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[Catastrophic lolcats]

Though you can't really create spells, Arx Fatalis has a very unique casting system. You have to use the mouse cursor to draw spell runes on the screen and then you could either cast the spell immediately or save it to cast when you need it. I don't really remember it very well, to be honest. The game itself is fairly old and you might have trouble running it on a newer system.

Bought it off GOG on a whim last night. I'm in a love-hate relationship with it so far. The environment are great and immersive, the character models are ugly as sin however. The magic symbol drawing system is rather fickle and will almost never register my signs no matter how slow and steady I draw. Trying to draw a symbol in the middle of combat is impossible.
I couldn't find where my memorised spells were kept. Closest I could find was a page in my journal that showed the runes, what to do with those runes and in what order to cast a spell is still lost to me.

The UI is rather confusing and it's very mouse driven. Dragging stuff to your inventory on a widescreen monitor isn't all that fun and it took me a while to realise that holding shift will auto move stuff into your inventory, the game kept calling shift "stealth mode" for some reason instead of saying that shift is used for more things than just stealth. Opening/closing UI elements are again confusing and conflicting, sometimes pressing ESC will exit the element and sometimes you have to reclick on the element's icon.
There's no hotkey for inventory for example, at least not one I could find.

The source code was released a while ago and with it came a patch so it worked fine on modern systems. Windows 7 and 1080x1920 works fine for me. I ended up rage quitting the game after I got a fair way in when some kind of uber spider, that looked no different from the others, wrecked my shit. Turns out there's no autosave. Saved three hours ago? Tough.
Never did find a bow, it made my ranged character build rather embarrassing when I had to flail hopelessly at enemies and flee before they got a shot in. Found plenty of arrows though.

Apart from all that I was having fun with it. Melee combat feels alright though I would have praised it much more if there was a way of blocking. Characters and storyline are fairly decent so far, voice acting can be hit and miss.

[Vattic]

Magicka's system is interesting. There's 8 schools of magic, and 5 slots. You press combos of QWERASDF to put magic schools into the spell slots, then press a cast combo for self, area, weapon enchant.

arcane arcane earth cold cold would make you cast a boulder projectile that chilled enemies near impact, while casting it with the radius trigger would make short-range arcane frostquake. There's a thread for it here that's been active recently.

Can you accidentally fry yourself? Sounds like chaotic fun either way.

In TES you just take existing spell effects and make them more powerful or give them area effect and such. In the ones before 5 you could have multiple effects per spell by default, so you could have a ice-fireball combo if you wanted.

It was more the potion making that made me include the series on the list. I do remember hearing complaints that spell crafting was out, though, I didn't know exactly what you could do.

one would say fable even with the limited spells you had combining them were cool

I found the magic enjoyable in the first one although I don't remember it so well (arcs of lightning?). Didn't play the others. How does the combination work?

Though you can't really create spells, Arx Fatalis has a very unique casting system. You have to use the mouse cursor to draw spell runes on the screen and then you could either cast the spell immediately or save it to cast when you need it. I don't really remember it very well, to be honest. The game itself is fairly old and you might have trouble running it on a newer system.

I got this cheap on GoG a while back but haven't got around to playing it. Sounds pretty interesting.

[Ivefan]

Can you accidentally fry yourself? Sounds like chaotic fun either way.

Say that you prep that 5x fire that by pressing lmb you make a fire spray. Now, instead of lmb you press the scoll wheel which targets yourself.
Fun

This is the only game that i know of that with four players playing cooperatively makes it harder than a single player... And its all due to friendly fire.

[webadict]

Can you accidentally fry yourself? Sounds like chaotic fun either way.

Say that you prep that 5x fire that by pressing lmb you make a fire spray. Now, instead of lmb you press the scoll wheel which targets yourself.
Fun

This is the only game that i know of that with four players playing cooperatively makes it harder than a single player... And its all due to friendly fire.

Fact is you're more likely to be killed by an ally than any monster.

