(The Return Of) Ten Ridiculously Cool Magic Systems!
Mermaid by Yuri Arcurs PhotographyIt’s Wyrd & Wonder, which means it’s time for another list featuring cool magic systems! (I mean, your mileage may vary, but I find them all very cool!)
My annual list of interesting magical abilities will be up later in the month; and you can find links to previous years lists of magic systems at the end of this post.
Enjoy!
The House of Shattered Wings (Dominion of the Fallen, #1) by Aliette de Bodard Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
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Multi-award winning author Aliette de Bodard, brings her story of the War in Heaven to Paris, igniting the City of Light in a fantasy of divine power and deep conspiracy…
In the late twentieth century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins, the aftermath of a Great War between arcane powers. The Grand Magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart. But those that survived still retain their irrepressible appetite for novelty and distraction, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France’s once grand capital.
Once the most powerful and formidable, House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.
Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires’ salvation—or the architects of its last, irreversible fall. And if Silverspires falls, so may the city itself.
There are a few different ways to do magic in this series, but the main one is powering your spells with bits of angel.
‘Free range’ angel parts: breath, eyelashes, nail or hair clippings.
‘Factory farming’ angel parts: blood, bone, flesh, wings.
Enough said!!!
The Tensorate Series (Tensorate #1-4) by Neon Yang Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads
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The Tensorate Series, which has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, and Lambda Literary Awards, is an incomparable treasure of modern epic fantasy.
Across four novellas, Neon Yang established themself as a fantasist in bold defiance of the limitations of their genre. Available now in a single volume, these four novellas trace the generational decline of an empire and unfurl a world that is rich and strange beyond anything you've dreamed.
In the Tensorate Series you will find: rebellious nonbinary scions of empire, sky-spanning nagas with experimental souls, revolutionary engineers bent on bringing power to the people, pugilist monks, packs of loyal raptors, and much, much more.
‘Magic’, aka slackcraft, works by manipulating various forces or ‘natures’ that exist within the Slack – not the ‘team communication platform’ but a layer of reality beyond the mundane everyday one. In Black Tides of Heaven, the forces are described to us thusly
Earth, for gravity;
Water, for motion;
Fire, for hot and cold;
Forest, for flesh and blood;
Metal, for electricity.
So one uses forest-nature, or manipulates forest force, to heal, for example. Every spell you learn makes a connection between you and the Slack; other slackcraft users (called Tensors) can see these connections. Most people only have a handful of basic ones; a fully-trained Tensor might have hundreds or thousands. And since these connections look like light, the perception of someone who knows a lot of slackcraft is honestly deeply eerie.
Slackcraft is an interesting magic system (at least to me!) for a few reasons, the first being that gravity/motion/heat/flesh/electricity are not common fundamental forces in Fantasy magic! It almost feels rooted in physics, or something like physics. The Slack is everywhere all of the time; you don’t need to gather, summon, or create earth-nature, just manipulate what already exists all around you. It’s almost reality-warping.
But the most interesting aspects are how versatile it is – the ways Yang/their Tensors mix the different natures to create specific functions is wonderfully outside-the-box and creative – and how woven into society it is. Slackcraft purifies water, electrifies fences, powers lights; there are even slackcraft ‘phones’ and ‘cameras’. HI, IF MAGIC EXISTS IN YOUR WORLD, IT SHOULD DEFINITELY BE EVERYWHERE. It’s so useful, why wouldn’t society embrace it? And then in many ways depend on it? (This is, in fact, one of the major themes and conflicts of the series!)
Sparrow Hill Road (Ghost Roads, #1) by Seanan McGuire Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy
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Rose Marshall died in 1952 in Buckley Township, Michigan, run off the road by a man named Bobby Cross—a man who had sold his soul to live forever, and intended to use her death to pay the price of his immortality. Trouble was, he didn’t ask Rose what she thought of the idea.
It’s been more than sixty years since that night, and she’s still sixteen, and she’s still running.
They have names for her all over the country: the Girl in the Diner. The Phantom Prom Date. The Girl in the Green Silk Gown. Mostly she just goes by “Rose,” a hitchhiking ghost girl with her thumb out and her eyes fixed on the horizon, trying to outrace a man who never sleeps, never stops, and never gives up on the idea of claiming what’s his. She’s the angel of the overpass, she’s the darling of the truck stops, and she’s going to figure out a way to win her freedom. After all, it’s not like it can kill her.
