Suggestions for Unifying a Magic System

[Dan38]

Hi guys,

I'm going to apologise now if this post is a bit rambly, or I miss out anything relevant that's specific to my setting - I've been bubbling this through my head for weeks, and can't seem to quite get a firm grip on the problem (which is almost certainly the core source of my issues, to be honest).

The game I'm currently running is a fantasy game set in a late-antiquity TL2 world with very film-Conan aesthetics but more of a Joe Abercrombie "The Blade Itself" grit level, if that makes sense. Part of the idea is that all magic is spirit-based - you have shamans who gather low-level ally spirits around themselves or make agreements with more powerful spirits, and you have wizards who bind spirits and force them to perform services (often unknowingly - many wizards in the setting just know that saying *these words* and doing *these gestures* in the right way makes the person they're pointing at set on fire).

Mechanically, here's where I'm at:

Shamans take Ally (Summonable), then pick advantages related to the spirit they've bonded with and then pin them to the ally as Alternate Abilities. Alternatively, they do the same thing with a Patron for a more mighty spirit. This means they get a lot of quite broad options, limited in scope by the point cost of the spirits they've made pacts with - so someone who makes a deal with a barely sentient 25-point spirit of candleflames can't throw around fireballs, whereas someone who spreads the interests of the great spirit of storms pays a lot of points to have him as a patron (back of the envelope calculation: 20-25*RoA base, +100% grants powers, +50% highly accessible), but can take some mean powers for a reasonable points cost off the back of it. The key thing here is that their abilities represent them channelling spirits' powers through themselves, so they don't need to make any rolls for the most part, they just do it.

Wizards who understand the principles of magic (read: have a high Thaumatology skill and a massive amount of Magery) can look around, see what spirits are in the area, and then bind them on-the-fly to get stuff done. I'm thinking that this would work like Syntactic Magic from GURPS Magic, because having a high enough level of Modular Abilities: Cosmic to model this would be ludicrously expensive and almost impossible to administrate during a game. I also thought about Ritual Path Magic, but a) I don't have that and b) what I've heard of it makes it sound a lot more, well, ritual-y than the "fast and loose" magic I'm trying to emulate.

Which brings me to the mechanics for the majority of wizards in the setting - people who get shown that saying "Fus Roh Da" and yawning in just the right way makes cheese fly around the room (I didn't play much Skyrim). I want this to be skill-based, very specific in function (so you wouldn't ever learn how to "control fire however you fancy at the time" like a shaman might, instead you'd learn "chuck fireball", "set fire to a thing" and "stop someone from being hurt too much by fire") but, crucially, not cost any FP - you're not really working magic, you're just telling invisible people nearby to do it for you. On the face of it, the default magic system seems to work well for this, but it looks to me like it's very strongly balanced around FP as a limiting factor.
The other thought I had was pinning each spell as an Alternate Ability with Skill-Based to the Magery advantage, but this has the disadvantage of not letting the no-Magery guy who finds some wizard's spellbook from learning one specific spell by rote without having to become a powerful wizard. Additionally, using spells makes wizards very mechanically different to shamans, which I like a little more than having everything be powers based (as well as needing less creative output from me to make powers up for any spell my players get access to).

I had a thought of a way to use standard magic without FP that loosely bases itself off the stuff in GURPS Thaumatology about having an entity provide the FP for you, but I'd appreciate some feedback on how balanced it looks to you guys:
- All spells take an extra second to cast, this extra action being the short incantation used to actually bind a nearby relevant spirit.
- All failures are critical failures, using the Spirit table from Thaumatology
- Instead of FP being provided from the caster's FP pool, it's granted at 1 + (MoS on the casting roll).
- For spells like Fireball, this means that if you get a MoS of 5, you can cast it and put up to 4FP into it for the purposes of growing the damage.
- If you're casting a spell that must be maintained, its duration is however long it could be maintained with FP equal to the MoS.
- If you don't get enough MoS to cast the spell, it counts as a regular failure.

So, the questions I had:

1) For abilities an Ally has but you can direct while they're around, is Alternate Abilities, Granted By Familiar or both the most appropriate model?
2) Similarly, is Alternate Abilities on a Patron reasonable?
3) How does the proposed FP-less magic system look?
4) Are there any similar magic systems already thought up that I could take a look at?
5) Any other thoughts or suggestions?

[johndallman]

Do you have Thaumatology? If not, it would be a good idea to get and read it; it has useful ideas for much of this.

[Dan38]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Do you have Thaumatology? If not, it would be a good idea to get and read it; it has useful ideas for much of this.

Yes, though I got confused and referred to it as GURPS Magic in the original post - I'll correct that now.

The system I outlined above was based on the "Assisting Spirits" section in Thaumatology - but the main drawbacks of that as written (namely, the need to strike an agreement with a spirit and the Spiritual Distortion drawback) aren't applicable to what I'm trying to achieve, so I tried to throw in some extra drawbacks to substitute.

As for the shamanism part, the example in Thaumatology with the Turtle Spirit is pretty much exactly where I'm at - though with the addition of the shaman himself getting some powers out of the deal (and, importantly, having a points-based system for linking the extravagance of your abilities to the power of the spirit)

ETA: Aside from that, I haven't been able to find much else that's directly helpful in Thaumatology. If there's something else in there you can recommend I look at, please do :)

[Mr_Sandman]

If the default magic system is a good fit, other than the use of FP as the limiting factor, would threshold magic work for you? Calamities could be the result of spirits having had enough of the pushy mortal and acting out.

[Dan38]

Originally Posted by Mr_Sandman

If the default magic system is a good fit, other than the use of FP as the limiting factor, would threshold magic work for you? Calamities could be the result of spirits having had enough of the pushy mortal and acting out.

Wow, I clearly mentally blanked that chapter. That's a good suggestion, I'll re-read it more thoroughly. Thanks!

[Dustin]

Originally Posted by Dan38

2) Similarly, is Alternate Abilities on a Patron reasonable?

The Divine Favor rules are a big worked example of exactly that, might be worth a look.