Laws Of Magic Part IV – Purification and Personification

For those looking to read in order…

• Part I  – The great systems of Correspondences
• Part II – Synchronicity and The Doctrine Of Signatures. Also links so some older articles on Sympathy and Contagion (Part I and Part II) and a sample build using those principles – the Võlur.
• Part III – Using The Laws and Karma.

And now for Part IV – Purification and Animism / Personification

In “real” traditional magic Purification is a vital prerequisite for any major working. After all… since everything is connected, and there are all sorts of influences and correspondences everywhere, the first step in any major working (that’s anything that isn’t purely reliant on your personal power like “psychic” abilities and petty cantrips) pretty much has to be to clear away all of the magical influences that you don’t want getting involved. Otherwise… you’ll be incorporating all kinds of random influences into your magic. So the first step in anything major is to set up a magic circle or ward to keep outside influences out of your working – and the second is to cleanse your ritual area of any influences that are already present. The third, of course, is to specifically invite, summon, or add those influences you do want present. These days this is usually known as Casting The Circle.

Only then do you actually start in on what you want to do. Otherwise you’re risking having your working go wildly out of control and causing god-only-knows-what to happen. Classically, working without purification was risking much more than your mere life.

In legends and literature, purification is mostly a matter of personal purification. After all, having your characters stop to conduct various purification rituals before they do anything every little bit gets boring very, VERY, fast – and even entirely mortal (super-) heroes are generally capable of doing the impossible ten times before breakfast anyway. Why shouldn’t they get away with skipping the dull bits here too?

Conventionally, when it comes to personal purity in legends and literature…

• “White” wizards are likely to have to refrain from sexual activity and/or most personal emotional relationships, or avoid certain foods, or follow strict rules to avoid “sin”, or take ritual baths (or possibly never bathe so as to avoid dissipating their personal energies), or spend time in a sweat lodge, or dance and chant, or any of a hundred other methods. In most such cases, the potency of their magic relies on how pure they are, although failure chances and such do show up in some cases.
• “Black” mages tend to offload their need for purity on other people – which is why they’re big on virgin’s blood, child sacrifices, and stealing the power of untainted magical nexi and items. Thus they weaken and corrupt the sources they draw on – which they care little about because they tend to throw them away as they weaken and grab new sources of power. Black Magic thus inherently taints and corrupts both the area around the user and the sources of magic he or she draws upon.
• Elementalists, “Nature Mages”, or “Priests” tend to just bind themselves to a particular source or type of power (and usually one they have a natural affinity for at that) or two – thus making it relatively easy to remain “pure” by not interacting with other kinds of magic. All those systems of freeform magic that only apply to particular fields probably work like this.

Which is at least one way in which the (rather boring) traditional generic ritualist – who can try to do almost anything at all given sufficient time in which to work – turns into the familiar specialist-in-a-field / “elementalist” / “necromancer” / whatever role-playing-game quick spellcaster who can keep up with the action but has a strictly limited variety and supply of spells.

Purification is even less important in most RPG’s though, simply because in such games most spells are preset, as with Amber’s “Hung” spells, d20’s “Prepared” spells, or World Tree’s “Grafted” spells. When the effects are set down in the game rules, active purification usually falls by the wayside. Why bother when that fireball wand is essentially every bit as “mechanical” as a grenade launcher?

With systems like that… if you needed to purify yourself, you presumably did it while you were getting your spells ready to go. Once a spell is hung, assembled, or grafted, it is pretty much independent of outside influences – just as a grenade will go off regardless of where it is when you pull the pin (at least barring really insane environments such as the surfaces of neutron stars or “antimagic” zones).

Still, there are echoes of the idea in most role-playing games; that’s presumably where cursed items come from – and it’s why half the powers of The Practical Enchanter’s Wards Major are normally selected randomly; the area covered by such a Ward is usually just too big to purify effectively before it’s enchanted.

Games that happen to have a (usually secondary) ritual magic system or adhere to “only blunt weapons for priests (so that they are not rendered impure by the intent to shed blood, like early AD&D) usually already include some nods to the idea of ritual purity – but if you want to emphasize it a bit more, noting that mages must spend some time every day in meditation to cleanse their minds, or spend a day of downtime not casting anything so as to purify the energies of their chakra every so often, or burn the occasional stick of special incense to let it’s smoke carry away malevolent demonic forces, or never speak an impure language, or whatever, as a part of being a spellcaster, will do it. You can even give it a small penalty to ensure that the players make a note to do it. 5% chance of spell failure per week missed to a maximum of – say – 10% per spell level – will be plenty of incentive for your spellcasters to find an hour or so a week for some purification ceremonies.

Personification is basically Animism – the belief that objects, places, creatures, and possibly even abstract concepts, have spirits of their own, are at least somewhat aware of the world, and can act in their own ways. From this point of view there is no sharp distinction between the spiritual and physical aspects of the world – or between mankind and the rest of the universe. Of all the classic laws of magic… it is perhaps the oldest and most universal. The idea is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages for it – or even for “religion”. It is unquestioned; Animism simply IS.

It’s true origin lies deep in infancy. Even infants as young as three months of age seem to realize that objects continue to exist when they’re out of sight. Soon after that they begin to understand that not much happens around them unless something makes it happen.

So what makes most things happen around an infant? Sometimes it’s wind, but most of the time it’s a creature – occasionally a family pet or other animal, but most of the time… it’s other people. Infants do tend to be kept safe, warm, and tucked away in quiet, stable, places after all.

It’s not much of a jump to the idea that when things happen… it’s probably people of some sort. Even if you can’t see them, bigger and older people do all kinds of marvelous things. They bring you food, they mend broken toys, they bring fire and keep you warm. So things like lightning, wind, the growth of plants, the flight of birds, the movement of celestial objects, and the great eruptions of volcanoes… are probably acts of even bigger and older people. Sure, some spirits (like some people) are relatively simple and are only good at a few things – but others, like the Great Sky Spirit, are vast and complex.

And, as children grow… a rich animistic overlay of gods, nature spirits, haunts, and fancies grows with them, cast over cold reality like a warming blanket. So you asked for what you wanted or needed. And if, in extremis, that failed you and you died… well, you didn’t pass on that experience. And those times when – against all odds – you succeeded, soon passed through storytelling into legend. What further proof could a member of a small tribe ask for?

Older human brains play into that worldview in another way. The brain is a survival mechanism. It looks for patterns, for ways to survive and prosper in the present – and to predict and influence the future. When the patterns are beyond it’s current understanding, and appear impossible to change to suit itself, stress sets in. The brain starts throwing preconceptions, fantasies, and wild ideas into the desperate effort to find a manipulable pattern.

And waiting there, from early childhood, in the minds depths… is Animism. From a time when life was controlled by mighty beings who did mysterious things for no reason that you really understood – but whom could be influenced to fulfill your needs when you made noise. Did you have a stuffed animal as a child that you talked to? Did you hide under the covers to keep the monsters from getting you? Have you sworn at your car or your computer while trying to get it to start? Then congratulations! You are a practicing animistic mage. Most of us are, if only because It’s VERY hard to get rid of the feeling that threatening that annoyingly balky piece of equipment with being thrown away will help somehow.

Animism is so deeply embedded in human cultures and thus gaming magic that it’s barely even noticed. Look at the setting of your game. Are their various gods of nature and natural phenomena? Are there elemental entities or storm spirits? Do magical items respond when commanded? Are there haunted places, sacred groves, spirits of the land, and great totems that control animals? Do older weapons have proper names and perhaps powers due to their growing legend? Can you speak to the spirit of a mountain or a river? There’s a reason why no one questions that sort of thing when it’s put into a setting. Every fantasy setting has some of that sort of thing.

About the only way that “Personification” elaborates on basic Animism is to say that Animistic Spirits tend to react in kind and can be channeled – and that this is an entirely valid way to deal with the unseen world. Are you a noble hero serving the equally-noble Sun God? Then the Sun God will tend to answer your pleas and will support you as you support him. Congratulations; you’re a Paladin. Do you demand that dark forces do your will and strike down your enemies? Then they will demand equally dark deeds and offerings from you in exchange. Do you attempt to gently persuade locks to open even if you don’t have the key? Then the locks may refuse, or gently ask for a few drops of oil in exchange, or try to talk you into going away – but the are most unlikely to demand anything much more burdensome. If you’re polite and reasonable… then so are they.

Purification and Animism can be left unremarked in your games of course – after all, they’re usually a part of the underlying assumptions anyway – but bringing them a little more into view does serve to hint at a vast, underlying, structure to your worlds magic – and in a way that most people are already primed to accept.

Laws Of Magic Part III – Karma

So why worry about classical “laws of magic” anyway? Why not just make up your own laws of magic?

That’s partly because – as many authors have shown – making up a coherent system of alternative physics is quite a lot of trouble. After all, human beings have been fiddling around with this set of rules for thousands of years and – as shown so far – the result still isn’t very coherent. That gets even worse in a game setting, where the players are going to be picking your efforts apart looking for any possible advantage that they can squeeze out of them.

Really, it’s mostly to give your game worlds some depth and make them seem fantastic. While it’s difficult to get away from having some mechanics in your game, it’s a lot more interesting if you can keep a sense of wonder and mystery in it as well. Like a movie, your scenes need a background – even if it’s the linguistic equivalent of a matte painting. And, like it or not, the “laws of magic” are a part of almost everyone’s mental library, are rich with associations, and somehow just seem reasonable. Some part of the human mind just seems to interpret things that way.

Thus slapping a superficial gloss of Correspondences (mostly in item descriptions), Sympathy and Contagion (mostly in spell components), the Doctrine Of Signatures (in the ingredients for potions and scrolls), Magical Circles (in summoning and a few spell names), Naming (mostly in Item Creation), Runes and Occult Symbols (in Glyphs of Warding and Symbol spells), over the fairly basic Vancian Spellcasting of first edition AD&D lent the magic system an underlying feeling of having laws and rules. It hinted that a system which was basically a list of handy game effects for wargames actually had deep mysteries and an occult basis that only the arcane spellcasters truly understood.

It didn’t of course, but that feeling helped make the setting fantastic and full of wonder. It helped make it feel “genuinely magical”.

Sadly, that same gloss of occultism was quite enough to convince quite a few people that AD&D – and many other games – involved actual magic, taught the players genuine occult lore, and led directly to the practice of black magic and Satanism. Those accusations were bad for sales since they upset young gamers parents – and so the natural reaction was denial. You can still see the disclaimers in the front of many older RPG’s – but denial of such “obvious” evil intent was, of course, taken as confirmation of it. The next step was, naturally enough, to strip that gloss away with the next edition. Of course, that also did no good – it was simply taken as confirmation that the authors were trying to hide their “Satanic” intent – but the nonsense gradually died away anyway, just as it usually does (see: Rock and Roll, Harry Potter, etc).

Unfortunately, by that time, the damage was done. Most RPG’s had pretty well purged all of their classical occult flavoring. The College Of Greater Summonings had vanished from Dragonquest, magical references had vanished from AD&D in favor of dry rules descriptions, and Champions included no setting material at all, filling the book with pure game mechanics. Some games held out – but an awful lot gave in.

That left us with playable games that – as a bonus – could be readily used as a basis for computer games. Unfortunately, along the way, they’d lost a lot of the classical fantasy “feel”.

Now I happen to LIKE that feeling of wonder, and having underlying, and somewhat mysterious, rules to how magic “actually” works – which is why the Baba Yaga RPG includes a somewhat snarky “Disclaimer” of it’s own:

Disclaimer: In the classic tradition of RPG’s, Distant Horizons Games notes that magic doesn’t actually work. If you think you can get somewhere with the “occult methods” given in this book – announcing what you want and rolling 3D6 twice – we reserve the right to laugh at you hysterically.

So that’s why these articles are taking a look at some classical “laws of magic”. It’s to help put some of that feeling back into games for those who miss it.

And to get back to that…

The Law Of Karma can be expressed several ways. The Threefold Rule says that what you send out returns to you threefold. Other formulations speak of “backlash”. Still others say that you must laboriously build up magical power before you can accomplish anything. Still others that you must burn your life force, or lifespan, to wield magic. Yet others claim that you are paying with portions of your very soul.

Perhaps the simplest expression is everything has a price.

Most games both embrace and utterly reject this.

• Any notion that practicing harmful magic will ultimately lead the practitioner to ruin has almost completely fallen by the wayside, eliminating the Threefold Rule. That was inevitable from the beginning given that combat – and thus harmful combat magic – is a major component of most RPG’s. On the other hand, many fantasy RPG’s also want to have some clearly defined “dark magic” for the equally clearly-defined bad guys to use. This leads to ideas like “necromantic spells are inherently evil” – which is why d20 took healing and various other spells out of the field. But even then… if you want to be evil, and use “evil magic”, then there really isn’t any special price for it. Being evil just grants you access to some especially unpleasant powers. (A few games include special abilities that are restricted to the “good guys” too, but that’s a lot rarer).
• Backlash – or “Drain”, or “Fatigue” or many other names – is a reasonably popular mechanic in games, but it’s mostly just a way to keep magic-users from utterly dominating the action. It’s only a cost in the way that burning some calories and a bit of fatigue is the “cost” of rearranging your furniture or digging a hole to plant a tree. RPG’s like Shadowrun, Ysgarth, Tales From The Floating Vagabond, and many more, all embraced various “fatigue” mechanics.
• AD&D embraced the “you must laboriously gather up motes of magical energy and build them into prepared spells!” idea. That served to give magic a notable price and greatly limited its power as well; an adventuring wizard might have a fair number of spells prepared – but refilling that reserve could take days or, at very high levels, a week or more of doing nothing but prepare spells. While actually on an adventure, a wizard would be lucky to find the time to prepare – say – three first level spells, one second level spell, and one third level spell (two hours of study worth) per day. Casting anything beyond that was burning very limited reserves that you might not be able to refill for a long time. That was why every wizard wanted a wand or two, just as desperately as the fighter wanted a magic sword and magic armor. It was much easier to use a wand in combat than it was to cast a spell, they held enough charges to be used right through most adventures, and they could be recharged at home. Secondarily, AD&D embraced the idea that being a wizard required vast amounts of study and time – which might not be a cost to the player, but certainly was to the character. It even limited your chance to learn particular spells and the total number of spells a mage could ever know.

This make the AD&D magic system fantastic, and put a convincing price on being a mage – but enough of the players found playing a mage as the system was written so difficult that game masters started treating the “maximum number of prepared spells” table as spells-per-day, greatly softened the difficulties of getting them cast successfully, and often entirely ignored the limitations on learning spells – all of which became standard rules in third edition. It was a good effort, but ultimately did not work – even if “can’t wear armor” and “low hit points” are still in play.

• A very few games – Necromancer, some very early versions of D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and a few more – embraced the “cast from lifespan” idea in one way or another. Casting major spells had direct and terrible prices. Casting too many would kill you or drive you mad – and there were few or no ways to reset the total, which meant that major spells could be grand, and terrible, and very powerful indeed, and still be very rarely used. This works – but it means that you really can’t play a mage, or you will often have nothing to do until a spell MUST be used – and you come a little bit closer to retiring your character. Magic was for insane NPC’s and the occasional player-character dabbler.
• In quite a lot of current games the only “cost” is an opportunity cost. If you want to be good at magic (or psionics, or your reality-tweaking option of choice), then you’re going to have to put a lot of your character-development resources (money, levels, time, whatever) into it – and thus won’t be able to put those resources into being good at other things. Now that’s a perfectly functional and realistic game mechanic. In fact it’s so functional that it’s near-universal; I’ve only seen a few games – such as Nobilis, Ars Magica, and Mage – where mystics simply get handed an additional resource pool to allot to magical benefits, and all of those games are firmly centered on supernatural characters (often to the point where nothing else is actually playable). Unfortunately, outside of those few games (where there is little or no reason NOT to be a “Noble” or a Mage) that approach puts “Magic!” on the exact same level as “Swordsmanship!” and only a little above “Blacksmith!”. You become a really good mage in exactly the same way that you become a really good maker of wine.

Some games make that work. As an example, TORG stresses the player-based cardplay so much that character abilities make little difference. Thus an elderly Shakespearean Actor found that his dramatic and oratorical skills were every bit as effective both in and out of battle as the talents of the werewolf-gunfighter, the mad-scientist robot and his built-in manufacturing systems, the ninja computer hacker, the archmage, or the psionic adept giant otter. In fact, they were better since he’d focused all his resources on them; it was his impossible oratory that got him hailed across a galaxy as the True Emperor and brought stability and prosperity to millions of worlds. The cyborg fox might have destroyed twelve futuristic grav-tanks with a pistol in a single action, but none of the rest of them ever did anything on a galactic scale – unless, perhaps, you count the Otter creating the unkillable Godzilla Virus Artificial Intelligence and unleashing it into the Cyberpapacy’s Matrix.

The thing is though, that most games make giving out pools of special bonuses to particular types of characters work by either giving out such pools to every kind of character or by – like TORG – making the character abilities mostly subordinate to the players skills.

There really isn’t an optimum solution to this one. You don’t really want to limit the players too much or tell them that their characters can’t start studying magic unless they take four years off to get the equivalent of an engineering degree in it. After all, in large part they’re playing to take a break from realities limitations. About all you can do is to complicate the character’s lives – and most of that sort of thing tends to be setting or system specific.

• Perhaps mages need special foci to use their powers – something much more complex and difficult to replace than a “spell component pouch”. Chivalry and Sorcery did this. Such things are fairly readily replaceable given a little time, but you’ll need to keep track of them and make spares.
• Perhaps magic is a limited resource, and you have to compete for it. Did you have to eliminate a few rival apprentices and take their sources of power to become an adventuring mage? Or do you have to maintain a cult-like array of followers who labor to build the pool of power you draw upon.
• Perhaps powerful magic corrupts the environment, or allows monsters to enter the world, or drains the life from villagers.
• Perhaps you need to give up your social life, practice monastic self-discipline, or renounce eating meat to maintain your powers.
• Perhaps you need to perform strange rituals at specific times, offer your blood, know that your firstborn child will be a tool of some magical being, or be forever unable to sing or hear music or find true love.
• Perhaps using magic leaves obvious and unnatural signs – horns, or strange eyes, or a “witches mark”, ruining your social life and making you a target of suspicion. Or perhaps it’s just extremely conspicuous in some fashion.
• Perhaps using magic is alienating, drains your emotions, or demands the sacrifice of treasured memories, leaving the user increasingly distant from normal humanity – or perhaps it inherently drives people away from the user or even drives them to betray him or her.
• Perhaps magic undermines the foundations of reality or is banned by the gods or simply attracts misfortune, or monsters, or hunters. NPC’s will only use it with great caution, player characters who use it will find themselves regularly attacked and obliged to go on various adventures because bizarre problems keep popping up around them.
• Perhaps magic damages your health, leaving you with a cough, or a tendency to catch minor illnesses, or causes other inconvenient and annoying problems with little game effect. Are you deaf in one ear, farsighted or nearsighted, or prone to fits?
• Perhaps using magic requires accepting various Taboos (things you must not do, however weird and pointless) or Oaths (things you must do) to maintain your powers.
• Perhaps magic requires a careful balance of some sort. Perhaps each time you cast your mighty fireballs, you need to help out a village or some such.
• Perhaps magical energy only builds up gradually; on the first round of combat you can only cast first level spells – and a battle must go on for nine rounds to allow the casting of a ninth level spell. Out of combat? Perhaps it takes a minute per spell level.
• Perhaps accessing a new level of magic involves rituals or trials. Concluding a pact with some mighty entity – or perhaps a classic sequence of trials, such as recognizing the limits of your power, seeking out magical tutelage, going forth on a quest, exercising self-discipline, and sacrificing something precious to you.

The point, of course, is not to make things hard on the player. It’s to ensure that – in the setting – becoming a magic-user is not simply another choice like learning a martial art. It is something with deep and mysterious implications that will have a major impact on your characters life, not a decision to be made lightly.

Laws Of Magic Part II – Synchronicity, Sympathy, Contagion, and The Doctrine Of Signatures.

For Part I (Background and Correspondences) look HERE.

Synchronicity says that “there is no such thing as “coincidence”“. Did the questioner draw The Moon as the card that would stand for them in the Tarot Reading? That Meant Something.

Like most laws of magic… this is kind of problematic in the real world. I cooked a turkey not so long ago, and between the time I put it in the oven and the time I took it out literally thousands of people died. Does that mean that I killed them with the dark power of my cookery? Of course it doesn’t. Better than a hundred people die every minute these days and those thousands of deaths were pure coincidence. Humans just have a tendency to remember it better when two events of interest or importance turn up close together (the root of “where were you when famous event X happened questions) – so they commonly see causation and relationship where none exists.

In Classic Fantasy it is Synchronicity – often in the guise of “Fate” or “Destiny” or “The Will Of The Gods” – that drives the plot. It’s why people die at convenient times, why it is a kind traveler who stumbles across the infant heir rather than a pack of wolves, why adventurers always arrive in the nick of time, why seers and madmen utter true prophecies, and why consulting Tarot Cards or the I-Ching (or the flight of birds, or the shapes formed by hot wax dripping into water, or the shape of a sacrificial animals liver or some such) can actually reveal glimpses of the future. There isn’t really any good reason why a great comet passing should signal some equally great event, or why the ancient prophecy should be translated just as the characters need that information – but that’s how it almost always works in classic fantasy.

Of course, when it comes to the “reality” of a game setting… Synchronicity rules the universe for a very simple reason; game masters have strictly limited time and a lot to cover. That means that if they take the time to describe something it is almost certainly relevant. Better game masters will throw in some red herrings and items that are potential lead-ins to new adventures or optional side-quests from time to time, but only a very few of the most hard-core “sandbox” game masters will simply let characters go wherever they please instead of trying to keep them involved with the material they actually have ready. Like it or not, most game masters aren’t really that good at improvising and find it quite impossible to keep track of everything if they start having to answer off-the-wall questions about areas they haven’t prepared notes on yet. There’s a reason why Chekov’s Gun (and it’s Brick Joke and McGuffin variants) are major tropes.

And so the player characters are the ones to witness the murder, hear the victims final words (no matter how they try to stop him or her from dying), get accused of said murder when the guards arrive a few moments later, and stumble across all the necessary clues and plot coupons as they flee the guards to hunt down the actual murderer and prove their innocence. RPG plots always involve heaping helpings of coincidence, and a bit of railroading, because otherwise a group of player characters can be counted upon to start off investigating a mystery in Pennsylvania in 1929, set off for Chicago to talk to Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone, and somehow wind up helping defend Beijing against Genghis Khan in 1214 – insisting all the while that they are hot on the trail of the Jersey Devil and without ever actually reaching Chicago or explaining what they wanted with Capone in the first place.

In active play in most game systems, Synchronicity lies at the heart of divination and destiny – and it often lies at the heart of every act of magic. There isn’t any good reason why singing a particular song while keeping time with a rod of alder wood and wearing a vest with a particular set of symbols sewn on it should summon a charging rhinoceros to strike whatever the spell caster is pointing at. It just happens. And if it happens reliably, despite the lack of any apparent reason why it should… then you have a powerful spell.

In one setting…

The first “wizard” was a peasant farmer who was singing a nonsense-song while waving his arms to scare some birds away from his crops while wearing a cheap copper ring with hid zodiac symbol on it (and a few other details) – and the result was summoning am obedient swarm of ghostly troops for a time. He happened to be a keen observer, and he managed to recall just what he’d been doing – and after several tries… he did it again. After a few months of practice he could do it fairly reliably.

By the time he died many years later… he was rich, powerful, and influential – and he’d managed to unearth two more (if far lesser) spells (“cantrips”) from among the lands other practitioners of folk magic.

Today, almost a thousand years later… the light-haired Wizards of his line command seven of the twenty-two major spells that are rumored to exist, and perhaps half again that many of the forty-three known minor cantrips. (Sadly, two of the major spells will not work for people with dark hair and one only works for females). In other lands other families and traditions exist – each devoting long years of study to mastering the intricacies of those few spells they know and jealously guarding their arcane secrets.

