An Alternate FUDGE Magic System by Ed Heil ------------------------------- This system is intended to produce wizards who produce a wide variety of effects with a wide variety of methods. It's terribly vague about just how difficult particular magical effects are to achieve, however, so it will require a lot of faith in the GM on the part of the players, and a lot of judgement calls by the GM, and maybe a little tolerance for inconsistency. Since when is real life consistent? So why should magic be? WHO This magic system assumes (arbitrarily perhaps) that the ability to use magic sets wizards apart from the general population. Thus, in FUDGE, one must have the Power "Magic Ability" to use any magical skills at all, and even for one with that Power, the default for all of them is Terrible rather than Poor. (Obvious variations on this theme are allowing anybody to learn Magic Skills, but starting them at Non-Existent if they do not have that Power, and allowing an even better power, Advanced Magic Ability [prerequisite: plain old Magic Ability] which gives you Poor defaults in all Magic Skills rather than Terrible.) HOW AND WHAT: MEANS & ENDS How do you do it, and what do you do? These questions define your magic ability. All Magic is accomplished (in game terms) by using Magic Skills, and those skills are in these two areas. Call them Means and Ends. MEANS Magical Means skills are the actual activities which cause magical effects. There's always something you have to do to make the magic happen, even if it's only concentrating. The following are suggestions for Magical Means skills: (traditional) Magic Words: you say the word, or the words, or the poem, and something happens. Glance: Like the Evil Eye, the magic follows your stare. Concentration: as if to activate a psychic power. Magic Wand: you have some kind of widget, like Gandalf's staff, which you must wield to make your magic work. It would be some trouble to get another one, if that's even possible. Runes: you inscribe mystic letters or diagrams to make the magic happen. Potions: you brew up some kind of drink which makes things happen. (more unusual but still traditional) Gestures: making signs with your fingers and hands, turning round three times, etc. Trance: Shaman-style, slipping into unconsciousness to release magic. Song: like a siren, singing to ensorcel. Timing: doing things at a certain propitious moment (midnight, the conjunction of Mars and Saturn, Beltane) -- the GM gets to tell you when the next propitious moment *is*. Dance: not just gestures, but a full-fledged dance. Like a Rain Dance. Mimesis: acting out what you want to happen symbolically, like sticking pins in a voodoo doll. Constructs: you make some kind of machine or object for each magical effect. Magic Squares: Like "runes", but these are made up of letters and numbers which can be read or added in different directions. "Sator arepo tenet opera rotas"... Familiar: You have some kind of pet who can cause, or help you to cause, magical effects. You just tell the pet what you want it to do... (non-traditional) Knot Tying: Tying different knots for different spells. Great for a sailing mage. Painting: You create paintings which have a magical effect on the viewer or the subject (cf. Portrait of Dorian Gray) [comment from s.o's.: this belongs above. This is traditional in Navaho magical healing, for example.] Tattoo Amulets: You have a tattoos or ritual scars which you can gaze at to cause spells... or else you can actually emplace spells permanently on people by tattooing them. Cooking: Not just potions -- you can put together a magical Crepes Suzette or Linguini Alfredo to cast a spell. And, for the Aleister Crowley fans, there's always Sex Magick, about which the less said the better... ("Honey, I need to do a spell to banish this demon..." "Not tonight, Al, I have a headache." "Uh-oh...") Those are just examples, of course. Each player may come up with his own variations or innovations with the game-master's approval, and the game master should approve anything creative and interesting which doesn't conflict with the tone of the campaign he wants to run. All these "Means" are skills, learnable just like other skills. The normal limits on skills apply to these as well: in the Objective Character Creation System they must be paid for with levels, and (as noted above) they start at a level of Terrible rather than Poor. If the Gamemaster says that no character can have more than 1 Superb skill and 3 or 4 Great skills (as suggested in FUDGE 2.62), then that goes for magic skills too. WHAT JUSTIFIES THE MEANS? What are these "means" skills for? Well, to cast any magic a character must succeed with his Means Action. This is an Unopposed Action, against a degree task set by the gamemaster. The player declares what Means he is using and then makes the roll, against the difficulty level the gamemaster has set. If he succeeds, something happens -- just what happens depends on whether he succeeds in his Ends Action too (q.v.). WHAT JUSTIFIES MORE THAN ONE MEANS? There