Introducing: Psychic Sorcery

For wiki week, we have a pretty clear winner, though the Lithian Language came in close second, at least on the Patreon poll. Given the extent and difficulty of sorcery, though, I suspect putting it on the wiki will take up the whole week. This may surprise you, dear reader, if you’re not a backer, as I’ve been releasing it monthly for quite some time, which is why the Patrons voted for it.

This is a project I’ve been working on quietly for about half a year now, releasing one “college” of magic a month or so, with minor updates. We’re up to about 6 colleges now, and it’s coherent and settled enough that I feel confident releasing it. This will be a multi-part series. You can click the link below and jump straight through it, or keep reading to learn more about how it works and what I changed.

Link to Psi Wars Sorcery

“Psychic” Sorcery?

If you are a veteran of GURPS, you’re likely familiar with Sorcery; if you’re not, Sorcery replaces the skill-based magic with advantage based magic. I love it, because I tend to believe skills are an unbalanced cheap-out by GURPS and a legacy, and we should be using advantages for all of our powers. Of course, the problem with it is that you need to define all those powers. Orrrr you can use the epic amount of work Enraged Eggplant has put into it; there really is no excuse not to use Sorcery, if you like the idea of advantage-based sorcery.

But why Psychic Sorcery? Is this just some weird fetish Psi-Wars has that everything has to be Psi? Well, yes, partially. But if I explain the evolution of Psychic Sorcery, it will be more clear to you.

My original intent in Psi-Wars was that there were only two primary power systems: psionics (“Psi”-Wars) and Divine (Communion). Even Communion, though, is referred to as a sort of psychic phenomenon. “Magic” was always going to be part of Psi-Wars. Star Wars, from which it draws much inspirations, features Obi-Wan as “that old Wizard,” the Sith have “sorcerers” and most space opera draws on multiple genres and redresses them as SF; it’s a peeve of mine when people call Star Wars “Fantasy in Space” because it’s also swashbuckling in space and wild westerns in space, but yes, it is Fantasy in Space, and fantasy has wizards. There was even a word I introduced back in… Iteration 4 or 6: “Zathare” which was Lithian for “Sorcery.” So it was always going to e a thing.

But I had assumed it would evolve organically. You had telepaths, and psychic healers and psychokinetics, and you had telepaths, healers and kinetics with an occult fetish who didn’t understand their psionic abilities and instead treated them as magic and bolstered them with rituals. Very early on, when I wrote Psychic Healing-as-Power-Ups I included some of those rituals. I think those are still up on the wiki. What I found, though, was that this construction was awkward and not especially obvious. If you wanted to play a sorcerer, you had to go through, collect a bunch of psychic powers, arbitrarily apply ritual limitations to them, etc. It seemed such a hassle. Worse, a sorcerer would want a wide variety of “spells,” that’s part of the draw. This is fine, psionic abilities allow for Alternative Abilities, so I can take psychokinesis, psychic healing and telepathy as alternative abilities to… uh… hmmm. I suppose I just take the most expensive one, right? So, say I have 30 points of healing, 25 of psychokineis and 25 of telepathy, then PK and telepathy cost 5 points, right? For a total of 40 points. But if I raise Psychokinesis so I’ve spend 35, then, uh… that means it becomes the “basis” for my alternative abilities, and Healing because the Alternative Ability and Telepathy remains as it was, so we end up with, uh, 46 points? From spending 10 points on Psychokinesis and… ugh… so much paperwork, the math! THE MATH! If I don’t like the math, you definitely won’t.

So, what I really needed was a standard trait that you bought more and more points of and THAT was what you bought your alternative abilities against and oh that’s just Sorcery. Great! Why not just use that?

Well, Psi-Wars is Psi. If I introduce magic, there’s a question that arises: how is it different from psi or communion? In particular, do counter spells stop psi, and are anti-psi characters resistant to sorcery? My answer: no to the first, and yes to the second. The first has to do with the construction of sorcery spells: it CAN help you resist psi, if a spell is designed that way. But an anti-psi character should definitely be able to resist magic. I don’t want to do what Dungeon Fantasy did where it treats psi and magic as fundamentally different. Instead, just as Communion is ultimately a psychic phenomenon, so is sorcery, hence “Psychic Sorcery.”

I used Control Psychic Energy, rather than the standard “Modular Ability” version of Psi as my basis skill. I envision sorcery as, in fact, a highly flexible and fine-grained manipulation of psychic energy. White Wolf’s Trinity/Aeon features psychics (“Psions”) with the usual abilities, and their rivals were Aberrants, mutants who could control “quantum” (aka “Super”) powers. There was a specific sub-group of psychics, the Quantakinetics, who could maniplate quantum forces, allowing them to manifest any particular super power, just on a smaller scale. That sort of theory is how I imagine Sorcery to work: a Telepath uses his power to read your mind, and can simply exert himself to read your mind better, or to read it differently; the sorcerer uses his power to construct a spell that lets you read your mind, and he has to learn how do that specific spell, and there might be weird nuances that the psychic doesn’t have to deal with. The sorcerer can imitate the powers of the Telepath and other psychics, but has unique drawbacks to deal with.

