I was just thinking about an alternate magic system. Instead of thr arcane/divine split or the
the druid , cleric, magic user dichotomy though how about a Chaos/Nature/Law split?
Chaos magic would be obvious "physics" violating spells, blast magic, walls and that sort of thing. Some of the shadow illusions would be here as well
Nature magic would deal with things that already exists animals, divination, mental spells plants, healing and such ...
Order magic would be things that effect probability, celestial energy maybe , turning undead (as as spell ala Lament of the Flame Princess) and some cross overs like divination and buff spells ...
If desired schools could be tied to a stat such Chaos magic to Cha , Nature Magic to Int and Order magic to Wis maybe
Or they could be tied to an OD&D 3 alignment system (Chaos= Chaotic, Nature =Neutral and Order = Lawful ) or even inverted (magic is about domination of the forces, so Chaos Magic Users are lawful and Order magic users and Chaotic)
As for the classes, in 3x/Pathfinder they'd be a custom deal mixing aspects of Wizard, Archivist and the Elements of Magic "Boon" system --
In OSR games they'd be treated as a magic user with a custom spell list and d6 for hit die instead of d4. Unlike MU's they can wear non metal armor (or mithril) and use most weapons. What balances this is that they have an MU's to hit ..
So what do y'all think?
Trail of Cthulhu 2e and Broken Empires
-
I try not to back funding projects (on Kickstarter and the like) that often
these days. This is because I backed a few in recent years that I now kind
of r...
4 weeks ago
I like the basic idea. Chaos spells destroy order. Law spells create order. Nature spells maintain balance. I think most spells could be slotted into one of the three, or simply into nature if none applied.
ReplyDeleteJust picking out one thing from your examples, I'm thinking I might put wall of stone and wall of ice in Law, but wall of fire and wall of air in Chaos. I'd base other calls like that similarly, dependent on whether a spell pushed physics toward or away from entropy, ice for example being further from entropy than water.
I would also put all the various healing spells currently in the cleric's repertoire in the Law list, but might add some chaotic healing spells. Something like 'wild growth' or chaotic regeneration.
As far as how to relate these 3 spheres to characters, I'd probably have wizards choose to be either of-Law or of-Chaos, then have druids cast from the nature list. If Law or Chaos had access to their opposite spell list, it would be minor.. for example, maybe the spells would cast with all minimum values for variables.
Those are pretty cool ideas. I like the entropy thing especially , its not something that would have occurred to me.
ReplyDelete