It’s been a long Wiki Week! As noted before, the winner for Patreon was Sorcery. The winner for SubscriberStar was House Tan-Shai. I’ve been discussing Sorcery all week, but let me drop the major wiki week updates here and then discuss the design notes after the jump.
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.
Continue reading “The Themes Of 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
Continue reading “Introducing: Psychic Sorcery”I want to complain.
I’m winding up Chivare and the last college, Primal Sorcery, which integrates certain aspects of herbalism/alchemy for our Lithian Witches and, pleased with the result, I began to work cautiously on some Wilwatiktan material (an unfortunate computer crash wiped out some of it, alas), and I began to work on poisons when I noticed something.
Poison is crazy.
My GM wouldn’t let me put cyanide on my rapier
Autumn Rain
I began by cataloging all of the various poisons to decide what precise toxins would show up in the Wilwatiktan environment when I noticed that some of these poisons are just insane. Sure, I expected something like Utra-Tech nerve poison to be dangerous. I didn’t expect primitive poisons to be absurd. Does anyone actually read these?
Let me explain what I mean. The Death potion, the most dreadful and terrible poison available to an alchemist, inflicts 4d toxic damage unless you succeed at an HT roll, in which case it’s so bad it still inflicts 2d toxic damage. TO me, this is the benchmark of a dangerous alchemical poison.
Cyanide, by contrast, deals 4d toxic damage with no roll to resist. It is more dangerous than the Death Potion.
I’m not sure what to make of this. Presumably, if you’re investing deeply into malicious forms of alchemy, it’s to trade in more lethal poisons than what one can find in nature. How are we to fix this?
Continue reading “The Problem with Poison”
My Backers have been getting little previews of Sorcery for awhile, which is an ongoing process. Today, I dropped the latest update on the current state of Psi-Wars sorcery, including two new colleges of Sorcery for Psi-Wars:
I’ve also included in this update a design dairy, and the current state of Psychic Sorcery and the current “Generic Spell Book” for the setting.
I’m quite pleased with both, but especially Relic Sorcery. I’ve wanted to include some “generic” magic here and there, rather than limiting everything to specific traditions of sorcery. Not every Psi-Wars sorcerer is a Chiva or a Deep Engine user. There should be scattered traditions. When I came up with the idea of using the latent energies found in relics to power sorcery, I thought it fit the setting, and my design goals so well. I prefer sorcery that changes how players interact with the setting, encourages deep investment in the setting, and allows the GM to reward the players with new spells to explore. Relic Sorcery did all of this, by encouraging players to invest in relics, and adding a new dimension to the urgency with which some relics are pursued. It also gave the idea of invocations, the idea of spells and magical effects unique to specific relics.
Of course, to make Relic Sorcery Work, I needed Relics. We’ve had Relics since… Iteration 4? 3? For ages now. But they’ve never been worked it out in fine detail, which means I don’t actually use them that much. What should they do? Well, I had a vague idea, but having a specific list of fine details would be nice, and since I needed it for Relic Sorcery, I finally sat down to work it out.
I still need to expand on the concepts found in Relics. In particular, I think we need some fine detail examples of relics that GMs can just grab and go, but I wanted to release it, and it was already at ~30k words, so it’s probably “enough.”
Relics are a release available to all Patrons/Subscribers. I figure the concept is generic enough that I think all GURPS players might find value in it. This includes some minor edits pointed out by the first crop of readers, so if you’ve already picked it up, it might be worth looking at again, to get the minor fixes.
The Fourth Iteration of Psychic Sorcery, including Shadow Sorcery and Relic Sorcery, available to all Fellow Travelers and better, as it’s Psi-Wars specific. You can pick it up here:
Thank you, as always, for backing this work. It’s been a blast writing this stuff, and I hope you enjoy this material and find it useful.
My work on Psychic Sorcery for Psi-Wars continues at an excellent pace. I’ve been focused on Chivare, Lithian Witchcraft, which draws a lot of inspiration from “Sith Sorcery” and both systems have alchemy. Plus we expect someone called a “witch” to engage in some sort of herbalism and stirring boiling cauldrons of something. It helps the “space fantasy” aesthetic to see space knights visiting a space witch to buy space healing potions, after all. So, I want alchemy in Psi-Wars, always have.
