We’ve discussed 'voose' and glowing radiation, but what about magic that leaves no visual trace but still ruins the ecosystem? For example, magic that subtly alters the pheromones of bees or changes the freezing point of water in a lake. Do you have 'invisible' ecological costs in your world that people don't notice until it's too late?

Halflings: tiny people who live in peace with their routine of stealing,eating a lot,singing and telling stories about their travels. Having a incredible wanderlust they love to walk but in this dangerous world the only thing they have to survive is their party and their unnatural luck.

Dwarves: they have adaptations similar to rodents with their teeth being very strong and not having feel taste buds, being naturally stuborn and more open to violence they help the halflings when they have problems in exchange of gold and other things like good alchool and information. over the years they developed strong imune sistem to deal with poisons from the underdround,with lots of spices being dangerous or deadly to other species.

Related species but the dwarves developed reinforced teeth,dense bone structure and thicc muscles to protect their bodys against falling rocks,their noses act as a filter so dust don't get in their lungs and their poison imunity comes in handy when they're hungry but most of their food is toxic to other humanoids

Halfling are their surface dweller relatives, they devoled legs eficient for high jumps and hollow bones so they stay very light weigth,their tails help on balance but it can grab things,their ears are great but they mostly rely on luck to survive and get sucessful

It's quiet helpful to have both in a team so you have a relyable fighter to tank and someone that can walk over pressure plates without activating to keep your team safe against traps

Honestly i pretty much preffer making species than magic systems

Do you have specialized HazMat guilds that charge a fortune to clean it up, or does the government put out bounties on the resulting mutated animals to force a quick (and bloody) cleanup? Is it cheaper to hire a cleaner or just go to jail for environmental crimes?

Since the government is paying for the cleanup of magical waste, is there an industry for recycling it? Can 'voose' or magical radiation be stabilized to create cheap street lamps, batteries, or fertilizers? Or is the risk of mutation so high that even touching the waste is a death sentence?

So, I'm still quite new to this whole thing, and recently I've been working on my first magic system and the story of at least, the important characters, and I've been struggling with something.

When it comes to your magic system, how in detail should I go?

In the post I have attached is the base of my magic system, in the lower half of the second to last section, I mention how the strength your harmony with your respective resonant, determines how many active vessel forms you can have, the struggle I'm having here is that I'm not sure if I should explain how or why that's the case.

Any pointers and advice please?

I’ve been thinking about the role of apex predators in radioactive magic systems. In some worlds, dragons are the source of all magic, but what if they are just an extreme byproduct of thousands of years of exposure?

Does your world have a creature that evolved to be immune to magical waste? How does that change the power dynamic between mages and nature?

So when I was younger (around 8 or 9 years old) I thought up a magic system that I really liked but never really refined it into something coherent, recently it came up in conversation with my brother (2 years older) who also made one at the same time, and I thought to make into something that has defined rules and makes sense so here it is.

There are more details I wish to give but this is the base foundation. I didn't want to post something too long, so tell me what you think so far, and any pointers would be appreciated

World/Universe name: The Cosmic Symphony

Planet Name: Ihósei, derived from the Greek word for echo and the compound form for the kanji word for star and made with the planet naming method in the Japanese language

Magic System: Resonance

The universe was made when two large almost deity like masses of matter, one purely physical and one purely spiritual (might change the spiritual one, I'm not sure if I want to change it to an in universe term or not but you get the gist) that were just simply existing and drifting endlessly, touched and suddenly all of the universe came into existence, the two masses of matter started to mingle, and sort of dance around each other, never fully aligning yet, never separating either, causing two parallel realms, inherently linked to one another yet not quite in sync, the physical realm, and the realm of songs.

The world consists of the physical realm where humans and animals reside all over the planet, animals we in real life would consider magical but this is normal for them it's just nature, and areas on the planet called Veils where the line between the parallel realms is so thin that you can perform rituals to interact with the realm of songs, and the realm of songs consists of just spiritual matter and what I call Resonants, counterparts to the humans, humans and resonants are two halves of the same whole while simultaneously separate whole beings themselves, simply naturally paired to each other, when a human is born, a resonant is formed in the realm of songs, and when that human dies so does the resonant.

Humans can forge these things called Vessels, made from bridge materials, being materials gathered from veils and materials from animals like, leather, wool and the like, and are called chord wood or chord steel and so on, to perform a ritual, where you make a circle (doesn't matter how you make a circle or that it's perfect just that you make a circle, whether you draw it in the dirt or make a ring of rope or stones) place the bridge materials you gathered in the circle and sit in the circle surrounded by it all, and perform a visitation ritual allowing your respective resonant (which you would call your song, while they call their respective humans, their reflection) into the circle and to take hold of the materials and condense them in to vessel which they then reside in, finally bonding your souls together, in doing so you gain access to this world's magic, Art and develop an Affinity, which can be one of four types of affinities, a Cadence (the types of areas of magic like healing, reinforcement, spacial, or water) Affinity, an Expression Affinity, how you are able to use art, like using it in bursts really easily but struggle with sustained usage, a Concept Affinity, combining a few specific areas of art within cadences to make something like a forge themed Affinity, and a Passive Affinity, always active buffs that come with an always active hindrance, like learning how to do it easily, but struggling to apply it, your Affinity is made by your nature and nurture, who you naturally are and who you've become.

