Nuclear Beasts

Casting Modifiers

There are a lot of factors that go into determining how hard a spell is to cast.

Base Difficulty: the power level of your spell determines its base difficulty. This is the target number you have to equal or beat to cast it. Your roll may be modified by other factors.

• Trivial: 10
• Minor: 15
• Major: 20
• Dramatic: 25
• Legendary: 30

Art Tier: how suitable your art is will modify your casting roll.

• Primary (what the art specializes in): +0
• Secondary (a different art would be better at it): -5
• Tertiary (on the fringe of being completely disallowed): -10
• Worse: impossible

Ritual: by taking extra time to cast a spell, you get a +1 to your roll, with a maximum bonus of +5. The amount of time that you have to take per +1 depends on the power level of the effect.

• Trivial: 1 minute
• Minor: 10 minutes
• Major: 1 hour
• Dramatic: 5 hours
• Legendary: 1 day

So to get a +4 bonus on a Minor spell would require a 40 minute ritual. Getting a +5 on a Legendary spell would require a continuous 5-day ritual and would probably be beyond the capabilities of a mortal caster.

Area of Effect: spells which affect multiple targets or large areas are inherently more difficult.

• Single target or no target: +0
• Small cluster of targets (max 5): -5
• Big group of targets (max 15): -10
• Huge group of targets (army, single town): -15
• Swath of countryside, valley, island: -20
• Excluding a specific target: -1 per target left out
• Excluding a readily identifyable class of targets (e.g. all humans or all non-humans): -2 per class

Duration:

• Spell happens and ends immediately: +0
• Spell with an ongoing effect that lasts as long as you continue concentrating: +0
• Spell that lasts indefinitely without concentration: -10

Mana: the local mana level has a big effect on spellcasting.

• Add the local mana rating to all casting checks unless you are using another mana source. If it's negative, it will give you a penalty.
• If you tap into your personal mana, ignore the local rating. Instead, add the amount that you choose to spend to your die roll. The maximum amount that you can spend is equal to your Drive rating.
• Priests and similar sorts have a mystical link between themselves and their deity. This means that the mana level that they experience is generally higher than their environment. The rating of a priest's connection is added to the local environment's rating but cannot increase it above the rating of the priest's connection. So a priest with a connection of +2 who enters an area with a mana rating of -5 will experience a mana rating of -3. In an area with a rating of +0, he'll see a +2. In an area with +1, he'll also see a +2 (it can't be increased above +2). In an area with a +3 or higher, he'll see no benefit at all. The strength of the connection is generally commensurate with the priest's rank, but can never be higher than the mana rating of the deity's own immediate vicinity (generally their mana rating divided by 2 and rounded down). Note that if they tap into stored mana, they do not receive this bonus.
• An alternate idea for priests is to say that they have to cast a Portal magic spell to open the link to their deity. A trivial one can give you a +1 for the scene. A minor +2, major +3, dramatic +4 and legendary gives you the deity's full mana rating as though you were right there beside him. Naturally, for really weak deities, the bonus can't exceed the benefit of being right beside them. Of course, if a priest goes to a low-mana area, they may not be able to get off this spell and thus can't open the link. Also, if the local mana is +0 or higher, you only get the higher of the local mana or your spell's bonus... you can't sit around a deity who grants +4 mana and open a link to them and get +8 in total... it'll max out at +4. What about opening a link to a +0 area, though? And would the effect benefit the caster or the whole area? I could easily see it benefitting the whole area, especially if you took a -5 to the casting roll. Perhaps it should just average the two ratings.

Misc:

• If you have a book or instructor whose skill in this art is at least 5 points higher than yours and they walk you through it, you can get a +1 bonus for every 5 points better than you they are.

Freeform Magical Effects

There's an easy way to allow for more freeform magical effects. Just say that any magical art can be used as an unskilled check, provided that you can use magic at all.

This means that if an Inferno mage wanted to cast a trivial healing spell, he'd roll KNO + 1d10 and try to equal or exceed a 10. Of course, he'd botch it 10% of the time, so this wouldn't be nearly as good as having, say, Healing Magic at +1, which would roll KNO+1+2d10 and would only botch 1% of the time.

He could also use his stored mana to give himself a boost up to his Drive rating. Between that and taking extra time, a decent mage ought to be able to cast any trivial spell effect with only a 10% chance of failure. Get a total of 9+1d10 and rolling a 1 will downgrade your result from "success" to "failure" instead of "failure" to "botch".

Another option, instead of allowing all mages to do this, would be to have an additional Edge that you could buy that allows you to make unskilled magic checks. With it, you can also learn new arts without requiring a book/tutor.

Magical Power Levels

The Power Level of an effect determines its base difficulty.

A Trivial spell can produce purely cosmetic effects and really minor and specialized effects. No foe should ever be defeated by a trivial spell... at best, it will grant you a minor advantage (+1) in a narrow circumstance. Most trivial effects could easily be duplicated with the right non-magical equipment. Difficulty 10.

A Minor spell produces a useful effect, but still not one that could easily defeat a foe. Specialized non-magical equipment could still duplicate the effect, but it would probably require special preparation and a lot of effort. Difficulty 15.

A Major spell produces a very strong and potent effect. It's not quite to the level of instantly defeating a foe, but repeatedly applications certainly could. Difficulty 20.

A Dramatic spell can instantly defeat a foe or otherwise transform the situation in a dramatic manner. Difficulty 25.

