#vancian casting

[thryth-gaming]

Vancian Casting

One of the key mechanics of D&D is Vancian spellcasting where the spellcasters have a certain number of "spell slots" that they can prepare in a given day. Magic Users (the precursors to wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers) would "memorize" spells and the Clerics (and later Paladins) would "pray" for spells. Later, druids and rangers would be added which would also pray for spells.

This was one of my biggest stumbling blocks for getting D&D magic because it didn't make sense to me that you just stopped knowing something because you used it once. And while I get the idea of becoming tired, the spell slot system was too rigid to represent how exhaustion works.

The Concept Broken Down

This is called Vancian magic because it is based on the Dying Earth novels by Jack Vance. None of which I've read, which probably contributes to my just not meshing well with Vancian casting.

In the series, magic was released by using magical words and the human mind could only hold a limited number of syllables in mind at a time and using them would wipe the knowledge from their mind. So the wizards would have to study their tomes everyday to regain their ability to perform magic. This mechanic was carried over to priests save that they would begin the day by asking their god for specific miracles. In both cases, the spellcaster needed to pick specific spells and couldn't change over to different ones if they decided that they didn't need a prepared spell after-all.

Raymond Feist, the novelist who created the Midkemia setting and wrote the Riftward novels, did some earlier work on D&D and refined this narrative into the idea that spells were long rituals but wizards had eventually built in a cutoff at the end where they could leave a spell unfinished save for a word or two. They would then have that spell basically just hanging on their word to release. Mechanically similar, though the narrative is different.

I have read some of that series and his approach to Vancian casting was the first one that made some sense. It accounted for why you "forgot" a spell. You didn't, you just expended the ritual and didn't have time to set it up again. And it explained why you had to prep spells ahead of time. Again there would be no time to do the ritual on the fly. However, it still didn't account for why the spell slots were rigidly structured on a level basis. And I still felt that surely you could do something with all that raw power even if you couldn't shape something intricate.

My Epiphany

What finally made the idea of magic slots work for me ... sort of ... is the video game Nioh 2. But even here there aren't slots, there's a "capacity" and each technique uses up a certain number of points of that capacity. But that's not the big "ohhh" moment for me here.

In Nioh 2, your Onmyou (and Ninjutsu) are physical tools and talismans which are consumed. So you would go to the nearest shrine and choose to "Ready Jutsu"

This would bring you to a menu show your capacity and what skills you've learned.

And then you could assign those pieces of gear to one of your eight hot-key slots. Resulting in me having a bunch of stuff I want available immediately and some items I use between fights so I can take my time about activating them and thus don't need to use one of my limited hot-buttons.

The main thing that made me go "That makes Vancian magic make so much more sense" even more than Feist's rituals with the cut-offs. Is that each of these tools is a consumable item and once you use it, you have to make another one.

The energy isn't something you have on tap where rituals are used to funnel it. It is something you take effort and time to create and then you expend it like a grenade, potion, or ammunition.

On top of this, Nioh 2 does have powers that you can use repeatedly over time as power builds up in the form of yokai powers and yokai shift. Both of which hinge on your nature as half-yokai and the yokai spirits that have allied with you. For these powers you have two pools of endurance that build up over time, one of which you can use piecemeal to summon your yokai powers and one of which you have to build up to a specific threshold in order to shift into a yokai form.

So they both have consumable one-use spells in the way D&D does in the form of Jutsu and inherent magical energy to fuel powers in the form of Anima (fueling yokai powers) and the Amrita Gauge (the threshold for changing into yokai form). But they are separated.

I'm going to set aside Anima and Amrita because they are basically "Sorcery that makes sense" and function by getting rid of spell slots.

The Jutsu is the method I'm focusing on here again because:

Each prepared "slot" represents a tool prepared using engineering, chemistty, mystical reagents, or appealing to spirits.

The stuff that makes the tools and talismans is external to the character.

The slots are not specifically numbered. As a note, point pools have been an alternative magic casting method since late 2nd edition.

This combination of creating a physical consumable and dropping the level-sorted slots was the thing that made Vancian casting make so much more sense. But then again... this wouldn't be Vancian casting, would it?

Side note, another facet of Nioh 2's "Jutsu" system is that leveling up the skill does not improve the damage that technique does. Fire Shot I, Fire Shot II, and Fire Shot III all base their damage on your Magic rating and other inherent bonuses.

What leveling up the skills does is increase their efficiency and increase the maximum number you can craft. For example

Fire Shot I: Prepare 1-6 fire shot talismans at 1 capacity each.

Fire Shot II: Prepare 1-8 fire shot talismans at 0.8 capacity each

Fire Shot III: Prepare 1-10 fire shot talismans at 0.7 capacity each.

This is largely just neat and not part of my epiphany on Nioh 2 and Vancian casting.

Now, you can't just change D&D to match that. It would be a completely different flavor of magic. But it is curious to see how it things would have developed if they had taken this track.

What If...

The big change here is that this mode of "magic" is more akin to being a D&D artificer than a D&D wizard. As you can also see, it would also have worked with some rogue abilities too with craftable thrown weapons, grenades, and medicines.

My suspicion is that if D&D had started with the assumption of wizards and clerics preparing relics and talismans between fights then it would be the sorcerer that was a late comer rather than the artificer. Though the artificer might not have been called such since it would be the base assumption.

I kind of suspect if the sorcerer had been introduced in that environment we would have heard something akin to the "no sci-fi in my fantasy" we get with artificers today but instead we'd be having "no mutant superheroes in my fantasy" with sorcerers.

[jormofyore]

I like Vancian casting (and the Animist),

Though I know it’s not for everyone, which is why variety is a good thing to have in a game. The trouble is Vancian casting gets a bad rap for a variety of reasons that people seem take quite personally. To me, Vancian casting is interesting because it lets me feel like I’ve got a finger on the pulse of the game. I get that feeling out outwitting the GM, whether he wanted that or not, in a duel of the minds. Now, to be clear, I do not endorse Player vs GM/DM/ST in most scenarios, yet, to me, preparing the perfect spell that spells flawless doom for the challenge for the day gives me that dopamine hit like nothing else. I’m not simply talking about how you happened to have a popular spell that saves the day, like our Druid being able to make my bard fly in Abomination Vaults vs a very specific boss (won’t spoil), but using a niche spell that makes your GM’s plans crumble to dust in an epic way. Let me provide an example of this.

Years ago, while playing Pathfinder 1, we were on a troll hunt and my Wizard was just killing it. I was playing a Fire Gnome Wizard with the Admixture school, so almost all my spells could be turned into fire or acid as needed. I had just hit level 9, getting level 5 spells, and was weighing my options when my eyes fell upon a spell called “Wall of Sound.” I hummed and hawed about it, deciding how to tune my character into a veritable machine to drum my enemies into submission and covering all the basses possible, to ensure a sound plan against any adversary. Agreeably, the damage is shite, and it is super niche, but hey, what if. WHAT IF? Well, reader, my GM that night decided to switch things up and introduced some kind of troll that we had never encountered before, and we were about to face a lot of them at once, Rock (‘n roll) Trolls. Long story short, guess what I had decided to prepare that day, and guess what was running at us in a barely staggered line? Cue Meat Loaf’s Wasted Youth, and it was musically delicious. A cacophonic tactic that we still chuckle about a decade later because who would use this spell on a regular day?

