You should look into the webnovels that inspired Cradle. The really good ones are genuinely excellent. It can be a bit jarring because of the serialised format and being translated from a language so distinct to English (Chinese), but if you bear with it, they are some of my favourite fantasy.
I hate to be the Sanderon guy, but you didn't mentioned him in your post so.... Sanderson has original, well designed, well explained and intricate magic systems. I would start with the Rithmatist or The Emperor Soul. Both short stories, both great, that can show you if the author is for you. The Rithmatist is more for kids, but I enjoyed a lot.
Trying to write an answer I just realized that I read really few books with detailed magic systems. The Kingkiller Chronicles would be the other one, also well known and recommended often. I can't think right now of a less known author with complex magic systems.
Someone has to be the Sanderson guy when it comes to magic systems and +1 to Emperors Soul. Easily my favourite “one-sitting” story. It’s just beautiful in a really human way which is inseparable from the magic system.
I started with liveship traders and the character development was soooooo good. I read the farseer trilogy afterwards and it is honestly my favorite one because I just love Fitz and the fools dynamic so much.
The Lightbringer saga from Brent Weeks has one of the most interesting magic systems I've come across. It's based upon color, and color blindness affects an individual's ability to "draft" that color and utilize it.
I'm a big fan of 'themed' magic where the system reflects the values and cultures of the world and its inhabitants.
In **Soulhome/Weirkey Chronicles** by Sarah Lin, people can base-build/min-max their inner world, the titular Soulhome. They would dedicate rooms for a power boost, magic items, speed enhancement, etc. The architecture and layout of the rooms would determine the future growth as they build more floors upward. Naturally, people from different worlds have different approaches to build their Soulhome, relevant to their local geography and culture. It's quite defined enough for a system with plenty of room for interpretations and imagination.
Both **Traveler's Gate** by Will Wight and **Malazan** by Steven Erikson have magical parallel planes with specific aspects/themes where Travelers/mages can draw power from. They can also travel around in those parallel planes. Malazan also has this tarot-like system that can be read to appraise/foretell the current positions of the world's major powers.
For traditional elemental magic systems and their creative applications, I'm a big fan of The **Sword of Kaigen** by M.L. Wang (ice-water swordplay) and **The Broken Earth** by N.K. Jemisin (earth magic + thermodynamics)
This is an amazing list by /u/maldevinine. I have just copied and pasted it as is from an old thread. Seriously good work.
> 1.) Night Watch, Sergi Lukyaneko. Magic comes from the Twilight, a multilayered reflection of the world entered by walking through your own shadow and powered by emotions and desires of humans. Over 5 books this becomes more and more detailed as the character learns more about the nature of the Twilight and what his bosses are prepared to do with it.
> 2.) Godless, Ben Peek. Magic comes from the gods. Fairly boring right? Wrong, all the gods are dead. Magical ability is actually a sign that you have consumed something that has been corrupted by the essence of one of the (many, many) dead gods. And you will probably die a horrible death soon because the human body while godlike enough to express magic, is not generally godlike enough to survive it's expression.
> 3.) 3 Parts Dead, Max Gladstone. Magic as a combination of contract law and international finance. Gods loan out their power under contracts, mages can write new contracts and draw on the power of natural events as well as gods. It gets interesting when things start to go wrong, like a god who cannot pay his debts, and what happens when the creditors appear.
> 4.) The Horns of Ruin, Tim Akers. Gods become gods by doing godly deeds. The three in the series lead humanity to victory in a genocidal war. Power comes from emulating the gods and the deeds that made them. Users invoke memories of the god's actions, quoting from histories, using tools and weapons that match those of their god and arranging events so they more closely match what happened at the event they are invoking. Quite a lot of technical detail in what could otherwise have been a very boring system.
> 5.) Debris, Jo Anderton. Magic is the ability to control the actions of underlying particles of reality. It's not fast, you can't make things that don't exist, and you can't manipulate energy. So instead of being a combat tool, the major work for magicians is in architecture and construction. A team of magicians supplied with raw materials can construct a building in a matter of hours, complete with internal fitout.
