Opinions and help with my magic system

[Relicmaster198]

I am writing a book and need help with my magic system. The best that I can come up with is that magic costs time. What I mean by this is that if you use magic it will take off a certain amount of time off of your lifeline. That is why after you use a large spell it weakens you, because it takes time for your lifeline to adjust to losing time. That is also why my main characters know where the Fountain of Youth is.

Any help with filling in any details would be helpful.

[Ziggelly]

Wow! I'm intrigued by this. It would make a fascinating story, if one could pull it off.

A couple of things for clarification sake though: Does the castor physically get older, or does it just shorten their lifespan? Can you gradually get your time back again, if you don't use magic? Most importantly: How does it do this? Do you have an explanation for why using magic makes your life shorter, or how this fountain reverses it?

[Relicmaster198]

First off thank you for raising these questions. I hadn't really asked myself any of these yet. To answer your first question the lifespan of the castor just shortens. The castor is then able to gain some of their time back through various processes. One of these processes is drinking from the fountain of youth. Though yes the fountain does make you younger in most stories one of my characters is from Avalon, alternate plain of existence in my stories, and the fountain has this adverse effect. Have yet to think of why the magic shortens the castor's lifespan though.

[Gruud]

Given your angle, I think the shortening of a mage's lifespan is a reasonably natural, biological process that many readers will accept without shining too much polish on it.

After all, if you take energy out of a system, there will always be a consequence.

I've heard/read plenty of folks "say" that if we all start out with a "a billion heartbeats", then everything we do along the way is in effect burning those heartbeats, never to be recovered.

So, for example, if you're heavy into cocaine or meth, both of which can substantially increase your heart rate while using, then you are taking beats off the end of your life.

Poorly worded perhaps, but I think you get the gist ...

[Snowleopard]

Er, not to be a pain but they had the magic use = time off of life thing in one of the last Ray Harryhausen films.  Tom Baker was the evil sorcerer in it, I believe.
However, they didn't explore the magic system it was only that they used that idea.
It could be too, I don't remember all that well, that it was blood or evil magic that took from your life force.
Maybe in your magic system - doing something good - you could figure out what - would replenish lost time for white magic use.  Whereas blood magic use would be almost impossible without using the life force of someone else or something else to replenish it.

[Darkshore]

IMHO the limitations and costs of a Magic System are the most interesting parts. I don't like the fountain of youth idea or the "they can gain back time" at all. It would add a lot of interest and tension to if and when the characters would resort to magic. Your best friend is going to die if you don't unleash a spell that will take a chunk of your life never to be replaced, do you do it? An innocent civilian or a poor street urchin in the same position, would you do it? Adds a lot more depth, risk, and will show us readers a lot about the characters.

[meg_evonne]

OTOH, a race against the biological time clock in order to FIND the Fountain of Youth before you die of old age is a great premise.

The premise is sort of the Seinfeild, "Is he worthy" delimna that I still grin and laugh about...  :-)

[Relicmaster198]

Thank you all for the suggestions. There is one important piece of information that I left out. One of the main characters of my book series is over 800 years old.

[OZ]

Could some creature that devours the lives of others in order to add to its own lifespan ( vampires, succubi, incubi ) use magic but steal years from others to keep from running out? I like your idea but only if the water must be drunk directly from the fountain to work ( not bottled and taken home ) and only if there is some difficulty or even sacrifice involved in reaching the fountain. Otherwise the price of magic will become meaningless to the main character as he/she cast spells then takes another hit from the canteen.

I do like the idea however. The idea that power comes at a price is not new but it still makes a great story when handled well.

[Haru]

I agree with the notion about the bottled fountain of youth, there should still be a price to pay. You could make the characters physically addicted to the fountain water, so someone who would use it would be more irrational, be prone to use more magic, since he knows he can replenish it as much he wants, etc. Maybe even have them "boil over" with magic, if they drink too much water without releasing it as magic, leading to all kinds of side effects.

The vampire idea was brought up as well, and it is yet another dark way to replenish ones magic/life.

