Necromancers: some more magic spheres

Just for interest, I whipped up a few more spheres to see if it would actually work out. Here's a couple of examples; the first might be a druid, the second perhaps some kind of priest or a hermit sorcerer? I dunno, I had a feeling of shininess and (metaphorical) coldness and hardness when I came up with that one, so it felt coherent. A sort of severe, puritan kind of magic that contrasts with the usual chaos and poetry and strangeness of spells.

	Forest	Earth	Weather	Beast
Commune	Navigate Sense forest spirits	Track Speak with earth spirits	Predict weather Travel safely in storms	Sense animals Speak with beasts
Evoke	Conjure plants	Summon earth elementals Create clay or stone items	Gust of wind Lightning strike	Summon animals
Manipulate	Warp plants Remove or create paths	Shape earth Hide tracks Damage elementals	Change weather	Control animals
Assume	Take on plantlike traits Blend into forest	Take on earth traits Meld into ground or rock	Ignore weather Fly	Take on bestial traits

	Light	Crystal	Metal	Cold
Commune	Sense light Speak with light spirits	Scrying orb Shattering vibrations	Sense metal Scrying mirror Magnetism	Navigate by temperature Scry with ice Walk on ice
Evoke	Glowing lights Laser bolt	Create crystalline objects Encase in crystal	Create metal objects Conjure blade storm	Ice storm Icy wind Freeze water
Manipulate	Shape, increase or decrease light Illusions	Warp glass Resonate crystals	Shape metal Command metal elementals	Change temperature Command ice elementals
Assume	Become radiant Avoid blindness from intense light	Meld into glass Become crystalline (semi-invisible)	Metallic skin Meld into metal Magnetic aura	Icy aura Ignore cold weather Avoid heat-seeking animals

Necromancers again

Any ongoing spell effect absorbs some of your Mana. So if you use three successes to summon a shadowy beast, it can be imbued with up to three Mana. The Mana commitment determines how powerful the ongoing spell is. This prevents summon-spamming (you reduce your dicepool for future spells) and helps balance different kinds of spell; it also gives a guideline for how useful things like growing skeletal claws might be.

Borrowing from Numenera, which I've been listening to, let's stick to Might, Speed and Intellect for non-spell activities. You have 11 points to allocate between these, because each needs at least one die.

So, for example: you might cast a Skeletal Claws spell (Assume + Bone) to make yourself more formidable in combat, granting you additional dice equal to the successes you roll. However, while you retain the claws, your dicepool is reduced. If you roll 3 successes, you can choose to allocate up to 3 of them; if you pick all 3, your Mana is reduced by that amount, leaving you only 2 dice.

The claws don't necessarily just boost your combat ability. They might help with climbing, breaking through doors, intimidating people, and so on.

I think for simplicity, I'll use these pools as hit points. Bad things happening to you deplete your pools - note, though, that I'm not envisioning any Mana-injuring effects, so while you might get beaten up, drugged and headachey, you should always be able to try and cast spells.

There's no critical rules for non-magical attributes. Either you succeed or you don't.

NPCs can be whipped up easily. If I want them to have magic or equivalent powers, I can easily either use the existing necromancy pools, or come up with alternative spheres for them, if I want an elementalist or druid or something.

More necromancers

So a while ago I imagined a Necromancers game and proposed a broad skills-based system. Dan disagreed and has put forward a class-based game with specific abilities. After much distraction doing other stuff, I have an initial idea for this that I’m going to play around with.

Although I originally mentioned a BRP-like system, and I still think that would work, I've been playing around with ideas for theme-based organic magic recently. Which is to say, ways of combining small numbers of generic keywords to create a variety of interesting effects. I feel like this could avoid the need for massive lists of specific spells, and allow player creativity,

Spellcasting

The basic idea is that magic – which should be the majority of the cool stuff going on – will be modelled as a combination system. There are Talents (what you do) and Spheres (what it relates to) which can be combined to model a wide range of necromantic magic, without creating specific spells. The Talents are Commune, Evoke, Manipulate and Assume. The Spheres are Darkness, Essence, Bone and Beast.

Spells are cast by rolling up to 5 d6s, at the caster’s choice. Each roll of 4+ is a success. On a double, the spell misfires in some way – low numbers will tend to sputter out or go awry so they have little effect, while high numbers go out of control, possibly doing what you intended but also wreaking havoc. As a result, rolling more dice will produce a more powerful spell, but will also increase the risk.