This magic system has no theory, no consistency, and no logic to it whatsoever – but it’s very, VERY, classical. You can do anything at all if you can just find the secret spell that does it and it isn’t too hard to perform – but there’s really no way to “research” a new spell; it’s either out there to be found or it isn’t. You could spend multiple lifetimes doing random things, and even if something magical happened… there’s no guarantee that you will be able to figure out how to get it to happen again. The critical elements that made it work might note even have to have to anything to do with you at all. New spells are fabulous rarities.

Given that there is no underlying logic to synchronicity at all, it’s hard to work it into active play outside of purely arbitrary requirements for various acts of magic and divination – but it tends to rule the plot. Still, if you want to let the players get their hands on plot-based powers… the most classic way is to use one form or another of Whimsy Cards (or my own Runecards) to allow the players to twist the plot a bit. Alternatively, you can use Tarot Cards (although that will call for a lot of interpretation) or something like the free Scion Legend Cards. In Eclipse, you can use the Narrative Powers Template or just invest a few points in abilities like True Prophecy or Destiny Magic (scroll down).

Sympathy and Contagion do get some play in older games (and the occasional current “old school” game). They’re simpler, easier to explain, easy to portray, and far more immediate in application – if just about as arbitrary if you really start analyzing things. They’re covered in some detail in the Mystic Links and Sympathetic Magic Articles (Part I and Part II) and are used by the Võlur. Unfortunately – also as covered in those articles in detail – these rules of magic really aren’t that compatible with adventuring. Performing lengthy rituals that have subtle effects on targets a long ways away doesn’t make for exciting adventures.

Similarity or “Signatures” are another simple idea – that something’s appearance indicates its hidden powers. Gold shines like the Sun, so it must have solar powers. It endures for centuries untarnished, so putting gold in your food should let you live longer. A plant with fronds like fingers must be good medicine for your hands – or possibly useful for animating disembodied hands. Eating tiger penis soup (or several other similar dishes or – for that matter – phallus impudicus mushrooms) must enhance male potency (that notion – like anything that promises more or better sex – remains quite popular today, in part thanks to the placebo effect).

In reality, the doctrine of signatures is pretty easily disproven. There are a lot of very poisonous mushrooms that look a great deal like edible and nourishing ones. If “Signatures” really meant anything… then the results of eating both should be much the same – but surviving victims of the Amanita Ocreata mushroom would beg to differ.

Even games are often more sophisticated than this, and used less naive notions. For example, bat guano contains a lot of potassium nitrate, which is used to make gunpowder – so it was “reasonable” to infer that “explosions of fire” must be a part of it’s hidden properties given that neither sulfur nor charcoal were all that explosive by themselves. Ergo you could use a bit of guano as a component for your Fireball spell. You could substitute other things – but the results were unpredictable and varied from game to game, since no one wanted to compile a list of possible modifications for a thousand different components (a prospect which contributed to the general dropping of notes about how differing components might modify spells in later editions).

On the other hand, signatures – and the reputed properties of various substances, both real and mythic – are important in magical herbalism, in selecting components for spells, and are vital in alchemy and the brewing of various potions. Dragons blood may be pretty much like any other large animals blood biologically, but gamers are generally interested in it’s magical properties, not in its compatibility for transfusions.

Only a few games every really got into this kind of list though. Rolemaster – notorious for its exhaustive lists of everything – covered a lot of plants and herbs, as did the supplements from Bard Games; both their original Alchemists book and the combined “Arcanum” book covered long lists of plants, minerals, metals, alchemical preparations, and specialized spell lists, all of it more or less first edition AD&D compatible. Unfortunately, later editions of most games tended to just throw random oddities into various sourcebooks and adventures, leaving sorting out the resulting incoherent mess of special cases to the internet and to the rare players and game masters who actually cared. Bastion’s 95-page “Alchemy & Herbalists” book was about the last gasp of serious lists of the magical properties of herbs and materials. Sure, Pathfinder produced a 30 pages worth of material for their Alchemy Companion – but much of the space is devoted to fireworks, character feats, and minor magical items.

The modern gaming version of the Doctrine of Signatures no longer relies on physical sensory impressions that go right past most of the intended audience. After all, most of the current game masters and players alike have no idea of what various plants, fungi, and minerals look, smell, or feel like. Secondarily, the idea of allowing characters to acquire even very minor “treasures” by simply taking a walk in the woods and looking for plants with special properties is mostly out of fashion. Thus the current version relies instead on the descriptions in various books of monsters. Players may not be clear on what a basilisk looks like, but they know exactly what it does – and nobody will argue much with the idea that its blood is poisonous, its scales extremely tough, and its eyes capable of empowering magics related to petrification or transformation if that’s what the game master says. Thus a part of the “treasure” for defeating it may be harvested directly from it’s corpse. After all, in a world of magic, harvesting magical components from a monster is no more exotic than historical whalers hunting whales for their meat, fat, and bones.

While there’s a certain amount of squick involved in – say – chopping up that intelligent dragon that you just killed for it’s teeth, hide, and other useful bits I’m sure that some people will pay very high prices indeed for Dragon Penis Soup – and money tends to get most adventurers over ethical compunctions very quickly indeed.

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, however, you can’t just require parts from exotic monsters for basic magic. After all, if you did, that would mean that player-character spellcasters might well never get to cast any spells – and so the Doctrine of Signatures gets relegated to a ghetto of rarely-used “power components” and optional subsystems. After all, the player characters will rarely HAVE a Cockatrice Feather (or whatever) – and so there’s little or no point in spending a lot of space talking about just what one is good for. Personally, I usually let this sort of thing go on the fly. If someone wants to gather up parts of monsters and use them for magical purposes… why not? They can try things and see what happens.

Laws Of Magic Part I – Correspondences

Once upon a time in first edition AD&D a Fireball filled so many thousands of cubic feet. If you set it off in a space that was too small, or the middle of a nest of tunnels or some such… the blast would fill it’s allotted space, even if that made the “ball” into a long line or it it blew back into your face and killed you. Similarly, lightning bolts could bounce back on the caster if you weren’t careful about where you set them off. Summoned elementals could go out of control and attack the summoner. There were fairly elaborate descriptions of where the energy that powered magic came from, how it was gathered, the time spent to bind it into each individual spell (fifteen minutes times the spell level for each spell so prepared – normally to a maximum of 32 levels of spells per day if you weren’t adventuring), and how tricky it was to use it properly. If you got interrupted, or fouled things up, it didn’t work. You could only learn so many spells, and would often find yourself permanently unable to learn the ones you wanted.

It was a time when making potions and scrolls required fairly high level and exotic ingredients – and if you didn’t have those ingredients, you couldn’t make that potion or a scroll. Making more powerful magic items involved arbitrary quests, and creating permanent enchantments cost a constitution point as enchanters gave up a portion of their life force to empower them. When Gods only granted spells appropriate to their portfolios, chose what spells they granted their priests, and sometimes withheld spells or other clerical benefits if said priests weren’t doing a good job of serving their gods.

For example, making a scroll of Protection From Petrification required giant squid ink, a basilisk eye, three cockatrice feathers, medusa snake venom, (specific) powdered gems, holy water, and pumpkin seeds. Lesser scrolls were usually easier, but they certainly weren’t things that you just churned out.

And there was a reason for all that. It was because classical fantasy adhered to many classical notions about how magic worked.

Classical fantasy said that gods and other magical entities paid attention and demanded that their servants and priests offer sacrifices, adhere to rigid codes of behavior, and actually serve them in exchange for the power they were given – and that various entities only offered powers related to their various portfolios. The Winter King would not – and COULD NOT – help you throw fire.

Classical fantasy said that learning to use magic without a supernatural patron was a difficult and dangerous thing, requiring years of study. It involved strange arts and the classical laws of magic – correspondences, synchronicity, sympathy, contagion, similarity or “signatures”, karma, purification, personification, destiny, and naming, magical circles, runes and occult symbols, and more. Would-be mages had massive lists of stuff to memorize in character – while even the player had quite a lot to keep track of. The Dungeon Master’s Guide showed glyphs for various Glyphs Of Warding (and noted that experienced players might remember their names from prior play, and so bypass them!) and several forms of protective inscriptions, including magic circles, pentagrams, and thaumaturgic triangles – and noted that when you summoned something the game master might require you to show them that you were using the right one!

Having an actual magic-user in your party was a luxury that called for a fairly high level party, a very experienced player, and a good deal of actual study and preparation.

And the first law of magic to take a look at is Correspondence.

Correspondence is built on the belief that every time, place, object, and symbol has some amount of magical power – and that that power is attuned to various purposes.

For simplified example, Fire is active, hot, dry, and emits light.

• It’s season is summer.
• Its Day is Sunday.
• Its Time is noon.
• Its Incenses are cinnamon, frankincense, and dragon’s blood.
• Its Signs are Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius.
• Its Animals are bees, lions, dragons, serpents, foxes, scorpions, and squirrels.
• Its Alchemical Symbol is a point-up triangle.
• Its Celestial Objects are Mars and the Sun.
• Its Colors are white, red, and orange.
• Its Sense is sight.
• Its Trees are Alder, Chestnut, Cinnamon, and Rowan.
• It Manifests in the sun, stars, and volcanoes.
• Its Gods are Agni, Brigit, Durga, Freya, Horus, Pele, Ra, and Vulcan.
• Its Tools are wands, lamps, and blades.
• Its Stones are bloodstone, carnelian, fire opal, red jasper, ruby, tiger’s eye, and anything from a volcano.
• Its Metals are gold, steel, and brass.
• Its Herbs include allspice, basil, coffee, juniper, onion, peppers, thistle, and tobacco.
• Its Fragrances include clove, patchouli, and chamomile.
• Its Direction is south.
• Its Spirits are salamanders and firedrakes.
• It is associated with youth, war, courage, animal life, and sex.
• It is linked with stringed instruments.
• Its magic is suited to spells involving light, energy, love, health, and transformation.

And that list is far from complete. Those categories should have more items and there are lots more categories.

Every correspondence you involved in your magical action – or, to some extent, in mundane activities – added a little bit of power. Thus a red-haired spellcaster who’d been born during the summer, on Sunday, at noon, had four built-in correspondences for fire magic – and so would show a natural talent for it (and a likely deficit in Water Magic). He or she could get another boost from using an Steel (Metal) Athame (Blade) forged with the aid of a Salamander (Spirit), blessed by a priest of Agni (God), with a Bloodstone pommel (Stone), hilted with wood from a chestnut tree (Tree) and engraved with the constellation of Aries (Sign) – adding seven additional correspondences from a rather powerful magical tool. It would also help if he or she was smoking or had recently had sex, either of which would make an even dozen correspondences (you might not want thirteen; that has some unhelpful correspondences).

A charmsmith might gift a fighter with an amulet incorporating as many correspondences to the arts of war as possible, knowing that carrying those influences with him would help to bring him or her victory. Making magical devices that aided the user in various ways… basically involved a lot of ritual purification to help keep unwanted correspondences from getting entangled in your creation and putting together as many ingredients from your list as possible. Admittedly, such items were fairly subtle – but an item with the proper correspondences was a lot easier to enchant with active powers as well.

A diviner might use tarot cards, or throw runesticks, or use any of hundreds of other methods, in the belief that – thanks to the innate correspondences of their tools – the results will reflect the forces currently at work in a situation, providing hints as to what the future will hold. Better tools – such as tarot cards – will be constructed to incorporate as many symbols and correspondences as possible, so they are as well attuned to the universe as possible – and usually can also serve as spellcasting tools (which is where card-based casting comes from).

While this sort of thing is still fairly popular – notions of astrology, birth-stones, spirit animals, tarot cards, rune-stones, the I-Ching, and such are all over the place – few people are really aware that giving someone a little birthstone pendant, made of the “appropriate” metal and bearing various traditional symbols (knots, zodiac symbols, animals, etc) is really an act of magic meant to strengthen the recipients personal talents and improve their lives.

Correspondences are simultaneously the least and most organized bit of magical thinking. The most because Correspondences tend to come in massive categorized and sorted lists (there are entire books devoted to such lists). The least because the magical associations of times, items, places,, and materials are completely arbitrary; each culture has developed it’s own ideas on the topic. Still, the theory says that the more correspondences you manage to tie into an appropriate magical working, the more potent it became – for each contributes power.

Honestly, correspondences are far too complicated for most game systems. Even first edition AD&D, which involved a LOT of classic fantasy elements, shied away from any attempt to make direct use of Correspondences – although you can see traces of the idea in the descriptions of the various magic items (especially the wands) and in the information on creating magical items.

Other early game systems also dabbled a bit. Chivalry and Sorcery used parts of the system in enchanting the tools a spellcaster required, Dragonquest used Birth Aspects that could modify attempts to do pretty much anything, but only when they applied. A system or two used “Star Signs” which could provide all kinds of modifiers – a notion which would work nicely in d20 since applying a “star sign template” to your character is flavorful and should be relatively quick and easy.

Only one game system that I’m aware of – Fantasy Wargaming – used a correspondence table as a central element of it’s magic system. Unfortunately, Fantasy Wargaming is generally regarded as unplayable. (It’s actually not all that bad, but the organization of the book is terrible, it takes a long time to design and cast a spell, and it – as expected for the era – uses a lot of wargame ideas that limit your control of your character rather than RPG ideas).

Continuum II uses correspondences as a central part of the Ceremonial Magic system – but that is a subsystem that occasional characters dabbled in during downtime, rather than something that was expected to be used while adventuring. A player who wanted to invest some time and effort researching correspondences and coming up with ceremonies could give their party some handy (if fairly minor) bonuses to use during adventures – but a party could get along just fine without such things. On the other hand… it gave things a nicely mystical feel, which was usually well worth the trouble. That system’s basically compatible with d20, so it could be used easily enough, In Eclipse it’s just a Specialized version of the Ritual Magic ability.

Thus correspondences – while a major and extremely thoroughly documented part of classical magic – only play a small role in classical fantasy and in the role-playing games based on it. They’re simply too arbitrary and too much trouble to include more than a few nods to in anything but an optional system. .

The sign of Aries is associated with March 21’st to April 19’th, Fire, Iron, Geranium, Gorse, Rosemary, Marjoram, Sage, Tiger Lily, Thistle and Wild Rose, Holly and Chestnut, Iron, Bloodstone, Ruby, Red Jasper, and Garnet, Scarlet or Pink, Mars, Tuesday, Four o’clock to Five o’clock, Spring, The Emperor Tarot Card, the Ram, Owl, or Bull, the Magpie, Owl, and Robin, the Head, she scent of Pine or Geraniums, Athena, Shiva, and Minerva – and it goes on.

Debatable Evils – Negative Energy And Undeath

And for today it’s another question!

I’ve recently encountered some media that have put forward an interesting idea with regards to undead beings. Specifically, the idea that it’s possible for there to be undead creatures that were never alive to begin with, essentially beginning their existence – whether summoned magically or created “naturally” – in an undead state.

While none of those media get particularly deep into the mechanics of how exactly that’s possible, the idea doesn’t seem so implausible that it cannot be countenanced. That is, if new beings can come into being while alive, why not do so at the opposite end of the metaphysical spectrum? That, or they could be animated by spirits associated with death, necromancy, etc. Coming up with an explanation that sounds plausible, at least on its face, isn’t too hard.

My question is, what mechanical alterations (to the existing rules regarding undeath) would that idea have if implemented under the d20 game rules? At the very least, it seems like spells associated with creating/summoning such undead wouldn’t necessarily have the [Evil] descriptor.

-Alzrius

Well, it’s important to remember that biology and metabolism really aren’t important in d20. That’s why d20 uses Hit Points instead of detailed wound systems, and why elementals – lumps of rock, or plasma, or swirls of air with no metabolisms or biology – are creatures with hit points. Undead basically have [Hit Points] – a negative value of hit points that they treat as a positive one because they’re things of negative energy.

Inanimate objects can have metabolisms, and biology – but in d20 terms they are objects, or perhaps organic machines, not truly living things. That’s why a Deathwatch spell doesn’t give you a report on every broken blade of grass in a field and why I can’t cast Cure Light Wounds on a mostly-eaten watermelon to heal it and let me eat it again. That’s also why Remove Disease (presuming that diseases are caused by micro-organisms) is a Conjuration (Healing) effect and not Necromancy (Death).

• Positive Energy drives growth, life, mobility, and creation. It is a force of light, change, and evolution that drives an increase in complexity in the face of entropy. Thus children are filled with positive energy while the extremely elderly, who have mostly exhausted their stores of possibility and can barely cling to life, have little left.
• Negative Energy weakens, kills, paralyzes, and annihilates. It is a force of darkness, cold, and entropy. That’s why undead are destroyed at zero hit points; they can no longer resist the side effects of the negative energy within them. It’s also why they generally do not grow or gain levels and why most undead feed on the living – their corpses gaining an unnatural mobility through theft.

Neither positive or negative energy is a moral agency in itself. In d20, that role is reserved for the energies of the outer planes, which make “good” and “evil” into absolute, measurable, and detectable, forces. There isn’t any moral relativism and there’s no point in arguing about whether or not an act is good or evil. Just use your Phylactery Of Faithfulness (a mere 1000 GP!) and you will KNOW.

In the real world clearing some forest is good for some types of creatures, bad for others, and will have ongoing effects, both knowable and unknowable, on the environment, the world, and the human population, that will not finish playing out until far in the future. Is doing so a “Good” or “Evil” act? The answer depends on your personal priorities and beliefs and on how many consequences of what kind you are aware of to consider. Would your decision change if you somehow knew that it would unleash a horde of plague-carrying rats and kill millions?

In d20, if you are tilting the alignment energy balance of the material plane towards Good, then you are committing a Good act. If you are tilting the alignment energy balance of the world towards Evil, you are committing an Evil act. If you’re doing neither to any noticeable degree… then the act is neither good not evil.

Are those babies of a species that is strongly inclined towards evil? Then slaughtering them all is a good act even if they are neutral at the moment. Adopting and raising one is evil. Adopting and raising a child of a species that is strongly inclined towards good is good. Adopting and raising a child of a species without strong inclinations? That could be good or evil depending on how you raise it. Running a slaughterhouse and massacring hundreds of true neutral creatures every day? That’s neither good nor evil.

The trouble with the d20 rules on Alignment is that no one ever actually sat down and tried to work out what the axioms of good and evil WERE (why would they? The only real point was a set of quick labels to sort out targets and people to protect). “Good” is loosely defined as a grab bag of behavioral traits that promote group welfare in a social species (“Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others”) while “Evil” is loosely defined as behaviors that disrupt social groups (“Evil implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.”).

According to the 3.5 Players Handbook (and supposedly in Pathfinder due to a lack of new rulings and back-compatibility) “channeling positive energy is a good act and channeling negative energy is evil” (Page 160).

Why is that?

Well… the Prime Material Plane is supposed to be made up of a mixture of the elemental forces of the inner planes – Fire, Air, Earth, Water, Positive Energy, and Negative Energy. But unless someone is importing or exporting such forces, what’s there is there. Like it or not, channeling substantial amounts of negative energy in from the negative energy plane – whether in the continuing tap that allows undead to exist or in bursts – drains energy from the material plane. It reduces the universe for all time to come. Adding positive energy doesn’t “make up for it”, since otherwise that energy could have gone into expanding and adding possibilities to the universe.

And there’s the connection; importing negative energy from the negative material plane reduces the total energy of the prime material plane, draining the possibilities of the future and denying existence to creatures that would otherwise have been born and lived. Throughout the eons to come… it is a never-ending crime, and so is an Evil act.

Importing positive energy from the positive material plane forever adds to the possibilities of the universe. It is a never-ending boon to all life yet to come, and so is a good act. And no matter what your reason for using Channeling is… that long-term Good or Evil is going to outweigh the immediate effects.

So why aren’t all spells involving positive energy “good” and all of the ones involving negative energy “evil”? That’s something of a game convenience so as to allow evil Clerics to heal – but what’s the in-game explanation?

Well, looking at the lists…

• Conjuration is used to bring in materials from other planes. Ergo, effects involving positive and negative energy that aren’t Conjurations must rely on gathering positive or negative energy from ambient sources – or simply generating both positive and negative energy at the same time from a zero state – rather than on importing it. Thus many spells (Disrupt Undead, Touch Of Fatigue, Chill Touch, Ghoul Touch, Stricken Heart, Defoliate, Deathwine, Gloomblind Bolts, Blood Crow Strike (which, interestingly, creates identical amounts of fire and negative energy), Enervation, Vampiric Shadow Shield, Smite Abomination, Waves Of Fatigue, Waves of Exhaustion, Orb Of The Void, and even Energy Drain) may involve positive or negative energy but they aren’t Conjuration effects – they’re Necromancy. And the basic definition of Necromancy is that “Necromancy spells manipulate the power of death, unlife, and the life force”. Ergo they use and manipulate, but do not summon, such energies – and thus are not inherently evil.
• Next up on the list of spells involving positive and negative energy we have the curative and anti-curative spells, such as Cure/Inflict Wounds, Vigor, Delay Poison, Energetic Healing, Healthful Rest, Cleanse, Heal/Harm, Life Shield, Symbol Of Healing, Revenance, Revivify, Remove Radioactivity, Resurgent Transformation, Pillar Of Life, Repair Undead, and Heal / Harm.

These spells are a bit weird. Most of the Curative spells are Conjuration (Healing) – which makes some sense – but the corresponding negative-energy vesions tend to be Necromancy, and neither version is (Good) or (Evil). Why aren’t the equal-and-opposite spells Conjuration (Infliction) rather than Necromancy? Or why aren’t the Curative spells Necromancy? After all, in first and second editions curative spells were reversible and were all Necromancy. (No one seems to be entirely sure why it was changed except that someone working on the project felt that “Necromancy” should be inherently nasty and that “Good People” shouldn’t use it. Of course, you couldn’t take Healing away from anyone, or the setting broke). There’s the argument that you are conjuring new flesh and blood to fix a wound, but then why can’t I fix that watermelon? And why do Air Elementals get healed this way? Worse, in Fourth Edition healing spells tend to be Daily Use Utility Prayers and in Fifth Edition curative spells are Evocation. Given that, it’s kind of obvious that the school assignment is pretty much arbitrary – especially since those are mostly Divine Spells, and “school” doesn’t matter much to Clerics.

So to justify this in game terms…

• Perhaps these spells are simply “taking out a loan”? Some of them are strictly temporary, while the excess positive energy of the actual healing effects might either leak back or simply take the place of the positive side of the usual flow of power through living and unliving things over time. That would leave no net gain or loss of energy on the material plane, and thus no reason for them to be “Good” or “Evil”.
• It could mean that those spells involve the old idea of Backlash. They’re neutral because their effects are automatically balanced out. Perhaps when one creature is Healed another one somewhere else suffers equal and opposite Harm. Or perhaps the power is drawn from the patient or healer in some form. Does being magically healed magically age you a few hours or days depending on the level of injury? Who would notice? It’s not like characters come with a life expectancy meter and how often does “death by old age” come up for Adventurers anyway?
• It could also mean that these spells are simply misclassified, and actually are necromancy spells – which could be taken to mean that there are limits to how much healing is available, or mean that healing does not work well in dark dungeons full of pooled negative energy (where little or no ambient positive energy is available), or some such. That would have the (very welcome) side effect of restoring some slightly longer-term meaning to losing hit points after the first few levels (after which Healing Belts, Wands of Lesser Vigor, and similar tricks mean starting every encounter with your full hit points).

 

• The final major group of spells – Bless / Curse Water, Sanctify Corpse, Veil Of Heaven / Positive Energy, Empower Holy Water, Light of Iomedae, Consecrate / Desecrate, Khain’s Army, Animate Dead, Hallow / Unhallow, and Create Undead – DO carry the “Good” or “Evil” descriptor. And notably… they all definitely do import excess positive or negative energy, and so make permanent, ongoing, changes in the energy balance of the material plane.
• The last few relevant spells – things like Life Channel, Undeath Inversion, Blood Of The Martyr, and Fire Of Judgement – all have to do with either shifting positive or negative energy around or changing how they interact. They’re rightfully neither good nor evil.

Now the point of all this is to take a look at how positive and negative energy work and what they mean in terms of the setting so that we can see what MAKES casting certain spells or the use of Channeling inherently good or evil.