To me, Vancian casting creates the greatest mechanical opportunity for storytelling. Vancian casting encourages thoughtful planning and rewards cleverness. It teaches you to use niche spells in ways you’d not think of normally. It’s not Disintegrate or Invisibility, which are just good spells to have in an everyday environment because they are so reliable, and sometimes it means they fall flat and that just sucks at times. But it teaches planning, forward thinking, how to separate utility from usefulness, especially with limited information, and that is an excellent skill to have. No, there is nothing wrong with just wanting to play a game, have fun, and not to think too hard about what you are doing; that’s honestly a relaxing style of play that I don’t mind on the odd day. But for me, I need challenges to keep me engaged. That’s why I loved the Shaman of PF1 and am loving the playtest of the Animist in PF2, which I’m going to cover in my next post.

[prokopetz]

Wizard RPG that takes the Vancian "spells are demons made of math that live in your brain" thing to its logical yet absurd conclusion and casts the player character's prepared spells as a Disco Elysium style internal peanut gallery that influences dialogue trees and makes fun of your decisions. I want to get relationship advice from magic missile.

[thydungeongal]

Okay so as I posted earlier, I picked up Holveja & Hirviöitä, a Finnish retroclone/OSR game at the con last night. I do want to write about it in a bit more depth. This post is probably not going to be useful to any of you unless you can read Finnish, because there's probably no way this game will get translated: it specifically exists because the author saw a demand for an old-school D&D clone written in Finnish, inspired by the existence of Legendoja & Lohikäärmeitä (an unofficial Finnish translation and evolution of D&D 5e).

First of all, the full title of the book isn't just Holveja & Hirviöitä. It's Holveja & Hirviöitä: Pelaajan opas, the subtitle roughly translating to "Player's Guide." The book thus contains just the player-facing rules: character creation, combat, adventuring, spells, advancement, and so on. You won't find rules for monsters or designing adventures in this book. The author, Tuomas J. Salo, has spoken elsewhere about the fact that the game is likely not going to find purchase among anyone but people already invested in the OSR, and those people likely already have more GM's books than they need. I understand that rationale, but honestly I do hope he puts out a separate Game Master's Guide, because even in its current state there is a lot to love about H&H and I would love to see it expanded into a wholly standalone game. Also, I want to support Finnish language gaming. Even though I mostly hang out on the anglophone side of the RPG internet, I also happen to think that my first language is pretty cool and it'd be cool to play RPGs in Finnish with my homies.

H&H isn't a direct retroclone of any particular version of D&D nor is it a Finnish translation of any previously established OSR game. It is more like a best-of of the author's favorite elements of the OSR, picked from multiple different games and blog posts. It is most recognizably based on B/X, but it differs from that one too.

Here are some features of the game:

Four classes, corresponding to Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, and Thief. No demihumans classes, and in fact no rules for playing demihumans at all.

Characters get a class and level-based attack bonus. Fighters get a full +1 per level, other classes varying slower rates.

No class-based restrictions on weapons and armor, but there are limitations on the use of magic and skills when unencumbered.

To make Fighters (Soturi, warrior) still stand out as the best weapon users, besides their higher attack bonus they also increase all weapon damage dice by one type (a sword that deals 1d8 damage becomes a 1d10 and so on).

Magic-Users (Velho, wizard) are vancian casters, nothing surprising there.

Clerics (Pyhimys, saint) use a spell-casting system based on expending a resource called Suosio (Favor). After casting a spell a player rolls a number of d6 equal to their character's current Favor, and if at least a number of dice equal to the spell's level come up 4+ their Favor stays the same. Otherwise it drops by one. I have no idea how well it works in practice but I like the idea of differentiating between Magic-Users and Clerics mechanically.

Thieves (Taituri, master, expert) are clearly more in line with LotFP's Experts than B/X Thieves. Skills are a 1 of 6 chance by default and unlike other characters they get 4 extra points to divide between "pips" in various skills to increase their chance of success, with more skill points unlocked at each level.

Characters have a single saving throw number (16-level) which is further modified by the highest of two stat modifiers for a total of three different saving throws. If I'm not entirely mistaken, this is also how Sine Nomine's more recent games handle saving throws.

Besides just rules for adventuring and combat there are very specific rules for owning property and investing in business venture to gamble with your character's resources between sessions. These also seem pretty much lifted wholesale from LotFP.

The three alignments are as they always have been, but renamed to work better in Finnish. Specifically, Law isn't Laki which would sound dumb as hell, it's Kohtalo, or Fate. I think Fate vs Chaos is much more evocative, and it also reinforces how alignment in this game is cosmic and not just a shorthand for "is your character good or bad."

All in all there's very little here that I don't like. I mean, except for the fact that unarmored AC is 12 and AC goes up which is just bullshit. Again, there is nothing remarkable about this game in the context of other OSR games, as most of its rules have appeared elsewhere, but the translation of often clumsy gaming terms into Finnish is solid. (I especially love that Hit Points are just called Sisu, a word that would roughly translate into English as "guts, moxie, pep.")

[homebrew-a-la-traumaverse]

The Serpent's Fang - Homebrew Rogue Subclass by Nines, v1.0

Not all who kill strike from the shadows. To know the body is to know life and death in equal measure.

Playing around with a pseudo-Vancian casting mechanic here. You can prepare you concoctions for the day, but you can choose whether you want to heal or to harm with them as necessary.

Another subclass for the upcoming monster-based book.

[mask131]

Read-list for an "old school D&D" fantasy (plus bonus)

This is a remake of an earlier post of mine, that I decided to update (some additional books were suggested to me, others I found out about later).

This is a reading-list of various literary works that heavily inspired or were heavily used in the creation of the first editons of Dungeons and Dragons - and thus, reading them will allow you to plunge back into what the original D&D was meant to look what/what it tried to emulate.

J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit". No surprise here, Tolkien's works were the start of modern fantasy and thus the main source of old-school D&D. In fact, D&D was originally created to be just a Lord of the Rings role-playing game - or to be precise a LotR wargame. This was the original intention. Which is why, quite famously, the very first version of D&D included elements such as the hobbits, the mithril and the balrogs. And when the Tolkien Estate pointed out the consequences of what was plagiarism, D&D changed these concepts to... "halflings", "mithral" and "balors". The only Tolkien-element D&D could preserve vaguely unchanged were the orcs, because the Tolkien Estate could not prove Tolkien had invented the term "orc". But even beyond that, D&D's dwarfs and elves and ents (sorry, treants) and wights and rangers all were heavily inspired by Tolkien - the gods of the orcs even use symbols such as an "eye of fire" and a "white hand"...

Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions". Poul Anderson was quite influential on early 20th century fantasy, and this specific book influenced D&D in three ways. On one side, it was one of the two sources for the "Order versus Chaos" conflict of D&D (the other being Moorcock). On the other the D&D trolls were inspired by the Three Hearts and Three Lion trolls. And finally the Paladin class was inspired by Anderson's Holger Carlsen character (the same way the Ranger was Tolkien's Aragorn). [This book also seems to have had some influence over the Fey of D&D?]

Michael Moorcock's "The Elric Saga". With Anderson's work, it was the other main source of the Order vs Chaos, Lawful vs Chaotic division of the D&D game. It also served as the main inspiration behind the D&D Drows, due to the Elric Saga shaping the original image of "Dark Elves" in fantasy, through its Melnibonéan Empire. D&D also originally collected references to the Elric world - creating many variation of Elric's evil magical sword Stormbringer through a variety of cursed soul-drinking weapons.

Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Barbarian". The source of heroic-fantasy the same way Lord of the Rings influenced epic fantasy, the world of Conan was also a huge source of inspiration for D&D - the most obvious reference being the Barbarian class, shaped for those who wanted to play Conan.

Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser". Originally intended as a parody of the Conan-style heroic fantasy, but promptly becoming a serious and admired work that created its own sub-genre of fantasy (the "sword and sorcery" genre), they also were inspirational for the first editions of D&D. Sometimes it is indirect - the "Thief" or "Rogue" classes were inspired by Leiber's Gray Mouser character - other times it is MUCH more direct. For example, among the numerous pantheons you could choose to use in early D&D, one was the various gods of Newhon and the city of Lankhmar, the universe of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. And the fantasy trope of "Thieves' Guild" made famous partially by D&D was originally an invention of Leiber.

Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. This emblematic series of the "science-fantasy" genre offered to D&D its magic system, which is generally known as "vancian magic". It was Jack Vance who had the idea that a wizard had to learn/store spells in their mind, with a limited number of spells they could carry in their brain, and that once cast the spell had to be re-learned or restored. Several spells and items of early D&D were also directly taken from the Dying Earth books - the "prismatic spray" or the "ioun stones".

H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos". No need to explain how Lovecraft's brand of eldritch horror and alien-fantasy shaped the creatures and deities of early D&D, to the point that early on the deities and monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos were part of the pantheons you could chose to use - listed alongside the Newhon gods of Leiber, or the gods of the Conan universe.

While not fantasy works, the most famous creations of Edgard Rice Burroughs - Tarzan on one hand, and John Carter of Mars on the other, were claImed by Gygax to have been very influential to his creation of D&D.

Another author Gygax mentionned as being a huge influence for D&D was Fletcher Pratt - through his Harold Shea fantasy series, about a main character being carried away in various magical and fantastical worlds very different from each other, in which he has to adapt himself to new settings and learn new rules to avoid dangers and threats... Sounds familiar? The idea of world-travelling might also have been inspired by the science-fiction series by P.J. Farmers' World of Tiers: the rules of travel in D&D between the various planes of reality seem to have been inspired by Farmers' own rules for dimension-travel.

One of the lesser known influences of D&D is the fantasy series "Kothar" by Gardner Fox: Gygax explicitely said that the idea of the "Lich" as a D&D monster came from Fox's Kothar series.

Not a book, but movies: the Sinbad movies of the mid 20th century were influential on early D&D. Various monsters and creatures referenced pictures such as "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" or "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad".

"The House on the Borderlands" by William Hope Hodgson was explicitely referenced by Gygax's 1979 module "The Keep on the Borderlands", and it might have heavily influenced the original depiction of the D&D orcs as pig-men...

The Shannara series by Terry Brooks has also been pointed out as an influence on D&D - while not on the very first edition, elements of the Shannara world seem to have influenced later ones...

Mind you, this is but a fragment of a much longer list known as the "Appendix N" composed by Gygax, and that lists all the books and pieces of work he took inspiration from when designing D&D. Beyond the most famous works evoked above he also listed:

Poul Anderson's "The High Crusade" and "The Broken Sword"

John Bellairs' "The Face in the Frost"

Leigh Brackett's works

Fredric Browns' works

I evoked before Burrough's Mars series, but Gygax also listed his "Venus series" and his "Pellucidar series".

Lin Carter's "World End" series

L. Sprague de Camp's "Lest Darkness Fall" and "The Fallible Fiend" and "The Carnelian Cube"

August Derleth's continuation of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Lord Dunsany's writings, of course.

Gardner Fox's "Kyrik" series

Sterling Lanier's "Hiero's Journey"

A. Merritt's "Creep, Shadow, Creep", "Moon Pool" and "Dwellers in the Mirage"

Michael Moorcock's "Hawkmoon" series (which is technically part of the wider universe of which the Elric Saga is the central piece)

Andre Norton's works

Fletcher Pratt's "Blue Star"

Fred Saberhagen's "Changeling Earth"

Margaret St. Clair "The Shadow People" and "Sign of the Labrys"

Stanley Weinbaum's works

Manley Wade Wellman's works

Jack Williamson's works

Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, and "Jack of Shadows".

In 2007, Gygax even updated his Appendix N with a handful of new titles reflecting elements added to later editions of D&D:

Sterling Lanier's "The Unforsaken hiero"

Piers Anthony's "Split Infinity" series

And of course, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series

And since this post is all about updates, I will also include a list of works that were used as inspiration for current day/modern D&D - especially the fifth edition. Like that, you'll have the evolution of "old school D&D versus new school D&D". This list is taken from fragments here and there of interviews given by Mike Mearls, the Appendix E "Inspirational Reads" of the fifth edition, and Rodney Thompson's interviews.

Appendix E replaces several elements Gygax talked about in interviews or in his Appendix N: Leiber's work, Burroughs's Mars series, Howard's Conan, etc...

Appendix E adds among other things China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station", and Elizabeth Bear's "Range of Ghosts".

Mike Mearls said that what inspired him in his design work of modern D&D was Ursula LeGuin's "Earthsea" series, Patrick Rothfuss "The Name of the Wind", Saladin Ahmed "Throne of the Crescent Moon" and Octavia E. Butler's "The Parable of the Sower".

But Mearls also repeated several of the picks already used by Gygax. He invoked again The Elric Saga, and Roger Zelazny's Amber series, and Tolkien's Legendarium of course...

Rodney Thompson rather insisted on returning to the Anderson roots of the D&D fantasy: mostly "Three Heart and Three Lions", but also "The Broken Sword".

[rathayibacter]

Tricks of the Vancian Mage

Mages tend to see limitations more as fun challenges than anything else, and revel in finding new ways to overcome them. It's only natural that Vancian mages, struggling under the yoke of spell slots, would eventually turn their mind to solving the problem once and for all. Branch of the Worldtree Easily the most effective means of circumventing spell limitations. Every morning, the mage shunts an echo of themselves into the aether, which can be recalled with a word to instantly replace the original, all spells freshly prepared.  The only small hiccup is, no part of the original mage survives. The echo replacement remembers only up to the moment they cast the spell, so while they may be crackling with arcane energies, they're often caught unprepared and with no awareness of the situation they're in. Empty Box All energies are the same, or at least analogous. When mages are subject to enervation spells, all that sapped power has to go somewhere. By shaping the spell just right, a mage can make sure the end product is useful spell slots at the cost of endless, ravenous hunger. Witchblood Tincture As it turns out, spell slots are stored in the liver. By removing the liver of another mage (typically an enemy defeated in a duel) and brewing a foul, slimy oil from it, mages can carry around extra spell slots on their person. Mint helps it go down. Bone Networks Many mages working together can cast spells with a potency and consistency that no single mage can perform alone. This is useful for spellcasters willing to share their burdens with others, to reach out and be vulnerable- namely, fools and simpletons. Instead, most mages simply bind the weak to their service. With a stave made from one bone taken from each apprentice in the network, a mage can draw on their collective power without the little whelps even having to be nearby. Just make sure they don't get their hands on it. Pinned Butterfly The problem with Vancian magic isn't the spell slots themselves, some say, it's the way the spells leave your head after casting! So why not just stop that? By hollowing out a part of the mind (usually an emotion or an old memory), mages can build mental cages. When the spell tries to escape, instead it slams against a barrier of thought and is ready to be cast again mere moments later. Spells cast this way do require regular maintenance, however- if you wear it out too much, it'll start to rot in your skull, and that's a whole mess. Three-Petal Lotus Often the simplest approach is the best. This spell, when cast, gives you three spell slots, one of which is always occupied by another casting of Three-Petal Lotus. There you go! Uh, one thing to keep in mind. The spell may have some... addictive properties. It's all well and good when you've cast it once or twice and are ready to take on the world, but every once in a while an overzealous mage gets caught in a loop and has to have any recollection of the spell purged from their memory to come back to themself.

