Rules of Magic

Magic is mysterious and otherworldly, but there are some guidelines that make it easier for characters to interact with that mystery in an interesting way. Whether examining a magical trap, to understanding how the BBEG gets their superpowers, consistent, permanent magical effects require some level of explanation, both so the rogue can sabotage it, and the wizard can dream of stealing it’s power.

Magic requires Energy.

Whether a permanently invisible bridge (a la Indiana Jones), or a wall of fire blocking off a hallway, magic comes from somewhere (even if the origin is completely opaque to the average layperson.) 

Leylines. Geological force flows through rocks and trees like a vast web, forming nexus nodes where major leylines meet. These nodes are often the locations of ancient druidic stones, temples, and the Church has built it’s own temples over many of these same sites. Leylines provide stable, predictable power, and so are very useful for magical architecture and traps. Temporarily blocking the flow of magic from a leyline is possible, but permanently rerouting major lines typically requires massive engineering projects to move mountains of earth around (these projects are more feasible in wide, flat regions, and are one of the major purposes of pyramids and similar projects.) Harnessing a leyline is typically very slow, but is a commons source of magic for Rituals.

Rivers. Very similar to a major leyline. The power of rivers may ebb and flow with the seasons, and can be blocked or lessened by projects such as bridges or dams. Rivers attract attendant spirits and are essentially minor gods unto themselves, so building a simple bridge involves bargaining or chaining the resident spirit. Rivers have fewer nexus points, whereas geological lines form a kind of net, but they may form nodes at sites such as waterfalls where they interact with the geological lines. Rivers and streams have a kind of world-walking magic inherent to them- Estuaries and the mouths of rivers are often the sites of ethereal portals, which souls use when entering the underworld, and crossing three streams can land you in the land of the Fey. In a way, each land bounded by a river is partially it’s own plane, with it’s own slightly different set of natural laws. This is also why vampires have trouble crossing running water, since they are creatures out of sync with reality.

The Winds of Magic. More akin to magical radiation blown on the wind, than the power of the wind itself. Although fickle, these powers are easily accessible, and as such are the starting point for many wizard’s spells. Plenty of spell preparation involves consulting almanacs, considering moon phases and weather forecasts, in order to tune spells to the appropriate conditions of the Winds. The winds come in many ‘colours,’ visible only to the magically attuned. Most common are the seven winds that correspond to the seven levels of the soul, but there are other shades as well. The Octarine wind of dawn is one of the most potent, and it is this wind that recharges many artifacts, which otherwise might be too portable to be tapped in to a reliable power source.

Elemental Planes. Another source of magical energy involves essentially poking a hole in reality to access another dimension, and then sculpting and harnessing the forces that poor out. The issue is, these rifts are not stable on their own (and if they are, they can cause all kinds of problems), and require an investment of magic to create. Often the magic required to hold open a portal is as much or greater than the power that can be harvested from the portal, and as such spells that utilize this technique tend to be quick taps into high-energy dimensions, such as the Plane of Fire. Naturally occurring or otherwise permanent portals exist as well, especially at the nodes of leylines which can help keep them stable, but even a ‘permanent’ portal can be a fickle source of power, only functioning and specific times of day or under specific conditions- which can be in fact useful if a wizard wants to use a portal for transport, and would prefer the gateway be somewhat secure against the uninitiated.

The Gods. Faith is a source of great power, and the gods can maintain a miracle essentially infinitely should they choose- but the gods can be fickle. Clerics do not necessarily require a leyline for a permanent magical effect, but they may need to set up elaborate ritual elements, altars, holy symbols, to maintain the miracle. There exist temples where the priests sit in constant prayer, intent on maintaining some obscure magical effect. Priests of the wind god often set up flags or prayer wheels, and driven by the wind they manufacture constant stores of faith. Other beings of lesser power may fulfill a similar function, albeit on a smaller scale, such as through the gifts given to warlocks and cultists.

Sorcerers. Those with innate magic may tap into any of the above, but the core of their magic is their own. It burns within them, providing the seed for all their spells- even in a world otherwise dead to magic, the weakest sorcerer might be able to muster the power to lift a pebble or light a candle.