[mattie2009]

Can you accidentally fry yourself? Sounds like chaotic fun either way.

Say that you prep that 5x fire that by pressing lmb you make a fire spray. Now, instead of lmb you press the scoll wheel which targets yourself.
Fun

This is the only game that i know of that with four players playing cooperatively makes it harder than a single player... And its all due to friendly fire.

Fact is you're more likely to be killed by an ally than any monster.

The only known defense against being smashed in the face by a meteor cast by your ally is killing yourself before you get reduced to a cloud of blood and a fancy hat.

[TempAcc]

Magicka is your best bet for non ancient games, otherwise arx fatalis is a decent pick if you can overlook its flaws. I'm pretty sure legends of mana allowed you to create your own spells in a way after you did a certain quest, but they were all combat centered and customization wasn't that high, but it was something. Plus it allowed you to forge your own weapons from different materials and effects and name them.

[webadict]

Can you accidentally fry yourself? Sounds like chaotic fun either way.

Say that you prep that 5x fire that by pressing lmb you make a fire spray. Now, instead of lmb you press the scoll wheel which targets yourself.
Fun

This is the only game that i know of that with four players playing cooperatively makes it harder than a single player... And its all due to friendly fire.

Fact is you're more likely to be killed by an ally than any monster.

The only known defense against being smashed in the face by a meteor cast by your ally is killing yourself before you get reduced to a cloud of blood and a fancy hat.

That's what Quit To Desktop is for!

[sambojin]

 While it's not magic as such (it's guns) DoomRL has a pretty good weapon modding system in place. You can mod any weapon to be more accurate, stronger, bigger ammo, etc. Plus there's certain combo's of mods that with change the weapon entirely (assemblies), and some of them have pretty cool effects that are fairly different from the original weapon. Some are just bigger or better, but some really are different.

If you're good with Lua code you could probably do a mod to make it magicky rather than shooty. I've always wanted to actually........

[moogmg]

Though you can't really create spells, Arx Fatalis has a very unique casting system. You have to use the mouse cursor to draw spell runes on the screen and then you could either cast the spell immediately or save it to cast when you need it. I don't really remember it very well, to be honest. The game itself is fairly old and you might have trouble running it on a newer system.

Bought it off GOG on a whim last night. I'm in a love-hate relationship with it so far. The environment are great and immersive, the character models are ugly as sin however. The magic symbol drawing system is rather fickle and will almost never register my signs no matter how slow and steady I draw. Trying to draw a symbol in the middle of combat is impossible.
I couldn't find where my memorised spells were kept. Closest I could find was a page in my journal that showed the runes, what to do with those runes and in what order to cast a spell is still lost to me.

The UI is rather confusing and it's very mouse driven. Dragging stuff to your inventory on a widescreen monitor isn't all that fun and it took me a while to realise that holding shift will auto move stuff into your inventory, the game kept calling shift "stealth mode" for some reason instead of saying that shift is used for more things than just stealth. Opening/closing UI elements are again confusing and conflicting, sometimes pressing ESC will exit the element and sometimes you have to reclick on the element's icon.
There's no hotkey for inventory for example, at least not one I could find.

The source code was released a while ago and with it came a patch so it worked fine on modern systems. Windows 7 and 1080x1920 works fine for me. I ended up rage quitting the game after I got a fair way in when some kind of uber spider, that looked no different from the others, wrecked my shit. Turns out there's no autosave. Saved three hours ago? Tough.
Never did find a bow, it made my ranged character build rather embarrassing when I had to flail hopelessly at enemies and flee before they got a shot in. Found plenty of arrows though.

