And for today it’s a question…
I just discovered your Eclipse d20 RPG the other day – clearly I am very late to the party – I was just wondering – how would one go about generating a new Spellcasting slot table – such as the one the Duskblade uses?
-Darkholme
Interestingly, while I recall a lot of requests for specific conversions, I don’t remember a prior request for how to build spell progressions in general – although it’s been touched on a few times for specific builds. In fact, there is an article discussing how to build an Eclipse clone of the Duskblade up over here. It uses Specialization and Corruption to tweak an existing progression to fit. Of course, this being Eclipse there are a LOT of other ways to build spellcasters and fighters with magical boosts to their combat styles. There’s a sub-index of some of the ways to do that (and how to build various types of martial characters in Eclipse) over here, with the articles in the series indexed at the start and related materials indexed at the end. Still other builds – such as the Bokor, the Gleaner and the Nymic Mage – have used entirely different methods.
If you want to build a new spell progression from scratch, instead of simply using Specialization and Corruption to tweak an old one, the basic building block is generally Mana as 2d4 Generic Spell Levels (averaging 5 generic spell levels per purchase. If you’re buying a lot, simply take it as 5)
- So the Duskblade gets a total of (6 x 1/2) + (10 x L1) + (10 x L2) + (10 x L3) + (8 x L4) :+ (6 x L5) = 125 Spell Levels. So that’s 25 purchases of Mana as Generic Spell Levels. Of course, that purchase should be considered Specialized, since it is divided up into a specified progression with a maximum spell level of five. So 75 CP.
- They get Twenty Base Caster Levels specialized in Duskblade Magic. That’s 60 CP.
- They get to know 21 Spells as Spontaneous Casters. That’s 42 CP. You could buy cantrips this way as well, but it’s cheaper to purchase Occult Talent, Specialized for Increased Effect (8 Cantrip Slots, but no first-level spell slots, runs off the Duskblade Magic Pool rather than providing it’s own slots, slots are acquired gradually based on level and intelligence, 6 CP).
- They get to trade around a few spell slots as they level up, but that’s just a Specialized version of Rewrite (normally found under Returning), Specialized / only works to allow changing out 2 CP worth of spells when leveling (3 CP).
- They get bonus spell slots for having a high attribute: that’s Magician (found under Rune Magic, 6 CP).
That gives us a Duskblade-style spell progression at a base total of 192 CP. Of course, we’re going to be working with a very limited spell list – a Corruption that cuts it down to 128 CP.
That is 8 CP more than simply adjusting an existing spell list as the original build did – but if you spread the cost evenly over twenty levels and round down as usual, you get the same thing. Existing spell lists normally get a slight price break simply for being standardized in any case.
And that is both how to build new spell progressions and an illustration of the major problem in actually doing so. Theme and focus are generally as important as how many spells of what levels you get. After all, a Sorcerer who was limited to Divination Spells will have some useful effects – but we could hardly say that they were as effective as one who was limited to Illusions and Divination or even just Illusion. And neither will be nearly as useful to the party as a full-access Sorcerer played with a reasonable level of competence (and yes, a “reasonable level of competence” includes not making really, REALLY, poor spell selections).
In Eclipse, such things are represented with the magic level limitations from page eleven and by Specialization and Corruption. That Diviner would almost certainly count as Specialized and Corrupted (6 CP / Level). Illusions and Divination… well, there are a fair number of useful spells in those groups, but it’s still going to be at least Specialized (9 CP/Level). If the list has a good variety of spells available to suit a particular purpose, but a fairly limited number overall… it’s Corrupted. For a fairly recent example we have the Piscin, and their extremely limited spell list.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy mechanical way to decide just how restrictive and limiting a given spell list is. Since the actual and perceived effectiveness of any given list will vary between settings and game masters that’s always a judgement call. Even worse… it will vary enormously depending on the secondary abilities any given user develops. That’s what makes the Classical Illusionist build work.
And for a few more references…
- For general information on building spellcasters, there’s an article over here.
- Making Skill-Based Partial Casters is addressed more extensively in a pair of articles over HERE and HERE.
