Magic Systems

I’ve seen a few main approaches to magic systems, all tampering with power, cost and reliability mechanics in a handful of ways. Namely, there are: spells, words of power/modules, rituals, and sapients.

Spells are straightforward: create a more or less specific effect for a specific cost. They usually have a “power level” measured by the cost you have to pay to invoke them. LotFP, Knave, Twisted Tunnels and D&D editions use spells. Because spell-based systems are so widespread and well-known, I won’t touch on them much here.

Another form of spells are “spell-like abilities”. Those often don’t follow a particular “magic system”, but instead vary in their reliability, uses per X amount of time, or range of interpretation.

D&D has very specific abilities, so specific I’d rather call them “extra spells” than “abilities” - healing X times per day, adding dX to another player’s roll, X times per day, etc. Very specific, very gamey, often not very interesting.

PbtA, (in this case Dungeon World) relies on modifying the reliability and cost of a spell-like ability, instead of limiting the amount of uses. Let me give you an example of a spell-like ability that causes a lot of problems for many DMs (especially new ones) running Dungeon World.

Elemental Mastery

When you call on the primal spirits of fire, water, earth or air to perform a task for you, roll 2d6+Wis.

On a 10+ choose two.

On a 7–9 choose one.

On a miss, some catastrophe occurs as a result of your calling.

- The effect you desire comes to pass

- You avoid paying nature’s price

- You retain control

That’s it. There’s no limit to what degree of effect you can create, how many elements you can invoke at once, no act of in-system balancing save for “if you mess up you’ll probably regret it”. No specification of what “control” means, what “nature’s price” is, etc. This creates a variety of outcomes where the power and versatility of the ability ranges from “druid Jesus” to “GM’s tool for messing you up”.

Due to the vagueness of the “nature’s price” it often turned into a nasty sidequest generator in the hands of an inexperienced GM (like many PbtA moves tend to do), but since I liked the idea, I used it for my own system, the framework of which I’ll explain later.

Modular - Ars Magica, later Arx Fatalis, recently Maze Rats and Tyranny present a system where “components” in the form of words or runes are mashed together to create an effect.

Because Tyranny and Arx Fatalis are PC games, they’re forced to specify the exact effects you can create, thus ending up with a more “hidden/unlockable spell list” situation than a freeform magic system, but they give a good idea of how modular systems work.

You get together components (runes in this case), and get a specific effect. For example, combining “create”, “fire” and “missile” runes in Arx Fatalis gets you a fireball, “create” and “fire” lights up torches, etc. Without getting too deep into it, Tyranny uses a similar system, except it adds things like range, shape, area size, while narrowing the amount of effects you can create with them, especially if it comes to utility. From tabletop standpoint, they’re more a proof of concept or a guideline.

Now, we have Maze Rats and Ars Magica, along with Gorinich’s names system, which fits into this category much less, but I wanted to mention it regardless. Now, a power word system in a tabletop works in a similar way (you use a verb + noun combination of words to form a spell), but usually leaves the spell capability up to player interpretation to a greater or lesser degree.

Let’s cast a spell that way. The words I’ll pick will be “Shape” and “Spirit” - Shape Spirit. I can interpret it as the ability to shape some kind of spirit matter, perhaps move individuals’ souls out of their bodies, or perhaps move or shape my own soul in some manner. Its use is going to come out in play, in whatever wacky manner the players decide to use it.

Now the question is, how do you balance it. If your answer is “you don’t”, you’re likely to end up with a party split into “spellcasters” and “everyone else”, or with “that guy” that gets to summon metric craptons of fire with no cooldown and “solve” most combat encounters. Maze Rats generally doesn’t give you much to that effect. It forms a tool that is resolving instead of a transformative by design. I don’t think magic should work that way. Instead, introducing some form of resource management or aftereffects is a desireable outcome.

Rituals - create a “nonspecific”, sometimes even “any” effect by paying a sufficient cost, usually it takes some time. Using this type of magic as a sidequest generator is an enormous waste of potential.

There are a aspects to a ritual: the ability to perform it, the time it takes, the effects it can produce and the cost it requires.

The ability to perform it and effects, depending on how specific, have the potential to turn a ritual into something along the lines of a spell. It’s the cost and sometimes the time it takes that often makes it something more.