You can’t kill what’s already dead.
It plays a bigger role in book two – I think it’s only worldbuilding trivia in book one – but I adore the roadwitchery in this series! The more you’ve travelled in your life, the stronger a roadwitch you are – which is especially interesting in the context of the North American setting, since most Americans never travel abroad, but you have a very different cultural approach to extremely long car journeys. And car journeys are very plot-relevant in a series about a hitchhiking ghost!
The roads are also alive, and one of a roadwitch’s most important roles is taking care of them – which also means, putting them down when they go bad.
Blood of the Old Kings (The Bleeding Empire, #1) by Sung-Il Kim, Anton Hur Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy
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Blood of the Old Kings begins an epic adventure in which three strangers journey through a vast Empire that uses the power of dead wizards to conquer and subdue, from award-winning author Sung-il Kim and translated by the highly-acclaimed Anton Hur.
Powered by the corpses of sorcerers, the Empire has conquered the world. It claims to have brought peace and stability to its conquered lands, but some see that peace for what it is—a lie—and will give everything in the fight against it.
Loran is desperate for revenge after the Empire killed her family, so much so that the swordswoman climbs the volcano where the legends say an ancient dragon slumbers and leaps in. She finds that the legends are true, and Loran leaves the mountain with a sword made of dragon’s fang and a great purpose before her.
Cain arrived in the Imperial Capital lost and orphaned, and it’s only thanks to the kindness of a stranger-turned-mentor that he survived on the city’s streets. When his friend is found murdered, he will leave no stone unturned to find those responsible, even if it means starting a war.
Arienne’s future has never been in question—born a sorcerer, she’ll be a Power Generator for the Empire upon her death. But when she starts to hear the voice of a powerful necromancer in her head, she realizes the only thing more terrifying than dying for the Empire is never getting to truly live in the first place.
When peace is a lie, there is power in truth—and as Loran, Cain, and Arienne hunt for answers in their own lives, any one of their small rebellions could be the stone that brings the Empire toppling down.
It’s not exactly a secret that in this book, the ruling empire has found an alternative to electricity: the bodies of dead sorcerers! (Which I guess is technically a renewable resource, since sorcerers keep being born? Neat, environmentally friendly power source!) That’s already a very cool idea, and I was fascinated to see how it shaped the empire’s approach to sorcerers and sorcery (basically sorcerers belong to the state, who teach them very little magic because it’s safer not to, and sorcerers get state stipends and can do pretty much what they want within certain limits, because no one cares about them till they’re dead).
But! It is not the only cool-magic-thing here! Because pre-empire, every nation had its own magic. As in, the sorcerers of each place used it in completely different ways for completely different things than their neighbours. They each had a unique magic system. ! That’s not something we see very often! Usually magic is magic and there’s only one way to use it – or very occasionally there might be different schools or disciplines of magic, but usually everyone understands that it’s the same magic underneath relatively superficial differences. This is not that!
Yes I did absolutely nerd out over a world that has/had dozens and dozens of magic systems, won’t you join me???
Winter of Ice and Iron by Rachel Neumeier Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads
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In this gorgeous, dark fantasy in the spirit of Jacqueline Carey, a princess and a duke must protect the people of their nations when a terrible threat leaves everyone in danger.
With the Mad King of Emmer in the north and the vicious King of Pohorir in the east, Kehara Raehema knows her country is in a vulnerable position. She never expected to give up everything she loves to save her people, but when the Mad King’s fury leaves her land in danger, she has no choice but to try any stratagem that might buy time for her people to prepare for war—no matter the personal cost.
Hundreds of miles away, the pitiless Wolf Duke of Pohorir, Innisth Eanete, dreams of breaking his people and his province free of the king he despises. But he has no way to make that happen—until chance unexpectedly leaves Kehara on his doorstep and at his mercy.
Yet in a land where immanent spirits inhabit the earth, political disaster is not the greatest peril one can face. Now, as the year rushes toward the dangerous midwinter, Kehera and Innisth find themselves unwilling allies, and their joined strength is all that stands between the peoples of the Four Kingdoms and utter catastrophe.
