I've always liked the idea of magic in a game being incredibly powerful but horrific for the enviroment/the caster. Thaumcraft, a minecraft mod, did something kind of interesting in this vein.
Mind telling me more about it? If you don't think it's appropriate for the thread then you should PM me. I could just look it up or watch videos but talking is more fun.
Oh, thaumcraft is nowhere near NSFW, if that's what you're saying.
You have a book, do research by combining symbols on pieces of paper copied from the book, and then that causes the book to update and you learn more about how to do magic. You have a lense which you can look at the world to gain more symbols with which to do research, or you can use a table to break down objects into those symbols if you run out of things to look at. You have a wand, which can hold energy drawn from these small tears in the world, and if you're not careful you can damage those tears. You then have an alchemy pot, which can be used to make stuff (and if you aren't careful, release taint into the world), and you can use your wand with a special crafting table to make stuff out of the energy from the small tears (nodes). Some of the things you can make attach to your wand so you can use the energy stored in it directly to do things (like shoot lightning). You can then build a complex alchemy station for mid-early game, which allows you to break things down into slurry, which is safer than the other alchemy method, but if you let that slurry loose by accident it turns into taint again which is this nasty purple stuff that spawns purple slimes and damages you directly. For mid game, you create this giant infusion structure, set up jars of slurry, and you have to make sure everything is symmetrical except for your crafting ingredients, because not being symmetrical causes instability, also not having enough slurry causes instability, and instability makes a lot more taint and flux, which at these levels causes the ground to transform, trees to turn into crusty taint, plants spread more taint, and very scary tainted monsters appear which can spread more taint.
Also, some research causes "warp", which is another word for "insanity", which can cause hallucinations, which can attack you and do real damage. It also makes you more likely to accidentally make taint.
I don't know what comes after the infusion altar, because I've never made it that far.