What's Going On Here?

Caveat: anything stated explicitly should be suffixed by 'unless you have a great idea for a roleplay hook based on the contrary, in which case talk to me about it.'

What, a party of five mages? How many magic missiles does an adventure need?

I probably don't have to go over this, given that I'm hoping to try it out with mature gamers who have broad ideas about what 'role-playing' means, but: You can make your magic system do whatever you want. This explicitly means that you don't have to follow the D&D standard of magic-users being bad with weapons but always ready with a fireball. If you want you can have a style of magic specifically designed to make you an unusually awesome swordsman - or a style that de-emphasises combat entirely. The style of magic you design will have a large effect on the style of campaign play.

Isn't this an awfully lengthy character-creation process?

On the whole, I think that people relish and enjoy the character-creation stage, so I don't have a problem with extending it. But yeah, I acknowledge that a lot of that enjoyment lies in anticipation, and might be detracted from somewhat if people didn't expect the actual gameplay to be as good. Still, I think that the process of exploring one's own parameters should make for decent gameplay.

There's no points system here! Won't people just horribly overpower their own style?

Well, I'm trusting them not to, because that would just make things lame. If I feel that an aspect of a style might be over-the-top, I'll try and negotiate with the player to restrict it; I don't expect this to happen due to wilful munchkinism, though.

Isn't this kind of ambitious, given that you haven't got a great deal of recent GM experience?

In a word: yeah. It may turn out that this is more than my tiny brane can handle, or I may be persuaded that I should really get a bit more practise in first. In which case I'll put this on hold, pick up a rulebook for a more sensible RPG and run a campaign in that. Which I wouldn't mind at all; I'm just fairly compulsive about big complicated ideas and enjoy playing with 'em.

Are you going to be using any system for character stuff beyond the magic system? Other skills, physical attributes, that kind of thing?

Depends on what the players want, really. I'd like this to be rules-light but I don't object to a basic structure at all. If people feel more comfortable with a roughly d20-based framework we can do that, or something more like the light system inky used for his Mystery oneshot (list 6-10 significant attributes, rank them Terrible to Superb, write a paragraph about why). Alternatively, the world may suggest things once it's developed. We'll see.

What are the players actually going to be doing? I don't want to design a magic style that's mostly about really, really good cooking if we're just going to be killing kobolds.

Again, that'll be to some extent determined by initial player input. If you don't want to spend hours dealing with the internal politics of your School, you can set up a self-invented Tradition; if you want to spend as much time as possible flirting with NPCs, you can design your Style accordingly. However, it's probably safe to assume that there will be some amount of inter-Tradition politics / negotiation / intrigue, at least some combat (hitting things makes RPGs more fun), and some problem-solving / tactics / investigation stuff.

Some guidelines on describing things:

• I'm more after essay-type answers than picking choices off a list, so all the stuff below should just be regarded as talking points. This will get reiterated ad nauseam, so brace yourselves.
• Don't try to nail down cultural specifics beyond the domain of the style, tradition and school. Initially, don't specify places, political structures, historic individuals or specific social groups. If you want to refer to this sort of thing, use square brackets to enclose the class of thing you're talking about: for instance [RULING BODY], [MINORITY GROUP] or [IMMEDIATE REGION].
• You can imply things about a society, or draw on real-world or fictional models - in fact, it'd be helpful. For instance, the example assumes a leisured, educated upper class, and assigns baromancers a role not unlike that of English country parsons in the Regency or Victorian period.
• Your idea is going to get tweaked to make it fit; leave some elbow room.
• The most powerful practitioners of a style - who, in all probability, you're not going to be - shouldn't have godlike powers. Formidable, certainly; world-power, perhaps; omnipotent, no.
• You will probably be playing medium-ability magic-users, so it's probably not a great idea to design a tradition that's nearly useless to all but the select few.

Things you can safely assume:

• a late Renaissance / Enlightenment level of technology, at base (magic may have modified plenty of things);
• a non-egalitarian society with fairly strong class conceptions; how precisely this'll work is up for definition;
• obviously, a world where magic is relatively common, though it need not be widely accessible;
• no sodding demihumans; similar stock-fantasy elements only if people really want them

A style is a type of magic; it may have many and various effects, but it works in a unified fashion - deriving its power from the same source, operated by the same pseudo-physics - and generally has some kind of cohesive theme.

A tradition is an approach to one or more styles. It includes cultural associations, techniques, knowledge, theories, rituals, all that stuff. More than one Tradition might be associated with a style.

A school is an organisation that practises a Tradition. More than one school may practise the same Tradition.

This is not in-character terminology - it's just going to be used to set things up. Once you've constructed things you can call 'em whatever you want.

If you're still interested at this point, head on over here for some slightly more defined ideas about how you might want to lay out your magic system.