GURPS Thaumatology: Sorcery

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by PK

I'm going to break protocol here by first addressing my fellow hardcore GURPS geeks clearly and frankly. GURPS Thaumatology: Sorcery combines the colleges and themes of GURPS Magic with a new power framework and spells built as advantages. It includes nearly 50 spells and simple rules for adapting the rest. A lot of you have been asking for this for years. We heard you. It's here. Go buy it. :)

Oh. My. God. My mouth litterally dropped open when I read this. I stared at the screen in (sleepy) disbelief for several long moments.

Is this . . . Is this the "real" Magic for Fourth Edition? Is this the scalpel that will finally relieve us of that festering, cancerous boil that that has afflicted us these many years? Is that what I'm reading?

It's 3:30 a.m. and I just got home from a long trip, but I'm looking forward to reading up on this and buying it instantly if this is basically, "Magic, but with balanced costs/effects plus an end to the many legacy issues and fixes for the several outright mistakes." In other words, what we've been screaming at the top of our lungs about for ten years or however long it's been?

If so, thank you. Thank you so, so very much.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Stripe

Oh. My. God. My mouth litterally dropped open when I read this. I stared at the screen in (sleepy) disbelief for several long moments.

Is this . . . Is this the "real" Magic for Fourth Edition? Is this the scalpel that will finally relieve us of that festering, cancerous boil that that has afflicted us these many years? Is that what I'm reading?

It's 3:30 a.m. and I just got home from a long trip, but I'm looking forward to reading up on this and buying it instantly if this is basically, "Magic, but with balanced costs/effects plus an end to the many legacy issues and fixes for the several outright mistakes." In other words, what we've been screaming at the top of our lungs about for ten years or however long it's been?

If so, thank you. Thank you so, so very much.

It is, except that since it's a shorter PDF than GURPS Magic, it includes only 2 spells (there is one exception to but it's not that important) per college. It includes guidelines to roll your own spells though and I expect that the spell list will be filled with future publications, or at least Pyramid articles.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Stripe

"Magic, but with balanced costs/effects plus an end to the many legacy issues and fixes for the several outright mistakes."

Sorry to disappoint, but no. Sorcery is a nice piece of work, but it's not a fixed and updated Magic. It's the other thing people have been asking for since forever -- magic built as powers, rather than skills. Skills play no role in Sorcery. (See the other thread about making Sorcery feel more academic, instead of the intuitive / inborn kind of magic it was intended to model.)

It neither has Magic's legacy issues, nor fixes them, as it's a completely different system. It has the legacy and balance issues that abilities built as powers has; you've seen all the Advantage pricing debates on the forum.

As people have noted, it doesn't have a complete catalog of spells. There's only so many pages in the book! There are enough examples that you should be able to extend the list to suit.

Sorcery is a worked example of one possible framework for implementing magic-as-powers. Mechanically, it's based on Modular Ability for improvising spells, and Alternate Abilities to that MA for some few spells that you want to know really well. Like Psi Powers, it shows you one way to make the existing rules work for you. It differs from Psi Powers in that it has more focus on the magic system -- the net result of the infrastructure that was built -- and less on cataloging individual abilities (spells).

As with RPM, the genius here is deceptively simple-looking. You've seen all those pieces and parts before, as have we all. Why, anyone could have put them together like that... All Michelangelo did was remove the marble from a block that wasn't part of "David".

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Sorcery is a worked example of one possible framework for implementing magic-as-powers. Mechanically, it's based on Modular Ability for improvising spells, and Alternate Abilities to that MA for some few spells that you want to know really well. Like Psi Powers, it shows you one way to make the existing rules work for you. It differs from Psi Powers in that it has more focus on the magic system -- the net result of the infrastructure that was built -- and less on cataloging individual abilities (spells).

That said: what Known Spells we have been given have universally been patterned after spells from GURPS Magic; and the expectation is that this will continue for as long as there's enough interest to justify writing more of them. And the Known Spells are easily decoupled from Sorcery, if you want to use some other framework for implementing magic-as-powers.

I would love to get a series akin to GURPS Spaceships out of this — say, a series of pdfs that catalog related sets of Known Spells that are modeled after spells from GURPS Magic, with each volume covering a handful of related Colleges (so you can do it in under ten supplements).

[Fossilized Rappy]

Another possibly dumb and obvious question...

Sorcerous Empowerment already has Limited Colleges for the same cost reduction as it is for Magery. Would it be reasonable to allow it to use most of the other Magery limitations as well, such as Ceremonial, Dance, Day-Aspected, Solitary, etc.?

[Leynok]

Originally Posted by Fossilized Rappy

Another possibly dumb and obvious question...

Sorcerous Empowerment already has Limited Colleges for the same cost reduction as it is for Magery. Would it be reasonable to allow it to use most of the other Magery limitations as well, such as Ceremonial, Dance, Day-Aspected, Solitary, etc.?

I think the problem here is that you would have to add a similar modifier to all your spells, but with more Advantage acceptable versions rather than the Magery versions, like Requires Gestures or Accessibility Only During the Day. The reason why Limited Colleges work is it doesn't touch the Spell's Advantages, just what ones you're allowed. And since you're getting points back with each Spell, I probably wouldn't even use Magery's versions of Dance and Aspected either, they seem to give more back than the more generic modifiers because they affect every Spell in the Magic System, which are usually left unmodified.
You could do it, it would just be more work, and some spells might not even save you points if they were modified back enough.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Fossilized Rappy

Another possibly dumb and obvious question...

Sorcerous Empowerment already has Limited Colleges for the same cost reduction as it is for Magery. Would it be reasonable to allow it to use most of the other Magery limitations as well, such as Ceremonial, Dance, Day-Aspected, Solitary, etc.?

Yes and no. Basically there are many power modifiers that could be applied to the sorcery and the spells, both limitations and enchantments.
Spell modifiers are not directly applicable, but you need to use the corresponding powers modifier.

In general I would mostly want to apply them to spells only: As keeping the sorcery itself high enough cost to work as the base ability for spells otherwise easily requires really high sorcery level. Applying the limitations to the spell itself provides a different reduction based on the current enchantments.

Example:
Day only would be a -20% Accessibility according to powers page 99.
Applying that to scryguard would reduce the 68 points to 66 points or a 3% savings.
Applying same to Sense Life base version would reduce the 26 point cost to 20 points or a 23% savings.