Hi! I just read Eragon (a book that has much in common with both Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter) and just loved the way magic is described there. The author actually came up with a kinda reasonable explanation for a specific kind of magic, the one that the hero uses (actually it's not exactly "reasonable", but rather "logic" and thus imposes some limits on it, so it's not like "magic is the stuff that can make anything happen, no matter what, and it just exists"). There's an ancient language, the first language that ever existed (yadda yadda about the dawn of the world and the Ancients), and when you're speaking it you're calling the true name of things (I think I heard about this True Name thingy once before). Whenever you're speaking this language you cannot lie (this must be a rule enforced by the gods or something). So, you're speaking THE name of an object or whatever, not just a name made up by people, so you can actually do anything with it by focusing your mind on what you want and speaking the right words: the language will make sure that what you're saying becomes true (you cannot lie, remember?). What makes this really interesting for the story, is that if you just say "fire", anything related to fire can happen, and you have no control over it. You must be really specific or something else will happen. This implies a lot of knowledge of the language. The really bad side of this is that, once a magic starts, there's no way to stop it, and until what you asked is complete, it goes on to suck your entire energy if it's needed. Any mistake can be fatal. There's things like, to bring someone back to life, you'd surely die from the effort, etc. There are lots of details on this but I was trying to sum it up for people who don't know what the hell I'm talking about:P I thought this should give some really nice ideas for a game - I mean, the magic system of an RPG. I'm kinda tired of the same old magic based on points; magic should be mistical and more organic than most games make it (the other thread on a Free-Form Magic System is really nice, but do you get my point? what if the "slots" the wizard chooses to create a spell are not like element, area of effect, target, etc, but things a bit more high-level?). This does not mean that this hipotetical game should have a parser for magic sentences, although that would be interesting:)

Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea books use a similar system - there the biggest control is that everything has a specific name, so a spell that creates a tidal wave in "the sea near Roke" will have no effect if you're on the island of Gont instead.

Yeah that seems cool :) I think that this kind of carefully thought-out limitations are what create interesting magics and not "yet another way to cast magic missile/fireball". Hasn't anyone here heard of this book at all? Weird, I thought it was a lot more mainstream than most fantasy books... What do you think about a more "organic" magic system instead of playing around with points?