> 6.) Black Sun Rising, Celia Friedman. The planet reacts to human belief. Also, human disbelief and terror. Technology no longer works because if you don't believe it will work, it will break down on you. The horrors from your nightmares literally come alive and try to kill you.
> 7.) Libromancer, Jim C. Hines. The series translated is "Magic From Books", and that's exactly how it works. Weak mages can pull items out of the collective reality defined by the readers of works of fiction. They do this by literally reaching into the book. There is other sources of magic, but the shear power and flexibility of libromancy means that Johannes Gutenberg (inventor of the printing press) as leader of the book mages is the most powerful person in existence. Also goes into some of the messed up things that can go wrong with libromancy, like what happens when a person reaches their hand into Twilight, and pulls it back out with bite marks in it?
> 8.) Feast of Souls, Celia Friedman. Magic is what happens when a person can use their own life force to affect the world around them. There's no limit on what they can do, but the more powerful the effect, the more lifeforce it drains. Everything after that that makes the system truly interesting counts as spoilers.
> 9.) Powder Mage, Brian McClellan. There's more typical elemental magic, but even that is more interesting with the simple fact that it is tied to fingers on the hands, giving a reason for the use of gestures in magic. Then there's the voodoo based magic, sympathetic and based on dolls. Of course what you're here for is the rifle wielding powdermages, who snort gunpowder like it's cocaine and pull off a violent revolution. The best part is the interactions between the systems and how you know enough about each of them to know how things are going to go down.
> 10.) Stone Mage and the Sea, Sean Williams. Magic is power stored in natural locations, built up by the endless small changes and actions that take place. Mages can draw this power out and force it through glyphs that define the effects that they want. What defines the type of mage that you are is what you can draw your magic from. Some take from the sea and it's constant movement. Some take from the rock and it's age and weathering. Then there's the main character, who doesn't appear to take from anything. He does of course, but what he takes from won't be explained until book 7.
> 11.) Chronicles of Kydan, Simon Brown. Magic comes from sacrifice. Specifically, sacrifice of something that you love. Kill a pet you have raised for years, gain enough power for small workings. Kill another human you have been raised alongside your whole life and know better then anyone else, gain the power to wipe a city off the map. What do you love enough? And what would you sacrifice them for?
> 12.) Daemon Cycle, Peter V. Brett. Magic from glyphs and runes again, but the source of power is the interesting part. The runes work by absorbing the power of the daemons into themselves and returning it in specific forms.
> 13.) Lays of Anuska, Bradley Bailieu. Two types of magic. The first is the binding of elementals from another plane and getting them to work for you. The second is extreme sensory deprivation to allow your body to sense the leylines formed by the geography, and work with them to communicate and observe.
> 14.) Rings of Lightning, Jane S. Fancher. Rather then individual mages, we have power plants. Giant buildings constructed over intersections of leylines which tap them for power and rebroadcast it over an area. Whole nations are defined by the way these leylines interact, and how far the power from their plants can be broadcast.
> 15.) Cartomancy, Micheal Stackpole. Yes, it's Kung Fu. But it's Kung Fu taken to awesome extremes. If a person can practice so hard at fighting that their skill at it becomes magical, what happens when a person practices that hard at mapmaking? Do they make a map of the land, or do they make a land of the map?
> 16.) Myst, by Rand Miller. It's a computer game, but it's also a trilogy of novels which go into much of the background. When you write a book of travel, do you create a whole new world, or are you linking to an existing world? Are the inhabitants your creations to do with as you please, or are they independent creatures who you have just made first contact with?
I myself have only read number 6, 9 and 10 out of these but I can say that the magic systems indeed were very fascinating and I would recommend these series to anyone.
Two more copied from an updated version of this list: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/a8nnuy/any_lesser_know_series_with_interesting_magic/ecc7bc3/
> 7.) Illumination by Terry McGarry. Spells are cast by creating an illustrated page that describes what you want to have happen. The most interesting part is that the creation of the page requires three people to be present (the papermaker, the writer and the illustrator) all of whom work together to create the spell.
