(A) Supernatural forces: Arcane magic, Divine “magic”
This is archival material from previous blog
I think I dipped in this topic before. Calling power granted to a person by divine being “magic” makes it entirely less magical but more importantly – less divine. You just use magic with different flavour. Maybe a cleric has more healing spells than a wizard but both these classes inherently use “spells”. These are not restricted by ritualistic means or religious blessings. No, you get your spell sandwiches as ordered every day for breakfast.
I kind of understand that. I mean, DnD and even games inspired by it use this duality. Today it doesn’t sound that unusual. And I also understand pragmatism of using such system for magic of both classes. Fact that 1st level clerics didn’t got spells because world was full of 1st level clerics was a nice design choice. I also understand cultural inspirations – in the end gods or rather faith and religion in DnD really kinda looks like how one could think of ancient Greek gods. And Hekate – goddess of magic – was one of them. So treating magic of divine similarly to the magic of occult is understandable. But for duck’s sake it rubs me the wrong way. I still remember how Warhammer Fantasy explained it. I mean, the fact that the priests spells are the same magic wizards use but filtered by faith based spiritual/intelligence entities from the magic realm is kind of metal. But then you get “magic armor” spell and expect players to make up their own names for it and explain it by different powers. Well, everywhere it is named “magic armor” and everybody calls it that because it’s a canon name given in rulebook. Why’d you change it?
I really don’t like spells being castable from the hip or out of finger. Both arcane and divine. I understand nuisance of all material components for spells. But I would really like spells to be something else, more ritualistic, more thematic. Imagine this – you get to cast all your divination spells, all your “let me know this stuff” but every time it takes one minute and you have to have your “diviners kit” with you. Your crystal ball, incenses, wood giving lots of smoke, tarot-ish cards and dice carved from dragon/demon/giant/any-other-magical-creature bones. And you have to take it off the backpack and spell description says you see this shit in the smoke or crystal ball or whatever and you almost cannot dismiss magical flavour of it. The same goes with other things – most of components are not perishable stuff, most are specific foci for that type of spells/school of them. Maybe some divinations need magic-bone-dice from you, the worst need smoke-wood or pipe smoking and the best divinations need very expensive crystal ball (imagine losing this stuff while climbing or sneaking through the dungeon and being unable to cast the best spells). And then wands and alchemy stuff can get into play, also missions (like in MMO rpgs) to find and collect some special items to cast certain spells.
I’d really like to see some more ritualistic magic. I read recently description of 5e spell Ceremony. And I thought – EVERY clerical spell should look like that. Need a light? Make sacrifice to god, light some incense or smear magical symbol drawn with Holy Charcoal on item which has to shine. Need blessing? Chant your prayers from book of prayers (and get mechanic of memorizing few spells available without the book). And so kind of in Knave (http://questingblog.com/knave/) style you need equipment to cast spells. Maybe less than 1 for 1 but still similar. It’s climactic – priests would walk with tonnes of their clerical stuff, always available to hand you candle, smelly stick or god-inspired tools, symbols, reliquaries.
First of all I don’t like spells being castable from the hip or out of finger. Both arcane and divine. I understand nuisance of all material components for spells. But I would really like spells to be something else, more ritualistic, more thematic. Imagine this – you get to cast all your divination spells, all your “let me know this stuff” but every time it takes one minute and you have to have your “diviners kit” with you. Your crystal ball, incenses, wood giving lots of smoke, tarot-ish cards and dice carved from dragon/demon/giant/any-other-magical-creature bones. And you have to take it off the backpack and spell description says you see this shit in the smoke or crystal ball or whatever and you almost cannot dismiss magical flavour of it. The same goes with other things – most of components are not perishable stuff, most are specific foci for that type of spells/school of them. Maybe some divinations need magic-bone-dice from you, the worst need smoke-wood or pipe smoking and the best divinations need very expensive crystal ball (and also imagine losing this stuff while climbing or sneaking through the dungeon and being unable to cast the best spells). And then like wands and alchemy stuff can get into play, also missions (like in MMO rpgs) to find and collect some special items to cast certain spells.