A Legendary spell produces effects that outdo even Dramatic spells. Where a Dramatic spell might burn a foe to death, a Legendary one could turn them to stone or disintegrate them entirely.

Magical Arts & Effects

The difficulty of producing an effect with a magical art is based on the intersection of two things: how difficult that effect is and how oriented the art is towards that kind of effect.

For each art you should list off the Primary Effects... the things that this art is primarily concerned with. For example, in the art of Inferno, the primary effects are producing, controlling and protecting from flame. There might be another art which is equally good at creating one of these effects, but there shouldn't be any arts which would be better at it.

The Secondary Effects are those that the art could do, but which a different art would clearly be better at. For example, the art of Inferno could extinguish fire or make an area cold by draining all of the heat out of it, but it's clear that the art of Frost would be better at cooling and the art of Oceans (water) would be better at snuffing out fire. Producing a ball of light that produced no heat would also qualify. Often a Secondary Effect could be produced by combining Primary or Secondary Effects... such a producing flame to provide the light, but controlling or reducing the heat to provide just light. Secondary Effects are always cast at -5 to the roll.

A Tertiary Effect is one that barely fits inside the definition of the art at all. For instance, with Inferno, instilling a "burning rage" in someone would be a Tertiary effect. Since it's not a real fire, but just a fire-like effect, it's on the verge of being completely outside the art. Note that there's no good way to produce a rage-like effect in someone using the Primary or Secondary effects of Inferno. Tertiary Effects are always cast at -10 to the roll.

Beyond that, you just can't do it with that art. Using Inferno to turn someone to stone just would not work. It can't be done.

Golems

The secret of creating soulstones is lost, although it's doubtless a Legendary effect from some art or another that is no longer practiced. Activating a soulstone can be done with Metamagic. It's difficulty 10 if you have detailed instructions or have done it before... and difficulty 20 if you're just trying to wing it. Critical failures generally destroy the soulstone.

The material being animated adds to the difficulty, too... sandstone works best. Wood is okay, too. Metal is -5 to the roll. Increasing the golem's size is... -5 per size step? The body has to be made from a single piece; disconnected parts won't animate properly. You want it to be high quality, too... if there are cracks and fissures you didn't notice, the golem will be unusually vulnerable.

Another Race

How about a gecko-dragon-person thingie? There was a nice pic at VCL that's kind of similar. Although I'd probably just make them into gecko people. Graceful and extremely good climbers. Probably with a sticky tongue, too.

Low Mana Zones

I may want to say that if you spend mana out of your personal pool, that you get to ignore the local Mana Rating if it's below zero. I might say that spending mana from your pool always replaces the local mana rating, to avoid real extremes where a mage goes to a +5 zone and spends 15 mana to get a +20 and work some uber-magic really easily. Oops, that's not such a problem... you're still limited by your Drive.

I kind of like the idea of a mage in a low mana zone being able to ignore the -10 for a handful of spells by spending at least 1 point of mana on them (and getting a +1 instead of a -10 for that roll). That would enable them to act at full power briefly, which fits a little better with my original concept. The last version I wrote up wouldn't be much use in a -10 zone, since they'd have to exhaust most of their energies just to overcome the -10 penalty once.

Gods & Realms

• Xualia, the Demon Queen, formerly a goddess of Love. Her palace is Philos-Aphilos, the Hate-in-Love.
• A Demon King. A god of War, formerly a god of Peace.
• A goddess who leads a small pantheon of "good" deities. They've been known to send their armies to attack weak and vulnerable realms and seize control of them before the demonic armies can. Lesser gods are sometimes forced to leave their realm and join their pantheon... or die and have their power absorbed. The head goddess has been behaving a bit more ruthlessly than normal of late... and may be falling.
• Korth, the abandoned realm. A goddess of nature once ruled it, but is believed dead. Its great jungles are slowly decaying.
• Hybris, the forsaken city. It apparently has a god or free mana source somewhere, but it's never been found. The last god to occupy it vanished mysteriously, along with most of his servants, so it's considered off-limits by the other deities for now. Also, it is strangely resistant to creating large stable portals, so only a handful of people can go through one at a time.
• Realm of the god of Wisdom (now Madness) who created the Lendehar.
• Three elemental realms... a network of tiny caverns deep underground, a vibrant blue ocean and a volcanic realm of molten fire. The air realm, if there is one, has been missing for centuries.

Magic Types Needed

• Shapeshifting. Required by gods who want to shrink down to a merely mortal size and interact with others. Also necessary for gods who want to assume a demonic form that better fits their personality. Polymorphing others would probably fall under this too, but would be harder.
• Flesh-weaving for gods who want to create new species or otherwise alter folks.
• Portals for gods who want to open paths between realms and such.
• Metamagic for general mana manipulation, gathering and merging with mana sources.
• Emotions/minds for mind-affecting stuff. Illusions might be lumped under here.
• Natural Order for making harsh, barren areas lush with life (and weather control, which is generally needed to keep that life going).
• The traditional 4 elements, just because. And it allows us to support elemental PCs. They might be called different stuff, though, like Storm, Ocean, Stone and Inferno.
• Possibly Unmaking for a Void-style disintegration/weakening art.
• Some sort of scrying/divination art? Or should that just be subsumed into the others, so that each one can scry for stuff in their specialty, but there isn't a "pure" divination-for-everything art?
• Energy fields for TK and mage-lock and creating similar effects.

