Changes to spells from GURPS

[Michael Thayne]

I recently noticed that in DFRPG, the Bravery spell explicitly grants Unfazeable, which was not explicitly stated in GURPS Magic. This got me wondering about other changes to spells—specifically, things that add detail that was not explicit in Magic, or which even contradicts Magic. (Lots of spells have small changes to wording, cutting text that's only relevant in high tech settings, or just stating the obvious.)

Wallwalker seems to have gotten ever so slightly nerfed—Magic doesn't reference any advantages and seems to let you walk on walls at full Move. The version in Spells specifically works the same way as the Spider Climb chi ability, which means you're at half move.

In Magic, Earthquake's effects are very vague beyond causing people to potentially fall down. Spells has explicit rules for using Earthquake to aid Intimidation and cause buildings to fall down.

In Magic, the rules for Flesh to Stone are very vague. DFRPG adds an explicitly defined "Petrification" condition (Exploits p. 66), whose details mostly aren't surprising though a few things might not be obvious (e.g. the fact that the victim isn't considered living or even formerly living).

Walk Through Earth and Steelwraith both now explicitly say you must leave everything but your clothing behind, and explicitly define "clothing" as being limited to 6 lbs. and DR 0. The same definition of "clothing" is added to Ethereal Body (though in that case, the Magic version did mention "clothing", it just didn't define the term).

Stop Bleeding restores 1d-3 (minimum 1) HP rather than just 1 HP. This change seems to ultimately be downstream of Dungeon Fantasy simplifying the First Aid rules (unlike in GURPS, there's no distinction between "bandaging", which restores 1 HP, and "treating shock", which restores 1d-3 HP at TL3).

In Magic, there's a reference to the possibility of an 8 yard radius Mirror, but doesn't say anything about this costing more FP or anything like that. In Spells, larger mirrors have their cost multiplied by (1 + SM).

Apportation gets updated to be resistible by ST or Will, instead of just Will. Used on anyone but the caster, gives -3 to DX-based skills.

Aura gets updated to explicitly detect any spellcasting talent, not just Magery. Similarly, inside the extradimensional space created by Sanctuary, all spellcasting (not just mana-based spellcasting) is at -5. It wouldn't surprise me if this had been addressed somewhere before DFRPG came out (even if it was just a forum post by Kromm), but I can't find it.

In writing this post, I didn't rigorously compare Magic and Spells, I just skimmed Spells and checked Magic only when I saw something that made me go "huh, I don't remember that bit..." So if I've missed anything, please do tell me!