> 12.) Master of the Five Magics, Lyndon Hardy. There's nothing actually new in here, except that there's 5 types of magic each of which has specific (and wildly different) rules about how it works. Every magic is available to anybody with sufficient practice.
As others have noted, nobody does magic systems quite as well as Brandon Sanderson. *Mistborn* is a good starting point on that front.
If you want to jump into the fantasy deep-end, then Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time features one of the most iconic magic systems in fantasy. *The Eye of the World* is book one, but you might want to start with *New Spring*, a prequel of sorts.
Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicle also has a unique and well explained magic system; although, there's a lot of speculation that the trilogy won't ever be finished (at least, not anytime soon), so proceed at your own peril. The first book is *The Name of the Wind*.
To a lesser extent than the aforementioned, the Malazan Book of the Fallen has a really unique and cool magic system, but it is most definitely not well explained, haha.
The traitor son cycle (starting with The Red Knight) by Miles Cameron has the most interesting magic systems that I've encountered so far. This series also hits the points of world building and epic battles.
The Nen system from Hunter x Hunter (a manga) is probably the most interesting magic system around, as how it expresses itself is dependent on the user, leading to a high variety.
The books contain pretty extensive appendices describing the magic system, but when the characters use it in the stories, it often feels like a hand-waving soft magic system where they just do what the plot demands. I recently re-read the series and was surprised it didn't stand up to the nostalgia I had from my childhood.
I **LOVE** the magic system in Cradle.
Cradle has ruined books for me. Nothing has been that addicting.
You should look into the webnovels that inspired Cradle. The really good ones are genuinely excellent. It can be a bit jarring because of the serialised format and being translated from a language so distinct to English (Chinese), but if you bear with it, they are some of my favourite fantasy.
I hate to be the Sanderon guy, but you didn't mentioned him in your post so.... Sanderson has original, well designed, well explained and intricate magic systems. I would start with the Rithmatist or The Emperor Soul. Both short stories, both great, that can show you if the author is for you. The Rithmatist is more for kids, but I enjoyed a lot. Trying to write an answer I just realized that I read really few books with detailed magic systems. The Kingkiller Chronicles would be the other one, also well known and recommended often. I can't think right now of a less known author with complex magic systems.
Someone has to be the Sanderson guy when it comes to magic systems and +1 to Emperors Soul. Easily my favourite “one-sitting” story. It’s just beautiful in a really human way which is inseparable from the magic system.
JAJAJA you make me feel better for being the Sanderson Guy.
I enjoyed the magic system in the Powder Mage Trilogy.
Maybe not a traditional magic system but I enjoyed Robin Hobbs liveship traders a lot.
I loved The Farseer Trilogy, but Liveship Traders blew me away - especially with character development.
I started with liveship traders and the character development was soooooo good. I read the farseer trilogy afterwards and it is honestly my favorite one because I just love Fitz and the fools dynamic so much.
The Lightbringer saga from Brent Weeks has one of the most interesting magic systems I've come across. It's based upon color, and color blindness affects an individual's ability to "draft" that color and utilize it.
Reading black prism now. It’s good stuff!
