Warhammer Fantasy magic (Colleges)

[Maz]

Another recent thread on D&D schools of magic (http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=155919), got me thinking of the Warhammer Fantasy magic and it's colleges.

I have many times considered running a Warhammer game using GURPS. For the most part I would run a low-powered game with focus on grim and gritty. Using a lot from Low Tech and mainly focusing on a more medieval feel and less on a high fantasy feel. So for the most part I would just use GURPS as is. But I now realize spells should probably get a special treatment.

Anyway. My point is I would like to use the traditional GURPS magic rules but sort them differently. I would not try to convert Warhammer spells into GURPS.


Have anyone done this before? I seem to recall someone making a GURPS-hammer book. But I cant find it, and what I could find was very limited.



From how I remember Warhammer. Spells were divided into two categories.

Petty spells, than any wizard could learn.
College spells, that are more powerful and that you needed to be part of a specific college to learn (ie. Bright wizards had destructive fire spells for instance).


So I am thinking you could pile most spells with no Magery requirement into a common group of "petty spells".
And then have Magery be "college specific", and divide the spells into those colleges.

[johndallman]

If you have the full suite of GURPS spells available, aren't you going to change the feel of Warhammer quite a lot? GURPS has a lot of spells that are just plain useful, in ways that Warhammer magic, which concentrates on combat, doesn't seem to match.

[Devil_Dante]

From warhammer fantasy rpg you can find a lot of different spells..
From warhammer wargame you will find different lore of magic, everyone design to be used into the battlefield.. depending, in my opinion, about what you are trying to do.. could u do some examples?

[a humble lich]

Now I do not have too much experience with the Warhammer RPG, but I am fairly familiar with the setting and have played the 40k games quite a bit. With that said there are some big differences to take into account with the magic system.

First, as was noted, I agree Warhammer spells tend to be more combat focused than GURPS magic.

Second, Warhammer magic tends to be much more powerful on the battlefield. Especially in the wargame, wizards had multiple spells which would destroy troops in a sizable area, and they could cast these many times without collapsing with fatigue. Compared to the underwhelming GURPS Explosive Fireball, playing used to Warhammer magic might be disappointed. However since you said you are focused on a gritty low level feel this might not be a problem.

Most importantly, Warhammer magic should be dangerous. Battle wizards who trained in the Colleges of Magic are safer, but the PCs should be afraid every time a wizard opens his mouth, he will accidentally summon a daemon to rip their faces off. In many ways this solves the first issue. All those utility spells become less useful once you include the aforementioned face-eating daemon risk. Magic should be powerful, but dangerous to use.

What does all this mean for GURPS? I don't know. If I were doing this, I would go through magic and get rid of a lot of spells, and sort the rest into colleges. To make magic powerful and dangerous, perhaps allow high levels of Magery, add some new high powered combat spells, and allow Wizards to purchase a sizable energy reserve. However, put a limitation on the Magery and/or the Energy reserve that when they are used, bad things can happen.

[mlangsdorf]

I would handle Warhammer magic with Threshold Magic. Set a fairly low Threshold, around 15 or 20, and a very high Recovery Rate, like 80/day. And then have a Catastrophe table that involves a lot of demon summoning. You may also want to reduce the effects of Threshold on the table, by giving a -1 modifier per 10 or 20 points over Threshold instead of per 5.

That lets mages cast one big spell like a 9d Explosive Fireball without melting, and spells after that become risky. But the risk resets after a day, so there's a strong incentive to push it at least a little.

For even more hostile and risky magic, set the Threshold to 10 and the RR to 40, but have recover happen every 4 hours. So a wizard can spend 50 FP every 4 hours with no long term effects as long as he doesn't suffer a catastrophe on any given roll.

You can adjust the numbers to get the exact feel that you want, but that's what I'd go for: some Threshold, a Recovery Rate that is much, much larger than the Threshold to encourage people to go over, and a catastrophe table that is fairly flat but features demon summoning happening fairly early in the results.

[borithan]

WRFP 2nd split magic into 3 categories:

Petty Magic - the most basic spells that any of a particular type of caster would have (there was Petty "Arcane" "Hedge" and "Divine", with a couple of extra additions in the splatbooks). These basically let them be roughly equivalent to a level 1 (D&D) wizard. Essentially Sleep, Light, Magic Missile, Ghost Sound... and possibly Mage Hand and Prestidigitation? Petty Hedge Magic had "Protection from Rain" (and some other even less useful spells). The Divine one... can't remember, didn't have any Priests in the game I ran.

