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Old 06-29-2022, 08:51 PM   #11
mlangsdorf
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Default Re: College Ritual Book Magic

Like I said upthread, https://westmarchsaga.fandom.com/wik...ual_Book_Magic is the most recent version. Compared to the original version, I fixed some typos and clarified the language in places. There hasn't been much other evolution: The biggest changes were the introduction of reduced energy costs for maintaining spells for extended periods and the addition of rules for enchanting.

The basic design has proven to be fairly solid, though sometimes kind of terrifying - a reasonably designed mage can toss 2d (2) bu Explosive Fire Balls with a 4-5 yard area of effect radius several times in a single combat, and those are hard to avoid and fairly damaging. Artillery mages in CRBM can be dangerous!

CRBM should fit in Banestorm fairly well. It mostly uses the stock spells (aside from adding more variety to damaging spells) and uses the standard colleges. Converting existing characters may be challenging. Here's my off-the-cuff advice:

Start by figuring out which colleges the character is focused on, and then convert the existing Magery talent into some levels of a focused talent covering those colleges. Remember that individual spells are easy, so a air/fire mage with Magery 3 can take Fuel-Air Mage Talent 1 and keep the same skill levels. Which is good, because mages will probably want to buy some levels of Extra Magical Ability (EMA) to improve Threshold and Recovery. EMA 2 gets a mage Threshold 25 and Recovery 40, which is enough energy to cast as many spells as a typical fatigue based mage in my experience.

Next, you can either just keep the existing spells and turn them all into M/E skills, many of which will probably no longer have a talent bonus, or convert them into College of $WHATEVER skills. The break-even point is notionally 8 CP of spells in a college, but then you have to factor in default penalties and grimoires so it's kind of up to you.

Finally, assuming the mage has College skills, you will want to buy some grimoires to reduce the penalty for favored or difficult spells.

I should mention that most of the spell revisions at the end of the current document aren't strictly part of CRBM, but mostly some fixes for spells that either break the game-world's economy or that cause problems for traditional dungeon delver. They're tuned for my preferred play experience, so modify them if you prefer something else.
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Last edited by mlangsdorf; 06-30-2022 at 05:52 AM.
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Old 06-30-2022, 10:29 AM   #12
apoc527
 
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Seattle, WA
Default Re: College Ritual Book Magic

Very helpful thanks!

If one wanted to de-emphasize grimoires, I assume that I could just allow individual spells to be taken as Techniques for their respective College skills, just like standard Ritual Magic?

Also, in your experience, what would happen if I modified the Calamity table to add in a more gradual bit of actual pain in the form of Afflictions, FP loss, and actual HP loss?

One of the "eureka" moments for me reading your CBRM posts was the thinking behind FP being exchanged for problem solving as a fundamental problem with FP-based magic. I just cannot agree more. (Brilliant observation, by the way!) But I also like the idea of over-use of magic causing physical and mental damage that escalates. I may work up a modified table and post it here for your thoughts (and anyone else's of course).

Do you have a list of recommend Talents? I suppose the Talents are really stand-ins for Styles in a lot of ways, which I think is quite cool.
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Old 06-30-2022, 06:05 PM   #13
mlangsdorf
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Default Re: College Ritual Book Magic

Requiring grimoires is a major objective of CRBM. It's meant to encourage the old school D&D trope of mages requiring spellbooks and another mage's spellbooks being valuable loot. But sure, if you don't want grimoires for some reason, then treating individual spells as M/A techniques of their College skills could work.

My big goals with the calamity table was to make the consequences mild enough that players were tempted to risk going a little over threshold and actually engaging with the mechanic, while also preventing suicidal mages from massively overcasting spells to turn themselves into bombs. Additional FP and HP loss and afflictions are fine, but I'd suggest you make it gradual: no one is going to go over threshold if they immediately risk lethal damage when they do. And FP and HP loss should be confined to mage.