Late Night Mana Musings

• The local mana rating defaults to +0 and is applied as a modifier to all spell-casting rolls.
• If you have mana stored, you can spend up to your Drive in mana points as a bonus to your roll. Maybe even after you roll, to make up the difference you need to get a success.
• Gods get a hefty casting bonus to all spells, because they have an innate mana source.
• Priests can do something to open a connection between them and their deity. When that's open, you can spend up to your Drive or your deity's Mana Rating minus the local one (whichever is smaller), in mana per spell. Basically, you're drawing mana from the higher mana level around your deity, rather than the local mana. So if you're in a Mana +1 zone and your deity provides a +3, you can spend up to 2 additional mana or your Drive, whichever is higher.
• Folks with a Drive of zero or less make lousy mages. Folks with a negative Drive might well be prohibited from working magic at all... they just can't muster the willpower required to order control magic.
• An area with a Mana Rating of -10 would give you a -10 to all spellcasting. You'd be burning through those mana points pretty quickly trying to overcome that, I think.
• Each maintained spell gives you a cumulative -1 to casting rolls. There could be a Maintain Spell meta-skill that lets you offset that many points of these penalties, though.
• An enchantment is a permanent -1, so you'd better sink some points into Maintain Spell first.
• Replace Mana Gathering with the Metamagic magical art. Metamagic gets effects like gathering mana, analyzing other spells, the generic counterspell, blocking mana flow (artificially lowering the mana rating in an area), etc. Oh, and it has the Merge With Mana Source spell (diff, say, 20+MR*5, failure = death). So mages (who tend to be good at this) are generally much better at metamagic stuff than priests (who often don't bother with it at all).
• Folks can thus skip taking Metamagic (especially if you can perform the Mana Gathering task unskilled and get your Drive+Local Mana in MP) and still be mages.
• Metamagic might also have feats like concentrating mana in a little magic circle (mana rating +1 there) or blocking an area off from mana (reducing the mana rating there).
• Drive will be critical for magery, even if you usually include Knowledge with spell casting rolls instead.
• Your effective Maintain Spell skill could also be multiplied by your personal Mana Rating +1. So a new demigod with a mana rating of +1 instantly doubles the number of spells that he can maintain without penalties. A god with a +10 MR and a +10 Maintain could maintain 100 spells simultaneously without penalties. That's particularly important if declaring someone to be a "priest" requires a permanent enchantment to create the link.
• If the magic system is too fluid for your group, just require the players to write up their spells ahead of time... they get 2x their Kno+Art or something like that. All effects can be pre-agreed upon and written up ahead of time.
  Posted by Kiz at 05:39 AM | Comments (0)

Korth

Korth was a bounteous jungle realm, ruled over by the benevolent goddess Allassara. She was a master of life magic and when she took over this barren, rocky realm, she soon transformed it into a paradise. Her non-human minions included the Korthian Giants (said to have been bred from the stock of the huge trees she populated the realm with) and the Korthian Tigers (said to have been bred from the sacred tigers which were her favorite animal). Both, of course, are actually magically modified humans, but hey.

Korth fell to invasion finally when both demon lords attacked at once. A fair number of survivors evacuated to other realms while the demon armies fought each other... the goddess was lost, believed slain by the Xualia the Demon Queen. But her true fate is unknown, since the demon lords don't exactly answer questions. She may have escaped to another realm.

Regardless, Korth has no mana sources now... the realm has slowly decayed and the jungles are growing steadily less vibrant. The realm is slowly reverting to its lifeless state. The great trees are dying (slowly, but dying) and the rains are drying up. A few colonies of Giants and Tigers remain here, awaiting the return of their goddess and blaming each other for not defending her during the final assault. Petty feuds are the order of the day... those who are exiled (often for preaching peace between the clans) may find better lives in other realms, but the zealots remain here, believing that if they pray hard enough, the goddess will come back and restore Korth to its former glory.

Rule Ideas

I like the Unknown Armies/Unknown Ages system for rating armor and weapons. Basically, you give them 3 categories (weapons could be Big [2-handed], Heavy or Penetrating). Each one increases its stats by a bit.

For armor, they suggest Rigid, Covering, and Heavy. Each one adds 3 points of protection, but makes it worse if you wear it.

They also have a similar setup for bows... which can be Large, Penetrating and/or Leveraged.

Interestingly, shields just penalize enemy attacks, but can't penalize them more than your own shield skill... and encumbrance and fatigue will penalize your shield skill, requiring a higher skill to keep seeing a benefit.

Fatigue Checks are another cute idea from Ages. You have to roll once per 4 hours in armor, even if not doing anything. Each failure gives you a cumulative -5 penalty that sticks around until you rest. There's an "Armor" skill which helps you pass these checks.

Pretentious Spell Names

I could use pretentious names for the arts.

So power over the dead might be referred to as Command the Damned.

Power over bodies could be called Weave the Flesh.

Natural Order could keep that name; it's pretentious already.

Unknown Ages

There's some really cute bits in Unknown Ages, a Conan conversion of Unknown Armies.

The magic systems are Diabolism (summoning demons), Druidism (sacrificing living things to gain power over life), Mysticism (power over minds and perception gained by living an ascetic lifestyle), Necromancy (power over death and the dead) and Wizardry (power of spoken words, particularly curses and blessings).

Wizardry is the coolest in my opinion; it's "blast" power does no harm, but requires mental checks to avoid being filled with fear and awe and can affect everyone nearby who sees & hears the wizard. The downside of this art is also really cool... whenever they cast a spell another spell gets created... whenever the wizard says something, the GM can decide that one of those waiting spells gets cast. So if he curses someone, there's a chance that magic will flow through him capriciously and his curse will take effect. But since the GM decides, it tends to happen at the worst possible moment. Thus wizards are encouraged to be quiet and to speak in riddles when they must speak.