I’d really like to see some more ritualistic magic. I read recently description of 5e spell Ceremony. And I thought – EVERY clerical spell should look like that. Need a light? Make sacrifice to god, light some incense or smear magical symbol drawn with Holy Charcoal on item which has to shine. Need blessing? Chant your prayers from book of prayers. And so kind of like in Knave (http://questingblog.com/knave/) style you need equipment to cast spells. Maybe less than 1 for 1 but still similar. It’s climactic – priests would walk with tonnes of their clerical stuff, always available to hand you candle, smelly stick or god-inspired tools, symbols, reliquaries.
I’m not fan of spell lists. I kind of get that in case of arcanists and sciencey magic. I get you learn specific ways of magic, especially with high power. Low power magicks should be more open ended. But that’s arcane stuff, it’s based on occult uncovering secrets of universe by accident. You may know how to summon death ray but how and why it works (and why it sometimes doesn’t work) is a mystery. Yet clerical stuff? It should be based less on spells and more on powers. I see it more like OSE Turn Undead ability. So maybe Turn Unholy, Divine Knowledge, Detect Supernatural, Lay on Hands. A set of powers which could have different power level depending on your level and sacrifice and how well you walk the way of your god. Or maybe something like Genie in Heroes of Might and Magic III – you bless your allies but the blessing is randomized/decided by god(GM)? I just really, really don’t like clerics being another flavor for spellcaster.
The priesthood could be given more of “Tool of the Gods” flavour than just sleep and cast your spells. As I remember ancient Greeks visited famous oracles, had sex to please gods of fertility, drank wine to please god of partying, fought to please gods of war and sacrificed their children to cold, indifferent gods of winds blowing during their wars. Priesthood looked a lot more like in Game of Thrones (Song of Ice and Fire). Maybe that could be the case? Clerics cast their spells but don’t have full agency over the effect? It kind of misses the point of OSE-like classes, since then your abilities wouldn’t be predictable and it would be hard to play this chaos-who-knows-what-will-happen class. Investing levels to still don’t know what you could do. So I went the way of classes being additions (something like GLOG templates). Each class has a three-four special elements – monster hunters get better at surviving monstrous attacks, wilderness striders get better at surviving wilderness, and supernatural classes well.
My idea of design of such classes is that: cleric/priest/warlock/cultist whoever is using supernatural “divine” power has to have a strong disadvantage. Preachers of the Ice have their skin pale and are cold to touch and one can easily distinguish them for example. Also you can assume they are not entirely human anymore, probably infertile, probably susceptible to their masters whims. And they get inherent powers, like making place more attune to cold, make “holy” water with cold affinity, making ice unmeltable for some time or pull icy effects out of their ducks. That’s my vision of warped priesthood class. And further with levels but moreso with adventures you learn new spells and powers – but only in contact with Ice master – ruins of old cult, new Preacher mentor, reading scrolls or divining connection to Ice monstrosity granting powers. And you’ll learn some ceremonies, blessings, rituals, specific, situational, but you may learn Ice Beam, Frost Bolt, Blizzard, Thin Ice, Wall of Snow, Ice Nunchaku (yeah I’m ripping of Adventure Time). But if you don’t interact with it then maybe you lose your Ice King powers, maybe you won’t learn new spells and only stuck with starting powers, who knows.
But how this class design distinguishes “divine” casters and arcanists? Well, witches and wizards don’t stop being human. They don’t necessarily pact with alien powers to get some powers to themselves. No. They learn things easing them access to spells and rituals and ducks. But not powers from the get go. Witch can forage herbs and create some crazy duck out of them. Can enhance their will to overcome psychic interference. Can discern magical influence. Can speak secret language and decrypt secret code of local witch communities to learn actual magic and spells from witches around, their words, markings, rituals and any written texts. This would kind of control whatever magic GM plans to hand to PCs, to make successful gating for megadungeons, to make climactic decisions. This way you can decide if every spell is unique or if wizards are common enough so everyone can cast magic missile and magic hand and some cantrips. Maybe they actually need to be “divinely” changed first before being able to wield magic (kind of DCC style Magic User with patron)? Or each spell corrupts, takes some sanity, part of the soul or changes them into alien abomination. As long as there are no universal rules of how spells and magic and arcane secrets should work then there is room for growth. Of course I assume people won’t be making all this duck up as they go – most will choose one of the few popular ways of presenting and working with magic that will emerge, some homebrew 3rd party stuff but variety will be seeded. And who knows what will grow out of it.
So these are my not well described ideas over arcane and divine and how they should work in players hands. Any thoughts?