The Mystery. No one is quite sure where bards get their power, including bards themselves. At lower levels, they might not even realize they are casting spells. They may tap into and dabble with leylines, faith, or any of the other means listed above, they may even have a sorcerous spark within them (and many do)- but the core of their ability is unknown. The magic does not seem to always originate from them, sometimes, rather, it happens to be there at the right time, and they happen to stumble upon it. A feather fall spell may manifest as a conveniently placed haycart, magical defenses can appear as amazing coincidences of luck, and even flashier magics disguise themselves as unlikely confluences of events. Above all the power of their music or even just their simple suggestions to influence minds and change the course of events cannot be easily explained

It’s a Trick! As the aforementioned ‘invisible’ bridge, sometimes the easiest and most mana-effecient solution is not to use ‘true’ magic at all. Many studies of the arcane include learning particular combinations of smoke and mirrors, whereby a practitioner’s apparent power may be magnified. 

\

Harnessing & Storage

Gemstones. Some of the most flexible and potent vessels for magic, gems come in all shapes, sizes and uses. Small or poor-quality stones may ‘burn out’ after a few uses, but with the correct precautions a more powerful gem may become a ‘rechargeable battery,’ gaining it’s power from the Winds of Magic, leylines, or the magic of the wielder.

Token objects. Certain objects may accrue specific magical energies around themselves, such as a much-loved child’s toy, a veteran’s blade, or a lucky coin. These magics can be tricky to harness however, as the magic may be specifically attuned (a lucky coin that is good for luck magic but little else), and they may recharge slowly or not at all. Nevertheless they can be useful, and they are the origin of many ‘naturally occurring’ magic items, some of which have considerable, if unsophisticated, levels of potency.

Runes. Situated somewhere between a leyline, a token object, and an element of language, lies the rune. Thousands upon thousands of runes occur in nature, in the random jumble of sticks and stones, in the swirl of leaves and the lines laid by frost and carved by water. Many of these are simple, nearly powerless, like the background static noise of the universe. Others are unparalleled instruments of fate, the runes at the heart of creation, that repeat again and again and resonate in the hearts of all mortals. Fashioned into the surface of an object, they inscribe it’s magic with form and intent. They themselves can provide their own power, but this is often finicky, and often better paired with gems or ritual elements to ease the process.

Pearls of power. Naturally occurring rifts of magic, pinprick-sized, wink in and out of existence every second. Sometimes when they appear within a sensitive organic form, such as a giant clam or a sorcerer’s brain, they stick and the organism begins to secrete a protective coat around it, like a pearl. Those occurring in humans can be less pleasant than the mollusk variety, appearing as a tumor, a bezoar, a carbuncle, and so on- although pearl-like opaline structures have been known to occur.

Do you believe in Luck?

There's been some speculation as to the role dice play in the roleplaying game. Dice as the decision-maker, adjudicating and limiting options, and the oracular role of the dice in expanding options. There's a missing element here though! Or at least not explicitly stated. That's the mythological significance of the dice themselves.

Do you believe in luck? Do you feel lucky, punk?

It's almost an existential question. We're running a simulation of a world here, and we're running a game of chance. That world reflects our own, whether it's a clear reflection or a smokey mirror it still says something about what we believe. Here are some questions about how we approach this, broadly-- 1. Do we believe our own world is random, deterministic, is luck random truly or is it an attribute that things or people might possess, or which forces or spirits might assign? 2: is there free will, and if so what is the nature of free will? 3. does the game have a parallel to our own, or is there are departure? 4- If there is a departure, what is the game? It's possible that the game world is framed as an escape from the normal rules, creating a new set of rules-within-rules. Or it may be simply an extension of the same order, played out in miniature and simplification.

I use this dynamic somewhat consciously. In the world of the game, the mythology is on of the Authority, a nearly-omnipotent god who set all of the world in motion. That's the claim anyway! Alignment is a great example of this cosmic dictation- how much of you being 'good' or 'evil' is because of your actions, and how much is because that's the cosmic slot you've been assigned? Who's making that decision? The DICE sort of act as an intervention into that space, almost an outside force acting on the fabric of the game world. The Authority can dictate everything within the world, but surely not the result of a d20 roll on the physical, real table in front of the player!