By itself, the misfire rule would be annoying. However, the caster’s aptitude makes a great difference. This allows you to ignore doubles, based on your Mastery, making it advisable to stick to your favoured spells.

Ignore numbers

You rank the Talents and Spheres from 0-3, and when casting a spell, add these numbers together to find your, um... Mastery? Sure, why not. You can ignore any doubles less than or equal to your Mastery. This means that your best combination can always be safely cast (3+3=6), your worst combination will be pretty risky except at low power, and most spells can be cast with 2-3 dice for only moderate risk.

Of course, this means there’s always a risk for anything but your very best combination. Or do I want to have improved skill cancel out specific numbers of doubles, making casting below your skill level always completely safe? Let’s look at some numbers.

For 2d6, the probability of a double is 1/6

For 3d6, the probability is... ouch. Okay, I can’t actually find any guidance on this question from people who are willing to talk the right level of maths. Which is to say: I can find people who answer specific questions about this with specific numbers, and I can find people who refer obliquely to complicated maths, but not anyone who will lay out clearly how I would calculate this stuff for myself. I’m pretty sure it’s a factorials thing, but I’m happier with my ability to tediously lay out charts in Excel than with my ability to guess at statistics. And doing factorials with fractions is a nightmare.

So it looks like probabilities go something like: 0.1666..., 0.444..., 0.722... and I can’t be bothered with the ghastly cut-and-pasting required to do 5 dice, but it should be around the 0.9 mark. Assuming I didn’t mess up. The figures match the specific figures I got elsewhere, so great.

This means that if you’re casting a four-dice spell, you have a 72% chance of something going wrong. Unless you’re casting your very best spell, there’s at least a 12% chance of a miscast, and this will generally be more like 36% as the average spell rating will be 3. Okay, you’re not likely to cast your rubbish spells that often, but basically you have a substantial chance of problems on any but your most favoured spells, although in many cases this will be a case of overpowering them rather than wasting your action, because low doubles get lost first.

Dice-negating

What about cancelling dice instead? That is, on favoured spells you can ignore specific dice for the purposes of doubles, rather than doubles with certain numbers? So if you rolled 4, 4, 4, 5, 6 you’d be able to ignore the triple if you had two Mastery. I’d need to adjust the ranks, probably using 0012 rather than 0123.

That’s... at least equally difficult to calculate, if not more so, because I have to care about number of pairs rather than their existence. Thankfully, someone has done it because Yahtzee exists, although again they only vaguely mutter about binomial expansion without explaining it.

With only 3 dice, the most likely common minimum (rolling 2 dice for 4+ doesn’t seem like a gamble many people will take often), there’s a 3% chance of needing 2 mastery and a 42% chance of needing 1.

For four dice (I did this one first, which is why it’s longer): Four identical = 6/1296, Three identical = 120/1296, Two pairs = 90/1296, One pair = 720/1296

So there’s a 6/1296 chance (0.00463) of needing 3 Mastery, a 16% chance of needing 2 Mastery (a triple or two pairs can both be cancelled by negating two dice), and a 55% chance of needing one Mastery.

With 5 dice, there’s a vanishingly small chance of needing 4 Mastery, so small that I don’t think it’s worth worrying about ever. There’s a 5% chance of needing 3, a 38% chance of needing 2, and a 46% chance of needing 1.

On the whole, then 2 Mastery will be enough the overwhelming majority of the time. I suppose I could introduce a rule that when cancelling pairs, you have to cancel both dice of the first pair before you can cancel the second pair, but that seems a bit clunky.

Highs and Lows

A simpler alternative would be the ever-popular 1s rule. Rolling a 1 would make the spell fizzle, but Mastery allows you to ignore 1s. Similarly, 6s might make the spell a bit more powerful than you intended, but Mastery absorbs that (whether you want it or not) although they still count as a success. If you roll a 1 and a 6, you could decide which to cancel first. You’d of course get more 1s and 6s with more dice, but with Mastery you can ignore many of them. This is probably a lot simpler, I wish I’d thought of it before. But I probably want to use d10s rather than d6s here, and go for a 5+ success.

Spells

Here's a table of the Spheres and Talents, with some example spells that might be possible.

