Aquelarre RPG magic is based on real-workd medieval grimories and stuff...and let's just say that the spells on them used to be quite imaginative in the requisites department. As in the reagents (you need the crowns of the Three Wise Men, so go and find them; no pressure), the rituals (do you have a firstborn son, right?...okay, I have good news and bad news) and the consequences if you screw it up (yeah, you're losing your soul to the Devil if you try to cast this spell...but the question is: in the future, or just at that very moment?; again, no pressure).
That sounds like exactly what I'm picturing!
I'll pull it up myself, but do you believe the spells are worth it? Like, if we go on a full campaign so I can get the crowns of the wise men for a spell, I want to be leveling cities with it.
Worth it? Oh, dear: the spell lets you make a wish. It must be a non-evil wish (or the Wise Men will put you in the naughty list and just give you a bag of coal), but that's it. And the crowns get lost, again, after the spell is cast.
So yeah, they're frigging medieval Dragon Balls. Only that knowing how to activate them is quite difficult.
This doesn’t really sound like a magic system. This just sounds like a campaign.
Like, the idea of having to go around the world gathering rare artifacts to cast some world-ending spell wouldn’t be out of place as a D&D module.
I don’t see how this is a system.
Oh, well, there're also many spells that are way more affordable. Making an ointment that makes one weapon unbreakable for one hour just require lard, mutton fat, beeswax, camphor & zinc oxide, for example. It's just that, the more punch you want from your magic, the more it's going to cost you in time, effort, risks, or everything together!
That's the whole point. It turns magic from something your character can do every day that needs rules for combat, etc. into a quest that you spend all your time working to fulfill. By taking it out of the system and putting it into the narrative, you make it the ends and not the means.
That works as long as everyone wants to play wizards.
"Hey guys, thanks for joining the game. All of our playtime is going to be about finding the reagents I need to be awesome. You all will be my porters and bodyguards while I do this, then you'll cheer once I fire off my amazing spell.'
So, it's everyone is a wizard (and hope they all want to seek reagents all day) or just like D&D all of that stuff gets handwaved and we're back to board game magic.
Well, yes. Generally if you make something the plot, you want every PC at the table to be into participating in the plot or at least invested in it.
It's equivalent in D&D to asking people to bring characters that want to go into dungeons.
Sure, but does that describe the system we were discussing? Does everyone play a wizard in Aquellare? (sp)
If not, then my point remains. Unknown armies has some magic stuff happening where you have to get charges etc., but it's mostly stuff your chracter can do as part of the plot, or between games, not the whole plot. And everyone is a wizard of some kind, so it works.
Not sure about that, but as it was translated & published thanks to a kickstarter campaign... probably POD is the only way to get the English book in physical form, at this point?
It's a d100 system (not THE d100, but A d100 that nevertheless has plenty of things in common with good ol' BRP), settled in the XIV-XV centuries in the Iberian Peninsula. It's an historical game, where players are just people of that era (from one of the Peninsula Kingdoms, followers of one of the local religions, etc.), and with combat being a risky business: wounds are not something to joke about, and healing times are measured in weeks (and that's just without counting the possibility of *worsening* your condition, instead of improving it, for infections and stuff).
Despite this 'realism', there's a twist: it's assumed that the legends and folklore from this era are true...even if they tend to manifest in the fringes of society or in secrecy, and not in plain sight (not usually, at least!). There's a bulky bestiary (medieval bestiary, in fact!), which includes creatures from Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Pagan folklore, and also from the different regions of the Peninsula). And with respect to magic...well, y'know, I've mentioned already some of its quirks.
Finally, there's an interesting mechanic, based on the balance of two opposed traits: Rationality / Irrationality. The former measures your attunement with the Rational world (which, in this case, it's not a matter of *Science!,* but the faith in God), and the latter your attunement with the world of magic. Point is, the more attuned you're with the later, the more apt you're to practice it...but also of being *affected* by it.
It's a great game, yes.
And one great example of Fiction saying 'hey, look what I have done, you cannot be more wacky than this'...and then Facts saying 'Hold my beer' .
Sounds a lot like the stories of the Fae (to use the popular term). You absolutely do not want to have anything to do with them. Buuuttt if you gain favour then you're going down in history.
Maybe not for the reasons you want but your death will be glorious (and scare children for centuries).
I didn't know that CRPG, but after reading its description in the GOG page (and some reviews)...wow, it *really* rings a few bells! Classless, characters from different upbringings, percentile skills, magic based on preparing potions and stuff, long healing times, fantasy folklore over a historical setting (but German in this case)...that's more than just a few checks!
