Continuing the article series from the last post, you can find the house rules I’m responding to here.
Magic-Users and Clerics (if I even decide to go with classes for my own system) always need to prepare spells.
Before we begin, some ground rules:
There are no creation of food or water spells. No magic items that spawn infinite food, no infinite water spells in the desert, no feeding a caravan on the march with magic mumbo jumbo.
There are no 5E ranger style “can’t get lost” spells. The Long Rim is a particularly easy place to navigate. It’s the habitable band of a tidally locked planet: the sun rises and sets in the West, you usually travel either north or south, there’s usually something ahead, like a city or a geographic location, and if you head too far east or west, you die. Anything more detailed than that, the day to day travel, relies on maps or scouts.
This is a game about the caravan crawl, about logistics. Deeper, it’s a game about burning yourself up, grinding yourself to dust. The spells included in 5E are intended to be a fast forward button to that kind of content, which is why they’re in that kind of game. If your players don’t care about traveling to the dungeon, grab a ranger. (This is kind of counter-intuitive because the person who’s playing a ranger probably wants to be that wilderness scout, but all of their class features make wilderness travel moot. Like the old OSR saying about how Magic-Users solve magic problems, Fighters solve combat problems, and Thieves solve dungeon problems, Rangers would probably solve travel problems. If they were utilized correctly. Which they’re not.)
A spell is made up of two components: the ritual and the component.
We’ll actually start with components. The first is material components: they’re measured by the sack and come in two flavors. The first is like an equipment kit, similar to the other kits that can be carried by other characters. Having a particular sack allows you to attempt to cast a spell or a small list of spells. If you have an “illusion spell sack”, you can freely cast simple illusion spells, with all the glass baubles and owl feathers and incense and black gloves and “blind gods eye” herbs… all the consumable and non-consumable components you need to cast those spells. The sack is not consumed, if you’ve got it mounted on a horse you’ve got what you need. Anything about the level of 5E’s Prestidigitation spell can be cast this way. Something with a bit more juice than that, like a first level 5E spell, requires the kit and an attribute check, usually a Routine (12) Aura check. Perhaps a failure means it becomes a consumable spell sack.
However, this is small-time stuff. For more powerful magic, you need raw material and time. The second kind of “spell sacks” are consumed when used. Sometimes you need a crate full of blessed iron nails and a keg of martyr tears and an entire tree’s worth of smitten ash and all of that is going to be burned up to pull off some truly awe-inspiring stuff. These materials are spent when casting the spell, they’re one and done. You want an illusion spell that hides an entire army, that makes it look like a forest on the march? Be prepared to burn the carrying load of two horses worth of materials for it.
There is another kind of component you can use, though: yourself. Just like you can burn attributes to gain an Advantage on checks, you can temporarily lose and burn attributes to create magic. This still requires the materials for the spell, but burning more attributes means you might need fewer materials, maybe down to half and quarter sacks for three or four points attribute points. This is a last resort kind of thing, spending your mind and body to act as an arcane conduit to get what you want in the universe to come true. If recovering temporarily lost attributes requires a week of rest, and burned attributes leveling up, casting spells this way, without the components to protect you from that spell burn, kills the stupid wizard that tries it too often.
Now, the ritual. Rituals take hours, even days, to perform. Using 5E terminology, the ritual is the equivalent of knowing a spell as opposed to preparing the spell. This is probably more roleplay than hard mechanic, but each ritual needs to be taught (at least you learn something in those classes you’re in debt for) or found in the world. Even then, each ritual is different for the person casting it. A teacher might be able to get you seventy percent of the way there, but you have to push yourself the last thirty. As for the actual mechanics of the ritual, they can be flavored as needed: are you a cleric, praying to your god? A druid following the leylines and lifelines? A warlock who negotiated the spell licensing fees (an excellent place to insert some debts)? A sorcerer who can actually use her flesh and blood as spell components?
Finding new spells and inventing your own probably earns the wizard experience out in the Long Rim, another subsidized action in the game to make wizards act like wizards.
You might have noticed something. If it takes long periods of time and massive amounts of materials to cast high-level magic, you might ask, how does my wizard cast fireball in a dungeon?
The inscription.
Inscriptions
It costs the same amount of time and material to cast a spell as it does to inscribe the spell onto an item, usually a staff or stave. If you want to cast a fireball, without the drawing of the circle and the focus on the Rites of Fire and the pound of ash, the ritual of the thing, you do all of that in your off time and inscribe it to your boomstick… literally. You can also burn attributes to inscribe them into equipment: this is where magic items come from. You transfer a part of yourself, your strength, your intelligence, into an item to boost the person using it. It means that while there’s no change for you until you level up, for someone else, they might be modified, changed by it.
I haven’t decided if you can burn attributes from items, breaking them in the process for an Advantage on a roll.
Cursed Items
What about being an evil piece of shit and kidnapping people to make into magic items? That’s how you get cursed items. Magic items that consume a person who was an unwilling participant of the ritual are more powerful, having more attributes added to them, but are cursed by the sacrifice’s personality and memories. These items gain Bans and Banes. A Ban is a thing an owner of a cursed item cannot do, and Bane is a mission an owner of a cursed weapon must undertake to break the curse.
For example, let’s say Benjamin has found a sword in a dungeon. The wizard in his party says it’s magic. As he grasps the hilt, he feels the force of the void grip his hand and spread up his arm: the sword is cursed. The DM asks Benjamin to make an Extreme (20) Aura check. If he passes, Benjamin would be able to throw the sword down. Unfortunately, he fails, and the DM informs Benjamin that he is now under the curse of the sword. The ban of the sword is that Benjamin can no longer willingly give up gold, even when buying supplies. The bane of the sword is the destruction of the Red Monkey Trading Company, the same company that sold the person sacrificed to the sword up the river.
All of this to say a wizard’s off time during the caravan travel is important: there are some people fishing, or hunting, or foraging, or taking care of the horses or managing supplies, but the wizard is working on their rituals so that if you go into a dungeon, they’re ready to cast spells to save lives.
This also makes wizards kind of strange and insular. They’re always by themselves, praying to their gods or walking in the woods or reading dusty tomes or tattooing themselves.
In the future, I’ll spend some time cleaning these up into actual rules, and incorporating other game ideas into them. I have an entire section on where magic comes from.