Making a magic and cultivation system

The project I'm working on in the background is going to be a cultivation fantasy. This will be the first of those I've written (that isn't a straight up litrpg) and I'm trying to make a system for it that's unique but similar enough to other cultivation stories that anyone familiar with the genre will be able to pick up on it fairly easily.

The idea revolves around the panentheistic language that uses the true names of all things. Those true names take everything that something is, was, and ever will be, and condenses it all into a single world. True names have an inherently lyrical quality that makes the people who speak them sound like they're singing, so the language is known as the Hymn, the words are Lyrics, and people who speak it are Choristers (collectively called the Choir). Choristers carry books that contain all of the Lyrics they have memorized called Hymnals. Are you starting to see the theme here?

Because of the connection between a Lyric and the thing it represents (in an abstract way, the Lyric is the thing it represents) saying it out loud gives you power over it. But since the mere existence of the Hymn extends beyond the realm of mortal comprehension, you can't just learn Lyrics the way you would words in other languages. Some people describe Lyrics as the instinctive feeling you get when you think about something, translated into audible sound. To learn a Lyric, you have to meditate on a word until you come to a deeper understanding of it, as well as develop some sort of connection to it. Like, if you wanted to learn the Lyric for water, you would have to meditate until you understood not just what water is, but what it means to be water, and then how you, yourself, also fit that description. "Water is both powerless and overpowering. It can only move at gravity's whims, and it must conform to the shape of whatever is containing it. It has no will of its own, and yet when there is enough of it, it can flatten mountains and demolish entire cities. I am also shaped by my surroundings and able to accomplish only what the environment I exist in allows me to. But when I am able to build up the proper momentum, the destruction I can wreak is devastating. I am water, and water is Hashalurek."

But even then, you've only learned part of a Lyric. Hashalurek might give you the power to propel water forward in a wave or rapid current, but not to freeze, boil, or purify it. Those words are similar, but also different. Making water freeze might be Hashurak, and boiling it is Hashitee'a. And then, some Lyrics can be combined together to further influence what you can do to it. The word for "sharp" is Klen, so HashalureKlen essentially means "propel needles of water forward."

There are also limits to what you can use the Hymn to do. Hashalurek roughly means water quickly flowing forward, but you can't just say "Hashalurek" and spawn a wave out of nothing. There actually needs to be water there for you to use. Some Lyrics are harder to learn than others. Sometimes that's because they're more complicated than other words, other times the words themselves almost feel like they're actively resisting being found. Maybe there's a Lyric for "create" out there that would let you spawn things out of nothing, but nobody has been able to find it.

What do you guys think?

If Hashalurek's ability is mechanical water manipulation, then "purification" should logically be a pro-level move. Tbh, purifying water is just about removing the filth (or flipped: moving the water and ditching the dirt).

---

OmegaC said:

If Hashalurek's ability is mechanical water manipulation, then "purification" should logically be a pro-level move. Tbh, purifying water is just about removing the filth (or flipped: moving the water and ditching the dirt).

Click to expand...

I'm trying to keep it from getting too complicated. If you go into the minute details, then everything is going to be a pro-level move. Hashalurek is actually gravity manipulation because water always flows downwards, so you must be creating a gravitational anchor to pull it in that direction. Hashurak and Hashitee'a are heat manipulation, either lowering it or increasing it to freeze or boil the water.

Yeah, I want to avoid that.

I like it. You have a lot of creative freedom using water to set-up exactly how you want the power to work. Scale to your liking and have fun with it.

I was researching this for my character that was turned into a mop. Water flowing forcefully enough can be devastating in the way it precisely cuts through objects. Just vary the force allowed by the ability for the desired affect.

My personal expertise is strictly within the Game Design and LitRPG aspects, so if you're deliberately working to not include those elements, the best I'd have is general advice to consider how the system plays into your narrative, and what elements may need more specific detail once you've shaped the system fully.
@MakBow has a fair bit more experience and understanding of the Cultivation genre, and has created more than a few distinct systems within it that were shared here.
@FRWriter also seemed far more familiar with the genre and expectations for writing within it as well, so he may have additional insights worth taking note of.

