Yrth revisited

[hal]

Hello Folks,
In a private discussion so as not to derail a thread elsewhere, someone asked me about summarizing the various issues that have come to surface with the use of GURPS MAGIC and the Yrth background. I had made an off-hand comment that One of my pet peeves regarding GURPS MAGIC is that it made it impossible for the world of Yrth to exist as written. In the other thread, someone took up that question and mentioned the Create Metal spell. But it isn't just that one spell that has made Yrth as written, impossible to justify with the spells current or the rules current in GURPS MAGIC for 4e.

This thread, is intended to collect those various rules changes or spell changes that distort or ruin the ability for Yrth to have evolved as written in either of:

GURPS FANTASY 1st edition

GURPS FANTASY 2nd edition (expanded upon Fantasy 1st edition)

GURPS BANESTORM

So, my point of starting this thread, is to get the collective minds of the Forums to contribute those things they feel make it impossible for Yrth as written, to exist with unfettered access to the spells in GURPS MAGIC for 4e.

Any takers?

Hal

[scc]

It's not strictly magic related, but I've giving some thoughts to stating out farms in Caithness compared to the rest of the world. Now with no need to maximize land usage it's likely that low yield crops will be grown in off seasons because the lands just sitting there, the result of this is that Caithness will be richer then other parts, in particular I figure that the militia are likely to be better equipped with magic then the Legions

[vicky_molokh]

The Mars terraforming, of course!


. . . oh wait, wrong thread. ^_^

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by hal

So, my point of starting this thread, is to get the collective minds of the Forums to contribute those things they feel make it impossible for Yrth as written, to exist with unfettered access to the spells in GURPS MAGIC for 4e.

Why are we limiting ourselves to GURPS Magic for 4e? Yrth didn't make sense as written based on the spell list available when it was first published.

[David Johnston2]

There is of course no good reason to allow unfettered access to the spells in GURPS Magic anyway. I never worried about Earth to Stone though because on my Yrth nobody used magic that casually. Everyone had too much of a dread of unleashing something they couldn't control to cast the same spell over and over again for a modest profit with each casting. And had a player tried it, they would have gotten the magical catastrophe they were asking for. Healing was the main exception, largely because healing almost never had the potential to anger anything you didn't want angered.

[CraigM]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

There is of course no good reason to allow unfettered access to the spells in GURPS Magic anyway. I never worried about Earth to Stone though because on my Yrth nobody used magic that casually. Everyone had too much of a dread of unleashing something they couldn't control to cast the same spell over and over again for a modest profit with each casting. And had a player tried it, they would have gotten the magical catastrophe they were asking for. Healing was the main exception, largely because healing almost never had the potential to anger anything you didn't want angered.

How much does it alter the economic assumptions of default GURPS Magic ($1/pt Q&D casting to 60, $33/pt past there) if you factor in the economic impact of critical failures that are not-that-infrequently catastrophic on a large scale?

Should the authorities crack down hard on high-frequency commercial spellcasting while leaving the wandering adventurer spellcasters alone?

[VulpesFulva]

Besides which, Yrth always struck me as a place where PC-level shenanigans all-too-quickly drew the Curia's attention.

If not the Church, then the Mages' Guilds.

Another fair point to bring up: MOST folks are at best 25 point characters.

A 25-point mage just isn't going to have the prerequisites for the more broken spells in the "classic" Magic system.

Another thought, since it's the new hotness: Where would one place the RPM Greater/Lesser effect divides for Yrth, should a GM decide to run an Yrth campaign with it? Presumably somewhere between DF and MH, I'd think.

Call it... 3d direct damage?

Alternatively, "Urban Fantasy" levels might be good for folks running from the Church's anti-Tech order, with the accepted forms of magic being the rotes of Classic GURPS Magic. Can't have these faithless heathens from Earth understanding magic and casting spells willy-nilly! They need to pay their guild fees for this specific scroll that's been approved by the church for hundreds of years, etc etc.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The Mars terraforming, of course!


. . . oh wait, wrong thread. ^_^

Yrth is really just terraformed Mars?


The low gravity helps big critters fly?

;)

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Why are we limiting ourselves to GURPS Magic for 4e? Yrth didn't make sense as written based on the spell list available when it was first published.

If I ran it, I'd re-do the whole magic system using Thaumatology.
Maybe a variant on Path/Book.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Many of the problems with Create Earth (there is no Create Metal) go away if you remember that this is a "Permanent" duration spell, not an Instant spell. Thus, the earth, metal, or stone it creates is a magical creation and will be destroyed if successfully hit with a Dispel Magic. That will make people very reluctant to rely on it for anything important - nobody wants to use swords which will go away when hit by a Dispel Magic, or a building which will collapse when its magic goes away.

Of course, as pointed out in another thread, this has nasty implication for the Create Water or Create Food spells - which are also Permanent-duration spells, implying that if someone eats or drinks created stuff and absorbs them into his body, these things could be dispelled as well. Which could easily be fatal.

You could houserule that once such stuff is eaten it becomes part of their Aura and can no longer be dispelled, but this is precisely that - a houserule.