Sycarion Diversions

I looked that the Arcanist pdf and I need to apologize. There’s throwing stuff together for a concept, but this was pretty bad. Yes, I said it was an alpha, but that doesn’t make me happy.

I’m re-working the PDF. I forgot to include the Casting Time for all the spells. I also didn’t provide descriptions for several spells that were “identical to the level X Cleric spell of the same name.” The word ritual appears in odd places.

So, I’m working on the revision. It will hopefully become something a bit more useful.

On a different topic, I will not reach Z before the end of April, or even May. I have to finish Shayakand work which has stalled for the past three months due to real life. I hope to spot more frequently, but I can’t do everyday anymore. I promise that the post titles will not be something like T is for Time. I’ll have normal blog post titles.

Here are some of the upcoming alphabet posts provided in the forbidden format:

C is for Combat – A post about the Combat rules

D is for Dragons – Some new dragons

E is for Equipment

M is for Magic – Options of being a spell caster

P is for Proficiencies – the entire proficiency system in one place

P is not for Paladin because I won’t have one, at least not called a paladin, anyway.

T is for Tiezerakan – Outer Spaaaaaaaaaaace!

The non-weapon proficiency system in 2e was used in the Psionics Handbook to make psionics different from magic. A table demonstrated the number of powers a psionic character could know at any level. Each power was treated as a proficiency to determine success.

Since I make use of a similar system for psionic characters in my 2e inspired clone, I wanted to have other classes take advantage of a similar system. One example is the arcanist.

The arcanist is a part of the Wizard character group with some similarities with mages. Both have a written book to keep ‘spells’. Both gain access to more powerful magic as they advance in levels. Both are very limited in the weaponry they employ. The biggest difference, however, is that the arcanist employs what I call arcane rituals to generate magic. A ritual consists of a glyph, rune, or shape combined with some kind of material component. For example, an aracanist would draw a line and sprinkle garlic powder onit to create a Protect from Undead spell. The glyphs and material components are up to the GM. I don’t include them in this rough draft.

The pdf is thirty pages long, so I didn’t post everything about it. You will notice that the rituals are about 95% composed of spells from the Labyrinth Lord Original Characters book. These were included to demonstrate a proof-of-concept more than anything. I added a couple spells, but in the final product the spells will be more carefully selected and defined.

Why Labyrinth Lord? I stated earlier that I didn’t want to re-invent the wheel so I plan on using LL as a base. Hopefully the end result with be something similar to the Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Companion.

Enjoy!