But I keep running into problems when it comes to Psi-Wars and Alchemy, sticky issues I can’t really resolve, and I thought I’d talk it out in a post to see if that helps, or if it tickles a useful insight from a reader.
Continue reading “Psi-Wars: Drugs vs Alchemy”
You don’t necessarily have to keep the same results, the potions can interact with the Hours and local planet and sanctity level and and and…
Shinanoki
This seems like a really interesting idea, but to make it work, I need to give the Hours modifiers, which I need to do anyway, as they’re a prime candidate for anti-path modifiers. I’ve put this off for awhile, but I’m not sure why (perhaps just getting distracted), so let’s dive into a minimal sort of working concept here.
I’m sure I’ve talked about them before, but if they’re not on the wiki, I can’t be certain you know what I’m talking about, so permit me a quick rehash for those who might be new to the idea.
The idea first came up in the Great Book of Destiny, but I’ve found it very useful to borrow as a broader concept. See, GURPS Thaumatology often has temporal modifiers, things like the time of day or the season or where the stars align. But this makes little sense on a galactic scale. What does the Zodiac mean when you’re well beyond Earth on the other side of the galaxy so that the constellations that make up the zodiac aren’t even visible anymore? What does it matter to a hell world with a year-long day and a day-long year, or an “eyeball” tide-locked world that doesn’t even have a day, that the northern hemisphere of Earth is currently experiencing autumn? So I had dismissed the idea of time as an interesting modifier.
And yet, time is so great, because we need to wait for precise moments, which is great as a narrative conceit. If the “stars will align” in about a month, and the bad guys aim to sacrifice the curly-haired librarian love interest in our pulpy story, then we suddenly have a clock on the adventure and that’s great.
So I came up with an arbitrary time system called “the Hours” (a name ripped straight from Cultist Simulator). The idea is four separate “times” that resemble important times of the day or times of the year enough to be intuitive to the reader or the player. When do the Hours change, though? Well, we can’t know, can we? We can assign it to the rotation of planets, but what if you’re not on a planet, or the planet doesn’t rotate? So, for the Great Book of Destiny, I assigned it to moments of destiny. The Galaxy itself has these “hours” and how they change is obscure and difficult to understand and you need to be some sort of expert fortune teller to know (which is not the craziest concept; I’m pretty convinced that the reason we invented astrology in the first place was so that Egyptians could read the seasons affecting the meltwater that fed the flooding of the Nile from half a continent away). I tended to see them changing as based on events in game, because it was tied to “Destiny.” So when adventurers first showed upon a world or began an adventure, perhaps it was the Hour of Ending, and everything sucked and was building up to the death of a major NPC, and once that NPC was killed, we could move the hour to Midnight and fate becomes its darkest and hardest to predict, and the players must work to revive hope and advance the Hour to the Primal Hour. Is it a little weird that the “hour” of the entire galaxy is determined by the actions of a few heroes on one planet? Well, this is pulp space opera, so I think its fine as a narrative concept.
Making it difficult to grasp without specialized skills also made this a “hidden mechanic” that we could play with, this arbitrary changing of values that might not be obvious to the player: what was easy or plausible yesterday is suddenly difficult now. Why? Hmmm, you don’t know, but there is an underlying system more than just GM capriciousness, and characters “in the know” can manipulate that system.
So this was the idea behind the hours: a deliberately obfuscated system that plays with time and moments of destiny to create a different occult “charge” throughout the galaxy as a wholly optional concept. While totally optional, it does sound like a good source of Communion modifiers, though, doesn’t it? They shouldn’t be the only source, but at least one source.
But for that, we need modifiers. So, onto the point of the post!
Continue reading “Communion Modifiers: the Hours”
Oh alchemy. What am I going to do with you?
