The Themes Of Psychic Sorcery

Sorcery isn’t a system of magic, it’s a framework of magic. It’s up to you as the GM to provide the details of the structure and details that turn it into a true magic mystem.

Enraged Eggplant

Previously, I introduced the basic essentials of Sorcery and its rules, but rules are just the basis for how the system will run. What makes magic genuinely interesting are the options it opens up, and how those options interact with one another. That is, the spells and the structure.

I’ve talked a lot about my disdain for flexible magic systems, because I tend to believe magic is as defined by its limitations as its options. If you can just up and murder your hated enemy instantly, most people will do just that. If we instead say that to kill an opponent requires knowing their name, or eye contact, and that every time you use magic to kill, there is some sort of “price” you must pay, some karmic scale that must be rebalanced, we start to get some of the interesting choices and “counterplay” that makes a game fun. Limits, thus, allow for interesting gameplay and problem solving.

Okay, but what sort of “gameplay” and “interesting choices” do we want? Since I’m working essentially with a blank slate, I can do whatever I want within the limits of what would be appropriate for the Psi-Wars setting. So, in this post, I’ll lay out some of my design goals and inspirations, so you’ll get a sense of what direction I went with my magic.

Inspiration

Most of the time I see “Inspiration” in modern RPGs, they tend to be “Let me give you a list of the cool stuff on Netflix I watched recently .” But my intention here isn’t to talk about the best magic systems, or even my favorite magic systems, but those that I most wanted to emulate and the set of themes that most interested me for Psi-Wars.

GURPS

Not an especially shocking choice, I’m sure. Most people who run Sorcery base it on GURPS. In particular, I draw heavily from the works of Enraged Eggplant, who mostly converts existing spells, and so my sorcery also inherits something of a “Vanilla GURPS” feel. But that’s not actually the direction I am for the most.

I want my sorcery to “feel realistic.” That is, if you walked into an occult bookstore and plucked up some books on magic, I’d want my magic system to at least superficially resemble what you read in that book. This is not the first time I’ve done this. A lot of my core inspirations for Psi-Wars elements and come from the psychic research of the mid 20th century. And the best resource I’ve found for that sort of vibe is Path/Book magic from GURPS Thaumatology (though GURPS Magic Styles: Horror Magic and GURPS Powers: Nature Spirits and Animal Totems also deserve a mention). In general, when I’m at a loss for what to include in a sorcery spell set, I just pull open one of those three books and start pulling spell ideas from those.

The result is an occult “feeling,” which is definitely something I’m looking for.

Mage: the Awakening

Yes, I know, I keep saying I don’t like Flexible Magic systems and, oh look, I’m drawing inspiration from a Flexible Magic system. But Mage: the Awakening (not Mage: the Ascension) details the rules of magic for about half the book. The result is that while you have a lot of flexibility, you have that flexibility within a tightly constrained framework that creates some basic assumptions that all mages will play with, including sympathetic magic, mage sight and elements of secret, conspiratorial, occult-underground warfare that I want to emulate in Psi-Wars.

Exalted 3rd Edition

Sorcery in Exalted is a lot of fun, but generally a more high octane affair than I’m looking for in Psi-Wars, so I don’t draw much inspiration from the spells of Exalted, but Exalted 3e introduced concepts like sorcerous workings, distortion and initiation that I quite like. It also adds abilities and powers around sorcery that allow different characters to interface with the same spells in different ways. There’s interesting ways of approaching the concept of a magic user that are very useful to me.

Unknown Armies

Perhaps my favorite magic system comes from Unknown Armies. Like my GURPS inspiration, this vibes a lot like “real world magic” which is useful to me, but it tends to veer towards a sort of pop-culture take on high weirdness that definitely fits the Psi-Wars vibe. It encourages you to see the world in a different way, which is an element I’ll return to again and again, and it includes the idea of “Charges” which are experiences or items characters seek out to power their magic, which I tried to reflect with my Raw Energy rules.

Age of Magic

Age of Magic is a simple, pay-to-win, character-collecting RPG where you make teams of 4 heroes to fight other teams of 4 heroes through a modestly interesting story, while the game tries to get you to spend money on various new characters. I’m sure you’ve seen games like it; Raid: Shadow Legends, Galaxy of Heroes or Marvel Unleashed all had similar gameplay. Like most of these games, each character has a highly limited set of moves.

The reason I include it here is their mages were particularly inspired. They had various “classes” like Striker or Tank or Healer, etc, and they had factions of the game. Each faction typically had one character of every class, and so each faction had a “mage.” What made the Mage interesting was now what they could do, but how they changed the rules of the game. They would alter how their faction interacted with one another and the game itself. While I would not recommend the game overall (it was great, as far as mobile games went, but that’s damning with faint praise, as I wouldn’t recommend mobile gaming in general), it definitely made an impression on me, and I want expert sorcerers to change how other characters interface with the world.

