What is the story purpose of the magic system?
Making a super complex system is pointless without the PURPOSE.
Now in HKN I use a combination core/magic circle combination. Cores are how people gather mana. Mana must be contained to be manipulated or it is too defuse to be directed. So, there must be containment of some sort. Living bodies naturally contain mana, because mana is life. Ergo, the skin is a natural container, which is why people can do magic.
Outside the body, the ideal container is a magic circle. Inside the circle are, basically, circuits. Mana condensers, mana resistors, mana splitters, mana capacitors. These are brought together with certain types of mana to properly direct the mana. It sounds like you have a bunch of shapes, but they don't do anything. They're just shapes.
Now when you have the principle of there must be a containment, the outer layer of the magic circle is the containment layer. You could have a magic square, or a magic cube, but they are not as mana efficient as a mana circle. However, if I follow this logically, what happens when I try making the mana circle a mana sphere? Well, the 90 degree circle would have it's own mana containment track, and it would try to CONTAIN the first circle. Each one expanding out to contain the other until the mana sphere simply becomes too defuse to work.
In the story, I called this Burnelli's Folly, since he was the first person to come up with trying to figure it out, and wasted his life with the impossible problem. Of course, the MC figured it out, because he was an engineer, and his solution was to have the containment tracks alternate. It wasn't QUITE as effective as it should have been, but it was certainly an improvement.
By doing this, he made the magic sphere, which was much more condensed and thus more mana efficient, but it had the limitation that it could only work in a linear fashion. It was great for shooting bolts of ice, or using detection spells at range, but not good for something like, a Ward.
Do you see how in coming up with how the system functions, I created STORY ELEMENTS based on the magic system? And logical limitations based on how the system works?
I'm not really sure what you are trying to do, other than have a cool special effect.
Uhhh... Look up TORG and the spell creation system as developed in the world book about the fantasy setting. Aysle, I think was the title. That had a good Construct a spell system. Also, Mage the Ascension. Ummm.... lets see... AH. Here.
drive.google.com
That's my complete collection of the magic system for M:tA. Now, MtA uses a sphere system. You have Time, Correspondence, Spirit, Matter, Energy, Life, Entropy, Prime, Mind. You can just use them straight up, or COMBINE them for various effects.
Life:4 lets you heal someone, but life: 4, Correspondence: 4, Prime: 2, Mind: 3 lets you create a puppet body that you can remotely control. (This gets around using life 5, by basically co-locating your body.)
We'll skip over the specifics.
What it sounds like to me you want shapes to represent the blending of magic so that it flows through the structure to create the effect. Which would say to me that you are looking at certain types of magic being are certain points in the diagram to create the effect. Which is why I mention the spell creation system of TORG, because it is basically that concept. You contruct the spell, add in the various effects, calculate values, eventually you get a final difficulty and you can add on certain limitations to make the spell work. All of this on a rather neat flow chart.
Or you can go the hero system, which is a point based system for various powers, which you put limitations or bonuses on to increase or decrease the cost.
Regardless of what example you use, I think you need to start with the core mechanics then move up to working on what basically is nothing more than special effect. It's all interesting and excellent fluff. but how do I DO anything?
How do I shoot a fireball?
MtA - Forces: 3, Prime 2
TORG - Don't even ask. You need an engineering degree to figure that shit out. It's the only game that uses LOG for calculating difficulty.
Hero - Energy blast 5d6 (30 base pts) +1/2 explosive advantage (45 active) with -1/4 Gestures, -1/4 Incantations (Total Cost: 30) then I put it in a multipool as an ultra (True Cost: 3u)
D&D 3.5 - I cast Fireball
Amber System - I have more Psyche. I invoke the pattern. I win.
Teleport:
MtA - Correspondence: 3
TORG - Still too complicated
Hero - 2 pts per Hex of movement
D&D 3.5 - I cast teleport
Amber System - I got more Psyche. I invoke the pattern and I'm there.
Smack Someone Upside the head with a Logrus Tendril:
MtA: Uhh... That sounds qliphothic to me.
TORG: Hold on. Let me get out my slider ruler.