Armor

Hm. A guy on RPG.net had an interesting solution for armor in Buffy that I might use. Basically, armor stops X points of damage and turns X more into fatigue/stun. So, let's say that you're in full plate that normally stops 8 points of damage. Now you stop 4 points and take 4 points of stun and anything beyond 8 is regular damage. I'm not sure that it's realistic for armored folks to regularly get beaten unconscious instead of being killed, but it certainly wouldn't hurt an RPG.

Magic Types

So, let's think... what sort of magical arts would be good?

1. Weather
2. 4 Elements
3. Molding/healing/boosting flesh
4. Manipulating minds/emotions
5. Creating energy fields
6. Teleportation/Portals
7. Metamagic/manipulating mana flows
8. Scrying/Divination
9. Illusions
10. Summoning/Binding creatures? Would this be fiends (evil people), avatars (evil magical people) or Things-From-Beyond?
11. Blocking/Warding/Banishing things
12. Animals
13. Health/Diseases
14. Plants

Death by Mana Deprivation

Hm. Suppose that the realms require some mana to support life? The sun in the sky, the fact that plants grow in soil that can't really support it, the fact that the atmosphere doesn't bleed off into the void... these all require some level of background mana.

So, without a god or a free mana source, most realms become dark and cold... and everything eventually dies. Even the air tends to get stale and bad. Adventuring in such realms often requires a mage with appropriate magic or bringing along magical life support devices (with their own mana stored in them, naturally).

So you want mana sources. Unfortunately, once mortals figured out that they could become gods by merging with a mana source, they did so. And gods eventually go mad. And sometimes they use their powers to leave their realm for a nicer area... after which the realm tends to shrivel up and die unless a new mana source appears there.

There could even be a few realms where they have free mana sources that they're protecting... but once someone learns about it, you're liable to be invaded. And then, the best bet is to pick your most trustworthy leader/mage and make them into a god (assuming you know how). That way, you can move the mana source if it's threatened and you get the benefit of its magical boosts.

The problem is greed, really. The only way for a god to become a more powerful god is to absorb additional mana sources. Of course, if they take all of the ones out of a realm, they can either spend lots of time there (maintaining it since the god themself is a mana source) or just abandon it. Ambitious gods are often willing to sacrifice "minor" realms... and if they find a realm with mana but no known source, they're liable to send agents there to search for it.

Sometimes it can't be found. It may be deep underground, up in the sky, or hidden away somehow. It could even be gone, but the mana level hasn't dropped yet because not enough people are using it to really affect it. Actually, that wouldn't jibe with the "everything dies without mana" bit, so maybe not.

Constitution

Hm. How would I handle stuff like Survival rolls without a Con stat? I suppose I could combine Strength & Drive for most of it. Con could even be the equivalent of the Fortitude rating.

Tygers

A race of somewhat bestial tiger people... a bit like a cross between cat-people and wookies. They are great climbers, jumpers, etc., but poor at charm and drive. They suffer from a kind of battle madness a bit like the Ahazu(sp?). Say every round that they injure someone or get injured they suffer a -1 to Knowledge, Charm, and Perception.... once it goes below zero, they can no longer long distinguish friend from foe.

Creations of a nature god who thought that bestial warriors would be better than humans... or at least more expendible than his worshippers. That god died or fled and now their home plane is a slowly decaying jungle... occupied by a small force of fiends, it'll probably eventually be abandoned completely... it's clear that the land just can't support the magically created rain forests there and the mana level is slowly fading to zero. The Tygers (Tygres? Tyroars? Eh.) are a dying breed there, but they occasionally exile members for not wanting to remain on guard in preparation for the return of their deity.

Mana Idea

Okay... suppose that your environment has a Mana Rating.

If you cast a spell whose difficulty is greater than the Mana Rating, you have to make up the difference with your own Mana Points. If it's at that level or less, you can just use ambient mana and not have to drain your own. The maximum amount of mana that can be recovered per day using the Mana Gathering skill is equal to the Mana Rating.

Thus, in a Zero Mana area, casting a trivial spell would cost 10 mana, a minor one 15, etc. All magic is difficult and expensive. Recovering mana is impossible... there's none to absorb.

In a 10 Mana area, trivial spells are free. It costs 5 mana to cast a minor one, 10 to cast a major, 15 to cast a dramatic, etc.. You can recover 10 points of mana per day, max. (Or maybe it's Mana Gathering + Mana Rating is your max, I dunno.) 10 would probably be a typical area, since it makes trivial spells free and others cost a bit.

In a 20 Mana area, even Major spells are free. A Legendary one (diff 30) would cost only 10 Mana.

The base mana rating of an area is generally equal to the strength of its mana source... or perhaps 1/2 of that? Hm. Maybe 5+MR/2? The mana rating in the vicinity of a mana source is stronger... 10+MR. If you touch it (and take MR in damage per turn) it's 10+MR*2. If you're a god, it's always 10+MR*2.

Of course, if I want "typical" mana to be 10, then maybe it should be 10 in a region with a mana source, 10+MR if you're near it and 10+MR*2 if you touch it. A deity with a MR of +5 could throw around Major spells with no cost and even Legendary ones would only cost 10 mana. Of course, he'd still have to make the skill roll, but there you go.