On a similar notion, a carrion eater. If people in your world have a fixed amount of life force, then some will probably die before it is used up, maybe they are murdered or die in an accident. Magic users might be able to suck the remaining life force out of those bodies and add them to their own. Would probably be more morally valid (that is, if they don't actually eat part of the body), but also not as powerful. Especially interesting, if some of the dead persons life will actually be mixed into the magic user and change his personality slightly.

Another idea, though I guess it should be exclusive to one character, would be to not use ones life to fuel a spell, but quite the opposite, you use your own death to fuel spells, not shortening your life but pushing back the time when death will find you. Which would mean, that the character would live longer and longer, the more he used magic. One problem with this would be, that it is probably going to be a everlasting life without everlasting youth thing, though you could remove that, if you say he is not only fuelling his spells with his death, but also decay and stays young that way.

[Aminar]

Well...  Could the fountain not replenish the ability to use magic?  So it keeps you alive but every time you spend magic that is time from your replenished life wherein you will be helpless without magic?  Could raise some fun questions...  I'm not entirely clear what kind of help your looking for but magic should always have a cost...  Your characters are paying a hefty cost, but at the same time they don't entirely pay that cost until much later...  It'll be a tough concept to keep balanced(as a D&D campaign I witnessed learned the hard way.

[Quantus]

You can leave the mechanisms vague when you are staying within the lines.   If you keep to the established boundaries, in this case the notion that Magic uses up life force, then you can get away with not looking too close at the mechanism, because its just background to the story to be briefly mentioned and then you can move on.  But in this case a loophole, a way to break the normal rules, is a central point to the story, so your readers will be looking at it much closer, unless many such loopholes exist, and the fountain is just his personal path to it, at which point you can hide it all offscreen again.  That would play well with the vampire/succubus angle, if everybody /can/ replenish, but the MC happens to have a morally acceptable way to do it.  In that case it doesnt really give him a significant advantage in terms of power or scope, just a more palatable than average means. 

Now, that still leaves the explanation pretty open.  You can go Chi energy style, where its the base life force energy that the body uses to keep things pumping.  You can go more spiritual into a spirit/soul that is wounded and needs time to recover.  You can do the aging bit or not, have the fountain reverse his aging or just stall it.  It could be described as cellular damage that takes time to heal and also exponentially increases the odds of cancer developing, random or specific (ie all casters eventually get the same rare brain tumor), "shortening your life" in a less literal but more scientifically explainable way. 

I do agree with others who suggest limiting the access/benefits of the Fountain as much as possible, otherwise it takes all the balance out of your MC using magic.  One idea I had would be that the Fountain just stalls his natural aging, but does not actually replenish his magic life energy.  So the fountain keeps him from aging day to day, but every time he uses magic he ages a little anyway.  He can live 800 years, but needs to ration his magic use out, and eventually stop completely if he wants to stay alive.


0.02

[Snowleopard]

"On a similar notion, a carrion eater. If people in your world have a fixed amount of life force, then some will probably die before it is used up, maybe they are murdered or die in an accident. Magic users might be able to suck the remaining life force out of those bodies and add them to their own. Would probably be more morally valid (that is, if they don't actually eat part of the body), but also not as powerful. Especially interesting, if some of the dead persons life will actually be mixed into the magic user and change his personality slightly."

You could do a riff on this with a magical version of the Resurrectionists - Burke and Hare.
People who set out to kill those, before their time, so that others might use up their life force.
A twist on that would be that the Resurrectionists can't use the life force because it won't work and/or go
to a person's murderer or maybe just a murder period.

[Darkshore]

I'm still a little iffy on the whole fountain of youth bit, but that carrion eater idea is just plain awesome. My magic system is huge on costs so I may be a bit biased.

[OZ]

I like this. I have always wondered what the difference is between a ghoul that eats dead bodies and a plain old cannibal. If a ghoul only eats fresh bodies that still retain residual magic, that would be a good definition of why they are supernatural creatures rather than just people with a strange diet.