I kind of like the idea of having magic broken up into Spheres and Skills. These skills could be limited to specific Spheres (like Shadowforce Archer psi) or they could overlap, like in World of Aden.
So, for example, let's take the Sphere of Evocation (producing energies out of nothing). It might have matching skills like Conjuring Fire, Conjuring Electricity and Conjuring Light. Or... we could have a Sphere of Fire, which (if you take it) allows you to use your Conjuring skill to produce flames. But if you had the Sphere of Electricity, instead, you could still use that same Conjuring skill to throw a lightning bolt.
Basically, these are noun/verb pairs, like so many games use. The question is which should be the skills and which should be advantages/feats. And whether the skills should be very specific and only usable for their matching feat (which enforces specialization), or should be shared between feats (which encourages mages to generalize).
Ugh. No idea which I'd prefer for the setting. I'll have to think about it.
Some likely Spheres/Skills are: Fire, Earth, Air, Water, Planar Magic, and maybe even Wizardry. Wizardry isn't a Sphere as such; rather, it's a collection of specific spells stolen from other Spheres and compiled into a big list of effects. The advantage of Wizardry is being able to cast specific, preset spells that do almost anything... the disadvantage is that you can't create new Wizardry spells unless you can cast them using one of your other Spheres.
Posted by Kiz at November 10, 2004 04:41 PMCommentsPost a comment