Lesser Magic - Available to all casters (I think of a particular type, but Divine and Arcane casters may have shared shared the same selection). Largely various utility or protection spells that any wizard would find useful, like Mage Armour and I think the equivalent to Knock. Oddly actually the hardest spells to learn, as they were acquired individually. At least some of these were meant to be flavoured by a wizard's college, possibly being different spells but with identical game mechanical effects.

Lore Spells - Based on the college they belonged to. The most powerful spells, and the ones that really defined the colleges (or religions in the case of the divine spells). You got them as a package, but you couldn't cast them all at the start (as you couldn't reach the require casting numbers.

Then you had Battle Magic (the magic in the wargame), which was of out of the realms of WFRP (and noted as such). There were some spells that kind of mimicked spells in the table top, but the scale simply was not the same (the spells might decimate a whole regiment on the table top, but affect 4 or 5 people in the roleplaying game). Personally I came the conclusion that a mighty Wizard Lord in the roleplaying game was probably roughly equivalent to a Level 2 dweeb in the tabletop game. Note that this did not stop a Wizard Lord being a ridiculously powerful character in the context you would play in the RPG.

I think part of the split was simply down to player expectations and playability. "Petty Hedge" was probably closer to how lower level magic works in the setting (and I really liked the expansion for it in one of the splatbooks, which added more powerful effects, but were much subtler than college Magic), and according to the lore pretty much any other (human, non-evil) magic should probably be college based (eg, Sleep doesn't make any sense for a Bright Wizard). However players expect to have some offensive spells and some generic useful spells from the beginning, and not be locked entirely into a certain style of spells without any flexibility. Also, why repeat "low level attack spell" for each college, when having a single one would do and you just vary it where it was really needed (such as the Bright College getting an identical spell with slightly more damage to emphasise their role as the damaging magic college).

Tonally standard GURPS Magic and Warhammer Magic are quite different (as suggested a heavily modified form of Threshold Magic is probably closer... and some of the spell sets are probably more like Magic as Powers, with some kind of possibility of backfire), so I don't think it will feel like Warhammer regardless of what you do, but splitting it according to theme would help. I don't think it should be based on Magery requirement though, more how tightly they fit into the theme of the Warhammer Colleges.

[Maz]

I think many of you missed my point about it being low-powered and inspired by WFRP not the Fantasy Battle minature game.

Originally Posted by borithan

WRFP 2nd split magic into 3 categories:

Petty Magic - the most basic spells that any of a particular type of caster would have [...]

Lesser Magic - Available to all casters [...]

Lore Spells - Based on the college they belonged to. The most powerful spells, and the ones that really defined the colleges[...]

Then you had Battle Magic (the magic in the wargame), which was of out of the realms of WFRP (and noted as such). [...]


Tonally standard GURPS Magic and Warhammer Magic are quite different (as suggested a heavily modified form of Threshold Magic is probably closer... and some of the spell sets are probably more like Magic as Powers, with some kind of possibility of backfire), so I don't think it will feel like Warhammer regardless of what you do, but splitting it according to theme would help. I don't think it should be based on Magery requirement though, more how tightly they fit into the theme of the Warhammer Colleges.

Thanks for the run down. It's been many years since I last played WFRP.

I don't know how threshold magic works. I have only ever used the traditional GURPS system. ... and psionic powers as I mostly play sci-fi with GURPS.

Threshold might be a better fit. Where do I find info on it?

[borithan]

It is in GURPS Thaumatology. However out of the book it still isn't quite right for WFRP, and to make it really fit would need further work (it gives some guidance on how to modify it further if you wish). mlangsdorf's suggestions are a good place to start, and might be enough, depending on how close a conversion you want.

Basically using magic adds to a tally, which once it passes a certain limit there is an increasing chance bad stuff will happen. The basic threshold lets you cast a few normal spells safely (or like... one really big spell) but then you take quite a long while before you can cast safely again, which suits the feel they were going for (Mysterious Wizard blasts enemy dramatically with powerful Magyks, and then will not do it again for Mysterious Wizard reasons), but doesn't fit Warhammer Magic so well (almost all spells carry a risk, and the bigger the spell the bigger the risk, but a wizard doesn't need to wait 3 days before he can try casting a big spell again).