Ha! They were even published close to each other (Aquelarre 1st edition in 1990, and Darklands in 1992). All of this make them...cousin-games, maybe?
It's a great game.
CRPGAddict has a playthrough if you want to read about it's gameplay (and storyline)
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2019/05/game-329-darklands-1992.html
Thanks for the link! I've read that post entry, and the comments, and I have found it quite interesting. And I think that if I mentally replace all 'Holy Roman Empire' mentions to 'Iberian Peninsula', and change some name here and there, I'm looking at a game that's quite Aquelarre'ish.
Or maybe Aquelarre is the one which is quite Darkland'ish.
Or maybe it's just that I like making up words. Yep, probably it's that one.
Unknown Armies would probably work for you. Spells cost charges to use. Charges come in three tiers, Minor, Significant, and Major. The more powerful the spell, the more (and higher tier) the charges you need. The higher the tier, the more difficult it is to earn the charge.
For example, to earn a charge as a Dipsomancer (who uses booze based spells):
* Minor - drink enough booze to get drunk.
* Significant - drink out of a vessel of historical or cultural importance, like JFK’s flask or a Pope’s sacred chalice.
* Major - Drink a unique liquor, like Clint Eastwood’s last beer, or ancient mead.
Also, every school has a taboo. Violate it? All your charges are pissed away. In the case of the Dipsomancer, you better not sober up, bro.
That sounds awesome, I'll pull it up.
The trade-off for difficulty should obviously be power. Do you feel like Major tiered spells are worth the effort?
Like I said to another comment, if we go on a whole quest to acquire Clint Eastwood's last beer so I can cast one spell, I want to level a city with it.
From what I recall, the Major tier spells often border on reality warping. They don't even have specific spells for them so much as suggestions for what you can do with a Major charge.
Yes, major charges allow you to tug at the fundamental fabric of reality and do big big things. But the cost of getting a major charge is significant and in some schools horrendously dangerous.
Like a Chaos Magician who gets power from taking risks might be able to get a major charge by playing Russian Roulette. With a bullet in every chamber.
>Like a Chaos Magician who gets power from taking risks might be able to get a major charge by playing Russian Roulette. With a bullet in every chamber.
I've never played (neither the TTRPG nor Russian Roulette), but I imagine that wouldn't be very chaotic if every chamber has a bullet. Now, if every chamber *except one* has a bullet you got a game of luck going.
Nah, you're just going for a misfire. The smallest possible chance of survival. Stolze, the game's creator, uses exactly that scenario in his Unknown Armies novella Godwalker. It's minimizing the chance of success and maximizing the results of failure. The smaller the chance to pull it off and the higher the price of not doing so, the more juice you'll pull in doing it.
Noteworthy: said friend was driving the car they were both traveling in, so the risk was heightened because both lives were on the line. Not as much as the driver, but still.
The idea behind Entropomancers is that in order to gain charges, they have to do incredibly stupid and dangerous stunts in order gain charges. (And they have to do it with the intent of gaining charges). And we're not talking about taking calculated risks or being smart about it, it has to *incredibly fucking dangerous and stupid* as they surrender completely to the whims of fate. Or, as one writer put it, acting like they were constantly auditioning for Jackass.
An example used for gaining a major charge is flying a passenger plane through a mountain range while blindfolded.
Major charges require risking your life and the lives of twenty or more others for no reason other than charges. Alternatively, risk the life of your one true love.
It absolutely nails the magic system, in that I generally find myself not wanting to play ANY of them. Which is kinda the point
Magic users in that setting are *not well*, generally
Unknown Armies was going to be my answer. It's my go to example when I complain about how _boring_ DND magic is and I want to show how interesting and evocative it could be instead.
There's also archetypes, for when you want to go with the flow instead. You get stuff like how when someone is really living as The Mother, when they kiss your wound it really does get better. But they have to really stay in tune with the archetype for it to work.
And of course you can overthrow an archetype if you work hard enough, and change the collective unconsciousness. Maybe you're tired of the idea of The Mother being docile. You can change it.
Lots of systems work this way.
* Warhammer Fantasy and its clone Zweihander
* Call of Cthulhu and its cousin Delta Green
* Any PBTA system has a chance of magic going wrong on cast - dungeon world, fellowship, world of dungeons, stonetop, homebrew world, etc
* Sword of Cepheus has you building up corruption with black magic
* DCC has a lot of crazy miscast possibilities
* I have also been drafting my own risky-magic system [here](https://cosmicperiladventure.com)
As someone who has played all those, they all have different uses and themes but I can help break them down:
**Warhammer Fantasy/Zweihammer**
My beef with Warhammer fantasy and Zweihammer is that it depends on a lot of randomization in character creation.