Why are we even talking about alchemy and Psi-Wars? I imagine as soon as I mention “Psi-Wars Witchcraft” a die-hard Psi-Wars fan pictures a Ranathim witch over her cauldron, and that’s indeed the core reason to have it. When it comes to space opera, I hate the term “space fantasy” because it’s too narrow in scope: space opera also encompasses space westerns and space pulp adventure and space super-heroes, etc, but I want it noted that parts of the setting are very “space fantasy,” and I’ve always wanted “sith alchemy” and the crazy witchcraft of the Nightsisters to find their way into Psi-Wars, especially in the Umbral Rim. We might expect to go to a primitive world, and have an alien shaman treat our blaster wounds with a strange mixture of xenological herbs. We want to go to a sultry (they’re always sultry), bone-talisman-wearing Ranathim witch to get that strange potion you need for that extra boost to defeat the enemy. We expect magic, and part of that magic is cauldrons with bubbling, glowing liquids, quests for odd alien herbs and mystical healers.
So how do we get that into Psi-Wars? We already have the mystics and I’m working on the witchcraft-as-powers, but what about our bubbling cauldrons? How do we add Alchemy to Psi-Wars? This has weighed on my mind for a long time (you can see it a bit when I discuss the Mephitic Witches of Wilwatikta). I thought I’d make a post to break down my thoughts on everything.
Continue reading “More Psi-Wars Witchcraft: Alchemy and Herbal Lore”
I’ve got a few posts I’m working on. I’ve not forgotten Wilwatikta, and there’s some stuff I want to share from someone else that will come soon enough, I’ve just had a busy work week and the kids have the week off from school, so I don’t have much time to myself.
However, I have been taking the time to work on the Psychic Sorcery of Psi-Wars. I’ve discussed it before and why I think it needs to exist, and given the excitement coming from the Secret Council, it seems most of you agree. They’ve been asking me to drop my notes, but one of the problems is that, first, I see sorcery as a series of cohesive systems that need to have some integration before they’ll make sense, and because this is an ongoing experience where I tend to discover themes and mechanical needs as I go. So I’ve put off releasing what I have as I double down and finish one of those cohesive systems.
I’ve been trying to write “a spell a day” for a few months now, but sometimes everything clicks into place, and I’ve had a burst of creativity regarding on of the systems I want in place: Chivare, or Ranathim (Lithian?) Witchcraft, and I’ve had a burst of spells (I’m up to about 35), though I’m in the midst of a reorganization. In particular, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the charms and talismans that the chivana often create and bestow upon others. See, I see them as a major element of Lithian society, especially beyond the edges of the core of Lithian culture. If you’re on some place like Sarai or the Blood Moon of Charybdis and you have a religious, spiritual or magical problem, you go to a temple. If you’re poor or you don’t have a temple around, you might go to a chiva, and because their art is far more portable than entire temples and whole religions, if you’re on a world like Kronos, where there are no temples or vast religions, you go to a chiva instead. But they matter on a more day-to-day level. Just a like a medieval knight might go to a priest for a blessing, or a fantasy barbarian might visit a druid or a shaman, a Ranathim satemo might to go a chiva for a blessing or for a protective charm or talisman.
Specifically this one:
Shield Charm: This probability-manipulating psychotronic charm, typically resembles a belt buckle or brooch decorated with occult patterns and a colored crystal with a faint glow. This charm protects the wearer from the first ranged attack of 9d or less; this will also defend against several hits if they total 9d or less and all hit as part of the same attack (for example, someone hit by three shots from a single blaster pistol rapid fire attack). This defense triggers after the character has rolled their Active Defense, if any, but before damage is rolled. The charm manipulates probability so the attack will simply miss by chance. It offers no protection against melee attacks. After it has discharged its defense, the gem loses its glow, and it takes ten seconds for the charge to recover. For reasons unknown (the Ranathim claim you must have faith in the charm, but psychic experts think it may be because the probability field grounds out in too much worn metal), the charm will not work if the character wears too much armor: a single layer of layerable armor or armor marked as “clothing” is permissible, but nothing more. The benefits of a Shield Charm cannot be stacked. $10,000, 0.3 lbs.
It’s a on the Lithian armor section, and I thought it covered both the Ranathim need to be as naked as possible combined with their space fantasy aesthetic and the need for PCs to have some access to protection. I’ve even seen PCs making good use of them in Wanderers of Dhim.
