Dungeons & Sorcery Part 1

by on August 1, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

Here’s another magic system for GURPS. This one has the goal to get some of the feel of old-fashioned D&D into GURPS. This not quite a complete system, as it should include rules for a character to create a new spell (either for normal use, or as a one-off project, such as enchanting his home with protections). But I’m a long way from figuring that out, and may never get around to it (which would be Part 2).

Magic-users

Most spellcasting ‘in the field’ uses thoroughly-researched pre-assembled spells. They are effectively recipes giving the general procedure to produce the desired effect, complete with instructions on how to make small adjustments for current conditions (positions of the stars and planets, current weather, etc.). Many of these spells have limitations that may seem odd or arbitrary, and most of the time this is because it is the most stable version of the spell, and least likely to start giving odd (and potentially disastrous) results because one planet happens to be in retrograde today. As long as a magic-user has a spellbook with a particular spell available to study (and double-check for needed adjustments) on a regular basis, these spells are very reliable, and are treated as Sorcery-style powers.

The rest of the time, magic is a drawn-out, tedious affair, where the magic-user determines exactly what he wants to do, and works out all the possible variables, and then plans the best time to perform his working (“The stars are right!”). This is usually the most efficient possible time, to keep the casting energy down to something reasonable.

Sorcerers using this system, which requires study of spellbooks and lots of gesturing and chanting are generally known as magic-users.
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Elemental Channeling

by on July 12, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

A little while back Chris Rice presented an idea for a new GURPS magic system on his blog. His main goal was to use the ‘long-term fatigue’ idea from GURPS: ATE. Naturally, it immediately gave me an idea that didn’t use that at all. Instead, I turned to the concept of tally from Threshold-Limited Magic in Thaumatology.

The world flows into existence from the commingling of the four elements: Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. All magic is the process of letting the power of one of the elements flow through the caster to affect the nature of the world around him. This, however, pushes him out of alignment with the universe’s balanced state, sending him down a destructive path that can consume him if left unchecked.

This system uses two tallies (or four if it’s easier for you to think of it that way), one for the opposed elements of Fire and Water, and the other for the opposed elements of Air and Earth. Casting a spell incurs tally in that element as given on T76. This should also use the Auras optional rule; anyone who can see magic will be able to see the unbalanced state of the caster’s mystical makeup, and very possibly a non-magical physician should also be able to see this through observation of the four humors in his patient. I would also recommend allowing the Automatic Maintenance option with free ambient energy. The main way to reduce a tally is to cast a spell in the opposite element.

In terms of actual spells, instead of using the standard spell system’s elemental colleges (which each have a standard attack spell, etc.), the elements are effectively Realms as in Syntactic Magic (T188). Each element has its own role to play, and mages don’t get to just alternate between Fireball and Water Jet in combat to stay balanced.

  • Fire: The realm of energy and destruction. All methods of directly damaging something come out of Fire.
  • Air: The realm of movement and thought. Travel and divination spells come from Air.
  • Water: The realm of renewal and change. Healing and transformation spells come from Water.
  • Earth: The realm of stability and resistance. Defensive spells and many ‘buffs’ come from Earth.

Part of the point here is keep combat-useful spells from being on both ends of the same tally scale. There’s still potential for multiple ways to get something done though; Heat Room would be a Fire spell and Resist Cold would be an Earth spell…. From here, there’s a few different routes that could be taken. A complete reorganization of the standard spells as per Changing the Colleges (T41) would work (and be a lot of work), but the concept seems well suited for Syntactic magic as mentioned before, or use as an alternate structure for Ritual Path Magic. (Here’s a question: Taking a glance at Realms as Powers on T190, is there any established mechanism for having abilities rack up tally?)

An extra possibility is for each element to differ slightly in casting. Earth spells may last longer, but be shorter ranged (say by adding one to the Margin of Success for time, but subtracting one for range when using Parameter Effects, T181), while Air spells are longer ranged, but have shorter durations. Water may take longer to cast, but have a wider area of effect, while Fire is faster but must be tightly focused.

