Sorcerous Restraints

[Richard]

I'm about to start running a RQ campaign. Actually I'm about to restart a 2 (3?!) decades old campaign we had to stop 5 or 6 years ago which ran on RQ3, with minor twiddles. The premises is that it takes place a century or so after our last much loved band of heroes passed away leaving their mark on the world.

I actually like a lot of the RQ2 simplifications and would like to use the system (Well okay not all of it. What the hell is going on with the economics? It's like D&D all over again!). However a mental run through of the consequences of sorcery give me pause for thought. We might be shorn of the massive possibilities of gargantuan Free Int sorcerers with enormous experience and huge wells of magic points (Strangers in Prax etc) but the basic RQ2 sorceror is still pretty enormous. In fact any sorceror with a decent grimoire may make other characters seem somewhat incidental or at least underpowered (Suggested examples from the 'Regenerate' thread give a flavour of the kind of thing I'm talking about). I realise this is not so much a flaw in the game as a reflection of some 'mighty God Learner sorcery can obliterate the universe' element in 2nd Age Gloratha but I feel I'd better rein it in a bit for my somewhat grittier setting.

I'm thinking that each spell should be learned and paid for as a separate advanced skill. Any other ideas?

 

[Dan True]

I'm running RQ2 in Eberron, as such Sorcerer's shouldn't wear armor. I've added the house rule that you recieve your a penalty of your Armour Penalty * 10 to your Sorcery. So a Sorcerer in full plate recieves -90%.

That way, at least a single crossbow bolt might threaten him - even with the fighter covering him.

I've also banned Regenerate and Treat Wounds.
I've added monetary costs on creating Enchanted Items.

Plus, they live in a world where most Guard Sergeants or officers carry a Wand of Countermagic or Neutralise Magic.

- Dan

 

[Simulacrum]

Without going so far as one skill per spell - simply keep the grimoires small, and don't allow too many "useful" spells to occupy the same one. And package related spells into a grimoire, which both makes setting sense and pushes a sorcerer towards a particular set of strategies which oftentimes won't be much use.

 

[Dan True]

Without going so far as one skill per spell - simply keep the grimoires small, and don't allow too many "useful" spells to occupy the same one. And package related spells into a grimoire, which both makes setting sense and pushes a sorcerer towards a particular set of strategies which oftentimes won't be much use.

Yeah, you could do that too. I've devided them into Grimoires based on the classical schools in D&D, so they tend to be fairly large. However wrack only exists in Evocation, and that has less useful spells than many of the others.
But I'm also looking for a d20-style MRQ, you are obviously not


- Dan

 

[Deleriad]

I would also go for the 4 spells per Grimoire approach as the most basic way to row back on sorcery. The problem with one spell per skill is that IRs are quite limited.

An alternative approach is to enforce the need for non-sorcery skills. E.g. you may need various lores and require a separate skill for literacy. These skills would essentially be baggage that the sorcerer has to learn but aren't used that much in play.

The other really simple way is magic defences. In a world where magic is ubiquitous then magical protection is going to be much more common. The big weakness of sorcery compared to other forms is that its Magnitude defaults to one so it's easy to dispel.

Finally, do make sure MP sources are very rare. That is the default in RQII anyway but it's good to remember it.

 

[kintire]

I just have to add this one once more:

The other really simple way is magic defences. In a world where magic is ubiquitous then magical protection is going to be much more common. The big weakness of sorcery compared to other forms is that its Magnitude defaults to one so it's easy to dispel.

This is Glorantha. Anyone who is anyone and most people who aren't will have maguc defenses of some sort, or access to someone who can provide them if they will be needed. And this is Sorcery's big Achilles heel. Every point of manipulation spent on boosting magnitude is a point not spent on doing anything useful, so magical defences drain a sorcerer's effectiveness even if they can get through

 

[Richard]

Thanks chaps. Some food for thought. I've chewed over some of this already and liked the small, in terms of content, grimoires idea. This is what lead me back down the old RQ3 'one skill to a spell' path. I think the actual physical object could also be rather large and unwieldy containing a lot of related lore. The campaign already had different schools of sorcery on the go. However it's hard to imagine these would not pull their resources giving access to libraries of useful spells. Leads to a whole other intriguing area of rival sorcery traditions, corporate/guild style spell theft and the like.

As good old ENC subtracted from sorcery, and other magic, skills in the RQ3 campaign I could also use a variant of the 'armour worn' penalty (Although in the past this wouldn't just have hit sorcerers). I don't want to change the flavour of the preceding, much loved campaigns though by making it feel like D&D. The magnitude requirement and a world where widespead magical defences are commonplace (Which doesn't really fit the grittier than Glorantha feel of my game) are certainly limiting to attack spells but not generally to enhancement spells cast on the cmage and their allies wherein the largest opportunity for throbbery lies.

We may run into some problems when wizards decide to learn only certain spells from a single grimoire and not the whole book. Why learn Wrack from one Grimoire and Flight from seperate grimoires when I can copy them all into one book and learn them using the same skill? Perhaps each mage simply copies out the spells they want to learn into a personal grimoire and learns that way. There may be brigades of talented scribes doing just that. Without access to the tome in question, or one describing the spell in a script the magician understands, no improvement may be possible, a major disadvatage. (But then if learning the same spell from another Grimoire is a seperate skill needed?)