What I’ve Changed

I started the project claiming I had to throw out half of Sorcery. What I actually had to throw out was most of my assumptions. I’ve learned a lot about Sorcery since beginning this project, but a few of the changes stuck around.

Control Energy

This is derived from Control Mana from Pyramid #4/1. I like the principle of the idea, and I find nobody uses the “Easy Improvisation” option of vanilla Sorcery except,perhaps, for some minor perk, or if they’re very very powerful (which is a topic I’ll come back to later). But I also find people don’t use anything but the spells when it comes to Psi-Wars Sorcery, so it doesn’t really matter: in practice people just take Sorcery as the prerequisite trait and then focus on spells. Still, it lets me offer some default tricks people can do to manipulate “ambient psionic energy” which is conceptually neat.

Ritual Magic and Casting Skills

Sorcery just uses IQ as your roll. I use IQ/VH skills based on the Ritual Magic structure: you need Ritual Magic, it places a cap on your “College skill” but it also acts as a prerequisite. The casting skill handles all rolls for a particular college. Which means, unlike Sorcery, I have colleges.

This has worked out quite well for me, because it lets me collect spells into conceptually bounded groups. I’ve seen Psi-Wars players talk about them that way: “Blood Sorcerers” as distinct from “Relic Sorcerers” and so on. It also means that when Sorcerers branch out, there is more initial investment (you’re not just rolling with straight IQ; you need to “learn” how this new college of magic works), but fairly minimal investment can rapidly broaden your capability, and you can invest more deeply in a specific subgroup of sorcery. It’s working quite well!

Structure

This is less of an explicit change and more of a peeve of mine. Have you played with Sorcery? By default, there’s nothing that stops you from learning any spell you want other than your Sorcerous Empowerment level, and what you can get at 1 or 2 is pretty meager, or seems to be. I’ve bundled everything into colleges associated with a skill and then sorted those spells by “Sorcery Level.” This makes it more obvious what you can do: a level 1 Blood Sorcery can obviously use the blood sorcery spells listed at level 1. Right? What I find this this makes magic much more immediately accessible, and suddenly reveals how really powerful and flexible sorcerers are.

And they are. I’ve talked about Sorcery before and discussed how, sure, using Advantages means you get fewer powers, but that’s because skill-based magic was overpowered. Now, I’m not sure that sentiment is even correct. The number of spells a “low level” sorcerer has is pretty prodigious provided they can handle the improvisation penalties.

This isn’t a change, it’s just a way of organization information that makes it more accessible, and makes it easier for me to bundle things together in thematic structures.

Hardcore Improvisation

With the removal of “easy” improvisation, we only have Hardcore Improvisation, and I’ve even made that harder, though mostly in the form of skill penalties you can overcome with occult themes. There’s a theme you’ll see me coming back to again and again with magic-as-lore or magic-as-discovery, so I’ve required things like books or written instructions, or fairly deep knowledge of a topic, to improvise a spell. Of course, this will also tie into style familiarity and knowledge of a tradition of sorcery, which ties into my desire to associate magic with my setting.

Ceremonial Magic and Ritual Casting

This is not something I’ve found anywhere else. I’ve introduced “Slow casting” Ceremonial Magic versions of sorcery, inspired more by Path/Book Magic (which has always been my favorite form of “skill-based” magic) than by Vanilla’s ceremonial magic. This has resulted in far more occult-feeling sorcerers, especially when it comes to Hardcore improvisation. Suddenly, they’re drawing out pentagrams in blood, gathering strange herbs and burning them while slowly chanting from the text written in their grimoire for a minute to pull off some specific, rare spell.

I also wanted Sorcerers to be able to cast far beyond their means; you know, some punk teenage wannabe-witch who decides she’s going to summon the Devil and gets way out of her depth? Or the sorcerer who is gathering a bunch of rare items and secrets so they can cast this extremely difficult immortality spell or bring their loved one back from the grave. That suggests casting beyond your means, which Sorcery frowns on. Fortunately, Enraged Eggplant again comes to the rescue with his Ritual Casting. These take the Invention rules and integrate them into sorcery, so you can cast an arbitrarily difficult spell provided you’re willing to invest serious cash and time into it. I’ve struggled with the naming conventions somewhat because “Ceremonial Magic” and “Ritual Casting” have some linguistic crossover that I’m trying to sort out, but the two ideas are present, at least, whatever I end up naming them.

Buffs and Malediction

When designing sorcery, I did what any sensible person did and consulted the expert: enraged eggplant! It quickly became apparent just how much of sorcery is built on afflictions, especially afflictions that grant advantages, because once you fire the spell, you can regain your ability to cast other spells.

