Some of my favorite magic side effects:
-Nosebleeds. Never gets old.
-Coughing up blood. The good ol’ “cough into your hand and pull it back to see blood” also never gets old.
-Headaches. You keep fighting as your head pounds, desperately telling you to take a break. At first they fade within minutes when you stop using magic, but overtime, they become chronic.
-Fatigue. After a big battle, you stand triumphant, and then just fall asleep on the spot.
-In a similar vein, overuse causing you to straight up faint rather than just fall asleep. Darkness begins to overtake your vision in the middle of battle, unconsciousness abruptly looming over you.
-Any of the side effects happening to another person. Maybe two close characters are connected, and whatever side effects character A would normally endure are transferred to character B. When A uses a blast of magic B screams loudly because holy shit that hurt.
-Magic gradually deteriorating your mind. Using it too much eventually caused hallucinations and an inability to retain memories, or even larger scale memory loss.
Feel free to add more, I’m looking for some to steal
-CONVULSIONS–you are a conduit for forces that were not meant to flow through feeble human flesh, it’s natural that your nerves would short-circuit.
-Nausea/Throwing up. I mean, hey, it happens when people run marathons all the time.
-Sometimes you just straight up get overtaken by whatever magic you’re tapping into. Maybe you’re a warlock and your patron is like, “Okay, I mean, if we’re going to play it like this–” *uses you as a meat puppet*. Or a mage calls upon the storm, and then the storm just… doesn’t leave. Congratulations. You threw a molotov at the problem and now your problems turned into different problems.
-Lowered inhibitions and manic states, like you’re drunk or amped up on way too much caffeine or both. Your will-they-won’t-they romantic interest claps you on the shoulder with a “Good Job” after you just pulled off an absolutely bonkers spell and you just fucking dip them and kiss them full on the mouth before you’re fully aware of what you’re doing.
-General delirium, the battle has ended and you’re acting like you just came out of wisdom tooth surgery.
-OLD WOUNDS REOPENING. YOUR BODY SIPHONING OFF ITS OWN HEALING ABILITY TO PUSH ITS ENERGY TOWARDS YOUR MAGIC.