I've created a talent for CRBM:
* Fuel-Air Mage Talent (covers Aerobatics, College of Air, College of Fire, Innate Attack, and Weather Sense) [5] and I'm incidentally amused that I came up that name twice for an air/fire mage over a 9 year gap

I thought I had more, but they were either for RPM or I can't find the skills covered.

But honestly, CRBM talents are easy. For a 5 point talent, pick two colleges that you think have some kind of relation with each other, which is easy, because just about any two colleges can have a relation. Then pick four mundane skills that relate to those skills. For a 10 point talent, pick four colleges and eight mundane skills. Takes maybe 10 minutes.

So:
Elementalist [10/lvl]: College of Air, College of Earth, College of Fire, College of Water, Aerobatics, Fishing, Geology, Masonry, Prospecting, Swimming, Weather Sense.

White Mage [5 pts/lvl]: College of Healing, College of Light/Darkness, Esoteric Medicine, Lip-Reading, Meditation, Observation.

and so on and so forth.
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Old 06-30-2022, 06:52 PM   #14
apoc527
 
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Seattle, WA
Default Re: College Ritual Book Magic

Quote:
Originally Posted by mlangsdorf View Post
My big goals with the calamity table was to make the consequences mild enough that players were tempted to risk going a little over threshold and actually engaging with the mechanic, while also preventing suicidal mages from massively overcasting spells to turn themselves into bombs. Additional FP and HP loss and afflictions are fine, but I'd suggest you make it gradual: no one is going to go over threshold if they immediately risk lethal damage when they do. And FP and HP loss should be confined to mage.
Totally agree. I am going to be very careful about the progression. Initially, there will be HT rolls to resist Fatigue loss, progressing to HT rolls to resist minor "magical backlash" HP damage, and ramping up slowly by dropping any chance to resist and slowly increasing damage. I also had a cool idea for somewhere in the middle of the table about crippling limbs with mana backlash that doesn't go away until Tally hits 0 again (and then has to be healed naturally...standard magic, at least, can't help you, but maybe Divine Power could).

I've also considered an idea where the mage begins to glow threateningly the closer they get to "bomb stage" (though it will always be localized--no suicide nuclear bombers). That could be funny. And also variations of that: only mages can see the "glow" as you cross your Threshold, maybe it requires a spell to see, maybe there are spells to conceal your "glow", etc. Lots of possibilities.

And yes, that does seem easy to come up with CRBM talents...I guess my question was more one about whether you envision CRBM talents as features of the setting or as individualized character features. In other words, is there a Guild of Elementalists all with that Elementalist talent because that is just one of the ways that people learn magic or is every wizard a special snowflake with their own spin on magic via a unique or semi-unique Talent combination? I will probably just use the Talents to create clearly defined Schools of Wizardry, now that I think about it...

Thanks!
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Currently Playing: GURPS Banestorm: The Symmetry of Darkness

Inactive:
Star*Drive: 2525-Hunting for Fun and Profit
My THS Campaign-In the Shadows of Venus
Yrth--The Legend Begins
The XCOM Apocalypse
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Old 07-01-2022, 09:20 AM   #15
mlangsdorf
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Default Re: College Ritual Book Magic

Your ideas for a more dangerous calamity table seem pretty good. I've had two games with CRBM, and Kiva went wild with calamity and crippled his wizard a couple of times (x2 casting costs for his favorite spell and x3 casting costs for his favorite spell's college was the point where he kind of shut down) but ArchonShiva as best I can recall did not lot accumulating Tally over Threshold, though he did a couple of times. So just go slow with changes and try to make sure that the players of wizards are actually willing to risk going over Threshold.

World design questions are up to the world designer, I think. My preference would be for standardized talents with the possibility of special snowflakes as needed. I wouldn't limit entry into a magical order on a talent, though: John Bright with IQ 16 learns College of Fire spells faster than Joe Pyro with IQ 11 and Fuel-Air Mage 2 (and is generally better at schmoozing than Joe on default skills) so I wouldn't expect the Guild of Soaring Fire to reject John Bright.

Good luck with your game.
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Last edited by mlangsdorf; 07-01-2022 at 09:24 AM.
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