So it becomes a random, uncaring, deterministic world which is actively contradicting the cosmic Ordered world within the fiction, and the 'fiction' becomes as much the propaganda of the Church as it is the fiction of the story- although the two are heavily intertwined. It's the Authority's story, as much as any. And I should note that it's questionable how 'true' that ideology of the Authority really is, since no one's actually MET them-but it IS clear that there's a force within the universe that's shaping things in a specific way, and alignment is maybe one of the more player-facing elements of that. I'm constantly, maybe heavy-handedly, trying to get my players to question alignment, and how it's imposed and by who.

I suppose that says a lot about my own philosophy and ethic. And I think the choices anyone makes about how to interact with the dice say a lot about how they see the world, and how we see the world of the game, whether they're conscious decisions or not.

I also like the dynamic of prophecies or fortune telling within the world of the game, as a way of highlighting those different levels of reality. Of course you can use the prophecy as a kind of mechanic, similar to the 5e divination wizards school 'portent' ability, or any kind of 'luck' mechanic. You could even be more heavy handed- if a character is prophecied to die by fire, you could just have it so they CAN'T die any other way, and events conspire to protect them until their fate is sealed. But my favourite way of handling it is to make a prophecy and then... do nothing. At least nothing specific. A suitably vague prophecy of course helps a lot with this. But I find often events conspire naturally to fulfill the prediction, or just as good, when the prophecy falls flat completely (or needs to be re-interpreted)

A shared ritual space:
Another place this comes up is in the social contract of the game. The element of the dice allows multiple points of view on this to come together to one table to play. One person might say 'you, the GM, believe the world is deterministic, but I, the player, shall prove you wrong through the stunning acts of daring my character performs in the course of the game. Surely some fate must be looking out on my behalf!' Other permutations of course are possible.

Hence the common hang ups some players have around people touching their dice without permission. This might be ascribed to simple personal property issues, not wanting your dice to end up in another player's bag, etc. But more common I observe the belief that it effects the luck of the dice- similar to the practice of having 'lucky' dice, which may even be reserved for specific situations in play. Tools of oracle- altar, tarot cards, athame, there are plenty of magical tools that are traditionally only supposed to be handled by the practitioner themselves, or else by others only under certain conditions. I could probably write a whole post, and whole books have certainly been written, about the 'proper' way of approaching these ritual tools. This adherence to certain ritual, whatever that may be for the individual, is I think is another venue to bring different worldviews together to create a shared experience at the table.

The 24-sided die as 'rulebreaker'
One way I have exploited this ritual element to create a certain impact on the game and the players is with special dice. It's something I want to experiment with more. When my players encountered Strahd von Zarovich they discovered that instead of rolling a regular d20 he had a special purple d24 to use instead. I'm not great at statistics, but that seems like on average a +2 bonus over his regular abilities- not a huge increase, but the psychology of the extra numbers on the dice made it feel like it was unfair, weighted against the players and in favour of the vampire, which is exactly what it was.

I also keep a special Fudge die or two on hand, to resolve truly arbitrary situations. The d20 has the feeling of some sort of fairness, like your abilities and modifiers could matter, like there's a set difficulty or target. Rolling a d20 makes players feel like they should be able to affect the roll. A percentage d100 roll is too clinical and math-y, and it opens the door to debate on the actual probability, players arguing why they should have a 75% chance instead of only 50%- which is maybe what you want in some situations. But a fudge dice feels truly arbitrary

I have another set of dice with little shields and swords on them, from some boardgame, I'd like to design a monster that rolls them to dictate it's attack and defense for the turn. Or another set of D6s with numbers in the negative and positive range, making them very swingy. Anything basically to remind players that they're rolling dice, and why, and to get them to think outside the box instead of just another 'd20 roll to hit.'