And what the game seems to imply… is that using ambient negative energy, or generating it by producing equal amounts of positive and negative energy, is morally neutral. On the other hand, pulling negative energy from the Negative Material Plane into the rest of the universe – whether in a burst or in a slow trickle – is inherently evil.

Stronger creatures powered by ambient negative energy will need some way to harvest it – perhaps haunting places where it collects (the classic graveyard haunts), or cultivating and draining it from others (for example, the Sirens from My Little Pony). This could even be benign, at least to start with. After all, stealing negative energy from a normal creature could theoretically leave it happier and healthier. Of course, when that’s no longer enough available naturally, and the creature must start to cultivate negative energy to feed… then things will start to get bad.

In theory you could also get spontaneous negative energy creatures arising anywhere where a lot of negative energy has built up – but the nature of negative energy is destructive. You won’t get evolved complexity, built up over time (that’s why even intelligent undead tend to go madder and madder over the centuries). Something else will have to provide a framework for your creature to form around and a spark to bring it to (un-)life – but if the old manor has built up a pool of negative energy, is filled with psychic traces of hatred and disharmony, and someone murders the old man who owned the place during a burglary… then you have power, purpose, and spark.

That does give us an opening though; in this view Animate Dead draws a burst of negative energy into the world to create weak undead powered by ambient energy and Create Undead gives them a continuous link – but you could (at least in theory) use a higher-level spell to gather ambient negative energy and use it to create Animate Dead style undead powered by ambient negative energy without it being actively evil – at least as far as the process goes. You’d still bear at least some responsibility for anything they got up to later though – and THAT is almost certain to go badly eventually. Similarly, you could use ambient negative energy to manifest undead constructs, allowing you to use “summon undead” without the [Evil] descriptor as Pathfinder does – but that also goes a long way towards explaining why those spells are so ineffectual for their levels.

As for what you could animate or what might animate spontaneously… you’re creating a creature with no pattern to follow using forces which are inherently difficult to control and shape. That means that complex creatures and minds are likely going to be out of reach. Destructive oozes, simpler aberrations, and constructs are a good starting point. You just make them evil instead of neutral and throw “undead” qualities on top of whatever they started with. Make them vulnerable to positive energy and let negative energy heal them and you’re mostly ready to go. For a few possibilities… consider the Ragewind (3.5 MMII), Raggamoffyn (3.5 MMII), Hangman Golem (3.5, MMIII), Cadaver Collector (3.5 MMIII), Necrophidius (3.0 Fiend Folio), Attic Whisperer (Pathfinder), Corpse Candle (Pathfinder), Byakhee (Pathfinder), and Jealous Structure (Pathfinder Curse). For items on the blog… I’d recommend the Dark Tales series (The Hunt, The Grove, The Well, The House, and The Ship). I’d also recommend the Occult monster-enhancing packages.

Anything with an active link to the Negative Material Plane (like virtually all of the more powerful undead) however…. will be a walking blight on the world, actively draining the energy of the universe to survive. It may not consider itself anything but hungry – but by the objective standards of d20 such creatures are inherently evil and utterly hostile no matter how they limit themselves or justify their feeding.

And for another reader response and answer…

Personally, the issue I see is that most undead seem to act as either constructs like skeletons and liches that just happen to use living remains as the raw materials or are some sort of a contagious plague like vampires or zombies. As such they all seem to be defined with regards to a former “living” state. Thus I find it hard to visualize some method of generating undead corpses without some source of corpses to begin with that required it being alive at some point. Which isn’t to say you couldn’t animate a mass of calcium and synthetic protein into a zombie, but I don’t think that is the idea you were going with.

Instead, I would look at the idea of negative energy life forms as a mirror to positive energy lifeforms. A lot of material seems to assume that all living things have some sort of link to the Positive Energy Plane that provides the animating/organizing force independent of the creature’s metabolism. While never entirely clear, the positive energy a creature can pull through into the material plane is limited and that is what is the bottleneck for things like healing, lifespan, and growth. To further boost those in response to disease, injury, or aging, external sources are required in the form of medicinal herbs, healing spells, and lifeforce infusions.

With that said, I would argue that lifeforms that use a link to the Negative Energy Plane as an energy sink would be possible. Instead of pulling energy in to heal injuries, it could instead sacrifice mass-energy to the sink to generate power for healing instead.

While in many ways indistinguishable from normal life forms, this could have a number of interesting side effects: poor (or even addictive) response to normal healing, a tendency to lose mass over time, a body temperature a little below ambient, healing ability being proportional to mass (i.e. being fatter), slower growth rates, much higher need to eat/drink to maintain mass and health, higher tolerance to heat, and lower tolerance to cold.

Thus I can imagine life forms running around the material plane vacuuming up loose bits of mass-energy to consume, growth, and multiply across the landscape. Attempts by these creatures to eat normal life forms or vice versa could go poorly as the resulting (brief) collision between positive and negative energy taps lead to explosive results. Which could then lead to entire areas being dominated by one form of life or the other depending on which gained a hold first. Perhaps this could be the mechanism behind those absurdly vibrant underground ecologies and why people aren’t roasted alive due to the geothermal heat.

This could then lead to all sorts of fun little issues like you can’t eat the local flora/fauna without some significant preparation work, extremely potent medicines made from plants of the other type that are a pain to gather, and really nasty monsters that start off huge and can continue fighting for long periods of time simply by sacrificing mass for regeneration until it is too small and then flees whereupon it may return larger than ever when you least suspect it.

Not that this is a set of mechanical alterations like you asked, but perhaps this is food for thought to help brainstorm some more ideas, adventures, and horrifying experiments.

-Spellweaver81

This is actually a lot like the physics of Continuum II – where energy flowed from Hyperspace into normal space and from normal space into subspace. Physical creatures could exist in any of the three – and energy creatures could exist across the interfaces. The most common energy beings were “Demons” (linking Normal Space and Subspace, and so almost universally deadly predators, feeding on each other and on any energy they could get) and “Manitou” (linking Hyperspace and Normal Space. Their problem was controlling the flow of energy). A very few life forms had both Hyperspace and Subspace links, but while that provided immense abilities to both generate and dissipate energy, coupling it was wildly unstable; a “God” needed stabilizing feedback to avoid exploding or dissipating.

• “Undead” combined a Demonic aspect and a Physical Body in Normal Space. They needed constant energy inputs to resist the drain of Subspace.
• Faerie combined a Manitou aspect and a (Living) Physical Body in Normal Space. They dissipated excess energy as a variety of powers.
• Elementals occurred when a Manitou anchored itself into nonliving mass. They ranged from tiny things to the planetary core elemental.
• Totem Spirits were anchored through the Empyrean (mental) Plane into a group of living things.
• And so on.

Overall there were five major orders of life, dozens of types of symbiotic hybrids, and a lot of tinkering, Thus the characters occasionally did things like analyzing the metabolism and biology of dragons, or the genetics underlying the different power-expressions that led to storm, fire, ice, and primal giants. After all… once they knew how something worked, they could figure out how to manipulate it to be more to their liking.

Alas, however, d20 and Pathfinder don’t really go into that kind of detail. There are reasons for that. They have many writers, so maintaining any kind of consistent physics is near-impossible to start with and (worse) going into that kind of detail would mean that the game master would need to study a lot of physics before running the game. Pathfinder’s writers in particular are very reluctant to introduce any new mechanics (preferring to refluff old ones, which is how they wound up with Psychic Spells and with Grit, Ki, and several other kinds of points which all work the same way while supposedly representing wildly different processes) for fear of the kind of unexpected rules interactions / exploits that so plague 3.5. That, in fact, was a part of the reason for Eclipse; you can use it to build exotic mechanics (such as the Nymic Mage), while maintaining a basic consistency.

So this won’t really work. D20 tells us that the Negative Energy Plane is full of undead (who, if they had negative metabolisms, should respond to being there like positive energy creatures do on the Positive Material Plane – although they’d probably disintegrate instead of exploding), that negative energy creatures cannot grow or reproduce except by infecting or consuming positive energy creatures, that negative energy creatures cannot gain levels save by stealing positive energy from truly living creatures, and that negative energy is inherently entropic and entirely destructive. Negative energy creatures can amalgamate with each other – but that’s merging, not growth. Thus a negative energy creature will always have to have a structure provided for it somehow.

I think the closest things to this in d20 are the half-undead templates from Dragon Magazine. Of course, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a half-undead ecosystem going.

And I hope that helps!

Eclipse And the Sha’ir

And for today it’s another question…

How would you build a sha’ir (from the Al-Qadim setting) with the Eclipse rules? The class had a 3rd Edition conversion (in Dragon magazine, reprinted in the Dragon Compendium), but that version made some small-but-significant changes to how the class functioned.

-Alzrius

Ah, sha’ir spellcasting! Any spell you want, at any time, with no books or memorization! All you have to do is send your minor Genie Familiar – your “Gen” – out to fetch them!

It has been a long time since anyone asked about sha’ir – and I must admit that that is for fairly good reason. As written in second edition…

• They can only have one spell ready at a time.
• They lose that spell it in thirty minutes if they don’t cast it (not long enough to scribe it, so they can’t be a source of scrolls or spell formula).
• They can only ask for “Common Spells” (Level one or two and normally available in the setting) or spells which they’ve seen used. (How did you decide what spells a new sha’ir might have witnessed before starting play? Wasn’t it at least POSSIBLE that you’d seen a magic show, or witnessed a duel, or seen their great-uncle the retired adventurer use a few spells, or something? There never was an answer for that).
• They need to supply the spell components for their spells, which can seriously hinder the use of some of them.
• They will often find that they can’t get spells at all, since their gens don’t like to be disturbed at night, and take vacations, and so on.
• They don’t always get the spells they want, since their gens don’t always succeed at finding them. The base chance of success is [50% + (5 x shair Level) – (10 x Spell Level)]%. For special modifiers we have: +10% for Common Spells, -30% for Divine Spells (plus a 10% chance per level of the spell of suffering minor divine retribution when you cast it), -30% for spells that weren’t on the list for the setting, and a cumulative -10% for each prior failure looking for a particular spell in a day. And even at best, the chance is capped at 90%.
• It takes (1d6 + Spell Level (+1d10 on a “00″)) minutes (arcane spells of Level/2 rounded up or less that are normally available in the setting), tens of minutes (arcane spells of higher level that are still normally available in the setting), or hours (divine spells or arcane spells that are not normally available in the setting), to have a gen fetch a spell.
• If you lose your gen, you can’t do any spellcasting until you get a new one – and each new gen is less loyal and slower (+1 time increment) about getting spells than the one before.

Sure, your first level sha’ir may be able to get a fifth level arcane or second level clerical spell that he or she has seen used, but the chance to get it is only 5% – and trying requires (1d6+5) x 10 minutes for the arcane spell and (1d6+2) HOURS for the clerical spell. Worse, with the failure penalty, they’d only get one try per day. If it was a foreign or clerical spell… they’d need to be at least level nine to get that 5% chance.

A ninth level sha’ir looking for Wall Of Stone? 1d6+5 Minutes, 45% chance of success – and a 22% chance that they would not be able to get it today at all. Of course, if they were lucky they might get it six or seven times – albeit at 1d6+5 minutes each time.

So what were the writers thinking?

This actually gave a sha’ir a lot more spells per day than a standard magic-user. It took a magic-user (or cleric) fifteen minutes per level of the spell to memorize one spell. If you spent four hours memorizing spells each day, your daily magical budget was sixteen spell levels – perhaps a fourth level spell, a third level spell, three second level spells, and three first level spells. If you cast more than that you were draining reserves that might take days out of action for you to rebuild – which was why a wand or even a few scrolls were such good treasures. Had you gotten a hold of a Wand Of Frost (100 charges, Ice/Sleet Storm or Wall Of Ice for 1 Charge, 6d6 Cone of Cold (treating 1’s as 2’s) for 2 Charges, rechargable)? It might well become your magic-users go-to weapon for most of his or her adventuring career – just about as vital as the paladin’s holy sword (should he or she be so lucky!).

The ideal situation for a sha’ir was 1) Party scouts out area, 2) Party waits until the sha’ir has managed to get a hold of a spell that will be really useful (or vital!) to whatever plan they come up with, 3) Party moves in, sha’ir casts his or her spell, and immediately sends his gen out after another spell – probably something low level – that he or she thinks will be useful. 4) If the sha’ir is lucky, he or she may get another low-level spell to use during the initial fighting. If not, it will most likely be ready for the next problem if the party keeps moving. Otherwise… the sha’ir will have to rely on scrolls and magic items, just like the standard magic-user (who will probably have used a fair chunk of their sixteen level daily spell budget already).

Did the surviving orcs set a fire for cover, fall back, barricade the corridor, and turtle up? That gave the sha’ir plenty of time to get a hold of another spell.

The trouble was, that the way the game was actually played often greatly favored the standard magic user, who knew just what he or she had available and had it available RIGHT NOW. It was very common to just treat the “maximum number of spells prepared” chart as “spells per day” (which it was never meant to be), and that meant that spells were thrown around in every fight instead of being saved for special situations. Similarly, it was easy to ignore the limits on how many spells a magic-user could learn, to ignore how easy it was to disrupt spells (and how long they took to cast), to skip past much of the difficulty of acquiring spells, to simply kick in the door instead of carefully scouting and planning, and to press the attack rather than risking giving the enemy time to prepare (even if that left you with no time to prepare yourself). After all… no one BUT the sha’ir really needed time to prepare once the adventure was underway.

Of course, when the party was stuck, and needed a specific high-powered effect to proceed… they could sit back for a while and let the sha’ir try to solve their problem. They needed to teleport to another continent? A first level sha’ir could try to do that if (and it was a pretty big IF) he or she had ever seen that spell in action – but it would take an average of twenty days to actually do it. Adventurers usually wanted to get things done faster than that, so that sort of thing was never a particularly popular option in actual play.

In a lot of ways the sha’ir was the first “per encounter” spellcaster – albeit with a side-order of ritualist. Unfortunately, in a game of resource management, that made them far too weak (one or maybe two spells) when it was time to blow resources in a tough situation, often useless in sudden emergencies, and far too powerful during downtime. After all, a high-level sha’ir could – in theory – throw a LOT of spells. At level twenty they had a 90% shot at sixth level spells in (1d6+6) minutes (call it an average of ten), and so might well be able to throw an average of fifty-four sixth level spells in a day (ten eight hour days worth of spell preparation for a standard magic user!) – even if they WOULD have to change what they were asking for fairly regularly.

That gave them plenty of out-of-combat use of spells like

• L1) Comprehend Languages, Mending, Mount, and Read Magic.
• L2) Continual Light, Locate Object, Rope Trick, and Whispering Wind.
• L3) Clairvoyance, Clauraudience, Explosive Runes, Find Water, Invisibility 10′ Radius (which lasted until you attacked), Item (currently “shrink item”), Non-Detection, Phantom Steed, and Sepia Snake Sigil.
• L4) Detect Scrying, Enchanted Weapon, Hallucinatory Terrain, Magic Mirror, Remove Curse, Wizard Eye, Fire Trap, and Dig.
• L5) Animate Dead, Dream, Fabricate, False Vision, Sending, Teleport, Stone Shape, and Airy Water.
• L6) Contingency, Enchant An Item, Geas, Guards and Wards, Legend Lore, Permanent Illusion, Move Earth, Stone To Flesh, Part Water, Transmute, Control Weather, and Invisible Stalker.
• L7) Mass Invisibility, Sequester, Teleport Without Error, and Vision.
• L8) Antipathy-Sympathy, Clone, Permanency, Polymorph Any Object, Symbol, and Glasteel.

Sadly, since they did have to keep swapping what they were asking for regularly, what they had at any given moment would be more or less random – and so they didn’t actually get to cast those spells nearly that often. And if that twentieth level sha’ir asked for a ninth level spell… there was only a 60% chance of getting it and it took at least (1d6+9) minutes to even try.

Then third edition turned a lot of “the way it’s usually played” items into hard rules. Now the “maximum number of spells prepared” chart was indeed spells per day, it only took an hour to prepare all of them, spell formula were easily purchased, concentration checks often let you cast a spell even if you were interrupted, and turn-based combat meant that spells were cast much more quickly – so opponents no longer got many chances to interrupt (and thus a mage no longer had to be carefully defended by other characters to cast any major spells), most spell components were assumed to be available in your spell component pouch, and you were no longer limited in the number of spells you could learn.

And now the sha’ir was blatantly inferior to a normal wizard in everything but out-of-combat utility – which wasn’t a big thing in most games. Out-of-combat utility spells tended to be taken along in wands and scrolls just in case you needed them.

Fourth Edition could have revived the concept, but while Fourth Edition embraced the “per encounter” system, it wasn’t big on scouting, delays, or wildly flexible abilities that could seriously disrupt those encounters. Fifth Edition… well, it could still shift course, but it doesn’t seem to be headed towards the sha’ir’s “can try for anything” style at the moment.

So there are several ways to look at this. We can either copy what the Sha’ir actually did or we can give them an ability set that works like they were probably intended to work as updated for 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder.

For the “what they actually did version” we’ll want…

The Sha’ir (96 CP if bought gradually or can be taken as a +3 ECL Template for “Born” Sha’ir).

• Skill Specialties in Knowledge/Arcana, Spellcraft, and Knowledge/The Planes, Corrupted / all the same: “Genies and their Works” (2 CP).
• Power Words, Specialized and Corrupted for increased effect: User can only store one spell at a time although it may be of up to level nine, user must “cast” it normally (complete with Arcane Spell Failure) and must provide any components for it, only to store spells transferred from the user’s Companion, spells are always cast at the user’s level (6 CP).
• Major Favors (Geniekind) with +4 Bonus Uses (12 CP). Among many other possible favors, sha’ir can ask the desert Janni for guidance and hospitality, ask the greater spirits to provide transportation to and from the Elemental Planes (they normally throw in about a months protection from the local planar effects as a bonus), or even ask for an audience with a great lord of Geniekind. Genies do tend to want return favors later on of course and won’t grant wishes without a compensating service, even as a favor.
• Immunity / Elemental Attacks (Very Common, Severe, Minor, 10 CP). Provides 12 points of resistance or – if resistance is not relevant – +4 to either AC or the relevant save as needed to protect against a particular elemental effect. This will allow the user to survive on the elemental planes for some time. (Note that their gen familiar increases this to Major Resistance (30 points of Resistance or a +6 bonus) against the element their familiar represents).
• Major Privilege (6 CP): Geniekin. Genies consider sha’ir to be relatives, treating them fairly and with some goodwill. Moreover, sha’ir can use items made for Genies (a form of “Device Use”, but basically free since no such items normally exist). Finally, a sha’ir can recruit a Genie (Janni, Djinni, Efreeti, Marid, or Shaitan) as an ally provided that it’s ECL is no more than two higher than his or hers. Such an ally will want at least a half share of treasure, counts as a party member for experience point computations, will not grant wishes without proper payment (25,000 GP), and has it’s own motives. While it is there to help the sha’ir, it will not do suicidal things or fulfill unreasonable requests. If it’s more powerful than the party, it will tend to regard itself as being a babysitter at best. Furthermore, Genies aren’t very sociable with mortals. Asking a Genie to run a minor errand in town may lead to all sorts of problems. Only one Genie will accompany a Sha’ir at any given time; they aren’t very sociable with each other either.
  • Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that an enemy Genie will refrain from fighting – but it will probably offer to recruit the Sha’ir before the fight starts.
• Genie Summoning:
  • Inherent Spell / Dismiss Genie with +4 Bonus Uses (L3, requiring user level 5, as Dismissal, but Genies Only. A Dismissed Genie cannot return for a year and a day) (12 CP).
    • The original sha’ir could use “Genie Traps”, but there were long term penalties for trapping Genies (even if you didn’t demand wishes). To avoid that mess I’m giving them an option to call Genies to help out, but not to grant wishes. Similarly, a Genie Prison has become “Banished for a year”, which is close enough in most games.
  • Summon Genie I: L4, requiring user level 7, as per Summon Monster, but 1 Janni or 1d3 Mephits. (3* CP).
  • Summon Genie II: L5, requiring user level 9, as per Summon Monster, but 1 Djinni or 1d3 Janni or 1d4+1 Mephits. Note that summoned Genies – regardless of type – cannot grant wishes. (3* CP)
  • Summon Genie III: L6, requiring user level 11, as per Summon Monster but 1 Efreeti or Shaitan or 1d3 Djinni or 1d4+1 Janni. Note that summoned Genies – regardless of type – cannot grant wishes. (3* CP)
  • Summon Genie IV: L7, requiring user level 13, as per Summon Monster but 1 Marid, 1d3 Efreeti or Shatan, or 1d4+1 Djinni. Note that summoned Genies –  regardless of type – cannot grant wishes. (6* CP).
    • *All the Genie Summoning spells are Specialized; once one is used, that particular spell cannot be used again for seven days. In addition, using them requires a Genie Seal – an palm-sized disc of precious metal set with small gems and inscribed with intricate elemental and magical sigils. It has a minimum value of 100 GP x the Highest Level of spell it can be used as a focus for – thus a minimum of 300 GP for Dismiss Genie up to 700 GP for Summon Genie IV. Summoned Genies will, however, remain for an extra round if the item is worth 2000+ GP or enchanted (it counts as an Amulet, and so uses the throat slot).
• Basic Magical Lore: +1 Level of Wizard Spellcasting with no Base Caster Level, Specialized and Corrupted / only to let them understand the basics and use magical items (4 CP)
• Empowerment, Corrupted for Increased Effect (user may add charges as well as substituting his or her power for them) / only works with Wands and Staves (6 CP).
  • Empowerment Pool: 4d6 (14) Mana, Specialized / only for use with Empowerment (2 Mana = 1 Charge) (9 CP).
  • Rite of Chi with +3 Bonus Uses, Corrupted for Increased Effect (automatically gets 14 points) and Specialized for Reduced Cost / only works overnight, only to refill the Empowerment Pool (5 CP).
    • Most sha’ir should be able to get a hold of a wand or two fairly quickly. After all, given a week they can charge up a mostly-depleted one – a very valuable service.
• Mephit Companion (Familiar) with the +2 ECL Sha’ir Gen Template, Specialized / Demands occasional quests on behalf of geniekind under penalty of no spells, is difficult or impossible to contact while it is resting (8-10 hours per day), must be paid 10 GP/Level/Month, insists on being treated as an honored ally. If mistreated, a sha’ir gen takes two to three times longer to get spells, may take off for a month, or may demand a fee of up to 1000 GP/Level to return to work (9 CP).

Classical Sha’ir Gen Template:

• Spellforging:
  • Immunity / the normal limitations of Ritual Magic. Spellforging Rituals are quite quick, immune to most external modifiers, and require little or nothing in the way of components (Common, Major, Epic, 27 CP). Note that, as a natural-law immunity, this can be expected to have a pretty major impact on the game.
  • Immunity / Interaction With Reality (Very Common, Severe, Great, Specialized / Only works while the gen is conducting it’s rituals or resting, 18 CP). Only very high-level effects, such as Wish, can interfere with a gen’s “search for a spell”. Gens normally find spells, rest, and take time off, on the elemental planes – with no defined mechanism for finding them and at no risk. This covers that.
  • Ritual Magic, Specialized and Corrupted for Increased Effect / only to duplicate spell effects, the spell effects produced are always transient and unstable; they cannot be stored for more than half an hour, cannot be used to make items, and cannot be inscribed into spell books. Components have no effect on the ritual check, only produces effects duplicating spells which must be either released or stored immediately, failed rituals have no consequences (6 CP).
    • Check: 1d20 + Level versus DC ( 10 + 2 x Spell Level, +6 for Exotic or Clerical Spells, +2 per unsuccessful try in a day). Spellcraft lets you recognize all standard spells – so Familiarity with any given spell is pretty much a non-issue.
    • Requires: (1d6+Spell Level) Minutes (for Arcane Spells of up to half your level, Tens of Minutes for Arcane Spells of higher level than that, and Hours for Divine Spells.
      • Given the existence of Ur-Priests, and the Magic domain, and dual-progression casters, and so on… I’m dropping the idea of divine retribution for daring to duplicate a divine spell effect. There’s no longer any firm division anyway.
• Power Words, Specialized and Corrupted for increased effect: User can only store one spell at a time although it may be of up to level nine, only to store the results of it’s own rituals, only to transfer them to a companion (master) with a similar power (6 CP).
• Immunity/having to give up it’s own hit points to be a Familiar (Uncommon, Severe, Major, 6 CP). Just add it’s hit points as a familiar to its own hit points.
• Speaks the Genietongue (whatever that may be in a given setting) 1 CP.

