Power foci

A most obvious case is that a magic user is incapable of performing magic without the intermediary object. Commonly these are crystals, often placed at the tip of a wand or a staff. These merely help the magic user perform and direct magic but by themselves have little magical properties if any, meaning if a non magic-user were to try perform magic with one, nothing magical would happen, even if they did exactly as the magic user did.

Essentially a variation of innate magic, though commonly a component of verbal and/or somatic magic. Likely an error if used alone.

Some more traditional foci are in shape of wands or staves, though they've in modern times lost this function in most fiction (notable exception being Harry Potter series) and have become more like an amplifier rather than enabler.

There's two variations of this:
* Focus : without the foci the magic would be very vague and non-specific, utterly lacking precision. Such as trying to light a candle would blow up the whole room in flames.
* Amplifier : without the foci the magic is simply too weak to do anything else than affirm that magic is done, but not enough to actually Do anything with it.

If the foci is only a learning tool, then it's not part of this tag.

[ Magic ]
Variations: Somatic, Verbal, Symbolic, Focal, Innate