Now, most rituals I’ve seen are basically sidequest generators. You want to summon shub-niggurath, you need to gather up ten virgins, two mages, and at least one catgirl and promptly burn them on a huge pyre at midnight during the winter solstice. This has twofold use: it gives the players things to do, i.e. generates content, and puts a difficult choice before the players (catgirls or tentacles).

A more interesting approach to this would be a “I have X things that I’m willing to sacrifice, and a few things I’m less than willing to sacrifice, what can I get with them?” or a “I want to create X effect, which of the things I have access to can I sacrifice?” Let’s say you have some blood, and are willing to part with it. Perhaps your god wants some of that blood. You draw up a circle on the ground, burn your blood up in a chalice, and out from the circle crawls out a lesser demon that you can do whatever you want with for an hour or so. I’d prefer a catgirl, but you’ve gotta make do with what you have. That’s the staple of OSR, you know.

Sapients - Sorcerer, GURPS and World of Dungeons present a system that fiddles with reliability in an interactive way. Namely, the only way to cast magic is to summon a specific demon, capture some spell-casting fairy. The effectiveness of the spell cast, its limitations and flavour depend mostly on the creature you’ve bound. Its reliability - on your relationship with the creature, its state, and the effectiveness of your persuasion methods.

Let’s say you’ve bound an ifrit into a bottle. Depending on who you ask, ifrits are usually malevolent, satanic vengeful spirits, potentially a fire-infused version of a djinn.

You ask the ifrit to summon a fiery tornado to vanquish your enemies, offering him a mountain crystal you found in the last dungeon.

The tornado wreaks havoc amongst your enemies, after all, they’re not immune to fire. You soon realize that neither are you. You know what is immune to fire? An ifrit.

None of this would’ve happened if you’d summoned a catgirl.

Another form of sapient spellcasting could rely on using thinking artifacts or commanding/commissioning NPCs of various sort to your advantage.

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All right, now that I’ve laid the groundwork, let me present you my own magic system. It uses aspects as its core. They work in similar ways to DnD-ish schools of magic, or perhaps spellcasting classes. An aspect determines what effects you can create, what powers your invoke, where your magic comes from, and what cost there is to abusing your magic.

An aspect consists of its name, a short description, and its tags (that work somewhat like words of power of modular systems). While I didn’t allow for that in my game, I believe it’s entirely possible to create your own aspects and rearrange tags (or add new ones) in any way you like.

Let’s get an example of a druid-ish aspect:

Deep Wild - the untamed regions of the world, be they a scorching desert, a forest, a swampland, a steppe or high mountains. A spellcaster calls forth magic inherent either in the area around them, from distant places of power, or from the heart of the world. Druids, witches of the woods and shamans are often attuned to the Deep Wild. It has places of power (nodes) all over the world, but never in other planes.

Deep Wild tags:

1. Plants - command plants, ask them a question

2. Animals - talk to them, command them, call on them, ask them to bind souls with you

3. Spirits - everything has a spirit of its own - the air, the water, the forests, the tools and weapons that people have used; mortal souls sometimes also linger in this realm before passing into the Starlit Sky and you can talk to them, command them, or project your own spirit out of your body.

4. Elements - you may change the weather, shape water, earth, fire and air to nearly any degree, but you cannot produce any more of it. Some spirits can, however.

5. Poison and Medicine - you know and understand the contents of plants and produce of animals. If you work in tandem with a doctor, or have such education yourself, you may create healing potions, poultices, etc. Or deadly poisons. Generally such creation works like a ritual.

6. Form - You may change your shape - be it your whole body or part of it.

As you can see - power-word-like tags, with a sentence or two of explanation. Mind that these tags define what you “can” do, not necessarily what you have to do. You can make up a character that focuses solely on manipulating the elements, or a spirit-talking shaman. I personally allow my players access to all tags of their given aspect, but some GMs may prefer for aspects to be unlockable as a progression of some sort.

Now, another important component of an aspect - aftereffect tables. See, whenever you interact with magic, be it creating effects, using artifacts, messing around with places of power, or fighting magical beasts, it warps you in its image.

When casting a weak spell, at first nothing happens. You roll warping points, check them against your coherence stat. If it doesn’t go over your temporary limit, it’ll go away after the scene ends. Any warping points over your temporary limit become permanent in a way that you cannot remove them without a ritual. They also cause aftereffects. Those might become semi-permanent, and after reaching your coherence limit, you’re struck with an incoherence effect that is major and often permanent.

