RPG Carnival: Beyond Vancian Magic Wrap-Up

 

 

Hello Friends!

It was a blast to host RPG Blog Carnival's 2024 year-end topic, Beyond Vancian Magic! Thank you all so much for your input!  In no particular order, here's what some of you shared as your response to the topic, along with attempts at summaries:

• Robgoblin kicks things off with Skills for the Magic-User.  Starting with propositions for turning read magic and detect magic into skills, then suggesting some innovations with counterspells, upcasting, and harsher spell recovery to bring wizards closer to linear power progression.
• Xaosseed shares a spell point and spellburn system of magic, which briefly talks about the system Xaosseed uses to add more risk to magic when magic-users run dry, and shares a wish list of what the perfect magic system would have.
  
• VDonnut Valley gives us Beyond Vancian Magic - Wizards of Sword of Don II, which talks about magic of the culture in the wake of the fall of the Bronze Towers of Marano.  Where once wizards knew hundreds of spells, they are now down to about twelve well-known spells.  On the balance, though, wizards are not as dependent on spell books as under Vancian magic, and while preparing spells is slightly more difficult, they can even prepare spells multiple times a day, and try to prepare more spells at a time with a risk system.
  
• Learning Magic in Glimmermark shared how learning magic works in the Glimmermark setting. It also discusses the philosophy of magic-user guilds in the Glimmermark, including an example of a guild, the Spiegelheim Guild of Spellweavers.
• Sailing the Stygian Sea has a thoughtful and elegant framework for magic. I'm loathe to do injustice to it by attempting to summarize it: Beyond Vancian Magic: Applied Arcana.
• In Miracles of the Forgotten Gods, Alone in the Labyrinth shares a post about mechanics for manifesting miracles, explaining how high priests, prophets, and saints (living or dead) influence these manifestations differently from normal folk.  Wonderful food for thought!
  
• On a Swamp in Space shares a post called Troika, Jojo & Superpowers, discussing wr3cking8a11's Second Sun game's magic system, taking inspiration from Troika, but also more-flexible and chaotic skill-based systems such as DCC and GLOG.  These systems treat magic more like super-powers, and how wr3cking8a11 takes inspiration from anime sources, including Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.
• Over on Tabletop Curiousity Cabinet, in Beyond Vancian Magic: Goetia for adventure games, Panic Pillow re-imagines some LBB spells using a simple recipe system that makes every spell a simple recipe that requires preparation of physical components.  I love that each spell also has a taboo that nullifies or inverts the spell effect.
• Robgoblin follows up with The Magic of Poetry, a more magically open system.  I wonder if there's ground there to make an OSR bard that doesn't just feel like a weak and thief-ish magic-user.
• Due to the carnies' extravagant new year's celebrations, Salad was able to sneak in a last post in the Bommyknocker Press blog, Anti-Spells and Lost Humanity, which talks about slot-based spells (like Mausritter), and also the concept of anti-spells, a way for magic-users to give up one's humanity to make room for more spells.  I'm just going to sum with this quote from the post:

"Obviously this is a contentious practice in the wizarding community. Everyone denies it, but everyone at the top is doing it. There are various methods in vogue for masking the effects of anti-spells in social settings."

 

Thank you all for sharing your wonderful magic system-related ideas!  This will probably carry me at least half way through the year!

Tags: #RPGBlogCarnival #OSR #Resource