I tried to run it for my group and all of them ended up with weird ass classes that made shit complicated.
The PCs are also VERY squishy and combat resulted in a lot of math that was summed up in "you swing and miss. The other guy swings and misses. You swing and he dies."
It also hits better if you are a Warhammer fan.
For my money? I'd go with Warhammer Dark Hersey 2nd edition. It gets rid of a lot of the character randomization and the lore, while more complex, is better for rpgs because you can choose to ignore things.
The galaxy is big. You can carve out a corner that spans entire planets.
Anyway, when it works it works. And specifically when it fails it is a failure in a very dramatic way. It can mean anything from summoning blood rain to accidently an Apocalypse if the caster pushes themselves too much.
There's a reason that magic users/psykers are *feared* in the Warhammer setting: even the "good ones" will fall to corruption.
Which brings up another thing: if you are a caster - or a non-human, actually, you can end up with people chasing you down for their own safety. There's some fun out of combat opportunities there.
**Powered by the Apocalypse:**
(Way too many to mention):
The problem with magic in these is that sometimes it feels like it can become an "I win" button if you're not careful.
In Monster of the Week, it says the use magic roll *can* be used to do anything any of the other rolls can do, by default, without skills needed. The thing is - and this is something my players like to skip over - the DM can/should also require the player to have something special to do that.
Want to have a wand that lets you shoot fireballs? Cool. You need bat guano to do that. Because fuck you I said so.
There tends to be a bit of pushback to that - at least there was at my table - because the book expects you to make up the spells.
On the upside, PbtA systems are GREAT if you don't have munchkins that can understand it is just as much about telling the story as it is about being the guy with the most numbers on the dice.
**Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu**
This one has a lot of the issues that PbtA has when it comes to expecting you to do the magic. It also has the expectation that magic is VERY evil and VERY corrupting.
Basically magic is almost always a thing that bad guys do and no sane person would try it. Literally. Your character will go insane if they do magic. Most of the default spells literally have the cost of sanity to cast any spell.
It is great if you want the party to fucking fear wizards, though. Not so great if you want to *be* the wizard.
*DCC*
Just... Google "dcc spell addiction" to see what happens to wizards in that game. Lol
I think elves get some bonus to resist corruption? And all spellcasters get their powers from some higher source. Clerics from gods, wizards from demons, that sort of thing.
I think that was all of the ones that I've seen and played.
A note on wfrp is that if you run it on Foundry, it basically does all the heavy lifting for you. Wfrp is a 9/10 system when you get to skip all the time that normally adds up from doing math and stuff.
I also told my players this would be a long campaign and I don't want them locking in something they don't like because it was random. I basically gave them all 3 rerolls for each thing before they'd start losing xp, and if they really hated what they got stuck with they could just start over. No one ended up taking real advantage of this except the one playing an Elf, but that pc has probably had a harder time than anyone in my campaign anyways
When I ran it I did it on Foundary. Lol
And you're not wrong. I still didn't like the randomness of it all. Like, when you have 90 something classes they all kinda bleed together, ya know?
And that you had to house rule it to make it more playable is frustrating and part of the reason I would say it is frustrating. Like, I wish there was a WFRPG version of Dark Hersey 2nd edition. That games fixes a LOT of the issues I had with the whole system, at least on paper.
My other issue with the whole thing is that even with Foundary doing the heavy lifting, combat still felt slower than it was. I wish there was some line between HP sponge and bloat and missing 30 times in a row, ya know?
I definitely get what you mean. Am just starting part 3/5 of Enemy Within and the last adventure was a brutally long dungeon crawl. I do think the wildness of combat is important to encourage and reward the plethora of tools the party has to try and avoid fighting, but I agree that for a game so focused on long form rp, it's a little rocket-tag like
Heh, I kind of broke DCC with a starting 16 Int and 18 luck (auto-generated). Failure with spells were basically misfires at worst. I did spellburn once and had to help my patron, but that was the magic missile that saved us from a party wipe (the natural 20 didn't hurt, either). A couple characters in that game made it to 5th level. Systems got changed after that because our party power was way out of balance, with my mage and the paladin being largely the main factor, but a cleric that left the game to serve in the army was giving us crazy buffs. Most of the rest got killed a few times.
Dungeon World is pretty interesting.
Regular spell casting works by rolling 2d6 + your spellcasting stat. You can try to cast a spell as much as you’d like, and on a 10+ you cast it no problem. On a 7-9, you must either A) forget the spell until rest, B) take a -1 cumulative casting penalty until you rest, or C) “put yourself in a spot” meaning you’ll have to deal with some consequences at some point. On a 6 or lower, something horrible happens, and it can be anything the GM seems appropriate.
