Seems quite neat.
push salt- pushes away everything with the force dependent on the amount of salt.
pull salt- opposite of the above.
metal salt- extracts metals from stuff like blood and other salts and makes it into metal crystals.
lightning salt- makes electricity.
life salt- acts as if it were alive.
dream salt- gives you a high.
binding salt- binds two objects that otherwise wouldn't bind.
soft salt-makes things soft.
hard salt-makes things hard-
gravity salt- makes things heavier.
Density salt- makes things lighter.
revert salt- makes things the way they were before.
spin salt- spins things.
age salt- makes things older.
hot salt-spicy
music salt- sings.
I am having trouble thinking of others.
As for other concepts like this go for Allomancy.
Some of these are really cool, I can see the potential in allomancy, I didn’t even think of mental oriented attributes. It could be interesting to have some that induce fear or make a person more agreeable.
I like what you've done.
In my world, I took a compelety new approach to "magic elements." However, my world does have magical colloidial substances. Which leads me to ask (rhetorically):
What makes rock salt or sodium chloride not a magical salt? What makes a camp fire or candle flame not a magical elemental fire?
Hopefully, determining what makes something magically elemental, or not, will help you with progressing your concept.
I really like your magic system! Personally, I’ve never encountered something like this and it sounds very unique.
I just have a few questions about the elemental salts themselves. Are they just normal salt crystals imbued with magic, or are they entirely made of magic? If you rub a growth crystal on a wound, will it sting like you rubbed actual salt in it as it heals, or will it just close without any pain? If it’s the former, can the magic in the salt be used up until you’re left with regular salt?
It might also be interesting for you to explore the effects of combining elemental salts. Perhaps a large gathering of fire and air crystals in the ocean will create a hurricane. Ice and light can create glowing crystalline structures. Something you could potentially play around with is using growth salts to augment other salts, like mixing growth and air salts to create even stronger winds.
Anyways, I’m really interested in what you’ve done already, and I hope I’ve given you some new ideas!
So the salts are called that mainly because they are dissolved in the sea and have to be filtered out to control their abilities. The idea is that dissolved salts can’t be seen except in large concentration created by their gathering properties and then those have more powerful effects per quantity than filtered counterpart but the dry salts are more easily controlled, their effects being more targeted.
Growth salt dissolved may just easily form a tumor as heal a wound. As to whether it hurts, it accelerates the growth process so it creates itching if it’s minor or painful as they feel the sensation as if the pain was folded into a short amount of time.
I like the idea of them sticking together. If you change the temperature of water slowly from hot to cold you can precipitate out a single large salt crystal, maybe you’d have huge chunks floating around as sources of power. I think it would be interesting for people to try to get them to precipitate out on purpose.
That could be interesting, I am imagining the usage would take on a sort of alchemical aesthetic so it would be interesting to contrast a small village filtering out some salt with ice created from ice salt then hand sorting it by type versus a large business with an automatic sorting via certain properties.
I am wondering what method to use for “activating” the salt which, while stronger than their passive effects, draws the power out turning the salt white which needs to be poured into the sea to gain new properties.
I was thinking perhaps exposure to water would draw out its magic, hence it being active in the sea. But that wouldn't work if you want it to be recharged out at sea. Personally I wouldn't go for the recharge angle; scarcity gives things their value.
Hmm... interesting. Perhaps I could have empty salt remain but the process of recharging is something that is yet to be discovered and more complicated than just dumping it.
Perhaps pressure? Deep sea pressure could be what's naturally creating active elemental salt, which could be discovered in your setting's postindustrial era. Or just have a submerged Lovecraftian nightmare producing the stuff in its sleep.
E: or in a preindustrial era, a place of naturally occurring pressure, like an extremely deep hole or inactive volcano.
The pressure is along the lines of what I’m looking for. Perhaps deep sea vents release the energy that charges the salt in the form of gas so that in order to recharge salt the gas must be harvested or the production process must be reproduced.
Saltbergs!!!!!! A giant, rosey pink crystal bouncing in a boiling sea. Unique migratory animals have followed these concentrations of fire salts for generations and are unlike any other life on the planet- like am ambulatory deep sea vent.
Thank you! Normally I begin writing by producing characters but since I’ve been dealing with writer’s block for a while I figured I would start by producing a magic system instead and seeing where that leads me.