Apart from all that I was having fun with it. Melee combat feels alright though I would have praised it much more if there was a way of blocking. Characters and storyline are fairly decent so far, voice acting can be hit and miss.

when I liked the magic system in Arx Fatalis just how fickle the system   can be for  sign recognition nearly ruins the game

[Shadowlord]

The first Black and White had a similar issue, which soured me on the concept of drawing symbols to perform gestures/spells/whatever in general. (Not to mention that you need to memorize what to draw, then convince the system that you had actually drawn it)

I liked the spell memorization system in The Summoning (by SSI) better, which had hand movements chained together to form spells. You had to enter these correctly to memorize a spell. You could of course record them (in fact you could enter them by pressing letter keys on the keyboard, a, b, c, d, etc, and write down the necessary keys, or you could just remember the proper hand positions for a spell). Of course it didn't have emergent spell creation - they were all fixed spells created by the designers (though the potion that the liquefy spell created depended on whether you gave it a gemstone, and what that was).

[sambojin]

One of the stranger ones (and very specific to just one skill of one character type) is the Monk from Slash'em's "Chained Blitz" skill. It essentially lumped all your skills into one attack, but let you perform them in a variety of different combos. The only thing that was notable about it was that it required you to enter the different attacks off the arrow keys on your keyboard, so it felt like you were doing a combo in a beat 'em up game (which you essentially were). Not a spell system as such, or even an actual spell,  but I'd love it if there was a bit more of this sort of stuff in roguelikes for melee characters to make them feel a little deeper (and more old-school). Hyper-combo!

[Vattic]

It sounds like I really should give Magicka a go.

While it's not magic as such (it's guns) DoomRL has a pretty good weapon modding system in place. You can mod any weapon to be more accurate, stronger, bigger ammo, etc. Plus there's certain combo's of mods that with change the weapon entirely (assemblies), and some of them have pretty cool effects that are fairly different from the original weapon. Some are just bigger or better, but some really are different.

If you're good with Lua code you could probably do a mod to make it magicky rather than shooty. I've always wanted to actually........

Did a low difficulty play through of DoomRL a few versions back. Got the second ending too. I hear it's changed a lot since and even have tile graphics now. I really enjoyed the gun play in it. Didn't know it was modifiable.

I liked the spell memorization system in The Summoning (by SSI) better, which had hand movements chained together to form spells. You had to enter these correctly to memorize a spell. You could of course record them (in fact you could enter them by pressing letter keys on the keyboard, a, b, c, d, etc, and write down the necessary keys, or you could just remember the proper hand positions for a spell). Of course it didn't have emergent spell creation - they were all fixed spells created by the designers (though the potion that the liquefy spell created depended on whether you gave it a gemstone, and what that was).

I'll add it to the OP anyway. The spells in Dominus are similar but I think they are random each game. Integrating captured foes in the torture chamber to get new recipes was a laugh.

One of the stranger ones (and very specific to just one skill of one character type) is the Monk from Slash'em's "Chained Blitz" skill. It essentially lumped all your skills into one attack, but let you perform them in a variety of different combos. The only thing that was notable about it was that it required you to enter the different attacks off the arrow keys on your keyboard, so it felt like you were doing a combo in a beat 'em up game (which you essentially were). Not a spell system as such, or even an actual spell,  but I'd love it if there was a bit more of this sort of stuff in roguelikes for melee characters to make them feel a little deeper (and more old-school). Hyper-combo!

That does sound interesting. There is certainly room for innovation in RL games. Something besides bump to attack would be nice.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

If anyone has their heart set on the "draw a symbol to cast" system I think The Void manages to pull off a lot less fickle system. The combat in that game remains rather odd however, there's a lack of "damage spells" so you have to so I usually set up a whole bunch of magic traps, put up a magic shield and try to lead the enemies into it.

[moogmg]

If anyone has their heart set on the "draw a symbol to cast" system I think The Void manages to pull off a lot less fickle system. The combat in that game remains rather odd however, there's a lack of "damage spells" so you have to so I usually set up a whole bunch of magic traps, put up a magic shield and try to lead the enemies into it.

God,the void, a very interesting game but hard to recommend.

[superstepa]

The Mage Guild roguelike is purely based on the idea of DIY magical items (you can mix any two objects and they create something new. For example adding a wolf hair to a polymorph potion transforms you into a wolf)
While you don't create spells themselves, you can create objects which cast spells