Originally a Sha’ir could expend money, time, and other resources using rituals to upgrade his or her Gen. To do this in Eclipse, simply invest a few more points in your Companion to improve it. Innate Enchantment is always good, but there are lots of other ways.

I’m not actually sure if this template – or sinking enough levels into the project to avoid taking it as a template – is worthwhile. It could be extremely useful in some games, and utterly useless in other games, all depending on playstyle – and I’ve got no way of knowing what that will be.

For a modern Sha’ir?

Well, if we’re going to think about an updated version we’re going to have to think about what role the sha’ir was intended to fill – and it looks to me like the intent of the sha’ir was as a patch to the magic-user.

• If a magic-user lost his or her spell books, they might well be semi-permanently crippled. Ergo, sha’ir had no spell books. If a gen was lost, it slowed things up slightly, but was hardly crippling. On the plot level… you could block access to a gen, or simply decree that they were on vacation, and so had an easy way to take away the mages powers temporarily – unlike removing their spell books.
• Magic-Users were often frustrated at being unable to obtain a favorite spell. If they rolled badly, they could NEVER add a particular spell to their spellbooks unless they somehow managed to raise their intelligence, which (in early editions) was a rare, game-master-only, thing. No more of that!
•  Magic-Users had a bad tendency to “Go Nova!” and burn through many days worth of spells at once – and then the players griped about not having anything to do save toss daggers. Ergo, a shair only got one or two spells per situation but never ran out – and automatically encouraged scouting and planning to boot.
• Magic Users had a strong tendency to ignore much of the spell list. They learned and prepared only the “best” and most versatile spells. A sha’ir, however, would often find that their first few choices for a given situation were unavailable – and so would find themselves sorting through the spell list for the perfect spell for a given situation.
• Magic-Users were pretty much never found undertaking weird quests or doing strange stuff. No matter how flavorful it might be Why should they? The rules didn’t call for it. But sha’ir… sha’ir got little tasks from the Genies all the time and sometimes got major quests from them. Their magic required some character interaction and occasional prices.
  • Secondarily, as a party patch… if the Cleric was down a normal magic-user couldn’t do a thing about it. A Ssa’ir could try to fill the gap – albeit very poorly and at a heavy price.

The trouble with all that is that most of those problems no longer exist. For a modernized sha’ir you want them to have more spells in (much faster) combat but a lot less out of combat, be able to recognize any spell with Spellcraft, but not know about them to ask for them, to have wide but unreliable access to spells, but not to keep halting the game while sorting out what they get. This is pretty awkward since those are kind of self-contradictory.

The 3.5 / Pathfinder Sha’ir:

• Sha’ir channel all kinds of spells. Thus they need an unrestricted Base Caster Level, at 6 CP/Level, for a total of 120 CP.
• Favors (Geniekind), Specialized for Increased Effect (Effects become available next round and may be “held” for up to three minutes) / Can only be used to obtain spell-like effects which may include metamagic but which the user must supply the caster level and components for. Minor Favors suffice for levels spells of level three or less, Major Favors for spells of Level six or less, and Enormous Favors for spells of level nine or less. Unfortunately, Genies are elemental beings; they may have trouble providing high level priestly magic and with whatever other spells the GM feels are inappropriate to their powers (IE: Whatever effects he or she does not wish to deal with – usually the most “broken” spells). Unfortunately, since these are spell-like effects rather than spells, they cannot be used with the standard crafting feats in the creation of magical items or be transcribed into spell books (although they can be used to recharge Pathfinder-style Staves). Save DC’s are based on either Intelligence or Charisma, at the option of the sha’ir, although the choice is permanent once made.
  • Three Minor Favors, Corrupted for Reduced Cost / once per “encounter” (6 CP).
  • Three Major Favors, Corrupted for Reduced Cost / once per “encounter” (12 CP).
  • Three Enormous Favors, Corrupted for Reduced Cost / once per “encounter” (18 CP).
    • As “per encounter” abilities these provide our Sha’irs primary magical firepower – at least one big, and potentially two lesser, spells per major scene.
  • Three Minor Favors, Corrupted for Reduced Cost / once per hour maximum (6 CP).
  • Three Major Favors, Corrupted for Reduced Cost / once per hour maximum (12 CP).
  • Three Enormous Favors, Corrupted for Reduced Cost / once per hour maximum (18 CP).
    • As “Daily” powers these favors can be used out of combat, or – in the case of a “boss fight” or emergency – tapped into within a fight for extra magic. Perhaps fortunately, however, a Sha’ir cannot expend all of his or her resources during any single battle. This also prevents our sha’ir from endlessly casting spells like “Shrink Item” during downtime. 
• Immunity / Having to repay favors at full “value” (Very Common, Minor, Epic, 36 CP). Genies don’t really value spell effects all THAT much. After all, they are beings of magic explicitly capable of granting mortal desires. When operating from their own planes, channeling through enough elemental power to grant some sha’irs request for a “fireball” doesn’t count for much. This does not mean that they won’t want occasional services, payments, or favors – but that’s on occasional thing, despite the fact that a sha’ir will be calling on them pretty much every day.
• Immunity / Elemental Attacks (10 CP): As above.
• Major Privilege / Geniekin (6 CP): As above.
• Genie Summoning (27 CP): As above.
• Mystic Companion (CR 3 Mephit) with a +2 ECL Template (+1 ECL to buying down it’s CR for purposes of being a companion, +32 CP), Specialized / is difficult or impossible to contact while it is resting (8-10 hours per day), must be paid 10 GP/Level/Month, insists on being treated as an honored ally. If mistreated it may take off for a month or demand a present to return to work) (6 CP).
• Basic Magical Lore (4 CP): As above.
• Empowerment, Corrupted for Reduced Cost / only works with Wands and Staves (4 CP).
  • This version of the sha’ir cannot recharge wands and staves outside of the usual methods for Pathfinder staves, but can still preserve their charges to some degree.
• Empowerment Pool: 4d6 (14) Mana, Specialized / only for use with Empowerment (2 Mana = 1 Charge) (9 CP).
• Rite of Chi with +3 Bonus Uses, Corrupted for Increased Effect (automatically gets 14 points) and Specialized for Reduced Cost / only works overnight, only to refill the Empowerment Pool (5 CP).
• Speaks Genietongue (1 CP).

That comes to a total of 300 GP – 15 CP per level through level twenty. Of course, the package includes a fair number of things that wizards buy separately.

Modern Sha’ir Gen Template:

• Shapeshift with +4 Bonus Uses, Specialized / essentially cosmetic, no game-statistic modifications (6 CP). Gen commonly take on the form of androgynous children, good-looking young men or women, or small (winged) animals, but this makes no real difference in their abilities. (Looking like Barbara Eden is optional).
• Speaks the Genietongue (whatever that may be in a given setting) 1 CP.
• Gains +1 SP in Knowledge / Mortals (1 CP). Gen don’t understand mortals very well, but they do have a few clues.
• Innate Enchantment (Belt Of Many Pockets, 11,000 GP), Specialized and Corrupted / can only hold the gen itself and its personal items (4 CP).
• Innate Enchantment: Six Unlimited-Use Spell-Completion Cantrips at Caster Level One (3000 GP), Force Shield (2000 GP) (6 CP).
• Blessing, Specialized for Increased Effect (Cantrips are cast at the users Base Caster Level) and Corrupted for Reduced Cost / only to let its master use some of its Innate Enchantments (the Belt Of Many Pockets and it’s Spell-Completion Cantrips) and Spell-Like Abilities while it’s in it’s in the “pocket” (4 CP).
• Two Bonus Feats (12 CP).

A gen can “turn to smoke” and tuck itself safely away in one of its masters pockets, a bottle, or some similar sanctuary its master carries. While it is there, its master may employ it’s Cantrips and even it’s Spell-Like Abilities. It’s important to note that this Gen is not a Familiar – it’s a mystic companion, similar to a Paladin’s celestial mount. If you want it to have some of a familiars abilities, it will have to purchase them with its bonus points from being a companion.

So:

The Sha’ir: 20d6 Hit Dice (Fast Learner, Specialized in Hit Dice, 6 CP), +24 Saves (Good Will Saves, 72 CP), +10 BAB (60 CP), Sha’ir Magic (300 CP), Proficient with All Simple Weapons (3 CP), +46 Skill Points and Adept I and II (58 CP) = 499 CP out of 504 CP, so there’s enough left over for a bonus feat – possibly Ritual Magic if you want to maintain the “can occasionally pull off major wonders” aspect of things. “Create Artifact” might be better if you want to make yourself an older-edition style wand or two though.

If you wish, you can add something like “Duties”, and add an additional 40 CP worth of abilities – perhaps some bonus feats or the Ranger or Paladin spellcasting chart (perhaps focusing on Illusions or some such) to take advantage of those unrestricted base caster levels and to have some magic independent of Geniekind.

Now, in general, I recommend a buy-as-you-go approach – but this is also a good point to illustrate breaking up your new “class” into a level progression by simply slapping it’s abilities into a table so that it looks reasonable. That’s a bit sloppy – if you sat down and calculated the prices some levels would be overpriced and some would be underpriced – but it’s not like the base classes aren’t that way anyway and the game still functions just fine.

 

Char Level / BCL	BAB	Saves		Daily Favors			Special Abilities
		For Ref	Wi	Mi	Ma	En
1	0	+0	+2	1	0	0	Encounter Favor (Mi), Basic Lore, Gen Familiar, Bonus Feat.
2	1	+0	+3	1	0	0	Elemental Immunity (Trivial)
3	1	+1	+3	1	0	0	Genietongue, Empowerment 1/Day
4	2	+1	+4	1	0	0	Geniekin
5	2	+1	+4	2	0	0	Dismiss Genie 1/Day, Empowerment 2/Day
6	3	+2	+5	2	1	0	Summon Genie I 1/Week
7	3	+2	+5	2	1	0	Encounter Favor (Ma),
8	4	+2	+6	2	1	0	Elemental Immunity (Minor), Empowerment 3/Day
9	4	+3	+6	3	1	0	Summon Genie II 1/Week
10	5	+3	+7	3	1	0	Dismiss Genie 2/Day
11	5	+3	+7	3	1	0	Empowerment 4/Day
12	6	+4	+8	3	2	0	Summon Genie III 1/Week
13	6	+4	+8	3	2	1	Encounter Favor (En)
14	7	+4	+9	3	2	1	Dismiss Genie 3/Day
15	7	+5	+9	3	2	1	Summon Genie IV 1/Week
16	8	+5	+10	3	2	2	Empowerment 5/Day
17	8	+5	+10	3	3	2	Dismiss Genie 4/Day
18	9	+6	+11	3	3	2	Empowerment 6/Day
19	9	+6	+11	3	3	3	Dismiss Genie 5/Day
20	10	+6	+12	3	3	3	Empowerment 7/Day

And there we have the sha’ir. They’re actually substantially more powerful than a wizard for the first few levels, during which even one modest per-encounter spell plus the abilities bestowed by their Mephit’s will easily outshine a wizard’s few spells – but the power balance will shift back the other way at higher levels, After all, a 12’th level sha’ir will get two spells per encounter (one of levels 1-3 and one of levels 4-6) and has five extra spells per day to draw on (three of levels 1-3 and two of levels 4-6) out of combat or in emergencies. Say four encounters? that’s 13 spells. Admittedly, they will probably be well-chosen spells fitted to the exact situation – but it’s still only 13 spells in a day. They are close to being unmatched in flexibility however,

Eclipse d20 and the Classical Illusionist

Alzrius has put up a very nice little Eclipse Package Deal for making Illusions a bit more effective in d20 games – and it’s reminded me of the old days. Back in first edition when a pure “Illusionist” was a viable – and fairly important! – class. I had a lot of fun with illusions back then.

Of course, D&D games were very different then. These days the game often revolves around fighting, loot from fighting gets spent on buying magic items to make you more likely to win more fights, treasure-free random encounters are almost a thing of the past, and most encounters are “Balanced”. You usually don’t WANT to evade encounters now unless you’re trying to sneak past the guards or something.

Back in the old days you might well encounter creatures far beyond your ability to handle, killing things brought in a little XP, but stealing treasure brought in a LOT, and you couldn’t spend loot to make yourself more powerful (after all, just getting it had done THAT). Loot got spent on things like building castles or mansions, buying land, funding charities, paying troops, educating your kids, and living a life of indulgence and luxury – and so adventuring parties often wanted to avoid encounters in favor of stealing that loot.

And even a first level Illusionist could REALLY help with that. An illusion of an open door (and empty room) covering a closed one, or a bramble-thicket covering where the characters were hiding, or some such could let that dragon, or group of ogres, or other powerful creature go right on by. This sort of thing was very limited – at fifteen minutes per spell level to memorize EACH spell it could take a high-level mage a week to fill up his or her spell slots – so they couldn’t use many illusions per day and would need to be carefully guarded while they cast them to keep from having them disrupted and spoiled – but Illusionists were VERY useful.

When it came to a fight, it was hard to tell what spell someone was casting and illusions could actually defeat opponents – and that made them very much worth supporting. You might toss out that flask of self-igniting oil and start chanting – producing real flames, real smoke, real heat, and possibly even a few real burns – to help convince your targets of the “reality” of the illusory fire elemental, wall of fire, or swiftly-spreading blaze that you then “conjured” from it.

When it came to designing 3.0 however, the problem was that illusions were EXTREMELY “swingy”. Did the Illusionist “collapse the cavern roof” over a group of opponents? If they failed to disbelieve, or save… the entire group might be rendered unconscious and easy prey. On the other hand, if they saved, all you’d done was hide them from the rest of the party until they charged – and once the cries of “It’s an illusion!” started up, your illusionist lost a lot of effectiveness and didn’t have that much to fall back on. He or she simply had to hide behind the fighters and wait for the next encounter.

Just as bad… one game master might note the lack of dust in the air and sound of impact (at least with the first level Phantasmal Forces spell) and thus have the victims automatically attempt to disbelieve, while another might not think of that or feel that – what with the exigencies of battle to keep track of – they probably wouldn’t notice in time, and so would have only a few attempt to disbelieve.

Still, “Swingy” was much less of a problem back then because – if an encounter was going badly – it was quite normal to break it off and run away. Illusions could be really helpful there too. If you could just get out of sight for a few moments, a well-chosen illusion gave you a pretty good chance to evade any pursuit.

So lets say we want some of that old functionality back, over and above Alzrius’s very handy package.

First up…

• We want out illusions to be able to knock people out, but never to do any more than that.
• We want them to be interesting and interactive. A rain of boulders is one thing, but an illusory “Fireball” is basically just a flash of bright light. How would they even know what it’s supposed to be?
• We want to avoid “I Win!” buttons. Damage is one thing, but simply taking opponents out of the fight is not very interesting.

So purchase Shadowmaster, Corrupted for Increased Effect (gives a bit of reality to a limited set of illusion spells that normally have none at all – Trifling Image, Silent Image, Minor Image, Major Image, Hallucinatory Terrain, Persistent Image, Permanent Image, and Programmed Image) and Specialized for Reduced Cost / only applies to those eight spells or variants thereof, only inflicts nonlethal damage and minor related effects, cannot inflict further damage after the victims go unconscious, disbelief and a successful save provides complete protection, even without disbelief the damage is determined by comparison to a similar spell effect of equal or lesser level to the illusion used and may allow saves for reduced effect, and the damage is limited by the targets expectations and experience – and so instant effects are rarely very effective and no effects will work on mindless targets or objects (3 CP).

Using this ability…

• A Silent Image spell COULD be used to “collapse the ceiling”, but the (nonlethal) damage is not going to exceed the 1d4/Level (5d4 Maximum) that you could get with “Hail Of Stone” – and trying to affect a larger area is likely to bring that down to 2d6.
• A Minor Image spell could be used to simulate a Fireball, but the actual results are likely to be a blinding flash and a momentary feeling of heat – likely resulting in victims taking two or three d6 of damage and being briefly dazzled. Turning the room into a “raging inferno” will probably be more effective, since that can be maintained over several rounds, even if it will only be 2d6 per round.
• Using a Major Image to “bring down the ceiling” might well get you up to Fireball damage – but a reflex save to “dodge the boulders” will apply to halve that damage, even if they fail to disbelieve.

That makes illusions versatile and somewhat effective attacks – but certainly not overwhelmingly powerful ones.

• To fit the theme, I’m going to make Light and Darkness effects reversible. In Pathfinder you can do that with the Eclipsed Spell (+0) Metamagic. In Eclipse, you’ll want the Elemental Manipulation Metamagical Theorm, Specialized and Corrupted / only applicable to spells that affect the level of illumination, only to apply the +0 “change the elemental effect” modifier to switch between versions that provide light and versions that make it darker (2 CP).
• And we’ll want Specialist (Illusion Spells), Corrupted / only for Trifling Image, Silent Image, Minor Image, and Major Image. The first casting of each of these spells in a day does not count against the user’s available spell slots (2 CP).

So how should we build the actual spellcasting? Taking a look at the original Illusionist Spell List we have…

• L0) None. This was before L0 spells were introduced.
• L1) Audible Glamour, Change Self, Color Spray, Dancing Lights, Darkness, Detect Illusion, Detect Invisibility, Gaze Reflection, Hypnotism, Light, Phantasmal Force, Wall Of Fog.
• L2) Blindness, Blur, Deafness, Detect Magic, Fog Cloud, Hypnotic Pattern, Improved Phantasmal Force, Invisibility, Magic Mouth, Mirror Image, Misdirection, Ventriloquism.
• L3) Continual Darkness, Continual Light, Dispel Illusion, Fear, Hallucinatory Terrain, Illusory Script, Invisibility 10′ Radius, Non-Detection, Paralyzation, Rope Trick, Spectral Force, and Suggestion.
• L4) Confusion, Dispel Exhaustion, Emotion, Improved Invisibility, Massomorph, Minor Creation, Phantasmal Killer, Shadow Monsters.
• L5) Chaos, Demi-Shadow Monsters, Major Creation, Maze, Projected Image, Shadow Door, Shadow Magic, Summon Shadow.
• L6) Conjure Animals, Demi-Shadow Magic, Mass Suggestion, Permanent Illusion, Programmed Illusion, Shades, True Sight, Veil.
• L7) Alter Reality, Astral Spell, Prismatic Spray, Prismatic Wall, Vision, First Level Magic User Spells (you could take several of them in one seventh level spell slot).

Most of this was actually folded into the Bard list in 3.0, but an Illusionist was a subtype of Wizard, so we’ll take…

• Wizard Spellcasting (Spontaneous Variant), Specialized for Reduced Cost / only for the following list of “Illusionist” (mostly Bardic) spells, maxes out at level seven spells (7 CP per level).
  • L0: Dancing Lights, Decrypt, Detect Magic, Encrypt, Ghost Sound, Light, Signal, Trifling Image
  • L1): Color Spray, Disguise Self, Dispel Illusion (as per Dispel Magic, but Illusions only), Hideous Laughter, Hypnotism, Magic Mouth, Silent Image, and Ventriloquism.
  • L2): Blindness/Deafness, Blur, Hypnotic Pattern, Invisibility, Minor Image, Mirror Image, Rope Trick, Suggestion.
  • L3: Confusion, Daylight, Fear, Invisibility Sphere, Major Image, Mass Invigorate, Nondetection, Secret Page.
  • L4: Greater Invisibility, Hallucinatory Terrain, Minor Creation, Mirror Image (Greater), Phantasmal Killer, Shadow Conjuration, Shadow Jaunt, Weave Emotion* (Greater Invocation, creates any emotion-influencing effect of up to L3).
  • L5: Chains Of Light, Major Creation, Mislead, Persistent Image, Plane Shift, Shadow Evocation,
    Shadow Walk, Suggestion (Mass).
  • L6: Dirge Of The Victorious Knights, Maze, Permanent Image, Programmed Image, Project Image, True Seeing, Veil, Wizardly Pretense (prepare any five first level wizard spells, although these cannot be transferred to others or put into scrolls).
  • L7: False Vision (Greater), Invisibility (Mass), Limited Wish, Prismatic Spray, Prismatic Wall, Shadow Conjuration (Greater), Shadow Necromancy (Greater), Shadow Terrain.

Sample emotion-influencing effects of L3 include Crushing Despair, Fear, Good Hope, Heroism (one hour per level), Malicious Spite, Rage, Overwhelming Grief, Smug Narcissism, and Terrible Remorse.

Finally, we’ll want to be able to run more than one illusion at a time – so we’ll want…

• Persistent Illusions: Streamline x 2, Metamagical Theorem/Stabilize, both Specialized and Corrupted /only to give Silent Image, Hypnotic Pattern, Minor Image, and Major Image durations of one minute per caster level past concentration and extend Veil to 2 hours per caster level with no concentration (6 CP).

So our first-level Illusionist trades out Wizard Spellcasting (14 CP) and a Familiar (or Arcane Bond) (6 CP) for Illusionist Spellcasting (7 CP), Damaging Illusions (3 CP), Reversible Light and Darkness (2 CP), Bonus Illusions (Specialist I, 2 CP), and Persistent Illusions (6 CP). That’s an even trade, so they can otherwise be built like any other Wizard – which fits nicely. Since their spellcasting will continue at only 7 CP per level, they can either continue to spend the extra CP on further improvements to their illusions or they can invest in other abilities.

If they want some other boosts to their illusory talents they may want to consider…

• Ability Focus (Illusion Spells): Increase the DC of saving against the user’s illusions by +2 (6 CP). For another +6 CP you may increase the bonus to +4.
• Augmented Magic (+1 Caster Level on Illusion Spells) (3 CP).
• Augmented Bonus: Adds (Cha Mod) to (Int Mod) when calculating the DC of saves against their spells, Specialized/only for spells from the Illusion school (3 CP). Charismatic and persuasive Illusionists have quite an edge.
• Improved Specialist (Illusion Spells), Corrupted / only for Hallucinatory Terrain, Persistent Image, and Permanent Image. The first casting of each of these spells in a day does not count against the user’s available spell slots (2 CP)
• Occult Sense / Detect Illusions (including invisibility), Corrupted / this ability must be actively used to function (4 CP).
• Power Words (6+ CP) will let them keep some very fast spells ready to go.
• Shadowmaster (6 CP) will increase the reality of Shadow Conjuration, Shadow Evocation, Shadow Conjuration (Greater), Shadow Necromancy (Greater), and Shadow Terrain when the character gets them.
• Shaping, Specialized for Increased Effect and Corrupted for Reduced Cost / can only produce effects on the user’s list of known cantrips but can produce those cantrips, user must be free to gesture and speak (4 CP) will give them unlimited use of their cantrip slots.
• Visions, bought as Inherent Spell, Specialized for Increased Effect (Contact Other Plane) and Corrupted for Reduced Cost (4 CP) / Requires an occult laboratory and a variety of special props, plus Luck, Specialized and Corrupted / only for the check to avoid a reduction in Intelligence and Charisma (2 CP). (The original Illusionist got the “Visions” spell, which was pretty cruddy. This is, in fact, much better – even if it does cost a little more than a spell slot).

This version of the Illusionist has several major boosts over the original, but they’re mostly built into the current d20 game system. For example, they get concentration checks instead of any interruption automatically ruining their spellcasting and they get individual turns and standard-action spellcasting rather than having to deal with enemies with simultaneous actions getting to ruin their spells. Both of those are very big advantages indeed – but they’re a normal part of d20 spellcasting these days.

And now I want to play one again. Oh well, maybe one of these days.

Linear Fighter, Assistant Wizard

For today, we have a retrospective question about just when “wizards got so overpowered!”.

For the quick answer, is 3.0. For the long answer…

Originally, back in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (First and Second Edition), if you played the game as written… spellcasting didn’t really dominate the game. Over more than a decade of play with several different groups it soon became pretty obvious that Fighters did. Paladins, Rangers and Monks were all good – but the entry requirements kept them rare. Thieves helped with scouting and traps and taking out bosses with carefully set up backstabbing, but the main drive against the enemy was always the fighters.

