Magic System Generator

One limitation is a prompt. A setting needs the whole arrangement: what magic does, what that costs, where the cost is drawn from, and what stops it solving every problem the story was going to be about. Whether the pieces sound good is a matter of taste; whether they fit together is not, and that is a property of the finished rules. So the rules here are read back afterwards — every cost traced to a resource, every resource to a way of getting it back, every limit to something a table already tracks — and what was checked is printed under the system.

Things magic can do

Spread across small, serious and remembered workings.

Limits

Each one turns on something the table already tracks.

Repeat word (optional)

Leave it empty and one is chosen for you. Whatever is used appears in the address bar, so the link rebuilds this exact result.

Your magic system will appear here.

What this generator does

Builds four things at once and ties them to each other. Resources, each with a stated way of coming back — or a stated refusal to come back, which is a different thing and is said plainly. Effects, spread across small, serious and remembered workings, each priced out of a resource. Limits, each turning on something the table already tracks. And a short list of what magic cannot do, with the limit that makes it so named beside it.

How to use this tool

Choose how many things magic can do, and how many limits bind them.
Read the costs before the effects: everything the system does is priced out of them.
Check any limit against the line under it, which says how a table settles it.
Copy the link to keep this system, or the text to paste into your notes.

Understanding the controls

Things magic can do: Three to eight. Always at least one of each size, so a system is never five small workings and nothing worth paying for.
Limits: Two to five. They are dealt across the effects so that no effect is left unbound and no limit is left binding nothing.
Repeat word: The word this system was built from. Anyone opening the same link gets the same rules.

Common use cases

A magic system for a novel that survives a reader asking why nobody just does the obvious thing
Homebrew rules for a campaign, with prices a table can actually track
Something to argue with: take the shape and change the flavour
Teaching what makes an invented system consistent rather than merely evocative
Handing everyone at a table the same rules from one link

How this generator works

The check is a separate reading of the finished rules. A cost drawn on nothing is the commonest failure in an invented magic system — it reads as a price and works as decoration — so every cost is traced to a defined resource, and every resource is confirmed to be spent by something and to have a way back. A limit that cannot be settled is the second failure: “the magic is temperamental” is not something anybody can adjudicate, so every limit here names the tracked thing it turns on. And on any resource that two workings share, the greater working is confirmed to cost strictly more. Costs are whole numbers, so that last comparison is exact.

Randomness and fairness

The system is built from a repeat word taken from your browser’s secure generator unless you type one of your own, so the same link rebuilds the same rules. A repeat word is there to make a system reproducible; it is not a security measure, and nothing here is suitable for anything that has to stay secret.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

Invented fiction. No real tradition, belief or practice is being described, and nothing here is a claim about anything anybody actually does.
The pieces are drawn from tables, so two systems built here share a vocabulary even when they do not share a shape. The consistency is generated; the flavour is worth rewriting.
The prices are in units this system made up. They are consistent with each other but they are not balanced against any published game, and dropping them into one would need work.
Nothing here models who learns magic, how they learn it, or what it costs a society to have people who can do this — all of which usually matter more to a story than the price list.
A system that holds together is not the same as a system that is interesting. This settles the first and leaves the second alone.

Privacy and your data

The rules and the check on them are worked out in your browser, and nothing about the system is sent anywhere or kept. The repeat word is a short label this page minted or you typed, and it is the only part that appears in the address.