- Martial Disciplines like you find in the Book Of Nine Swords can be built this way:
Stances (which are usually more versatile in Eclipse than in the Book of Nine Swords are covered over HERE. - Building all-out Martial Maneuvers is covered in this article. Watch out for this one; these maneuvers are designed to compete with Wizards and such.
- Entreaty Magic is for (classical) Dr. Strange style spellcasters – calling on various entities and owing them favors.
And hopefully that helps!
Filed under: d20, Game Rules | Tagged: Characters, Classless d20, d20, d20 Point Buy, Game Rules, Role Playing Game, RPG |
Emergence Campaign Weblog 
> I hope that helps.
It does, thanks!
Another Eclipse query: The abilities in 3.X all tend to completely recover on a night’s rest – but some of us tend to run fewer combats per day than the DMG suggests, because it often just doesn’t make sense to run the number you would run in a dungeoncrawl.
If I wanted to have a dial on how many of those uses the players recover per day, perhaps giving them A rest points to spend on refreshing consumed abilities when they rest, with recovering Psionic Power Points costing W points and Spell Slots costing X and Ki Points costing Y and Barbarian Rages costing Z rest points- any suggestions on the best way to do something like that? And Should that affect the point costs of the abilities if it’s done across the board at a campaign level, or no?
I think I would probably be going for it taking 3-4 nights worth of rest to recover everything, as opposed to the expected default of everything coming back on a single rest – but maybe players could make some abilities cheaper to recover by spending some extra points or something? And being able to change it easily depending on the campaign would be handy.
Thanks again!
There are a lot of ways you could do that.
If you want it thematic, it’s likely just a World Law. Perhaps Holy Powers recover once or twice a week, when the Sun Rises on a holy day, evil powers recover during the dark of the lesser (Demon) moon,(perhaps every five days as it marks out a dark pentagram in the sky), Arcane Spells must be prepared during the proper astronomical events (you could even split them up by school, thus forcing casters to vary their loadouts in thematic ways), and so on. Timing your missions becomes a serious factor.
The simplest mechanical way is to require that everyone buy their various abilities Corrupted (powered by Mana) and limit the amount of mana and uses of Rite of Chi that they can buy. They’ll have more powers and tricks available, but won’t be able to use them so often and will need to conserve their powers.
That was one of the primary balancing factors in older editions; the charts of “Prepared Spells” weren’t “daily casting”. It took 15 minutes per level of each individual spell to prepare it – and it required peaceful conditions. Spend 8 hours praying? You got 32 total levels of spells back and let the enemy prepare for you. A high level caster used all their spells? It might take them weeks to prepare them all again IF they got the time. Adventuring and only got four hours a day to prepare spells? That was 16 spell levels – 2L1, 1L2, 1L3, 1L4, and 1L5 was your spell budget for each day. And a single bump, or splash of water, while you were casting automatically ruined the spell. Worse, powerful spells took time – during which other people and enemies got to go. Trying to cast a spell without multiple other characters covering for you? You MIGHT get a simple first level spell off if you were lucky. (And minor rant over. I just rather miss the days when a mage was a luxury that parties had to work hard to support to get that occasional all-important spell…)
I thought I had replied to you after you answered me; mea culpa. I had read it, and have been thinking about it off and on since last year actually. Sorry about that. It got me to start digging into the AD&D1e and AD&D2e books more, and realizing that there’s a bunch of stuff that 3e changed, which I actually think the prior versions were better. From the spell prep times you pointed out, to stuff like the “Wall of X” spells being dispellable, with a duration of permanent rather than instantaneous, to some other things that were just better in the older editions. Lots of stuff I want to bring back to improve my future games using Eclipse and 3e, so thanks for that!
I had a followup thought on ‘Building Spell Progressions v2’ That I was curious about:
I stumbled across an article (and a forum thread) where you were talking to someone who wanted to do some kind of a 5th edition style Eclipse. Anyways, I don’t want to do a full-on 5th edition style Eclipse, but there was one thing that they mentioned that I did find interesting: The idea that you could have a single set of spell slots, independent from what you have with which to fill them.
