Here I’m going to get down and dirty, introducing some practical interactions with the physical world to spells. This will look at individual spells in isolation, trying to make the world an interesting factor in gameplay. My thesis on the overarching laws of spell science can wait for another day.
Warning, things get dangerously close to playable content, with a link to my “materialist” take on an illusionist at the end of the post.
I think I owe the first idea here to a Chris McDowall post, but I couldn’t track it down. I remember a version of fire magic where the wizard manipulates existing flames rather than evoking them from nowhere. No more does a fireball appear at the snap of your fingers.
In one sense, this works as a “nerf” on the fireball spell, it no longer serving to nuke any gang of foes at the wizard’s convenience. Reducing the power of magic this way fits my preferred materialist approach to RPGs. It prevents the wizard from too easily shaping the world to their will, making magic less a case of “thought determining being”.
This kind of environmentally dependent take on fire magic also nicely compliments the “Old School” style of gaming. Fire magic becomes a case of “don’t forget your matches”. Players might need to find slots in their inventory for oil and firewood. It further serves to reward clever play. Using such spells in combat might mean luring enemies towards that flaming brazier.
Telepathy
Arachnibot on Discord linked me an RPG which tries to apply the laws of physics to superhero powers. We agreed this might a bit much for a fantasy RPG, but there was an interesting take on telepathy, which involved submerging your head in water to employ.
Needing a body of water to use telepathy works as an environmental constraint on its efficacy, similarly to with fire magic above. Assuming their whole head must be submerged and they can’t breathe underwater, it also serves to naturally limits the spell’s duration. Water is traditionally the element most associated with thought, so it’s a nice addition of flavour too. Perhaps there are further problems to solve if the person’s mind you are reading must be in the same water too.
Vanishing
To me, spells that make things vanish (disintegrate) or vanish then reappear (teleport) belong in the same category. This type of spell makes me feel like being in a computer game’s level generation software, deleting or moving pixels as I see fit. If the game designer is God within their game world, this represents a godlike level of power for characters too.
As a replacement for teleport, some kind of shadow walk spell seems more interesting to me. That is, stepping into a shadow and remerging from another. Almost any variation on this theme is possible by integrating it into a different aspect of the game world – plant walk, lizard walk etc. Spells that straight up delete things like disintegrate I’m tempted to vanish from my spell list altogether. Perhaps the same should go for conjuration spells, which are effectively adding pixels to the game world from nowhere.
Flying
Flying spells feels a bit like playing a computer game on cheat mode. Maybe it’s fun for a few minutes, but doesn’t exactly make for sustainable gameplay. But there are numerous ways to more effectively “ground” flight magic (if that sentence even makes sense).
Avatar: The Last Air Bender has the hero fly through a combination of a fold up glider and manipulated air currents. Magneto in X-men flies through the manipulation of magnetic fields and metal armour. Even growing wings is a bit more interesting than straight up superman poses.
Illusionary
An illusion no one can tell is fake might as well be a newly conjured part of the game world. This can make them overpowered if automatically successful in fooling people, or potentially a complete whiff if dependent on a saving throw. The middle ground can be notoriously difficult for the game master to manage.
I’ve decided to tackle the problem at its source, more specifically, the light source. On my take, visual illusions only work under magically altered light. Under flame light, this amounts to adding a special substance to its fuel, which I’ve called “green burn” in the game I'm developing.
In terms of problem solving, the challenge might become smuggling green burn into a goblin’s campfire. The extent of the light’s reach works to impose a natural limit on the scale of the illusion. The same is true of its duration.
In a context where illusions are only effective in unnatural light, daylight presents their inherent foil. This ties with the idea of light representing truth. There are ways though that a clever illusionist could still trick people at daytime. With the proper treatment, light filtered through a green parasol or stained glass might still qualify as magically altered.
Here is an example of how the above translates into an illusionist “class” in a game I am working on with Panic Pillow. The format is derived from GLOG, in terms of rank advancement abilities. The term class is perhaps a misnomer though, because the abilities are tied to an institution (The Star Shard Opera), rather than a class template.
I found that having a universal limit on illusions meant I didn’t have to worry so much about them being overpowered (hence the Magnum Opus ability). There’s also some consideration of the ability’s role within the opera, rather than exclusively designing spells around dungeon crawling (as if everything in the game world is geared around this activity). Hence the idea of background and foreground illusions, which could be applicable to a theatrical stage.
Summary
This post was intended as a scattered bunch of individual spell ideas, but I can’t help seeing some principles common to them. They require players to tailor spells to the environment they have to work with, or alternatively equip their characters with appropriate objects to use in a scenario. Both cases naturally seem to fit well with the OSR style of game play and the type of materialism I have talked about here.
I intend to post a bit more regularly in the coming weeks, as Panic Pillow and I work on our class/institution designs. I’m planning to showcase more of the institutions I’ve come up with and discuss my thinking behind them. I’d love to hear any feedback people have on these.
No comments:
Post a Comment