Ignoring the details of actual spellcasting, there’s other details that need looking into. This is meant as a fairly difficult/dangerous form of spellcasting, so I figure every spell costs one fatigue point as well as the tally to keep mages from just casting their way to zero after racking up a large tally (no, energy reserves and external sources of FP are not normally available). Tally recovery is slow and my initial thought is for it to be zero, and all recovery is through actually casting opposing spells. However, if you want mages to at least have the option of being specialists, recovery of 1-4 tally per day would be better. Another option is recovery by prolonged exposure to the appropriate element: sitting under a waterfall to reduce Fire tally. (I seem to remember a vague mention of just this type of thing somewhere in one of the Thaumatology books, but can’t find it.) This could lead to the seemingly counter-intuitive situation of fire mages running a water temple, or earth mages congregating on windswept mountaintops….

Each element would have its own Calamity Table (T77), though they should closely mirror each other, and can probably be put into one table with a column for each element’s particular effect. In opposition to the problems of the rest of the system, calamities are less immediately aggressive here. Use the normal threshold of 30 and +1 to the table per 5 points of tally over threshold, but only roll 2d6 on the table (this probably needs more rework, but the idea is that the current tally drives the results more than in the standard). I’d be looking at a table progression like the following:

2-10 Nothing
11-12 Quirk related to appropriate Humor
13-15 Threshold reduction
16-18 5-point disadvantage
19-20 It becomes more difficult to cast opposite-element spells
21-24 Caster has an elemental aura around him (always raining, increased temperature…)
25 10-point disadvantage
26-30 Caster is Terminally Ill
31-39 Caster death by turning into an element (gust of wind, exploding in flames…)
40+ Permanent elemental locus where the caster was

As a final note, while initially discussing this with my roommate Smudge, she came up with the idea of using a five element system (such as the traditional Chinese elements) where the goal was to stay in harmony with all five. Effectively, your tally would be the difference between the element where you’ve used the most magic, and the element where you’ve used the least.

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Full-Spectrum Powers

by on July 8, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

GURPS Powers: Enhanced Senses is an interesting project. Technically, it looks at all the possibilities for perceiving the universe, and shows how to represent them in-game by re-packaging the existing abilities. In actuality, it mostly limits itself to what is biologically plausible, and leaves much of the truly fantastic to other products; this still covers a fantastic amount of ground.

Since this is a Powers book, it starts with a look at Sources that (with Foci—generally senses or a sense organ here) define a Power in GURPS. This ranges from ‘natural’ enhanced senses, to hypercognition (concentrating your brain to nothing but the information already coming in), to implants, to actual superpowers. I’m a bit leery of the 5% cost break allowed natural biological passive senses here; this is given for “technological countermeasures ranging from TL0 herbs to advanced nanotechnology”, but since Perception rolls (including opposed ones for hiding, etc.) are part of the game definition of how senses work, this makes me a bit uncomfortable. But it does meet the system definitions for getting a such a break, and it’s a pretty tiny one.

There is then a good discussion of different qualities of senses, from Vague, to Discriminatory, and Precise, and other terms that have already been in use in GURPS. It’s a very good discussion, but stops short of being great in two ways: First, I’m not entirely happy with how the hierarchy works out, especially when Basic splits into three separate paths. But this is caused by working inside the structure of advantages already given. Second, I find the discussion, and the following section of modifiers easy to mix up. The general description of what a Precise sense is is in the middle of page 7, the modifier to make something a Precise sense is near the bottom of page 8, and I usually find myself looking for the former when needing to reference the latter. I think it would have been much better to put all the information about a particular term, what it means, and the modifier used for it, all in one place. Also, I think a short ‘under the hood’ box, spelling out in one place the definition of each standard human sense, would help with thinking about how modifying them works (i.e., ‘Hearing is a Basic sense, with intermediate-range in a 360° arc’). Of course, there’s already a couple of boxed sections in here, which do not help with the sense of a jumbled presentation.

Along the way, there’s still more useful information, such as a treatment of senses that can deal damage (an electric eel is mostly sensing his environment through his electric field; the shock it delivers is an extra). Active Electroreception (eels again) gets a write up under Vibration Sense, Infravision gets split into near infrared (modern active IR equipment) and thermal infrared (poor resolution, but you see radiated body heat), and a couple more. There’s even an entire page of skill bonuses from various sense types.

