Spirit Magic - getting my head around it

[Deleriad]

OK. I'm trying to make sense of spirit magic to see if it is possible to play it RAW. This all comes from Cults of Glorantha 2.

As I understand it there are multiple ways to cast Spirit Magic.
1. Cast it yourself. To cast a spirit magic yourself, you need to have integrated a charm of the appropriate rune. (E.g. to cast Disruption you need to have integrated a Disorder Charm). And you need to have "imprinted" a spell-spirit on yourself that provides you with the spell. Your cast chance is equal to Summoning - ENC%.

Like Divine Magic, each magnitude of Spirit Magic requires Temporary POW to "store". So, if I have a POW of 10 then I can store 9 points of Magnitude. However, that only leaves me with 1 MP so I can't actually cast any magic.

2. Have a spirit cast it for you. (I'll come back to this in another thread).

In Glorantha, your access to charms is based on your practice. So, for example, Waha.

Waha has the following runes Beast, Death and Man.
Waha practitioners can make charms out of: Beast, Death, Law and Man.
That all makes perfect sense. Adding in the associated practises gives Waha access to:
Air, Beast, Death, Fertility, Harmony, Life, Man, Spirit

However, the following spirit magic spells are available to Waha practitioners

Blade of Virtue, Bladesharp, Bludgeon, Control (Law) Spirit, Detect (Rival Tribe), Countermagic, Detect (Spirit), Endurance, Heal, Peaceful Cut, Protection, Silence Sphere, Slow, Strong Saddle, Vigour.

If you look through that list, very few can actually be cast using any of the charms available to Waha practitioners. So, how as a Waha worshipper who can't make Metal Charms, am I supposed to cast Bladesharp (for instance)? In total, Waha practitioners have no way of casting any of the following spells they have available to them:
Bladesharp, Bludgeon, Detect (Rival Tribe), Countermagic, Detect (Spirit), Protection, Silence Sphere, Slow.

So they must rely on spirits casting those spells for them.

I get the impression that there are meant to be TWO ways of self-casting spirit magic:
1: using charms
2: using imprinted spirits
And that somewhere down the line these two got mangled together. Anyway,

Still trying to figure this out RAW,
to create a charm
you cast create (Rune) Charm: a 1MP spirit magic spell with the trait "enchant". It never explains the trait but I can guess that it means it is an enchantment. The spell is progressive but doesn't explain what effect casting the spell has at higher magnitudes has either. Finally, if it is an enchantment it doesn't explain how much (POW) if any needs to be spent; I have to assume that it takes 1 POW as a default.

To integrate a charm, you go away for a day, think about it and sacrifice 1 POW then you have an integrated charm which, as far as I can tell, provides the same benefits as an integrated rune of the charm's type. Rather nice really and it turns the Praxians into rune factories as it's going to be trivial to equip every adult male with 3-5 charms.
Your average Waha warrior then is likely to have the following runic abilities:
reduces damage from falling by half and adds +10% to Athletics skill when jumping.
+10% to Survival, +5% to Lore (Animal) and Resilience.
An opponent suffering a Major or Serious Injury inflicted by the Rune Touched’s close combat attack suffers a –10% penalty to Resilience tests to stay conscious or avoid death.
Rune Touched heals and recovers in half the normal time.
Rune Touched may grant a single ally +20% to a single skill test, once per day.
(Life rune doesn't have a write-up)
Rune Touched gains +1 to DEX, INT and CHA.
Any spells that target spirits cast by the Rune Touched inflict a –30% penalty on attempts to resist or counterspell them.

Is there anything I am fundamentally misunderstanding here or does Spirit Magic simply make no sense as written?

The more I start to try to use MRQ in practice, frankly, the less impressed I am. I like tweaking systems but it's simply not possible to use large swathes of the non-core books because there are rules missing or mangled.

 

[Rurik]

On point 1, yes it appears that the Divine 'Dedicated POW' rule also applies to Spirit Magic. Now Dedicated POW is my most hated MRQ rule on the books (and I don't use it), but at least for Divine Magicians they don't actually use MP to cast spells.

That all being said 'Personal' MP have no real advantage over stored MP in MRQ since nothing attacks/uses MP directly as in earlier versions. 1 Personal MP and 17 stored MP is no different than having 18 Personal MP in most (if not all) cases. I can't think of anything in MRQ that directly attacks or drains personal MP off the top of my head.

As to the rest of your points they are all valid. The Spirit Magic rules as presented are a huge mess and make no sense. I was waiting patiently for Voriof's promised errata, but am not so sure that will ever happen now. I think I'll go bump my question about the status of that now.

 

[Deleriad]

On point 1, yes it appears that the Divine 'Dedicated POW' rule also applies to Spirit Magic. Now Dedicated POW is my most hated MRQ rule on the books (and I don't use it), but at least for Divine Magicians they don't actually use MP to cast spells.