And that was about right. In a very large proportion of legends, myths, and fantasy stories… wizards were either enemies or they were assistants to the heroic warriors who were the real stars. They had many interesting powers, and their spells might turn the tide at a dramatic moment, enable visits to strange locations of adventure, and trick overwhelming foes – but they were still secondary. Swords, bows, secondary weapons, and (sometimes) martial arts still did the main work.

But wait! Magic-Users had all those incredibly powerful spells! Almost as many as Wizards and Sorcerers do in 3.5 or Pathfinder!

Yes, they did. And they had segmented casting times at ten segments to the round and usually at least one segment per spell level. It was often more; looking back at my first edition books, many first level spells required three or four segments. Hold Person, at level two, required five segments – in a system where you determined initiative with opposing d6 rolls and any interruption ruined the spell. There were no “concentration” checks, saving throws were fixed numbers, spellcasters couldn’t evade attacks while casting, only got to know a limited number of spells, often couldn’t learn spells they wanted, some of them couldn’t use armor at all, and might take many days of rest and study (or prayer) to prepare all their spells.

Thus the Dungeon Masters Guide told us

Because spell casting will be so difficult, most magic-users and clerics will opt to use magical devices whenever possible in melee, if they are wise.

For that matter… it took a lot longer to go up in level. For example… killing an Orc was worth an average of 14.5 XP. Getting to level three as a Magic User required 4501 XP. That meant that your party of four needed to kill off 1242 orcs to reach level three through combat experience if no one died (if someone died the doubling experience point tables let a new character catch up very quickly, which was good because older edition characters died a lot). Even with experience for treasure… a party usually only gained 3-6 levels per year of play – 50-odd sessions.

So what would those spellcasting limitations look like if you imported them into a current d20 game? Well, at least in Eclipse, such “Old School” magic levels are blatantly Specialized and Corrupted for one-third cost (or possibly even double-specialized given the number and severity of limitations here).

Basic Spellcasting Limitations:

Casting Spells takes more time. If the base casting time is:

• One Standard Action the spell requires three initiative counts per spell level including metamagic other than “Quicken”).
• One Full Round the spell requires sixty initiative counts.
• More Than One Round the spell requires ten times as long to cast.
• A Free Action the spell requires one initiative count.
• A Swift or Immediate Action the spell requires two initiative counts.
• Scrolls require the normal casting time, and are subject to the same limitations as direct casting. Wands and Rods only require three counts to activate, while Staves require six. Unfortunately, the save DC for wands, rods, and staves is only 14.
• If such an action would not be completed before “0”, the countdown continues into the next round.

There is no such thing as a concentration check. Any damage or distraction that would normally call for a concentration check causes your spell to fail automatically, and be lost.

Spellcasting does not invoke attacks of opportunity, but the spellcaster cannot apply Dodge or Dexterity bonuses to his or her AC while spellcasting without losing the spell.

You may only prepare spells after a period of uninterrupted rest or meditation.

• 1’st and 2’nd level spells require four hours.
• 3’rd and 4’th level spells require six hours.
• 5’th and 6’th level spells require eight hours.
• 7’th and 8’th level spells require ten hours.
• 9’th level spells require twelve hours.

It takes fifteen minutes per level of the spell per spell to prepare a spell. Thus preparing a third-level spell requires forty-five minutes. If you then go on to prepare a fifth level spell, that’s an hour and fifteen minutes – for a total of two hours to prepare two spells.

You cannot spend more than eight hours preparing spells before you will need to rest again to prepare more.

There is no such thing as spontaneous spellcasting. All spells must be prepared.

The spell charts are not “spells per day”. The spell chars show the maximum number of spells a spellcaster may have prepared. A powerful spellcaster may need many days to prepare all of his or her spells.

This means that a spellcasters daily “spell budget” is basically sixteen to thirty-two levels of spells. At the low end that might be four first, three second, and two third level spells. It would take a seventh level magic user five hours to memorize his or her selection of 4/3/2/1 (twenty spell levels in total) spells after at least six hours of uninterrupted rest. A ninth level magic user with the capacity to store 4/4/3/2/1 spells needs eight hours of rest and eight and a quarter hours to prepare spells – and if he or she tried to cast them in a fight, a fair chunk of those would probably be disrupted and lost.

The DC of saving against a spell is fixed at 16. Yes, this means that high-level targets will almost always make their saving throws.

Counterspelling is possible, but usually pointless. If you have time to hold an action for a counterspell, why aren’t you tossing off a quick Magic Missile or something and stopping your opponent from casting a spell in the first place?

Additional Arcane Caster Limitations Include:

• Arcane Casters may only learn (Int/2) spells of each level they can cast. Read Magic is automatically one of them. They normally begin with another three first level spells – one offensive, one defensive, and one utility, selected at random.
• Arcane Casters must record the spells they gain access to along with the results of a roll of (1d20 + Spell Level). If that is under their current intelligence, they can comprehend the spell and may choose to add it to their spells known.
  • For an example, Tim the Intelligence 14 Magic User has gotten ahold of scrolls or spell formulas for Color Spray (19), Burning Hands (3), Glitterdust (15), Pyrotechnics (12), Fireball (9), and Fly (16). With a maximum spell list of seven spells of each level he can cast, he may opt to learn Burning Hands, Pyrotechnics, and Fireball. If he gets his Int up to 15 he could opt to learn Glitterdust, and at 16 he could opt to learn Fly. Sadly, Color Spray is likely to remain far out of reach at any level where it might be useful – unless Tim saves a first level slot and opts to research (say) Tim’s Scintillating Butterflies, which is a different spell with the same basic effect. Note that, if you successfully research a spell you still roll – but the maximum result is equal to your current intelligence.
• Arcane Casters only automatically gain one spell formula from among those they could potentially cast each level (although they may seek out or buy more if the game master allows it or they capture a spellbook or something). They may check (and record) their spell comprehension for desired spells until they find one that they can currently comprehend to add to their spellbooks. They may add a spell that they cannot currently cast to their books if they so desire, but usually have no reason to do so.
  • For example, Tim has made level seven, and wants a fourth level spell – in his case he wants Wall of Fire. Unfortunately, the check results in a roll of 23 – far beyond his intelligence! He doesn’t pick that one. Dimension Door turns up a 15. That’s tempting – next level he’ll get his Int up to 15 and be able to use it – but why not choose it next level? Next up, his third choice of Lesser Globe Of Invulnerability comes up a “7” – and so Lesser Globe Of Invulnerability goes into his book and onto his list of learned spells.
• Arcane Casters will find that any armor or shield that would normally produce a 5% or more chance of arcane spell failure causes automatic arcane spell failure.
• As a note, spellbooks do NOT have plot immunity. They may be stolen, destroyed by area-effect spells and attacks, and so on. It is VERY WISE to use backup spell books and traveling spell books!

Additional Divine Caster Limitations Include:

• Divine spellcasters may only pray for a limited list (Wis/2) of spells of each level they can cast. “Consecrate Holy Symbol” (L1) is always one of them.
• Divine spellcasters may only select spells for their list that are appropriate to their god. For a quick example, Odin does not grant Sanctuary and Poseidon does not grant Flame Strike. If the game master has the time, and wishes to make the effort, gods may also offer access to unique spells related to their particular specialties.
• Divine spellcasters gain spells beyond level three from spiritual servants of their god and gain spells of level seven or above directly from their god at the discretion of those entities. They may be denied spells, granted spells other than what they prayed for, be assigned missions or quests, or be asked to attone for misdeeds at the whim of those entities.
• Divine spellcasters who change gods must prove themselves worthy followers of their new god with mighty oaths, quests, and deeds in the service of their new god. If they attempt to leave the service of their new god, those same oaths will utterly destroy them.
• As a rule, Clerics will be asked to spend time preaching, to refuse missions that their god does not approve of and to undertake ones that he or she does approve of without further reward, to use weapons and armor only as approved of by their god, to build and maintain temples, and so on.

Spellcasters operating under those restrictions will be roughly back to where they were in first and second edition; they may have some useful noncombat effects that they may use for special circumstances and they will have a very limited range of combat spells and game-changing effects that they can cast once in a while during fights IF a bunch of other characters protect them while they do it. Their spells, however, often will not work against high-end opponents, who can be counted on to make their saving throws. Magic will become, once again, a very limited special resource, to be husbanded carefully and deployed with planning – or in extreme emergencies.

Of course, in Eclipse, all this reduces the cost of your magic levels to the point where you can easily afford to add some weapons skills, a better BAB, a few more hit points, and other bennies – resulting in the modern equivalent of an old-style multi-classed character without any major complications or sacrifices.

Looking at all this also helps explain why so many players made Elven Fighter/Magic-Users in first and second edition days despite the 7/11 level limitation. After all… level eleven was well past the point where you could prepare all your spells each day. Were you on a long adventure? You’d have just as many spells each day as a higher-level human mage. They’d be weaker spells (at least in some cases), but YOU could wear armor. Not only did you have a better chance of getting your spells cast because you were harder to hit, but you weren’t an obvious target like that unarmored guy. If you started from level one, a human magic-user wouldn’t really have much of a magical edge on you for nearly two hundred sessions. Even better, the high-end magical gear worked for you just as well as it did for a higher-level wizard – reducing the gap even more. I, personally, played a maxed-out elven fighter/magic-user for a couple of years in a game that went up past level eighteen (for the human wizard, characters with easier advancement tables had higher levels) and it worked just fine. I even got some better items than the higher-level mage because they were used more often, and so did more good for the party, in the hands of someone who didn’t have so many other high-level spell options. And best of all… you could reasonably play your fighter/magic-user through the fifty-odd lower-level sessions before adding a human wizard to the party became really viable.

Underlying The Rules Part VI: Discussion and Development

And for today it’s an answer to a question again…

So I’ve recently been reading Dave Arneson’s True Genius, and it’s really been making me think of Eclipse. The first essay in particular, regarding how Original D&D utilized a melding of open system and closed system designs to establish a new paradigm of game design (and play) that went beyond what either could accomplish alone – and how this was largely lost with the release of AD&D and its rejection of the open system principles therein in favor of standardization – is an excellent summary of why I love what Eclipse has done with regards to (as I see it) trying to reintroduce those principles back into Third Edition (at least somewhat) via the mutability of game rules (a la corruption and specialization for abilities, world templates, a stronger focus on modularity with what’s used and what’s not, etc.).

In that light, this article takes on a new dimension, as it honestly looks like KrackoThunder is trying to leverage the closed system principles of Third Edition (e.g. the immutability of the “implied setting,” the invariability of the rules, and their extrapolation with regard to “how things work”) to achieve the results that you’d get from an open system, wherein those things are defined as part of the act of creating the setting (or, at a slightly higher level, using the rules as ur-tools to effectively build a game – along with a setting – unto itself) and so more easily allow for that level of alteration with regards to players tinkering with what is and is not allowable within the scope of the game.

Of course, as you noted here, that doesn’t really work; it’s like trying to “rob the bank” in Monopoly. Of course, the same is true in reverse as well, which is why I roll my eyes whenever I see someone unironically utilizing Eclipse to make what you called an “atrocity build.”

-Alzrius

Breakthroughs are often very simple insights; the genius lies in picking out something that no one else saw.

Test your hypothesis. Only survivors breed. “Particles” are waves. Motion is relative.

Those are the key insights that led the the scientific method, to the theory of evolution, to quantum mechanics, and to relativity in three words each. Each explained things – why philosophical theorizing rarely led directly to practical advances, why animals and illnesses were so well adapted to their environments, why electrons didn’t spiral into nuclei, how Maxwell’s equations could work when things were moving.

Exploring the consequences of those simple ideas is still underway – in some cases after many centuries.

Personally, I’ve always seen the stroke of genius fundamental to role-playing games as a bit of psychological insight; Adult “Let’s Pretend” needs rules. And while that phrasing does evoke safewords and agreed-on limits rather than RPG’s… that’s fair enough, since that’s where the notion appeared first – even if that’s arguably an independent line of development.

But when it comes to games and “let’s pretend”… Unlike kids adults won’t be happy with Robbie the Dinosaur, Spaceman Spiff, the Wicked Witch of the East, and Megatron.

• Adults are competitive; they don’t like to be overshadowed – and so every role needs to be unique and important. They need some rules on creating tolerably “balanced” characters and some expectations on what kinds of characters are appropriate.
• Adults have firm opinions. Since they won’t give in easily they need rules to resolve what happens when they don’t agree on an outcome.
• Adults want “fair” rewards and consequences for their decisions. They need a rules system for that or they’ll always suspect bias.
• Adults want details – a more complicated plot with surprise twists and turns. They need a game master.

All of that flows from “Adults need rules”. They aren’t going to be happy with the vague “everyone imagines their own thing” that little kids are. For them… it’s not much fun without acknowledgement by others and a certain level of participation. That’s why a player who’s sulking, or busy reading a book, or getting drunk instead of playing is such a downer in a group.

And the practitioners of this new hobby looked upon it, and it was pretty good – but, unlike the works of a divine creator, it was equally obvious that it could be BETTER.

But, the hobbyists being human, and each having their own personal inner description of the perfect game, they didn’t quite agree on what would improve it.

• Inevitably there were a lot of things that the original, simple, pioneering, rules did not cover – and so there was pressure for more rules, more tables, and more systems. They had a point. When there were no clear rules on a topic disagreements soon broke out.
  • Of course, more rules complicated everything. The people who wanted to play casually didn’t like that.
• There was the push for more coherent and simpler rules. They had a point. All those tables and different systems for resolving various tasks were complicated and messy to deal with.
  • Of course, that meant that a lot of factors that affected specific tasks didn’t get included. The simulationists didn’t like that.
• There were players who wanted pure role-playing and who didn’t like being restrained by rules at all – and wanted more options if there had to be rules. They had a point. More options meant more interesting and distinctive characters.
  • Of course, that complicated the rules in proportion to the number of options added. The people running the games didn’t like that.
• There were the wargamers, who wanted to just relabel tanks, infantry platoons, and artillery units as “Knights”, “Men At Arms”, and “Wizards” and so on. They had a point. They were experts at turning limited sets of rules interactions into exciting scenarios.
  • Of course, the people who wanted more “realistic:, normal-human-scale characters didn’t like that.
• The competitive players wanted clear methods of “winning” and – since that really didn’t work in a social game – at least wanted a way to keep score, whether that was accumulated gold, experience, reaching “name” levels, or access to better toys.
  • Of course, the people who liked to try new characters all the time didn’t like that.
• The world-builders wanted a coherent underlying description of the way things worked so that they could explore the worlds and social systems that would result from such things, instead of just presuming a vaguely-medieval world.
  • Of course, the people who wanted to search the rules for exploits that were being overruled in the name of “the way the setting works” didn’t like that.
• The deep-immersion players wanted death to be the result of heroic sacrifice, or a dramatic climax, or something. Wounds, disabilities illnesses… what fun were they?
  • Of course, the people who liked really big weapons and “realistic” battles didn’t like that.

And so compromises were made. Gaming groups filled with house rules, each group worked under different assumptions, and gaming fragmented.

And there were many other, albeit mostly more specific, fault lines and opposing forces for each.

And the publishers looked upon their sales figures, and this was bad.

To try and fix things there was compromise on the writers and publishers side. It was weighted towards new rules of course, simply because the publishers needed to keep selling stuff – but for quite some time gestures could be made towards almost everyone’s priorities because early game systems weren’t very sophisticated.

And so.,,

• There were more rules, but there were attempts to keep a lot of them unobtrusive, on the game masters side, optional, or limited to particular situations.
• There were premade characters, and quick-generation options, and ways to try to get people playing as quickly as possible.
• There were attempts to streamline and unify the mechanics with things like single-mechanic skill systems instead of a mess of specific formulas and tables.
• Compiled lists of special modifiers were (not unreasonably) pushed over to the game master to just assign some modifiers.
• Options were added.
• Characters did get to be the equivalent of military units (and superheroes and possibly even gods) later on, but they started off weak.
• All sorts of character milestones were set up.
• Character advancement was greatly accelerated, and the gap between old and new characters was (sometimes, since this annoyed the people with old characters) reduced.
• The rules attempted to imply dangerous combat, deadly wounds, and long-term consequences – but were rewritten to make actual consequences vanishingly rare.
• Some coherent information on “the way things worked” was added – but it was always a side-bar thing since the marketing department wanted every customer to buy everything.
• Exploits were plugged, but mostly in obscure errata that only the people who were really annoyed by the exploits bothered to find.

That didn’t all happen in every game of course. Some games – those designed after the first rush – started off with some of it in place. Champions / Hero System, for example, started off with a well-chosen bell-curve generic resolution system, lots of options, and military-unit characters, but is still struggling with complexity, a lack of character milestones, “the way things work”, and various exploits. Rifts – thanks to creator decisions – has never really updated much of anything past the first few “different from AD&D” reforms. Basic Dungeons and Dragons went the minimalist route – and soon ran into the nothing much left to publish” barrier.

Eclipse, of course, is a compromise just like everything else – and, not too surprisingly, leans towards my biases.

• Complexity? I can easily deal with that. Bring on the complexity!
• Casual play? Grab a pre-build (although I’ve put out a lot of those for various settings). I’m not giving up my options!
• Coherence? Well, using d20 as a base took care of THAT. If anything it had gone too far – and thus my support for a 3d6 skill mechanic. Roll 3d6 instead of 1d20 sometimes seems reasonable enough to me.
• Modifiers? I can think of thousands for everything. This is hopeless, so the game master will have to handle it.
• Realistic characters? A bit at first – but I can be a realistic person every day. I want my larger-than-life impossible feats of heroism!
• Disparity between old and new characters? Eclipse offers several ways to play with the power curve. For this… new characters can be made powerful, but very focused – becoming more versatile as their association with older characters drags them along to higher levels more rapidly fast enough to add new abilities as they finish exploring old ones.
• Deadly combat? I tend to prefer role-playing, so defenses are fairly cheap and plentiful – if sometimes (such as Action Hero/Stunts) limited use to ensure that there’s some longer-term cost to losing.

Perhaps most importantly… Eclipse restricts itself to pure mechanics, with little to no “setting” material – but directly tells the game master to restrict, modify, or ban any options that do not fit into his or her setting. In Eclipse, “The way things work” explicitly overrides “but the rules say”.

Not surprisingly, Eclipse appeals most to those with similar biases – although there is a substantial secondary appeal of “everything you need to make an optimized or exotic character is in the basic book”.

When it comes to KrackoThunder, I could be wrong, but I suspect that he or she sees the games as fairly adversarial things in which the game master has arbitrary power and it’s up to the players to try to “win” by coming up with rules-combinations that trump various game master ploys (or, occasionally, each other). Thus the questions about making your minions absolutely loyal, making spells totally unbreakable, using Channeling (Conversion) to gain limitless use of Wish or Miracle, laying mega-powerfed curses, and so on.

Unfortunately, from that point of view, suggesting that the setting and the social requirements of the game override rules, exploits, and gambits like the classic “introducing gunpowder” routine amounts to arbitrarily declaring that the players are not allowed to win and that there is no point in playing.

Still, while a few games (and MMORPGs) are run that way, tabletop RPG’s were never really designed to be adversarial at all – and “winning” generally consists of having a good time, being creative, and winding up with good stories rather than dominating clashes of rules. To the best of my knowledge, only World Of Synnibar has attempted to put in a rule which says that if anyone can identify a spot where the game master failed to follow the rules exactly as written during a session then the entire session is null and void.

I hope that KrakoThunder and his or her friends are having a good time with their games – but given that all the stuff I write ultimately comes with the caveat “See how your game master thinks this works in the setting” I just don’t see how I can contribute. to an adversarial game. Writing a few books doesn’t give me magical powers of overriding local game masters.

Still, I hope this little retrospective has been interesting!

Eclipse and Magical Schools Part I: Historical Notions

And for today, it’s trying to catch up on questions.

Looking over your (excellent) series of articles about how d20 magic would shape the nature and growth of cities, I’m moved to ask: what would “wizard schools” look like if you applied the same logic to such a concept?

I ask because the idea of magic colleges is a popular one, ranging from the Scholomance to Hogwarts (to, as we saw in the recent write-up for Trixie, Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns), and yet d20 doesn’t really seem to support the concept, or at least not incentivize it; the only downside or difficulty to being a spellcaster is the advanced “starting age” tables for spellcasters, and the idea that a wizard’s starting spellbook must have been paid for by someone else. Other than that, anyone with the requisite mental ability score of 10+ (to cast cantrips) has no problems learning magic just as easily on their own as they do in a scholastic setting. Especially if you’re using Eclipse.

To what extent do magical colleges make sense in a d20 setting?

-Alzrius

Schools which teach magic are quite popular in fiction. That’s not too surprising; they’re quite popular in reality where they don’t even work. After all, there are few more direct wish-fulfillment fantasies than getting magical powers – and “training” is how you acquired most of your more complicated skills. Ergo, “a school that teaches you how to use magic” seems at least superficially plausible – and you can find plenty of them on the internet to give your money to.

But where did that notion come from? What, underneath the various fictions, are people actually expecting from a school of magic?

The first “schools of magic” were probably shamanic traditions, being passed down in individual small tribes – informal affairs where the tribal shaman taught each generation of kids how to not anger the spirit world (most likely a mixture of practical advice intermixed with tribal myths). Judging by the cave paintings, this sort of “school” probably goes back to the origin of the species, if not to some of our ancestral species. So we’re starting off with “teach the kids how to get along in the world”.

Moving on, Martial Arts traditions date back at least five thousand years (and likely much further, but that’s when our earliest hard evidence dates to). Given a certain lack of understanding as to how things work, magical beliefs and practices were a part of almost any form of organized training at that point – and what tales we have from that period do portray their heroes with a variety of mystical powers derived from their great skill. Thus the notion of “Kung Fu” – “a discipline or skill achieved through hard work and practice”.

The first formal classes, with locations, multiple teachers, and groups of unrelated students drawn from a larger population, turned up after cities (and large, formal, permanent, organizations and structures) developed. They taught priests and record-keepers – a suddenly vital profession given the new need for organization, taxation, and keeping tabs on the population.

And those scribes DID have mysterious powers. They could “hear” the voices of the dead by examining strange talismans covered with equally strange symbols, they could remember more than any man, they could organize the construction of fabulous palaces and temples, they produced incredible remedies (often based to some extent on things that had worked, rather than on the placebo effect), they could know what was happening far away based on the delivery of a few bits of junk from that location… they were mighty wizards, who knew the powers of the hidden words. They could say and write down words which observably made impressive things happen. As far as the general population was concerned… that was magic. Observable, repeatable, WORKING magic.

Yet as the notion of writing spread, and it’s actual effects became more familiar and less impressive and mysterious… the tales of magic didn’t just vanish. Stories of mysterious and powerful secrets and knowledge never do; just ask the “Ancient Aliens” guy. Instead, those stories just pushed the mysterious powers back from general literacy to the “secret stuff” that only very select students got to learn. Hidden and powerful arts!

Not too surprisingly, that’s what “Occult” means. It’s simply a word for “hidden”.

But secret and powerful arts inevitably raise suspicions. Why are they hiding? (“because they don’t exist” has never satisfied anyone except for serious skeptics, and they’re pretty rare). Who is doing the teaching? What secret powers are there? What are they doing to you that they don’t want you to know about? What is their secret agenda?

And so scholarship became suspicious. Anti-intellectualism and the notion that knowledge was somehow unwholesome became popular. Why should another persons opinion be considered better than yours just because they knew more?

This has gotten worse now that there ARE secret (by virtue of being very difficult and time consuming to master) and powerful arts such as “Engineering” and “Medicine”. Just look at all the “they are hiding the simple answers to curing diabetes/ getting free energy / obtaining wealth / becoming more intelligent” from us!” scams on the internet. If those didn’t get a lot of money from people who believe that they’re being exploited by massive conspiracies there wouldn’t be so many of them. This is also why “Harry Potter” produced so much of a frenzy; quite a lot of people believe that that sort of thing is real.