And of course, the upshot of all these shenanigans is also to preserve the sense that rolling a dice is risky. It carries failure within it. Players should try to avoid rolling dice whenever possible, unless they truly have something to gain. Most traps, for example, can be bypassed with absolutely zero rolls. Social situations are the same, and even in combat I like to only roll the dice when absolutely necessary- if it makes logical sense, you can just do it, no roll required. This increases buy-in with the world of the game, and makes the moments when you do roll dice actually significant.

The flip side of this is using unnecessary rolling to hammer home a point. Goblin Punch's rules for drunkeness for example increase the characters critical failure range by 1 for every point of drunk they have. You can bet that if your character is hammered I'm gonna be calling for rolls for even relatively simple things, just to see what happens. I've also got an idea for a gremlin/slaad type monster which just has a static ability that forces characters to roll for everything- not increasing the difficulty at all, but if you have to roll you might fail... I feel this would be especially effective for OSR games where rolling is less of the norm, and 'DCs' are practically unknown

LATENCY
bring in Marcel Duchamp yo
One of my favourite essays (actually probably more than one) in art school was on this idea of 'latency.' It's an expansion on the idea of the gap between 'the intentions of the artist' on the one hand, and the 'perceptions of the audience' on the other. The gap between the lightning and the arrival of the thunder is a latent moment, or the latency time on an internet connection, or the time while the dice are in the air, after being thrown but before being read. Within that gap is a kind of transcendental moment, but it's a material transcendence, it relies on the medium of the expression. Painting, music, or in this case, dice. In that gap of the unknown, ignorant misunderstanding, the universe rushes in, and we trust the medium to take us to the other side.

Gold doesn't weigh anything

Gold doesn't weigh anything. Well, it does: when you hold a coin in your hand, it feels heavy. But still, you can hoist a backpack bursting at the seams, without straining your muscles or tearing the fabric.

Could it be that gold wants to be taken?

There is power in gold. Realness. Out of all materials, it maintains the most realness between timelines. You can travel the eons in a ship plated of gold. Iron can't be mined and quarried and brought back from a next door dimension, but gold can. The magnetic fields of iron make it especially 'sticky' to reality, which is why faeries shun it. But something about the heaviness of gold makes it light. Like an eyelid drooping with too much sleep, like a koi in a still dark pond, it can move between realities.

by Yoann Lossel

Lead is like this too, but no one covets the sullen stubbornness of lead. In its unimaginative state, it cannot fathom other realities, and so it persists through all of them, a sulky stain.

This is why both gold and lead are proof against scrying, and other magics that peer across dimensions.

Druids hate gold: it's dirty, polluted, you don't know where it's been. They wear bands of silver; pure and singing songs of unabashed Realness, and copper, which calls out to the heavens and thrums with the thunderbolts. Gold, although immutable, picks up imprints of it's owners, like a fingerprint in the soft metal. Hatred. Passion. Desire.

It sings to the dragons of desire. They hear it from eons away, from across the stars. They hone in on it, though they don't always know where it is. A wanderer chasing the echoes of singing through a cave. Dragons, who have no words for 'past' or 'future,' but only 'probability.' An event in the past that is almost unknown is assigned as much contingency and doubt as a speculative event in the future. Some parts of the future are very certain. But gold is Known, it is here. The Draconic word for 100% probability is the same as the word for gold.

by Justin Gerard

And gold in a dragon's clutches gains some of their power. It gains a charge, like the build up of static electricity, from every hand it passes through, every life it touches with it's burning brand of the Real. But in a dragon's smoldering hoard it gains the most of all. And when it passes to a mortal, after theft or murder, that smoldering passes too. Gold soaked in bloodshed begets more bloodshed still.

Alignment Languages Redux

I like alignment languages.

There, I said it. At least, I like the idea of them. The concept of a fundamental, cosmic language, writ on the souls of mortals and into the very fabric of the universe? Sign me up!

One of my favourite elements I noticed in a recent watch-through of Fellowship of the Ring is how they dont translate the black speech. They just kinda intone sinister sounding things and leave it at that. Now, being the huge nerd that I am, I sometimes have an idea of the gist of what they are saying, but it's still mysterious as fuck.