That all being said 'Personal' MP have no real advantage over stored MP in MRQ since nothing attacks/uses MP directly as in earlier versions. 1 Personal MP and 17 stored MP is no different than having 18 Personal MP in most (if not all) cases. I can't think of anything in MRQ that directly attacks or drains personal MP off the top of my head.

That's true up to a point though I assume that Spirit Magic costs MPs to cast when you use charms and I believe that you can't use the MPs that have been lost due to temporary POW being used to store the spell. So you have the odd situation of the more magic you know, the less you can cast (without external MPs).

I noticed your queries about COG 2 after I first posted questions. It is all a rather horrible mess. Good luck trying to get some answers.

 

[gamesmeister]

Agreed, the Spirit Magic chapter is a mess, and frankly needs a rewrite.

With regards to point 1, I didn't read the temp POW as being a requirement that reduces your POW - I simply read it as a limit on the total magnitude of spells you can remember at any one time. I can certainly see why you read it like that though, but I think I'll stick with my interpretation

I seem to remember querying the progressive nature of the Create Charm spell when the book was first released, and was told it was an error. There are dozens of anomolies in the rules unfortunately....

Not sure that it's so easy to churn out 3-5 runes per warrior - that's a hefty amount of POW to be sacrificing (and therefore reducing your max Persistence).

 

[smiorgan]

I get the impression that there are meant to be TWO ways of self-casting spirit magic:
1: using charms
2: using imprinted spirits
And that somewhere down the line these two got mangled together.

I've come to the same conclusion, There are two ways of self-casting.

One way to stay very close to what written and making the rules (almost) work could be the following:

1- Charms work *almost* like Rune Magic. You don't need Summoning to use them - By the way most practices do not have summoning among the skills taught to practitioners. You get a sort Runecasting skill from integration.
BUT To learn the spells you go to your Shaman who summons the spirit to teach you the spell. The spell occupies dedicated POW (maybe).

2-If you can use the Summoning skill you don't need charms. You just summon the spirits and learn the spells from them, and you can cast ANY spell, irrespectively of the Rune it belongs using the Summoning skill, without Charms or Runes. The spells occupy dedicated POW.

 

[Space Coyote]

The way I will be doing it, you'll need three things to cast a spirit spell: the charms, the knowledge of the spell (which occupies 1 POW in the same way that a sorcery spell occupies 1 INT) and the Summoning skill (minus ENC AND minus armor penalty? seems to me that the ENC penalty is a leftover from RQ3), which is used to cast the spell. Or you can have a fetish and let the spirit cast the spells it knows, which may be even better because spirits always have 100% chance of casting the spell (even if they overcharge it with all their MP?!).

It's true that most practices don't provide the charms for all the spells they teach, but the same is also true with cults and rune spells. It could be argued that this is actually a feature: the cult/practice/whatever teaches the knowledge, but to use the power if you have to quest for runes/charms/whatever. BTW, the charms description says that it is possible to integrate several charms of the same rune. I guess it's an error?

For all its problems, though, I like the new spirit magic. After all, finally spiritists actually use spirits in their magic!

Cheers, Alex.

 

[Deleriad]

For all its problems, though, I like the new spirit magic. After all, finally spiritists actually use spirits in their magic!

Cheers, Alex.

I like the idea of it. I must admit that I don't like the implementation though I suspect the problems are due to the editing process.

I have an ongoing dislike of integrated runes and their bonuses. I suspect that I'm going to end up trying to make sense of it in the following ways.

Self-cast spirit magic.
needs a charm of the appropriate rune to focus the energy and a spirit imprinted into you which provides the link to the spirit's essence. Spiritists can imprint an amount of magnitude of spirit magic equal to their POW; Shaman's can use their fetch's POW for additional storage. Chance to cast is Summoning% (and all practices teach summoning).

Spirit cast:
Fetish spell spirits - one use and then you must regain them. Takes 1 CA to order a spirit to do its thing and it then does it on its own timing. Chance to cast = 100% (+/- modifiers). You can give triggered commands "when I go unconscious due to injury, cast healing on my worst injury to the maximum possible).

Spirit Allies: as per fetish spirits only they can act more independently with triggered commands. "When I go unconscious, manifest yourself and heal me in the most intelligent way possible. Stay manifested until I say otherwise."

 

[gamesmeister]

Spirit cast:
Fetish spell spirits - one use and then you must regain them. Takes 1 CA to order a spirit to do its thing and it then does it on its own timing. Chance to cast = 100% (+/- modifiers). You can give triggered commands "when I go unconscious due to injury, cast healing on my worst injury to the maximum possible).