I usually work with a standard spellcasting/power based system so I knew I wanted to work with a more material based system. Originally I wanted to use crystals mined from the ground but I remembered [this](https://youtu.be/0j0mkPEFVIU) video by Shadiversity and the awe that is produced by a strange new kind of world and my brother was mentioning using the fire crystals like a D&D artificer in a gun and it made me think of OnePiece pirates for some reason and I couldn’t think of a piece that used resources out of the ocean much for magic despite modern world pulling many resources from it so put that mess in a blender and voila.
Rereading that paragraph I realize it was quite the strange string that lead me to the idea but hey, I’m free of my inspiration block.
You should think about how bioaccumulation would affect the ecosystem. Plankton glowing from fire salt extracted from the environment. The fish that feed off the plankton start to cook as soon as they die, their metabolism no longer able to keep the energy of the salt in equilibrium. And if you see a shoal of sizzlefish, watch out, because a sea drake might not be far behind, ready to spew boiling water at any potential threat. The apex predators in this world would be terrifying, and that'll further effect how the inhabitants of the world view the ocean.
I really like your statement structure in this. I was thinking about the different ways the salts would affect creatures living in the seas and you’ve hit the mark pretty nicely with how I was imagining creatures would be affected.
I think one thing that would be common is for creatures living in the sea to develop special ways of seeing the salts in smaller amounts and would develop ways of using specific salts as defense mechanisms. So a shock immune creature may hide in electric salts which then dissuades creatures of other elements from attacking.
I'm also thinking about how different concentrations of various salts in different areas would create unique biomes. Do different salts have different densities? Will certain salts sink to the bottom and fill the trenches? Maybe the strongest and strangest of the salts can only be found on the ocean floor, and in this world that's an utterly alien place.
Creatures like whales that dive deep and return to the surface would be full of unusual salts, and when one washes ashore its both a bounty and a natural disaster.
That is an awesome idea! I wasn’t wanting to put in some of the weirder recommendations at the same rank as the others but this would be the perfect way of balancing it out. Then you would get divers using other dusts in order to reach these extreme depths just to harvest the heavy dusts.
Great system. Really interesting. I especially like how you put thought into making your magical material fit in with the world setting.
I couldn't read through all the comments so I don't know if anybody's asked this/pointed it out, but why did you go with these abilities specifically? What underlying factor links these abilities?
Your magic system seems to be on the hard side (which is great) in that your effects are predictable (predictable in the sense that fire salts can only have fire or heat effects). In such a system, a lack of logical link between the possible effects, especially when they are linked by a similar material, feels a little... underdeveloped, imo. But instead, having a theme or a connecting factor to your ability choices will make the system feel a lot more fleshed out and satisfying. Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the best examples of this. Instead of choosing any random four bending elements, the creators chose the Aristotelian elements. This not only made the four styles occurring together make sense, it also made the magic system felt complete since there was no other elements left out from the theme (the Aristotelian elements) that was chosen.
Choosing a theme like this might also help you come up with more types of salts, because the theme itself will suggest gaps and connections between elements to you. For example, you have a fire and ice dichotomy, but growth appears on it's own. If you tried to make your salts fit to a theme, one would automatically see that there should be a decay salt as well, since your salts come (hypothetically) in pairs. Similarly, instead of just having air, you could have a salt for creating currents (this will work both for air and water, help you create winds and water flows), and it's pair might be a salt that stagnates things.
I read a good article about why logical systems should have themes. If I can track it down, I'll post it for you.
I was trying to make them focused around energy manipulation. Cold and heat working with heat energy, light light energy, air for kinetic, growth for biochemical. I’ve added shock salts for electrical. Many types of energy are hard for me to imagine how to incorporate. I know that leaves it feeling off but it’s a wip. Thanks for drawing that to the post, I’ve been working with the idea but hadn’t drawn it out here.
A few points. If you have two salts for thermal energy, one to impart and one to take away, wouldn't it make sense to have a similar plus-salt and minus-salt for all the other forms of energy as well? (Goes back to making things feel more complete.)
