In Favor of Magic Systems, Part 1

14 Sep, 2026

I just stumbled upon Kenzie's blogpost Against Magic Systems and I figured I'd write something about this. Not only because I also somewhat dislike many magic systems in RPGs, but because I feel like I may dislike them for very different reasons.

I'm not particularly fond of the idea that magic needs to always be unpredictable and that spell lists don't feel magical, as put forth by Prismatic Wasteland. And while I enjoy the creativity and the direction of magic both in Wolves upon the Coast and in the magic items from Elfgame, I feel that they miss a very important aspect of what interests me in magic: Culture and belonging.

Real world magic

• This mirror of polished obsidian is John Dee's Spirit Mirror. It's on display in the British Museum. It's of Aztec origin and culturally related to the deity Tezcatlipoca. There's a scrying ritual that involves peering into the mirror in a dark room under candlelight, and it requires an old map and a coin. John Dee was a polymath and a student of magic under the employ of Queen Elizabeth I, and very much interested in learning the language of angels to use their magic to help the British court.

• If you are talking about something bad (real or hypothetical), you knock on wood three times to avoid that fate from reaching you.

• If you also grew up in a catholic family in Brazil, there's a good chance you learned this way of finding something you lost: You ask for St. Longuinus' guidance and promise the saint that you will jump up in the air three times if you locate whatever you are looking for.

• Are about to enter the woods? Say "excuse me" as you do so! You don't want to be disrespectful to the spirits of the forest.

What?

Whether you believe in magic or not, we as human beings have been immersed in multiple religious, folkloric, and scientific endeavors that either resemble or are magic. It's probably fair to say that, for a long period of humankind, there was basically no distinction between magic, religion, and science. Science was a way to understand the world that religion helped describe, and magic was just one form to operate within reality.

For the pre-modern world, having a list of spells, potions, and rituals was a part of life. Need divine protection? Here's are a few prayers that will serve you. Unwanted pregnancy? Maybe the neighbor knows the correct technique to brew juniper tea and solve this issue. Did you get the Spanish Flu? Maybe make yourself a caipirinha!

When John Dee tried to decipher the Enochian language, he wasn't necessarily doing magic. He was using the most advanced technology at the time (in this case, Aztec religious technology) to develop their understanding of the world in a way that could be made useful. It was an attempt at systematizing the understanding of reality to achieve concrete results in the material world. It was an attempt at creating a list of spells.

I think at this point it might be good for us to find a definition for magic. I heard this definition once in an old episode of the Mundo Freak Confidencial podcast, probably when discussing famous occultists in history¹, and it goes something like this:

Magic is the manipulation of symbols to create an effect in the material world.

It is a good enough definition to encompass everything we'd can consider magic (including real divine magic, like prayers and religious rites), plus a few other things that are not magic, but feel like magical: Language, art, advertising, the placebo effect, and a lot of other examples that will come up spontaneously when thinking about this definition in the shower. This definition connects to why the magic in Wolves upon a Coast and in Elfgame are immediately appealing.

And let's be clear: Real magic IS systematized. Not necessarily through spell slots and tiers, but through language and culture. The symbology that guides magic in the real world is mediated by the folk knowledge of its practitioners, and embedded into their daily life. Some of those symbols are incorporated in a syncretic manner through generations of practice and social exchanges. In this context, magic is imprecise because it requires interpretation, because it might be at whim of an unknown consciousness.

D&D's Vancian magic system feels so not-magical because it never was! Dying Earth is science fiction. Vancian magic is a fickle technology that needs to be stored in your mind so you can use later. It's not about language and symbology, so it lacks the basic aspect that makes magic feels like magic in the real world. It is input and output, not interpretation and transformation. It's basically the banking model of education, but applied to spellcasting. At most, the symbolism that guides D&D magic only ever shows up through spell components, which are usually abstracted out during play anyways, never really an exercise in semiotics.

Towards everyday magic

While the magic of WutC and Elfgame are great, one thing that they can't capture very well is day-to-day magic. Sure, I can throw some hydra's teeth on the floor to raise some skeletons, but can I knock on wood to avoid the same gruesome death I talk about with the innkeeper? I can have a winged penis amulet² and jest about it to ward against spells, but does doing the sign of the cross while walking down a dungeon corridor protects me from traps through divine intervention?

The kind of magic that I really miss in RPGs is the kind of stuff you may hear from an elder when you were a kid and it never made sense. It's just some little superstitious act you keep doing to hedge your bets, just in case. In a world with magic, be it a high-fantasy or low-magic setting, where's the everyday magic that anyone can do? Surely there must be a way to systematize small habits of of everyday magic!

Alright, so...do I have anything to propose? The short answer is NO. roll credits

...

Long answer: For the past few years, I've been experimenting with rules that embed cultural practices into some sort of system. I want to find a way to give players a way for characters to seamlessly belong to one of the cultures of the campaign setting.

Sympathetic magic

Before I had ever heard about Elfgame or WutC, I came up with this for a D&D 5e campaign in the Colonies of Ibir, my homebrew setting based on Brazilian folklore and colonial history.