Hero: Sounds like it'll have to go in an elemental framework. Can you list off all the powers it has?
D&D 3.5 - Err... It that like Evard's Spiky Tentacles of forced intrusion?
Amber System: I got more Psyche. I bitch slap the Logrus until it does what I want.
As you can see, if I'm going with Amber system, it's a hell of a lot simpler than TORG. Hero (and I'm not talking 6th, BTW. That sucked.) is more mechanical, but straight forward. I have Power. It has advantages and disadvantages. I stick on a special effect It works. A Fireball is the same as an ice ball is the same as a wind ball is the same as a stick of dynamine, because it all comes down to DOING DAMAGE. For the purpose of game balance, you got so many points to spend on shit, so spend it well.
D&D front loads all the work on the DM by making him keep track of everything. You can do ANYTHING in 3/0/3.5 d20 system, but the DM has to eyeball a lot of shit as far as balance is concerned.
And since you are making a "System" for your story, you NEED to keep "balance" in mind. People can tell when you wing shit.
While I happen to love the MtA system, it is a high powered system lending itself to bitch slapping gods when you get your spheres up to 5. (Correspondence: 5 - Teleport enemy into sun. OR teleport sun to enemy. OR reduce the distance between enemy and the sun to 5 meters.)
D&D is very simple, so it lends itself to NOT being part of the story. What do you do? I cast Spell. Spell does X. X happens every time. If I go up in level, it does X+1. Just More X.
Hero system is great, but VERY complex, but still not as bad as TORG. It's good for keeping track of shit, BEHIND the scenes. Not good for a LitRPG, but if you just want to keep a rough idea of power levels, it's a great means of keeping track of relative strengths.
Wha I did was come up with some basic rules.
You need a core to do magic. Mana needs to be contained. Mana needs to flow to work. There are conjuration cores based on elements for humans. Aura cores only allow modifying your own body. Demon Cores are a combination of Elemental and Aura cores, but comes with a lack of versatility. They are HARD WIRED and cannot change once the power is set. They can learn more powers, but lack the ability to change once a power is set, plus it runs off different mana than human mana.
Dwarves have no cores, BUT they do have massive mana channels. so they can activate magic items, but cannot use magic internally.
Elves have a core that does just about everything, however, it is too powerful to be contained in a body, so they have their core exist in a familiar.
Then Magic Circles are engineering/circuits.
Then part of the story is about How Normal Mana becomes demon mana. How the MC who is part dwarf learns to take advantage of his extra thicc mana channels. How he uses mana tattoos to hard wire magic "circuits" into his skin to increase his power. How he does this for his friend and how it almost kills him.
Later an enemy country will steal his work and try to make their own Mana tattooed super soldiers. They will not get it right. It will get messy.
All this is because the magic system is PART of the story. If all you are going to do is "Cast Fireball" then the shape thing is fluff. If the story is about how the MC learns how to USE the shape system and you are going to describe how he calculates the spell, and more importantly, if he is going to come up with some great insight nobody else will using the system, GREAT. Nobody could make a Magic Sphere in HKN because they didn't understand the concept of a power condenser, nor did they know mana travels at the speed of light, so having two containment tracks that alternated, flickering on and off very fast, wasn't something they could figure out.
Just knowing that bosons exist was what the MC needed to understand so he could even try to solve the problem.
But if you are going to work out all these cool shapes and rules then... well... he's just gonna cast fireball... well... Skip it. make it sound cool, write up the fluff, don't worry about the particulars and focus on the story.
I mean, my MC uses water magic. So I studied water. Did you know there is a form of Ice called Ice-7 that forms at room temperature, but at about 40,000 atmopheres? Imagine what would happen if I shot you with a sliver of Ice-7 so it decompresses inside your chest? See, that's taking your magic system and then using it to drive the plot forward. If it's part of the story, MAKE IT PART OF THE STORY. If it's just fluff, then don't worry about it.
BTW, Side note: Because the Planck distance is a thing, true circles don't exist in reality. Also, Pi can be calculated to the last digit, we'd just need to measure a circle the size of universe down to the very last planck. Did you know the Pi of a square is 4? Food for thought.