And then we get to the bulk of the book. I count about 85 ability write ups categorized by what they sense: electromagnetic radiation, electricity and magnetism, acoustics and vibrations, and the ever-popular ‘miscellaneous’ (which goes far afield, from chi to gravitational waves). This is the worked-out part of the book after the first parts establish the tools to be used. Most of these these are counted as ‘supersenses’, not really possible, but tend to show up in fiction, with almost equal numbers of ‘sensor implants’ (electronic devices) and ‘enhanced senses’ (modeled after actual abilities seen in nature, plus some that are obvious how they’d work even if they haven’t been seen). It’s a very impressive list, and I doubt I’ll ever touch the vast majority of it. Those parts I do end up using will be very handy though, and the fact that they’re part of a larger set of possibilities makes it easier to understand their niche.

As a focused product, you are generally going to be interested or not, but GURPS players not wanting to worry about outre senses may still be interested in the extra crunch given to the existing hearing distances (giving their equivalent decibel levels as a way of generating modifiers at different ranges), and the table showing just how much light corresponds to the various darkness penalties. The crunch focus keeps its usefulness down for the non-GURPS player, but the extensive listing of biological and superscience abilities could be inspirational for anyone writing up aliens and the like.

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The Magic of Points

by on June 23, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

As GURPS initially evolved, a few different subsystems started getting added on to the core attribute-advantage-skill package. One of the very early ones was the magic system in GURPS Fantasy that added spells as a complex series of skills with other spells as prerequisite dependencies, a need for an advantage to be able to use them, and so on. This would grow, and be elaborated on, until Fourth Edition’s version of Magic was a 240-page book with a couple of PDF supplements adding even more spells.

Meanwhile, the concept of advantages grew, and became more nuanced and complex, especially with GURPS Supers 2e, which introduced modifiers to advantages. In Fourth Edition the entire system got overhauled and made as complete and flexible as possible. One of the results has been a number of ideas floating around as to how to do magic using the advantage system instead of as a series of skills. SJG finally released an official product in 2015 that used this approach: GURPS Thaumatology: Sorcery. (I find it interesting that Sorcery gets put in the Thaumatology line, even though it’s a spells-as-powers system, while the related concept of magic-as-patron in Divine Favor was put in the Powers line.)

Sorcery starts off laying out some very clear ground rules: All sorcerers need to have a new Sorcerous Empowerment advantage (…which is actually built off of existing abilities, and a side note talks about how) and should probably take the related talent that boosts all rolls with sorcery. Then, each spell the sorcerer knows must be bought, at one-fifth the normal cost (i.e., if it was a normal ability instead of one of many possible spells), but the Empowerment ability must be able to cover the full cost. All of this is relatively expensive (given spell costs are from 4 to 98 points with many leveled ones capable of going higher), and will keep beginning mages in a ‘normal’ 150-point campaign either relatively low-powered, or fairly specialized into sorcery (which is not exactly against genre expectations…). Costs can increase even further as a sorcerer can only have one spell ‘going’ at a time, but can get around this by paying full cost for his most expensive spell.

Further ground rules are established with eight keywords used to define how particular spells work with consistent mechanisms instead of redefining effects, resistance, etc., every time. Since ‘obvious’ is one of the keywords, this also allows the system to easily mark which spells are easy to identify as being cast by a particular person. All spells are defined as requiring at least one second (plus one second to switch between spells) and 1 Fatigue Point to cast (with a few needing more than that, and many of the underlying advantages needed modification to bring into line), and an option is presented of speaking and gesturing instead of the fatigue cost, with the idea that character would then need to do any two of the three (so, speaking and spending fatigued while bound, etc.). Finally, a sorcerer is actually able to improvise spells (to make up for the limited options at high cost), easily if they’ve spent ten times as many points on Empowerment than what the spell requires, or ‘hardcore improvisation’ involves spending 3 FP and a Will roll to cast any spell once that would be valid to learn with his current Empowerment. This could allow casting effects not covered by any spell, but it’s noted that the GM has final say, and could declare that only existing spells can be improvised (in fact, the author’s intent is more to allow a completely new spell only if the GM decides that it’s one that should already exist in the game world, but just hasn’t been written up yet).