Your maximum mana storage rating could be equal to your environment plus your Mana Gathering skill. But if you go somewhere else, it stays put unless you stay there for weeks. Maybe just assume it always stays there.

So... with an MG skill of +5, you could typically store 15 mana. If you went to a temple with a rating of +5, you could store 20. If you then took your 20 to an area with a MR of 5, you'd keep it, but you couldn't restore your mana up above 10 (5 + your MG of 5).

Buffy Magic

I kind of like the ideas in the Buffy game for magic.

Something like:

Trivial: can annoy, amuse or be mildly useful, but can't really harm a target. Base difficulty 10.

Minor: strong enough to inflict injury, produce impressive light shows or grant someone a minor bonus. Base difficulty 15.

Major: can alter a person's emotions, inflict severe injuries or grant major bonuses/penalties. Base difficulty 20.

Dramatic: can transform living beings in really important, dramatic ways. Destructive spells can kill outright. Base difficulty 25.

Legendary: can transform people utterly and permanently. Destructive spells generally kill outright and may not leave a recognizable corpse. Base difficulty 30.

Now these difficulty ratings might be too low. But to reliably get off a Legendary spell, you'd need a skill+stat of 20, which is way, way up there.

Affects willing subjects only: diff -2
Affects a single target or no one: diff +0
Affects a small cluster of targets: diff +5
Affects a large group like everyone in a crowd: +10
Affects a huge group like an army or a town: +15
Affects a huge region of the country: +20

So a Minor spell that affects everyone in a town is going to be difficulty 30 and thus equivalent to a Legendary spell. A Legendary spell that turned everyone in the country into your abject slaves would be difficulty 50.

Make an ongoing effect semi-permanent: diff +5 (lasts until you pass through a portal or another semi-permanent enchantment gets laid upon it; may also end after a week or so due to random mana fluctuations)

Make an ongoing effect really permanent: diff +10 (lasts until dispelled). Hm. Perhaps that should be based on the local mana rating, instead, since you'll be drawing energy from it to power the ongoing effect.

Affect a deity: +Mana Rating (note that this applies even against benign spells)

Skills

How many skills do I want? More than Savage Worlds, less than D20 or Ironclaw. Hm. Lemme look at that old CP2020 list... Or maybe Pendragon.

Pendragon: Awareness, Boating, Chirurgery, Compose, Courtesy, Dancing, Fae Lore, Falconry, First Aid, Flirting, Folk Lore, Gaming, Heraldry, Hunting, Industry, Intrigue, Orate, Play Instrument, Read Language, Recognize, Religion, Romance, Singing, Stewardship, Swimming, Tourney. A bit too oriented around noblemen, but I can probably still use a few of 'em.

Awareness, Boating, Medicine, Dance, Seduction, Lore*, Gambling, Tracking, Craft, Traps, Swimming, Administration, Engineering.

Leadership, Weapon*, Dodge, Acrobatics.

Hm. Do I want them to be based on stats?

Strength: Laboring, Wrestling, Heavy Weapons*
Agility: Light Weapons*, Dodge, Acrobatics, Climbing, Swimming
Perception: Tracking, Missile Weapon*, Shield
Knowledge: Craft*, Lore*, Spellcraft*
Charm: Seduction, Diplomacy, Fast Talk
Drive: Leadership, Resolve
Intuition: Mana Gathering, Danger Sense, Detect Magic, Psychology

So, I've got * for things that might require specializations. I've got Shield as a Perception skill (if you see the attack coming, you can block it) and Heavy Weapons as a Strength-based skill (Heavy Weapons should be worse at parrying, though). Light Weapons use Agility and can parry just fine.

More Arts

Portals

• Minor spells let you detect their presence even while inactive. You can open and close simple triggered portals. You can even teleport small objects short distances by opening momentary portals.
• Major spells can teleport man-sized objects short distances and reactivate dormant portals. They can temporarily make an opaque portal transparent or cloud a normal one. They can also modify a portal so that it will jam when the next person travels through it. They can create one end of a two-part portal or open one entirely if the other end is already in place, but it won't be stable.
• Dramatic spells can create stable portals between locations. They can render a portal inactive or clear out a jammed one. They can teleport a small group of people to somewhere in the same realm. They can modify existing portals, such as adding triggers or changing their destination.
• Legendary spells can open a permanent portal to a new location without having to do anything there first. They can teleport a large group of people to anywhere in the same plane or another. They can modify all portals in a plane, including shutting them all down.

Flesh

• Minor spells can boost healing rates, cure minor diseases, evaluate someone's health or change someone's physical stats in a minor way for a brief period.
• Major spells can make flesh regenerate rapidly, cure major diseases, detect specific traits (such as illness) at great range or change someone's physical stats in a major way temporarily. Used to harm, they can open gaping wounds in people.
• Dramatic spells can bring back the recently deceased (provided that their body is mostly intact), cure or inflict major diseases on large groups of people or change someone's into another creature temporarily.
• Legendary spells can create deadly plagues that ravage kingdoms or cure them. They can turn a group of people into another form permanently. They can bring back the dead even if they have been dead for awhile or their bodies mostly destroyed.

Magic Levels

Okay. Let's try and form some general guidelines.

Trivial (diff 10, 0 MP*): Stuff too weak and unimportant to even merit being called a "Minor" spell. Can do at most 1d6 points of damage to a single target or grant a +1/-1 to a single roll. Range is generally only 3 paces. Anything created is ephemeral and vanishes at the end of the round. So easily resisted that that the average person will usually get at least a Success and might get a Critical Success.