I wrote in this post about using the idea of a 'Common' language as a kind of magic tongue. But let's expand on this.

Abati is 'Neutral' with a capital 'N'- that is, it's a 'natural' language, in the sense of natural philosophy. It springs up everywhere, like norse runes, just lying around in the patterns of sticks on the ground, in the flight of birds, in the way the river carves the landscape. It's inscribed on every atom of the universe, like the ten commandments on a slab of stone. There are many different varieties, based on the biology and culture of the interpreter (because that's what speakers essentially are- they're speaking a language that already existed). The 'elemental languages' Terran, Ignan, Aquan, and Auran are non-human forms of this language.
                          How to describe it spoken: to non-speakers, it sounds familiar, like maybe you've heard it every day of your life and just can't quite remember. It feels like if you just concentrated hard enough, you could figure it out- and in fact, sufficiently 'mystically attuned' characters might be able to make a concentration or meditation-type check to grasp a few key words or the gist of a sentence. However, it takes a lifetime to unravel the full language, and there's always more to learn.
                        Because of this, and because of the language's universal nature, many speakers develop inflections, vocabularies, and whole dialects of the language, which reflect their own nature and being. Most of the time, this is just an accent, but in it's extreme form this gives rise to Alignment Languages.

   
Cosmic good and evil: imagine if the question of whether you were a good person wasn't simply a measure of ethics. If the nature of a person was stamped indelibly on a person's soul, for anyone with wise enough eyes to read. Where, in extreme cases, not only the persons past actions, but their future ones, figure into this universal evaluation.

This is kind of like the anti lovecraft ...but only kinda. At a certain point, whatever is making this decision is so far removed from human experience, you have to wonder if it's version of evil really meaningfully relates to any human priority or understanding at all. It's not optimizing for 'good' or 'justice' it's optimizing for something humans aren't capable of understanding. Unlike lovecraft, where the universe fundamentally doesn't care about humans, where we're just too small, in this formulation the universe cares hugely - but not necessarily in a way humans would find 'meaningful' because 'meaning' is a human hobby

SMBC 

But, humans being humans, I'm sure such a force would still massively influence culture, religion, and understanding of morality. After all, it might not be meaningful, but it's testable.

The Way of Nine Swords: the Church absolutely believes in alignment, but there's is a more old-school view. There are but three alignments: Law, Neutrality, and Chaos. The 'heresy of the Nine Swords' is a grave slip into sin in the eyes of the church. The nine swords philosophers contend that there are nine alignments, each as perilous to mortals as a sword. Like a sword, a person's alignment can be studied and mastered, but such a path is a burden, like the burden of a warrior, and not to be taken up or turned aside from lightly. The Church condemns this as obfuscating acts of iniquity: what the Nine Swords monks call 'Chaotic Good' is simply someone slipping away from the true path of morality, their soul tainted by chaos (but perhaps not permanently- the Church is very adept at conversions)

What do the Elves think? Non-humans don't have much truck for all of this. Elves see themselves as above all this rigmarole, although they ALSO see themselves as intrinsically Good (in whatever manner is most fashionable these days in the courts of the Fey). Dwarves insist there are five alignments, although they refuse to elaborate more on what that means. Elves care more about Beauty vs Ugliness (and elf characters should have an alignment based on such), and Dwarves care about things like Work, Honour, and Tradition. Other beings have likewise varying preoccupations. Most human-like beings do mostly understand what humans are going on about when it comes to morals, ethics, good and evil, etc, they just think we're a little obsessed with it, in the same way Elves are kind of overly preoccupied with Beauty. And just as there are humans who don't 'get' art (a failing no elf has ever suffered from), there are elves who don't 'get' morality.


There should be a lot of Alignment Languages
More than there are alignments, by a long shot. Make room for culturally specific variations. It always bugged me that vanilla D&D has Sylvan and Druidic and Elven all as separate languages. Not anymore!