Affliction has an issue in Psi-Wars, though, because Psi-Wars characters have lots of DR, and technically an Affliction needs to get past armor. My solution was to use Malediction, which has the added benefit of converting the malediction to something like an actual GURPS Magic spell: you can target anyone you can see, but you suffer -1/yard. Incidentally, the discussion converted EE on the idea of malediction-based affliction.

One weird side-effect of this is that all Buff spells become based on Will, which I didn’t like. I’ve arbitrarily shifted all such spells to IQ without making them more expensive with a Based on IQ modifier; I justify by saying this is a rule change, rather than a specific advantage change. The sorcerer certainly isn’t getting more utility this way; arguably, they’re getting less.

Sympathy

We’ll discuss “scry-and-die” mechanics more when I discuss themes, but I definitely wanted to replicate spell systems where the sorcerer can affect someone at any distance, provided they have a sympathetic connection. This involved quite some discussions with both Enraged Eggplant and Christopher Rice, but I think I have a pretty sensible system in place for handling it now.

Raw Energy

Thaumatology introduced the concept of Raw Mana, which is a concept I feel not enough people play with. In particular, and this a theme you’ll see pop up over and over again, I like “magic-as-loot.” A fighter and a mage both fight their way through a dungeon and defeat a dragon, and in the dragon’s hoard, the fighter finds a powerful (and magical!) sword, and the wizard finds some ancient tome with great secrets in it, or some other source of strange, arcane power. We might also expect sorcerers to demand that heroes go on a quest to find some precious herb or rare crystal that they need to complete some enchantment. Raw Energy, among other things, can fill this niche, acting both as a potent and interesting occult “ingredient” and as a reward for a quest.

Invocations

This was a concept that evolved out of the creation of one of my spell colleges which I’ve found myself using more often. As stated above, I like “magic-as-loot,” so I like the idea of things like scrolls or magic books that grant a character a new spell. There are other ways to handle this, such as the ability to activate whatever powers an enchanted or magical item has. Invocations work this way: if you have an item capable of an invocation you can cast a spell capable of invoking it, and you’ll get whatever effect the item has. So far in my system this mostly relates to relics (naturally occurring magical items) and herbs (if you can turn it into a potion, you can also invoke it for a similar effect).

I’m quite fond of the system, though I worry it’s too complicated, or that most sorcerers will just find an invocation spell and spend the rest of their time gathering up invocable items, though I’m not sure I wouldn’t call that a win. I love the idea of a magic user who mostly draws their power from their collection of the eclectic gewgaws they’ve put together (and can tell you endless stories about).

Curses

Finally, the last big change I’ve made is codifying the concept of a curse. These are mostly spells that have Cosmic (Immune to Neutralize) and Extended Duration (Permanent), but I’ve also attached some other concepts, such as requiring either a sympathetic connection or eye contact, and a deeper discussion of termination conditions.

I’ve also added the concept of a Death Curse, which is an example of “Save or Die” magic that most people don’t especially like, but I feel like these sorts of spells are critical to the “scry-and-die” gameplay I’m trying to create. Psi-Wars is also a setting with force swords that deal 8d damage on a hit or missiles that crack dreadoughts open, so a sorcerer killing someone off is hardly unusually powerful. But counter play is important, so I’ve built onsets into these effects, to give a perceptive character some time to break the death curse before it exacts its price.

Curses and Death Curses are integrated into a broader system of curse management. There are spells and amulets specifically designed to stop curses, or to manipulate curses, etc.

What I’ve Left The Same

Despite the long list, most things have remained completely as they were. In fact, early on, I presumed I had to change lots of things, but then when I actually played with it, I found I was making things more complicated than they needed to be.

Sorcery is actually a remarkably great system, and I wish more people would give it a chance. I’ve walked away from this experience with the conclusion that Sorcery is better than Magic. I had already concluded that, but my previous conclusion was something like “It might be worse because of X, but it’s still worth it because advantages are more fairly priced,” but now I’ve concluded that even those drawbacks don’t really exist. A sorcerer can be as powerful and flexible as a Vanilla mage. I had to relearn the old rule all GMs really should learn: master the system before you go changing it.

A Work In Progress

My plan is to integrate three major Sorcery systems into Psi-Wars: Chivare (Lithian Witchcraft), Astral Sorcery (the strange magic of the “Gods” of the parasitic, hyperdimensional Astral Lords) and the Deep Engine, and I’ve noticed that some parts of the system change with each step, and I’ve only finished Chivare of the three, so things can absolutely change between now and when everything is done.

That said, there have been smaller, less complicated forms of sorcery that have cropped up, such as Relic Sorcery and Eye Sorcery which people definitely like, especially Relic Sorcery, which is already getting used in other peoples’ campaigns despite not being fully released yet, and most of my changes have “settled” in a standard pattern, and all that really changes now are some subtle tweaks here and there, and mostly updates to specific keywords, such as Curses. So, I offered it as a Wiki Week option and people pounced on it.

Thus, keep this in mind when you read. It’s all subject to change.

Link to Psi Wars Sorcery