What is implied about the setting by GURPS Magic?

[Ghotfish]

So, I'm planning to run a game set in the modern world, with secret magic.* This will basically use the full list of spells from GURPS Magic without any house rules eliminating anything. (I'm not using Ritual and Path magic for this).

I understand it's my setting and I can add what I like, but what fictional things are implied to exist by GURPS Magic? I've noticed demons and spirits, because you can summon them, zombies, other undead, and golems because you can create them. There's also orichalcum and adamant from essential earth spells, and other essential materials. Have I missed anything?

Like I said, I'll probably decide to throw in vampires or fishmen or whatever, I'm just using this as a starting point for inspiration.

*Specifically the magic will use the Ritual Magic, Threshold Magic, and ceremonial only Mandatory and Significant Modifiers of the Decanic variety, in a Low Mana setting, but that's probably not important.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Ghotfish

what fictional things are implied to exist by GURPS Magic? I've noticed demons and spirits, because you can summon them, zombies, other undead, and golems because you can create them. There's also orichalcum and adamant from essential earth spells, and other essential materials. Have I missed anything?

Elementals, M27 talks about summoning them, M28 talks about Controlling or Creating them. Elemental Spirit magic is its own college.

Fire Elementals are particularly scary if you know about a certain spell...

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Ghotfish

So, I'm planning to run a game set in the modern world, with secret magic.* This will basically use the full list of spells from GURPS Magic without any house rules eliminating anything. (I'm not using Ritual and Path magic for this).


*Specifically the magic will use the Ritual Magic, Threshold Magic, and ceremonial only Mandatory and Significant Modifiers of the Decanic variety, in a Low Mana setting, but that's probably not important.

It depends on how common Magery is.
Threshold Magic plus the modifiers will make things more strategic than tactical. Spells will be cast when the best bonuses are available and mages may predict certain types of spells being cast based on certain time related details. Spells will be cast with the lowest FP cost possible and anyone with a high enough skill and bonuses to cast a spell at 0 FP will be highly valued.
However bigger spells are reasonably possible, your just going to see mages tending to hoard their magic.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ghotfish

S

*Specifically the magic will use the Ritual Magic, Threshold Magic, and ceremonial only Mandatory and Significant Modifiers of the Decanic variety, in a Low Mana setting, but that's probably not important.

This along with the "modern" and "secret" bit impacts an number of things about which spells people will bother with.

No Missile Spells except for the bare possibility of Winged Knife on an Enchanted Item.

On the other hand, the Hideaway Enchantment makes for the ultimate conceaable weapon but only such concealed weapons are likely to be Enchanted. Enchanting your Sig without a way to ge *** through security wouldn't be a good use of resources.

Starting off with a -5 penalty would make it hard to even bring off a Teleport of any significant range. It's not likely to compare favorably with mechnical transportation anyway.

Then many of the types of beings you listed are possible to make or at least deal with with by magic but are also extremely conspicuous. A Golem you have to hide in your basement might not be very useful.

If you go with a Stone Golem you could at least pretend to be a sculptor. Buy and retain stoneworking tools too even if you do Shape the Golem by magic. Do not be tempted by flesh or any of the Necromantic creations. There will be no explaining those if the SWAT team shows up with a search warrant. Even with Homogenous, Golems won't be very effective v. modern firearms.

These are just several of the examples of how even if all of Gurps Magioc is posible in theory there are many Spells that will not come up.

[Shostak]

Mana has to exist. Mana zones with levels varying off the baseline might exist.

You will almost certainly have ancient mages who have prolonged their lives by stealing the youth of others.

[Plane]

Perhaps you could allow Missile Spells but modified with the "No Signature" enhancement. This would make it easier to maintain the masquerade and make them more expensive.

Another way is: in addition to "Low Mana" (-5 to skill) zones have lots of "Very Low Mana" zones (Thaumatology 58) too.

"Non-Mages Casting in Lower Mana Areas" would also make it a lot more interesting to start off as "mages without magery" so to speak. You could learn some basic spells (ones that don't require knowing magery) but instead of being limited to casting them in Very High Mana Areas you could cast them in lower areas for HUGE amounts of energy.

The Continuous/Variable/Aspected/Wild/Twisted kinds of mana right after are also very interesting.

[Ghotfish]

Originally Posted by Refplace

It depends on how common Magery is.
Threshold Magic plus the modifiers will make things more strategic than tactical. Spells will be cast when the best bonuses are available and mages may predict certain types of spells being cast based on certain time related details. Spells will be cast with the lowest FP cost possible and anyone with a high enough skill and bonuses to cast a spell at 0 FP will be highly valued.
However bigger spells are reasonably possible, your just going to see mages tending to hoard their magic.

It's basically meant to be a conspiracy theory type setting. So Magery is meant to be present mostly in certain families that tend to be old money, and hoarding magic and using it strategically is as intended.

And the PCs will be government agents desperately trying to keep magic under wraps, while also using it themselves, so the masquerade being hard to maintain is also fine.

And yeah, non-mages will be able to cast, at huge energy costs, which translate into calamities because of threshold magic, which is why keeping it under wraps is so important, a bunch of untrained people trying spells can get very dangerous, very quickly.

[Plane]

Unless you're applying the "Non-Mages Casting" option I'm not sure that non-mages can cast spells using Threshold unless it's High mana, at normal and below pretty sure they need Threshold Magery as usual.

The NMC rule combined with Threshold is pretty dangerous for them.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Plane

Unless you're applying the "Non-Mages Casting" option I'm not sure that non-mages can cast spells using Threshold unless it's High mana, at normal and below pretty sure they need Threshold Magery as usual.

The NMC rule combined with Threshold is pretty dangerous for them.

Yeah, either changing the default rules or creating High Mana zones would be needed.

[Ghotfish]

Yeah, doing Non-Mages Casting as per page 58 of Thaumatology and also the Over Coming Distance option from page 87. Both mostly to add to the difficulty of solving "who-cast-it" mysteries by the PCs.

The Threshold problem will partially be mitigated by allowing Sacrifices to grant energy for spell casting (T54). The severe skill penalties are are partially offset by allowing Sympathy, Names, Contagion, and Significant Dates, from Thaumatology. As well as Time Spent from page 346 of the Basic Set. In addition to the Decons.

I know that's a lot of house rules (on some level this started out as a thought experiment for how much of Thaumatology I could use at once), but I find the overall implications of this total combination interesting. And it is meant to make magic kind of bizarre and dangerous, so that it makes sense as something the general public can't handle, as opposed to just being suppressed to hoard power.

If you don't think it will work, that's fine, but that wasn't really my original question.