Minor (diff 15, 1 MP): Spells that invoke or influence the Domain in minor ways. Can do at most 2d6 damage to a single target or grant a temporary +1/-1 to certain rolls. Range is up to 10 paces. Created things only last for the scene. The typical person successfully resists it about 50% of the time.

Moderate (diff 20, 3 MP):

Hmph. This isn't working for me. I can't decide what each power level should do because I haven't got any idea what I want them to be able to do. Let's step back a bit.

Elemental Fire

• Minor spells of Elemental Fire can create and extinguish small flames at close range.
• Major spells can shape and control existing fires or create/extinguish large fires at long range. They can protect people or things against burning.
• Dramatic spells can set fire to things that don't burn or create fires that don't consume (or otherwise violate the nature of what fire is). They can also perform Major effects indirectly.
• Legendary spells can produce lesser effects over a huge area, such as making a cloud rain fire or burning every person in an army to ash.

Elemental Air

• Minor spells of Elemental Air can control small breezes and predict the weather.
• Major spells can create gases of various sorts, including opaque fogs and toxic clouds. They can create powerful gales for a brief period. They can produce winds strong enough to lift the caster aloft or knock other people down.
• Dramatic spells can control the wind for an indefinite period, including producing winds strong enough to propel someone through the air at great speed. It can create, worsen or repel wind-based weather effects like hurricanes.
• Legendary spells can destroy all of the air in a large area or simply render it unbreathable to his enemies. It can change the air currents of a realm permanently or create a huge, unnaturally powerful storm.

Natural Order

• Minor spells of the Natural Order can call animals, bless plants and fortell the weather.
• Major spells can command animals, make plants grow and make minor localized weather effects like fog or sudden breezes. They can also transform the caster into an animal temporarily.
• Dramatic spells can change the weather in major ways, call down lightning on foes, animate plants or create localized natural disasters like earthquakes or floods. It can also transform a person into a plant or animal temporarily.
• Legendary spells can create huge natural disasters, change the weather permanently, or turn people into plants or animals permanently.

Spellcasting

First, your total mana capacity is equal to your Drive plus your Mana Gathering skill. Some magic items do exist which can hold mana as well.

Spells are cast by rolling Knowledge + Art + 2d10 vs the casting difficulty.

Hm. Those difficulties might be out of line. Unless we add something like giving you a +1 bonus per extra MP spent, it'll be nigh impossible to get off the top level... or even the Dramatic. Let's try again...

So a totally focused beginning character might be able to get +5 in Drive, Knowledge, Mana Gathering and a single Art. That would give him exactly 10 MP and a casting roll of +10... so if he took lots and lots of time for a +5 bonus and rolled a 15 or better, he could get off a Legendary spell. I might have to add a requirement that your skill has to be equal to the MP cost of a spell to cast it... then it would require a +10 skill before you could even attempt a Legendary spell.

That's a little more complicated, since we've added in another category ("Moderate" spells). But the numbers seem reasonable. A starting mage who specializes could cast moderate spells most of the time even without adding in any bonuses for time spent or meta-skills. He could have up to 10 MP to play with, which would cover 3 moderate spells and 1 minor before needing to recharge.

I've also ended up increasing the damage dealt a bit... Even 1 MP spells should probably do more than a sword swing, especially if the range isn't impressive. A typical shortsword blow will probably do 1d6+2, after all.

Note that with the typical person having 14 HP, a 4d6 spell will usually take them out unless they resist it partially or completely. An 8d6 spell will probably take them out even if they only take 1/2 damage... and a typical person will never even partially resist a spell that powerful, because it's a target of 35.

Keeping it simple

Let's keep it simple at first. No specializations, no knacks. A single Mana Gathering skill. Basic support for human-sized PCs (although I really want to allow pixies and giants, too). Something suitable for a playtest or two, just to see how well it works.

The Basics

1. The "average" stat is 2. The average skill for someone with training is 2 (for untrained folks, it's zero).
2. Task resolution is Stat + Skill + 2d10 vs difficulty. For a normal task, you get a critical success if you beat the target by 10+ or roll a natural 20 (both dice come up 10s). You get a botch if you roll a natural 2 (both dice come up 1s).
3. There is a special stat called Size, which is determined by your race. Size is added to Strength and subtracted from Agility. It also increases the amount of food you need, the damage you take from falls, and what areas you can fit into. "Normal sized" characters are Size zero (I might make it 2 for consistency, but zero is probably better since that way most folks can just ignore it).
4. Your basic Hit Points are equal to your Strength+Drive+10. You'll be knocked down if you get hit for more damage than your Strength + 5.
5. Hits with weapons do Weapon Damage + Strength, so even the average person gets a +2 to damage. Crits do double damage. I might add a D20-esque system where some weapons have an increased error/threat range or better multipliers on crits.
6. You have Skills and Meta-skills. Meta-skills are things like specializations, relationship ratings, and personal motivations. Meta-skills are limited to a max of +3 (+5 in a cinematic game) but will occasionally be applied as penalties instead of bonuses.
7. You'll get 60 points with which to buy stats and 60 points to buy skills. For simplicity, there will be a suggested set, such as getting two skills at +5, three at +3 and four at +2. Or two at +5, four at +3 and six at +1. Starting PCs should probably be prohibited from taking skills above +5 (that is a full quarter of their skill points in one ability).
8. Magic requires you to take Mana Gathering skill and one or more Magical Arts. Mana Gathering determines how much mana you have to play with, while the Arts are used to actually cast spells with it.
9. Your mana limit is equal to your Drive + Mana Gathering skill. A typical mage can hold 4 mp. A skilled one might have 10 or more.
10. Arts are described by keywords that represent what you have power over. Stuff like Fire, Lightning, Animals, Flesh, etc. There will be a decent-sized (but hardly comprehensive) list with guidelines for what sort of spells should be difficulty X.
11. I'm currently leaning towards 4 levels of spells (minor, major, dramatic and legendary) which correspond to difficulties 10, 20, 30 and 40. There's also a "Trivial" level, but I generally won't bother to describe that... it's any spell that fits in the theme of the Art but is too weak or useless to qualify as a "Minor" spell. Trivial spells would be difficulty 5 and no "real" mage should ever need to roll for one except under special circumstances.
12. Trivial spells are basically free so long as you have at least 1 MP left. Minor spells cost 1 MP. Major ones cost 3 MP. Dramatic ones cost 6 MP. Legendary ones cost 10 MP. Costs can be reduced by 1 MP by taking an extra round of preparation and by 2 if you take 5 minutes.
13. Mana manipulation is normally visible to the naked eye as glowing energy and little electric sparks dancing around. You can try to cast a spell without the visible effects, but it's more difficult.
14. You can get up to a +5 bonus to a skill test by taking lots and lots of time. Alternately, I might allow you to roll best 2 of 3d10 or best 2 of 4d10 instead. That would greatly shift the results up towards 20. No, actually having run the numbers, it wouldn't... best 2 of 5d10 still has an average of 13... it would be a lot more top-heavy, though. Hm.