And the last day or two I was mulling that idea over, and I was unsure how you would go about building that. CL is simple enough, you just have a single CL (or an Arcane/Divine/Psionic split) rather than one for each class, right? The slots, the spells known; that all follows from what you built here – but then you added corruption on at the end for the limited Duskblade spell selection, and applied that to the whole thing – if you’re doing a combined spell progression setup a la 5e or Trailblazer (Bad Axe Games Trailblazer) your spell selection is handled independently of your slots and CL.
Let’s say that for simplicity’s sake there was a clear way to combine the number of slots you have from your bard progression, cleric progression, and ranger progression, into a single set of slots (IE don’t worry about the logistics of what the rules are for how you combine these different sets of slots for the moment), and just look at like for like.
Your character has the slots of a 20th level divine caster, and you’re a Druid10; Cleric10, with a Divine CL of 20; You can either only prep spells as a Druid10 or Cleric10, unless you bought up the ability to prep your spells extra to close that gap, but your spell slots are a single shared set of spell slots.
Would you then only apply the limited spell selection Corruption to the spells known portion of a setup like the above?
Thanks again for making these books. I went out and bought some of your other PDFs. I like the extra builds in Volume 2. Lots to dig into. You really accomplished something with that d20 system that nobody else even seemed to dream of; in a way that really reminds me of the things that I like about GURPS, and occasionally makes me think about how I would port GURPS advantages over if they don’t already exist in Eclipse; or how I might port over more granular / fiddly GURPS style limitations and price them to be inline with Corrupted and Specialized.
Fair enough I forgot to get back to this one for a bit myself.
And you are quite welcome. While it may partially be nostalgia, I too think that first edition had some very good ideas. After all, it was written by a bunch of simulationist wargamers, and leaned heavily towards themes of survival and resource management. It’s general theme was more or less “You didn’t think it was gonna be that easy, did you?”
There was a lot more challenge to it – and that made for good long-term stories. It leaned more towards Tolkien and Narnia, rather than action movies.
Now, for spell progressions… there are a couple of ways to build open spell lists. The simplest is to simply buy a generic base caster level and Mana as unrestricted generic spell levels (unless you split them up into spell levels). Buy this setup with no restrictions and you will wind up with open access to everything.
I’m not sure why you’d want to bother though; since this wouldn’t get you access to higher level epslls and you don’t get much for casting a lower level spell from a higher level slot in this edition.
You could also just buy – say Cleric Package Deal Casting with the Conduct and Restrained limitations bought off (now costing 14 CP/Level but granting access to both Cleric and Druid spells) and Specialize the levels past 10 (does not offer access to higher level spells, just slots which can be used for lower level ones). That would total 210 CP at level 20, give you a full set of slots, and allow you to fill them with spells of up to level five.
You might need to pay some extra points to make the base caster levels simply Corrupted instead of Specialized, but that would be straightforward enough.
You;d wind up with more spells if you simply bought the base caster levels Corrupted (two progressions) and just bought Cleric Spellcasting 10 (no caster levels) and Druid Spellcasting 10 (no caster levels).
Now, if you want to dabble in a lot of lower-level magic… You could take 20 Caster Levels (Corrupted/only apply to he Paladin/Ranger list, 80 CP) and the Paladin / Ranger (Spontaneous) progression three times (120 CP in total) for Cleric, Druid, and Wizard spells. For the same per-level cost as a Wizard you cold throw in psion and psychic warrior effects. It wouldn’t be efficient, but it might be fun to have an arsenal of lower-level spell effects to play with.
So there are several ways, but I’m not sure it would be a particularly good idea.
> The simplest is to simply buy a generic base caster level and Mana as unrestricted generic spell levels (unless you split them up into spell levels). Buy this setup with no restrictions and you will wind up with open access to everything.
