The first question to ask about your magic is not what it can do, it is what it takes. Power with no price attached is decoration. Readers track cost instinctively - it is how they know whether to be worried - and a system is only as interesting as the things it cannot do. We work through building limits that generate story rather than restrict it, deciding how much of your rules the reader should actually understand, and revealing them through scenes instead of paragraphs of explanation.
What it covers
- Cost, limits and consequence as design tools
- Where your system sits on the hard/soft spectrum, and why
- Revealing rules through scenes instead of exposition
- Stress-testing a system against your own plot
- The escalation problem: keeping magic interesting in book two