[Michael Cule]

Things would be a whole lot easier if GURPS Magic had a system to it.

I mean looking back on it we might still have had the plethora of Magic systems Thaumatology rounded up (and all those which have come up since) but if they had started out with a system that told you how much being an Area spell affected cost and difficulty, what sort of chain of prerequisites you should build up for a particular effect, what level of Magery a spell should require... If there was a why to all that rather than just winging it my life would be easier than it is just now.

My (decades old) project to find a system for Tekumel that I like and can actually run went plotz again last week when I realised that FATE wasn't going to be the answer I was hoping for.

And my players, annoying simulationists the lot of them, looked at me and asked why I couldn't use GURPS.

It's the magic system (I told them as I have a thousand times). I can't use the core GURPS system: to keep the flavour of the world I need to convert the idiosyncratic spells of the source material. I can take the Psychic Magic and turn it into a set of GURPS Powers, no problem But the Ritual Magic is a bitch.

No, Ritual Magic in the GURPS sense won't work: it relies on the corpus of standard GURPS spells. Nor will Ritual Path Magic: the various temples keep knowledge of their specialities separate to increase their own power. There's no Thaumatological reason a Karakan worshiper can't learn the secrets of Wuru, purely social ones.

So are there any other systems for constructing spells in GURPS? Even unpublished amateur efforts.

You may assume I have looked at all the ideas in THAUMATOLOGY and have yet to be inspired by them.