The bulk of the book is taken up with the write-ups of 48 spells under this system (all adaptations of spells from Magic). While that is a good number to start with, it actually works out to about two spells per college in the normal skill-based system (and these are categorized in accordance with that), so no one subject gets very much attention, and building a specialist mage (rules for which are given) would be difficult currently. The surprising part is that the attack spells tend to be the cheapest, while ‘utility’ spells tend to be expensive; if you consider GURPS advantage pricing to be reasonably well balanced, this perfectly fine, but it is surprising when you’re used to systems that keep the nasty magical hurt people abilities under the lock and key of higher spell levels.

Surprisingly, there is also a six-page section on enchanting items, with another page on economics giving the wages of an enchanter at various Tech Levels (which affects the item prices!). There’s already been a couple of different systems for enchanting in GURPS, including an extensive one in Magic. That one I never cared for, as it’s geared around making very weak magic items, or making it so hard to do (so players don’t just make everything themselves) that it seems unlikely anyone would bother. This system is more flexible (Magic gives what kind of item each spell can be enchanted into, while Sorcery lets the enchanter choose his materials), but still tries to put some interesting brakes on PC enchanters by requiring more powerful items be made from more valuable items. It’s still costly, using “Spending of Yourself” in Thaumatology to require a few character points to be spent on creating non-trivial items as well as a decent amount of time. My main problem with the system is that it still assumes that any spell can be enchanted into an item, and anything that isn’t a spell can’t. However, with the points-based costs of everything, it would not be hard to work around this. A smaller problem I have is that it is assumed an existing item is being enchanted, and there’s still no support for enchantment through the act of creation, which is popular in a lot of fiction.

Conclusion

As a drop-in-and-play system, Sorcery is still underdeveloped, as the relatively low number of specific spells quickly becomes a problem. Hopefully, we will see sequels dedicated to rounding out the system some more (it should be noted here that an early version of this system appeared in Pyramid Vol 3, #63, and it has eighteen fire spells that aren’t in the current volume; also, Pyramid Vol 3 #82 included two more spells and a full sorcerer template for use with the Dungeon Fantasy line). Even if/when there are further volumes, an eager GM is going to need to make multiple purchases (of course, Google searches for other GM’s spells will help); I think this could be a great place for an eventual package deal.

That said, it’s a great book for tinkering GURPS GMs on two levels: First, all the mechanics are explained (though often kept out of the way in clearly marked boxes) so it is not hard to start making new spells on your own with just Basic Set (though Powers would help a lot). Second, the solutions for how to build some of the spell effects are very inventive, and there are ideas to be stolen here that can be used in completely different contexts.

As a magic system, it provides a very different feel to the standard GURPS solutions as there are no magic skill rolls. An attack spell still needs a ‘to-hit’ roll, and the target gets a defense roll, but normally a mage has to make a skill roll to cast the spell before even getting to that point. Most of the systems in Thaumatology don’t change this basic fact, but merely reduce the number of skills in use from dozens for the standard magic system (up to hundreds for a ‘know-it-all’ mage) to about a dozen in Path/Book, Syntactic, and related systems. Here, the relatively high expenditure of points declares this to be something the character can reliably do, and the initial point of failure is removed.

Also, since there’s no need for the logical prerequisite chains of the skill-based system, it’s possible for a GM to create a spell set that has deliberate holes in it. The standard skill-based system was built around mages learning small effects and working up to large ones, with enough prerequisites drawing from other areas to cause trouble if a GM wanted to disallow one college. Most of the other systems have enough flexibility that a mage can always do a small spell (light a fire) if he has a large spell. Only Path/Book and Sorcery can say A does not imply B (and Path/Book is built around longer rituals and hidden effects instead of the endless potential for flashiness in Sorcery).

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Studying Magic

by on June 11, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

A common problem with generic role-playing systems is that they often have non-generic answers to important questions.

For instance, Traveller was originally meant as a generic SFRPG, before it started generating a setting that pretty well took over the line in later iterations. But even sticking with the early, non-setting specific materials, it still has a number of assumptions built into the basic rules. Most notably, a severely range-limited hyperspace FTL system keeps it from feeling like, say, Star Trek, without going in and completely redoing that section. Similarly, for some time GURPS had a single magic system, that while very good in its own right, had its own flavor. Other systems got introduced in various worldbooks during 3rd Edition, but it would take a 4th Edition book to really look at the problem.

