7 Best Low Fantasy TV Shows With Perfect Magic Systems

Image via The CW Published Oct 1, 2026, 6:54 AM EDT Jennie Richardson is a TV Features and Lists Writer for Collider, and a graduate student pursuing an MFA in Fiction Writing. In other words, she really loves stories. Sign in to your Collider account While high fantasy shows are excellent for escaping from the real world and into complex, far-away ones, there's truly nothing like a great low fantasy show. The best low fantasy shows are grounded in the real world or a version of it, but the main storylines are driven by some sort of fantastical or supernatural element. This can look like shows that explore how fantastical beings exist alongside humans in the real world, as well as those that show normal people suddenly having to adjust to learning about the existence of the fantastical. High fantasy shows primarily need a vibrant and well-developed world to succeed, while low fantasy shows require a strong magical system. Great low fantasy shows have an excellent understanding of how the fantastical or supernatural elements of the series exist within this world, as well as how they impact everyone in it, and to what extent others are aware of it. These series take existing lore and expand on it to truly make it their own. Here are the seven best low fantasy shows with perfect magic systems, ranked. 1 'The Vampire Diaries' (2009–2017) Image via The CW Based on the book series of the same name by L. J. Smith, The Vampire Diaries follows a seemingly ordinary teenage girl named Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev), who has been grieving since the deaths of her parents four months earlier in a car accident that only she survived. All Elena wants to do is fly under the radar, which is hard enough to do in a town as small as Mystic Falls, VA. Since the accident, though, everyone around Elena has been paying too much attention to her. On her first day back at school, Elena sparks an intense connection with new student Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley), who has just moved to town with his brother, Damon (Ian Somerhalder). Unbeknownst to the rest of Mystic Falls, though, Stefan and Damon are actually vampires who lived in Mystic Falls before they were turned. Now, they're back in town, and they're just the tip of the iceberg of the fantastical beings lurking around Mystic Falls. The Vampire Diaries has a truly incredible and creative magic system, expanding on existing vampire lore in clever and bold ways with the inclusion of elements like the Daylight Rings, the Originals, and the dopplegängers. 2 'Percy Jackson and the Olympians' (2023–Present) Image via Disney+ Based on the book series of the same name by Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians follows a 12-year-old named Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell), whose life is turned upside down when he learns that he is the son of the Greek god Poseidon. Percy's mother, Sally (Virginia Kull), has done her best to give him a normal life, but when monsters start aggressively hunting him, she's forced to take him to a safe place for demigods called Camp Half-Blood. On the way to the camp, Sally is taken, and Percy becomes determined to get her back. Soon after getting to camp, Percy learns that Zeus' (Lance Reddick) Master Bolt has been stolen, and he is the number one suspect. Thus, Percy is sent on a quest to go get the bolt back, which means going all the way to the Underworld to confront the other main suspect, Hades (Jay Duplass). To accompany him on the quest, Percy chooses his best friend, a satyr named Grover Underwood (Aryan Simhadri), and Annabeth Chase (Leah Save Jeffries), a daughter of Athena (Andra Day). Percy Jackson and the Olympians has a fantastic magic system that cleverly weaves the Greek gods into nearly every aspect of the world, while still keeping them, their children, and the monsters from their world a secret from most mortals. 3 'What We Do in the Shadows' (2019–2024) Image via FX Based on the 2014 film of the same name, What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary series about four vampires and their familiar who all live together in a Staten Island mansion. Traditional vampires Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) all came to New York over a century ago after being tasked with conquering the area (of which the specific details were left vague). They live with energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) and Nandor's familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who dreams of becoming a vampire one day. What We Do in the Shadows is a hilarious hangout sitcom that pairs typical day-to-day problems with the unusual obstacles that come with being a vampire. The show's worldbuilding and implementation of vampire lore are extremely clever and laugh-out-loud funny. In one episode, the vampires learn that, because they died when they were turned, they all have ghost versions of themselves out there. This world also explores how the vampires are impacted by the existence of other fantastical beings and how the vampires of Staten Island as a whole collectively choose to organize themselves. Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance. 💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power) 👒Grand Line(One Piece) 🐺The Continent(The Witcher) 🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson) FIND YOUR WORLD → 01 What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic. ASomething ancient and half forgotten that came down through my family. BSomething completely ridiculous that works in a fight and gets a laugh. CNo magic at all, just training, potions and a very sharp sword. DSomething I inherited from a parent I have barely met. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own. AA fellowship drawn from every corner of the world who barely trust each other. BA crew I picked up one at a time, all of whom would die for me. CTwo or three people I would never describe out loud as friends. DTwo mates from school who are exactly as out of their depth as I am. NEXT QUESTION → 03 Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live. AA high city of white stone with the sea somewhere far below. BA ship under sail, with an island ahead that nobody has mapped. CA rented room over a tavern, in a town I am leaving in the morning. DA cabin at a summer camp with everybody else already awake outside. NEXT QUESTION → 04 How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse. AI am not, because somebody far older than me decided this was my duty. BTreasure, and I am not always careful about whose it used to be. CI take contracts, since people will pay well for what they will not touch. DI am fifteen and this is all technically a school trip. NEXT QUESTION → 05 There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark. ASend word to somebody who has seen this before, then hold the line. BWalk straight in, because it is interesting and possibly edible. CAsk what it has been eating and what the village is willing to pay. DWork out which myth it escaped from, then improvise very badly. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does. AAn ancient evil that has been patient for several thousand years. BA government that has spent a long time calling itself the good guys. CA man who turns out to be far worse than anything I hunt for money. DA god, or possibly my own family, and quite likely both at once. