[JulianLW]

Hey, y’all!

I'm sorry to bring this two-year old thread back to life, but I just couldn't help myself. I'm new to the forum (this is only my second post on here, and it’s muuuch longer than my first one-sentence comment), and I can’t figure out how to email another user directly. I suppose I could have started a new thread called “Enchanted Flying Ship.” But I didn’t. I wanted to share my work with the other GURPS nuts, especially in light of this old thread from two summers ago.

I read through this thread yesterday and then looked over GURPS Magic and Basic and then sort of stayed up all night nerding out trying to solve the problem of how to make a flying ship for a Dungeon Fantasy kind of world. I think (in the spirit of the original poster) that a lot of the fun of being an in-game enchanter should be about figuring out how to crack the tough nut of a really special magical item – and then creating a strategy to pull it off by pursuing the necessary skills, spells, and materials. The strategy I’m outlining here might very well occupy a highly gifted and determined mage for years and lead to a lot of adventures and challenges, all culminating in a pretty major enchantment that might take his character (as a lone enchanter) three or four or more years to cast. This process could, in fact, be a major subplot – or even the driving force – of an ongoing campaign. It’d be a pretty difficult mission to accomplish.

A mage in any world who came up with the kind of scheme I’m outlining here would probably also want to guard it as a very powerful trade secret – the kind of secret that wars are fought over. Imagine your surprise when the Eastern Horde of Moishe the Magnificent shows up one afternoon in a fleet of flying ships to bombard your castle! Why don’t WE have flying ships!?

But I’m going to go ahead and share the secret with you guys, because y’all are cool. Just don’t tell anybody. Here's how I'd solve this flying sloop problem using GURPS Magic enchantment rules *basically as written – with just a teensy bit of interpretive finessing, i.e. munchkinry.

Enchanted Flying Ship

This recipe calls for: 1) a very small sloop, no more than 30 feet long for SM+4, 2) a golem that the enchanter has to create himself, with a time and cost to create priced according to the GM’s determination of the material component requirements, 3) a powerstone with 25 energy – or more, for a larger sloop – and 4) the ability to perform a 948 EP ritual enchantment (or 1068 EP for a SM+5 sloop that’s 45 feet long, or 1188 EP for a SM+6 sloop at 60 feet, or 1308 EP at 90 feet, and so on). Let’s get started.

Step 1. Get your GM to rule that a sloop is a machine. GURPS Magic says "For the purpose of these rules, a machine is a tool that in some way uses, stores, or transforms power in order to do its job.... The GM has final say regarding any gray area" (M 175). A sailboat, I think, easily qualifies. Windmills are clearly machines, and sails fit the description of “simple machines” found in Wikipedia, examples of which also include pulleys and levers.

Step 2. Here’s the big potential deal-breaker: see if you can get your GM to rule that you can build a golem that knows spells. Without this, we’re out of business. The golem needs to be able to cast Machine Possession (M 178) and Flight (M 145), and since a golem can’t talk and has no FP, it has to know the spells at a level high enough not only to be able to cast them without speaking but also high enough that they can be maintained for free when cast on a subject the size of your ship, which is really, really high.

Machine Possession can be learned like a skill by anyone who can find a copy in a grimoire, but Flight has Magery 2 as one of its prereqs. So while you’re at it, get your GM to rule that you can (somehow – you may have to track down a special spell or item or substance to unlock this option) make a golem with spells using the “Alternate Prerequisites” rule found in Magic on page 200. For the purposes of this build, I’ll assume your GM does allow you to add to the prereq count in order to learn a spell without the magery, and this also ends up being a little bit cheaper – a flat 44 EP off the final enchantment cost to replace Magery 2 with an additional 3 levels of prerequisite count. (If the GM won’t go for “Alternate Prerequisites,” then you’ll need to give the golem Magery 2 for 25 CP. If the GM won’t go for that, then tough luck and, again, we’re all done here.)

Your GM should consider that there are no clear rules for “abilities added to the golem” (I emphasize the word “abilities” in the spell description, which clearly doesn’t limit the golem’s customization to just skills) – but the Enchantment College is about creating magical items, after all, and the description of the Golem spell is pretty open-ended: “GMs may allow more sweeping changes to the basic golem if they feel comfortable doing so. More powerful golems may require more durable (and more costly) materials, adding to the cost and time required to create the golem’s body” (Magic 59). If it matters, a golem is already a magically sapient creature (IQ 8), and many of the earliest stories of the Jewish golems (the Golem of Prague, for example) give the golem some pretty significant magical powers, including invisibility and spirit summoning. Your GM may decide that you can simply invest the points in the golem necessary to give it the spells you want it to have and you’re done. That’d be the easiest, though it’ll still be expensive.