The Eight Elements Magic System

Discover the secrets of the Arcane Arts and unleash Eight Elements against your foes!

Tired of endless memorization of spell-lists and strict rules that reduce magic to something mundane and dreary? Do you feel that magic should be a mysterious force, challenging the imagination of players and gamemasters alike?

Then let us welcome you to the Eight Elements freeform magic system! These rules have been devised to be both system- and setting agnostic and should fit into most gamegroups with only minor adaptations. Inspired by the magic from Malazan Books of the Fallen, the Warhammer Winds of Magic and the Chinese teachings of the Five Elements, these rules have been extensively playtested for several years.

The main idea about the system is to keep magic “magical”, to give players the feeling that magic is a mysterious thing that can be adapted and changed by their own imaginations, yet still has some established ground rules in the background to support any ideas they might come up with. We wanted the casting of spells to be like a type of music, more art than craft, where the rule system gives you the individual notes but you can choose to combine them and play a new, maybe even unique tune of your own creation.

To achieve this we have invented eight elements of magic. Each of these elements - air, fire, water, earth, darkness, light, metal and nature - stands for specific attributes, individual strands of reality and its own philosophical ideas. One element already allows a player to achieve many things, but combining several of them makes everything even more interesting.
Let's use an example: the Red Element is not only fire but also heat, friction, speed, passion, pain and the spark of life that sits at the core of every living being. Red magic stands for an existance of strong feelings, impulsive behaviour and passionate beliefs. Like fire the red mages burn bright and hot...yet they might burn out just as quickly if they are not careful.

The Eight Elements system rewards clever thinking, imagination and creative problem solving and is best suited for cooperative groups that have a well established trust between players and gamemasters.

Rulewise the system requires the use of several groups of D6s, ideally each group with a different colour. You won't need any other dice for it.

Also check out some of our other releases!

"Invisible Hands" is a book about factions of all kinds. It entails not only a thorough guide on how (and why!) to create factions in your games but also holds twenty fully fleshed-out factions of different kinds that you can directly put into your RPG setting! "Pawns in a Greater Game" adds the rules you need for playing as factions instead of individual characters and also adds stats and rules for each of the factions presented in Invisible Hands. "Unseen Strings" adds another twenty detailed factions to the collection and also includes all the rules you need to play these factions within the system presented in Pawns in a Greater Game.

Also check out our other publications: The "Thousand Trails" series is a collection of adventure hooks and story seeds, each book focused on adventuring in a specific environment and containing more than one hundred plothooks! "Dark Cities" is focused on urban adventures, "Edge of the Wilds" gives you many rural adventures, "Ocean's Call" is for nautical adventures and "Realm of Leaves" is a collection of forest adventures. "Crown of Winter" focuses on adventures in cold and mountainous areas! "Marshland Mists" is focused on swamp adventures. More is to come!