destiny Mark, you can increase it’s power by “embracing your destiny” — that is, taking actions that are related to the Destiny Mark’s core power set and synchronizing with it more closely.

There’s a whole level system for these, but I won’t get into that level of detail here.

Multiclassing Limitations

The ability to have multiple jobs/classes should be limited in some ways to prevent a character from having All The Classes at once.

For this, it was simple to draw inspiration from games like Final Fantasy 5 and Octopath Traveler, which allow for leveling up any number of classes, but only allow for a certain number of abilities to be “equipped” at once, limiting the number of abilities that can be used concurrently. After determining this was a good solution, I thought about how best to handle it from an in-narrative standpoint, and the solution was simple — I’d tie it into the same Dianis Point framework that the core system uses.

As a character gains Destiny Marks, they must choose where to assign these marks on their body. Only the mark assigned to the Heart Point is fully active; each other mark grants some fraction of its potential based on the specific slot it’s currently assigned to. For example, assigning a Warrior Destiny Mark to the Shield Point would allow for the character to benefit from some of the Destiny Mark’s defensive powers, but not all of the other powers it normally grants.

This allows for an intensely flexible and customizable system, but without the problem of every character having every power set at once. It also allows for a character to massively specialize by leveling specific essence types and Destinies that synergize well with each other, creating a truly formidable power set for a specific purpose.

Other Limitations and Considerations

There are a number of other factors involved in the advancement system that are important, such as training, the construction of techniques, and finding specific sources of essence of each type. Due to the length of this essay, I won’t be getting into too much of that here, but it’s important to acknowledge that these elements exist and play into the story. Most notably, the lack of sword essence (and swords themselves) in the forest where Lien grows up is a major element that drives his interest in exploration, and other characters with essence tied to more obscure essence types throughout the story may be driven toward traveling for similar reasons.

The way that essence gathers in specific locations in the world (crystal shrines, ley lines, and other powerful locales) also allows for organically creating interesting “set piece” style locations that are heavily themed around a specific type of essence. As someone who enjoys classic dungeons like the Elemental Temples of the Final Fantasy and Zelda games, this allows me to create locales like those, as well as outdoor spots similar to the Lost Woods and other iconic magical locales — and more unique ones defined by more esoteric forms of magic. My hope is that readers will enjoy these types of magically-infused locales as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them — and that it will help inspire other readers and writers to think about similar places of magic and wonder.

Other Magic Systems, Locations, and Characters

As I touched on earlier, there’s some overlap between Edge of the Woods and some of my other works.  I don’t want to go into too much detail because of spoilers for the specific content (and because this blog is already super long), but I’ll provide some basic information for the sake of understanding the systems side of it more clearly.

• Familiar locations exist, but may be different due to the time period and other factors. For example, there will be references to locations from the continents of Mythralis (The War of Broken Mirrors) and Kaldwyn (Arcane Ascension, Weapons & Wielders).
• There are some characters that also may be familiar, but different for reasons that will be clearer as the story progresses.
• Related to the above, the magic systems from the series above still exist in this setting. The existence of other magic systems is always a major consideration for world building. It’s easiest to handle this through forms of isolation (e.g. keeping the magic systems constrained to specific locations). I’m not doing that, as it’s too important for certain types of magic to be present for the exploration of certain character arcs. As such, both dominion sorcery and attunements will be referenced in this series, even though they’re not the primary local magic systems. This means adds significant complexities both in terms of world building and character interaction.
  • In order to make this work organically, this means that these other systems need to be reexplained when they’re relevant. I do this very early on with dominion sorcery, but try to only provide the minimal amount of information that is necessary to understand the actions of the characters that it is relevant to.Earlier drafts of the book contained much more extensive information on the interactions between dominion sorcery and essence sorcery, the local magic system. This was deliberately cut to avoid excessive magic system exposition, but I will likely still present this information elsewhere in the future.
  Some of the information in this book also helps expand on the reader’s knowledge of other systems and may recontextualize things they already have learned parts of (e.g. how essence works, what Gateway Crystals are, etc.)

Conclusions

Working on the magic of Edge of the Woods has been tremendously fun and satisfying for me. It’s simultaneously very similar to what I’ve already established in the setting and an evolution of it, representing slightly different design goals and improving on and expanding on features from previous systems.

When Edge of the Woods comes out, I hope that readers will enjoy my new take on magic and that my system might inspire other writers in the way that my own system has been inspired by countless other systems that came before it.

And if the magic is a little too complicated — well, don’t worry. I’ve still got snarky faeries and plenty of magic swords.