GURPS Thaumatology is a big book about magic systems (plural). It has a number of different systems to use, and some general talk about the ways magic can work in a world, and how this might be reflected in the game, all so a GM can have a system that feels right.

Variations on a Theme

Thaumatology starts out with a chapter on how magic works in general (magic as art vs as engineering, Law of Contagion, etc.), and then goes on to an extensive chapter that just deals with tweaking the normal GURPS skill-based system.

Just doing that provides a lot of food for thought, with a vast array of options. This ranges from different tweaks to the advantage that allows spell-casting, to the possibility of basing spell casting on something other than intelligence (say, willpower). There’s discussion of changing around the spell lists (including one thorough worked example), and prerequisites, and even a look at what types of shapeshifting fit with different background cultures. And there’s a too-brief look at how to enforce the ‘mages wear robes’ trope (the two methods looked at are skill penalties for encumbrance or for the amount of iron worn). In all cases, the options get the usual GURPS thoughtful look over, complete with the likely effects on the game.

The chapter after that presents bigger variations on the standard system; these are sections that deal with an overall rework of the system, instead of a bunch of little options. The first one is the idea of using the skill-based system for clerical magic as was presented in GURPS Religion, with a few more notes added.

After that comes a section on Ritual Magic, which is an expansion of a system suggested in Basic Set. There, it got about half a page, and here it gets four, which goes much more in-depth as to how to make it work. In this case, it simplifies the skill system down to colleges, with all the spells in the college attached directly to that. Then comes Threshold-Limited Magic from an early issue of Pyramid, which replaces the fatigue cost with a tally that limits casting by putting the mage at personal risk when he does too much.

Then “Mandatory and Significant Modifiers”, are more of a tool kit again. It proposes giving skill modifiers for various astrological or symbolic concerns, possibly being used to overcome a flat overall penalty (or they may be needed to be able to cast at all!), and several tables in the appendix give details. Finally, “Assisting Spirits” has the idea of a character getting a large break on spellcasting… by making a contract with another being that provides the bulk of the power—at an appropriately steep price.

Physical Magic

The next chapter takes a look at the use of physical objects for magic, first looking at the inherent properties some things may have, and how they could be used as another system of modifiers for a regular spell-casting system. Then about seven pages are given to alchemy, including thoughts on allowing characters to come up with new concoctions, or even treating it as a gadgeteer advantage.

After that, there is a serous look at enchanting items, starting with the standard systems given in Basic Set and Magic, and how they can be tweaked for the needs of a campaign. Some more serious alternatives are looked at with the idea of age granting power to items (after all, all the most powerful items in fiction are immeasurably old…). Also covered are all of the possibilities of great deeds, regular use and the like causing an item to become magical on its own. Finally, there is a discussion of items with a will of their own, from how they are created under the normal enchantment rules, to how to write them up as a character.

The Path of the Book

After this Thaumatology finally starts going further afield. The next chapter covers what’s called Path/Book Magic, which is based off a Third Edition system that originally appeared in GURPS Voodoo. Meant to act like a lot of real-world magic traditions, all ‘spellcasting’ is in the form of rituals that generally involve gathering energy, and then expending it for the particular effect. This is still effectively a skill-based system, but it concentrates on one skill: Ritual Magic. That skill, and skills for each particular tradition—a ‘path’ or ‘book’—makes up all the skill entries on the character sheet, which is a lot more compact than the normal system.

However, each tradition contains a limited number of particular spells, which are then cast at a specified penalty to the base skills. These are also more general spells than the standard ones, with the area of effect, duration, or number of targets being decided by the caster, which modifies the skill, energy, and time needed. The system is arranged around wider-ranging, and more subtle, effects than the usual ‘mage as artillery’ systems seen in many RPGs, though very high skill levels can allow a character to shortcut many limitations. After a fairly thorough grounding in the system, the chapter concludes with ten sample paths and three books.