Druidic is a language that is attempting to get rid of language. Based on Shalk, a language that sings in the blood of those born with it, it uses Abati loan words to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible, especially avoiding nouns, and avoiding names almost completely. Part of the language is one of signs, both gestural, in the lynx-like shrug of the shoulders, and physical, in the acorn tucked in the crook of a pine tree, left as a sign to another speaker of the nonlanguage. Much of the language is comprised of periods of silence.

Sylvan is the alignment language of the Fey. When the elves were exiled and fled into the Long Earth, they found many similar exiles there: gnomes, sprites, and nature spirits such as dryads, who call the Green Lands their home. Tuathan is the non-alignment language spoken by Eladrin today, Elvish is for Elves, Bolgish is for Firbolg (the cousins of the Eladrin), etc.

And then there should be other languages: one for Paladins, Thieves Cant for those CN types. Sounds like there's some material here for another post

its only bad if you make it bad (or maybe it's just bad)

Responding to this over at Hack and Slash, but also the things HE links to as responding to...

I run a lot of 'rail-roady' adventures (stacks of old Dungeon Mags, bits a and pieces I find online, etc). It's pretty trivial to break the railroad before you bring it to the table. I use them more as an aid, but if I can't find something in the wall of text, I make it up. It helps that I have a pretty good memory, but it also helps that I've read and re-read a lot of the material, in bits and pieces, over many years. So when it comes time to mash up three or four different half-baked adventures on the fly, it all kinda clicks into place. Or falls apart stupendously.

Example: I ran the first installment to the Age of Worms adventure path, an adventure called 'the Silver Skeleton,' AND another adventure called 'the Devil Box' all at the same time. Individually they're kinda weak in places, but taken all together it's a kind of sandbox. And then I added some stuff with unique traps, and showdowns at high noon, and long cons gone awry, and it was pretty great.

So I don't think it's an either/or thing, in every case. People do use those things for reading, yes, but it's not just idle daydreaming. It's a kinda ADD way of prepping things to run at the table, it's something that's accessible as training wheels for novice DM's to IMAGINE what DMing would be like before they sit down with the players, it's good for experienced DMs who can retain and filter and ad-lib around that information. Is it my favourite format? Definitely not, as I've learned more about what I like and what's most effective for me, I've gravitated to the kinda stuff Bryce Lynch likes in his reviews... but I still sprinkle in old ideas I gleaned from those poorly-designed monstrosities.

 I just don't think it's as clear-cut a design space as we would like to think. Maybe there's room for some kind of 'inspiration module' type of thing to evolve? Or maybe it just has to stay muddy and we muddy through as we find out what we like. Sounds familiar.

The Red Curse of Language

Everyone wants cool, mysterious languages for their games. But no one wants to deal with the annoying fiddly bits that come from it. Solution? Magical languages!

The Magical Tongues

• Carsek: Supernaturally easy to learn. Pushes out other languages, slowly, in the brain. Crawls its way into texts, slithers across pages and inscriptions, translating and destroying both. Because of this, the Carseks tend to see other tongues as particularly strange, like weeds groing in the cracks of a neatly-tended sidewalk. Speakers of other tongues call it the Red Curse.

• Shalk: Supernaturally hard to forget. Borne in the blood of it's people. All Shalk can learn the Language, it grows like a tree in their mind from the smallest seed of exposure. It can be suppressed, but will rise again. There are many dialects and ways of speaking, which a non-Shalk would have to learn individually, but all quickly become familiar to another speaker of the Language.

• Abati: Supernaturally universal. Words which reconstruct themselves before you from base principals. Although named after one culture, dialects, all different but relatively intelligible, spring up all over the universe like mushrooms after a rain. Spoken by wizards, understood by rocks and trees and birds. Fire speaks this language. As wizards walk by hidden ways throughout the many planes and cities, they carry this language with them, like sparks fanned out from a fire. In secret places all over the world, you will hear this language whispered. Those without magic speak this language haltingly, with leaden tongues.

All PCs should share at least one starting language. You think it'll be fun to have a language barrier, but... I mean, you do you, but in my experience it gets old fast. Shalk characters know the Language for free, spellcasters can know Abati, and anyone can know Carsek. In addition, humans probably know the local language, if it's still spoken at all.