9 types of magic for your fantasy novel

One of the most exciting parts of writing a fantasy novel is building the magic. Magic systems shape your world’s laws, power structures, religions, and conflicts. 

Understanding the different types of magic can help you build a more cohesive and compelling world. You can choose one to focus on or blend several to create tension and variety. Below, we explore nine classic and creative types of magic, their flavor, how they function, and how you can use them in your fantasy story.

Elemental Magic

Elemental magic is one of the oldest and most recognizable forms of magic. It draws power from natural elements: fire, water, earth, air, and sometimes additional ones like ice, lightning, metal, or shadow. Practicioners can control these elements to cast spells, summon creatures or create powerful effects.

What Makes It Great

• Visually dramatic: fireballs, tidal waves, earthquakes.
• Tied to primal forces: gives characters and readers an immediate connection.
• Allows for personality-driven powers: hot-headed fire mages, calm water casters, grounded earth-benders.

Story Ideas

• Elementalists divided by their affinities and forced to unite.
• A society where elements determine social status or destiny.
• A "fifth element" hidden from history, waiting to be rediscovered.

Divine Magic

Divine magic comes from gods, celestial forces, or spiritual devotion. It’s often wielded by priests, clerics, paladins, or chosen ones. Practicioners often channel divine energy to perform miracles or heal the sick. Keep in mind, it should still have limitations.

Key Traits

• Requires faith, obedience, or devotion.
• Powers often include healing, blessings, smiting evil, or performing miracles.
• May involve strict codes or rituals to remain “worthy.”

Story Opportunities

• A cleric who loses their faith and their powers.
• A war between rival gods through mortal spellcasters.
• A false prophet manipulating divine power for personal gain.

Arcane Magic

Encompasses various forms of magics that are based on secret knowledge or ancient rituals. Can include spells, enchantments and magical artifacts.

Arcane magic is the classic "wizard magic"—power drawn from studying the hidden laws of the universe. It’s intellectual, complex, and often dangerous.

Traits

• Learned, not granted.
• Includes spells, runes, ancient tomes, magical formulas.
• Can manipulate time, space, energy, or abstract forces like gravity or probability.

Why It’s Fascinating

• Shows the cost of knowledge and power.
• Encourages magical academia, guilds, or hierarchies.
• Makes for complex, clever protagonists (or antagonists).

Example Hooks

• A young prodigy unlocking a forbidden school of arcana.
• A secret society of mages preserving a lost language of spells.
• Magic as a slowly degrading force: each spell shortens the wizard’s lifespan.

Necromancy

Manipulation of death, souls and the undead. The necromancers can raise the dead, communicate with spirits or wield dark powers associated with the afterlife.

Necromancy is the manipulation of death, souls, and the undead. It’s usually dark, often feared, but not always evil.

Powers May Include

• Raising and controlling the dead.
• Communicating with spirits.
• Cursing, draining life, or reversing death (at a cost).

Moral Questions

• Is it wrong to raise the dead if they gave consent?
• Is a necromancer trying to bring back a loved one... or to rule the dead?
• Can a good-hearted necromancer exist in a fearful world?

Necromancy is deeply emotional, tapping into grief, love, and the fear of mortality.

Alchemy

Transformation of matter, energy or consciousness. Alchemists seek to transmute base metals into gold or create different elixirs, included immortality.

Alchemy blends science, magic, and mystery. It’s not just about turning lead into gold, it’s about transformation, transmutation, and the pursuit of perfection.

Common Elements

• Potions, elixirs, philosopher’s stones.
• Magical metallurgy, homunculi, artificial life.
• Symbolic or spiritual transformation: base to noble, chaos to order.

Story Potential

• A secret formula that grants immortality but at a terrifying price.
• Rival alchemists creating unstable magical substances.
• A character slowly turning into gold or stone after a failed experiment.

Alchemy adds a gritty, lab-based feel to magic and is perfect for mystery, horror, or steampunk-inspired fantasy.

Shamanic Magic

Based on the belief that all living beings are connected. Shamans and druids draw power from the natural world, communing with spirits, animals (even mythical creatures) and elemental forces.

Shamanic magic is spiritual, primal, and deeply tied to nature, ancestors, and the spirit world. Shamans act as mediators between the physical and metaphysical.

Themes and Abilities

• Spirit communication and possession.
• Animal familiars or transformations.
• Healing, divination, and curses through ritual.
• Worldwalking—moving between realms of the living and dead.

Rich Story Angles

• A shaman haunted by a spirit they can’t banish.
• A society that exiles shamans, fearing their “madness.”
• A tribe guided by ancestral spirits toward a mysterious destiny.

Illusion and Enchantment

This school of magic manipulates perception, emotion, and the mind. It can be used to deceive, charm, or reshape how the world is experienced.

Illusions

• Phantom images, sounds, sensations.
• Invisibility, disguises, sensory tricks.
• Misdirection on the battlefield or in politics.

Enchantments

• Mind control, love spells, sleep or truth compulsion.
• Magical charm placed on objects or people.

Intriguing Uses

• A con artist using illusion magic to fake miracles.
• A bard whose songs manipulate memory and emotion.
• A cursed ring that makes the wearer irresistible, but only to enemies.

Dark Magic

Dangerous, corruptive or morally ambiguous forms of magic. Dark sorcery and blood magic often come at a cost and with dire consequences for practicioners.

Dark magic is forbidden, corrupting, and often associated with evil. It may overlap with necromancy or blood magic, but its defining feature is moral and spiritual cost.

Often Includes

• Blood rituals, demonic pacts, soul consumption.
• Forbidden knowledge or lost artifacts.
• Power that grows stronger the more you suffer, or cause suffering.

Narrative Power

• Characters must choose whether to resist or wield it.
• Adds high personal stakes: “If I use this spell, I lose part of myself.”
• Can be seductive: power at the cost of morality.

Dark magic can be tragic, terrifying, or epic in scale. Use it to challenge characters' values or show the consequences of unchecked ambition.

Ritual Magic

Involves the use of symbols, sigils and rituals to channel magical energies. Practicioners may perform ceremonies, draw magical circles or invoke higher powers.

Ritual magic is slow, precise, and often ceremonial. It’s not something you cast in the heat of battle, it’s performed with preparation, components, timing, and often collaboration.

Key Elements

• Magic circles, candles, symbols, runes.
• Rare components: dragon bone, moonstone, a lover’s hair.
• Timed to celestial events: eclipses, solstices, star alignments.

Strengths

• Can perform massive, world-shifting spells (at a cost).
• Builds mystery and grandeur, rituals feel important.
• Encourages teamwork or secret societies.

Story Ideas

• A cabal of mages working years to open a gate to another realm.
• A child unknowingly caught in a ritual of resurrection.
• A forbidden ritual must be completed, or undone, before time runs out.

These nine types of magic are more than just categories—they're storytelling tools. Each one brings its own tone, mechanics, and worldbuilding flavor to your fantasy novel.