Cairn-ish Content: A justification for spellbook magic, take 2
I'm pleased with my previous take on Spellbook magic. ...yet, at the same time, something inside me says it's too detailed. Or perhaps, too "hard"; Brandon Sanderson is famous for (if not inventing the idea) popularizing the idea of "hard" vs "soft" magic systems. The explanations I proposed before definitely constitute a hard magic system. There's nothing strictly wrong with that, of course, it's just that everything else about Cairn is so pro-abstraction. Other things in Cairn feel "soft". Mind you, this isn't a criticism; Cairn is quite practical--the focus is on good gameplay. But my motivation was to come up with a sort of coherent understanding of magic. I think I definitely did that (or at least about 80% of it), I just, y'know, wanted to do it again . In part to hew closer to the "spirit" of Cairn, but also, in part, to demonstrate that these things are malleable, and one person's explanation nee...