>generic base CL
Yep, that fits;
>unrestricted spell levels
What about if you wanted to buy mana as spell levels (either with slots, or generic similar to psionics) with “does not come with any spells known or the ability to learn spells, you need to buy that separately”, and then just buying levels of ‘Spellcasting Known’, without any spell slots? I don’t need it to adhere rigidly to RAW Eclipse: the Codex Persona character building, so long as the price estimations are reasonable.
> buying classed slots without access to higher level spells for each class
That, I think, is going in a rather different direction than the idea behind my query, so not the avenue I would want to pursue if I do run a campaign with a unified slot and CL progression.
> I’m not sure why you’d want to bother though; since this wouldn’t get you access to higher level spells and you don’t get much for casting a lower level spell from a higher level slot in this edition
> there are several ways, but I’m not sure it would be a particularly good idea.
The idea was having a simpler BAB-Like approach to slots and CL, similar to what 5e or Trailblazer does, but without all the other 5e baggage, basically as a campaign-wide setup that would make multiclass spellcasting simpler, with the idea being ‘this is how spellcasting works in this campaign, and how it’s priced, for everyone’, Buy your slots from the standardized slot progression, and then buy access to your spell lists. rather than each character building their own bespoke spellcasting setup, and possibly juggling more than one of them a la standard 3e. But, you may be right, it may not be worth the effort. As you mentioned, the only real benefit of putting spells in higher level slots is for metamagic (which they could totally do with this setup, but they’d need to take metamagics).
Maybe if they want to multiclass I just tell them to buy their CL as unrestricted and leave the rest under a more typical classed 3e configuration with more strictly typed slots.
> While it may partially be nostalgia, I too think that first edition had some very good ideas
I definitely think it’s more than nostalgia, my only AD&D experiences have been through the eye of the beholder, stronghold, and dungeon hack videogames, and I never really got into reading it until recently – so I’m viewing it with pretty fresh eyes, and liking a good chunk of what I see.
It’s been a couple years now since the last time I had a chance to run / play in a campaign (we have a 2 year old, it’s been a little over 2 years since my last campaign, go figure), and I’ve just been mulling over what setup I want to employ for my next campaigns, both for d20 and for GURPS.
On the d20 front, I know I want to use Eclipse behind the scenes, but I think I want to do up something like the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy RPG / Action Specialists profession templates to go with it, and have the players start from a ‘class’ full of point buy eclipse-built features and a ‘recommended’ build they can grab if they don’t care to tinker, or let them cherrypick bits they want according to point values.
So, Eclipse would be in use, albeit more under the hood, and then full-on freeform Codex-Persona chargen where the player decides what their ‘class’ will be more loosely and just picks stuff from the whole book that fits, I think I would allow if someone really wanted to (with likely some setting restrictions on how magic works), but I think I only have 1 guy or so who would want to go that deep into it, at least to start – the rest though, I know would be pretty happy with a buffet of class features with point costs that they can grab as they can afford (a bit inspired by the classes in Rolemaster 4e, as well as the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy book).
I’m even toying with power-level ideas. Like, maybe I will toss out the exp per level table, tell them to build characters of level ___ to start (probably 8 or 10, knowing my group), and then do advancement through use (insp by Call of Cthulhu) and through downtime training / education (GURPS basic set) from there, rather than ‘every couple sessions you get a huge power boost, just because.’ (part of this more ‘static PL’ idea I also got from M&M, which I didn’t like the gameplay of, but liked character creation).
So, I’m getting pretty off-label from typical 3e, but, probably still running Faerun, simply because I like the novels and AD&D setting books and faction conflict for it.
And I dunno what my next GURPS game will be, beyond “not Forgotten Realms, Next time I’ll run that with a hacked up d20+Eclipse”. I’m considering a scifi wuxia mashup – ridiculous kung fu on orbital space habitats, travelling between them on ‘space-whale’-esque genetically engineered chinese dragons or solar-sail ships. That could be fun. (I know I *could* do something similar with Eclipse, but it would have a more d20 feel to it, and I think that’s not what I want for that kind of game – I also just enjoy GURPS mechanics, and sometimes want to do a non-d20 game. Y’know?).
