I got sidetracked a bit from Magic section of the Red Concordant by exploring material for the referee. Specifically, sketching out alternative magic systems.

This lead me to gematria (or isopsephy, if you prefer).

The main idea is that the name of a spell would tell you how powerful it was. Power is measured by spell level.

For example, for The Black Hack, the spell Dimension Door works out to be a 4th level spell. It's one of the rare ones that the calculated spell level is the same as the original spell level.

This lead me to another issue in that using gematria is great for generating new spells, but requires a lot of work to convert the old ones.

For example, Light is a 1st level spell. Using gematria, it's a fourth level spell, so I have to play with the name to get it back to a 1st level spell. It took about 10 to 15 minutes to discover that renaming Light to Portable Blue Light, reverts it back to a 1st level spell. Magic Missile didn't take nearly as long, changing it to Flaming Missiles works.

Despite the work involved, it can generate some more evocative names for spells given enough time.

For generating spells, I took all the words from spell names in OSRIC, 2e, Rules Cyclopedia, and The Black Hack. I ran gematria for all the individual words. The gives me a table of words that I can use to generate a spell of a specific level.

The rules are straight forward, choose a spell level you want and then choose words that will total the spell level you want. Just remember that spaces count as 1 point.

For example, for a 6th level spell using two words, I'll pick a word from the 2 point list and another from the 3 point list. Remembering that the space between the two words counts as 1 point, 2+3+1=6.

Randomly picking words, I get: Resilient Wormhole.
I imagine that it is similar to Gate, but weaker.

That's progress so far, I'll keep you posted.

    Yesterday, I went down a slippery slope. I started messing with gematria as a spell building system.

So, a ran the gematria for all the spells in The Black Hack, The Rules Cyclopedia, and the Rules Cyclopedia spell names translated into Latin. (Thanks Encounter zine issue #3).

I will post the results shortly. After that, I am back to the Blue spells for my homebrew.

    Working on magic for The Red Concordant, I have to fight off the new shiny idea so that I can finish this project.

The New Shiny is:

A gematria based spell research/building system. First, name the spell. Letters have a value from 1 to 9. Spaces count as 1. Total the letter values. Take the total and take the sum of the digits until you get a single digit number.

That final single digit number determines the level and relative power of the spell.

For example: Magic Missile
M(5)+A(2)+G(8)+I(1)+C(4)+space+M(5)+I(1)+S(2)+S(2)+I(1)+L(4)+E(6) is equal to 42. Four plus two is six.

This would make Magic Missile a 6th level spell. If the description of the spell is that the spell caster creates bolts that damages targets, the effect would change to something like two bolts are created per caster level, each bolt does 1d6 damage.

If you change the name to Magic Bolt and keep the same effect, you get down to a second level spell. That could give you one bolt per two levels, each doing 1d4+1 damage.

FWIW, if you want a 1st Level spell, I found the name Flaming Missile works.

This wouldn't be fun for every player, but I am discovering that I am getting less work done playing with names. 🙂