Hmm, you may want to try creating a few fetishes before you go with this - the fact is, with the RAW, it's damn hard to create one.

At one point I had a post prepared on this, then lost the whole thing. However, the upshot was that a cult Practice Spirit has a POW of 3D6+3, giving an average of 13-14. Now, when you perform a summoning, you need to spend MPs equal to or greater than the POW of the spirit in order for the summoning to succeed - but you don't know the POW of the spirit until it arrives! (Unless you are using named spirits, but that's not always possible). Therefore you need to sacrifice a whole bunch of MPs to summon the spirit, plus an MP to cast Create Fetish, plus at least 1MP to cast Spirit Screen - that's an average of 15 MPs gone already. And when the summoning completes, if the spirits POW is greater than the MPs spent, the whole thing fails and you've got to start all over again. Given that the summoning lasts a number of hours equal to the MPs spent, this is a huge waste of time and effort, and makes creating a new one each time impractical.

And from what I remember, you have to summon the spirit yourself - you can't get someone else to do it for you. However, you will need someone else available to cast Spirit Screen on you, as you'll be too busy once the spirit arrives to be able to do it yourself.

If the summoning succeeds, you then have to defeat the spirit in Spirit Combat, which is not necessarily the easiest thing to do. One assumes that the Create Fetish spell binds the spirit to the material plane, preventing it from returning. However, I'm not completely certain what binds the spirit to the current location - there doesn't seem to be any reason why it can't simply flee, wait till the shaman's spirit screen wears off, then come back and hit him with a Possession.

Oh, and if the spirit you summon happens to have Dispel Magic, you'd better kiss your a$$ goodbye, because he'll dispel your spirit screen, and then you have no MPs to resist his Possession attempts... :twisted:

If you interpret the rules to say that 'imprinted' spirit magic reduces POW temporarily in the same way that Divine Magic does, he'd have virtually no spare MPs, and therefore no way to summon a spirit. This means there's virtually no way a practitioner could ever create a fetish in the first place, thus preventing any kind of advancement up the shamanic ladder (which is why I don't read it that way, even if that's how it's meant).

 

[Space Coyote]

I like the idea of it.

Surely you like the spirit of it....

(Sorry, forum humor is still something new to me, and I couldn't resist.... )

Cheers, Alex.

 

[Deleriad]

Hmm, you may want to try creating a few fetishes before you go with this - the fact is, with the RAW, it's damn hard to create one.

Wow, I just looked at it properly and its a mess. Lets say you want a healing Fetish. Heal 4 spell in a fetish. nice thing to have.

As you say a practice spirit is POW3d6+3 (COG2) average POW of 14.

First rules problem:
COG2 - "Summoning is often a traumatic experience for the creature and it is considered Debilitated until it succeeds at a Resilience test."
RQ Companion - "Spirits are unaffected by any effect that requires a Resilience test, including diseases, poisons and spells with the Resist (Resilience) trait." Spirits in fact don't have the Resilience skill. So we've got this far and already the rules don't work. Let's assume that COG means "persistence". Practice spirit is Persistence 60%.

First, create your fetish. Lets use Create Fetish. It's a magnitude 1 rune spell with the trait ENCHANT. We don't know what the trait means so lets assume it means the spell is an enchantment. We don't know how much POW it requires. Let's assume that it costs 1 POW.

Rules have now failed us multiple times but at least we have an empty fetish. We spend 14 MPs to summon a spirit. It arrives, now what? Got to get it in there somehow. COG2 doesn't tell us how to do this. We could use the RQ Companion rules for Binding Enchantments. Alternatively we could use the COG2 Spell Control Practice Spirit and order it in. I would go with the latter.

We try casting Control Spirit on the spirit. It's a resist (persistence) spell so lets assume that the panicked spirit resists with 13 of its 14 MPs to give itself 60+65=125% Persistence. Your summoner (lets give him 75% Summoning) is looking at overcharging with 5 MPs - he is now 50% spell chance and spirit is 125-50=75% Persistence. That's not going to work. Basically you can't reliably control a spirit unless you have somewhere in the range of 150% summoning.

At this point I give up on trying to run the rules because you can't.

On the plus side, a summoned spirit is "debilitated" this means that it is -50% to all skills and has to make a difficult persistence test every combat round (i.e. at a total of -70%) or else fall unconscious. We already know it has to make a resilience test at the beginning of every combat round in order to become undebilitated. Of course they don't have resilience and I assume that if they did have resilience it's at -50% so the most likely timing seems to be this.

14 hours in: summons roll. Success.
Combat round 1: Spiritist prepares Control spell (Casting Time 2 Mag 3), spirit is arriving.
CR2 spirit arrives debilitated. Wack it with a control spell. Success? Great - we have a spirit. Failure means end of the round, spirit must make difficult persistence test (-70%) or fall asleep. Odds are we now have a snoozing spirit.
CR3: if it is still awake it tries to make a resilience test and disappears in a puff of logic due to its null value for resilience.
At this point the spirit is either bound, asleep or confused and the shaman has spent 17MPs.