are two reasons why one would diversify one's Means skills. First off, if you can only cast spells with your Magic Words, and somebody gags you, you're just stuck. If you can only cast spells while Concentrating, and somebody is disrupting your concentration (or you want to cast a spell while carrying on a conversation), you're stuck. Diversifying your Means of casting a spell has all the advantages that it would logically have in play. Second, if you know more than one Means of casting spells, you may use them simultaneously -- speaking Magic Words and making magic Gestures, or Gesturing with your Magic Wand, or speaking Magic Words and pointing the Magic Wand, or using the Magic Wand to inscribe Runes while speaking the Magic Words according to a precise Timing.... You must declare that you're using multiple Means of casting a spell before you try the Means Action roll. Then, you roll using your best Means skill. If you succeed, fine. If you fail, you can try again using your next best skill. And if that fails, you can try again with your next best... And so on until all have been tried. Only then does the magic utterly fail to happen. (Since the results of a Means roll are binary -- something happens or it doesn't -- the Degree of Success shouldn't matter here.) ENDS This is trickier than Means. Ends Skills might also be called "Attunements" -- they define what your magic is good at dealing with. They fall into three broad classes: Material, Process, and Theme. (materials) Materials are the sorts of things your magic is good at influencing. An End like this will be some kind of category of object, broadly or narrowly defined -- Animals, Plants, Rats, People, Human Minds, Human Senses, Human Emotions, Anger, Rocks, Copper, Winds, Sea-Winds, Water, Storms, The Fabric of the Universe, Mystic Illusions, Darkness, Creatures of Darkness, Previously Cast Spells. (processes) Processes are the sorts of things your magic is good at doing. A Process End may be broad or narrow, like a Material End, and a sample list might include: Deceiving, Transforming, Strengthening, Healing, Breaking, Transforming Into Gold, Tranforming into Frogs, Healing Rheumatism, Enchanting Magical Devices, Endowing with Intelligence, or Vanishing. (themes) Finally, Themes is a catch-all category which can be used to define a category of skill in magical Ends which is not united by either Process or Material, exactly, such as Nautical Magic: magic which would be useful on shipboard (mending ropes, calling winds, etc.), Judicial Magic: magic which would be useful in court (truth-compulsions, blood identification, etc.), Strategic Magic: magic which would be useful for a military campaign (finding out the location of enemy troops, influencing the weather, detecting and befuddling scouts), Smithing Magic (magic which helps forge sharp, true blades and well-fitted horseshoes) -- and so on. Anything which does not fit in Process or Material categories might make a good Theme. For example, an initiate of Bubastis might learn Feline Magic, which would allow him to walk silently, see at night, balance, climb -- remembering of course that he would still need a Means to do all this. (combinations of the above) Characters can of course take a Magical Ends skill which is a combination of some of the above, such as Transforming Humans, or Politically Useful Illusions, or Shaping Wood. This will generally narrow things down even further, which can be useful, though it is limiting. TO WHAT END ENDS? In order to make magic happen, a character must make his Means Action, as noted above. But in order to make it happen the way he intended, he must make an Ends Action. This is an Unopposed Action, made against the same Degree Task as the Means roll. A success at the Ends roll will make what you wanted to happen happen, and a particularly good success (succeeding by two or even four levels) means extra elegance, swiftness, effect, or maybe just overkill (GM's choice -- or he may let you choose). A failure at an Ends Action, on the other hand, means that something magical happened, but it is definitely not what you intended. The failure will usually be frustrating if you failed by one or two levels, problematic if you failed by three or four levels, and disastrous if you failed by five or six levels. It will be something within the scope of the Ends skill he used, however, and this is where defining narrow Ends can be useful. For example, if you have taken skill in "Turn Enemies Into Frogs" and fail your Ends skill badly, you will definitely not accidentally turn yourself into a rooster, which you might have done if you merely had taken the end "Transformations". You might turn the wrong enemy into a frog -- one you needed for questioning later, or enchant the enemy in such a way that he starts slowly turning into a frog, realizes what is happening, and gets very angry. But you'd definitely turn an enemy into a frog. MULTIPLE ENDS If you have more than one Ends skill which applies to a situation, you can use more than one, at your