[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Magery

[johndallman]

Magery [5, +10/L] is an supernatural mental advantage that makes you more capable at using “secular” magic. Depending on the setting, it may be required for you to be able to cast spells, or it may just help significantly. It can come in several forms, some of which give additional abilities, and a wide range of limitations and enhancements are available for it. It appeared in the original GURPS Fantasy, as “Magical Aptitude” but the shorter name became commonplace, and was standardised in GURPS fourth edition.

It isn’t possible to mention every use or function of Magery in one article. There are thousands in the GURPS corpus, even excluding spells’ Magery requirements. I’m pretty sure it is the most-referenced advantage.

Magery was created for the GURPS default magic system, with spells as skills, powered by fatigue points. There are variants for other magic systems, but let’s describe the baseline first.

Magery 0 [5] gives you a basic awareness of magic. The GM will make a Sense roll when you first see a magical object, and another when you first touch it. On a success, you know that it is magical, and on a 3 or 4 (frequently generalised to a critical success) you have some idea of how powerful it is, and how helpful or dangerous. The cost of Magery 0 can’t usually be adjusted with enhancements or limitations. If you have it, anyone who can sense your aura will be able to tell that you are a mage.
Adding further levels of Magery [10 each] does several things:

• These levels add to IQ for the Sense rolls above, and for learning spells. If you have, say, IQ 13 and Magery 3, then your effective IQ for learning spells is 16.
• For the avoidance of doubt, and because this point confuses some people new to GURPS, that means that Magery adds to your skill levels with spells. For example, if you learn a spell that is an IQ/H skill, as many are, putting one character point into it would give you it at a level of IQ+Magery-2. For our example character with IQ 13 and Magery 3, that spell would be at skill 14.
• Magery levels also add to IQ for learning Thaumatology skill.
• You get a 10% discount on the time needed to learn spells per level of Magery. So if you have Magery 3, you get to learn spells in 70% of the usual time, which means 140 hours per character point, rather than 200 hours. This does not affect the character point cost, if you buy spells with character points. It just means you gain character points from training in spells faster. The maximum discount is 40%, at Magery 4.
• Many powerful spells require a specific minimum level of Magery to learn. Magery 3 is good enough for just about everything.
• Many spells have variable parameters, such as damage. High levels of Magery let you do more damage with them, or vary other parameters.

There are many limitations that can be applied to Magery levels above 0 to reduce its cost. You can get a discount for one of the following requirements: dancing, needing to be in darkness, needing it to be daytime, needing to play a musical instrument, needing it to be night-time, only being able to learn spells of a single college, needing to be solitary, or needing to sing. These discounts are worth ‑40% or ‑50%, and are sometimes called “Aspected” Magery. Buying enhancements on Magery to improve spell-casting is quite restricted: Reduced Time is specifically banned.

You can have Magery if your background is entirely non-magical, but you’re unlikely to know anything about effective magic, and may not realise what your perceptions of magic mean if you encounter it. The attitude of magicians to an innocent with talent varies widely.

In some settings, Magery can be learned (or sometimes only improved) after character creation. There is often a cap on the attainable level, or an Unusual Background tax on the price of higher levels. The related advantage of Power Investiture (in summary, used like Magery, but for religious magic) can almost always be acquired, if your deity likes you; Incantation Gift (DF19) is likewise for a very different kind of magic, and requires an Unusual Background.

Naturally, Thaumatology has much more about Magery (mentioning it 441 times), including limiting the amount available, applying limitations in interesting ways, and more limitations. These include the inability to maintain spells, inability to use energy from external sources, the requirement to do everything ceremonially (even spotting magic items), generalisation of the day/night-time limitations, easily resisted spells, Magery only usable for enchantments (and spotting magic items), the need for a booming voice and flailing gestures when casting, magic that doesn’t persist, magic that has to be powered with HP instead of FP, only being able to use a small group of colleges, only being able to use a single spell, and being very prone to critical failures. There are some special enhancements for Magery: being able to cast less conspicuously, being able to do ceremonial magic alone, being less prone to critical failures, not having Magery show up in your aura, and having it be switchable. Thaumatology also allows some general limitations to be applied to Magery: Accessibility, Costs Fatigue, Pact for not-completely-secular magicians, Preparation Required (and thus the later Immediate Preparation Required), Takes Recharge, Temporary Disadvantage, Trigger and Unreliable. There are also special enhancements and limitations for being able, or unable, to use magic while heavily armoured, which are very setting-dependent, variant rules to speed up enchanting depending on Magery level, and Magery modified by the zodiac. “T” is an abbreviation for Thaumatology for the rest of this article.

Variants of Magery include Gem Injection Magery (p. T240), Path/Book Magery (p. T123), Ritual Magery (p. B242), Symbol Magery (p. T168), Threshold Magery (p. T76-79, with additional enhancements and limitations) and Wildcard Magery (p. T75). In some settings, different schools of magic using the same basic system may have different kinds of Magery, or at least of Magery 0.

Variable Energy Access [50] is a very specialised advantage that allows magicians to use both the standard magic system and the threshold system. Path/Book Adept [10, 20 or 30] is another specialised advantage that reduces ritual requirements for Path/Book magicians.

Ritual Path Magery (T: Ritual Path Magic) is very different from the standard advantage, with a precedent set by Syntactic Magery (p. T184). Both operate as a skill cap, rather than a skill booster, and Ritual Path Magery also comes with three points of Energy Reserve per level.

Notable uses of Magery in other GURPS supplements include the Discworld magic system, which might use a separate version of Magery if it was used in other settings, and has some well-designed limitations. DF Bardic Talent functions as two-college Magery, and can be upgraded to DF3’s Bardic Magery, which lets bards learn and cast any wizardly spell via music. Fantasy has discussion on rationalisations of magic and their effect on Magery, and adds the variants of Divided Magery and Restructurable Magery. Horror’s Corruption system allows for every use of Magery to bring corruption, and Power-Ups 2 has a perk that replaces Magery and other prerequisites for a single spell, although you still need to be able to cast spells to use it. Powers gives the option of Magery as a Talent for all magical abilities, and Realm Management has an example where the whole population have One-College Magery for Necromancy.

Magic points out that a mage will notice a change in mana level when they move through it, if they make a Perception + Magery roll, which is at ‑3 if they aren’t looking out for the change. It also has Suspend Magery and Drain Magery spells, which are a great way to get other mages motivated to kill you, but aren’t easy to use.

As a player, I’ve had Magery on magician characters, using the basic spell system, and RPM. My main experience GMing it was Infinite Cabal, where Magery 4 and up were Cabal secrets, and you could have Magery as high as your Cabal Rank. That seemed to work fine.

How has Magery been strange in your games?