Book/Path Magic

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Yeah but Kage2000 was talking about SHadowrun and Earthdawn.

Two things: Neither one are 'bog-standard fantasy" by any stretch of the imagination and he said Sorcery mostly fixed his issues with them.

Originally Posted by Kage2020

For those familiar with Shadowrun, I'm very much not a fan of how they treated mages vs. shaman, so pushing everything into the "ritual" territory would work well.

Could this be RPM? Maybe. My original magic system was predicated upon RPM until it didn't quite work, but I would totally love to explore a design approach for Path/Book Magic.

For 'replicating' a Shadowrun feel, I'd go with predesigned rituals, use standard non-Adept rules for all long* ritual work, and allow Adepts to specifically learn a number of 'fast' rituals, and speed* those up so they really are combat useful.

By 'learn fast rituals' what I mean is a way I did this for a rework of RPM into a more Dresden File-esque setting. Adept allowed the wizards to have a number of rituals that used Adept energy-gathering speed, that number was equal to the amount of points spent in Thaumatology plus their levels of Magery. I also allowed them to buy a leveled Perk that added it's level x2 in "Practiced Rituals". On the whole the two casters in that game had about 20 rituals they could fire off at combat speeds and then all the other rituals had to be set up as charms, potions, or enchanted items/areas.


* I doubled the time it took for non-Ritual Adept "Practiced Rituals" and doubled the amount of energy drawn for Practiced Rituals. Though in hindsight, simply letting the wizards buy more ER would have been a better choice than halving the time to draw energy for Practiced Rituals.