How to be Flexible

The next chapter then gets to the idea of cutting loose from pre-defined spells completely, and gives a couple major versions of that idea. The first is the use of symbols, or runes, which give a set of concepts to work with, which are then combined into a spell. This allows for inventiveness from the player, and the use of Symbol Drawing skill and skill in each symbol used (which means a character can easily be better at certain types of effects). Thaumatology then gives a couple of sample traditional systems, and gives ideas for using rune stones or drawing symbols fresh and the like.

Then is Syntactic Magic, which works similarly, with everything split up into categories, which need to be worked out by the GM, though two general schemes are presented: First, ‘Verb-Noun’ magic, where every spell consists of what is being done to whom. It’s mentioned that mages can potentially leave some normal parameters (like duration) undefined, and let his margin of success determine it. To that end, there’s also options as to whether certain effects take more energy or more skill to pull off, and lots of advice and tables for modifiers, depending on which way the GM goes. Second, ‘Realms and Power’ focuses on how much a mage can do with any particular realm as defined by leveled advantages (one side box also discusses the possibility of recasting this entire idea as a power structure from GURPS Powers, which would be mechanically much more complex to work out, but would tighten up the mechanics and definitions—which is great for consistency, and horrible for letting the GM insert plot-appropriate easing and tightening of restrictions). In both cases, the emphasis is on flexibility, with characters/players defining what they’re doing as they go, with the system defining what the limits and costs are, instead of working with a rigid list of spells.

Magical Advantage

The last ‘crunchy’ chapter points out that many of the advantages presented in Basic Set could easily have a magical origin. There’s some good discussion of how some traditional magical powers are represented in advantages, and there’s a couple pages of recapitulation of the basics from Powers (which is good for not requiring that book for this, but is the type of repetition that 4th Ed has tried to avoid). There’s good advice on supernatural servants (bound demons, spirit familiars, etc., done as Allies and Patrons), and spirit vessels (someone possessed by a spirit), effectively the methods where a character gets magic from another character.

My Kingdom For a Mage!

At the end of the book, Thaumatology returns to the discussion of magic instead of magic systems it began with. In this case, the chapter is about the nature of a campaign dealing with magic, and magic’s place in society and the like, instead of general thoughts of how magic works. One of the first sections notes that it probably not worth the GM’s time to work on an elaborate magic system unless magic is going to be a central pillar of the campaign. …It would have been best to present that advice up front, before going through two hundred pages of just that.

The more social discussion is then followed up by thoughts on particular game styles, most clearly when it comes to emulating how magic seems to function in a lot of superhero stories. The chapter then finishes up with four different campaign frameworks, describing settings where the nature of magic has much to offer in terms of adventure.

Conclusion

One of the brilliant moments of GURPS Space was boiling every form of FTL travel down to one of three general types and then showing how to vary them to produce anything ever seen in science fiction. Of course, how FTL drives work doesn’t really have any real influence on game mechanics the way the intensely personal nature of spellcasting does. Still, I consider it a missed opportunity that Thaumatology, for all of its wide-ranging discussion of a number of different systems and their variations, doesn’t even begin to provide a framework of discussion by taking a real comparative look at its own systems, grouping and giving an overview of them.

It is also worth noting that there are four different magic systems that currently get a fair amount of use in GURPS, each with its own distinct mode of operation, and none of them are in Thaumatology. The original magic system (magic as skills) presented in Basic Set and Magic still gets most of the attention. Second is Ritual Path Magic (magic as player/GM mediation) which got its own supplement after being introduced in Monster Hunters, but drew inspiration from several parts of Thaumatology. Divine Favor (magic as Patron) isn’t nearly as popular as the first two, but does see regular use. Finally, Sorcery (magic as Powers) just recently came out, and perhaps won’t see that much use, but so far seems to have a lot of people wanting to use it, and is based off a popular idea.

In the end, Thaumatology is an expansive, wide-ranging book with a lot of ideas for the inventive GM. But, while it has several pre-packaged systems, if that’s what you want, you’re better off skipping this book, and going for one of the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you don’t play GURPS, but want to tinker around with a different magic system, this isn’t as good at cross-system inspiration as some other GURPS supplements, but it does have a lot to say, and there’s very little out there that addresses the the question at all.

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