A Thaumatological Problem: Magic On Harn

[Michael Cule]

I continue to fiddle with rejigging my GURPS Harn adaptation to 4e and the main thing that causes me difficulty is the Magic system.

On Harn Magic is (mostly) dominated by the Shek-Pavar. The Pavaric magical system divides magic into six Convocations or fields of magic which are arranged to oppose each other (material magic is opposed to mental, fire to cold and so on) in a circular arrangement and there is also the seventh type Grey Magic which provides access to Meta Magic and Gate Magics.

I'm not planning to use the standard GURPS MAGIC spell list but as in HARNMASTER to allow mages to create their own spells while providing a basic set of commonly known magic.

Now, how I plan to do this is to have individual master skills for each of the six Convocations plus Grey Magic, with individual spells being Techniques off those skills. In other words a variant of Ritual Magic. The Convocations don't default off Thaumatology (Pavaric) though it is a prerequisite for them.

My problem is this: can I have this sort of system when you can't actually cast spells at default? In other words (I think) a skill where the techniques aren't automatically accessible to anyone who knows the root skill but which have to be learned.

You see I have the difficulty that a mage who knows a spell is at an advantage over a mage who doesn't but if he doesn't have to put points into it to learn it at default then that advantage cannot be expressed in character points.

(I am sort of leaning to having the 'cast improvised magic' in there as an option. Perhaps with the proviso that if you cast a spell without any points in it any failure is going to count as a critical failure. But I want to see if I can work it so that option isn't in there as it isn't in the HARNMASTER description of the world.)