I know this is something I have ummed and erred about when I was considering a WFRP conversion... I decided against it as I couldn't work out how to get Magic to behave how I wanted and converting the races was a larger task than I could be bothered with. GURPS was a great basis for the playing in the Empire with humans, but I wanted to include the more fantastical elements and they were just taking too much work.

Not as difficult as a 40k conversion though...

[JaJacob]

I did WH magic for my gritty ancient fantasy. Unfortunately we only played one adventure and now we are getting ready for a scifi campaign to take a break from fantasy, so I can't vouch for it being good in a long run, but it did make what I wanted and the mage player enjoyed it in the end after getting into the idea effect shaping. It is definitely not balanced though, but you can add or remove what you need to get the specific power levels you want.

Also, if you click on my profile and search threads started by me, I asked help with the design here, so maybe you will find some ideas there.

What I did was following:

-used effect shaping ritual magic as a base for casting, combined with threshold for fast casting

-create a winds of magic table that added bonuses or penalties to casting

-expanded the calamity table a little

-since effect RPM had slow casting time, I added the use of threshold for fast casting, meaning if you would want to cast a spell for 50 energy or -5 penalty in effect shaping, which would take 5sec, you could use up your threshold, add 50 tally and cast it in 1 sec (and consult the calamity table)

-used the corruption points as in Gurps Horror to add danger of magic. Especially powerful or "evil" spells would give you corruption, regardless of casting time.

I can't find the finished version with all the notes, but I can send you spell list and the tables if you want.

[Maz]

Originally Posted by JaJacob

What I did was following:

-used effect shaping ritual magic as a base for casting, combined with threshold for fast casting

-create a winds of magic table that added bonuses or penalties to casting

-expanded the calamity table a little

-since effect RPM had slow casting time, I added the use of threshold for fast casting, meaning if you would want to cast a spell for 50 energy or -5 penalty in effect shaping, which would take 5sec, you could use up your threshold, add 50 tally and cast it in 1 sec (and consult the calamity table)

-used the corruption points as in Gurps Horror to add danger of magic. Especially powerful or "evil" spells would give you corruption, regardless of casting time.

I can't find the finished version with all the notes, but I can send you spell list and the tables if you want.

Thanks. But after being able to read up a bit on Threshold I agree with borithan doesn't really fit all that well really. And I don't think I would go for Ritual Magic... mostly for playability and predictability reasons.


I actually think the way the normal GURPS magic ruels works fits pretty well with Warhammer Fantasy:
- You must learn one spell at a time. And can't cast spells you haven't learned. [In both WFRP 1st and 2nd as well as in WHFB you have always had a select few spells you knew, and nothing in between].
- Spells have pretty specific and predictable outcomes. (unless something weird happens). [You cast spell A it gives you result X. You can't change it depending on situation or just do "magic" and then have an effect based on your current mood and the situation]
- If you pour more energy into them, they can be more powerful. [In the newer additions you have often been able to get a better effect with a better roll (overcasting)... I might mix this up with the psionic powers in Dark Heresy actually]
- You need to be a "higher level" mage to learn and use the more powerful spells. [The classical 4 levels of "magery" in WFRP as well as in WHFB]
- How many and powerful spells you can cast is in part dependent on the mages fortitude and willpower. [For instance Wizards have in Warhammer traditionally been very tough (T:4)]

All of this fits how magic worked in WFRP 1st ed and WFRP 2ed. And to a lesser extend some of the different WHFB games.


The big difference is that in WFRP you do not have a "spell/mana/energy limit". Ie. you can keep casting spells. But each casting carries a risk.
This is different from WHFB where you usually had a limited amount of "winds of magic" with which to cast spells. but since the actual roleplaying games didn't include this, I would think that only Battle Magic spells of the size and power relevant for warfare might ever be at risk of draining an areas local "mana level".
Spells in the power level of the roleplaying game might be affected by the winds, but would never drain them.

-------------


So with all of the above in mind I have decided to use the traditional system. But restrict some of the more powerful spells to specific fitting collages.

And then use highly variable and aspected manalevels.


The only thing I really need is to decide if I just want to use the normal "critical failure" table... or if there need to be an inherent risk for every casting. Even for a successful spell.
It would really fit the game. The most energy you pump into something the greater the chance of something chaotic happening. I have yet to decide how to do it mechanically though. Maybe something like a Malf-Value. Where if you roll higher than that it triggers a roll. And the more energy you use, the lower the malf. ... usually the spell would still work even if the "malf roll" was triggered, but might have ... other... effects.