Psychic Magic for USS Crowfield

James will tell you that I’m not a fan of mixing magic and tech, and he’s right. There’s no limit to my hatred of sticking magic into a modern or futuristic world. Yes, that means I’m not a Harry Potter fan. I flat out refuse to read, watch, or play The Dresden Files.

You know what works well in a modern or futuristic setting, though? Psychic or psionic powers! They particularly show up a lot in Star Trek. Off the top of my head:

• The Talosians in “The Cage” (the first pilot episode).
• Gary Mitchell in “Where No Man has Gone Before” (the second pilot episode).
• The eponymous character in “Charlie X”
• Oh yeah, Spock and all Vulcans have low-level telepathy.
• The aliens in “Plato’s Stepchildren”
• Deana Troi (like all Betazoids) is a telepath.

So what if we had an ancient world where certain people had psionic powers? Wouldn’t they just be the wizards of that world? Wouldn’t their powers be considered magical?

I think this would work well for the U.S.S. Crowfield world. Maybe there’s something in the local fruit that gives certain people powers (like in “Plato’s Stepchildren”)? The locals might call them wizards, shamans, or whatever, but they’re really psionics.

That means I have to replace the spells with spells based on psychics powers, but I think it will work.

Maybe I don’t even tell the player’s that’s why I’m doing… just have the “spellbook” and see if they can figure it out.

What do you think?

Maybe next week I’ll have a working list of spells.

Crowfield Magic System Changes

A couple of years agao I posting about Crowfield’s magic system. I’ve made a couple of changes:

Spell Failure

In the original post I said that if the player fails the spell check then “The spell does not take effect, and the character cannot cast any more spells until they get a full night of rest.”

The new version is “The spell does not take effect, and the caster takes 1d6 damage.”

Wait! You mean I can die from casting a spell?

No. Not directly, at least. A failed spell check will never bring you below 1 hit point. If you take more damage than that, the excess is ignored and you fall unconscious. If you happened to be standing on a narrow ledge over a pool of molten lava when you fall unconscious you’ll probably die, but that’s the lava killing you.

How do I regain consciousness?

Starting the round after your spell failure, you can attempt a Constitution save in order to regain consciousness. If you don’t make it that round, you can try again each round thereafter. You can act normally the round after you make the saving throw.

Why did you make this change?

Three reasons: (1) It adds more drama. (2) It makes spell casting a more tactical choice. (3) It de-nerfs higher level spell casters where a single failure made them useless for the rest of the day.

Learn New Spells

In addition to the in-game costs listed in that post, each spell costs 1 XP per spell level.

Epilogue

That’s it for this week. What do you think of the changes? I tried to make it not too deadly!

Crowfield Spellbook Update #2

My last update on the Crowfield campaign’s spellboook was at the end of January. I thought it was time for another update.

• The first chapter is 95% done. It needs:

Crowfield Spellbook Update #1

At the end of December, I talked about my plan to write spellbook for Crowfield. 

The first part of the plan was to write-up all the converted spells.  I set a deadline of late March for that.  Fortunately, the Swords & Wizardry writes-ups were amazing, and I'm now done.

The next steps:

Monsters Never Save, Part 2

One of my goals for this year is to make shorter blog posts. I feel that I’ve been rambling trying to make sure I explain everything, and that doesn’t necessarily make for an enjoyable read.

So when I wrote the Monsters Never Save post, I left some things unexplained. Then Zomus offered suggestions that I’d already considered. That makes me feel bad, like I wasted his time.

This week’s post is addressing his reply to that post.  His reply is in italics.

Monsters Never Save

Back in July, I wrote about a house rules where monsters never miss in combat. The logic was that the story is about the PCs, not the monsters. So instead of the monsters rolling to hit, the players would roll to defend.

A week later, I wrote about my magic casting variant where players have to make a successful roll in order to cast a spell.

As I was translating the spell book for the latter, it occurred to me that I have significantly “nerfed” the spell casters.

Crowfield Spellbook

Back in July, I talked about the way that spell-casting is going to work in Crowfield. I like the system a lot, but it causes a few problems:

• Every spell in the rulebook needs to be updated to reflect the changes.
• I don’t have the rights to reproduce the original D&D spells .
• I need a way to distribute the updated spell book to the players.

Casting Spells in Crowfield

Why change the way spell casting works?

Because Vancian Magic sucks.

Clearly that’s just my opinion, but I know it’s shared by more than a few. Ever since the beginning of the hobby, players have been replacing the “memorize, fire, forget” system with different systems, most involving spell points of some sort.

This is not a spell point system. I think those add another level of book-keeping that I’d rather avoid.

I guess I should say why I don’t like Vancian magic. I’ve never read Jack Vance’s work, so his magic system doesn’t match my (pre-D&D) mental image of a magic user. If you were to ask young me to think of a magic user, there are four names that would have sprang to mind:

• Merlin
• Gandalf
• Samanatha Stevens
• Jeanie

I can’t think of a single scene with any of these “classic” magicians that fits the “memorize, fire, forget” paradigm. Instead they have powers that they can do, and when they need to do them, they do them…

…And sometimes it doesn’t work.

…And sometimes it goes horribly wrong.

…And sometimes they temporarily lose their powers.

That’s what I want to recreate.

While I’m at it, I want to align spell levels with character levels.

Fool's Tools, a spell for Tunnels & Trolls

This is a spell intended for Tunnels & Trolls,but can easily be used with the original Dungeons & Dragons.

Fool's Tools
[Conjuring]
(Snowgen)

Spell level:	1
Cost:	1 per w.u. of created item
Range:	Touch
Duration:	1 combat turn or less (see below)
Power Up?:	Yes. Double duration for each level increase.

Description: With this spell, the caster creates the normal, mundane, generic, inanimate object of his choice. Thus the caster could create a bowl but not a mouse; a sword would be acceptable, though a magical sword would not.

Created items must be generic. This a caster could create "a key", but not necessarily "the key that unlocks this door". Likewise she could specify a wooden bowl or even a diamond bowl, but not "the exact copy of that bowl there".

The object is created into the caster's empty hand, and remains in existence for the duration of the spell, or until the object is no longer in contact with the caster, whichever happens first.

When the spell expires no matter the reason, the object vanishes in a small flash of light and a poof of smoke.

Those stuffy wizards who thinks spells need somber names call this spell Ex Nihilo.

Using the Spell in [o]D&D and its OSR Clones

Unsurprisingly the spell needs minimal alteration to work in D&D. Simply ignore the "Cost" and "Power Up?" lines and change duration to read "1 minute per caster level, or less (see below)."

Inspiration

A post in the Frugal GM blog led me to discover the The Gongfarmer's Almanac. Within issue 1, I came across a spell called "Temporary Creation" written by someone named Terry Olson. I liked the idea behind the spell, but thought the implementation was way too complicated for my style of play. My guess is that Temporary Creation developed for Dungeon Crawl Classics, which I guess is a more complicated set of rules.