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[Soadreqm]

Everyone seems to be posting long posts on magic in DF these days, so I thought I'd make my own. You can't stop me. No one can stop me. I know the Magic Arc is post-version-one stuff, only before the Eventually Arc in the grand stack of things to do. A decade or two, maybe?

Anyway.

General: There's magic all around youuu!
Fire imps can live in lava and mudmen can walk around without any of the biological systems most animals need. There's no evident reason for them to be able to do that, they just can. There are all kinds of beasts about with magical powers ranging from "ability to live despite being made of fire" to "being translucent". This could be extended by

• turning the things now existing only in PREFSTRING flavor text into actual powers with related raw file tags and effects
• adding some interface to adventure mode for using the powers (FIREBALLS!)
• giving magic powers to more things that could be expected to have some, such as unicorns.

Of course, since there's pie in the sky and we're building a robust magic system capable of ANYTHING, the range of possible abilities you could give to creatures will be absolutely tremendous. Making metals corrode, walking through solid walls, talking to beetles and causing tsunamis.

Dwarves: Histories of Labor and Study
In my mind, the dwarves are grounded, practical and care little for this "magic" nonsense. Dwarven magic would be mostly what little there is now, only more of it. Artifact magic. Flesh out the current fey moods more, and give nifty powers and properties to the resulting artifacts. And, to give the player more control, add more strange and esoteric materials that any dwarf of sufficient skill can turn into magical items. Body parts of various magical beasts would be a good source for this; armor made from the hide of a dragon would have various properties, not all of which could be explained by the dragon's hide being tough. Letting highly skilled dwarves create magical artifacts, on command, from perfectly mundane materials could also be fun, but it'd make the resulting items feel less special.

Dwarves could also have some natural magic abilities. Excellent vision in low-light conditions would fit pretty well, as would some kind of mystical affinity with rock, being able to sense how much stress it can take and instinctively knowing the best strategy for digging into it. This would have the gameplay effect of making fortress lighting and cave-ins less of a hassle. Or rather, making them more of a hassle when playing with non-dwarves.

Dwarves wouldn't necessarily think of their magic as "magic". It's just something they can do. The dwarves make +1 fire swords by slaying a magma man and having a master weaponsmith forge its heart into a sword; the process isn't considered any more arcane than the process of making steel or astronavigation, assuming you have the knowledge and tools

Humans: Ancient forgotten lore
Since humans are the most mundane of the races, some kind of pseudo-real-world magic system would suit them well. Good old-fashioned pacts-with-devils witchcraft. Magic would be performed by wizards who jealously guard their secrets, by method of obscure rituals recorded in moldy old tomes. Practice of magic could be banned, organized or anything else, but it would generally rely on knowing things other people don't, and often involve contacting otherworldly entities to do things for you.

I haven't really thought much about how this would work in-game. I suppose you'd have some kind of "magician" class of people, who you could order to dance naked around a bonfire waving a chicken head around, and then things would happen. Humans would make a +1 fire sword by binding some spirit or other into it, and the correct way to do this would be a well-kept secret, only recorded in a centuries-old incomplete translation of an even older book, and you have to travel to Mount Doom and back to get a cackling old madman to tell you where to find it.

Elves: The Fair Folk have it easy
Elves are just better than you. Ask any elf, they'll gladly tell. Elves are resistant to disease and immune to old age, they can commune with plants and animals and probably have telepathy, they are more connected to any mystical life forces around than everyone else combined. They are also friends with a variety of nature spirits with a variety of powers other people have to kill their grandmothers to get. Elves could make a +1 fire sword by placing it in a stone circle for a week and praying to Mother Earth, but for some reason they seldom do this, and if you ask the druids to explain anything they just look at you judgementally.

In game mechanic terms, this could mean easy taming of any animal, choosing where the plants grow, making them grow faster and bigger and homeopathic medicine that works. Also manipulating weather and the like. Elf magic would probably be pretty entwined with elven religion, so having a number of Holy Things powering some magical effects would probably be appropriate.

Goblins: I've run out of ideas
Well, since they have demons and things as actual political leaders, maybe they could have some kind of theocratic system with higher-ranked priests being granted superpowers? I don't know.

[3]

The eternal problem with any suggestions of this type or similar is that it's not clear how such a system will work in a procedural environment.

Do we just have a series of tags in the raw files that determine this stuff? Does magic get its own tags? If not, is magic linked directly with religion and/or culture? In that case, what happens with procedural cultures? That aside, what happens with modded races? What about people that don't want anything like what you've suggested for their creations? What about procedural assignment of spheres to certain biomes and creatures? If individual magic "effects" are essentially preset to tags, are some of them associated with certain spheres? If so, are they associated to the spheres in a hard or soft manner? If they're not associated with spheres, how are magic effects assigned to forgotten beasts and the inevitable expansions upon the concept? Randomly?

I could go on. As I'm sure you're aware, part of the point of the changes made with the move to 3D was so things didn't just happen because they did. There needed to be a logical reason why there were, say, armies of undead - let's say a wizard raised them. Why did he raise them? What provoked his situation? How did the ability for him to raise the dead come to him? These things weren't explained. There wasn't any logical reason why the game would just decide to throw things at you - stuff just happened arbitarily. In a game very heavily concerned with procedural generation, we can't just have preset events or abilities or things being generated for no discernable reason and that is why, to be frank, we can't just have preset templates as to how things - especially complex things such as magic - should work.

[Apegrape]

A sacrificial/worship system of magic ala Black and White would suffice for the goblins. Perhaps goblins could ascend to become demons when they get a lot of worship or attend many sacrifices? I don't really know who would get powerm though. Maybe the priests? or just the entire population. Demon lords could perhaps siphon all the energy for themselves?

[Soadreqm]

3: Yeah, I know.

I'm really just rambling about how I want magic to work, and hoping that the game will one day be able to support this. Re-reading my own post, I discovered the notion of separating magic into natural abilities, to be controlled via the creature raws, and cultural approach to magic, controlled with the civ raws I guess. With some sphere connections and general rules on the Power Level of a given magic effect, giving random creatures magic wouldn't be impossible.

[hatcher]

When i was younger i wanted to make a game when i grew older and learned to program and stuff, well i never learned to program but in that time i wrote hundreds of pages of how the game i wanted to program would function. One of these was the magic/religion aspect as i feel they are one in the same.
   The key to this was Power Stones (like 14) of them 7 good and 7 evil, and thus religions would form from these 14. fire, ice, earth, air, death, life ect.
Once a stone was uncovered by a civilization it was an awesome thing as it would found a religion. The stone would be worshiped by characters who would power the stone up with prayer points based on there 0-100 faith level the chars were born with. As the stone became more powerful thou more worship, the faithful to the stone/religion would gain mostly passive abilities/bonuses, more strength, a resistance to the cold. The head priest would become a power magic user based on the popularity of the religion and the priests under him would also have some slight magic abilities. so it was important for missionaries to be sent out to convert other towns / outposts.  Any magic was mostly a bonus and was never over powerful.
      As for DF this game was awesome and better then anything i put to paper.
     A system could be created if lets say a dwarf Mined a Power Stone or a dwarf with high faith value intered a "divine mood" wheere they would build a statue of there predetermined god and thus found there organized religion, the char could hold religious services to convert others in the settlement, and in time convert other towns (even the hippie elves) perhaps even religious wars. All this would be about is to gain better passive skills/abilities and the priest class to gain more/ better spells.