So where does this Shield Charm come from? Is it psychotronic or is it an enchanged talisman? Well, this is a point I’m not fully certain on myself. I think the answer is “yes.” I think these started as luck charms from Ranathim witches, but I think over time the process became more reproducible and psychotronic, but I think there’s always this element of “space magic” to things like shield charms. So if we say that they come at least in part from Ranathim witches, and who doesn’t want to go into a spooky and beautiful Ranathim woman’s occult shop to pick up some trinket that she swears will protect you from harm, then we find ourselves in a pickle.
How much should a shield charm cost?
Continue reading “The Economics of Witchcraft”
Sometimes, I just can’t get something out of my head. Back in the good ol’ days of the blog, it would end up as a blog series. Lately, since I need to curate my material more, I hesitate to just brainstorm on the blog, but perhaps that’s a bad approach. After all, the point of this blog is to blather on in a way that gets my juices flowing, which helps me to think, and helps you to think about your own setting, and often starts a conversation. So while this post may or may not result in some changes to Psi-Wars, it will be useful for me to get some thoughts straightened out, and perhaps to inspire you as well, dear reader. Consider this less of an “article” and more a musing.
So here it goes: The though I can’t get out of my head is “Does Psi-Wars need magic?”
Psi-Wars has psychic powers and divine favor. Does it really need yet another powers system? What would “magic” add that psychic powers and divine favor already don’t? If you want to curse someone, you use your powers, or you call on God. If you want to wiggle your fingers and mutter incantations, you buy your curse ability with some additional limitations, right? Or you add a bunch of ritual trappings to your divine favor and it feels like magic. An additional system would clutter things up.
And yet, it lingers, in my mind. Why?
I’ve noticed a few things. The first was a discussion about the nature of psychic powers and their expense. There was an argument in favor of using Psi-As-Magic. The argument was that psychic powers cost so much that you can’t really get much in the way of flexibility and I personally find this to be true. A wizard might be able to light a candle, put someone to sleep, remove a curse, and bind someone from speaking a particular truth, while a psychic rarely works that way. Magic users are broad and flexible while psychics tend to be narrow and focused.
If I can expand upon this point, I notice that people tend to invest deeply in psychic powers, and they tend to start to revolve conceptually around a single point. For example, if you play as a telepath, chances are, you’re going to buy a single telepathy ability. For example, you might take Telerecieve. You will begin to dump more and more points int Telerecieve, as it can get quite expensive, and you may begin to invest in the skill and its techniques. You can easily invest 50 points in telerecieve and associated tricks. And if you do decide to expand beyond that, it’s more likely that you’ll invest in another related telepathy ability, such as Telesend, or maybe Mental Blow, rather than something completely off-theme, like Visions or TK-Squeeze. This is partially because of the way psionic talents work, but it’s also conceptual. Once you decide to play as a telepath, you begin to think of your character as a telepath. With a limited number of points, and the high cost in abilities, you’re not going to transition over into, for example, TK-Grab, because not only does your talent not help, but you’d need to invest a good 25+ points into it before you really started to see decent results in that new arena, and it wouldn’t necessarily synergize with your Telepathy.
Magic, by contrast, seems to be more conceptually eclectic. We have less difficulty imagining a sorcerer who learns to magically open locked doors and also how to understand the language of birds. They’re just two different spells. We may tend to focus our wizards in particular directions: one wizard might be more focused on fire while another on necromancy, but we also expect these spells to have a low buy-in cost: if igniting a flame or sensing a corpse is only a couple of points, then it’s easier to justify a brief excursion outside of your central premise, because you don’t need to make a major investment.
A magic spell is also more of a self-contained concept. Like we might imagine a spell that lets a character understand the speech of birds, or determine who somebody loves. It tends to be discrete, highly specific and done with great intention: “I cast detect love interest” and then you detect someone’s love interest. Psionic powers, by contrast, are part of who you are. If you are a telepath, you can presumably sense what people are thinking without even meaning to. You can reach out to another with just a thought. You need no special incantations or unique conditions anymore than a swordsman needs special conditions to will his hand to draw his blade. It’s a part of you, and this is part of why it has a more ingrained conceptual element, and a higher cost.