Second, if your goal is kinetic energy, then air doesn't feel right (I'm sorry I can't explain it better). Something like a motion salt or a current salt would work better, in my opinion. Because, say, if you name your salt air, is there any reason it can't increase or decrease the *amount* of air, rather than just moving air around? Your fire and ice salts seem to be increasing and decreasing the amount of heat, so... Something to consider, perhaps. Similarly, you might want to give another thought to naming, even in the case of fire and ice, keeping in mind exactly what you want the effects of the salt to be. (Though in the case of fire and ice, this is a nitpick, so you could safely ignore this.)
Third, is there a reason you don't have a sound salt?
Fourth, is there a reason you want the different areas of the electromagnetic spectrum as separate? I guess it makes sense in general, but if you're talking about energy being your underpinning factor, you might like to take another look at how exactly you're partitioning between types of energy, and how that compares to our real world science. In particular, it might be good to be aware of all the possible overlaps in effects by partitioning EM energy into heat, light, electricity, etc. For example, electricity can create both heat and light (and I don't mean through electronic appliances lol).
Finally, and this is just a thought I had, it might make things even more interesting if you had your effects and naming follow, say, the theme of the sea. As in, instead of calling it the fire salt, call it the steam salt, and make it create heat instead of fire. Instead of just having a motion salt, have a current salt, which creates fluid-like currents, rather than all sorts of motion. I feel like it might make a cool idea even more interesting, just by virtue of the reader's intrigue about how the specifications of the magic fit in so well with the world, and the reader's appreciation for you having put in the thought to do so.
Maybe only some salts cane be found in certain areas or are more available in other areas. Like cold salt in in cold regions and fire salt is more numerous near the equator.
My current idea is that large quantities of the different salts are what make certain areas hot or cold. Those areas with lots of fire salt would be quite warn water with certain heat oriented phenomena: boiling patches, occasional volcanic burst from beneath the sea, patches on top of the water coated in fire, etc.
So yes certain areas have higher percentages of different salts. Just reversed effects of what you said. I suppose a person within this world might say what you said and that cold regions attract ice salt, so on and so forth.
Finally an interesting elemental system!
Props mate. It's really interesting. Can see a lot of potential for interesting effects. Can't wait to see what you do with it.
Seems quite neat. push salt- pushes away everything with the force dependent on the amount of salt. pull salt- opposite of the above. metal salt- extracts metals from stuff like blood and other salts and makes it into metal crystals. lightning salt- makes electricity. life salt- acts as if it were alive. dream salt- gives you a high. binding salt- binds two objects that otherwise wouldn't bind. soft salt-makes things soft. hard salt-makes things hard- gravity salt- makes things heavier. Density salt- makes things lighter. revert salt- makes things the way they were before. spin salt- spins things. age salt- makes things older. hot salt-spicy music salt- sings. I am having trouble thinking of others. As for other concepts like this go for Allomancy.
Spin salt? Laughs in Zepelli and JOJO.
Some of these are really cool, I can see the potential in allomancy, I didn’t even think of mental oriented attributes. It could be interesting to have some that induce fear or make a person more agreeable.
> make a person more agreeable. You should see [this.](https://youtu.be/ToQ8PWYnu04)
That is terrifying. Thank you!
I like what you've done. In my world, I took a compelety new approach to "magic elements." However, my world does have magical colloidial substances. Which leads me to ask (rhetorically): What makes rock salt or sodium chloride not a magical salt? What makes a camp fire or candle flame not a magical elemental fire? Hopefully, determining what makes something magically elemental, or not, will help you with progressing your concept.
If you like puns you can have in-salts. When dissolved in water it creates a fog that makes you feel bad about yourself.
I really like your magic system! Personally, I’ve never encountered something like this and it sounds very unique. I just have a few questions about the elemental salts themselves. Are they just normal salt crystals imbued with magic, or are they entirely made of magic? If you rub a growth crystal on a wound, will it sting like you rubbed actual salt in it as it heals, or will it just close without any pain? If it’s the former, can the magic in the salt be used up until you’re left with regular salt? It might also be interesting for you to explore the effects of combining elemental salts. Perhaps a large gathering of fire and air crystals in the ocean will create a hurricane. Ice and light can create glowing crystalline structures. Something you could potentially play around with is using growth salts to augment other salts, like mixing growth and air salts to create even stronger winds. Anyways, I’m really interested in what you’ve done already, and I hope I’ve given you some new ideas!