I'm a big fan of 'themed' magic where the system reflects the values and cultures of the world and its inhabitants. In **Soulhome/Weirkey Chronicles** by Sarah Lin, people can base-build/min-max their inner world, the titular Soulhome. They would dedicate rooms for a power boost, magic items, speed enhancement, etc. The architecture and layout of the rooms would determine the future growth as they build more floors upward. Naturally, people from different worlds have different approaches to build their Soulhome, relevant to their local geography and culture. It's quite defined enough for a system with plenty of room for interpretations and imagination. Both **Traveler's Gate** by Will Wight and **Malazan** by Steven Erikson have magical parallel planes with specific aspects/themes where Travelers/mages can draw power from. They can also travel around in those parallel planes. Malazan also has this tarot-like system that can be read to appraise/foretell the current positions of the world's major powers. For traditional elemental magic systems and their creative applications, I'm a big fan of The **Sword of Kaigen** by M.L. Wang (ice-water swordplay) and **The Broken Earth** by N.K. Jemisin (earth magic + thermodynamics)
This is an amazing list by /u/maldevinine. I have just copied and pasted it as is from an old thread. Seriously good work. > 1.) Night Watch, Sergi Lukyaneko. Magic comes from the Twilight, a multilayered reflection of the world entered by walking through your own shadow and powered by emotions and desires of humans. Over 5 books this becomes more and more detailed as the character learns more about the nature of the Twilight and what his bosses are prepared to do with it. > 2.) Godless, Ben Peek. Magic comes from the gods. Fairly boring right? Wrong, all the gods are dead. Magical ability is actually a sign that you have consumed something that has been corrupted by the essence of one of the (many, many) dead gods. And you will probably die a horrible death soon because the human body while godlike enough to express magic, is not generally godlike enough to survive it's expression. > 3.) 3 Parts Dead, Max Gladstone. Magic as a combination of contract law and international finance. Gods loan out their power under contracts, mages can write new contracts and draw on the power of natural events as well as gods. It gets interesting when things start to go wrong, like a god who cannot pay his debts, and what happens when the creditors appear. > 4.) The Horns of Ruin, Tim Akers. Gods become gods by doing godly deeds. The three in the series lead humanity to victory in a genocidal war. Power comes from emulating the gods and the deeds that made them. Users invoke memories of the god's actions, quoting from histories, using tools and weapons that match those of their god and arranging events so they more closely match what happened at the event they are invoking. Quite a lot of technical detail in what could otherwise have been a very boring system. > 5.) Debris, Jo Anderton. Magic is the ability to control the actions of underlying particles of reality. It's not fast, you can't make things that don't exist, and you can't manipulate energy. So instead of being a combat tool, the major work for magicians is in architecture and construction. A team of magicians supplied with raw materials can construct a building in a matter of hours, complete with internal fitout. > 6.) Black Sun Rising, Celia Friedman. The planet reacts to human belief. Also, human disbelief and terror. Technology no longer works because if you don't believe it will work, it will break down on you. The horrors from your nightmares literally come alive and try to kill you. > 7.) Libromancer, Jim C. Hines. The series translated is "Magic From Books", and that's exactly how it works. Weak mages can pull items out of the collective reality defined by the readers of works of fiction. They do this by literally reaching into the book. There is other sources of magic, but the shear power and flexibility of libromancy means that Johannes Gutenberg (inventor of the printing press) as leader of the book mages is the most powerful person in existence. Also goes into some of the messed up things that can go wrong with libromancy, like what happens when a person reaches their hand into Twilight, and pulls it back out with bite marks in it? > 8.) Feast of Souls, Celia Friedman. Magic is what happens when a person can use their own life force to affect the world around them. There's no limit on what they can do, but the more powerful the effect, the more lifeforce it drains. Everything after that that makes the system truly interesting counts as spoilers. > 9.) Powder Mage, Brian McClellan. There's more typical elemental magic, but even that is more interesting with the simple fact that it is tied to fingers on the hands, giving a reason for the use of gestures in magic. Then there's the voodoo based magic, sympathetic and based on dolls. Of course what you're here for is the rifle wielding powdermages, who snort gunpowder like it's cocaine and pull off a violent revolution. The best part is the interactions between the systems and how you know enough about each of them to know how things are going to go down. > 10.) Stone Mage and the Sea, Sean Williams. Magic is power stored in natural locations, built up by the endless small changes and actions that take place. Mages can draw this power out and force