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Tag: Swords and Wixardry (Page 9 of 20)

Sachima – A New Race

March 16, 2014 /

Origins

Sachima describe their existence with a story. It begins with Amnaté, a very old and powerful dragon. Although wingless, he soared over his vast holdings of land navigating the space between earth's magnetic field and the ever-present winds. He was proud of his great wealth and fair dealings with mankind. He could have destroyed them all, but instead chose to spare them.

Amnaté was lonely. He would go to their cities in human form and revel in what seemed to be their endless celebrations. Yet after the festivals ended, he returned home more sad than before. He struggled to understand what motivated mankind to have these festivals.

Satva enoyed roaming the countryside and running free. She had no mate and had no need of one. Were it not for the endless celebrations of mankind, she would have remained solitary to her last day. Despite their mystery, she found mankind to be quite amusing.

Like all cats great and small, she would curiously enter towns and villages to see what would happen next. Sometimes she went as a small cat, other times as a human. Mankind feared tigers and she would never presume to interrupt their parties with her true form.

At one Festival of Spring, Satva found someone that appeared to be sad despite the revelry that surrounded him. She went to him as a small cat and offered purrs to comfort the man. They appeared to have no effect. He mindlessly stroked her fur and sighed. For his indifference, she hissed and scratched his leg.

Amnaté was startled by the attack. He understood sadness and the pointlessness of the festival, but he was intrigued that any creature that could be so angry at a party. He went to find the cat, but it was gone. Feeling sad once more, he went to return to his seat, but decided to find the cat instead. He searched the city with no success. Many shurgged when asked if they had seen the cat, but a kindly older woman offered to help him.

"Cats are fickle," she said, "it wouldn't have scratched you if it didn't have some interest in you. I bet if you go home, it will follow you. I will come along to help. Don't turn around to see the cat. If you seem interested, it may decide to stop following you. I've known many cats in my day, it will not concern itself with me."

Amnaté agreed and the two began traveling to his home. As they talked, he felt the pleasure of excellent company and the sharp pain of knowing his companion would be gone when he arrived home. Instead of taking a direct path, he took meadering trails and overgrown paths until they reached thick, dark forest.

A demon appeared saying that he would enjoy eating this foolish couple that dared wander into the dense forest alone. Amnaté swore to the woman that he would protect her, but that she had to run a short distance away without looking back. When it appeared she had gone far enough way, Amnaté changed into his true form.

The demon plead for his life, running away when he saw the great dragon build the fire in his nostrils. No sooner than he had gotten away from the dragon, a great tiger leaped upon him tearing at his demonic flesh. In fighting off the tiger's claws and teeth, the dragon caught up to the hapless demon.

"This demon attacked my companion!" Amnaté roared, "Let me relieve my wrath upon this fiend!"

"Why are you interrupting my play?" the tiger growled back, "This thing is no threat to you or to me."

Biting the demon on its shoulder, the tiger hurled the demon deeper into the wood. Licking the blood from its teeth, it lay down to groom.

"How dare you!" The dragon roared.

"Oh be still, Amnaté," the tiger purred, "didn't I tell you that the cat would follow you home?" At that, she transformed into a young woman and walked closer to the dragon.

"What sorcery is this?" Amnaté stammered, "Are you the woman that traveled with me?"

"I was interested." Savte replied, "And you were feeling so alone."

Amnaté changed into his human form. After some time, the two traveled to his home. Not long after they were married. Relatives of Amnaté and Savte soon moved into the kingdom and the land flourished.

The Sachima claim Amnaté and Satva as their ancestors. To be Sachima is to explore their draconic and tigrine heritage. Like dragons, they are proud and powerful. They are intimately familiar with ancient forms of magic, but judicious in its usage. They are innately curious, eager to learn new things. They also have a profound sense of play. Although generally amicable, Sachima are methodical, ruthless, and efficient killers when attacked.

Sachima can see in the dark up to 60 feet. They receive a +4 bonus against breath weapons and have a 2 in 6 chance of being able to communicate with any type of cat.

Sachima can advance to 10th level Magic-Users, but have no level limit as Theives. Sachima also have their own peculiar type of unarmed fighter that employs a handful of spells delivered as a breath weapon. There are no Sachima clerics.

If the Emphases system is used, Sachima magic-users automatically have dragon and big cat emphases.

The Abandoned Study of Zhanguo Jee

March 15, 2014 /

I mentioned in a previous post about creating spells with a mechanical element (number crunching) and a narrative element. It occured to me at some point tonight that a narrative tag, which I call an emphasis, does not have to be a part of a spell, but can function as a material component or a spell focus.

Let's say that amongst a magic-user's emphases, he or she has string and knots. Instead of using strings and/or knots in the description of the spell (though that would be great) I could create an M-U that uses knots to cast any spell. To keep with Swords & Wizardry, a spell's level is an indicator of the complexity of the knot required to cast the spell. Going even further, the M-U doesn't need to study spells to re-cast them. He or she simply needs to make more knots. The time requirement is the same to keep from mucking about the mechanics, but instead of hours of study to keep a semi-alive magical thing trapped in the M-U's mind to be released as a spell, the M-U weaves magical energy into a beautiful and complex knot.

