1 Magic and it’s Inner Workings

Magic works by taking your visualization and level of magical compatibility to create a spell, a chant will almost always be incorporated to reduce mental fatigue. Magic is essentially a method of altering and/or controlling reality in the surrounding area via something that ignores the normal laws or rules of the world or universe, because of this you can go in 1 of 2 directions and if you are especially confident you can use both, just know that it is hard to write using both types.

The first type involves an extremely hard system of magic where there is only a few types of magic that can only be used in a specific way. The second type involves a very soft system of magic that has some thought out systems but those are only human created guidelines that are not absolute, this creates it possible to utilize magic in a way that seems impossible from the perspective of that world's residents without destroying your existing magic system because a form of magic existing in one world doesn't mean that it will exist in all worlds.

While the idea of magic is to ignore the rules of the world it is usually a good idea to add some type of fuel to support magic or magic users will become far too powerful and balance breaking. Something I have seen to avoid this pitfall is to make individuals specialized so that they can only use one spell or magical ability.

Something that is sometimes missed when writing is how magic is formed, usually this involves a chant in some long lost language where no one remembers the meaning of the word that they are speaking. This type of magic formation usually appears in hard magic systems because it is difficult to introduce new spells or magical effects without it seeming to convenient or dull.

Visualization is also used to form magic and is mostly present in softer magic systems because it creates a "if you can dream it, you can do it" mentality. If you are not careful this can also create a dull magic system that is too convenient. For that reason this type of magic formation is not used very often without some type of restricting force.

Staves and wands also appear in lots of stories that have a focus on magic, usually these are used by the more wizard like characters, but staves and wands can also add certain interesting elements to the story. Personally I find it interesting when staves and wands are added to a story because they can add an element to magical combat that is not see very often.

Staves appear as more defensive magical tools because they are longer and can be planted into the ground for added support while wands which are smaller and are easier to point around can be more attack oriented because of this property.

Staves and wands add new elements to magical combat through their material, higher quality materials can make spells more potent and possible effective against forms of magic that they normally would be weak to if the individuals stave or wand is a higher quality than their opponent's. This can make a fight between magic users harder to predict and gives the author more freedom when writing magical combat.

Magic age and color is something that some writers will add to spice up their magic users. Something that is often done with magic aging is make it so that magical power will become more potent the older the individual is and as a result results in a spell cast by an older person being stronger than the same spell being cast by a younger person; however, this also works in reverse. Magic coloring is more common in stories with magical technology and is used as a type of lock and key with this magical technology by only allowing individuals with similar magic colors to use certain types of magic technology.