[bunchashapes]

How do you feel about Pathfinder 2e's Vancian(?) Casting (with the whole Preparing Specific Amounts of a certain spell) afaik it has alot of very mixed opinions

i don’t think i’ve heard of this but looking it up it seems….fine. definitely not how i’d want to play but definitely an interesting premise for a spellcaster

[samueldays]

I am once again reminding the public that prokopetz is full of shit and makes things up. He'd be better as an original content writer that occasionally name-drops inspirations, instead of spreading misinformation about the things he is fan-ficcing.

This is not what Vance wrote. This is not the logical conclusion of the Vancian thing. This reads like a third-hand garbled rumor by someone who heard about D&D, heard about Dying Earth, and filled in the blanks with an excuse to make a Disco Elysium hybrid game.

Firstly and most importantly, a Vancian spell is not a demon. It may summon a demon (a sandestin, to be precise) to serve the caster, but the spell is not alive. The reason it sits in your brain because the spell is originally a long ritual that takes a long time to perform and charge up. To make rituals combat-practical, the wizards developed a way to perform the first 99% beforehand, pause and hold the preparation in memory, and later finish with the last 1% on the spot as needed.

Two, "magic missile" never appears in Dying Earth. That particular spell is a product of D&D going away from original Vancian magic and towards many low-level filler spells of minimal effect. Vance's wizards cast things like the Spell of Forlorn Encystment which seals the target in a stasis chamber several miles underground. Here is what Mazirian the Magician prepares for a day:

Phandaal’s Gyrator, Felojun’s Second Hypnotic Spell, The Excellent Prismatic Spray, The Charm of Untiring Nourishment, and the Spell of the Omnipotent Sphere.

5 spells, marking him as a mighty magician able to memorize that much. (We don't learn what all of these do, but the Excellent Prismatic Spray is much like in D&D: cone of rainbow laser death.)

Three, Vance doesn't need the spells for a peanut gallery because Vance already has the aforementioned sandestins, alien creatures summoned and bound to tasks, who are sometimes uncooperative in the way one might expect of fictional aliens. Also, his different wizards and roguish protagonists do not get along, and have absurd arguments on their own about things like whether the plan should involve Cugel having explosives glued to his hat.

[palidoozy-art]

Oh god, I could gush and gush about 2CGaming’s stuff all day. Again, my ONLY complaint about them is that their stuff is scaled a bit high, so there’s certainly an adjustment period where if you’re not careful you’ll absolutely destroy your party. But they actually give you straight-up guidelines telling you how to run an “easier” encounter and a “harder” encounter. They also provide some actual guidance in how to build and run encounters for higher level parties as well!

Y’know I’ll use this post to give a shoutout to some other third party stuff I use

For Encounters, or general high-level design:

2CGaming’s Total Party Kill Bestiary 1 and 2

Giffyglyph’s Monster Maker (free older version on his website; you can get the pdf to the updated version through his patreon)

Badooga’s Monster Guidelines - He breaks down a lot of the math with encounter design, and was definitely a good starting point for me to understand how fights can be built. I also use a combination of this spreadsheet someone made as well as standard DMG xp calculations for building encounters.

Kobold Press’ Tome of Beasts (1 and 2), as well as their Creature Codex.

This monster stat cheat sheet tweaked from the DMG.

For player options

Pretty much anything KibblesTasty makes. His warlord class is SO GOOD. I use his crafting a lot as well, as a way of giving random encounters some kind of reward rather than just be time sinks.

The Warrior’s Codex - Martial enhancement, adds some cool baseline effects to weapons to make them all unique rather than just “i deal more damage.”

The Adventurer’s Domestic Handbook - because yes, if my players want to settle down and have kids I will allow them to, dammit.

Adjustments to baseline D&D economy rules - because yes my players bought a brothel and another one of my players wanted to run like 3 shops. If you don’t want to read through the blog, I’ve got the adjustments written down here:

(note: I just stretch out the total cost per day to total cost per month. Easier that way).

An Elf and an Orc had a Little Baby - OneD&D basically incorporated the upbringing part of this into the game (thank god), but we still sometimes refer to this book and its sequel to figure out what the players’ kids will be like (Kelogul’s daughter is quarter aasimar, quarter orc, half elf, for instance).

There’s probably a LOT more stuff, but this is all stuff I use routinely, in terms of 3rd party stuff.

In terms of actual alternate rules/homebrew we also use:

- Gritty Realism (not only does it fix 5e’s absolutely fucked encounters-per-day problem, as well as the short rest conundrum, but it ALSO stretches the time of the campaign out and makes the world feel significantly more lived in. It also essentially obligates downtime so players craft a lot more. Combine it with the fantasy calendar website to keep track of time in your campaign!)

- Spell Points (imo I would not use this outside of gritty realism. It definitely strengthens spellcasters, who do not need to be strengthened. However, because gritty realism is a significant ‘nerf’ to spellcasters in general, spell points helps offset it a bit. Also my players fucking love it. One of my players refuses to go back to vancian casting).

- Homebrew rule: when a player is downed and then healed and brought back up, they gain 1 level of exhaustion. This is to counteract the crazy health yoyo that is pretty endemic to the game. There’s an actual reason to not just let your party members fall so you can just bonus action healing word them now.

- Homebrew rule: when a caster casts cure wounds/mass cure wounds, or a person drinks a potion, the beneficiary may also choose to use 1 of their HD per spell level of the cure used to heal in addition. Potions allow one to use 1 HD per dice it cures.

- fun random additional note: our table has a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to not use counterspell, because all our spellcasters got together one day with me and went ‘we hate playing with counterspell’ and i went ‘yeah i agree’ and so we stopped. We have an armistice lol.

[songofsilentechoes]

Do you have a muse page for Noelle?I wanna know more about her backstory :3

// I have a little about her in my 'about' page, but it skimps on some of the backstory, I admit.

However, I'm happy to answer this for you. Wall of text below the cut.

Noelle was a character from a tabletop game I played called Invisible Sun. After the campaign I wanted to keep playing her, so moved her to tumblr when I started.

As for in-universe. Noelle was a mage studying at the Vancian Academy in her home realm's city of Saturyne. Almost everyone is a mage there, and magic is as commonplace as air. There was also a cataclysmic war that happened in the setting that she fled from...and returned after she remembered how.

Despite the magic in her setting, Noelle is a comparatively weak mage, having limited mana reserves and struggles to cast powerful spells. If she does want to cast more powerful magic, she usually has to carefully prepare a ritual for it, and likely set aside a few days to make it happen.

Currently, Noelle makes no sound. Through a quirk of the setting, nothing she touches makes noise, and this carries over to things she interacts with. For example, if she were to drop a fork, it would still fall silently, since she interacted with it last. This also made her mute.

However, she also has an ability which is somewhat less common in her realm: Runespeech. It's more of an oddity than a real power, but it allows her to create cloudy runes in the air when she speaks. After some practice, she learned how to channel magic through them, as well as use them to be her own subtitles (which is what she usually used them for).

She doesn't remember having sound, but she does remember that she used to play instruments. She didn't try to play after her return from the war's aftermath, so she believes her memories were tampered with, and that her sound was taken from her.

Her current suspect is an angel she made a pact with. They borrowed her body for a holy mission that she was too naive to ask for more details about. A month later, she regained control. After this moment, she never tried to play music, knowing it would be useless. This is the reason she suspects them.