	Darkness	Essence	Bone	Beast
Commune	See in darkness Detect shadow beings	Detect souls See ghosts Speak with dead	Find bodies Sense skeletons Forensic necromancy	Sense sinister animals Speak with beasts
Evoke	Conjure darkness Cause blindness Cause fear	Animate dead Death bolt	Conjure skeletons or skeletal constructions	Summon bats, wolves, rats, cats
Manipulate	Alter shadows Create shadow servant	Influence creature Compel Ghost	Warp enemy Shatter bones	Turn into cloud of bats
Assume	Travel through shadows Shadow aura	Heal pain or cuts Drain life Ghostly “rider” aids you	Grow skeletal claws or wings Mend bones	Take on bestial traits

Draft system

So, under this draft I'm using the high-and-low system.

During character generation, you assign numbers 0,0,1,2 to each of the Spheres and again to each of the Talents. When casting a spell, you determine which Sphere and Talent combination it falls under and add these scores to find your Mastery.

To cast a spell, you roll between 0 and 5 d10s. A score of 5+ grants you one success, making the spell more effective. To achieve significant effects, you need larger pools. The choice of how many dice to roll is entirely up to you; you decide how much power you want to try and draw on.

Rolling extra dice is risky because you're more likely to lose control of the spell. Any roll of a 1 is a Fizzle, as the spell dissipates prematurely or goes awry in some mundane fashion; there may be minor effects from the magic, but effectively it's a dud. Any roll of 10 is a Miscast, as the spell's energies overwhelm you and you lose control; the spell goes off and will typically achieve more or less what you wanted (10 is still a success, after all), but it's also going to have unexpected consequences.

Mastery helps you to control your spells without untoward happenings. You can ignore a number of Fizzles and Miscasts equal to your Mastery - this doesn't affect the number of successes you get (the dice aren't discarded), so rolling 10,10,10,2,4 with Mastery 3 is still a successful cast.

Additional successes don't have to change the result of the spell. If you only want to achieve a minor result, and roll four successes, it doesn't force you expand the spell's effect - it's not much of a success otherwise.

Walking the Dead

So, I had this idea entirely out of the blue for a game where you're all necromancers.

Hey, get back here!

As those familiar with my disposition will guess, this would not be a deeply serious game exploring the darkness and depravity that lurks within the human soul, or experiencing what it might mean to speak with the dead, or how being a shunned and hated practictioner of sinister arts might turn society against you and how you might react. It'd just be a fairly standard heroic fantasy game. Where you're all necromancers. In fact, I'm quite tempted to say it should be an exaggeratedly cheerful game (something a bit twee) where the people who get called on to solve problems are the "friendly" neighbourhood necromancers. The fact that you solve them with dominated skeletons, horrific apparitions and eldritch bolts of necrotic energy is just by the way. Necromancers ain't necessarily bad people. Cat stuck up a tree? Summon a flock of crows to fetch it. Or blight the tree so it decays and brings the cat crashing down. Or evoke a sense of blasphemous dread that brings it yowling down in terror. Or engulf it with your steely will and force it to slink down to bow before you. Then Mrs Goggins will give you some cake and a cup of tea for being so kind.

So, what system would let you run a game like this?

Given the specialised focus, what you want is to be able to articulate clearly how your necromancer is different from the next one. This might come down to different spell selections, different approaches to problems, or different characters. A pale, gothic necromancer in black lace is different from a cackling, withered necromancer in tattered robes.

I really don't think something like D&D would work for it, because the class framework pushes you towards certain roles. A necromancer would struggle to have hit points, and I don't think there are enough thematic options to make you anything other than a wizard without delving heavily into splatbooks. The combat focus of the game would cause problems for fragile casters with poor combat skills and a limited spell pool. Also, I don't think the health model really fits my concept here, somehow.

Something vaguely BRP-like might work, if you just came up with appropriate skill lists. A set of necromantic talents where everyone assigned points, and use those (rather than spell lists) to determine your effectiveness.

Weirdly, I'm somehow tempted to try it with FATE despite my rather meh experience with FAE. A system where (it seems) you assume you can do stuff and highlight a few key distinguishing features seems like it might well fit.

And of course I could put my money where my opinion is and hack together a Numenera adaptation, but I suspect it would involve quite a lot of hacking since I'd basically be devising new Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs.

So just a very quick post there to get the idea down while I still remember it. Comments and recommendations very welcome, I'm not particularly system-aware.