Beyond that, I'm getting serious Ursuka K. LeGuin vibes there. (IE: Earthsea), and a splash of Eragon's magic system as well (which was likely inspired by Earthsea).
"The word IS the thing. To know the word, is to control the thing." Ref. Brom; Eragon, as he is teaching the title-character the fundamentals of the story's True-Name Magic.

So by that measure, I can say for sure that you have certainly gotten my interest with that alone, because I am exceptionally curious to see how you are going to implement one of my favorite magic-system basis.

Earthsea, Eragon, Skyrim (the Thune) and even some real-world history holds that names hold power and I really like this application using a musical base. I might suggest you consider leaning into that a little more as, like you said, you can combine the Lyrics into something more. String a bunch of ones that you know together and you can simulate Lyrics that you don't yet know.

But that actually leads me to another point with your system that you must make use of. As your MC learns more Lyrics, they should notice the different patterns that will become ever-present to help them master a concept. Just from the example of Hashuralek being roughly translatable as "forcefully/quickly propel water forward" and then hashurak is "freeze water into ice", they should be able to deduce that the root hash-/hasha- is the Lyric meaning water. Just like a linguist mastering a new language, your characters should be able to use this to "-lurek" (quickly propel/advance) their abilities further. That gives things like [Lyric for fire]-lurek the ability to be learned and understood as "rapidly propel fire forward" or the more widely used term of "fire blast" (the staple spell of "fireball" would need to be "[ball+fire]-lurek"). Using actual linguistic practices to support your system will make it much stronger and more robust as, like you've said, simply knowing a term doesn't guarantee understanding.

miyoga said:

Just like a linguist mastering a new language, your characters should be able to use this to "-lurek" (quickly propel/advance) their abilities further. That gives things like [Lyric for fire]-lurek the ability to be learned and understood as "rapidly propel fire forward"

Click to expand...

It doesn't quite work like that. Every true name is unique, so while similar words can have similar names, they don't carry over to other names.

Example: Hashalurek isn't a combination of the words "water" and "propel forward," it is the word for water that is moving forward quickly. So yes, the other words all begin with hasha because that is, essentially, the "base" sound for "water" in this language, but you can't apply lurek to the word for fire because the word for "fire being propelled forward" is something entirely different.

Am I making sense here? I feel like I might just be speaking gibberish.

Edit: actually, I might change that. The idea of there being different words that effect the same thing in different ways is supposed to come from the fact that the true names are so "big" that you can cut out bits and pieces of it and still have a complete word. True names don't fit into our perception of reality, so in essence a true name is a really, really long word that has been folded in on itself over and over again until its been crammed into a much smaller space. So it doesn't really make sense if every word relating to "water" all starts with hasha.

So let's say the true name for water is hashalurektee'arak (it's not, the real thing is practically infinite in length). By breaking the word up, you can get hashalurek for swiftly moving water, tee'a for boiling water, and rak for frozen water, because they're all pieces of a word that, when put together, encapsulates water in its entirety.

CountVanBadger said:

It doesn't quite work like that. Every true name is unique, so while similar words can have similar names, they don't carry over to other names.

Example: Hashalurek isn't a combination of the words "water" and "propel forward," it is the word for water that is moving forward quickly. So yes, the other words all begin with hasha because that is, essentially, the "base" sound for "water" in this language, but you can't apply lurek to the word for fire because the word for "fire being propelled forward" is something entirely different.

Am I making sense here? I feel like I might just be speaking gibberish.

Click to expand...

You're making sense, don't worry. Seriously take a look into linguistics though, especially for learning pictographic languages. Just to give you an example of this let's say you learn 2 words in Chinese: the word for "woman" (女) and the word for "fish"(鱼). You combine them with other words to get what's essentially a word family that is connected through the same base (i.e. 妈，姐，妹，姨，姑，奶，姥 all have something to do with a female family member) but can be applied in different ways to change the meaning (so, 好 has the word for woman, but means "good" and 鳄鱼 has fish in it and means "alligator/crocodile" while 鳏夫 also has "fish" in it, but means "widower" and 鲸鱼 means "whale") (basically, anything that lives in water will be some sort of "fish").

In short, I think you've got a strong base, but because it's a cultivation novel - which are typically set in the far East - and the magic system is language based, it may not be a terrible idea to take inspiration from how people learn the languages associated with the cultures.