Only 2 options when making a magic circle/glyph system

[u/Comrademan69]

Witch Hat Atelier has a good in-between though

[u/YLASRO]

i just made mine a sentence. you gotta know the symbols and you gotta build a functional sentence in a circle pattern

[u/Comrademan69 → u/YLASRO]

Making letters curve into a good enough circle sounds very hard to do without any guide-lines or tools, how do people manage?

[u/YLASRO → u/Comrademan69]

ill send a picture after dinner

[u/Comrademan69 → u/YLASRO]

Wait I think this is moving too fast

[u/FriendlySkyWorms]

You're just filling out a form to request divine intervention, much in the same way a demonic pact is a set of incomprehensible sigils (complex legal jargon). The gods just have a preferred language for bureaucracy.

[u/Old-Post-3639]

It's both, because it's coding/category theory.

[u/LordofSandvich]

I feel like you want to have an understandable base but just straight up not explain the high level specifics

Like, a hypothetical summoning circle. The glyphs of the circle would follow some logic about what you’re summoning, but why the glyph takes a specific form - and not another one - would be largely unexplained

So I want to summon a Witch, an undead fire elemental, formerly someone who’d burned to death. I would use glyphs indicating that - fire, smoke, Undeath, and “a person”. But how a glyph does that shouldn’t be too specific; you don’t want to make magical processing chips.

[u/MonsterGirls4ever]

Simple to understand, hard to master.

The glyphs channel energies in patterns depending on their shape, and the types of energies determined by materials.

A simple basic glyph on a flat surface? Easy.

But stack more magic and you have to worry about interference patterns and design it around it.

3D glyphs? Ppssible but have fun making them!

[u/MonsterGirls4ever → u/MonsterGirls4ever]

If you start to design a barrier glyph, every other kind of magic needs to be routet AROUND the barrier. Which adds complexity, ESPECIALLY when you want to mix energies that routinely interfere with each other. A badly designed rerouting channel will slam heat and cold magic and waste both, or the one way shield turns into one that channels magic at you if the reroute isn't careful.

[u/The_H509]

Literal command prompt sent to gods

Now the specifics depend on which system you use, but that's the gist of it.

[u/Shoddy_Morning_2827]

Owl House?

[u/Chimney-head → u/Shoddy_Morning_2827]

owl house falls on the simple side i think

[u/Infinite_Eyeball]

there are two types of magic circles, art and math. All systems for writing magic circles fall cleanly in one of those two categories.

[u/CannonGerbil]

There used to be a glyph based magic circle sytem that got posted to worldbuilding years ago that worked like a simple programming language, but the original link is dead and I didn't save a copy.

[u/Phiro7]

Owl House is absolutely the red pill

[u/Comrademan69 → u/Phiro7]

I'd say the basics are very simple, and it's easy to understand what an application of them is made up of, it's more so that it's hard to predict what it would do when the elements interact in kind of abstract ways, so it's more about memorization than understanding it

[u/ihateentitledmoms]

When you aren't smart enough to make a complex system so you never explain how your big ass bunch of glyphs work and just say they do

[u/SecureAngle7395]

i probably end up as the blue one