Edges & Flaws

I see Edges as generally costing either 5 or 10 XP. A likely edge would be a Specialty or Knack... you spend 5 XP to get a new meta-skill that's a specialization of an existing skill... for example, Melee Combat With My Grandfather's Sword. It starts at +1 and can be increased normally. Like a regular meta-skill, it's limited to a max of +3.

Actually, would that be worthwhile? That's 5 points for an additional +1... 10 for a +3... That would only be worthwhile if your skill was at least +5 currently (for the +1). For the +3... it would be worth it if you had a skill of +2. So we might assume that you'll keep increasing it.

More Magic Musings

• Okay, let's go with a personal mana store. Once you use that up, you can only recharge by drawing mana from your environment.
• Priests can cast a simple spell that gets their deity's attention, then receive mana from him. Major temples have shrines that are magically linked to their deity so that some of the mana that they produce spills out here.
• All mana comes from sources referred to as Fonts. Fonts can be absorbed by mortals, who then become gods (or at least demi-gods). More often, though, they're absorbed by other gods, who add them to their own power. If a god dies, their mana font is freed, so lesser gods have to worry about being killed by more powerful ones for their mana font.
• Recharging mana from the environment requires a skill check. It might even use its own Mana Gathering skill. Priests wouldn't necessarily need that skill, but would depend on their deity for mana.
• The difficulty of recharging is based upon the amount of mana in the area. If there aren't any fonts in a realm, then it can run out of mana completely, making it practically impossible to draw any up. I might use a rule like every X points above the base you get an extra mana point... or perhaps you divide your final Mana Gathering roll by X to see how many points you get... so in a mana-poor area you'd always get just one. But I need some sort of rules for doing it that don't require a dozen rolls to recharge.
• Your maximum personal mana rating could be something like 10+DRV, or your highest mage skill + DRV. Or even your highest mage skill squared, although I think most spells are going to cost too few MP for that to really work. But I kind of like the idea of making it dependent upon your highest spell-casting skill.
• Do I want to encourage specialization? Currently, the skill-point cost system will discourage excessive specialization by making it prohibitively more and more expensive as it goes up. I could further reward generalist mages by using the sum of all of your mage skills to determine your mana limit, rather than just the highest. Or it could just be based on your stats and thus not have any basis on your skills. Or it could be based on your Mana Gathering skill... there might not even be an upper limit as such, it's just whatever you rolled... given sufficient time, it would always be based on 20+DRV+Mana Gathering.
• Hm. After writing up all of the options, I'm kind of inclined towards making your mana limit based on the Mana Gathering skill. It's a skill, so you can increase it fairly rapidly. And if we normally use just the flat value for your limit, we can let you recharge to full given enough time. Your new MP rating might be something like DRV+Mana Gathering+2d10 minus 20 (if it's lower than your current rating, there's no effect). If you take lots of time (hours), it's assumed that you roll a 20. If you want to roll, you can do it in mere minutes, but since there's only a 1-in-100 chance of getting a 20, you'll almost certainly get fewer MP. You can also super-rush it to a single round, but the roll is at -5. Powerful mages can get effectively infinite mana that way, though, by rolling DRV+Mana Gathering+2d10, subtracting 25 and still getting a decently high number.
• Let's see, if you wanted to get an average result of 5 mp despite the -5, you'd need... DRV+Mana Gathering of... 30-11=19+. Ouch. A god could do it, of course, since they get to add twice their Mana rating to this roll. We could also drop the base difficulty by 5, then you'd default to DRV+MG+5 as your max instead of DRV+MG. If you gathered mana in a region where there was a bonus to the roll, you could actually store still more MP than normal, so mages could actually supercharge themselves if they had access to a powerful mana source (assuming I allow it; it would be easy to rationalize saying that you can't hold that much mana so it bleeds off rapidly, if I wanted to).