Individual scholars gained reputations as sorcerers and mystics and tales of secret schools or “covens” spread. As education – “schooling” – started to become a normal and necessary part of life, classes grew, multiple instructors and specialized series of courses became the norm – and so the speculative secret schools reflected reality; they became institutions with physical buildings and established locations, rather than secret societies.

For practical reasons most of the literary examples (where things need a lot more logic and justification to satisfy the readers than rumors or popular myths have to have) for youngsters were boarding schools or – as in The Wall Around The World (1953) – were physically isolated. Even most conspiracy theorists have a hard time believing that a bunch of practicing magical kids would be able to keep everything secret without a LOT of help. And if it’s NOT a secret… the world is going to be a lot different than what we see.

Examples of the idea which didn’t keep it secret – such as The Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Operation Chaos (1971), or the Riddle Master Trilogy (1976) – are generally set in alternate worlds for just that reason.

And that pretty well establishes the “secret or alternate reality magical boarding school for kids” notion. The place is going to be filled with wonders and magical stuff simply because no one has ever actually seen such a thing, and therefore their imaginations run wild.

Given that this is for games where few passersby would blink at a kid practicing their magic, “secrecy” probably isn’t a big concern – but at least we’ve established a lot of the expectations and underlying assumptions.

Eclipse and Divinity: Building Gods Through The Editions

Gods have changed a lot over the various incarnations of AD&D – and not just in a mechanical fashion. The philosophy involved has changed a lot too.

For example, from Gods, Demigods, and Heroes (1976, the original Dungeons and Dragons) we have…

SHU GOD OF THE DESERT AND LIGHT

• Armor Class — 2 (About equivalent to 18 now),
• Magic Ability: (See Below)
• Move: 12″ (30′ Now).
• Fighter Ability: 12th Level
• Hit Points: 225
• Psionic Ability: Class 6 (Cannot use psionics or be targeted by psionic attacks – that’s Psionic Blast, Psychic Crush, Et Al, not actual powers).
• Brother twin to Tefnut, this God appears as a man. His main power is the ability to wither to death anything he touches (magic saving throw applicable). He can also levitate, is not affected by any form of heat, can shapechange, create the light of day as Ra, and call forth 1-4 air elementals per day. He wears plus 5 armor made of phoenix feathers enabling him to immolate for 25 points of heat. He uses a double strength Staff of Wizardry in battle.
• Finally, all his Attributes were considered to be “20’s” – likely equivalent to “30” now.

That was pretty impressive; Shu was as well armored as a man wearing full plate without being encumbered, had twice as many hit points as your high level fighter (even if he couldn’t fight as well), had a death touch (even if your high level fighters could save 90% or more of the time and anyone could have ways to neutralize it), and could shapehange (although that was a LOT less effective back then). A god could do some very impressive things, easily surpassing the efforts of any reasonable individual hero.

But, as was acknowledged in the front of the booklet… a really high level party could beat a god fairly readily. In fact, the authors made a point of belittling “Monty Haul” games where player characters reached such levels.

And this version of godhood was actually fairly true to many or most classical myths. A great many classical gods were basically really tough and powerful people with longevity and a handful of magical powers – often, but not always, including some ability to control an aspect of he environment and / or an awareness of what people were saying about them. Great heroes and specialists could, however, challenge them quite effectively and they generally had to go and interact – and risk heroic opposition – to actually do much.

Thus Thor could kill giants pretty readily, smack hills hard enough to make craters, and – exerting his full godly power in a single (late, and likely distorted) tale – lift a segment of the Midgard Serpent and temporarily lower the level of the local seas by several feet. Outside of the two magical flying goats, equivalents of his mythological equipment would wander into mortal hands as the Hammer of Thunderbolts, Gauntlets of Ogre Power, and Belt of Storm Giant Strength – but his personal powers outside of being really strong and tough (if not so bright), “stretching his legs to the bottom of the sea” (an immovability effect?) and (possibly) being able to influence the weather, aren’t that impressive in game terms. .

Thor also offered minor blessings of life and fertility, strength, and protection to those who invoked him. For that, use the Endowment ability and bestow something like the “Worlds of Faith” package (a good reason to be part of a pantheon; that way each member only has to contribute part of the cost) – presuming that that isn’t a natural part of such a setting to begin with.

Rather like Avalanche Press in “Ragnarok!” I wouldn’t find much of a problem in representing Thor as a Barbarian-type with a handful of magical abilities (they used a modest template), likely around level sixteen or so – by no coincidence, the point in d20 where you’ve gone past every real human being who’s ever lived (levels 1-5), past legendary heroes (6-10), through demigods (11-15), and gotten into the territory of traditional polytheistic gods (16-20).

Human beings have proven perfectly willing to worship funny looking rocks, perfectly normal animals, and similar things. In a world of normal (mostly level one or two with a maximum limit of five) people, a long-lived character of level 16+ will soon have a following unless they actively pursue a policy of “No Witnesses!”.

But what about the “Creating the Universe!” part? Well… “World Creation” is a bit of a special event. According to the myths, many gods participated in creating various versions of the world, but then never did anything even remotely comparable again. Of course, the tales of the Dreamtime and some other myths also tell tales of how fairly ordinary beasts, humans, and minor spirits helped create and shape the world without having any great power of their own. Personally, I’d say that it’s just that new worlds are both fairly easily started and very unstable and easily shaped at first – allowing anyone who’s there at the time to have an outsized level of influence on things. This is why Eclipse-style gods can easily create worlds, but changing them afterwards is not so easy.

Unfortunately, trying to basically mock the level 40+ characters into going away did not work – and so the first edition “gods book” – Deities and Demigods, or (later) Legends and Lore – upped the power level considerably. Shu, for example, now had 346 HP, another eight points of AC, a fly speed, the ability to cast spells as a 15’th level cleric and a 15’th level magic-user, and could only be harmed by a +2 or better weapon. The book also defined what his slightly-higher attributes actually did and granted all deities Teleportation, True Seeing, the ability to summon allies, and set their saves at “2” – a bit better than cross-referencing their class levels with the saving throw charts (but not too big an improvement given that first edition fighters had very VERY good saves).

Otherwise the description, and the special abilities presented, were almost identical – in fact, they were mostly a word-for-word reprint.

Writing up most of the first edition gods in Eclipse would require more levels than the gods in the original booklet – likely 25 to 35 – to get enough points to cover the special abilities they got “for free” in their descriptions. It wouldn’t be too hard though; most first edition characters didn’t get many special abilities in the first place and their magic was a lot more time-consuming and easily-disrupted – making it far cheaper to buy their class abilities. You’d have to buy the “Immortality” part and a few other boosts (or just give them one point of Godfire, specialized/they don’t get more and can’t spend it for 3 CP) – but that isn’t really a big expense.

The power boost wasn’t sufficient though. Quite a lot of games reached levels where the players started treating the gods as a collection of targets to take out – an early illustration of the idea that “If you stat it, the players will find a way to kill it”.

It kind of looks like the writers were really tired of that by the time that second edition came along – and so they threw the pendulum the other way, more towards what modern monotheists thought of as “God”. Now the gods had avatars – with statistics a lot like the ones they got in Gods, Demigods, and Heroes really – but the actual gods were immortal, untouchable by mortals, and (among several other mighty magical powers) could all use any spell of any level (without any components) at will. Greater Gods were nigh-omniscient, could take any form (including becoming astronomical objects), could create anything they wanted, could slay or raise any mortal anywhere with a thought, could speak with anyone anywhere, got an unlimited number of actions, could create many avatars, and could hand out pretty much any power they wanted to.

OK, Intermediate, Lesser, and Demi-gods got somewhat less potent divine powers, but they were still pretty ridiculous. “Any spell of any level” and “omniscience with a radius of at least one mile” covered quite a lot all by themselves.

In an awful lot of ways second edition represented the pinnacle of power for gods in Dungeons and Dragons; there was really nothing you could do about a god – and if one of them decided to target you… you were pretty well toast.

In Eclipse building Second Edition Gods is fairly simple: they have the Divine Attribute ability (6 CP – cheap because “I become a plot device until the GM sees fit to decree otherwise!” kind of goes against “I want to play!”) permanently active – and, as such, are pretty much beyond being attacked, have essentially limitless powers within their domain, and are automatically NPC’s. That’s because entities with unlimited use nigh-limitless powers are pretty unplayable, and so Eclipse automatically sidelines them.

3.0 and 3.5 tried to mix first and second edition. Gods were once more mortal, and killable (except for overdeities like Ao, for whom there were never any mechanics – or even real information – at all), but they got a LOT of levels and had “Divine Rank” – a special source of immunities and powers that characters who didn’t have Divine Rank could not counter because the descriptions of the powers said so.

Oddly enough, unlike virtually everything else in 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, and other d20 variants, that’s hard to duplicate in Eclipse unless you just give gods some special form of divine privilege as a world law. That’s because, in Eclipse, everyone, divine or not, draws their powers from the same basic list – which makes it impossible to build powers that can’t be countered. You can make powers that are really hard to counter, or which only allow very exotic defenses – but there’s always SOME way to block things. After all, avoiding the automatic “I Win!” buttons was among the design goals.

Still, building Divine Rank as presented in the Deities and Demigods book is simple enough. It’s a form of Mythic Power – an independent source of power that provides more character points to spend without an increase in the user’s actual level. You’d have to uncap it, but that’s not a big deal.

And you increase your Mythic Power Tier by completing mighty quests, collecting plot coupons, and qualifying for story awards – which works quite nicely as a route towards godhood.

More or less mortal heroes can usually get up to ten Mythic Tier Levels, If we take that as advancing towards godhood… well, six Mythic Tier Levels would cover buying the specialized version of the basic Divine Rank 0 Template – leaving 96 CP available to buy some other goodies and a Salient Divine Ability – putting a once-mortal among the lower-ranking divinities.

So how expensive is a Salient Divine Ability? Most of the Epic Feats that I tried building came out to around 12 CP (as expected, they varied a bit), and a lot of Salient Divine Abilities combine two epic feats – which gives us a baseline of sorts; a Salient Divine Ability should cost about 24 CP.

In particular, the original question was about the “Life and Death” Salient Divine Power.

• Prerequisites: Divine rank 6, Gift of Life or Hand of Death salient divine ability.
• Benefit: The deity designates any mortal and snuffs out its life. Or the deity can designate any dead mortal and restore it to life.
• Notes: This ability works across planar boundaries and penetrates any barrier except a divine shield. However, the subject must be in a location the deity can sense, either within the deity’s sense range or in a location the deity can perceive through its remote sensing ability. If the deity cannot see the subject, the deity must unambiguously identify the subject in some fashion. If the deity chooses to kill a mortal, the ability works like the destruction spell, except that there is no material component or saving throw. The mortal cannot be raised or resurrected afterward, except by a deity of equal or higher rank using the Gift of Life or Life and Death salient divine ability.
• If the deity restores life to a mortal, this ability works like the true resurrection spell, except that there is no material component and the amount of time the subject has been dead is irrelevant.
• This ability cannot restore a creature to life against its will, but it can resurrect an elemental or outsider. It can resurrect a creature whose soul is trapped, provided the soul is not held by a deity of higher rank than the one using this ability.
• This ability cannot restore life to a creature that has been slain by the Hand of Death, Life and Death, or Mass Life and Death ability of a deity with a higher rank.
• After using either version of this ability, the deity must rest for 1 minute per level or Hit Die of the creature affected. Deities whose portfolio includes death do not have to rest after using this ability.
• Suggested Portfolio Elements: Death, Supreme.

Now that’s an obvious gamewrecker when you can use it regularly.

My recommended Eclipse solution is to simply get the ability to toss out a bumped-up version of True Resurrection and Destruction. Use Specialized Channeling (double effect) and high-level Spell Conversion – allowing you to stack on things like “no saving throw” (Metamagical Theorem Amplify +4, equivalent to Double Effect – trading the ability to get double effect when the target fails to save for the ability to bypass the (much rarer) “Fortune” ability to take no effect on a save), “Easy” to eliminate the need for material components, and Lacing/Improved Brackish to prevent the effect from being absorbed by spells or items.

Back that with a point of Godfire to have it take effect where you want it to… and that will generally do it. It can still be stopped by the truly mighty (at least if they have the right effects), can’t be used often (due to the scarcity of Godfire), and will be expensive. It’s probably about 48 points – which is just about right since it will subsume the prerequisite Gift of Life or Hand of Death ability. That’s 30 points for conversion to ninth level effects (specialized to 18’th to cover that metamagic), 3 CP for a set of spells, and 15 CP for Channeling and some Bonus Uses. While a god won’t be using the Godfire boost often, having this available locally is handy too.

If you want to be cheesy about building the ability… you want some Metamagical Theorems, and a big stack of Streamline (both Specialized in the effects you want and Corrupted to only apply to a limited set of spells) and just stack on no-save, transdimensional range, unabsorbable, and so on until you can annihilate people on the other end of the universe with a wave of your hand. That will be a little more expensive at first, but cheaper to apply to more things – allowing supreme gods to have huge portfolios of virtually unstoppable powers.

Fourth Edition – in it’s focus on PC’s versus World-Building – quite intentionally set up it’s (evil) deities as end-game targets. Thus the Draconomican presented a detailed writeup of Tiamat the God as a L35 “Solo Brute” – and gave several options for killing her permanently.

While that ignores the question of “Why wasn’t she killed long ago by some earlier group of adventurers?” that kind of background development never really got into fourth edition.

In fourth edition gods can only be permanently killed in very specific ways (Returning), get extra actions that can only be used for a specific list of divine powers (Reflex Training) and can be weakened in various ways before a fight (invoking limitations on their powers – which is presumably where they save some points to pay for the extras). Otherwise… they are big monsters. They don’t even really provide spells for their priests any more; priests are granted the ability to tap into divine power via a ritual.

Fifth Edition seems to be following the same general philosophy (albeit apparently throwing in an Immunity to being attacked by characters of level twenty or less) with the Evil gods – who mostly seem to have cults instead of leading huge faiths – while the good gods are granted plot immunity by virtue of general vagueness and never showing up to be targets. Admittedly, I haven’t read all that much fifth edition stuff past the basics (I didn’t like fourth much and the early playtests for fifth seemed to be loaded with nods towards fourth edition and offered very little room for simulationists. That changed somewhat later – but no one around here wants to play it, leaving me with little interest beyond simply confirming that 5’th edition was Eclipse compatible, which it was) so they could have changed things radically somewhere – but that’s what I’ve got so far. Overall then, they can be written up just about as they could be for fourth edition.

Now pure Eclipse-style godhood is a lot cheaper. In Eclipse, Gods can be of quite low level – and we’ve had plenty of gods in play. What makes them playable is the cost of using their divine abilities.

• A lot of things cost Godfire – and most player-character gods are lucky to get two points of that in a game year and will want to keep at least a FEW points in reserve to come back if they get killed or something. Godfire may be a renewable resource, but it will remain scarce.
• Other things, like creating planes, or providing blessings for your followers, or forging mighty relics, cost character points or Feats – a permanent cost, and one that gods are rarely willing to pay for trivial reasons.

Thus divine conflicts are usually played out through mortal agents, and rarely involve direct conflict between deities. “Winning” such a battle is too often a pyrrhic victory which merely sets you up as an easy target for third parties.

This, of course, somewhat resembles the old D&D Immortals rules – although Eclipse doesn’t require that you advance to level thirty-six before you can start progressing through another thirty-six levels as an Immortal.

Eclipse and Spirits

Back in the old days it wasn’t too uncommon to have encounters with “spirits” – “creatures” who usually didn’t possess much actual power, but couldn’t be dealt with by any conventional means. Spirits were annoyances, puzzles, and talking characters who’s conversations couldn’t be interrupted by a crossbow bolt. If you had to placate an angry spirit that was haunting someone, you usually had to find a way to satisfy it; exorcisms and containments were temporary measures at best. Still, most spirits had a rather limited range from whatever was anchoring them to the material world – the site of their death, their treasured sword, or a hated foe. Quite often the simplest way to escape one was to simply leave the immediate area or dispose of the anchoring creature or item. Of course if the anchor was someone that you didn’t want to kill, or an item that you didn’t want to abandon or destroy, you had to fall back on persuasion.

Spirits could reveal secrets, offer guidance, provide warnings, or even offer very (very) minor support if you did something for them – if you took a message to their surviving relatives, rescued their friends before they too died, or found adoptive parents for their children. More importantly, you couldn’t simply use blackmail, torture, mind-probes, or other means to bypass a spirit; you either made a deal or you got along without whatever information it had to supply.

While it may be unkind to imply that the only people who can safely bargain with adventurers are the ones who are already dead, it’s often true.

In those days most characters only occasionally dealt with spirits – but there were always a few spiritualists, shamans, and other specialists who made a routine of it.

Some of them used class-based abilities, some skills, and some specialized spells that linked spirits to them.

Thus, for example, we had an Ancestor or Guardian Spirit associated with a member of the Kwin family. Ancestor spirits are generally effectively third or fourth level; no matter how powerful they are, there’s only so much they can do working through subtle psychic influences.

Yang The Invincible, also known as the Wonderful, the Incomparable, the (Censored), the Barbarian, the Magnificent, the Mass Murderer, the Pillager, the Arsonist, and so on.

Yang was something of an interloper in the clan Kwin family tree; he was a Tsongi horseman / raider instead of a citizen of the Empire. How he got involved with the family doesn’t bear mentioning, but the damage to the village was pretty massive. Yang died about 220 years ago, some ten generations back. He is short and tends to appear in crummy chainmail and stained leather, which matches his greasy hair and general aura of dirt extremely well. He always smells a bit of horses. Yang is loud, crude, and in favor of his descendants getting back to the “basics” or “Three R’s” – Raiding, Raping, and Ravaging. Pillaging, murdering, and going berserk are optional extras, but are nice if they can be managed. Yang’s advice is utterly uninhibited by any notions of being honorable and is often throughly vicious – but it also tends to be crudely practical, very direct, and occasionally quite insightful.

As an Ancestor Spirit Yang possesses several powers:

• Limited telekinesis. He can move small objects within sixty feet of his contact. If it should matter, treat this as Str 2.
• He grants 1d6 extra points of psychic strength to his contact.
• He provides a +1 bonus on his contact’s defense rating (armor class) while present.
• He can “scout” areas from the empyrean (ethereal) plane.
• He can appear to, communicate with, and offer advice to, his contact as desired.
• He can manifest for up to (Contacts Wis/3 + Level) rounds daily while within sixty feet of his contact.
• He can share his senses with his contact with a range of sixty feet.
• He may take limited possession of unresisting subjects – using their body until they either want to do something themselves or want him to leave.

Yang himself was fourth level. He was proficient with light armor and all weapons, knew a bit of unarmed combat, was a good horseman, and possessed several minor psychokinetic knacks – minor pyrokinesis (1d4 damage) and flame control, telekinetic missile control (+2/+2), and a personal force shield. Sadly, he has a psychic strength of a mere six points on his own, which is why he normally works through his contact. His other skills include some ability to evaluate the worth of common kinds of loot, power drinking, and evading pursuit. Finally, his advice on tactics is usually fairly decent. He’s picked up a bit of finesse since he died. (He was jumped by six armed men while he was in bed with someone else’s wife)

Now in first edition there was no problem with a spell that provided long-term special powers for the caster – such as being able to link up with several ancestor spirits. When mages could only learn a very limited number of spells, might never be able to learn particular spells, and obtaining new spells was difficult (making a captured spellbook a great treasure and a spellbook which had original spells in it a legendary treasure) finding a rare spell that offered special powers… worked just fine. In d20 games – where spells of all types are easily available and come in standardized levels of power – that approach doesn’t work properly. To make the same sort of resource-choice mean something we’re going to have to go with Feats – or, in Eclipse, Character points.

Ergo, to get some spirits invest in Leadership with Exotic Type (Spirits), Corrupted/Spirits ONLY and they definitely have minds of their own (6 CP).

That will get you a few spirits working for you.

So what can spirits do in d20?

Well, being nigh-indestructible is hard in d20. About the only way to manage that is not to get involved in the fight to begin with. Ergo, here’s a basic package for Spirits.

• Sanctum/Appropriate Outer Plane (6 CP). Most of a spirits powers – or at least the ones that we’re interested in – only work on the appropriate outer plane where it can manifest itself easily.
  • While on an appropriate Outer Plane, a Spirit may maintain a link with some individual or item on the Prime Material – although this must be established through a magical summons or at the moment of death. That’s Mystic Link with Communications II (allows sensory sharing) Power Links, and Transferable, Specialized/may be temporarily disrupted or blocked by exorcisms, spirit wards, and similar effects, involves hallucinations of the character actually being present (9 CP).
  • Spirits are pretty safe on their Outer Plane, and need not worry about things like making a living. That’s Privilege/Safe Residence on Alignment Plane (3 CP).
  • Spirits are naturally psychic; it comes of being creatures of mind and magical energy – but it’s harder to tap into that when they’re on less cooperative planes. That’s +3d6 Power (6).
  • Spirits need not sleep, and are generally available most of the time. That’s Immunity/Sleep (Common, Minor, Major, 6 CP).
• All Spirits – or at least the ones we’re interested in – possess Witchcraft II (including three basic witchcraft abilities), with the Summoning, Blessing, and Possession (Specialized for increased effect (minimal cost)/target must be and remain unresisting) advanced abilities. They are, however, bound by the Pact of Souls (they must attempt to recruit descendants for their plane of residence) and Spell Failure (their witchery will not work against characters or areas with spirit wards) (Net 18 CP)
• Spirits can easily recognize their descendants. That’s Occult Sense/Kinfolk (6 CP).

With a net cost of 30 CP we have a +0 ECL race/+1 ECL Template. That will come out of their assigned levels of course.

That package… allows them to use witchcraft powers on their “anchor” with ease and to spend a 3 Power surcharge to use witchery in the immediate vicinity of their anchor. While each spirits powers will vary, some can lend their anchor strength and healing, others can assault targets in the vicinity with pyrokinesis, some can whisper suggestions, or use illusions to “manifest”, and so on. Their very limited psychic strength will keep them from doing too much of that sort of thing – but they can still be pretty versatile. If they specialize minor telekinetic powers properly they can even play at animating “zombies” – or at least using corpses and puppets.

Spirits can serve as mentors, training partners, or aides, can possess small, properly trained animals, consulting experts, or scouts. As their anchors power increases their effective levels will go up – and their abilities will increase.

Is this “Balanced”? It will give you access to a fair amount of Witchcraft rather cheaply and it makes your followers pretty nearly indestructible.

Of course, there are lots of ways to arrange that. If you’re willing to allow the use of Leadership, this is hardly the most abusive way to use it.

Exalted – Danyl Woodsborne, Wyld Endowed Mortal

Danyl… was a bastard of no father as far as the village was concerned, and so the rumors about his possible father flew… Demon? Raksha? Itinerant Hobo? A disgrace in any case! He grew up… on the outside looking in as far as the villagers went.

Still, at least he could visit his Father and his Father’s people even if Vriath – a wolf-beastman – could not venture into the village and would do him no good at all if he acknowledged him. The Beastmen were not popular in the border villages.

Sadly, he was isolated there as well. Already inclined towards solitude, Danyl soon showed few social graces of any kind and spent much of his time in the deep forests surrounding his mother’s small village. There, however, he blossomed as a hunter, a trapper, and a harvester of the exotic herbs and arcane components which sold so well further into the civilized lands. Soon enough his growing skill eclipsed the natural advantages of the wolf-beastmen youths – and brought him to the attention of his Great-Grandfather, Salisian, a fairly powerful Lunar Exalt. He could use an agent with respectable skills, the social isolation to be grateful for mere acknowledgment, and a fine excuse to travel regularly into more “civilized” realms.

Salisian set the boy to training with Telewin, his oldest child, aged more than three centuries thanks to his Wyld Endowment and longevity mutations. While that instruction was most profitable, it meant that Danyl was nearby when Telwin’s heart finally failed entirely – and inherited Telwin’s Endowment. In Salisian’s eyes that was even MORE useful – and an even greater obligation (or at least so Salisian sees it) on the young man.

Since then, Danyl has quietly taken up the defense of his Mother’s village; even if he doesn’t get along with them very well, he has a lot of family there.

