Magic

Shifting from the action-movie genre to the high-fantasy genre requires some changes in the magic system. I’m going to call these areas of magic “spheres” instead of “schticks”, but you get the idea. You should look at your source of power (especially if a wizard) and pick a spellcasting style.

Deities should not grant alarming numbers of spheres to their priests. For play balance, it may be that in some lands where the native deities grant such alarming numbers of spheres, foreign priests may find themselves able to access unusual degrees of power due to the broad conduits of divine energy to channel, and that priests from such lands would find themselves more limited abroad. Naturally, if no deity is known for granting amazing degrees of power, this can avoid coming up in the first place...

Truly desperate efforts can also include permanently burning points of magic. These can be bought back with experience in a normal way (it isn’t a permanent negative to the stat).

Note that not all special effects in a sphere are available to a priest; these vary with the deity.

Effects listed as requiring continuous concentration mean that the caster may only perform passive Dodges while maintaining the effect, and take no other action.

Magicians can recover one Magic point by meditating for half an hour or sleeping for an hour. Unconsciousness due to wounds does not count as sleep.

You need not be a spellcaster in order to use magic: Fu paths and related phenomena can produce magical effects, and some high-magic areas exist where even the peasants know folk magic.

Spheres

• Blast: blowing things up with a high special effects budget.
• Blessing: the purest channeling a priest can use.
• Chi: the study and manipulation of pure magic; includes enchantment of magical items.
• Divination: studying the signs and portents, mediumship, piercing illusions, setting warnings, scrying, and psychometry.
• Elements: mastery over the four elements.
• Healing: bringing people back from injury and death.
• Illusion: not your grandpa’s Phantasmal Force, higher-level illusions can emulate reality... or unreality.
• Influence: manipulating minds by means subtle or overt.
• Life: a druid’s delight.
• Light: The conjuration of holy light or darkness.
• Movement: Telekinesis in all its applications.
• Sound: Silence and noise.
• Summoning: reaching into other levels of reality.
• Weather: command of the elements, priest-style.

Some important things to explore are the different possible ways of changing spell durations, areas of effect, and triggers.

Priest spheres: divination, heal, life (hold animal), mind (hold person, hold animal), blessing, blast, chi, light, summoning (speak with dead), weather (earthquake? rock to mud?). Priests may get AV penalties or bonuses to certain spheres from their deities.

Wizard spheres: blast, illusion, mind, detection (clairvoyance), shaping, movement (heavy lifting, shield, fly, floating disc), summoning, light, chi.

You should get back spent points of magic/attunement by sleeping or meditating rather than waiting a whole session. Of course, the magic system and opponents should be arranged to encourage using that reservoir of magic...

To keep sorcerers balanced for long-term campaign play, there are a few limitations to apply to them:

• Wizards need to improve their skills by finding the appropriate magical exercises to practice at their current level of aptitude. Senior master-level exercises would risk life and limb to a journeyman, but are quite practical to a junior master. Wizards who wish to advance rapidly in their art tend to travel a lot and try to use their magic in a variety of situations. (Wizards who do nothing but stay home in the lab and practice tend to do very poorly outside of the lab, since magic across the world is so variable.)
• The really impressive magics should always require rare goodies to perform, and happen with ritual magic or enchantments. Goodies that can boost wide classes of spells should be very rare. In general, such things should only boost one particular application of one particular magic schtick.

Links

Much inspiration was derived from Earthdawn, Rolemaster, Ars Magica, AD&D, Psychedelic Goblin’s work, Bryant Durrell’s pages...