forum Magic and Abilities and How to Pick Them

Started August 12, 2018 by WiseWillow

tune

How do you go about picking your magic and powers/abilities for your characters. Without making it cliche/ like most powers given to characters.

In my story, Alindorans (people from the country of Alindor lol) all have low level psychic powers. Usually telekinesis, some have weak telepathy powers. Might add one with psychic healing or premonitions. But basically I have a baseline of magic and add abilities to relevant characters. If a character isn't from Alindor (my kiddos Sam and Nikki are from Earth), they don't have powers, or if they're from another country they prob also have diff powers (I haven't had to do much world building beyond Alindor. Anything I have is just a vague idea of "ooh that's cool")

I feel that my magic may be stereotypical given their names (Yama being an Earthbender and Aqua being a Waterbender, etc.), but I try to keep things creative by doing something not seen by others. Some ideas include Bloodbending, freezing and boiling water at will, creating lighting by using a cloud of dust or ash, messing with the calcium in someone's bones, pulling salt and minerals out of ocean water, the ideas can be endless if you can come up with an idea. Hell, even people who do things like "shoot fire out of hands" can be awesome if they do something different with their power (condense a blast into a torch-like plume, carbonize cells so that they can't regenerate, pull a Col. Mustang and cauterize their own wounds, how badass is that?!). It could be a fighting style, it could be relatively mundane, it just needs a bit of creative thought to make magic more than cliche.

I think the most important part is coming up with a magic system that has rules that can’t be broken, as long as every character has powers that fit within the rules of the world, they won’t come off as out of place or overpowered, but can also still have powers that are pretty unique.

Like in harry potter when to the wand chooses the wizard, have the magic choose the person it thinks is most capable of using it, whether for good or bad. And the magic can be taken away from someone if it thinks it chose wrong. idk it was just a random thought that I'm using too :)