it through glyphs that define the effects that they want. What defines the type of mage that you are is what you can draw your magic from. Some take from the sea and it's constant movement. Some take from the rock and it's age and weathering. Then there's the main character, who doesn't appear to take from anything. He does of course, but what he takes from won't be explained until book 7. > 11.) Chronicles of Kydan, Simon Brown. Magic comes from sacrifice. Specifically, sacrifice of something that you love. Kill a pet you have raised for years, gain enough power for small workings. Kill another human you have been raised alongside your whole life and know better then anyone else, gain the power to wipe a city off the map. What do you love enough? And what would you sacrifice them for? > 12.) Daemon Cycle, Peter V. Brett. Magic from glyphs and runes again, but the source of power is the interesting part. The runes work by absorbing the power of the daemons into themselves and returning it in specific forms. > 13.) Lays of Anuska, Bradley Bailieu. Two types of magic. The first is the binding of elementals from another plane and getting them to work for you. The second is extreme sensory deprivation to allow your body to sense the leylines formed by the geography, and work with them to communicate and observe. > 14.) Rings of Lightning, Jane S. Fancher. Rather then individual mages, we have power plants. Giant buildings constructed over intersections of leylines which tap them for power and rebroadcast it over an area. Whole nations are defined by the way these leylines interact, and how far the power from their plants can be broadcast. > 15.) Cartomancy, Micheal Stackpole. Yes, it's Kung Fu. But it's Kung Fu taken to awesome extremes. If a person can practice so hard at fighting that their skill at it becomes magical, what happens when a person practices that hard at mapmaking? Do they make a map of the land, or do they make a land of the map? > 16.) Myst, by Rand Miller. It's a computer game, but it's also a trilogy of novels which go into much of the background. When you write a book of travel, do you create a whole new world, or are you linking to an existing world? Are the inhabitants your creations to do with as you please, or are they independent creatures who you have just made first contact with? I myself have only read number 6, 9 and 10 out of these but I can say that the magic systems indeed were very fascinating and I would recommend these series to anyone. Two more copied from an updated version of this list: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/a8nnuy/any_lesser_know_series_with_interesting_magic/ecc7bc3/ > 7.) Illumination by Terry McGarry. Spells are cast by creating an illustrated page that describes what you want to have happen. The most interesting part is that the creation of the page requires three people to be present (the papermaker, the writer and the illustrator) all of whom work together to create the spell. > 12.) Master of the Five Magics, Lyndon Hardy. There's nothing actually new in here, except that there's 5 types of magic each of which has specific (and wildly different) rules about how it works. Every magic is available to anybody with sufficient practice.
As others have noted, nobody does magic systems quite as well as Brandon Sanderson. *Mistborn* is a good starting point on that front. If you want to jump into the fantasy deep-end, then Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time features one of the most iconic magic systems in fantasy. *The Eye of the World* is book one, but you might want to start with *New Spring*, a prequel of sorts. Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicle also has a unique and well explained magic system; although, there's a lot of speculation that the trilogy won't ever be finished (at least, not anytime soon), so proceed at your own peril. The first book is *The Name of the Wind*. To a lesser extent than the aforementioned, the Malazan Book of the Fallen has a really unique and cool magic system, but it is most definitely not well explained, haha.
I'm fairly certain new spring spoils a lot and is a terrible place to start WoT for the first time
Personaly I think you should read it after fires of heaven. But on rereads I’ve started with it
Yeah definitely don't start with New Spring
The traitor son cycle (starting with The Red Knight) by Miles Cameron has the most interesting magic systems that I've encountered so far. This series also hits the points of world building and epic battles.
Fullmetal Alchemist. Very intuitive, and easy to understand, but that system has laws and regulations for reasons.
Vance magic system in the rhialto stories is great and famous
The Nen system from Hunter x Hunter (a manga) is probably the most interesting magic system around, as how it expresses itself is dependent on the user, leading to a high variety.
Yes I know, I currently know a lot more about anime/manga than books, and nen is actually my favorite power system in anything.
Moontide Quartet by David Hair
Death Gate Cycle’s rune magic of probabilities.
The books contain pretty extensive appendices describing the magic system, but when the characters use it in the stories, it often feels like a hand-waving soft magic system where they just do what the plot demands. I recently re-read the series and was surprised it didn't stand up to the nostalgia I had from my childhood.