Has anyone tried Spirit Magic from Thaumatology?

[Anders]

Thaumatology gives an option in which you strike a deal with a spirit and the spirit casts the spell for you... even paying the energy... and all it will cost you is your soul.

Has anyone tried it out?

[AllenOwen]

Originally Posted by Anders

Thaumatology gives an option in which you strike a deal with a spirit and the spirit casts the spell for you... even paying the energy... and all it will cost you is your soul.

Has anyone tried it out?

Do you mean Assisting Spirits on pg 90? I have not tried it, but I like the idea. I like the idea of power having a price.

[Anders]

Yep, that's the one. If I ever do a Dark Sun conversion I will probably use that mechanic to simulate Defiler corruption. (Yeah, I know there's one already, but where's the fun in using that?) :)

[AlexanderHowl]

Spirit-Assisted magic can be applied to any situation where energy fuels magic (and any situation that could benefit from the Corruption rules in Horror). I generally reduce the effective energy borrowed from a spirit patron per ritual/spell for distortion purposes only by the character's alignment with their spirit patron (-1 effective energy per full -5 CP of aligned mental disadvantages). For example, a character that calls upon Aphrodite for power who possesses Lecherousness (6-) and Xenophilia (6-) would reduce the effective energy borrowed by 10 per ritual/spell for the purpose of calculating distortion only.

[AllenOwen]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Spirit-Assisted magic can be applied to any situation where energy fuels magic (and any situation that could benefit from the Corruption rules in Horror). I generally reduce the effective energy borrowed from a spirit patron per ritual/spell for distortion purposes only by the character's alignment with their spirit patron (-1 effective energy per full -5 CP of aligned mental disadvantages). For example, a character that calls upon Aphrodite for power who possesses Lecherousness (6-) and Xenophilia (6-) would reduce the effective energy borrowed by 10 per ritual/spell for the purpose of calculating distortion only.

Now that is a good idea.

[AllenOwen]

I don't think you need to use Corruption with Assisting Spirit magic; I think the Spiritual Distortion takes care of that.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by AllenOwen

I don't think you need to use Corruption with Assisting Spirit magic; I think the Spiritual Distortion takes care of that.

It's basically just expanded Black Magic / Black Penalty for different situations. Could always use corruption too, they degrade you through different paths.

In terms of summoning a demon, I always wondered how you would stat a demon to reflect their ability to make contracts and supply FP to wizards...

Maybe that's like Share Energy somehow except it can be imparted across dimensions?

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by AllenOwen

I don't think you need to use Corruption with Assisting Spirit magic; I think the Spiritual Distortion takes care of that.

According to the Power Corrupts section of GURPS Horror, Spiritual Distortion is one kind of Corruption (so are the power tally used by the Threshold-Limited Magic system, and the point debt option for Meditative Magic; but this thread isn't about them). If you wanted to, you could define powers and abilities with the Corrupting Limitation, and declare that the resulting Corruption takes the form of Spiritual Distortion. You could, for example, take the Totem-Bearer Advantage from GURPS Totems and Nature Spirits and apply Corrupting (Spiritual Distortion) to it so that every time you call upon the power of your Totem you build up some Spiritual Distortion.

[Balor Patch]

Originally Posted by Plane

In terms of summoning a demon, I always wondered how you would stat a demon to reflect their ability to make contracts and supply FP to wizards...

Maybe that's like Share Energy somehow except it can be imparted across dimensions?

Buy Energy Reserve with the Drains Familiar (DF5:20) [-50%] limitation. Basically, drawing from the ER also costs the familiar FP and the ER recovers as the familar does.

[Anders]

All this is very good, but has anyone actually played using it?