Incarnum

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Incarnum is a Dungeons and Dragons 3.5e magic system introduced in the game book Magic of Incarnum that earned the title of "Most Confusing System Ever."

OK, so this is how it works: you have a bunch of mystical energy constructs called Soulmelds that sit where your magic items go, except you can't have more than one per item slot (which they call Chakras) unless you take a feat, and they don't stop you wearing magic items most of the time.

You then have two non-exclusive ways of charging these up: you can put points of magic gunk called Essentia in them to increase properties of your Soulmelds like DCs and bonuses, or you can bind them to a chakra (sometimes you can choose from a bunch of chakras for one soulmeld, unless you're a Totemist which has a special chakra that isn't actually a body part that turns the energy thing into a monster body part like claws), which does stop you wearing a magic item, but it becomes about as strong as a magic item. At high levels of Incarnate, or other meldshaping classes if you take the appropriate feats, you can bind them to the heart and soul chakras, which replace the vest and robe/armor slots and are correspondingly more powerful.

You can redistribute the invested essentia each turn with a swift action between anything that uses essentia, granting you a great deal of versatility. That is, unless you take a feat that you can invest essentia into, in which case any essentia you apply is locked all day (because fuck you, that's why). The amount of essentia you can invest in each of these things is limited by your Constitution modifier or an arbitrary number based on your level, whichever is lower, which keeps you from pumping your entire essentia pool into one ability and doing that over and over. You'll want to invest resources into expanded essentia capacity, because the arbitrary number only goes up every five or six levels at first and then slows down to a crawl of every ten levels at epic. For some reason, it's stuck at 4 between levels 18 and 30.

The purpose of the Essentia casting system was to make a unique magic system for D&D, unlike the standard Vancian magic, the spontaneous casting of sorcerers/bards, the points-based system of psionic classes, the at-will casting of Warlocks, the horribly broken skill-based casting of truenamers, the pact magic of binders, the item-based casting of artificers, and whatever the fuck was happening in The Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic. The result is this mass (and mess) of rules. Once you get used to it, it's not as unwieldy as it looks, and totemists are among the most thematically awesome classes in the game. "What's the scariest thing you ever ran into? Yeah, I can do that too."

Astute players might notice that most soulmelding classes can emulate magic items, making them potentially a decent user of Vow of Poverty. Very astute players will ignore this temptation regardless. Gestalts surprisingly well with Druid, since they can't have non-passive magic items anyways.

Balance wise, Incarnum leaves a lot to be desired. Power is all over the place, with Totemist a pretty solid combatant with enough versatility to be relevant beyond that, and Soulborn a solid candidate for second worst player class in the game. Incarnum, as a whole, is most effective at higher levels: the ability to replace magic items is more relevant, feats are more common, and the restrictions on essence/chakra investments more open.

One thing that gets Incarnum noticed is that you can get surprisingly far into progression through feats alone, and pick up some interesting tricks for otherwise "mundane" characters with them. This makes incarnum feats worth a note in most optimization handbooks, especially for classes that get few features (Commoner, Fighter), or little support for them and for Epic6.

Eberron

In Eberron, incarnum is native to Xen'drik, though they've spread to Shifters, who have learned a great deal about it. It's origin is unknown, but it is thought to be as old as "normal" magic and was either a: taught at the same time the dragons taught "traditional" magic b: A leftover of the Quori invasion that destroyed the giant empire c: it's a native giant tradition and/or d: the incarnum using races are descendants of the giants. Setting creator Keith Baker doesn't use Incarnum, but agrees that the fluff of it using one's own "soul energies" matches the Blood of Vol's mantra of unlocking the power in their own blood.

Pathfinder

While Incarnum didn't carry over to Pathfinder, 3PP Publisher Dreamscarred Press and author Michael "Ssalarn" Sayre brought it back as Akashic Mysteries and gives it a near-east sort of feel.