Themes

Inspirations tell us where I get my spells, but where do I find guidance in what those spells should be doing? How do I see sorcery in the Psi-Wars setting?

Exotic

Sorcery is an alien concept in Psi-Wars. Magic in general, especially in the western conception of it, is an exotic idea. Our own magical traditions derive from (among other things!) syncretism between Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and indigenous European traditions, so we tend to see them as relating to our past, or relating to “foreign” cultures. Even more modern magic, often spelled with extraneous “k” tacked onto the end, tend to be from counter-culture movements, and thus not something ordinary, suburban, “respectable” people would engage in. Magic is a thing of mystery with a tinge of the foreign. It’s exotic!

I wanted that sense in Psi-Wars. Sorcery is not something the average character is familiar with, if we define the baseline Psi-Wars character as a plucky human adventurer with a blaster on his hip, a robot at his side, and a starfighter or corvette in the space-garage. Sorcery is something that happens in the dark confines of superstitious, backward or mysterious worlds. A Ranathim witch who worships strange, alien gods and partakes of strange, alien drugs: she uses sorcery. Or an Imperial archaeologist, exposed to the strange, eldritch ruins of a long dead Eldothic civilization may wake one day, obsessed with the sigils he found and seeking some way to master them and the secret, forbidden powers that come with them.

I had a player ask me what sort of sorcery his bog standard human would learn. The answer, then, is “he wouldn’t.” This isn’t to say humans will have no “native” traditions: there are a few I can imagine, but they tend to be isolated to conspiratorial groups or more primitive forms of humanity, such as the psychic shamanism of the Pheonix Cluster, but by and large, humanity use technology and wit and cunning to defeat their enemies, not “powers some would consider unnatural.” That’s not to say, of course, that your character can’t start off with Sorcery, but you’ll have learned it from one of these strange, alien sources.

The Weirdness of the World

While I didn’t initially articulate this theme, as I explored sorcery, I realized it was a key element to the way I see magic. See, like many veteran gamers, I went through an RPG collection phase where I tried everything under the sun, and I found I really enjoyed some magic systems over others. I used to say what I looked for was a magic system that wasn’t just “combat reskinned with elements.” But in reality, a lot of systems did things other than just combat. D&D, for example, had quite a variety of non-combat spells, but still failed to satisfy me. Working on Psi-Wars sorcery has helped me understand what I’m looking for.

I like magic systems that let you interface with the world in a new and unique way, especially if it interacts with something most people would consider mundane. It’s a concept I see over and over again popping up in my sorcery designs. Blood Sorcery doesn’t just do things with blood, it uses blood as a resource and allows you to better exploit blood. Primal Sorcery converts the herbs and animals of the world into new magic abilities. Relic sorcery lets you unlock new powers and options from Relics that most people can’t. Star sorcery means stars matter to you in completely new ways.

Unknown Armies is very good with this, with magic schools like Bibliomancy suddenly making books deeply important to the character for reasons that often have nothing to do with the actual contents of the books, but GURPS Magic itself often does this too, as much of its magic plays more like a physics simulator than a tactical engine.

Magic-as-Loot

I’ve mentioned this before too, but I love it when a game offers a spell as a reward, or when spells become random, such as a hand of spells in Magic: the Gathering or the random spell deck from Talisman. I don’t think all spells should be random: player characters should definitely have their repetoire, but offering a chance to roll on a random spell table for a new, unique spell that they can play around with can be a lot of fun.

I had noticed this early on in my RPG career: people like leveling up because they get a new toy to play with, but what if you gave players a new toy without necessarily upping all their other stats? Especially if the toy is single use, or “lasts for today only” or something like that. Then players can explore a new magical concept, and maybe it can be even a “try before you buy” affair, where characters later get the option to permanently add the spell to their collection later.

In keeping with the “Weirdness of the World,” it’s ideal if this “magic as loot” comes as a part of the exploration of the world. It’s even better when the non-sorcerers can play a long. Shadowrun and Werewolf: the Apocalypse both had interesting rewards for magic users, but they were all gated away in worlds accessible only to the magic users. The normal characters just had to twiddle their thumbs while the mage one-on-oned with the GM. D&D was better in this regard, as the fighter and rogue could join the mage in his quest through the dungeon, help him fight the monsters, and get their own loot and not feel left out.

The iconic example of this right now is Relic Sorcery, as it encourages the GM to hand out relatively low impact magic items that offer a benefit to everyone, but rarely more than a point or five of new “advantages.” Except to a relic sorcerer, where relics become like a set of scrolls. If you get a relic sorcerer in your party, I guarantee she’ll pester you over every relic you find, wanting to analyze it for its invocations and adding them to her growing collection of options she can play with.