Personal Attributes: Str 2, Dex 3, Sta 2, Cha 3, Man 2 (1), App 1, Per 1, Int 5, Wit 3

Abilities: Archery 4, Awareness 3, Craft 1, Integrity 3, Linguistics 1, Lore 4 (5, favored, 1 BP), Melee 1, Resistance 3, Ride 3, Socialize 1, and Survival 4.

Archetype: Ranger. +1 Dot each in Archery, Lore, and Survival (already included). You need a visual? Well, the Van Helsing image works tolerably well – with a touch of Ash and Indiana Jones.

Backgrounds:

• Artifact 3 (5, 4 BP). It’s a stretch, but a character with an Endowment DOES get to use his or her choice of traits mechanically, so Artifacts as per Raksha; 15 dots, including at least five one dot artifacts and no more than one five dot artifact. For flavor, most of his minor artifacts are thaumaturgically-produced equivalents. Ergo the Sardion/Endowment ****, a Staff of the Magi ***, a Traveler’s Pouch **, and six one dot Thaumaturgic or Grace Magic Artifacts – Perfected Boots, an Ithaquan Firewand, a powerful Lucky Charm (negates three botches/story), a Resonant Chorus Bow, a Ranger’s Hat, and a Lash of Fate.
  • Ithaquan Firewand: Taking advantage of the low kick of a Firewand to use a pistol grip and an intermediate-length barrel, the base Ithaquan Double-Barrelled Firewand is Speed 5, Accuracy +1, Damage 10L, Rate 2, Range 10 (and no further), Max Strength —, Cost ***/* (Ammo), F, S.
    • The Thaumaturgically Enchanted (Artifact *) version is considered Perfect (Accuracy +2, Damage 12L, Rate 3), and can store up to a dozen extra charges of firedust, reloading with a simple flourish as long as those charges hold out. It has no attunement cost however.
  • Ranger’s Hat (Onieromancy *):
    • Assumption of Bestial Form (1): The hat has lots of leather trim.
    • Imposition of Law (3): The wearer can always communicate clearly and concisely with animals.
    • Mad God’s Mein (1): The hat is immune to Countermagic.
    • Adored By All The World (2): The user may call god-blooded or heroic sapient animals to his aid.
    • Waypoint Knife (3): When the wearer picks a campsite, he and his companions generally will not be disturbed.
  • Lash of Fate (Onieromancy *)
    • Assumption of Bestial Form (1): It’s a leather whip.
    • Veiling the God’s Eyes (2): The user may roll (Per + Occ) as Str to exert telekinetic force on whatever the whip touches.
    • Emotion Weaving Style (3): Anyone struck by the whip acquires the motivation “please the guy with the whip”.
    • Behemoth-Forging Meditation (3): Once per scene per target, when a mortal target is struck by the whip, the user may launch a free Staff-Shaping attack to try to give said mortal up to (Ess x 2) points of mutations.
    • Ordinary Object Conjuration (1): Anyone who becomes subordinate to the user through being hit by the whip gets a nice ornamental collar.

Background/Patron 2. His Grandfather Salisian is a fairly powerful Lunar Exalt – but he has a LOT of descendants. While he will give them a little backing at times he expects a fair amount of loyalty and service in return. On the upside, HIS beastmen have been created with a Mutation Manse which he uses to hand out mutations, rather then by less mentionable methods.

Background/Spies 2 (2 BP): Danyl has access to part of his Grandfather’s spy network.

Virtues: Compassion 2 (3, 1 BP), Conviction 2, Temperance 3 (4, 1 BP), Valor 2

Willpower 10 (5 BP).

Flaws: Diminished Attribute (-1 Man, -3 BP), Diminished Attribute (-1 Cha, -3 BP), Dark Secret/Half Wolf-Beastman (-1 BP), Ward/Assorted Local Villagers (-2 BP), Bastard Child (-1 BP).

Awakened Essence Abomination. Pool = (Essence x 5) + (Willpower x 2) + (Sum of Virtues) = 41 Motes. 11 Committed Motes.

Essence 2 (10 BP).

Next up – the final statistics.

Crafting Worlds: Do’s and Don’ts

Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds good games

Too many games, and too many settings, run into a pair of contradictory problems which work against the setting. On the one hand, you need to make a world your players can understand. If the world and its people are important enough to matter, then obviously it has to be comprehensible to players, especially if they don’t own every sourcebook. But on the other hand nobody much likes worlds which are too familiar, too boring. This is where The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion went wrong (we’ll get to that another day), by making the game world so generic that it became flat and lifeless.

There are three things to keep in mind, and collectively they’re a huge pain:

(1) The setting must make sense as a human (or whatever) society and must be reasonably sane for the players.
(2) The setting has to be different enough for the players to be interested.
(3) It has to mesh well enough with the rules so that it passes the Sniff Test.

So it has to be different, but not too different, and not get crossed up with the actual game, and nobody’s going to tell you when until they start playing with it.

Well, that just sucks.

Fortunately, you can usually boil things down to a few key principles based on your game.

First, is this is a game where the player characters and/or the major NPC’s are grossly more powerful than “normal” people? In the real life, no individual is grossly more powerful – tougher, stronger, able to do quantitatively more, than another. Even the difference between, say, specialist Olympic athletes and normal, in-decent-shape people is usually much less than a factor of 5 or so. Most jobs do not require extreme capabilities, and even fairly complicated surgical techniques are mostly things which everyday people could do if they practiced, or have good instructions. The most “powerful” members of society aren’t those who are tough, fast, strong, or even skilled, but those who put a lot of effort in persuading and influencing others.

The most dangerous people alive are probably special forces soldiers, and they need endless training, support from hundreds if not thousands of other soldiers, and many others feeding them information to be effective. And any of them could be killed by a single bullet, or one just moment of bad luck.

But game heroes, even in nominally “realistic” settings, aren’t like that. They’re often capable of taking multiple hits which would be lethal to a lesser man and a dozen (and up-Up-UP!) times more effective in their chosen specialty than a normal but skilled professional. They’re often capable of killing hundreds of normal people, and might even be capable of depopulating cities by themselves, given some time. We’ll call these people Heroes, because this tends to be more of a fantasy trope, but it is definitely NOT limited to people who are actually heroic in nature.

This consideration absolutely influences your game setting – and may be the single most important factor. If nobody has this kind of power, then you can have a relatively normal political situation. It might be complicated, but fundamentally the world follows from real life: “power” is your ability to persuade lots of people to agree with you and your ability to motivate them to get things done. Almost anyone can potentially kill anyone else.

However, if Heroes do run around, society will very likely congeal around them rather than a political or economic system, and will change as these figures die or otherwise pass on. Simply put, they *are* the armed forces as well as Kings or religious figures in their own right, and they can largely do what they like because no one can stop them. Usually in these settings, monsters or similar threats also exist that the heroes have to deal with, and these are equally capable of wrecking civilization if not stopped.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have “normal” nation or states, but those groups are going to need their own, equally effective, protection. This can and should lead you into new ideas to refine your game world. Note that we said “equally effective”, because they don’t have to have equal Heroes of their own, although there’s nothing wrong with that either.

Some quick ideas: A decentralized society that can largely ignore the deeds of Heroes. This might be a nomadic tribal nation that avoids monsters, or an agrarian people scattered over farmland that mostly handles its problem through resettlement and militias. These don’t directly challenge powerful characters, but also can’t be easily controlled by individual bullies. Or perhaps the nation is a wealthy trading power which hires mercenaries as needed to deal with problems. Or society might publicly laud selected Heroes and reward them well, gaining loyal allies through respect and praise, so that they want to protect the people from other dangers. Or society might be intensely nationalistic so that any heroes who come from it have a natural interest in defending it. Or you may have outright divine aid, or mystic balancing forces which keep any one power group from completely dominating the world. Any and all of these could appear together as well.

So from the get-go, you have a lot of options to work with. Just make sure you adapt them intelligently when adding them to the culture you want to borrow (which, let’s face it, you probably do).

Second, beg, borrow, and steal everything in sight. The most common way to build a setting large or small is the take a human civilization and build off of that. This approach has many problems, but it has one huge advantage which usually outweighs all of them: the players have some idea what the hell they’re in for.

There are few writers with enough talent for world-building to create (and then sell the hell out of) an entirely new culture. Tolkien probably did it best, in developing multiple cultures for Elves and Dwarves and Men and even some tidbits for Orcs. Even then, he borrowed many pre-existing ideas, but certainly there was immense amounts of invention. George R.R. Martin borrowed many more existing fantasy images and style to construct his world, but he also worked hard to create an original (and ridiculously complex) world with varied peoples inhabiting it.

If you’re neither of those two, you probably have to steal heavily from an existing culture.

This is not bad. Unless you’re a genius historian, linguist, architect, fashion designer, and economist all in one, you need to show your players what the gameworld is like as much as possible. In order to do that, you need to give them mental images as much as descriptive text. Consider trying to describe what Feudal Japan was like. Libraries could, and have, been written to describe it.

Now consider one – just one – picture, found in a random search for the term Feudal Japan.

We’ve been dead for a century and we’re still more badass than you.

That picture is worth far more than a thousand words in describing the scene. Your players know what it means, and what it implies, even if they know little more about Japanese culture than late-night viewings of Evangelion and couple of horrible ninja movies. Give ’em five minutes and they’ll be arranging tea parties (possibly OF BLOOD AND DEATH!) and trying to quadruple-wield katanas.

While it’s not good to stereotype things, putting some cultural weight on the matter can give your players a starting point for understanding the nature and style of the setting. And it’s not like you lack for choices: a huge Empire might borrow from Rome, Persia, Mongolia, China, Russia, France, England – and that’s just mentioning a handful of real-world nations with Imperial ambitions. But you can take themes and elements from any time and place and develop it into a new idea.

Third, make sure the world doesn’t have giant obvious issues, or least give a reason as to why those issues haven’t been fixed. People are not generally stupid, and the laws of economics are flexible but they apply everywhere, even to alien species. If you have a reliable solution to a problem, then people are going to use it, unless they have a better solution. And likewise, if something doesn’t work, sooner or later people will stop using it.

This means that if you can magically produce food, then people will try to use it unless food is so cheap and reliable that it’s not worth doing. If enchanted items can give near-permanent benefits, people will eventually invest in them if there’s any way to afford such useful magic. If armies get slaughtered by individual high-level opponents, then people won’t use armies, or the military does other things than try to fight powerful enemies. In short, there’s a lot of ways to go wrong and your players will notice sooner or later.

For an example of how to do this right, consider the basic game of AD&D 2’nd Edition. This was a good approach: magic is very powerful, but also very limited and focused. Wizards have many limitations and require a lot of careful consideration. Because of this, they were able to write worlds similar to our own, with limited impact from magic. Magic mostly mattered to adventurers or similarly powerful people, and you wouldn’t see it used for for mundane purposes. Making magical items was a difficult, expensive process in terms of lifespan, questing, and wealth, and they could easily go wrong. Further, getting or researching the spells for custom magic wasn’t easy, either, so many desired effects would be quite difficult. The system matched the world, at least reasonably enough to tell the kinds of stories players and GM’s wanted to tell. Magic was (usually) rare, precious, and difficult to find, and magic items simply couldn’t be made for most ordinary purposes. Ordinary people might get their hands on the odd healing potion for emergencies, but otherwise the best they could hope for was a very low-level local cleric or wizard to help out. There was certainly no way to use magic on an industrial scale, and magic items were made so rarely that they didn’t accumulate over time.

One of the flaws of 3rd edition (which was otherwise pretty good) was that the writers often forgot to explain how the system changes affected the game worlds. Let’s state this up-front: There is nothing wrong with the 3rd edition system in making a game world. The only issue is that most of the DnD worlds were based off old 1st and 2nd edition rules and didn’t properly update to consider the impact of the new system. Forgotten Realms was a particularly hilarious example of this, because some of the new rules changes were considered to be “recent developments” owing to a big in-universe event, some were considered to have always been in effect, and most was simply ignored. One small example, continuing from the Magic Item theme mentioned above:

Items with a few per-day uses are really, really easy to make. Characters as low as 3rd level could make them quite easily, and there’s tons of low-level spells useful to all kinds of people. How many communities beyond the most incredibly poor couldn’t scrape enough enough gold to buy a magic item which used curing magic every so often. How many towns couldn’t scrape up enough gold for a water-cleansing pipe fitting, or even permanent lanterns? These minor items don’t cost very much, and yet they substantially raise quality of life for many people. Even better – they’ll outright save money in a pretty short while. With a little bit more of an investment, civilizations could eradicate dangerous diseases, provide substantial quantities of food to the poor, provide power to machinery, or even reshape the land to suit. In real history, most of these developments required, and to this day still require, the hard work of millions of people and the outlay of billions of dollars. (Trillions, adjusted for inflation and adding it all up.)

It can all be done with third level magic or lower, with items that never wear out, and require no fuel.

In the Forgotten realms, we have canon examples of individual cities with assets in the many millions of gold coins. Even granting that you can’t always tax it all, individual characters can easy have a hundred thousand in cash, and much more in tradeable goods or land they can borrow against. Charitable giving is a major function of several religions and an entire character class (the Paladin). Can you really make the case that nobody – not one person – would feel like making the small investment these tools require? Would no merchant ever have the resources or interest to try? The math is simple enough to make sense for even the most evil of evil empires, and compelling enough to attract the greediest of the greedy, and cheap enough that you don’t need spectacular wealth to get started. Sure, not every wizard would willingly give up the experience points to make these items. But a retired wizard, who doesn’t expect to go adventuring certainly might – that’s a good income and a pretty low cost per-item, allowing him or her to perform spell research. Some casters, particularly clerics and some druids, would see it as a duty to occasionally help the common folk, and what better way to do so than make a small magical item which can continue helping the common man forever?

Bear in mind that these are just the basics – the first few ideas which would occur to people. You could go far beyond this into entire arcano-industrial civilizations, or entire societies devoting themselves to magic as we do science and technology. And sure, magic takes more work to build up – but it also takes a hell of a lot less to keep running. Most magical items require no power, no maintenance, and no direction to keep working, and will continue to do so indefinitely. In fact, a major aspect of D&D is that magic items (barring one-use stuff like potions) inevitably outlive those who make it, from weapons to mythallar to spell designs. That’s why adventurers loot useful stuff from eons-old tombs and lost cities.

In short, a jump from 2nd to 3rd edition implies a lot of changes to how a setting is run. This is not a bad thing. You can tell many new stories, and look at how change affects the people who have to live with it. There’s a lot of different directions you can take this, just as industrialization caused widely varying changes in all societies affected by it. new magic will affect people in even more extreme ways, and there’s a lot of ways you can develop it. Some societies may look identical to what they used it to except with huge changes hidden away. Others may be hardly affected – at least yet. Other could be completely transformed – or split into factions, or utterly destroyed.

In short, there’s nothing wrong with the rules, but most existing game worlds wanted to avoid using them as much as possible. And that’s sad.

However, also understandable. Writing and rewriting settings takes a lot of work and a lot of thought, so it’s not always easy to explain why they change or don’t change. In the next installment, we’ll cover some ways to do end runs around common sense, and get your setting where you want it.

Related articles

• [Emergence Campaign] Eclipse, Character Gear, and the “Big Six” Magic Items (ruscumag.wordpress.com)
• Time Heroes – Fate Adaptation – The World of Time Heroes – Part 1. Eras (geekworldonline.blogspot.com)

Situational Tactics and Role-Playing Games

Recommended Tactic: Do Not Allow This To Happen.

“So… I’ve got two mutually-supporting castles and a small force of knights and some peasant militia to protect the royal court from a similar force? Man the castles, put the court in keep in the strongest castle, prepare to fire from the walls, and reserve the knights to sally out and break the siege while we await reinforcements!”

“For the last time George! The game is Chess, it does NOT work that way, and demanding that the rules be changed to accommodate YOUR desire for what you call “realism” is about the most UNREALISTIC thing that I’ve ever heard of!”

One of the most basic rules of tactics is that you have to adapt them to the situation – and, in a role playing game, the rules are a big part of the situation, even if they are usually a bit less abstract than the rules of chess.

Consider d20. It…

• Is designed to promote dramatic and exciting battles, and so makes it very difficult to one-shot anyone of a roughly similar power level without using carefully-set up limited-use effects – which breaks tactics based on the lethality of real-world injuries and weapons.
• Uses turn-based combat time, rather than simultaneous actions, to make it easier to run and play and to ensure “fairness” about who gets to do something – which breaks most real-world notions about “covering fire” and tactical movement.
• Has magic because people like magic and characters with fabulous abilities – which breaks pretty much EVERY real-world assumption about fortification, the advantages of being on the defensive, and information security.
• Gives similar creatures – say a first level commoner and a tenth level character with a reasonable build – radically different abilities. Otherwise, how can you play a mighty hero? Of course, if you give fifty first-level commoners equivalent armor and weapons, and send them up against a tenth level character with thirty seconds warning… other factors being equal, the tenth level guy will soon have a heap of new armor, weapons, and (if he chooses to be merciful and has the abilities to capture without killing) prisoners. That breaks most tactics based on deploying groups, along with most assumptions about military training and concentrating force.
• Says that effective combatants may not even need armor, weapons, or supplies – breaking most real-world assumptions about disarming prisoners and logistics.

And so on.

For better or for worse, a great many other role-playing games use similar – or even LESS “realistic” – assumptions, making the characters impossibly skilled, tough, and central to events. Yes, they’re simulations – but they’re usually not simulations of the real world. They’re simulations of a fantastic cinematic reality full of epic heroes, mighty magics, and literary conventions. They’re designed for fun, not for historical accuracy.

Yes there ARE plenty of tactical options and strategies in d20 and in other role playing games – but they rarely look much like anything that would work in the real world. Good tactics in role playing games depend very heavily on the exact rules in use, what the game master approves of, the situation (which is likely to be laughably weird by real-world standards), how persuasive and friendly the player proposing those tactics is, and on whether or not the other players go along with them.

Serious tactical studies for role-playing games are rare to unheard of – and that’s a good thing. It’s a LOT more fun to try to figure out an applicable tactic than it is to quote a tactical study and precedent. You doubt that? Look at serious chess, where the first twenty moves are often straight out of books. Somehow… memories of old chess games rarely become stories that get trotted out years later to tell to friends.

So when your local military-history buff tries to drag real-world tactics into a game – and then gets upset when they don’t work – no, he or she does not have a reasonable cause for being upset or for complaining about the game system. Even if the character has tactical skills (in which case the game master should provide some advice on tactics that will actually work in the game) trying to drag real-world tactics in is just as much cheating as trying to have your spear-wielding stone age tribesman character using your real-world electronics expertise to repair a crash-landed alien spacecraft. Behavior like that should NOT be rewarded.

Fortunately, there’s rarely any need to intentionally frustrate players who try this sort of thing. Since the tactics they’re trying to use probably will not work in the game it’s not ONLY cheating, but it’s STUPID cheating that generally doesn’t work.

Yes, every adventurer should develop some basic tactical notions – but they should be lessons learned from their experiences about things that actually work in the setting, not from reality.

After all, “reality” is what we’re playing these games to get away from.

D20 – Mass Combat Made Simple

Yes, Lizard Men would be great at this, wouldn’t they?

A common complaint in d20 games is that there’s no mass combat system.

Fortunately, that’s actually pretty easily fixed – although, as usual, the first step is in figuring out what cases your rules actually need to cover.

• If the PC’s are not involved in the battle you don’t need any rules. You simply narrate whatever result seems reasonable – perhaps modified with the result of a few die rolls to see if something unlikely happens.
• If the PC’s are running one side or the other from a command position, but are not getting involved directly, you can have them make a few skill checks, let those results modify your notion of what seems reasonable and narrate the results. If you want to get elaborate you can give the players a few decision points – when to advance, when to retreat, and some basic tactics to pick from – and base your narration on that. Once again, in this case you don’t need any rules. It’s not like they’ll really be able to micromanage anyway – and if they CAN, we no longer have “they are not getting involved directly”.
• If the PC’s are operating as special forces against small groups of opponents… the standard combat system handles that very nicely indeed. That’s what it’s for. You don’t need any mass combat rules here either.
• If the PC’s are in direct battle with – or beside – mass-battle sized groups of near-equal, equal, or superior individuals… Then you don’t need rules. Their options are basically limited to 1) run away, 2) cash in a plot coupon, 3) come up with something so incredibly clever that the GM gives it to them, or 4) dying – heroically or not at their option. You can just narrate the result again.

So; the only time you actually need “mass battle” rules is when the player characters are up against large numbers of much weaker creatures that are organized enough to still be threatening. (If they’re not organized you can just use the Swarm rules…).

So lets reach back, back beyond d20, back beyond AD&D, back beyond the original edition… back, in fact, all the way to one of the older editions of Chainmail and a little page of fantasy units in the back of the booklet.

Hm. It looks like heroes and wizards and such count as military units. Their mighty heroism and magical power makes them equivalent to sizeable groups of normal soldiers, capable of competing directly against military units on the field of battle. Of course current RPG’s tend to focus on the individual heroes, start them off well before “name level” – and forget all about that “equivalent to military units” stuff. (Except for the occasional threads about “Can an army of 10,000 peasants and a midlevel warlord take down the 20’th level wizard in his tower? And no sending out the Iron Golems!”.)

So; there are your rules. Powerful heroes are equivalent to military units. Ergo, for combat purposes, Military Units can be reasonably represented… as powerful individuals.

OK. We’ll give them a few special rules;

• They are disrupted – and effectively vanish – when they hit zero hit points, just like summoned creatures. There will be lots of broken survivors who will run away. Actually “killing” them will require chasing down the majority of the individual fleeing creatures. It’s usually not worth the bother.
• Looting them gets you lots of lesser gear, rather than the higher-level equivalent items that they combine to represent.
• The scale is bigger. How much bigger? It really doesn’t matter much; the player characters can simply be presumed to be moving about on a larger scale, spending time picking out good targets from among the mass instead of just blasting away, and a few characters can effectively man that city wall. Time and distance are stretched out proportionately – and so don’t actually change anything. The only major effect here is that – if you want to add mounts or supplies to your military group out of your personal resources – you’re going to need a lot of them.

If you must guess the CR – instead of just making it reasonable for the group (remember, you don’t need rules for “an easy victory” or “too strong to fight”) – divide by five or so. Groups just aren’t as well organized as individuals.

So you have a peasant militia with 120 CR 1/2 members being organized by a sixth level fighter?

OK: that gives us… three wings of 40 guys each. Divide by five. 8 CR 1/2 characters is… a fifth level equivalent.

So; build them as three fifth level characters – probably fighters. They’ve been taught to dash in and out? Mobility feat. One wing was taught to strike mighty blows? Power attack for that one. One wing includes a bunch of novices from the temple? Build that one as a cleric; the novices massed efforts can approximate a few higher level spells. They include some creatures with weird abilities? Give the units you’re building some. That’s easy in Eclipse, but there are ways to do it in most d20 systems.

You’re modeling a swarm of demons? Use the statistics for a few more powerful ones and simply describe the seething mass of lesser creatures as they combine their powers to launch a few more powerful attacks.

The nigh-invincible United Armies of the Hundred Cities might be built as a quartet of eighteenth level characters. Sure, there are things out there that can take them out – but their well-trained massed forces of the dozen cities that actually contribute much, with all their minor priests, magicians, and mystics, and their field fortifications, catapults, and other defenses, say that it isn’t going to be easy unless you’re a high epic level type yourself.

This also has a subtle advantage; you can use masses of lower-level opponents quickly and easily to oppose those high-level PC’s – rather than having to have massively powerful creatures and opponents lurking around every corner. That way you don’t have to answer questions like “where were all these guys when we were low level?”, or “how do the normal peasants survive?” or “how can the world still function when it’s full of people who can warp it, twist it, and overthrow it at whim?”.

Now, if a player wants to command a military unit, or the services of a temple full of novices and underlings, or some such… let them take Leadership and apply the same principle. Use the statistics of a single, higher-level, character to represent the massed efforts of many lower-level ones.

No, this isn’t a perfect simulation of a mass battle – but it’s quick, simple, workable, and works in the game. If it still worries you, just remember; d20 is full of high-order abstractions already. What will one more hurt?