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it. ASome things are worth defending even when the odds are hopeless. BNobody gets to tell me where I can go or what I am allowed to want. CPick the lesser evil, and never pretend afterwards that it was not evil. DMy friends come before anything a prophecy has to say about it. NEXT QUESTION → 08 A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world. AIn a song, in a language hardly anybody still speaks. BAs the one who got there first and proved the whole thing was possible. CBarely, and mostly wrongly, in ballads I would absolutely hate. DOn a plaque at a camp, read by kids about to do the same thing. REVEAL MY WORLD → The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return. Middle-earthYou belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime. This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends. You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line. The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight. You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot. The Grand LineYou want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there. One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together. You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea. The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it. You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it. The ContinentYou would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated. Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept. You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer. The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people. You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong. Camp Half-BloodYou want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you. Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse. You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for. The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way. Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 4 'Pushing Daisies' (2007–2009) Image via ABC Pushing Daisies is a fairytale-style procedural that takes place in a surreal and whimsical version of the real world. Ned (Lee Pace) owns a pie shop and lives a quiet, mostly isolated life. He works very hard to keep his secret: that he has the power to raise the dead with a single touch, barring a few important rules. In his spare time, Ned uses his power to help Private Investigator Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) solve murders by temporarily waking the victims and asking who killed them. When the latest murder victim is Ned's estranged childhood sweetheart, Chuck (Anna Friel), he risks everything to bring her back from the dead. They quickly get to know each other again as adults, and she starts a new life in hiding after her very public murder. There's just one catch: Ned and Chuck can never touch, or she will go back to being dead again forever. While the main fantastical aspect of Pushing Daisies is Ned's power, the entire world of the show is perfect for a low fantasy series. Each week, Ned, Emerson, and Chuck solve a bizarre and over-the-top murder mystery that could only take place in a world like this. Additionally, Ned's powers and the rules attached to them are very clever, and they drive multiple of the main emotional conflicts of the show. 5 'The Good Place' (2016–2020) The Good Place follows Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a selfish woman who wakes up in the Good Place to learn that she just died in a freak accident. Eleanor knows that she wasn't a good person on Earth — and she never tried to be, either. She also doesn't believe that she was terrible enough to have to go to the Bad Place, though. After soon realizing that she was sent to the Good Place by mistake, Eleanor asks her mistakenly assigned soulmate, former Ethics and Moral Philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), to teach her how to be a good person before she gets caught. The Good Place is grounded in the real world, and a significant portion of the show takes place in it, particularly through flashbacks to the lives of Eleanor and her new afterlife acquaintances before they died. Even the world of the afterlife feels very grounded in reality. The Good Place is made to look like a collection of ideal human neighborhoods, and the show is packed with pop culture references throughout. The series also has a fresh and bold take on the afterlife, as well as on what it truly means to be a good person. 6 'True Blood' (2008–2014) Image via HBO Based on the books by Charlaine Harris, True Blood follows Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a waitress who lives in the small town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. Although Sookie is very kind and friendly, she often feels out of place, primarily due to her ability to read the minds of everyone around her. For the last two years, vampires have been existing out in the open after the invention of a synthetic fake blood replacement called TruBlood. When Sookie meets a vampire named Bill (Stephen Moyer) at work, she's immediately drawn to him, in part because she can't hear his thoughts. The bulk of the world is still very prejudiced towards vampires, and some people are interested in stealing, selling, and using their blood, which is like a drug to humans. As such, when Sookie starts to fall in love with Bill, a great deal of her town is against their romance. Additionally, right around the start of the series, local human women connected to vampires start getting murdered. True Blood is very grounded in the real world and the town of Bon Temps, but this version of the real world has a brilliant twist through the existence of TruBlood. Most vampires just want to be treated like anyone else, but prejudice and ulterior motives from powerful people pose a threat to even some of the most dangerous creatures in existence. 7 'Supernatural' (2005–2020) Image via Warner Bros. Supernatural starts with a simple premise: 22 years after their mother was killed by a demon, brothers Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) learn that their monster-hunting father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has just gone missing. While searching for him, the brothers spend each episode driving around the country and saving people from supernatural beings. With each season, though, the show expands on its magic system with the introduction of new lore. Most notably, Season 4 marks a crucial shift for the series with the introduction of angels, starting with the character of Castiel (Misha Collins). It's difficult to think of any existing mythological, fantastical, or religious lore that does not make an appearance at some point throughout the course of Supernatural's 15 seasons. While the primary points of otherworldly focus throughout the series are on angels and demons, the show also has episodes that feature imaginary friends, a real-world version of The Wizard of Oz that turns out to be based on true events, and even leprechauns. Supernatural's take on all of the existing lore that it includes is extremely clever and unique, setting it apart from other past depictions of these myths and stories. Additionally, through it all, the series stays grounded through its focus on each of its main characters' arcs and emotional conflicts. Supernatural Release Date 2005 - 2020-00-00 Network The WB, The CW Cast Jensen Ackles Dean Winchester