option. If your best one fails, you may try another one with impunity, until you've run out of applicable ends. If your first one succeeds, and you wish it had succeeded better, however, you may only try another one if you throw out the results of the first roll (thus you may end up failing) -- this is to prevent all the players rolling again and again on the off chance they may get really lucky with a low Ends skill. The down-side of using multiple Ends skills is, of course, that if you fail in all the rolls, the result of the spell could be anything within the domain of any of those skills.... So if you have "Transformation" and "Weasels" as Ends Skills and use both of them to turn a weasel into a steed, you might end up doing anything at all involving weasels (it all falls within the "Weasel" category) or Transforming anything at all into anything else (it's all "Transformation"). You might summon a horde of ravenous weasels, or transform your own Magic Wand into a glowing coal. Hey, it's magic. DEGREE TASK: NOTES FOR THE GAMEMASTER The trouble with all of this is for the Game Master to arbitrarily set a Degree of difficulty ranging from Terrible to Superb+4 (or higher) to any magical activity you can think of. The only thing I can suggest is that the GM keep in mind how common wizards are in his world and what effect they have on the social structure and history of the world. If they are common and that effect is negligible, then obviously anything which changes the world and affects the course of history is going to be way up in the high Superb ranges. If the history of your world is one magical upheaval after another, with gold devalued to near worthlessness by alchemists and armies of summoned demons enforcing curfews in small towns, then keep the levels lower. In any case, wizards SHOULD be allowed to guess reasonably what a difficulty level is before attempting a spell. They're professionals, and since FUDGE allows people to perform fairly consistently at their own level of ability, they'd have a good idea of what they can and can't do. ("Cause the entire attacking garrison to burst into flames? You think that maybe your old teacher Sendiari could have done that at the height of his power. Maybe. You could *try* it, but to speak plainly, I'd give it a Superb difficulty level." "All right, how about I make the front line's pikeshafts burst into flames?" "Now we're talking...") There will be no choice but to be inconsistent occasionally. (If your players complain, use a spell to exercise the hobgoblins from their little minds.) You will occasionally be forced to make more difficult something that was easy once. That's FUDGE. Make up an interesting excuse if you like, or just tell the players they must have got lucky the first time. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Noun-Verb Magic system by Andy Skinner ----------------------- Who can cast: anyone who has power available (Gift or crystal) and has been trained (Skills) Levels of Power: yes Source of Power: surroundings, powerful objects Reliability: Good Time to cast spells: slow for spontaneous (depends on difficulty), quick for readied spells Spells: improvised or readied Material Components: powerful objects provide energy Drawbacks: spontaneous: slower readied: limited to what you have pre-prepared Intent & Summary ---------------- The intent of this system is to provide magic with varying levels of power, specialties in certain materials or effects, and both spontaneous and prepared spell casting. In summary, this is a noun/verb word-based magic system, powered by the magic user, the surrounding area, or some magical object. Difficulties for desired spell effects are set by the GM in terms of Terrible to Superb (or even Legendary). Noun/Verb System ---------------- Every spell is controlled by nouns, which specify the subject or material of the spell, and verbs, which specify the action or effect desired. The GM decides on some group of nouns and verbs used to perform magic, and gets an idea of what spells need what words to be cast. Some example nouns might be Air, Fire, Water, Earth, Life, Death, Magic, Light, etc. Some typical verbs are Create, Destroy, Change, Know, Move, Summon, etc. Use words from some other word-based system or create some that match the world in which the game will take place. A variant is to not require that nouns come from a specific list. But be any concept. The GM assumes that many words have been researched and developed into magic skills (very general ones like Air, Fire, Water, Earth; more limited but practical ones like Sound, Speech, etc), and these may be studied from anyone who knows those words. A desired word that the GM rules either has not been developed into a magic word or is not known by anyone that can teach the PC must be researched, and by some process (for now left as an exercise to the GM :-) developed into a magic word. The player's proficiency with each magic word is given by a Skill level in that word, defaulting to Non-Existent. If the GM would like to limit