When she was younger, she was teased for her silence at the academy, called a mime and such. Frustrated by the teasing, she decided to spite her peers by adopting the idea as her thesis project; something usually designed to be flashy and a demonstration of power.

Not being powerful herself, she had to make it unique and pragmatic. So while her overall magical power is low, her specialization is creating unseen walls and blocks. Normally it would be extraordinarily difficult for her to cast such a spell, but because she designed it as her thesis, it's easier for her.

After this, she became a student teacher, and after she advanced in rank, she became a regular teacher...but only of the fundamentals. She wasn't strong enough to be able to instruct the higher levels of magic. Still, it was enough to retire to the academic life after the group's adventures were done.

However, she began to feel listless, and one day happened upon a curio shop (@curiosofthechasm ). There, she was enchanted by the wares on display and ended up purchasing a voice. It didn't give her sound, like she'd hoped, but the voice did allow her verbal speech without needing her subtitles. In gratitude, she became a regular customer.

Crossing the store's threshold was the second time she'd crossed into a different reality or realm. The first was her escape from the war. And it was enough for her to recognize what happened. After some jobs from the proprietress of the curio shop, she learned how to tap into that ability. Most mages would brute force their way into other realms. Noelle, with her weaker mana tends to...fall through the cracks between them, instead.

This brought her to Runeterra and dozens of other realms. She's gotten herself an apartment away from her home realm, but she found that mark and recall spells work across dimensions for her. Getting TO new places is difficult, often leaving her disoriented and drained. But getting back is generally easier. This includes return trips. It's still a difficult spell for her, so she can't blink between realms rapidly.

From there, she's made new friends and explored new lands. She still works for the curio shop, but has been called upon less for work, so she tries to do other odd jobs. Delivery, Alchemy, babysitting, barista, etc.

Reinvigorated by these new experiences, she became determined to find a solution to her missing sound (which she usually refers to as a 'curse' for convenience's sake). Her experiments and efforts have been a big driving force for her main story stuff.

Which brings us to the current day.

Feel free to ask me about specifics. My ask box is always open.

[thryth-gaming]

Daggerheart - What I've Seen So Far

Template-Based Character Builds

This will be familiar to players of D&D, Pathfinder 2e, Monster of the Week and similar systems where you choose from one of several existing classes, playbooks, ancestries, backgrounds, and the like.

The selection of templates here come in three categories:

Classes

Ancestries

Communities

Classes

Classes are built along lines familiar to D&D players with the following options.

Bard

Druid

Guardian

Ranger

Rogue

Seraph

Sorcerer

Warrior

Wizard

Most of these are what they appear to be, with Fighter and Barbarian bundled together across Guardian and Warrior, with one being more tanky and the other being more damage oriented. Cleric and Paladin are represented together by Seraph.

Each of these classes has subclasses similar to D&D with each currently having two options. These subclasses start with a "Foundation" ability, moving to "Specialization" and then "Mastery". I'm curious at this moment whether in the future each subclass will have multiple Specialization and Mastery options but currently there's only one to each subclass.

Each class also has two "Domains" which determine the selection of other skills they can draw from. This has similarities to both City of Mist's themebooks, with the exception that the Domains are hardlocked to each class, and Pathfinder's Class feats, with the exception that each class is going to overlap their abilities with other classes.

For example, Warrior and Ranger each have access to the "Bone" Domain abilities while Druid and Sorcerer all have the "Arcana" Domain.

Initially, a character will have two of these abilities but they will get more as they level up, with the ability to have at most five active at any given time, with a cost to switch abilities out if you suddenly decide you need X instead of Y.

This smacks a bit of Vancian casting, spell-slots and the like, however there are two closer mechanics, one of these also from Darrington Press. In Candela Obscura you have a list of items which you can declare you have at any point, but only up to three-items. Then there's Scion 2e, where you can buy as many Knacks as you want, but you can only have a number active equal to your ranks in associated Callings.

Ancestries and Communities

These represent the character's genetic heritage, what D&D currently refers to as Races. These have a basic ability like a Daemon's "Dread Visage" helping them to intimidate others. At current moment, there doesn't appear to be a list of future abilities connected to Ancestry similar to Pathfinder's Ancestry Feats.

Similarly, Communities are similar to Backgrounds in both D&D and Pathfinder and come with a similar power to those found in Ancestries. Again, there doesn't seem to be a sign of other powers based on Community as you level up. But this is no different from Pathfinder or D&D.

Analysis

It's familiar enough to D&D and Pathfinder that a lot of people are going to be comfortable with it. The use of cards feels a bit like a gimmick, but I imagine it will make parsing through abilities a bit easier for a lot of people since you can cut down to just your abilities rather than look through the entire book. Assuming more abilities get put out as the game moves on, this is essentially not too different from D&D/Pathfinder Feats or Scion Knacks.

From a design perspective it's also a good move since new classes will only require building the basic class features and subclass features and the majority of the abilities will come from the same pool.

All in all, it's easy for D&D players to pick up and appealing enough to those of us whose home games are more of the narrative variety.

Health and Defense System

The Health System is probably the most innovative part of this game.

First, the parts of the system that are elements I've seen before:

Separate Evasion and Resilience is a thing that has been around for ages. Champions/Hero System has done it since the early 80s and it also shows up in Storyteller, Storypath, Cypher system, Mutants and Masterminds, and so on.

The combination of Stress and Wounds is also something I've seen before. Notably in City of Mist and Fate.

Armor as a resource that gets expended also is something I've seen in The Fellowship, Scion 2e, and several other such things.

Capped damage... and this is initially the one that stood out to me as the that's cool... appears in Scion 2e where the most you can deal with any attack is 2 Wounds... in a game where one Wound is enough to take out most enemies.

Low Health totals are a common build design for PbtA games, Fate, Scion 2e, World of Darkness, City of Mist, and several other games.

It's the Damage Thresholds added in here that makes this most interesting thing and where it avoids the pitfalls that affect some of these other systems (note that Fate, MotW, Scion 2e, and City of Mist are the systems I consider my "home games" so yes, I'm pointing out their pitfalls.

The Damage Thresholds allow for the fun of rolling huge numbers and building significant differences between squishies and crunchies without making balance too difficult.

Capping the damage at 3 where all players have 6 HP at base means that you're never going to have a player be one-shot. It shares this feature with Scion 2e. Though Scion 2e has the options to spend extra success on other things beside damage, so allowing for a more scenery chewing, cinematic, superheroic style of fight (the developers of the game point to the fight between Kratos and The Stranger/Baldur at the start of God of War as what they wanted for Demigod tier combat).

However, the Damage Thresholds and rolling damage are likely to be more intuitive to players only familiar with D&D.

PbtA matches low Harm/HP counts with static damage: a knife will always deal 1 Harm, for example. Similar to Scion 2e, this prevents characters from being taken out in one blow ... you know, unless the static damage is something like 6 or 8... which feels like a bad choice on behalf of the GM. But not rolling damage can be a little jarring the first couple of times you encounter it.

Those are minor issues. Scion 2e, City of Mist, Monster of the Week, and Fate were all built in a world where the big risks were already apparent and demonstrated. The differences between them and Daggerheart is significant, but which you prefer is largely going to be a matter of preference.

Hero System and old Storyteller system is where the danger of separating evasion and resilience. Hero System tanks become incredibly difficult to damage even when you do hit them because their resistances cancel out all the damage. Building attacks to get around that tends to be expensive. Likewise, high Speed or Defense characters can be just impossible to even touch... though you can counter that with area effect attacks.