Related articles

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• Eclipse Monster Characters II – The Succubus (ruscumag.wordpress.com)
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Magical Biotech and Monster Making Part II – Monster Making for the GM.

To pick up the biotech for d20 series again, we’ll take a look at “monster design” from the game master’s side with the Spirit of the Times.

Some places achieve timelessness. Others have timelessness thrust upon them.

A time and place may become a legend, an idealized archetype, a fixed reference point for later civilizations, a numinous wonder that becomes the timeless setting for a thousand myths and tales…

The Wild West, Feudal Japan, the Roaring 20’s… all host more tales than the original locales could ever have contained.

Those archetypes have become spirits. Spirits of Time and Place, Vestiges of Other Worlds…

And Spirits can be invoked.

A Spirit of the Times possesses landscapes, not creatures or characters – and so a lot of the usual statistics are quite irrelevant. Do you want an armor class for the desert? To decide how many hits with a sword it will take to kill Mount Everest? No, the sole way to dispose of a Spirit of the Times is to find it’s central focus (invariably a complex glyph or series of glyphs that expresses the nature of the spirit in question) and enact the unique ritual of closure which will end it’s reign.

This isn’t necessarily urgent; people may live under the influence of a genre for many years without being particularly bothered by it – but eventually things will want to move on. Despite E.E “Doc” Smith, extending a particular culture indefinitely across time – no matter how much the setting changes – rarely works all that well.

So a slightly crazy wizard (my, don’t those guys get blamed for a LOT of things? They should get a lawyer), wishing to protect his monopoly on something or other, has enacted a bizarre ritual thought long-lost, and summoned up the Spirit of Prohibition – calling on it to force all other, legal, suppliers out of business.

Perhaps it’s rock salt. Or perfume. Or some sort of music.

Across the kingdom it will abruptly become accepted that dealing in whatever-it-is is illegal. Enforcement organizations will spring up. So will black markets, and illegal establishments where you can go and eat salty foods, or enjoy a selections of scents, or listen to the illegal music. There will be raids and gangsters.

In fact there will be hordes of gangsters, riding by in carriages firing wildly with their rapid fire repeating heavy crossbows that – oddly enough – will not work outside the kingdom.

The locals will accept the new situation, traders will find new restrictions at the borders, and a hundred other details will change to fit. Characters who go along with the cliches that the spirit enforces will find their actions greatly eased. Characters who attempt to fight the genre will find their lives far harder than they need to be.

Who can defy the Spirit of the Times?

So lets make a stat block.

Spirit of the Times

• Dimensionless Outsider (Neutral, Extraplanar)
• Hit Dice: Nope!
• Initiative: Nope!
• Speed: Nope!
• Armor Class: Nope!
• Base Attack/Grapple: Not really!
• Attack: Dispatches hordes of generic minions, which simply show up annoyingly.
• Full Attack: Dispatch Boss Minion
• Space/Reach: Er… Yes?
• Special Attacks: Alter Genre (enforces appropriate cliches), Mass Acceptance (the population at large will see no problems), Law Enforcement (the local authorities will enforce the new social mores), and Alter Setting (the environment changes to suit the genre).
• Special Qualities: Immune to pretty much everything except the dismissal ritual, unless the GM feels that certain tactics (unique to each spirit) will weaken it.
• Saves: Too big to need any.
• Abilities: Str –, Dex –, Con –, Int 10, Wis 24, Cha —
• Skills: Hm. Spot Annoyances +17, Elementary Tactics +10, Influence Culture +20. No, these aren’t standard skills. Who cares?
• Feats: Nope!
• Environment: The Beyond, wherever it’s summoned, or in mortal hearts and minds.
• Organization: Solitary
• Challenge Rating: Depends on the minions assigned to it.
• Treasure: Large piles of appropriate props.
• Alignment: True Neutral.
• Advancement: Nope!
• Level Adjustment: Nope!

OK: now this “creature” violates virtually every rule of monster design out there. There’s only one way to defeat it and none to “harm” it. It’s built on pop-culture references. It’s stat block is woefully incomplete.

And yet… it rather looks like fun to me. If you want a chunk of the Wild West, or a Chicago-Gangster break from your usual high fantasy, or an espionage interlude – well, here you have an excuse. The fact that there’s only one solution (perhaps, for the Spirit of Prohibition, bringing in a wagonload of whatever-it-is that’s banned and proclaiming “Repeal!” while standing atop it’s mystic seal will do) isn’t too relevant; this “monster” sets up interesting situations and periodic annoyances with mobs of “gangsters”. It’s not like it goes around directly stomping on player characters.

Still, player creations are just going to have to be a lot more limited than GM creations. The “fling together anything that looks like fun” approach may have a lot of gaming tradition behind it, but it’s a lot trickier than it looks. How many really lame creatures have you run across?

(Oh no! Old memories… surfacing! Judges Guild: Field Guide To Encounters… More than a thousand of the LAMEST most unusable creatures ever imagined! In what may well be the WORST game supplement in my entire collection!

And that’s saying something. Honestly, I didn’t really find one single item or creature of use in all of Volumes I and II. I got it them for a quarter each, and decades later I still feel ripped off.)

So; next up, it’s going to be building monsters for players.

Death in Absentia: Characters and the Law

As with so many things, when you’re looking at how you handle malefactors in role-playing games, it’s often wise to look back at the beginning…

Once upon a time there were wargamers, and they had little cards for units that might look something like this:

Class-A Tank (d6 Generic Wargame):

• Move 5. No Swamp or Mountain Terrain.
• Saves: Small Arms 2+, Heavy Weapons 4+, Flamethrower 5+.
• Four Wound Levels. Repair 1 Daily 4+
• Attacks: Main Gun: Ranged 3 wounds, one hex. Machine Guns: 2 Wounds, Two Adjacent Hexes

There: A squad with small arms attacks your tank? Roll 1d6; on 2+ they do no damage. They’re using a bazooka? Now it’s a 4+ you need. You know how fast you can move, through what terrain, how hard it is to damage your unit, and how much damage it can take. Throw in a few similar unit-cards, a hex-gridded map, and a few tokens, and you have a wargame.

Then someone crossed out “Class-A Tank” and wrote “Knight with Magic Bow and Claymore” – and now it was a basic role-playing game. The basic game abilities were just the same, but now your tank could go off-duty, drink in bars, and chase women.

You can still see pretty obvious signs of that in first edition AD&D; a “name level” fighter there could take out minor enemies by the swarm (attacking once per level against very weak foes in melee), withstand more damage than any normal human being could ever endure, move quickly on his mighty steed – and still couldn’t move in swamps or up cliffs. Their armor was too heavy.

And there’s our first problem with maintaining law and order in RPG’s that allow characters with vast personal powers. When you come right down to it, powerful RPG characters are not normal human beings. They’re the equivalent of major military units. If major military units are running rampant across the area, and they refuse to stand down and surrender voluntarily, you don’t send out the police to arrest them. You send in other military units to destroy them.

That’s been the foundation of the law since the very beginning. If you don’t obey the authorities, they will kill you.

So you’re an adventurer and have been summoned to be tried for some sort of crime.

Yes, you can indeed use your mighty powers (or feet if your powers are not so mighty) to not show up, but if you refuse to work within the law, then you’re outside it and the authorities may well declare you outside the law or “outlawed “- although, if they’re kind, they won’t do it until after your trial.

Not showing up can be bad. Why?

Well lets talk about what being “Outlawed” really means…

What makes a “Civilized Area”?

A “Civilized Area” is a place where people have agreed to help defend each other and to take measures against attackers in the interests of mutual security. A futuristic apartment complex where no one will stick their noses out or call for help if a neighbor is attacked is not a civilized area. A collection of mud huts and thorn bushes where the neighbors will bring crudely pointed sticks to help repel a lion that’s attacking a neighbor… is.

That’s why times when jack-booted thugs can burst into someone’s house and drag them away without protests from the neighbors are referred to as a “breakdown of civilization”.

Outlawry doesn’t mean the authorities are after you. The authorities are after lots of people. It means that the authorities will pay a bounty on you and that you’re outside the protections of civilization – and that’s the scary part. It means that anyone can kill you and take your stuff without having to worry about getting into trouble.

Adventurers generally have nice stuff. The price of that second-hand basic longsword could feed a kid for a year. Throw in armor, a horse, and a few other bits and pieces… most people will never see that much money in their lives.

And that’s just for your basic starting fighter-type.

Being outlawed means being poisoned by bartenders, coup-de-graced in your sleep by maids, and hunted by other adventurers. For them, the real prize is usually your stuff. Any reward that may be offered on an adventurer is usually just lagniappe. If you’re an experienced adventurer, you’ll have enough stuff to be well worth the attention of even more experienced adventurers. Remember that cheap scry-teleport-blast-repeat routine that sometimes pops up in high-level d20? Congratulations; you’re now the target for every cheap trick that you’ve ever used to take out the bad guys easily. You’re… loot on the hoof, without the protections of being buried deep in the wilderness at the bottom of a dungeon full of traps, monsters, and ancient evils. Why risk trips like that when there’s a lump of concentrated wealth that you can grab without leaving town – and with the healer right around the corner and no social consequences except applause?

A child-pickpocket might flee outlawry successfully; he or she is unlikely to have anything worth the effort of taking and the reward is likely to be trivial. Get a weeks travel away, take a new name – and in a year or so everyone will have forgotten about you. But once the reward is worth a few hours work for a powerful mage…

Lets say it’s d20, and some upset noble has put out a 200 GP reward – for him, small change – on our child-pickpocket. A twelfth-level sorcerer can easily scry out the kid, teleport in, drop him or her with a single spell, and turn in the pathetic corpse (or unconscious body if he or she is feeling REALLY kind – or perhaps REALLY unkind) for the reward within five minutes. If the locals (somehow) find time to question our sorcerer, all he has to do is point to the kids status as an outlaw.

Now that does presume that powerful mages or other reality-manipulators exist in the setting and can find you – but if they can’t, local justice is a meaningless joke anyway as far as powerful people are concerned; they can just move elsewhere.

Bounty hunters are not sporting – and if you’ve got a soft heart and pity for the helpless, it’s not a profession you wind up in. Being outlawed means being screwed. Unless you’re so far gone in munchkinism as to be a problem for gods rather than mortals, being powerful won’t help a lot; sure you can survive more attacks, but there WILL BE a lot more attacks too.

You don’t actually need the accused at the trial either. You don’t show up? The court will STILL consider any evidence of your innocence that comes up, but not showing is a big strike against you and a pain for anyone trying to present your side. Remember; in most older societies the legal system does not exist to produce justice. That’s a modern ideal, and a VERY expensive social investment that pre-industrial societies often cannot afford. The legal system exists to maintain order and to keep the powerful people happy. Justice is nice when it can be arranged – but no one is letting the chance of committing an injustice stop them; there are always gods and afterlives to sort out the mistakes.

No, that’s not fair. Most RPG characters are working on the military level – and the military is interested in making things as unfair as they possibly can. If some innocent has gotten in the way, that’s what “collateral damage” is all about.

This may lead to compassionate types restraining people – especially young thieves and such with powerful enemies – from running away from accusations; no matter how much they panic. They may not understand that not showing up for trial is almost certain doom – but their benefactors will.

If you do show up but don’t behave they don’t need to take massive and expensive measures to restrain you either; if you aren’t simply killed in the fight, and if they really need something from you, they can just pour cups of narcotics into you until all you can do is mumble confused answers. They may throw in mind-probing spells and such if those exist in the setting – but there’s no need for it. You CAN be forced to testify against yourself, and no one will bat an eye. Quite a lot of places will still be using judicial torture.

You didn’t put up a fuss? You can probably defend yourself and testify without restraint. If you were going to use your abilities to escape or attack… waiting until you were in a courtroom that’s likely to be full of guards and powerful people would be bloody stupid.

Modern courts tend to ban weapons, but RPG’s tend to offer characters so many weird-ass powers as to make it a moot point. When the person next to you may be a werewolf, or have flaming explosive halitosis capable of demolishing castles, the fact that someone has a knife on them doesn’t look so important does it?

Showing up for trial and behaving yourself – particularly if you’re powerful enough to have a good chance of escaping for awhile – will often be taken as a big point in your favor too. Even if you’re guilty as hell, there’s a good chance of clemency, or a royal pardon in exchange for some special services, or some other way out. Adventurers who are sane enough to show up, face the music, and stick around to see the outcome even if it doesn’t look good are too valuable to waste – and and the price tag of forcing the issue can be rather high.

And that’s why when that ordinary Court Bailiff turns up to deliver a summons to your archmage for blowing up a small town and killing fifty people, it may be smart to go along with it. The trial might go badly – but the worst that’s likely to happen is an escape (it’s blasted hard to restrain an archmage) followed by Outlawry – and that’s exactly what will happen if you blow away the Bailiff and go for the escape right away anyway.

You’re already under sentence of death. Going to the trial… might get it lifted.

Residents of the Ars Goetia, Part II

What could go wrong?

The “Demons” of medieval tomes were mostly the creation of fevered would -be demonologists and “scholars”. While they might be loosely based on a few genuine mythological fragments, those tattered threads are pretty thoroughly lost in a sea of wild conjecture. For our purposes this is good; it provides a lot of room for turning them into creatures that can play an interesting role in various games.

Part One included Andromalius (the Judge), Beleth (the Berserker), and Bifrons (the psychopomp). To continue with part II, we have…

MALTHUS (Mal-Thus) The Earl Of Slaughter, Armorer Of The Abyss.

• Favored Form: A slim, languid, effeminate fop, carrying a rapier, dripping with gems and jewelry, and wearing exquisite silken clothing – often a near-parody of a high-ranking officers military uniform. He takes care never to appear before a given individual twice in the same outfit. Some people call his outfits and appearance “ridiculous”. HE calls them “bait”.
• Major Powers: Grandmaster Psionic (Disruption and Vamparism), Powershaping (Conjuration and Battle Magic), Master Strategist, Tactician, and Military Engineer. Despite his utter brilliance as a general, putting Malthus in charge of a military force somehow always results in a very high casualty rate (most infamously, the legendary “morning calisthenics massacre”)- but he does get things done. If it’s needed he will conjure up his own troops, fortifications, and arsenals, but he prefers not to waste his time and genius on matters of simple logistics.
• Sacrifices: Malthus prefers human sacrifices, dying violently and in pain. He will quite cheerfully collect his own sacrifices if the summoner doesn’t get them ready for him – although he quite willing to count casualties among any troops placed under his command as sacrifices. Luckily, he can be somewhat placated (at enormous expense and far less effectively) with an assortment of new outfits and various luxuries – gems, silks, fine wines, and the best of foods.
• Ritual: Summoning Malthus requires setting up a magical circle – and a substantial lump of opium to be burned as incense.
• Basic Nature: Malthus is a master general, and he knows it very well. He will want to take charge, snap orders at all and sundry, and lay around languidly and be waited on. Unlike many of the other creatures of the Ars Goetia, Malthus has embraced the darkness, simply because it gives him more chances to exercise his supreme skills in the arts of war and attracts great heroes to meet in battle. He does not see his troops – or his opponents – as people, but as pawns.
• Combat Skill: Malthus is insanely dangerous in battle. He has enormous personal strength, as well as being very, very, skilled with virtually all weapons. He will, however, normally spare noncombatants; children can grow up to be worthy opponents, and older noncombatants can produce and care for more children – giving Malthus more people to kill or to lead into battle to die demonstrating his supreme brilliance later on.

OROBAS (Or’-O-Bas) “The Prince Of Steeds”

• Favored Form : Orabas most often appears as a powerful black stallion with a crimson (or actively flaming) mane and tail, but sometimes appears in the form of other steeds – although always in a similar color scheme. He speaks in the inhuman voice of whatever creature he appears to be. Regardless of his form, he will be equipped for war, with silver barding and tack – although he wears no bridle.
• Major Powers : Basic Powershaping (Counterspells, Divination, and Enchantment), Lesser Psionic (Beastmastery, Healing, Belamourment – and Exokinetic Fields). As befits a mighty steed, Orobas possesses great Physical Strength, Toughness, and Speed.
• Sacrifices : None.
• Ritual : A complex summoning circle. Orobas is of little use unless bound, a rite that requires a silver bridle and several minutes. It also requires providing Orobas with the summoners true name and reason for calling him forth – information that Orobas will freely share with any other summoner.
• Basic Nature : Once bound, Orobas is a faithful retainer and will do his best to serve and obey the summoner and to answer his or her questions – giving him something of a reputation as an oracle. While Orabus is a most superior mount, keeping him bound will gradually drain the summoners vitality – inflicting (1D6) points of damage each day which can only be regained via rest and time, and not at all while Orabas is kept bound. Orabus views his office and purpose as to be a faithful retainer of whoever his current “master” is – a powerful steed and wise advisor. He does not feel that it is the business of a war-steed to question it’s master – and so turns a complete blind eye to the summoners moral status, and to the nature of the deeds he is called on to assist (no doubt the reason for his current status). Orabas might carry a heroic master through storm, flood, and the very fires of hell to rescue a single child – while for another he would crush a dozen beneath his blood-soaked hooves. As a part of his service he will hold a master’s secrets in absolute security – unless asked about them by another master, in which case that aspect of himself will cheerfully tell it’s master whatever he wants to know.
• Combat Skill : He’s a war-steed, and – within that basic limitation – is extraordinarily competent.

STOLAS (Sto-Las”) “The Prince Of Carrion Crows, Bard of Chaos”

• Favored Form : A huge raven with silver talons and red-golden eyes. Stolas “prefers” to speak in riddles, snatches of song, and doggerel nonsense. He often sends a minor aspect of himself to answer a summons, instead of coming in person. Such raven-familiars can grant a summoner various minor powers – usually translation or very minor powershaping abilities (as always, in a particular field or fields).
• Major Powers : A master Spy and Thief, Stolas also possesses Powershaping (Air, Sound, and Illusion), and possesses the ability to speak and read all languages, a talent he may share with his summoner if he desires. Stolas is a notable musician – and may be a true master. He can produce a wide variety of bardic effects.
• Sacrifices : Stolas favors original music, elder texts, weird snippets of knowledge, and concerts. What he finds acceptable seems to be a matter of whim. The summoner usually needs to negotiate.
• Ritual : An elaborate circle, incense, and a full set of ceremonial gear is needed to summon Stolas – unless the summoner is capable of performing the far faster Song Of Summoning on woodwinds or harp. Stolas will teach a summoner the song on request, but a proper performance requires considerable skill and personal tutoring from Stolas; books, recordings, and similar methods are not sufficient to learn the subtle personalization that makes it work. He’ll also teach summoners about music and herbs on request.
• Basic Nature : Stolas is a rogue, a trickster, and quite unreliable… Everything he does should be taken with a grain (several grains?) of salt. Even when bound to a summoner, he cannot be prevented from dragging everyone in the vicinity into baroque entanglements, twisting answers to questions that do not involve music or herbs, and generally making mischief.
• Combat Skill : Stolas’s talons apparently possess some curious venomous or disruptive property – making them unexpectedly dangerous to both living beings and magical constructs.

Related articles

• Residents of the Ars Goetia (ruscumag.wordpress.com)

Residents of the Ars Goetia

It's best to double-check that before starting!

When it comes to source material, it’s hard to get much more authentic than going medieval – and the list of “demons” in the Ars Goetia offers quite a lot of inspiration.

Of course, when you read that list you don’t find a lot of game-style “demons”. You don’t find much in the way of berserk killing machines, of evil for the sake of evil, or of random torment. You find pursuers of thieves, teachers, healers, seers, war-leaders – and even war-steeds.  A list of entities who… wound up on the wrong side of heaven for one reason or another – apparently rarely for direct rebellion – and who were cast out.

There are a lot of reasons why someone can wind up on the wrong side of a war and still be a decent enough person. Traditionally, quite a few of these entities were serving their summoners in pursuit of their own redemption – even if they’re not very good at it and have massive blind spots.

For game purposes, most of these entities can be treated as Conceptual Spirits – entities that embody immortal ideas, and so can be in many places at the same time. The summoning rituals open the way for them to manifest – and the more powerful the summoner, the more powerful the manifestation.

They’re relatively easy to summon – at least as far as games in settings where magic works are concerned – but there is always a price…

ANDROMALIUS (An’Dro-Mali~Us) “The Earl Of Justice”

• Favored Form : A stern and fearsome man attired in the clothing of a judge. He occasionally appears with, or sends in his place, one or more terrible black hounds – in reality merely embodied fractions of his own energy and immaterial essence. He has been known to leave one of these “creatures” with a summoner.
• Major Powers : Grandmaster Psionic (Psychic Senses and Heightened Talents), Powershaping (Nymic Magic and Transformations – only when embodied), Spell Imbuement (Only in living creatures, maximum of seven). He will often bestow a set of carefully-tailored spells to allow a summoner to enact judgement on the guilty.
• Sacrifices : None required when the summoner is acting in pursuit of justice, otherwise he may require some quest – always in pursuit of justice – in return for his aid. He will also always tell the summoner something about himself or something he’s done that he would really rather not know – most often revealing the undesirable or unjust results of the summoners own past actions.
• Ritual : Circle, scribed with an oaken rod.
• Basic Nature : Vengeful and merciless. Andromalius tends to use his “summoners” as agents in carrying out his eye-for-an-eye judgements. It is probably this lack of mercy that put him on the wrong side of the greater celestial powers.
• Combat Skill : Master of the “Soft” martial arts.

BELETH (Bel-eth) “The Mad King”

• Favored Form : A handsome and powerfully built man riding a mighty war-stallion, usually accompanied by martial music. He occasionally simply sends the horse-fraction of his energies, in which case things can get “uncomfortable” for the offering (see below) – unless the “summoner” has a mare – and some splendid tack – ready (which is very, VERY, wise). The horse can be ridden, and is a useful and obedient mount – at least as long as you do a lot of fighting.
• Major Powers : Master Psionic (Telepathic Powers), Powershaping (Winter and Summer magics), Hypercharisma and Hypermasculinity.
• Sacrifices : Beleth requires the, er, attentions and companionship of a pretty girl while he’s present. He will leave her psychically bound to the summoner as a personal slave when he leaves (this can actually be very very useful if he arrives in horse-form and is offered a mare). If such an “offering” is not forthcoming, he can occasionally be placated by a supply of expensive weapons, armor, and masculine accouterments.
• Ritual : Beleth can be summoned through the use of an enruned ring – and an invocation – but it is a very good idea to have inscribed either a protective circle or a containment circle first.
• Basic Nature : Lustful, hot-tempered – and far too easily enraged. Beleth often arrives in a fury, and can be extremely dangerous if defied. He’s more than a little nuts. Unfortunately for him, he sees nothing wrong in his behavior; is not a mighty warrior entitled to such small indulgences?
• Combat Skill : Beleth is competent with virtually any weapon but primarily relies on sheer strength and his immense personal vitality. The horse is a powerful steed, although it does have a pesky tendency to teleport right into the middle of combat.

BIFRONS (Bi-Frons) “The Earl Of The Dead”

• Favored Form : Either an insubstantial minotaur with eyes full of stars or a slim, naked, boy. He is very hard for most people to see at all either way.
• Major Powers : Navigator, Caravan Master, and Inter-dimensional Traveler, Powershaper (Necromancy and Mindsending), and Cultural Adaption. Bifrons is a wanderer of the empyrean plane, and is capable of taking people on a guided tour through almost any afterlife.
• Sacrifices : If not placed with the gift of some means of transport (Horse, boat, car, plane, whatever) Bifrons has an annoying tendency to drop off those who travel with him in an inconvenient location. Summoners who simply want him to use his necromantic or tutoring talents on their behalf may either undertake a “brief” empyrean combat/quest or placate him with simple cash – although, unless things have changed recently, Bifrons does not take paper money, credit cards, checks, or letters of credit. He insists on gold and silver coins.
• Ritual : The summoning circle must be drawn in the earth, either outside or in some public place – such as an inn. The summons also requires mold from a graveyard, and all negotiations must be completed within seven minutes – or Bifrons will travel elsewhere.
• Basic Nature : Irritating. Bifrons is a know-it- all, and delights in telling endless stories about his travels elsewhere – and how they were so much more interesting and dramatic then whatever is going on at the moment in his summoner’s life.