Magic Words suck. Here’s Magic in the Moment.

Fighters are good at fighting. Their core mechanic is the same attack and damage roll used by every other class and creature. To do the thing they are good at they roll a d20, add some bonuses, and compare the result to a target number. This bare-bones framework has been used by players and referees to negotiate everything from kicking sand in someone’s eyes, to chopping off a tentacle, to winning at beer pong. Different people at different tables taking a shared notion of what a fighter ought to be good at, and making it work with a single codified mechanic.

Viewed from this perspective Magic Users are the first example of unnecessary complexity creeping into the game’s rules. It makes sense to a degree: strong humans exist ergo it’s easy to have a shared notion of what they can do. Fighters and Magic Users represent the extreme ends of a scale between the grounded and the fantastical; a scale which correlates linearly to class complexity. The less “real” a thing is, the more rules we need to understand it. But that gap between the least and the most complex class should be much narrower than Gygax intended.

I want to give Magic Users at my table set of simple tools. Tools both referee and player can hold the entirety of within their heads. Tools that can be twisted into different shapes to suit a million different situations. I want to harness the power of negotiation to give players a creative role in determining how their magic works, but I want that creativity confined strictly to the table.

Magic in the Moment

Magic users may know one Magic Word for each odd numbered level they’ve reached. They begin play with a single word randomly determined from the list below. New words (gained at levels 3, 5, 7, etc.) may either be rolled from the list, or discovered through play by some means acceptable to the referee.*

1. Fire	11. Bubble
2. Cold	12. Phantasm
3. Stone	13. Wall
4. Dark	14. Hold
5. Charm	15. Water
6. Slow	16. Gravity
7. Detect	17. Anchor
8. Animate	18. Separate
9. Nature	19. Create
10. Bone	20. Time

Magic Users may attempt to cast spells at any time by describing an effect which is supported by the words they know. For example, a Magic User who knows the word “Fire” might say: “I want to cast a spell…

“to light all the candles in the room.”
“to attack the goblin with deadly heat.”
“to melt the manacles I’m wearing.”
“to allow me to swim through that lava safely.”
“to shape our campfire into an image.”
“to neutralize the flaming oil they’re throwing at us.”

So on, and so forth.

After the Magic User describes their spell, the referee assigns a target number (discussed below), and the magic user rolls 2d6.** If they roll equal to or greater than the target number the spell goes off as it was described. If they roll less than the target number the spell fails. Failed spells may simply fizzle, or they may backfire more spectacularly depending on how badly the attempt was failed, and how the referee likes to run their game.

The base target number for any spell is 5 + the number of spells successfully cast. This resets each time the Magic User has a full night’s rest.

The base target number is intended as a starting point. It’s meant to be modified according to how closely the described spell matches the referee’s idea of what a Magic User is capable of. The referee should make every attempt to be consistent and communicative about their standards, and must be willing to negotiate. They have to be able to tell the player why the target number is what it is. If the player then wants to change the spell to get a more favorable number before they roll, the referee ought to allow that.

Some things simply cannot be done no matter how high the dice roll. If a first level character wants to use the word “Fire” to deal d6 damage to everyone in the world, the referee can just say ‘no.’ Ideally the standards will be consistent enough that players will learn how to reasonably predict what they can and can’t get away with. It’s the same as how some referees ground their rulings for fighters in real world history, while others ground their rulings in Conan stories.

I cannot dictate what level of magic power seems appropriate in your game. As an example, however, the difficulty of a spell might increase if:

The caster is using more than one word.
The spell’s connection to the word is tenuous.
The target isn’t close enough to touch.
The casting process is hindered in some way, such as the caster’s hands being tied, or attempting to cast without being noticed.
The spell is in conflict with the environment, such as casting a fire spell in pouring rain.
The spell has more than one target.
The spell deals more than d6 damage.

Likewise, the difficulty of the spell might decrease if:

The magic user is willing to spend extra time on the casting.
Something appropriate is sacrificed, such as hit points, or a valuable item.
Another magic user is helping with the spell casting.
The spell is in concert with the environment, such as casting a fire spell in a volcano.

After successfully casting a spell, Magic Users may record the spell for later use. Each recorded spell may be used once per day without a casting roll. These still count as successful spells for the purposes of determining the base target number. Magic Users may know a maximum of one recorded spell per level. At any time they may forget a recorded spell if they wish to replace it with a new one.

Footnotes:

*Discovering a word in my game would require finding another magic user’s spell book, or performing some lengthy and expensive experimentation. Other referees might be satisfied to let a Magic User discover a word which they’d merely seen another Magic User use. Foolishly lenient referees might even let their players pick whatever words they like (scandalous behavior if you ask me.) In any event the important thing is that the player only have a number of words equal to half their level rounded up.

**If your game has ability scores, this roll would be a good thing for Intelligence to modify.

Thanks are due to Chris H. and John Bell for contributing to the development of this idea.

