Hello all. I've been working on a system for a D&D-inspired game I want to run, and I've come to a bit of a problem trying to make the various magic systems different from one another. As part of the backstory, there is clerical magic, spirit magic, and sorcery, with humans unable to access spirit magic but able to wield sorcery, and vice versa for the other races. With much of my experience in gaming coming from the various versions of D&D over the years, my first instinct is just to go through the thousands of spells and create custom spell lists. However, I also want to implement mana (MP, magic points, whatever you want to call it) for sorcery and clerical magic, and have spirit magic summon various elemental spirits and have them be the spell, so to speak.

In fact, if there are those who've seen the classic anime series Record of Lodoss War, spirit magic would be what the elves use, while sorcery is the token mages' specialty. Clerical magic would be fairly similar to current 3.5e D&D magic, with each god/dess' magic basically being equivalent to a domain.

In any case, I'm also trying to keep it as rules-light as possible, just so most of my players (who are mainly 3.5 players) won't have a 500+ page book to chew through. I've tried to run a Basic Fantasy RPG game before, and watched as another friend brought Dark Heresy. Neither game garnered too many people, nor did either last for any decent period of time. So my thought was to keep things to a minimum and not drive players away with tons of rules.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Aniodia,
Everything you seem to be going for has already been done in Savage Worlds and its accompanying Fantasy Toolkits.  Its not super-crunchy, it uses Power Points (mana), differentiates between magic types through game mechanics, and has customizable spells via the concept of "trappings".  If you haven't already, I suggest you look it up.

savage worlds does it, but in a minimalist fashion.  Spells are basically the same and you use trappings to pretend they are different.  If you like the variety of spells in D&D you won't get that with savage worlds.  I like savage worlds, but it is far from the D&D spell system.

I'm not clear on what you don't get just by creating custom spell lists.  What makes casting a cleric spell different from a sorcery spell?  Say what you want the effect to be, and then figure out the mechanic to get that effect.