I sense I'm going to have to put some work into the exact mechanics of this. I have in the past organised the old Harn convocations into RQ3 schools (I see a thread for someone doing the same for RQ2) and created sorcerous tomes for various wizardly characters so it should be doable. I probably need to go over the rules again in a fine tooth comb frame of mind and tweak accordingly. It'll all work out once the wheels are turning I'm sure. Ta for your thoughts.

 

[Dan True]

As good old ENC subtracted from sorcery, and other magic, skills in the RQ3 campaign I could also use a variant of the 'armour worn' penalty (Although in the past this wouldn't just have hit sorcerers). I don't want to change the flavour of the preceding, much loved campaigns though by making it feel like D&D.

That's fair. I'm not really into Glorantha (yet, at least...) and neither are my players it seems, so this approach was the first stop for me. But of course, we all have different wants for our campaign to go in.

We may run into some problems when wizards decide to learn only certain spells from a single grimoire and not the whole book. Why learn Wrack from one Grimoire and Flight from seperate grimoires when I can copy them all into one book and learn them using the same skill? Perhaps each mage simply copies out the spells they want to learn into a personal grimoire and learns that way. There may be brigades of talented scribes doing just that. Without access to the tome in question, or one describing the spell in a script the magician understands, no improvement may be possible, a major disadvatage. (But then if learning the same spell from another Grimoire is a seperate skill needed?)

Well, you could rule that a grimoire is much more than the sum of it's parts (the spells). A grimoire could maybe contain 4 spells, but they would be inherently related and a Wrack spell from Grimoire A, might be very different from a Wrack from Grimoire B (maybe the one uses air pressure, while the others pull the water from their bodies). Thus he simple can't mix and match and copy stuff over, to use the same skill.
Think of it as trying to copy a method in a Chemistry book, and expect it to make any sense in a Physics book. The two things are related, but uses a different method and context.

So if the player wishes to copy stuff over into his own Grimoire, it is much harder than simply writing down his spells. He would have to convert the spells into a new context, rewriting them and actually re-inventing them. It would take a long, long time and a lot of other ressources (money, perhaps POW or IR). Only then would he have converted "Fly" to be similar enough to his form of "Wrack" that they can be cast from the same Sorcery(Grimoire) skill (the context and methology).

- Dan

 

[Deleriad]

The argument is that you can't just copy the spells from book to book. Depends on the cosmology but for examole you can think of the contents of a grimoire existing on some sort of essence plane as a 'node.' One aspect of this node is that it includes the ability to cast certain spells as well as other insights. A grimoire is therefore the manifestation of a node in the real world. To learn a grimoire the sorcerer actually has to be able to create a connection to the node and that is a secret ritual held by an order.

Two different nodes require different connections, different ways of maintaining those connections and different ways of using the node to cast spells. This means as well that the same spell from different nodes (e.g. fly, would look very different. What's more the relationship with the node is always unique to the sorcerer meaning that their spells will share common features (i.e. the good old wizard's sigil).

So copying spells from different nodes into the same physical book simply wouldn't work regardless (because your skill is based on your relationship with the node) and might actually compromise your node relationships.

That's something of a variant of how I understand sorcery in Glorantha to work but it could be applied to other settings. In purely game terms it would explain why sorcerers don't need to learn each spell with a different skill. Instead they can learn a package of spells.

 

[Simulacrum]

I do think additional skills for sorcerers to fully function can be a help as you suggest, and this works best in areas such as summoning and enchanting where you would expect some sort of lore or craft skill to be needed too (and this is reflected in my Age of Treason setting out later this year). But the main thing is its essential not to allow grimoires to be combined through a simple copy and paste process. The "style" and underlying precepts and philosophy may (should) be different from one grimoire to another, and the requirement for seperate skills rigidly enforced.

Combining grimoires must mean starting a new one - and a new skill. Achieving the synthesis is a feat of some sort - in AoT there is an enchanting ritual to create a spell book (grimoire) and an Education skill that reflects the literacy required to successful reinterpret the constituent spells while keeping them functional.

 

[DamonJynx]

It all depends on how the magic was structured in the original campaign. I know 3/5's of FA about the Glorantha setting, however, in the Elric setting there are various summonings available, each requiring their own separate skill. Runecasting is the same in that each rune is a separate skill. While it does chew up a lot of resources, particularly in IR's, it does, quite successfully, limit the power of most sorcerers.

 

[Mixster]

So, this advice actually stems from my own misreadings of the rules when I read MRQII the first time.

What I thought was that you have to use 1 Ca and one Magic Point per Manipulation point you are using on your sorcery spell.

If this was true it would be much harder for a sorcerer to consistently buff himself up to being a fighting monster without running out of magic points ridicolously fast, also it really hurts when you need to take 2-3 CA to cast a spell and getting hit in between means you must make a persistence check to not lose the casting. Yes he could attempt to Shapechange or Enhance Dex once per encounter. But if he runs into more than 4 or 5 things where he wants to use his spells per day, he gets really limited.

Also, opponents could use the fact that sorcery doesn't last forever to their advantage. Withdrawing and Neutralising are great plans for someone who doesn't want to mess with mr. magic.

Atm. I'm playing a sorcerer who isn't to keen on the whole anti-magic thing (yet, he's getting more Grimoires), if he was to fight someone who used a lot of spells, he would cast haste and run away and try to get back when their spells have been depleted.