Astral Sorcery will also explore this concept as it’s largely an attempt to put into a practice an idea I’ve had for ages about “random daily spell draws.”

Scry and Die

Scry-and-die is an old D&D exploit. The idea is to use scrying spells to explore a dungeon remotely, find the end point, and then either find some way to cast a death spell on the dungeon boss, or cast teleport to ambush them with the whole party. It was generally considered “Bad form” as it violated the premise of the game, but some games, like Mage: the Awakening, were built from the ground up to handle such gameplay.

Such a system, if correctly devised, results in a sort of occult “cold war” where mutually assured destruction keeps mages in check. You have the spells that could instantly kill another mage, but you need to, first of all, find that mage, bypass whatever defenses they might have erected, gain access to whatever resource is necessary to enact the spell, and then, after you’ve done the deed, you need to get away with it, because his allies will certainly notice the unusual death, and will begin to investigate and if they determine you did it, well, they’ll retaliate with their own scry-and-die.

The result is similar to a spy game. Characters skulk in the dark, researching one another, hiding from one another while trying to figure out what’s really going on. If you’ve ever played GURPS Cabal, it has a similar vibe. This “sorcerers as cold war spies” might seem at odds with the Psi-Wars aesthetic, but Psi-Wars is based on Action, and Action is definitely based on spy thrillers and cold-war spy stories, though usually the more cinematic versions. Sorcerers hiding their actions under the veil of conspiracy while gathering the necessary elements to ensure the death of their rival, perhaps even cursing the hero to die in a day unless they can kill the sorcerer first. Action even has the rules required for performing the investigations necessary to unravel said conspiracies.

Getting this sort of gameplay right is difficult, and can easily become unbalanced. I’m not certain if I’ve hit the right notes, because to make it work really requires a player who’s willing to exploit the hell out of it, while most players I’ve seen interacting with Sorcery have been more of the “Ooo a neat new spell! I wanna play with it!” sort of player.

Sorcery and the Psi-Wars Setting

Of course, this Sorcery isn’t a system in a vacuum. It’s part of a spooky, pulpy, conspiratorial-Action space opera setting which draws inspiration from Star Wars. It needs to hit some SF-as-Fantasy notes, it needs to hit some conspiratorial notes, it needs sorcerers to be comparable in power with commandos and space knight. But in particular, it needs to fit into the various parts of the setting that already exist.

The way I usually integrate my character traits into the setting is with styles and Sorcery will be no exception. I’ll be breaking down sorcery into major traditions and minor traditions.

The major traditions are the big ones that most Psi-Wars veterans should be familiar with. These are almost always “Lithian” in origin, native to the Umbral Rim.

• Chivare: Lithian Witchcraft, with which the chiva, or witches, of Lithian culture heal others, protect them from ghosts or corruption, speak for the gods, or master the natural world. This has four casting skills: Blood Sorcery, Primal Sorcery, Shadow Sorcery and Star Sorcery. There will be a “secret, forbidden” fifth set of spells based on Lithian “monsters”: the Matra (ogres), Temkor (man-eating worms), Venetim (intelligence-stealing manticores) and Lafre (dragons). The base version of Chivare is (almost) done, and will be released to backers next month.
• Astral Sorcery: This will be the magic of the Astral Lords, the winners of one of the Race polls of the Umbral Rim; hyperdimensional psychic parasites that seek to possess and control other races. It’ll explore random magic, and the idea of “secret mechanics” that require investigation and exploration to fully understand. It’s got quite a few prototype colleges that are half finished.
• Deep Engine: The sufficiently advanced technology of the Eldoth. This one is in a weird place, as it’s technically already finished, but needs a complete revamp to fit into the new model, but I’m not sure how that new model should look.
• Zathare: A lithian “magpie” tradition that steals from the spells of other traditions. It’ll be last, mostly since it will have very few spells of its own, and acts more like a lens on the other traditions.

Minor traditions are more of a new concept, because I don’t want all sorcery to be stuck in the Umbral Rim. There’s currently only one concept in the works, which is Relic Sorcery, though I’m not sure how it will look. I can think of plenty of skills and traits to give it, but only one casting skill. That might have to be how these minor traditions work.

Generic Sorcery

It wouldn’t be a wiki week post without, you know, some wiki updates, so here’s the next one:

• Generic Sorcery

These represent spells any sorcerer can learn and can cast using any casting skill. They’re generally default “workhorse” spells that either defeat other spells, manipulate spell signatures, or investigate spells. They are essential for a scry-and-die sort of game, but they’re not the sort of spells most sorcerers will care a great deal about. They’re just a foundation that supports the other colleges.