The Gaming Den

I like The Name of the Wind a lot, even though it was overhyped and lacks plot weaving. It has a scene near the beginnig of the book where the main character nearly kills himself with careless use of magic. The fact that I was able to mentally shout "No you dumbfuck, wtf you're doing" before it was revealed he screwed up contributes a lot to my liking the book.

Basically, magic comes in two types - bindings, which obey the principle of energy conservation, and truenaming, which does not.

There are easy bindings, advanced bindings, added complexity for binding objects that aren't alike. Bindings are "Duration: concentration" and it is possible (but hard) to concentrate on several at a time. Rune magic removes the need for concentration and is used to craft magic items. Knowing the bindings in a matter of reading a book, maintaining them requires experience. It is stated outright that bindings are mostly impressive due to being rare and breaking the laws of conventional physics, virtually anything is ten times easier to do in a mundane way.

Truenaming is Awesome defined even less clearly; mages tend to know a handful of names. Knowledge of names only comes with experience.

Wrapping it up. The very basic approximation of the "rules" in NotW is how magic already works: there are standard effects (roll Spellcraft and find out) and special effects you take feats/prestige classes for. A more trye to the book system I can see working in a combat-light game such as Black Forest: bindings allow a mage to be a jack-of-all-trades guy, truenaming is the schtick.