Subtle Spells for Iron-Age Warriors

[Peter Knutsen]

For healing, you'll want to get away from the Insta-Heal of D&D-Land, and instead use something that has no visible effect. The simple solution is to speed up natural healing, e.g. by a factor. A low level spell doubles natural healing speed, a medium level spell triples it, and so forth. For GURPS (or indeed most other system) you'd probably want such spells to only work on wounds or HP loss that happened before the spell was cast. Otherwise it's like Bestow Regeneration which is quite powerful.

By far the "best" might be if it's not a spell-"shaped" effect at all, but rather just looks like very skilled medical care, where the healer spends hours or days or even weeks acting as a physician, but via the magic he achieves supernatural results, such as quadrupled recovery rate from wounds (and cripplings!).

There are also a lot of non-wound-related things that healing magic can do in subtle ways, but this depends on how well the RPG simulates those. If there are few rules for pain, for instance, then it's not going to be very cool to include all sorts of Anti-Pain magics.

So look at GURPS' combat system, at whatever complexity and detail level you're going to use it. What are the sucky conditions that the combat system can impose on characters? Invent magics that mitigates or even removes those sucky conditions. Outright removal is sometimes too blatant, but in other cases it isn't, e.g. reviving the unconscious

Magic that alleaviates or cures diseases and poisons is mostly a setting issue. GURPS has fairly good rules for those, so the question is, how commonly will those be encountered in your campaign? If they're rare, healing magic that works vs poisons or disease will be less desirable.

Subtle buffs might also work, e.g. an elaborate magical/religious ritual to temporary bestow Higher Purpose on a character, or even a group of characters. Clearly such magic is very powerful, so such a ritual should be costly, either if paid for with CPs, or if paid for with in-world ressources such as skill and time and spent materials (a Wotanic blot to ask for victory in battle would cost at least a dozen head of cattle, e.g.), and perhaps also some other mechanics to prevent in-world denizens from using such magic all the time.

Recently I re-read a web-article or two by Diana Paxson, about Norse seid magic, and the spirit travel thing sounds cool, and it's exactly the kind of thing you can build with GURPS' building blocks, applying a lot of Limitations both to make the magic more flavourful and to reduce the CP cost so that it becomes affordable. Others can better help you with the details of such a build, but it'd be perfect for Saxons or other Germanics (even if they think it's kinda gay).


GURPS Monster Hunters has some divine abilities, IIRC for the Crusader template, that are subtler in nature than the ones in Divine Favour, so those might be a good starting point.

GURPS Fantasy might have something useful in it Roma Arcana setting. 5th centry Britain would have Romans, Kelts and Germanics, all of which are covered in Roma Arcana, although the examples of advanage-built magic are very scarce, and I'm not even sure if there are any Roman ones.

Also don't forget the suggestions in GURPS Fantasy for applying Limitations to Talents (Skill Talents, mind you - it's very illegal to apply Limitationst to Power Talents, and most of the time that ban makes a lot of sense). A stack of 4 or even 6 levels of some Talent to enhance social skills, leader skills (Tactics, Ladership, Strategy), medical skills, or most or even all combat skills, with some appropriately flavourful Limitations, will probably work very well. The main problem I see with this approach is that in order for the Limited Talents to make a noticable difference (i.e. not being so ultra-subtle that they might as well not exist) a character should have at least 3 of them, and there's some sense in allowing more than 4 levels of Talents. Maybe allow 4 levels of Talent with just the usual "magic/ritualistic" Limitations, and then a further 2 or 3 levels with the previous Limitations but worse, or with some extra Limitations added.

When defining the skills covered by such magical Talents, you should never feel constrained by the RAW examples from the core book or from Power-Ups 3. Build the Talents so they make sense according to the magic system or the religion, i.e. so that each Talent covers the portfolio of one god.

Blessed (Heroic Feats) can also be toyed with, perhaps. I'm not sure I like it too much as written, I suspect it'd work better if it was based around the CP value of the buff (thus +1d6 ST, +1d3 DX, or +2d6 Move - or +1d6 Move for half cost to maintain some subtlety), but even as it is you can still apply Limitations to it, and allow the taking of multiple instances of Blessed, either to stack their effect or to allow multiple uses per day.

Also note that a little DR can represent luck or rolling with the blows. It doesn't have to seem like armour. If you add too much such magical DR, however, it'll start to look like invisible plate mail.