In a lot of Storyteller (World of Darkness, Scion 1e, etc) systems Dexterity got marked as a "God Stat" usable for both attack and defense and where their armor mechanics were far less reliable.

Daggerheart gets around both those major balance issues. It does have the potential for some psychological downside in that rolling especially high damage rolls may feel like you're wasting effect. However, it looks like part of how they do multiple attacks or area of effect is let you roll damage and split it up between multiple attacks as you desire. So if you did a massive amount of damage, you can apply the bulk of the effect on a main enemy and scatter the remaining damage to several of the minions around them.

As far as resisting goes... a Warrior is going to be a lot harder to damage once you hit them than a Rogue, but they will still have to deal with being slowly nickel and dimed down. High Evasion characters will avoid most attacks, without the risk being pasted by a single strike.

This reduces the scenario design burden on the GM since they don't have to worry as much about overwhelming the tanks or flattening the dodgers (or casters) in a single roll.

Death Move, not Taken Out

One side note is that Daggerheart does not use a Taken Out mechanic. When your HP go to 0 you have three options:

Go out in a blaze of glory.

Risk a scar and resist death, scars are more likely the higher level you get.

Risk it all and roll hoping your Hope die is higher than your Fear die at the risk of dying flat out.

This is in comparison to Scion 2e and Fate where getting Taken Out mostly just means that you are out of the scene and death is a matter of choice and negotiation between player and GM. This presents the players from being blindsided by death and getting drama out of defeat such as being captured or separated from the group. Or... they can let their character die if they feel it is narrative enough.

Daggerheart similarly has ways to avoid death blindsiding the group and derailing campaign progress with the need to introduce a new character and the loss of story arcs that had been built up. But death still remains a risk, similar to City of Mist or Monster of the Week. (Though Monster of the Week has a significantly dramatic resurrection mechanic.)

Action Resolution System

The d12+d12 system is a bit interesting. You roll 2d12, each a different color called "duality dice". One of the dice is Hope and one is Fear. If your Hope die is higher than the Fear die, then you gain a Hope (the meta-currency of the game), but if the Fear die is higher, the GM gains a Fear (the GM's version of Hope). If the two dice are equal, that's a critical success.

They list Genesys as a Touchstone, and I can see its DNA here. Genesys uses a number of signature dice and you roll large dice pools of positive dice versus large dice pools of negative dice generating and cancelling out resources. It was not nearly as bad as I expected it to be and, in fact, I found it quite a fun system to play, but it is intimidating to a newcomer. Heck, as implied, I was doubtful of it before I played it.

This is more similar to rolling Fate dice where you roll 4d6 where the sixes are each marked with 2 blank, 2 minus, and 2 plus sides. Add those together and you get a range of effect from -4 to +4. But again, they haven't listed Fate as a direct Touchstone, so I don't think this is deliberate. If it was Hope minus Fear the comparison would be almost exact.

As a note, this d12+d12 method creates a slightly higher chance of getting a critical hit. As seen here in an Anydice comparison, the chance for a critical hit on this method, where the dice roll the same number, has an 8.33% chance of success compared to a 5% chance with rolling a natural 20... and no chance for a critical failure.

The "with Hope" and "with Fear" also allows the GM to describe a success that yet promises coming danger (succeeding with fear) or a failure that yet gives a sign that all is not lost (failing with hope).

As a note, it appears that the GM rolls a d20 instead of d12 + d12. This means that they have a narrower and more swingy success rate compared to the far more consistent and reliable PCs. PCs are going to find their results cluster around a die roll of 13, making bonuses more impactful. This is a benefit of game systems that don't use a flat curve (single die).

The choice to make rolling pairs the critical hit result neatly avoids the downside of crisis resolution methods that avoid flat curves where critical hits are either very rare or else come about as a result of a player just spending tons of resources at once to turn a good roll into an amazing on as happens in Fate (granted, I love that a lot of the success and failure of Fate is hinged more on the player choice to spend resources than on random chance, but there is something to be said for the natural 20 moment).

Speaking of Fate and spending resources, this is the point where I point out that Daggerheart is a Fortune-at-the-End system. To explain this:

Fortune-at-the-End: Barring a few special abilities, the die roll is the last step of an action resolution. Spending resources comes before you roll. D&D is Fortune-at-the-End

Fortune-in-the-Middle: Rolling the die is a middle step and the player can choose to spend resources after the die is rolled. Fate is Fortune-in-the-Middle.

Fortune-at-the-Beginning: Rolling a die would come at the start of the action, generating resources which the player then spends to accomplish things. 7th Sea is Fortune-at-the-Beginning as in it you roll dice at the start of a scene to generate "Raises" which are then spent as the scene moves forward.

A good way to describe it is as follows:

In Fortune-at-the-End when you are jumping a chasm, you gather yourself up and rush forward and then leap. The die roll happens once you are in the middle of the air and unable to do anything to alter the results.

In Fortune-in-the-Middle, you move forward taking some preparations, but die roll happens at the last possible moment you have to abort the choice. The die roll then basically determines just how much success is going to cost you. Do you abort and stay on this side? Or do you risk a minor injury to hit the other side? Will you need those resources later?

In Fortune-at-the-Beginning, the die roll happens before you decide to jump and you check to see if your roll gave you enough resources to make the jump... and then judge whether making the jump would leave you vulnerable to consequences.

I tend to favor Fortune-in-the-Middle game play and have even tended to treat D&D 5e with Inspiration (when I remember it) as a Fortune-in-the-Middle situation. I also allow players to take the Help Out move in Monster of the Week in response to other players rolling poorly.

There's a psychological element to knowing that your failure comes because you chose not to use the resources to succeed and there's a question as to whether or not you made the right decision. Especially if you choose to spend and later find you lack the resources you need to follow through to completing the overall objective. To me, random chance deciding failure can feel just frustrating... but with this, it's my choice that caused the fail.

However, I'm not inherently opposed to Fortune-at-the-End.

Narrative Initiative

Daggerheart uses a Narrative Initiative style, this means that there is not a set turn order as you would see in D&D. Rather, the characters take actions as the players at the table, including the GM, feel that it makes sense for actions to occur.

Some versions of Fate use this method, but by and large the most common style of gaming that does this are Powered by the Apocalypse games and their descendants: Forged in the Dark or... it doesn't really have a generalization since only Son of Oak is designing with City of Mist's system... but lets call it "Made in the Mist".

Scion 2e uses initiative where there are Hero turns and Enemy turns, but the Heroes all choose who goes in which turn, so in one round, the players can decide the child of Kali takes the lead while the child of Loki sets up and then reverse that order next time where the child of Loki takes advantage of the set up to give the child of Kali an opening for a big hit.

This is probably where most players are going to have the most confusion about "whose turn it is". I've already seen second hand people responding to statements of "if there's no turns then it's not a game." But again, I point at the fact that there are numerous games that now play exactly this way.

Meta-Currency

There are several Metacurrencies in gaming. In fact, when you come down to it, most RPGs run on meta-currencies including D&D with it's spell-slots, hit points, and action economy, but mostly when a gamer refers to "meta-currency" they are going to be talking about points which are used to modify rolls or trigger effects.

Fate Points might be the ur-example of this type of meta-currency, but there might be something older. Fate points are used to activate Aspects either to make a task easier or harder. Both players and GM get Fate points to do this, and they can also use Fate points to add narrative elements.