Thanks again, for the suggestions & discussion, and your game design. They’ve been inspiring. One of these days I will have to order Eclipse in paperback, just to have it on the shelf.
Looks like this got caught in the Spam folder – and when I let it out of there in “awaiting approval” after I’d already approved it. And then I had no time for weeks… I’m sorry about that, but better late than never.
I also find myself a bit unsure as to what you want; it sounds like you’re after something like the “Magic Rating” and “Generic Classes” from Unearthed Arcana (2004)? It’s usually a lot easier to talk about the end goal, and then choose mechanics to match.
One of the base Mana options is to take it as Generic Spell Levels or Psionic Power(both automatically recovered daily) – and you can further restrict it to get a specific progression.
Now, looking at fifth edition… the “Multi-class Spellcaster” table gives a final total of 4/3/3/3/3/2/2/1/1 spell slots for levels 1-9. That’s a total of 4+6+9+12+15+12+14+8+9 levels worth of spells – 89 in total. That’s actually a lot less than most 3.5 progressions provide. That’s in part because fifth edition made a great effort to keep things in the “sweet spot” before the characters became overwhelmingly powerful – but it makes it fairly easy to build:
Getting 90 Generic Spell Levels (Average 5 per 6 CP worth of Mana) calls for 18 purchases of Mana – for a total 0f 108 CP. Corrupting it into a specific progression will reduce the cost to 72 CP.
Caster levels are straightforward, and are principally limited by what kind of spells they want. Access to two lists would be Corrupted to 4 CP per caster level. The original idea might have been stopping at CL 10, so that would be 40 CP, but it’s at least as likely that it goes to CL 20 (80 CP). 152 CP is a fair chunk, but it’s a lot less than a Wizard or Cleric spends,
As for how you obtain spells… that depends on the restrictions you put on the spell list. Most of the basics are pre-defined; you have to find spells for wizardry, pay attention to an appropriate power source for divine magic, and so on. For Sorcery, you’d need to buy particular spells.
It might be simplest to – say – simply give every character spontaneous Adept or Bard style spellcasting and let them pick a theme. Warriors get – say – “(Weapon) Mastery Spells” or “Martial Disciplines” that are mostly “cast” as part of an attack action, thus behaving a bit like Martial Adepts. Roguish types might take Illusions for an actual caster-type, or Skill Enhancements and Movement abilities cast as part of other actions for swift-and-stealty types.
Actual mages might take “Healing”, or “Fire”, or any of dozens of other themes. It’s not like d20 has a shortage of specialized spells to fit any given theme. They might even buy two or three progressions (a net cost of 12 CP per level for three) thus getting several times much active magic at the cost of reducing their other abilities. It would never hit spells of above level five of course – but for a lot of campaigns that would be a good thing,
Offering pre-built character templates is certainly one way to do it – there are, after all, plenty of them on the site already. There are some options for point-by-point advancement in the web expansion if you want to look at those.
And I, personally, sometimes feel a craving for Basic Role-Playing – the system used for early-edition Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, and several other games. That was more or less the epitome of “you get more skilled, but remain human!”.
And I hope that helps!
Oh, hey! You replied! Thanks! I wasn’t sure if you saw it.
“I also find myself a bit unsure as to what you want;”
That’s fair. Maybe I haven’t communicated it very well. I’ll try to be more clear about what I’m trying to do.
“it sounds like you’re after something like the “Magic Rating” and “Generic Classes” from Unearthed Arcana (2004)”
I’m actually looking at Unearthed Arcana quite a lot. Yeah. Definitely. Eyeing up some variant of Wound and Vitality points too, and maybe Armor as DR. Not sure if I’ll go for that one yet or not.
• Magic Rating – Yes, maybe Arcane / Divine split.
• Generic Classes – Closer to full classless point buy and letting them go in whatever direction they feel they want to develop, but Generic Classes are a start.
Main goals that I’ve not yet ironed out
• Consolidating they many ability resource pools, to easily scale uses (or scale the recharge) to the amount of combat in my campaigns so the players aren’t always sitting at full resources if I’m not running combat-heavy dungeon crawls, and do more town / wilderness adventures. The slower pace of recovering slots on 2e spells is something I think I want to bring into my 3e Eclipse game. It seems a good pace for a game with a fair bit more on the rest side of the rest:combat ratio.