Here are some examples to ponder:

Keeping that in mind, let's create an NPC wizard with emphases on knots, things that take thread form, red, gold, knots, and two or three more. We'll call him Zhanguo Jee.

Fast forward a number of years to our party delving into a dungeon and tower that are the remnants of Zhanguo Jee's tower and lab. There would be encounters with all kinds of crossbred creatures, monsters taking refuge in the tower and dungeon, local dread of the place, and the promise of great reward.

Into this dungeon, we scatter a few knots here and there. Maybe we add in a mad mongerlman M-U that was Zhanguo's assistant. He goes around muttering gibberish about how it's all tied up and can't be untied. Throw in some spiders weaving really really weird webs. Use the M-U's emphases to create some variant creatures.

This may seem like uneccesary window dressing the the party, but if they find Zhanguo's spell book and/or scrolls, the party's M-U has some new spells and a few knots to be able to get started on casting them. The referee could rule that after some study, the party's M-U can add one or two emphases to be able to cast Zhanguo's spells. Of course, there would be slight variations as the party's M-U would not have the same emphases as Zhanguo did, but that's all the more fun for everyone.

I'll have to write this up someday.

Some Problems with Spell Building Systems

March 14, 2014 /

I love the idea of spell building systems, but not always the system itself. I absolutely love EABA v1.1 and the Universal Table. Going through the book of spell examples, I found myself building all kinds of magic items and spells. The whole time, I kept thinking that it was cool to be able to quantify just baout anything I could think of.

Then I found that I was beginning to create spells/items/whatever that didn't work. The system usually broke down because the effect was too novel to quantify. I should say that EABA could quantify it, but I felt like that I was shoehorning something that really didn't fit.

When Epic Magic came out for Pathfinder, I discovered Epic Magic for D20. I read them both excited about spell seeds as a building block for new spells. But then the same problem came up. A spell I couldn't really quantify. To make matters worse for me, I found that spells with the same effect made the "trappings" or "special effects" meaningless.

For example, there is a spell on an OSR blog that describes a one-time teleportation effect from one campfire to another campfire some distance away. (My google-fu is weak, I couldn't find it to link to it and give the author credit for coming up with a great spell. Sorry!) I found that using EABA, Epic Magic, or even Open D6 gave me a spell that was no different than a spell that simply teleported the magic-user a random distance away. I liked the idea of the campfire, but found it disappointing that there was really no reason to have the "cool" version because it was more limited than the "generic" version that worked everywhere. Sure, I could houserule the system, but that seemed to be quite daunting, to say the least.

Similarly, even the straight damage spells made the boring versions more useful. Why create a fire missile spell that does 1d6 damage when you already have Magic Missile.  Creatures have immunity to fire, but very few, if any, have immunity to force or whatever substance comprises a Magic Missile. So, there's little reason to use anything but Magic Missile.

This lead my two year long quest to come up with a spell building system that I actually like. Unfortunately, I kept coming back to the same two issues over and over. I could live with effect that couldn't be quantified well, but that whole business that favors generic spells over flavorful or colorful spells seemed to change the whole business from fun to math. I love math, but not the kind that gets into min/maxxing and optimization.

So, I think I'm on to something now that I have come up with reasons for a magic-user to research and/or cast the more flavorful spells. Using the emphases system that I mention a lot around here, a magic-user would choose a more flavorful spell because it would be faster, cheaper, easier and/or more effective than the generic version of the spell. For a different kind of spell caster, the emphases system would also make the colorful versions of spells more likely to suceed than the generic version.

For example, if a magic-user has an emphasis of Fire that provides a bonus to research Fire-based spells, the Fire Missile version of Magic Missile is easier to come up with. For spell casters that use a skill roll to succesfully use spells, a spell caster with a Fire Bonus will find that the Fire Missile is more likely to work compared to Magic Missile.

More than that, if a magic-user has a series of seemingly odd emphases, it is to the spell caster's advantage to find a way to combine as many of these bonuses as possible. When a magic-user has emphases of cold, small round objects, blue, and four, he or she is more likely to cast a spell that begins with four small blue pearls of energy zooming to a target and exploding in a 30 x 30 x 10 cylinder for 1d6/level cold damage rather than a fireball spell. The effect is the same (except that one does cold damage and the other does fire damage), but with all those emphases incorporated into the spell, the magic-user either invented that spell for a song, made it up in record time, or finds it trivial to cast this spell compared to the traditional fireball spell.

Even better, I can put the 30 or so traditional tags associated with spells (like fire, ice, illusion, protection, summon, transform ,etc.) and combine them with 50 or so others I've come up with based on classifiers in other languages (like small round objects, rows, seeds, stalks, thread, charcoal, tubes, etc.) to make a random table. I roll up for or five random emphases and now there is an interesting spell for the players to find on an adventure.

I've posted a bit on my Google+ Page, but I plan to write up details here.

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