Scion 2e basically does this but names the player meta-currency "Momentum" and the GM currency "Tension". 7th Sea has "Hero Points" and "Danger Points". Fabula Ultima has "Fabula Points" and "Ultima Points". But where they name Genesys, I'm suspecting they are coming at this from there and the original version of Genesys: Star Wars FFG with it's "Light Side" and "Dark Side" points.

One of the key things that make Meta-Currency work well or poorly is in managing the economy of the points.

Fate Point economy is largely controlled by the GM and players and it can be difficult to manage. Fate Points refresh at the start of each session but are also gained by suffering inconveniences based on your Aspects. However, Fate Points are so central to the game and most Fate advice points out that the game's success hinges on making sure to keep Fate points flowing into the characters as well as making it clear to the players that when they play up the downsides then they generate resources.

In Scion 2e, Momentum is gained when the PCs roll poorly or suffer consequences from their injuries or other conditions and Tension is generated when the PCs accomplish some success, keeping a good ebb and flow between the heroes and the villains.

7th Sea, Fabula Ultima, and Genesys also all have very clearly defined ways that the meta-currency is generated.

The only meta-currency strict D&D 5e only players probably have encountered is Inspiration which is basically a Fate Points poor cousin. It feels largely tacked on and the method of gaining is so poorly sign-posted that it was almost a decade of playing the game before I learned that you're supposed to get Inspiration when you play up the personality traits from your character's Background.

So, D&D players have experience with a poorly implemented, largely unnecessary to its system, and forgettable metacurrency. This has caused the idea of metacurrency to have a bad reputation with some gamers. So Hope and Fear may be a point that generates doubt and concern from some potential players.

That said, Hope and Fear are generated in very clearly outlined methods and they are both very central to the game so that they are not easily forgotten the way Inspiration is.

Overall

Daggerheart draws from a lot of sources in terms of mechanics, but it so far blends things together quite well and most of the mechanics are fairly well-trodden ground, often with at least a decade of prior history.

I've seen games that cobble together mechanics from multiple sources rather shoddily... the 1st edition of Numenera comes to mind. This beta is much better condition that that game was finished.

It looks like a good half-step between games like D&D and narrative games. Probably hitting in the same general region as three of my home games (Scion 2e, MotW, and City of Mist) but just closer to D&D than Fate (my fourth home game).

[jormofyore]

A Review of the Playtest Animist

So, I’ve been toying with the Animist a fair bit recently, and last week got to play it in Foundry for the first time. While I am going to need more time to figure this class out, such as optimal lines of play, proper action economy, and understanding the stance dancing (literally), I am really looking forward to seeing it fully released. What I want to avoid is doing a “this sucks” and “this is super duper powerful” post, and instead say something more along the lines of what I like and don’t like. After all, most of what’s good and what isn’t is often rather subjective and dependant on the campaign and makeup of the party. I also intend to give it a proper review once it officially is released. So here are my top 3 Likes and Dislikes. Also, a curious thing: in the Foundry Playtest, there is a Vessel Spell called Trickster’s Mirrors (which is F-ing bonkers) that doesn’t appear in the “War of Immortals’ playtest. I’m guessing it’s one of the Apparitions that didn’t make it to the playtest, yet still somehow the dude who made the playtest knew about it.

Likes

First, a contentious part of the class: it’s casting. As a combination of both Vancian and spontaneous casting, I love it. If you know anything about me, it’s that I’m unironically a big fan of Vancian casting. I don’t think it has a place everywhere, and that’s part of the fun of the Animist, is that it combines the two with spontaneous options based on your Apparitions. It’s like spontaneous Vancian, making your decisions each day a key part of your approach to the game.

Apparitions (as a whole, not the individual abilities. Talk about that later.) This added level of flexibility to the class that allows you to pretend to fill a variety of roles in the part is fantastic. I especially appreciate Custodian of Groves and Gardens, because it means topping off your party after each combat without needing to rely upon Medicine; it’s a small thing, but it feels nice not having to risk rolling successfully as much.

General flexibility of roles. Need a frontliner for your party? Backliner? Support? Stealth? Damage? You’ve the option to fill it. The key takeaway here is that even when doing so, you aren’t weak at it; you’re actually pretty good and this is something I hope Paizo does more going forward: being flexible should be a bonus, not a flaw that falsely looks like a benefit. You’re still not going to be as good as a Champion if you use Discomforting Whispers, or as a good as a Fighter if you have Embodiment of Battle, but you’re still pretty solid in that role. I really hope this doesn’t get “fixed” in the final version in the form of the pre-remaster Witch.

Dislikes

Apparition Skills being tied to certain Feats. Sure, I guess it’s so you/Paizo can add more Apparitions and builds for Feats, but it’s a little confusing and you need one of those conspiracy charts from Always Sunny to be able to keep track of what is tied to what. It’s strangely constricting.

Speaking of Feats: The Animist desperately needs more, especially ones that aren’t tied to your Apparition Skills. I don’t know what else to say here, but I really hope they reveal more feats, because some levels I’m just left with a blank expression on what to take. Add to that, some of the mid to high level feats are tied to Apparition Skills, and this bothers me a lot, because while it forces you to focus (a good thing), there could be some cool combinations outside of the locked choices. Oh, and Spirit’s Sacrifice is H-I-L-A-R-I-O-U-S. Not even a reaction, just a free action to get back up from death 4 times a day.

Animistic Practice’s. I love the themes, but Apparition’s Possession is kind of…I know I said I wasn’t going to say this, but here it is: it’s kinda bad and awfully, awfully specific. And that’s in part because Apparition’s Whirl is so good. I hope they just give Apparition’s Whirl as a default feat because it really exemplifies the Shaman. Additionally, it feels a lot like “we gave the good feat to one, so their other Boons aren’t great, and did the reverse to Channeler.” Additionally, the Boon’s seem like they are given to the wrong Practice’s.

My biggest regret with this Playtest is that I did not see it and get the chance to toy with it earlier. I think I might partake in future playtests more, because I love helping balance things out and make them more playable. Sorry, this went to 3 pages in a doc and is longer than my other posts. Please let me know if you like longer dives, or if you prefer smaller bites.

Jorm out.

[wild-magick-child]

Wizardry: It's Not Witchcraft

I see all over Witchblr and across the greater magickal Tumblr Community that the general consensus is Witchcraft. I practice Wizardry, not Witchcraft. Most would likely assume that these are different terms for the same thing. You would be wrong.

There is a reason these are separate terms: they are completely different practices. "Wizard" comes from Anglo-Saxon "wysard" ("learned one"). Wizardry translates to "Art of Wisdom." The primary attribute of a Wizard is a thirst for knowledge and a keen mind. Indeed, ALL Wizards are loremasters. We are essentially the Scholars & Philosophers of the Magickal Community. That being said, Wizards often go to colleges to study with other Wizards or seek out a Master to train them in Wizardry, just as I have done. My Master was Jeremy Maloy, a Draconian Wizard who trained me in Merlynean Wizardry. An example of a Wizard college would be the Grey School of Wizardry. I go there on occasion to expand my knowledge and power.

Our Magick comes from our strong minds & the ability to focus, the ability to learn and gain knowledge. Wizardry focuses on the attainment & preservation of arcane lore. Our power comes from our vast knowledge. We spend our whole lives studying Magick from books that have been passed down by Wizards from Master to Apprentice. The more knowledge we have, the more power we have. The phrase Knowledge is Power was made by Wizards.