I'm not impressed.

 

[gamesmeister]

Yep, it's bollocks.

On the point of controlling the spirit, my assumption is that that is what the Create Fetish spell does i.e. when the spirit does arrive, and assuming it stays, it's bound to the material plane by the Create Fetish spell, and if defeated in spirit combat it's bound into the fetish.

Of course, all this requires some creative interpretation of the rules, but that's how I'm playing it.

At this point I'd also like to plug my other house rule, which gives the shaman another option other than beating the spirit over the head with a large bat.

 

[smiorgan]

Rules have now failed us multiple times but at least we have an empty fetish. We spend 14 MPs to summon a spirit. It arrives, now what? Got to get it in there somehow. COG2 doesn't tell us how to do this. We could use the RQ Companion rules for Binding Enchantments. Alternatively we could use the COG2 Spell Control Practice Spirit and order it in. I would go with the latter.
[...]
I'm not impressed.

From p. 7 of COG2 it would seem that for a shaman "compelling these spirits to obedience through Spirit Combat" is a possible alternative to the use of control spells.

Smiorgan

 

[Deleriad]

From p. 7 of COG2 it would seem that for a shaman "compelling these spirits to obedience through Spirit Combat" is a possible alternative to the use of control spells.

Smiorgan

A Shaman which can dissipate a spirit through spirit combat (which basically requires your shaman to have spirit bane and a big stick with 75% attack) can catch it with his fetch and then order it into the fetish, this is true.

The problem though comes in the rules again. According to CoG 2 A summoned spirit is "debilitated" until it makes a resilience roll. However, spirits don't have a resilience skill and ignore all effects that require resilience rolls. If you figure that maybe they mean persistence then a debilitated spirit is at -50% to all skills so a spirit turns up the first thing it does is "fall asleep" for about 5 hours unless it makes a persistence test at -70%.

There are just so many bits of the system that have been written without looking at each other that you need to basically re-write spirits, spirit combat, summoning, shamanic practices and spirit magic, various rune spells and various enchantments so that it actually works. I suspect that if I ever look properly at theism and sorcery, the same will be true of that.

 

[gamesmeister]

There are just so many bits of the system that have been written without looking at each other that you need to basically re-write spirits, spirit combat, summoning, shamanic practices and spirit magic, various rune spells and various enchantments so that it actually works.

There's definitely an element of different rules sections being written in isolation, as admitted by its author (Jeff Kyer) when the two cults books were first published. However, I think your earlier post was more accurate - the spirit magic rules just got mangled during the editing process, and this wasn't picked up until after they were released. Of course, I could be wrong, and I'd love to hear from any 'Geese who wanted to explain what really happened...

I suspect that if I ever look properly at theism and sorcery, the same will be true of that.

Theism definitely, and there are a number of house rules out there already. Don't know about the Sorcery rules, as I've not yet had reason to use them.

 

[Rurik]

Theism has a couple of big (and easily fixed) problems. Sorcery works very well - it is one of the clear cut cases I prefer MRQ over RQ3 (and I liked RQ3 sorcery).

Divine Magic's problems are the evil bad dreaded and just plain silly Dedicated Pow Rule and the fact that Acolytes and Priests are really no better at learning/casting Divine Magic than Initiates. Both of those are easily fixed, and the rules actually are playable as presented without any house rules.

Spirit Magic on the other hand is not. But it was, as has been mentioned, developed by a freelance writer who did not have access to all the rules changes in MRQ when originally developing them and then 'fixed' by editors new to MRQ rules. Divine and Sorcery were developed by the core MRQ developers at Mongoose so don't suffer from the same problems as shamanism.

 

[weasel_fierce]

I can attest from experience that divine magic and sorcery works fine in play. There;s some contention about dedicated POW but thats more a question of taste, than of anything not working.


Im trying to break down a simple interpretation of spirit magic for use. I'll let you guys know if I emerge with something usable

 

[elgrin]

I am currently trying to redefine the Spirit Magic system as I do feel it is essentially deeply problematic.
I am trying a route where the fetish actually stores nothing, it is simply a conduit between the Spirit Plane and the Shaman. The Shaman has to get agreement/coercian of a Spirit on the Plane and then has the knowledge of the spirit on the plane to cast the spell.
The basis of the Shaman interaction is the use of the Control Spirit skill suggested on the Forum by gamesmeister, which the shaman uses to convince friendly or coerce atagonistic spirits to give him the Spell knowlege for a particular spell on demand.
As yet not playtested, but if it works I will keep updating.


elgrin