In this setting, anywhere humans live eventually develops a spirit called an Immanent Power. Everyone has a connection to the Immanent Power of where they live, but when an Immanent Power is just getting started, ‘strong and ambitious’ people can make a stronger, special bond to it, called a ruling tie. This is how monarchs get made, by being the person with this tie. Immanent Powers learn from the people they have a ruling tie with, so the personalities of the royal line can have a lot of influence on the nature of the land they rule, especially over time.
(It also influences whether the Immanent Power becomes a Fortunate or Unfortunate God, when it eventually undergoes apotheosis, so it’s quite a big deal!)
Littler Immanent Powers ‘belong’ to Great Powers, so a duchy’s Immanent Power is bonded to the Immanent Power of the nation the duchy is in. The older and bigger an Immanent Power is, the stronger it is; it also gets stronger if smaller Immanent Powers are bonded to it.
One of the big things a healthy, strong Immanent Power does is heal the humans within its territory; not just from normal everyday injuries and illnesses, but also after battles and things. The other big thing is mitigating the effects of things like drought: even if the rain doesn’t come, a strong Immanent Power can make the plants grow anyway. Unlike the healing, things like keeping blizzards away or making grain grow without rain requires power an Immanent Power draws from its deep tie; so, the local monarch.
In theory, an Immanent Power can do quite a lot, if it’s strong enough – but the human with the deep tie has to convince the Immanent Power to want to. And since Immanent Powers are most concerned with the natural world, they’re rarely useful in a cinematic way – but when they are, it’s things like throwing back a tsunami, so, you know, I think that makes up for it not happening often! In the more usual run of things, humans with a deep tie can do things with it like track anyone within their Power’s territory, and minor stuff like protecting your land from multi-headed monster dragons. The deep tie with a Power is great for that too.
This isn’t a small part of the book, either; the whole plot is about connections between the continent’s Great Powers and those who hold their deep ties, and the politics of those connections.
Beguilement (The Sharing Knife, #1) by Lois McMaster Bujold Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Goodreads
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An epic fantasy of devotion, destiny, and perilous magic from one of the most honored writers in the field--multiple Hugo Award-winning author Lois McMaster Bujold
Young, pregnant Fawn Bluefield has just fled her family's farm to the city of Glassforge, where she encounters a patrol of the enigmatic soldier-sorcerers known as Lakewalkers. Fawn has heard stories about the Lakewalkers, wandering necromancers with no permanent homes and no possessions but the clothes they wear and the mysterious knives they carry. What she does not know is that the Lakewalkers are engaged in a perilous campaign against inhuman and immortal magical entities known as "malices."
When Fawn is kidnapped by one of these creatures, it is up to Dag, an older Lakewalker heavy with sorrows and responsibilities, to rescue her. But in the ensuing struggle, it is not Dag but Fawn who kills the creature--at dire cost--and an uncanny accident befalls Dag's sharing knife, which unexpectedly binds their two fates together.
The magic of the Lakewalkers is a very subtle, unflashy thing, but they’ve found all kinds of creative uses for it. Lakewalkers can ‘see’ what they call ‘ground’, basically the life force of everything from humans to animals to rocks. And they can influence the ground of other things; putting a thought in a horse’s mind to make it stay put, for example, or ‘bouncing’ mosquitoes away, or summoning fish into a net. These are the kind of things most Lakewalkers can learn how to do fairly easily.
But there are also Lakewalker Makers – we’d call them artisans – who use groundwork to ‘make a thing more itself’. By strengthening or reinforcing a quality the material you’re working with already has, a talented Maker can make leather – already naturally tough – impossible to cut (so, functionally a kind of armour!) The other form of Making takes the ground of multiple pieces and makes them one, and while you need a lot of talent and power to turn leather into armour, all Makers can blend the ground of what they’re making this way. So you get boots which never leak because all the parts of the boot have been convinced they are one thing, one piece, and so don’t part along their seams. Not flashy, but super useful, and the many – and sometimes very strange – applications the Lakewalkers come up with for this are great.
Domesticated Magic by Wendy Palmer Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads
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Mateo Taurasi and his family fled their island home when their people turned to sorcery. Mateo’s own magic is tame but it’s still banned in the Vaeringan Empire...and his family still use it every day in their cosy teahouse. The last thing they need is an Imperial barging in to catch them at it.
Luckily, Jonas just wants to offer them a trade deal too good to resist. As hard as he tries, Mateo begins to find the cheerfully charming Jonas too good to resist, too.