Post Script:

I don’t imagine the schedule of Papers & Pencils updates matters much to anyone but me. However, if you do care, be advised that I’m changing things up. For the past few years I’ve set myself a rigid 1-post-per-week goal. It was a good system for maintaining my work/life balance, but my priorities have shifted, and I don’t think a rigid schedule is a good fit for the way I do things now.

Going forward I’m only going to post something when I’m satisfied that I’ve completed something worth reading. That means fewer posts, but hopefully that lack will be compensated for by an increase in post quality. It should also mean that I spend less time writing filler posts when I ought to be getting the Duchy of the Damned Dancing Duke ready for layout.

I am fully aware that when I’ve attempted this approach in the past it has usually resulted in months of dead air. Sneeze sneeze, 2014, sneeze. I’ve got a different approach these days which I’m confident will be more successful. If it isn’t, I’ll just go back to a more rigid approach, easy peasy.

Thanks for reading!

(By the way: Magic Words doesn’t actually suck. I was just making a reference).

Fuck the King of Space: Post Mortem

We played the last session of Fuck the King of Space on December 29th, 2018. The game ran for about a year, with a total of 23 sessions played.

I decided to end the campaign for a few reasons. The biggest of which was just my available energy. I said during my original campaign pitch that it was a stupid idea for me to agree to run a second campaign, and I was right. I already struggle to find enough time to make ORWA a good game. I never managed to devote much at all to FKOS, and play suffered because of that. Within just a few months the game went from weekly to biweekly. That helped a lot–and thanks are due to Chris H. for offering to run during my off weeks!–but even with that help I wasn’t keeping up.

There were other factors as well. My intent had been for FKOS to be vastly different from ORWA. I wanted some variety on my end. In practice my work wound up being pretty much the same. Not because ORWA’s back end systems were a good fit for FKOS, but because I never worked out what FKOS’s own back end systems should look like. There were also interpersonal conflicts, personal tragedies, and lots of folks being seriously overworked, which made it difficult to get enough people together for a session during the latter half of 2018.

That’s not to say it was a bad campaign; all good things must end. We enjoyed 23 entertaining sessions which I was mostly pretty happy with. That said; campaigns never end because of what did work about them. So now is as good a time as there will ever bo to look back over what didn’t work so it can be improved if I ever attempt the game again.

There’s Too Much Space in Space. I never realized before running FKOS how much of a blessing ORWA’s intensely confined spaces are. When the entire game takes place within a 6-mile dome it makes sense to run the world like a megadungeon. Of course there’s some weird new thing lurking around every corner, behind every door, and beneath every manhole cover. The world is built on that kind of density, and I’ve come to rely on it for how I run my game.

That doesn’t work in space, but I did it anyway. Players constantly stumbled across lost planets, weird phenomena, other starships, and it always felt hacky. I failed to leverage the gameplay to communicate the setting. Space shouldn’t be empty–we are playing an adventure game after all–but it shouldn’t feel crowded either.

When the players have an interstellar space ship with an advanced FTL drive, it makes it difficult to:

Communicate the scale of the distances traveled.
Have them encounter the unexpected.

The first point can be mitigated somewhat with fuel consumption, but “You expend 30 fuel getting there” still feels like hand waving. Perhaps ships should need to refuel more often, thus forcing the players to interact with environments along the way. Alternately, “Travel Turns” might be added as a sort of limited version of the Haven Turn. The players have a lot of downtime, but their resources are limited to whatever is with them on the ship.

Encountering the unexpected during travel might be something I need to mostly give up on. It could still happen now and again, but I don’t think it ought to be a primary driver of play. Instead of using random encounters as a way of hooking players into adventures, I could use similar tables to generate rumors and job offers at various ports. It’s less interesting to hear “there’s a dragon over that hill” than it is to simply bump into a dragon while you’re in the hills, but it’s probably a better fit for space.

Even with my later revisions, Space Ships did not work. As I always do I started out with something that was way more complicated than it needed to be, and over the last year have learned how unnecessary most of it was. It’s a habit I need to break myself of. Writing complicated rules I’ll never use is not an efficient use of my time.

Turning “Space” and “Power” into resources was more trouble than it was worth, and I could never figure out how to make either into an effective limit on the player’s desires. Hull points offered too much protection between the party and any real danger to their ship. The codified modules were just…too much. I really should have known better.

If I were to redesign the system there’d be no hull points. Each hit in combat would reduce the ship’s functionality in some way. Many of the things on the modules list would become assumed parts of the ship (cockpits, engines, crew quarters), and modifications like adding a science lab would be handled in a more ad-hoc manner.