Have a look at two of the aftereffect tables for the Deep Wild aspect:

Blood Moon

1. You smell nearby prey. It’s intoxicating.

2. You must kill something, at least once a day.

3. You can’t talk in human languages anymore, but can talk to animals without a problem.

4. Everyone who looks into your eyes considers you a predator.

5. You feel an insatiable hunger for raw blood or flesh.

6. When you stain yourself with blood, you won’t be able to wash it off.

Shapewarping

1. Your bone structure warps and you find it hard to stand upright.

2. A limb of yours is warped, perhaps covered in strange growths or resembling that of an animal.

3. Your eyes become slit-like and oversensitive to light.

4. You grow a tail and a pair of animal-like ears, or horns.

5. You grow a set of long, sharp fangs or claws; prune them or say goodbye to fine manipulation.

6. You become cold-blooded; you need external heat or become weak, sluggish and fatigued.

Which table to choose generally depends on the GM’s decision and should generally be justified by the effect created by the player. For example, using form tag should induce shapewarping aftereffects.

Now, based on those tags one can make up a course of action. Let’s say I want to turn myself into a menacing owlbear. First, I’d need to determine the power of a spell, then roll appropriate dice for warping effects.

How do I determine “power level”? This can be done by the GM “on feel”, but I’ve also been poking around creating rough estimates of how much things should cost, roughly. I’m not done with it, since I’ll need far more playtesting to get a working cos table.

Let’s say I want to be an owlbear for the whole battle, the GM would estimate that as medium strength and have me roll 3d6 for the warping points, then divide the result by half, since I’m a spellcasting class. My temporary coherence is 5 and maximum coherence is 15. I rolled up 12, which divided by half is 6, meaning I get 5 temporary warping points that’ll disappear after the battle ends, and 1 permanent warping point that will stay with me until I clear it up with a ritual.

Because I have permanent warping, an aftereffect will change me as a result of this spell. Since owlbears are beasts, the GM decides to roll on the Shapewarping table. He rolls a 5, meaning after I leave the the owlbear form, I will still retain the owlbear fangs and claws, impairing my fine manipulation and being generally unwieldy in my otherwise weak, human hands and jaw. If the GM were to roll 4 on that table after I shapeshifted into a feline, I’d now be a catgirl.

If I were to hit the maximum coherence with the temporary and permanent warping combined, the GM would roll, laugh, then laugh some more, and then hit me with a much bigger incoherence effect. Here’s two of the six possible ones for this aspect:

Deep Wild incoherence effects:

1. Berserker - you lose control over yourself and keep on killing until there’s nothing left to kill within sight or you are put down.

2. Curse of the Phoenix - you burst into flames with all of your equipment and may be reborn through an elaborate ritual at a powerful source of flame; your soul wanders the world as a lost spirit until then.

Rituals - there are two types of rituals in my magic system.

Aspect-based rituals, which allow for creation of much stronger aspect-based effects for a more manageable cost, performed near a place of power (node) of your aspect. The most common of these rituals is a cleansing one, that removes permanent warping points, along with most warping aftereffects.

Another example of such ritual would be:

Feral Oath - turn yourself permanently into an animal, removing shapewarping from aftereffect tables. You’ll still retain your memories, mental capacity, and sanity.

Non-aspect rituals, that create spell-like effects, for a fluctuating cost, dependent on the campaign and the situation the players are in. The big thing about those is that they can be performed by a non-magical character, i.e. one that isn’t attuned to any aspect.

Here’s an example of one such ritual:

Megalith

Construct a grand structure of Law-bending design.

Polyhedron - all fragile and fleeting things are preserved forever within. Beware the Inevitable.

Iron Citadel - a watchtower whose walls are alive with blood and warping; magic cannot pass through them.

Ziggurat - the staircase amidst it leads down, down, into the uncharted depths, or even the Heart.

Cost would be something to determine during the game. Let’s say a player wants to construct a Polyhedron. The GM could tell them they need: a magical artifact as a cornerstone, a large supply of blood to nourish its growth, and finally a sapient soul to harness the power within.

So, here it is. Pretty much the whole technical aspect of the magic system. Hopefully it can be of some use to you. Maybe I’ll drop more aspects and aftereffect tables over time as I nail down what I want in them.