• Bringing back more 2e style Priest spell lists with Spheres.
Consolidation
Maybe I will have a single spell slot progression, or maybe it will prove impractical, and I will only end up consolidating all of the 1/days to run on some kind of ‘Difficult’ Ki pool or Stamina pool, or perhaps let you burn HP, or similar. I haven’t settled on the exact options, but I know I want to not have them individually tracked for every ability.
The 5e Slots
The build directions on how to make a spell slot progression separate from your list of spells known / available is pretty helpful as a start, but it doesn’t give spelless slots.
For the ‘lists’ I mostly know what I want them to be (I want most of the default PHB D&D lists, except Cleric, and weirder stuff I add will be added on top of that), I was just unsure how to go about pricing spell availability separately from slots to put them in. Like, say you have 10 levels of spell slots. How would you price it if that didn’t come with any spells known to put in them, and players had to pay separately for spells known. They might buy up to 10th level druid casting, and 7th level cleric casting, with the slots (bought separately) having to be shared between both types of spellcasting. That was the idea, but it may just not be practical. It was just an idea.
I can at least reduce the slot progressions and slow the recharge down, so maybe I’ll just keep them separate pools for each list, and focus on consolidating all the little X/Day abilities to run on ‘Difficult’. Like, for instance, instead of having spell levels all automatically recover daily, have you study to recover them for 10 minutes per spell level. (Taking it as ‘Difficult’, in Eclipse Terms, I think, regardless of whether I consolidate the slots). I think that’s ‘Difficult’ Specialized, rather than ‘Difficult’ Corrupted.
Clerics
Clerics – I’ve never especially liked the 3e take on Clerics (I find it unsatisfying that a Cleric of a god of Assassins would get almost all the same spells as a Cleric of a god of Healing and Agriculture or a god of Artifice), and was thinking I might make a new spell list based on the Spheres in the 2e PHB, so that instead of only a couple domain spells, the Clerics would get a more custom tailored list to their god, with a much smaller common list. Not trying to copy every detail of the 2e clerics, but, the idea of grouping spells into Spheres and then giving them mixes of Spheres according to their deity. And again, ‘Difficult’ Recovery as above.
Other Feats & Features
Rages, Smites, Lay on Hands, Channel Energy, and whatnot, Ideally I would key to a small number of shared ‘Difficult’ ability pools.
What about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Now?
The talk about the alternate class approach more inspired by GURPS DF, was that rather than a fixed level-by-level advancement track like in 3.5, the class would be a buffet of themed and priced abilities to be taken in almost any order (many drawn from the ones you’ve priced out from the base classes, for the base classes I end up keeping. I mentioned overhauling Priest because I don’t like 3.x Implementation as much, but also probably redoing Monk based on your old designs, and maybe also fighter, which also falls pretty flat) to take as a recommendation, but the players would be free to take the features in any order, or take something they felt was suitable for their character off-list. Treating it as more of a convenient list of suggestions for players who are overwhelmed by having a whole point-buy characters book to dig through. Much like for GURPS, where some players do a lot better if they can start with a template and make some customizations rather than if you just say “Okay you have roughly 400 points, build a GURPS Character for a Fantasy game”. Similarly, there’s a bunch of stuff I’m just pre-allocating and spending from the 504 point budget like how you give out an 8 pt HD with every level. I’m just giving everyone 1/2Lv Warcraft and Magic Rating, and pre-spending the points for their low saves and at least one good save, and 2 skill points per level (+6 at level 1), setting a slightly higher floor of stuff that everyone just gets levelups. And then they’ll only end up paying for the stuff they get on top of that, which will be fewer points for them to juggle, and I think it works in a more D&D-esque playstyle.
• BRP
I do enjoy Gold Book BRP or Mythras once in a while. They’re fun for historicals, and pretty straightforward as well.
Thanks for the reply!