a magician's powers, the GM may require one Gift for the Terrible level, and one skill for each level beyond that. Any particular spell needs at least one noun and one verb to achieve the desired effect. These must be decided by the GM, but can be suggested by the player, since there may be different ways to accomplish an effect. For example, to put out a fire, the player might use a Destroy Fire, Create Cold, or Move Water spell, depending on his skills and the situation at hand. More than one noun or verb may be needed: to turn a prince into a frog may take a Human and an Animal noun as well as the Transform verb. This depends on the magic words available. When two or more nouns or verbs are needed, take the lowest level noun and the lowest level verb when making rolls. For example, the witch Haggie has Fair skill in the Animal word, Mediocre in Human, and Fair in Transform. She wants to turn Prince Bill into a frog. The GM says that that spell has difficulty Good. She needs to roll a Good degree on the noun, based on a Mediocre skill (lowest of Fair and Mediocre) and on the verb, based on a Fair skill, plus she needs to make the Power roll. How well the spell works depends on two separate rolls (plus a Power roll), one for the noun, one for the verb. The flavor of a spell failure can be suggested by which of the two was failed and by how much. Power ----- A magician must have some level of Power to be able to cast spells unaided. Power is rated in the Terrible to Superb trait levels, but each level is worth one gift when using the objective character creation system; default is Non-Existent. Thus, a magician with Fair Power has the equivalent of 4 gifts invested in that Power level. Power may be lost by extra expenditure or various failures. Any roll missed by three levels or more or any casting where all three spells fail cause the character to temporarily lose a level of Power. This is recovered in a certain time set by the GM, called the Recharge period. No spells may be cast during that period for any lost levels to be recovered, and only one level may be recovered per period. That period should probably be around a day, but it depends on the game world. A magician usually draws power from the world around him. He can "channel" as much power as his Power level. Whenever a spell is cast, the player must succeed at an Unopposed Task (degree needed is the difficulty level set by the GM) based on his Power level. If that task is failed, the character was unable to draw the needed power for the spell. The lowest of the amount the noun and verb rolls succeeded by (if so) can be used as a bonus for the Power roll. For example, if Greyham cast a spell resulting in a Good and Fair for the noun and verb rolls on a Mediocre difficulty spell, he gets a +1 bonus on the Power roll. Casting ------- Actual spell casting happens in the following steps: 1) Magician decides on desired effect and suggests noun(s) and verb(s) to accomplish it. 2) GM decides whether the suggested noun(s) and verb(s) are sufficient for the task, possibly adding more requirements. 2) GM sets a difficulty level for the task and the time needed. The word rolls "happen" at the beginning of the time, the Power roll at the end. 3) Magician rolls an Unopposed degree task of noun skill vs difficulty level. 4) Magician rolls an Unopposed degree task of verb skill vs difficulty level. 5) Magician rolls an Unopposed degree task of Power level vs difficulty level. 6) If all three succeed, the spell works. In setting the difficulty, the GM needs to remember that it is much harder to make three consecutive rolls than it is to make just one. There is about a 70% chance of achieving your trait level or better, but only about a 34% chance of doing it on three different rolls (assuming all the same level). The magician may cancel a spell anytime after the noun/verb rolls and before the Power roll. The Power roll must be made anyway, and the magician may still lose Power on a particularly bad roll or when all three rolls fail. The GM will probably have to interpret the results. If all three rolls succeed, the spell works. If any one or two of the rolls fail, the spell fails, with some minor result depending on the results. If all three rolls fail, the magician's Power level goes down by one for the Recharge period. Magic crystals store Power, and are rated the same way as magicians. If a crystal is used to power a spell, however, it goes down one level for the Recharge time, no matter what the result. Spells can be cast almost instantaneously if they are prepared in advance. The first 4 steps of spell casting are done taking the normal time and some specified spell difficulty, chosen by the magician preparing the spell. At casting time, only the Power roll is made. The advantage of doing this is that powerful spells can be cast very quickly. The disadvantage is that a magician may only store one plus two spells per Power level, and must choose from them for any arising situation. For example, a Fair Power magician may store 9 spells.