Whether Modern Witches like it or not, traditional lore dictates that Witch's power is granted to them by their Familiar Spirit. Witches can do nothing without the aid of spirits. Even Atheist Witches use the Superconscious Mind (a consciousness directly outside of themselves). Witchcraft is bound to the Spirit World & the Astral Plane. A Familiar Spirit is really any spirit that aids the Witch in their Magick (yes..."their" because Witch is still a gender neutral term). Another common entity that aids Witches is their Fetch. There is a good reason for this. Witches don't use Mana. Witches raise power in a Sacred Circle, called the Cone of Power.

However, Wizard's power comes from our knowledge of Magick & ability to absorb Mana from the air we breathe, food we eat, & water we drink. Wizards store mana in what we call the Core, the origin of our power in the center of our being. It (aether) comes from the Wellspring. Since we absorb aether & our bodies use it to generate Mana, that Mana has to be stored. As such, we have a natural capacity for Mana. That means our Magick is Vancian: we have a certain number of times we can cast/certain amount of power for spells before we run out of Mana. We don't "raise power." We use what we have in our Cores.

Even though Witches can specialize if they choose to, Wizards always specialize. In fact, that's the defining trait that separates Wizardry from Witchcraft. Wizardry is divided into Disciplines: areas of magickal concentration. There are 16 of them, each with a color related to the field of study:

• Loremastery (Grey) (my Discipline)

• Thaumaturgy/Sympathetic Magick (Black)

• Ceremonial Magick (White)

• Magickal Practice (Gold)

• Natural Philosophy (Silver)

• Beastmastery (Brown)

• Lifeways (Pink)

• Mathemagicks (Clear)

• Psychic Arts (Aqua)

• Alchemy (Red)

• Performance Magick (Orange)

• Divination (Yellow)

• Wortcunning (Green)

• Healing (Blue)

• Mind Magicks (Indigo)

• Cosmology (Violet)

These Disciplines also have a wavelength of Mana related to them, I call this "Mana flavors." Mana is a spectrum, a color spectrum to be precise! This is often why Wizards always have a Staff made of a specific wood. It's based on the idea that the Staff carries the magickal properties of the tree it is made from. Each tree is aligned to a specific "flavor" of Mana and is so aligned to a specific type of Magick (more on Staves later).

Staples in Wizardry are Numerology & Planetary Days/Hours. Our Magick is highly calculated based on Circumstances. We can't just cast all willy nilly. Because of this, our Magick is very Vancian. That means we have to prepare our spells AHEAD OF TIME in order to cast when we need to. For this reason, we learn the art of Dragoncrafting (for more information, check out Amber Wolfe's Druid Power). This is also why Wizards have always been heavily associated with Dragons. Our spells are often in the shape of Dragons as thoughtforms. This is not always the case but the point is we always shape our energies & spells into thoughtforms with the traits we need. That's why you will often catch me sharing a lot of stuff about Thoughtforms, Servitors, & Egregores.

The last thing of note is the Wizard's Staff. While Witches *can* have a Staff, a Wizard is required to create & use one. The Wizard's Staff is essentially part of their body. It is composed of the very essence of the Wizard who created it. It is the Wizard themselves synthesized into a Staff. Much like the concept of the Witch's Fetch. Just as a Fetch is part of a Witch naturally, the Wizard's Staff is part of the Wizard who makes it.

The Staff also has many other significances:

• Extra Power: The Staff is simply capable of drawing power from the ambient and delivering it to the linked Wizard. A linked Staff simply increases the surface area the linked Wizard has to draw mana from his surroundings.

• Mana Magnification: The Staff is essentially a focusing lens. Think of it like a water hose with a nozzle attached. Without the nozzle the water just flows and pretty much just goes wherever you point the hose. Great for watering gardens, not great when you need to power wash something. Without a Staff, a Wizard's mana flows out of them without resistance. Which is okay if you are just using your powers and don't need a "push." But for the bigger stuff like when you need to project a large amount of energy in one direction, then a Staff is needed to concentrate the Mana into a narrow beam. Like a magnifying glass in sunlight.

• Load Balancing: A Wizard uses mana when casting spells, but his ability to draw mana is probably constant over time. A Staff helps to balance the load of Mana. This prevents "short circuiting. My old Master taught me that "a Wizard's power is measured by how much energy we can continually channel at once." Remember that nerves can be fried if you force too much energy through them. Like trying to force 600 volts though a 60 volt wire.

• Mana Concentration: Instead of collecting mana within itself, the staff attracts it. This essentially creates a high mana field around the Wizard. It would in practice work much like the previous option, but would be more transparent. It would also be useful for non-combat (non-offensive) spells as the level of mana can limit what magick can work.

• Power Filtering: The Staff allows the Wizard to draw clean and stable power. It filters out spikes and "dark mana". It also filters out dips in the mana. This allows the mage to use less of the available power and time to stabilize the spell without increasing the chance of spell failure. It just makes casting spells easier and more efficient.

• Flavor Conversion: Since there are multiple flavors of mana, the Wizard is not equally efficient at using them all. The Staff collects mana the Wizard is bad at and converts it to what the Wizard actually wants. The effect is similar to extra power and power filtering options. This trait acts like a prism to light. We can use our Staves to "split" Mana into a spectrum, then transmute the Mana into what we can use. This is one of the core functions of a Staff, and is based on the type of wood the Staff is made of.

Sources:

Amber Wolfe's Druid Power

Oberon Zell's Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard

5 years of Training in Wizardry by Jeremy Maloy, a Draconian Wizard

Fairy Tail Anime

Rise of the Shield Hero Anime

Grey School of Wizardry

(I know this was made for RPGs but it's such a great source for my purposes of explanation!)

[wearesorcerer]

If you could personally have any spell form d&d to cast irl, what would it be?

I have a running list of spells I would like from D&D, but ignoring wish and prestidigitation (which allow you to use the Vancian casting system to bypass itself in favor of a freeform magic system), the absolute top of my list would be some sort of healing spell that removes conditions and afflictions (like heal or restoration, maybe regenerate).

Half of this is because I suffer from multiple chronic illnesses which in turn lead to other illnesses. Being able to remove these is a dream of mine that is proving maddeningly frustrating.

The other half, however, is recognizing that the chances of me escaping the Hellish American medical system are slim to nil, that medicine can only do so much, and that having a spell that removes any affliction (and maybe restores HP) would remove a good chunk of worry in life.

For instance, my mom fell at the end of August and broke her wrist; she is a court reporter (stenographer: she sits at the little keyboard and takes down everything in a form of shorthand) working as an official court reporter (meaning for a court, as opposed to a freelancer who either does depositions or live captions things [classes, broadcasts, etc.]), so she is having to miss weeks of work because of a very small fracture. A healing spell would eliminate this problem entirely.

My answers to real life vs. D&D will be very different because the utilitarian needs of real life overwhelmingly favor Clerical spells and miscellany like teleport and purify food and drink; D&D favors combat, which (thankfully) I rarely have had to face (and basically never in my adult life). I do still fantasize about having artillery spells; they just aren't a priority.

[homebrew-a-la-traumaverse]

Subclasseptember Day 4: Crystal

The Prismatic Domain - Homebrew Cleric Subclass

Put your spells into crystals to buff them - but you have to choose how many and which ones you want to use beforehand. Choose wisely.

Is this just Vancian Casting in a trenchcoat? Yes. You also get six flavors of blasting spells at level 6 because rainbows are awesome, actually.

Real talk though. Why is Prismatic Wall not concentration? You have seven flavors of nonsense to break through - some of which are, by RAW, technically impossible to destroy, because the required damage types don't have spells that can damage objects. You really need to concentrate on something else while doing that?