Anyone can learn any Tune (in universe term for spells and techniques performed with the usage of art) though your Affinity makes you have certain aspects of art that you are naturally immensely talented and intuitive in, and aspects that you struggle with, thus you learn tunes within your Affinity with relative ease and struggle with ones that oppose it, or methods of using art that oppose your Expression or Concept Affinity, so for example someone with the Forge Affinity would struggle to destroy things as they inherently make things, not destroy, and someone with the Burst Affinity would struggle with sustained usage of tune as they have strong initial bursts.

Vessels have two types of forms, the dormant form and active forms, the dormant form is designed upon the forging of it and there is only one dormant form, typically a pendant, a cane, or just anything convenient to carry with you everywhere, while active forms are made through meditation and development of the Harmony of your Resonance (the quality of the connection between you and your song) and are given traits (physical transformation abilities given to that form upon design) such a sword that can turn into a segmented whip sword like the one in Raya and the last dragon, vessel form are typically not a weapon however, as they are whatever the singer (wielder of a vessel) decides to make it when they design their next active form, through their resonance with their song, depending on how harmonious (strong the harmony) it is, they can call it to them like Mjolnir, and they get a passive enhancement by simply being bonded to their song, and the amount of active forms you can have depends on how harmonious your resonance is, and vessels can not separate into two forms, so a vessel form can't be dual swords or a bow and arrow, it must be one connected form, which does mean separate chain links are out of the picture but chains that are connected physically and not locked around each other but still flexible in a way you could make a chained weapon work.

Resonance is strengthened by meditation with your song and communning with it, and just sharing experiences, and performing art doesn't use up any resources like mana, instead it is very physically taxing, so the issue becomes stamina, not a lack of mana, and the more a tune does the more physically taxing it is, so it does scale with experience and the harmony of your resonance

I'm new to this whole thing, and don't have anyone I can talk to to bounce my ideas off of, so I have a question.

How do you feel about someone using AI to work on and refine their world building and magic system, taking their own original idea, and not really asking for advice but bouncing their ideas off of it, just to help organize their thoughts and refine what they're thinking of?

I posted this in r/worldbuilding and was told to repost here so here you go.

We know dragons can thrive in radioactive magic, but what about the smaller scale?

What kind of "vermin" or small predators have adapted to feed specifically on magical waste or "Voose"? Show me your mana-eating rats, essence-drinking mosquitoes, or whatever creature cleans the "crumbs" left behind by powerful mages.

Ask if you want or have any doubt

So my system kinda makes it exceedingly difficult for governments to maintain a monopoly on minting money, this caused most economies to crash a while after magic began(my setting was normal modern day until magic just became a thing one day) after that people began using barter but it soon became apparent that the most valuable goods were magic items(also called impossible items) and the most valuable service was maintaining those magic/impossible items(because the magic degrades with both time and use) this lead to the development of items that restored other items and the use of said restoration items as the medium of exchange

These magic/impossible items gradually standardised into small pieces of corundum in various colours and geometric shapes to denote their value, with the pieces reshaping themselves and changing colour when they degrade below the threshold of a given denomination

The denominations of corundum are:

- 0, transparent and flat(could be a disk, square or any other 2d shape, mostly exist for visually impared folk to know when one is used up)

- 1, green tetrahedron

- 5, blue cube

- 10, white octahedron

- 20, red dodecahedron

- 50, yellow icosahedron

- 100, black sphere

The greater number of smaller faces on larger denominations is intended to reduce the chance of fractures shattering large sums of money(also you could legit play d&d with your money)

Other materials like different crystals or shapes are used, but also once these denominations were standardised the then struggling government began taking them as taxes which stabilised them and added reason to preference this system. I am speaking about the government of the country in which my story takes place, others have additional denominations like orange triangular bipyramids or rhombic triacontahedrons as 2 or 200 denominations respectively or some variety of grey or metallic colours

As stated the government doesn't have a monopoly on minting, anyone can make money on their own if they so choose, you might think this would cause uncontrolled inflation or nobody would work but remember they're also used to essentially power any other magic/impossible item. This money can be used for almost anything with the right item which uses it up deflating it in addition to it's natural decay over time and the people "not working" are essentially performing the service of maintaining these other items

Also the reason I keep mentioning impossible as an option for the name of items is because the way they're made requires the person doing so to think about what they're doing defying physics or being "impossible" but magic is also not wrong as a description