But an unfairly attractive Imperial is not Mateo’s only problem. Rumours of sorcery loose in the city mean trouble for the Taurasi. With Jonas caught up in the mess, Mateo must investigate.
His family already lost their world once. Mateo can’t let them lose again. Not even if it costs him the man he really wishes he didn't have feelings for.
c/ explicit transm/m sex scenes
Another less-flashy magic system, the one in Domesticated Magic delights me because it’s so elegantly simple – ‘neat’ as in ‘cool’, yes, but also ‘neat’ in the sense of ‘perfectly arranged’.
All Ystherans can use magic, but whether they do or not isn’t entirely up to them – because being able to use it doesn’t mean they have it. Only certain individuals, called Souls, actually have their own magic – and, usually in a daily ritual, they give magic to their clan-members. If a Soul doesn’t give you magic – or cuts you off if you’re in the process of receiving it – then too bad, no magic for you.
To make things even more interesting, the amount of magic a person can contain varies a lot – some have a much larger or smaller inner ‘receptacle’ than others, meaning that when they’re ‘full’, not everyone has the same amount of magic to work with.
But the size of your receptacle does not determine how much magic you can actually use. Many people with smaller receptacles can ‘channel’ much more magic than they can contain – so, if their Soul is passing magic to them, and that person is using the magic for something (say, creating a magic shield) as it’s being passed to them, they can potentially use quite a lot. Basically, the size of your tank has little bearing on the size of the pipe feeding the tank; and if your tank is in active use, you can receive a lot more magic than your tank could hold if no magic was going out.
(Or, if you have a huge tank but a small pipe, a lot less.)
It’s so simple but so elegant!
Sorcery and Small Magics (The Wildersongs Trilogy, #1) by Maiga Doocy Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads
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Desperate to undo the curse binding them to each other, an impulsive sorcerer and his curmudgeonly rival venture deep into a magical forest in search of a counterspell—only to discover that magic might not be the only thing pulling them together.
Leovander Loveage is a master of small magics.
He can summon butterflies with a song, or turn someone’s hair pink by snapping his fingers. Such minor charms don’t earn him much admiration from other sorcerers (or his father), but anything more elaborate always blows up in his face. Which is why Leo vowed years ago to never again write powerful magic.
That is, until a mix-up involving a forbidden spell binds Leo to obey the commands of his longtime nemesis, Sebastian Grimm. Grimm is Leo’s complete opposite—respected, exceptionally talented, and an absolutely insufferable curmudgeon. The only thing they agree on is that getting caught using forbidden magic would mean the end of their careers. They need a counterspell, and fast. But Grimm casts spells, he doesn’t undo them, and Leo doesn’t mess with powerful magic.
Chasing rumors of a powerful sorcerer with a knack for undoing curses, Leo and Grimm enter the Unquiet Wood, a forest infested with murderous monsters and dangerous outlaws alike. To dissolve the curse, they’ll have to uncover the true depths of Leo’s magic, set aside their long-standing rivalry, and—much to their horror—work together.
Even as an odd spark of attraction flares between them.
What if you could write spells or cast spells, but not both? And to be clear, if you are a caster – you can’t cast anything until a writer prepares it for you. Not even if you’ve cast the same spell hundreds of times before! Which means that it doesn’t matter which you are – if you want magic, you’re entirely dependent on the kind of sorcerer you’re not. Magic is communal – even if you’re using a spell prepared ages ago by a writer you’ve never met, the fact is that magic can’t exist in this setting without community. It’s the exact opposite of the traditional Wizard Who Walks Alone.
It’s such a superficially simple but fascinating set-up!
The Gossamer Mage by Julie E. Czerneda Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Goodreads
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From an Aurora Award-winning author comes a new fantasy epic in which one mage must stand against a Deathless Goddess who controls all magic.
Only in Tananen do people worship a single the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic.
Mage scribes learn to write Her words as spells to make beasts or plants, designed to any purpose. If an intention is flawed, what the mage creates is a a magical creature as wild and free as it is costly for the mage.
For Her Gift comes at a steep price. Each successful intention ages a mage until they dare no more. But her magic demands to be used; the Deathless Goddess will take her fee, and mages will die.
To end this terrible toll, the greatest mage in Tananen vows to find and destroy Her. He has yet to learn She is all that protects Tananen from what waits outside. And all that keeps magic alive.
The idea of magic being done via writing or marking some kinds of symbols isn’t new, sure. But how it’s written – and what it is and isn’t able to do – makes the one here very cool.