Receive the Spirits

Sympathy • Act • Quilombola, Jangalori

Performance: 10 minutes

Duration: 5 minutes

Materials: 10 GP altar or statuette of a Jangalori spirit.

Offering: Food, alcohol, and/or the life of a creature.

RITES The participants set the offering next to the altar or statuette and engage in ritualistic song and dance, enticing the spirit into the body of one of the participants.

EFFECT For the duration, one willing participant receives a spirit which will answer questions regarding their domain from other participants. That participant is aware of all that is happening but can’t interact with the spirit. The answers come from the perspective of the spirit and can be hard to comprehend. The spirit has access to the memories of the receiver. Roll a d6 and check the table below to determine the type of spirit you summon. For each type of offering, you can add or subtract 1 from the result.

AFTERMATH The participant that received the spirit gains two levels of exhaustion.

Type of Spirit

I took this directly from my Obsidian notes. As lengthy as a complex 5e spell!

Characters would learn sympathetic magic during character creation, have access through contacts within their communities, or learn from research during downtime. Whichever method, it always required some sort of cultural connection to be able to use it. There was a base template for sympathies, then we could fill in the blanks as needed. I had a couple of sympathies pre-written for each culture the PCs could be from, and I created a few more as it became necessary.

The example above is based on afro-Brazilian religious rites that I ended up writing it specially for one player: He read through my setting overview and decided to play a spirit druid that came from a quilombo³, and had some cool ideas on how to embrace and expand that. We even got to see a spirit incorporating into another PC as the party investigated a mysterious chain-letter curse.

What worked well:

• The sympathetic magic felt a lot more magical than spell slots, for sure.
• Having a cultural tie also meant that characters would need to go to distant places or interact with different NPCs to unlock more sympathies, which was good for our hexcrawl campaign.

What could be better:

• By not having a list of sympathies available for players, they weren't usually considered as an alternative solution to a problem.
• Also, it's D&D, so spell slots already cover so much with standard action that the design space for sympathies reduces as the campaign progressed and PCs leveled up.
• Too much text! As I started playing other RPGs, I came to enjoy terse descriptions.
• Did not feel like everyday magic. More like a different type of ritual.

I'm burnt out of 5e at this point, so this system is taking a time out.

Cultural Traits

I'm designing this for a future Shadowdark game in the Colonies of Ibir. I haven't playtested this yet, but here's the gist:

1. Make your character.
2. Roll a random cultural trait.
3. Go roleplay.

A cultural trait can be:

• A sympathy, a piece of everyday magic. Should be usable in adventures.
• A ritual, takes time but stronger effect. I'll probably also include recipes for potion and magic items here. Aimed for rest or downtime.
• A belief, a static effect that is always active.
• A taboo, a negative action that must be enacted by the player, but gives an XP reward.
• A skill, something that is emblematic for the culture (not necessarily magical) I'll probably collapse a bunch of these categories (or maybe not even use categories).

Some sample traits so far:

Thank the Sun!

Settler Sympathy

Say "Thank the Sun!" or "Thank Sol!" and do the sign of the cross whenever you exactly succeed on a roll to gain a Luck Token. (You exactly succeed when you roll exactly the number you need to beat)

Petition St. Bart the Finder

Settler Sympathy

Spend your action petitioning St. Bart the Finder for help in locating something, someone, or some place you desire to find. For the rest of the day, you simply find it if looking at the right place, or roll with advantage on checks to locate your quarry. If you find it, pay penance before using this again.

Beneath the Ladder

Settler Taboo

Walking beneath a ladder is bad luck. Lose a luck token, and if you do, gain 1 XP the first time it happens in a session.

Purified by Baptism

Settler Belief

Roll disease damage with DISADVANTAGE.

Ask for Divine Guidance

Settler Sympathy

Do the sign of the cross before a roll outside of combat. If you fail by exactly 1, you succeed instead. Can't use this again until paying penance.

Curse of the Kuparag Spirit

Ourú-Krapok Belief

When you die, if you are not buried and a bonfire lit above your burial spot before midnight, 5:6 chance to raise as a Kuparag Spirit (it's a hungry shadowy jaguar spirit) and hunt the rest of the party.

Funeral Storycircle (Placeholder name)

I don't know yet

Spend a day burying a dead companion, exchanging memories and stories. Participants gain XP equal to the companion's level.

Right now I'm coming up with a rollable list of cultural traits for each of the playable cultures in Ibir. Probably similar/connected cultures will share a quite a few traits. I also want to explore how distinct cultures might treat topics as death and luck. Multiple cultures might have burial rites, for example, but they might require different actions and serve different purposes.

What next?

At this point, I'm more interested in designing modules than whole games, but I think there's a ton of potential to be explored with a magic system that centers on culture and language and builds outwards. A system that acknowledges that science and folklore can go hand in hand, and the occult is just another way of discovering reality. Where maybe a list of spells reflects how magic is interpreted in a corner of the world, and those spells can't function properly if you don't understand how those practitioners think. Or maybe you can indeed do foreign magic, but the costs are higher and the risk is exponential, because more is lost in translation.

If anyone actually reads this, I hope this nonsensical rambling has at the very least inspired new ways to disliking existing magic system, and hopefully leads into even more ways for us to systematize magic differently.