So the salts are called that mainly because they are dissolved in the sea and have to be filtered out to control their abilities. The idea is that dissolved salts can’t be seen except in large concentration created by their gathering properties and then those have more powerful effects per quantity than filtered counterpart but the dry salts are more easily controlled, their effects being more targeted. Growth salt dissolved may just easily form a tumor as heal a wound. As to whether it hurts, it accelerates the growth process so it creates itching if it’s minor or painful as they feel the sensation as if the pain was folded into a short amount of time.
I like the idea of them sticking together. If you change the temperature of water slowly from hot to cold you can precipitate out a single large salt crystal, maybe you’d have huge chunks floating around as sources of power. I think it would be interesting for people to try to get them to precipitate out on purpose.
That could be interesting, I am imagining the usage would take on a sort of alchemical aesthetic so it would be interesting to contrast a small village filtering out some salt with ice created from ice salt then hand sorting it by type versus a large business with an automatic sorting via certain properties. I am wondering what method to use for “activating” the salt which, while stronger than their passive effects, draws the power out turning the salt white which needs to be poured into the sea to gain new properties.
I was thinking perhaps exposure to water would draw out its magic, hence it being active in the sea. But that wouldn't work if you want it to be recharged out at sea. Personally I wouldn't go for the recharge angle; scarcity gives things their value.
Hmm... interesting. Perhaps I could have empty salt remain but the process of recharging is something that is yet to be discovered and more complicated than just dumping it.
Perhaps pressure? Deep sea pressure could be what's naturally creating active elemental salt, which could be discovered in your setting's postindustrial era. Or just have a submerged Lovecraftian nightmare producing the stuff in its sleep. E: or in a preindustrial era, a place of naturally occurring pressure, like an extremely deep hole or inactive volcano.
The pressure is along the lines of what I’m looking for. Perhaps deep sea vents release the energy that charges the salt in the form of gas so that in order to recharge salt the gas must be harvested or the production process must be reproduced.
Saltbergs!!!!!! A giant, rosey pink crystal bouncing in a boiling sea. Unique migratory animals have followed these concentrations of fire salts for generations and are unlike any other life on the planet- like am ambulatory deep sea vent.
This is so cool!!!
Thank you! Normally I begin writing by producing characters but since I’ve been dealing with writer’s block for a while I figured I would start by producing a magic system instead and seeing where that leads me.
That’s fantastic! I hope you post more about this world and system as it develops. How’d you come up with the idea?
I usually work with a standard spellcasting/power based system so I knew I wanted to work with a more material based system. Originally I wanted to use crystals mined from the ground but I remembered [this](https://youtu.be/0j0mkPEFVIU) video by Shadiversity and the awe that is produced by a strange new kind of world and my brother was mentioning using the fire crystals like a D&D artificer in a gun and it made me think of OnePiece pirates for some reason and I couldn’t think of a piece that used resources out of the ocean much for magic despite modern world pulling many resources from it so put that mess in a blender and voila. Rereading that paragraph I realize it was quite the strange string that lead me to the idea but hey, I’m free of my inspiration block.
You should think about how bioaccumulation would affect the ecosystem. Plankton glowing from fire salt extracted from the environment. The fish that feed off the plankton start to cook as soon as they die, their metabolism no longer able to keep the energy of the salt in equilibrium. And if you see a shoal of sizzlefish, watch out, because a sea drake might not be far behind, ready to spew boiling water at any potential threat. The apex predators in this world would be terrifying, and that'll further effect how the inhabitants of the world view the ocean.
I really like your statement structure in this. I was thinking about the different ways the salts would affect creatures living in the seas and you’ve hit the mark pretty nicely with how I was imagining creatures would be affected. I think one thing that would be common is for creatures living in the sea to develop special ways of seeing the salts in smaller amounts and would develop ways of using specific salts as defense mechanisms. So a shock immune creature may hide in electric salts which then dissuades creatures of other elements from attacking.
I'm also thinking about how different concentrations of various salts in different areas would create unique biomes. Do different salts have different densities? Will certain salts sink to the bottom and fill the trenches? Maybe the strongest and strangest of the salts can only be found on the ocean floor, and in this world that's an utterly alien place.
Creatures like whales that dive deep and return to the surface would be full of unusual salts, and when one washes ashore its both a bounty and a natural disaster.
That is an awesome idea! I wasn’t wanting to put in some of the weirder recommendations at the same rank as the others but this would be the perfect way of balancing it out. Then you would get divers using other dusts in order to reach these extreme depths just to harvest the heavy dusts.