Meta-skills

You also have a Meta-skills category which rates your meta-skills. These aren't proper skills, but represent relationships, personal motivations and obsessions. So you could take a meta-skill like "Hates Olaf the Mighty" or "Loyal to Count Morgren". Augustus would have "Hatred of Necromancers".

Meta-skills are priced just like skills, but are limited to a maximum rating of +3. You can include them as a bonus in any skill test or stat roll that they would apply to. Occasionally, they'll be applied as a penalty, such as your Hatred of Olaf the Mighty making it harder for you to heal him. But mostly they're positive ratings.

Since you buy them separately, you can get a nice, substantial (and fairly cheap) bonus that's cumulative with your skills. The +3 max keeps them from getting out of hand. Starting PCs will probably only get 6 points worth of meta-skills... enough for 6 +1s, 2 +2s or a single +3. It might be acceptable to allow meta-skills to be increased up to +5 with XP... but I think that would have to be playtested, since they overlap with regular abilities and can thus give you a big bonus.

Meta-skills cannot represent an obsession with a particular skill (no "Loves fighting with swords"). It must involve specific people... if the person you were using your skill against could be swapped out with a completely different person and you'd still get the bonus, then it's not an appropriate meta-skill.

The "person" can be somewhat general, such as a specific race or a group... Defender of Carpathians would work, since you could replace Carpathians with another nationality and lose the bonus.

Relationships & General Musings

I'm trying to think what all I want to accomplish with Hybris. Would adding a Relationships section that could be bought up like skills be worthwhile?

• The basic idea is to steal simple, workable systems from other games and build it up into a full system all its own. In my experience, even if I start with an idea that's been done before, the final version will have enough new tweaks and add-ons to make it unique.
• Stat + Skill + 2d10 vs difficulty. I decided on that after a brief discussion with Sean that made it clear to me that I really don't care all that much about the resolution system. This is simple and intuitive, even if it doesn't support the same range of effects that a dice pool system would.
• Support for a wide range of intelligent races... big ones, small ones, fast ones, slow ones, etc..
• Preferably a nifty new magic system. It could be semi-freeform (that's the way I'm currently leaning) but should have enough rules/guidelines that spell skills are about as broad as regular ones.
• Mana can only be recovered by drawing it from the environment. I'm currently divided on whether you can carry a decent amount with you (a personal mana supply that could be taken with you into a mana-dead zone) or are stuck drawing it from the environment prior to each spell. The spell-point system seems simpler, though, and certainly makes mages more useful in a mana-dead zone... and priests a lot more useful, since they can get supercharged by their deity and then carry that mana elsewhere.
• Size should basically increase your Strength and reduce your Agility. If Strength doesn't factor into your toughness/HP, then Size should.

Skill Costs Table

The cost to raise a skill by one point is equal to the rating of the new level. If you want to know the cost to take a new skill at a high rating without doing a lot of math, this table summarizes the total costs.

Skill stuff

Some ideas...

• Start out with 2 skills at +4, 4 at +2 and 6 at +1. That's a total of 12 skills and 60 points.
• We could use a general rule that you always roll just 1d10 if you're rolling a skill with a rating of zero and then give everyone a free +1 in all of the "everyman" skills. Not sure how to reconcile that with the super-simple "take these skills" system... I suppose I could just specifically state that you can move the +1 to a different skill or that you get as many extra XP as the number of +1 skills that you replaced with +2s or higher.
• Character races will probably "mess up" the point balance by changing what's considered "normal". I'm not too concerned though... I don't mind if Ogres find it cheaper to be big and strong... it would be a weird Ogre who wasn't.
• The cost to increase a skill by one point is equal to the new rating. So going from a 5 to a 6 costs 6 points. Going from a zero to a 1 costs only 1 point.
• Stats can be increased as well, but at 5x the normal cost. Racial stat adjustments don't count for this, though... so bumping up your base strength by +1 costs 5 points regardless of whether your base strength is -2 or +4.
• I could handle the "everyman skills" by just making a list and saying that if you have some leftover +1 skills, you should probably put them in these skills so that you get 2d10 instead of 1d10. They'll be super-cheap to add later, so that's not necessarily bad.
• In fact, adding a new skill could conceivably end up being too cheap, although it would probably take playtesting to see whether or not there should be a "surcharge" for buying the first point of certain skills.
• Folks could start with 60 points worth of stat boosts, too... since stats are 5x as pricey, that's only 12 points... say a +3, a +2 and 3 +1s.

Realm Types

• Major: a big, populous realm that has regular contact with Hybris and probably has a fair number of relatively stable portals (meaning as long as only a few people travel through them at a time, they'll stick around; sending an army through would break them).
• Minor: a realm that is generally only lightly populated (and often quite small). It may still have regular contact with Hybris, but it probably doesn't have as many connections as a Major realm.
• Lost: a realm which has no known connections with Hybris or the other realms. Occasionally folks from a lost realm will show up through a one-time portal, but often end up stranded. No one knows how many lost realms there are... a few scholars think that there are an infinite number, but most people scoff at that.
• Sealed: a Minor or Major realm whose deity or deities have deliberately sealed it away, breaking all connections between it and other realms. The difference between a Lost realm and a Sealed one is that the Sealed realm has been deliberately cut off and would probably automatically drift back into contact if the inhabitants stopped working to keep it sealed.
• Gathered: multiple realms can be drawn together until they actually form large connections, making them effectively a single realm... so long as sufficient magical energy is available to maintain these artificially strengthened connections. Such realms are referred to as having been "gathered" together.