Writing magic costs a mage some of their lifeforce, causing them to age physically. But it costs less lifeforce with high-quality ink, pens, and paper – and still less if the ink, pen and paper have been made by the mage himself. This creates an odd situation, because older mages are more experienced, and therefore better at magic. But creating ink and paper especially (pens might be easier? at least if we’re talking quills?) are very demanding physical tasks – older mages, who have bodies maybe three or four times older than their real age, are not up to making their own materials from scratch.
Another detail I really like is that the magic ‘words’ are written not left to right or up to down, but one word written directly over the previous one. So you don’t end with anything that looks like a sentence, but something more like a Rorschach test.
This is not a magic system where anything is possible; in this world, magic can create life and nothing else. Which gets utilised in all sorts of ways: creating horses who can see in the dark are very popular for couriers, and anyone who has to deal with ploughing really appreciates oxen who don’t get tired! Statues and things can also be animated – though like most of the flesh-and-blood creations of magic, they don’t last indefinitely. (Permanent creations are possible, but the spells to make them are so expensive in lifeforce that few mages are willing to do that.)
And one you should preorder immediately…
The Mercy Makers (The Moon Heresies, #1) by Tessa Gratton Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Published on: 17th June 2025
Goodreads
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A talented heretic must decide between the pursuit of forbidden magic, or the ecstasy of forbidden love—either way, her choice will upend the world, in the start of a sweeping, romantic epic fantasy trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.
Can an empire trip and fall on a mere strand of silk?
Iriset is a prodigy and an outlaw. The daughter of a powerful criminal, she dons her alter ego Silk to create magical disguises for those in her father’s organization, but she longs to do more with her talent: to enhance what it means to be human by giving people wings, night-sight, and other abilities; to unlock the possibilities of gender and parenthood; to cure disease and even to end mortality itself.
Everything changes when her father is captured and sentenced to death. To save him, Iriset must infiltrate the palace and the empire’s fanatical ruling family. There, she realizes she has a chance—and an obligation—to bring down the entire corrupt system. She'll have to entangle herself in the lives of the emperor and his sister, getting them to trust and even to love her. But love is a two-way street, and Iriset’s own heart holds the most mysterious and impenetrable magic of all.
The Mercy Makers isn’t out for another month, but my friends, not including it wasn’t an option. I loved everything about this when I got to read it early, and the magic system is SPECTACULARLY awesome!
Architecture is the magic of manipulating four forces: Falling, Flow, Ecstatic, and Rising, each of which have their own properties. (Which force a person has more or less of either determines their personality or is determined by their personality; I’m not sure which direction the causality flows in.) But Architecture is extremely localised: outside the bounds of the empire, it doesn’t work at all.
Haven’t seen that very often, but okay, sure.
Except: when the empire’s borders expand, so does the area where architecture works.
??????????? What??? Magic is something that either exists or it doesn’t! What do you MEAN it only exists in this one area? And if it only exists in one area, how is it that that area isn’t, you know, geographic, but is instead tied to the human hallucination that is a nation’s borders??? The handful of times I’ve seen magic localised like this, it wasn’t possible to make the area where magic exists bigger or smaller. Because that means that the magic isn’t – natural? Is that the word I want? It’s not a fundamental part of the reality in this world, it’s artificial, imposed.
*FLAILS*
As a magic system, architecture is extremely versatile and incredibly powerful – it can be used for magical graffiti, to create otherwise-impossible bridges, and even to unmake a person. But one branch of architecture is completely forbidden, and of course, it’s easily the most interesting: human architecture, that is, magically manipulating the human body. Which covers everything from most healing, to sex changes, to the completely Out There stuff like giving people cat eyes, or wings, or scales.
TELL ME THAT IS NOT RIDICULOUSLY COOL, AND I’LL CALL YOU A LIAR.
That’s my 10 for 2025! Looking for more? You can find them in my earlier lists here;
Ten Ridiculously Cool Magic Systems!
Ten (More) Ridiculously Cool Magic Systems!
Ten (Even More) Ridiculously Cool Magic Systems!
Ten (Yet More) Ridiculously Cool Magic Systems!
Ten (Still More) Ridiculously Cool Magic Systems!
Or you can check out my lists featuring unique magical abilities – start here, and keep an eye out for this year’s!
What are some of your favourite magic systems?
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