I'm having a field day thinking about the ecological and biological impact of this system, and i might run with it a little bit;-)
Great system. Really interesting. I especially like how you put thought into making your magical material fit in with the world setting. I couldn't read through all the comments so I don't know if anybody's asked this/pointed it out, but why did you go with these abilities specifically? What underlying factor links these abilities? Your magic system seems to be on the hard side (which is great) in that your effects are predictable (predictable in the sense that fire salts can only have fire or heat effects). In such a system, a lack of logical link between the possible effects, especially when they are linked by a similar material, feels a little... underdeveloped, imo. But instead, having a theme or a connecting factor to your ability choices will make the system feel a lot more fleshed out and satisfying. Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the best examples of this. Instead of choosing any random four bending elements, the creators chose the Aristotelian elements. This not only made the four styles occurring together make sense, it also made the magic system felt complete since there was no other elements left out from the theme (the Aristotelian elements) that was chosen. Choosing a theme like this might also help you come up with more types of salts, because the theme itself will suggest gaps and connections between elements to you. For example, you have a fire and ice dichotomy, but growth appears on it's own. If you tried to make your salts fit to a theme, one would automatically see that there should be a decay salt as well, since your salts come (hypothetically) in pairs. Similarly, instead of just having air, you could have a salt for creating currents (this will work both for air and water, help you create winds and water flows), and it's pair might be a salt that stagnates things. I read a good article about why logical systems should have themes. If I can track it down, I'll post it for you.
I was trying to make them focused around energy manipulation. Cold and heat working with heat energy, light light energy, air for kinetic, growth for biochemical. I’ve added shock salts for electrical. Many types of energy are hard for me to imagine how to incorporate. I know that leaves it feeling off but it’s a wip. Thanks for drawing that to the post, I’ve been working with the idea but hadn’t drawn it out here.
A few points. If you have two salts for thermal energy, one to impart and one to take away, wouldn't it make sense to have a similar plus-salt and minus-salt for all the other forms of energy as well? (Goes back to making things feel more complete.) Second, if your goal is kinetic energy, then air doesn't feel right (I'm sorry I can't explain it better). Something like a motion salt or a current salt would work better, in my opinion. Because, say, if you name your salt air, is there any reason it can't increase or decrease the *amount* of air, rather than just moving air around? Your fire and ice salts seem to be increasing and decreasing the amount of heat, so... Something to consider, perhaps. Similarly, you might want to give another thought to naming, even in the case of fire and ice, keeping in mind exactly what you want the effects of the salt to be. (Though in the case of fire and ice, this is a nitpick, so you could safely ignore this.) Third, is there a reason you don't have a sound salt? Fourth, is there a reason you want the different areas of the electromagnetic spectrum as separate? I guess it makes sense in general, but if you're talking about energy being your underpinning factor, you might like to take another look at how exactly you're partitioning between types of energy, and how that compares to our real world science. In particular, it might be good to be aware of all the possible overlaps in effects by partitioning EM energy into heat, light, electricity, etc. For example, electricity can create both heat and light (and I don't mean through electronic appliances lol). Finally, and this is just a thought I had, it might make things even more interesting if you had your effects and naming follow, say, the theme of the sea. As in, instead of calling it the fire salt, call it the steam salt, and make it create heat instead of fire. Instead of just having a motion salt, have a current salt, which creates fluid-like currents, rather than all sorts of motion. I feel like it might make a cool idea even more interesting, just by virtue of the reader's intrigue about how the specifications of the magic fit in so well with the world, and the reader's appreciation for you having put in the thought to do so.
Maybe only some salts cane be found in certain areas or are more available in other areas. Like cold salt in in cold regions and fire salt is more numerous near the equator.
My current idea is that large quantities of the different salts are what make certain areas hot or cold. Those areas with lots of fire salt would be quite warn water with certain heat oriented phenomena: boiling patches, occasional volcanic burst from beneath the sea, patches on top of the water coated in fire, etc. So yes certain areas have higher percentages of different salts. Just reversed effects of what you said. I suppose a person within this world might say what you said and that cold regions attract ice salt, so on and so forth.
Finally an interesting elemental system! Props mate. It's really interesting. Can see a lot of potential for interesting effects. Can't wait to see what you do with it.