And this brings us to the second unique element I see: where psychic powers seem mostly based on innate potential, magic seems mostly based on knowledge. To be sure, psychic powers involve skill and training, but the premise of psionics is that your character can read minds (or see the future or heal with a touch, etc), and they need to train this inherent talent, and then they can expand its power and flexibility. It is like a super-power. Magic, by contrast, is more about knowledge of the world. We usually see wizards as somehow set apart, typically by the magery trait, but in principle, if one wizard can do something, another wizard can do it, all that separates them is knowledge. The specifics here vary: magic could be an inherent force in the world and those with magery are just more naturally attuned to it, or magery is sort of a single “power” that all mages share, but in the end, what differentiates one wizard from another is not what their potential talent is, as these are more-or-less the same for all wizards, but the strength of that talent and the number of secrets they have mastered and their understanding of the lore of the setting.
If a psychic is a super-hero, a wizard is a scholar (and someone who uses Divine Favor is a conduit and a pawn of vast powers they can never fully control).
And Psi-Wars definitely has this niche. We have two traditions that are literally magic users: the Zathan sorcerers and the Chiva witches. Both are associated with the Umbral Rim, but when you start looking very close at things like the Asrathi Witchcat traditions, or people who use the Deep Engine, or archaeologists who go out looking for arcane secrets in lost ruins, and it starts to feel like there’s a real niche for a character with a broad and eclectic blend of smaller, more subtle powers that are based more on knowledge of a tradition and secrets than of a discipline and body of techniques for a specific power.
For the sake of argument, let us say that I have convinced you that Psi-Wars needs magic. Okay, now what? What would it look like?
First, some hard constraints. I don’t want to use GURPS Magic; there’s a reason I reference sorcery in the title. Psi-Wars is heavily invested in advantage-based effects, and magic would threaten to short circuit that. Also, the work in creating a bunch of advantage-based spells is made much easier by the fact that so many effects already exist in Psi-Wars. Presumably, whatever rules this magic works by would somehow be related to the phenomenon of psionic powers and communion, as they’re all extensions of the same sort of thing. Ergo, the ability to heal people or curse them would look similar if it were a psychic power or a divine favor or a magic spell. So, we’d use Sorcery, though perhaps a heavily modified version, or perhaps even entirely unique.
Second, I don’t want a bunch of independent systems for each magical tradition. Whatever this would be would fold the Deep Engine, Chiva witchcraft and whatever else I come up with, as much as possible, into a single set of rules. If something doesn’t fit into that set of rules (Perhaps Morathi Witchcraft is best treated as just a discipline focused on Probability Alteration), it should fit into one of the other existing rule sets of Psi-Wars. Rather than proliferating systems, I’d want to use this approach to streamline things.
So, if we want to use a single system, what system should we use?
Sorcery is the obvious choice. It’s advantage based magic. So we just use that, make some new spells and we’re done, right? Sorcery can even handle multiple traditions. We have alternative rituals and we can set up spell lists unique to particular traditions. Easy. In fact, one of the things that really draws me to this is struggling with the idea that a lot of psychic powers feel like all of them should be alternate, but then you run into “but technically,” like you might want to read someone’s mind while also healing them, and this ties into the “innate trait” nature of psionic powers. They’re there and they’re always a part of you, but the ability to will one particular minor ability at a time seems a very applicable approach to tackling this problem.
But just using Sorcery out of the box might not be the best fit. For example, it lets you cast spells quite quickly, and the point of this would be to create a system whereby people are always chanting and waving their hands around. We might also look for other ways to differentiate it from psionic powers. For example, I rather like the idea of spells taking awhile to prepare. To my eye, what the occultist of Psi-Wars do looks more like Path/Book magic than straight up sorcery (or vanilla GURPS Magic). It’s probably slow, patient and weak compared to psychic powers, but makes up for that weakness with broad flexibility.
Fortunately, Sorcery is more than flexible enough to allow us to rework it. The core premise is that you have some advantage that you pay full cost for, and everything else is an alternate to that one advantage. You can improvise with that core advantage, somehow, if need be. And you have a standard modifier that represents the basis by which all spells work. In the case of sorcery, the core advantage is a modular power, and the modifier is “It’s magic and it always costs 1 fatigue.” Our version could replace the modular ability with something else, if we wanted, and use the Psionic modifier rather than the Magic modifier, and we could change the rules on the fatigue-based spell casting (I lean towards requiring chanting and rituals by default, and perhaps some additional preparation, but I’d have to think about it).
Mailanka's Musing 