Weapons didn’t work in kinda the same way Space Ships didn’t. I had an over-complicated approach. Unlike Space Ships, the downfall of the system is that I never codified fukkin’ anything. The players were walking around with weapons that supposedly had quirks and special purposes, but neither they nor I had any idea what those were. Like I said above, I just never had the energy to give this game the attention it deserved. I still think the idea of restricting all weapons to d6 damage is a good one. I’ve certainly seen it work. I also still like the idea of differentiating weapons through their secondary properties, but like space ship modules I think that ought to be handled as an ad-hoc consideration. Your axe doesn’t have the “Also chops trees” special ability. It’s just an axe, and you know how axes work, so if there’s a tree to be chopped down you can say “Hey, I have an axe, can I get a bonus?”

I wonder if part of the issue here is that I tend to work through my problems by writing about them, and I have certain expectations for how long a piece of writing should be, which leads me to over-solve my problems. Something for me to think about.

Magic Words oddly enough, did not work well in this game. It’s a system I’ve used successfully for years, but FKOS put it to a whole new kind of stress test with two highly skilled and efficient players both running as magic users. My sketchy draft for Magic Words 2 was partially written in response to this problem, and I have yet newer ideas I hope to discuss soon.

Finally, The Setting didn’t work, which is again a matter of how little time I was able to spend on it. I’ve got notes somewhere about how the universe breaks down into several factions that all nominally work for the King, but are at odds with each other. There was going to be a powerful university structure called “The League of Distinguished Academics.” “The King’s Loyal Soldiers” were going to be this monstrous military machine without enough enemies to fight. The fact that I can’t remember all six (six?) factions off the top of my head is testament to how poorly they were communicated through he actual play of the game.

This is real disappointing for me. Figuring out how these factions worked with and against one another was what made me most excited about the campaign, and now they may well never be put to any use.

I hope one of these days I have the opportunity to give Fuck the King of Space the attention it really deserved. C’est la vie.

Discovering Dungeon Moon: What is a God?

Most of my games share a nebulous theology. There are vague deific entities who feed on human devotion. They perform miracles as a way of planting seeds for later harvest. I don’t put energy into crafting gods as agents in their own right because that pretty much never comes up. I do often create new religions for each game, because religion is a human foible, and something that will inform the world around the player characters. Those religions do not describe a metaphysical reality. It’s just people making shit up trying to understand the world around them. Deific entities then play into the expectations set by these religions so they can get their devotion fix.

(I’ve written before about Neve Canri, who is something of an exception to this rule.)

Dungeon Moon is a notable exception to that pattern. The gods of dungeon moon are not distant metaphysical entities. Divine power is neither so mysterious, nor far reaching. To be a god on Dungeon Moon one must be present on Dungeon Moon. Gods can be met, spoken to, touched. They are two steps removed from mortal existence, but no more so than that. They are weird, but comprehensible.

There is the Pale Jaguar, a cat larger than an elephant with forgotten knowledge inscribed on each strand of hair. It forbids any procreation by its adherents except by a ritual so complex that it must be personally overseen by the deity.

The Rot God is a fetid heap of decay which consumes life at a touch. It is bound to a pit by ancient holy magics. Fools throw it offerings of fabulous goldworks hoping to ward off disease and death. Their offerings sink into the god’s oozy body, ignored and unappreciated. The fly folk are its only true servants.

Shai wraps himself in a tattered brown blanket. The light from his eyes is blinding, giving visions of the true past to any who look into them. He fancies himself a “good” god, but is cautious to excess. He weighs options and ethics until it is too late to take effective action. He inserts himself everywhere as mediator, and his decisions carry the force of godly might–until his back is turned.

“Blender Head” is an impolite way to refer to That God Who Insists Names Are Beneath Their Dignity. When not enacting their own will, Blender Head moves so slowly that they might be mistaken for a statue, save for the constant creaking from their metal body. Their followers have a sort of roaming tent city with their god always at the center, moving one row of tents each day from the path behind the god, to the path before of the god. When compelled to act, Blender Head is faster than fast.

Mother Long Legs discovered a little town without its protective runes, filled with cowering peasants. She positioned herself over the town, with her eight legs around its edge, and set her spider-headed children to wrapping a wall of steel web from leg to leg, completely encircling the town. There is no kindness in her protection. She is omniscient within the town. She personally involves herself in the minutia of people’s lives, playing with them like dolls and devouring those who can’t be molded.

Corpse Seeker is a many-armed thing with a sense for where to find the dead. It interrogates corpses, and passes judgement over their lives. It has no power over what happens to their souls, but it wants them to know whether they have its approval or not. It may be convinced to ask slightly tangential questions if the answers would aid the living in a goal it approves of.

The gods of Dungeon Moon are not omnipotent. They are not omniscient. They can even be killed, though they have no hit points. Each god’s mortality is guarded by a trick. Some seemingly harmless non-sequiotor of an action which will destroy them. Like robots that can be rendered immobile when presented with a logical paradox; or aliens defeated by the common cold. Sometimes their weakness is ironic, other times it’s just random. It’s always a secret.