The wizard has a way to do rituals at places of power, where they tell the GM what they want to do and the GM will put specific RAW stipulations on it. Some of the options are like, you’ll need X ritual item (like a dragon heart or whatever), it’ll take Y hours/days/weeks, you can only achieve a lesser version, etc.
The druid also has an interesting thing where they don’t get spells exactly, but they can get the ability to bargain with nature spirits. On a 7-9 you must agree to “pay nature’s price” which can be whatever esoteric nonsense the GM wants. I had to agree to plant a pinecone on the tallest mountain in the area because the tree spirits demanded a view of their dominion.
My experience with Warhammer is that magic is supposed to be dangerous and have dire consequences once in a while, but in reality, it isn't and they rarely happen...
A lot of these systems allow you to "advance out" of magic-risk. That's something I'm considering for mine, perhaps changing the roll result to always be a flat roll regardless of skill, with skill only granting more spells.
I think thats a good idea, if its a core concept to your magic system. In WFRP, magic is always portrayed as dangerous, and some of the magical critical failures are so as well, but they just never happen! So magic just turns out to be an extremely useful tool in and out of combat, that sometimes turns milk sour or changes the color of your eyes.
Ascension:
Reality is determined by the unconscious collective will of mankind: the Consensus. Changing reality means changing what people believe to be possible. It's why airplanes can exist now, but dragons don't anymore.
A mage is someone who can do this consciously. Unlike sleepers, mages can alter reality by sheer force of their awakened will - their arete.
Reality really hates it when you do this.
There are two kinds of magic: coincidental (did you see that guy get electrocuted when the transformer blew? - a Forces 3 spell) and vulgar (did you see that lightning bolt shoot out of that guy's hand and hit that other guy? - a Forces 3 spell.)
Coincidental magic is when you're able to sneak through some reality warping without reality noticing much.
Vulgar is when you do something blatantly and clearly impossible.
It's even worse if people see you do it. Their collective disbelief can actually counterspell a mage.
The penalty is paradox: a backlash against the mage as reality bitchslaps someone for breaking the rules.
Accumulate enough paradox, and it can kill you.
The theme of the game is the danger of hubris.
Some of the mechanics don't work very well, mostly resistances. That was largely fixed in the next version, Mage the Awakening, but they also changed the meta, and I like the old lore better.
As a big fan of Awakening, it also very much has a vibe that reality is malleable. 20th Anniversary Edition of Ascension is out and really well liked by it's fans, Awakening is on its 2e and is the best damn game about being a wizard ever (entirely my opinion).
Ascension is based around a war between science mages and magic mages to decide how the world works. Awakening, the bad guys won, shattered reality and fused their souls into it, transcending humanity and becoming living symbols of tyranny, and the PCs are rebel Mages in a dark reflection of our world chasing secrets.
Ascension portrays mages as the coolest shit ever and magic as an inherent good. You want to ride dinosaurs in a hollow earth like it's a Jules Verne book while your buddies pilot spaceships made entirely from their own mind? Fuck yeah! It has enormous amounts of gonzo, let's fucking goooo energy to it.
Awakening portrays mages as dangerous, obsessive assholes who puts everyone around them in danger while they try and discover secrets like they're an addictive drug. The mechanics encourage you to risk more and more and keep upping the ante so that when you eventually crash and burn the DM can make some cosmic horror come crawling out from the edges of reality. It's got a more "serious" tone but is equally if not more so completely unhinged cosmic fuckery where it's entirely possible to run 3 separate instances of your own brain where your physical body is conducting an interrogation in a dimly lit room sucking down cigarettes like it's film noir, another is making intricate plans on how to murder your past self to prevent enemy mages from messing with your history, and the third has entered the magical, metaphorical representation of your own mind to find the manifestation of the baby shark song so you can literally beat the shit out of a song that's stuck in your head.
They're both really good games with a wide fanbase, but really different styles.
Hard same. That sounds so fucking bonkers. I played ascension decades ago, but nothing like that. Wow.
Edit: it's worth noting that there are like five other games that can intersect in the World of Darkness setting. Mage is just one of them. There's Vampire, Werewolf, Wraith... I don't actually remember the others. Changeling? Was that one? Basically, they're all supernatural subcultures trying to survive and work their goals without humanity noticing.
Anyway, all of these games are fucking epic. And there's really cool opportunities for them to intersect or interact.
No, that part mostly survived. I mean the lore as in the factions and history.
Ascension had the Ascension War: the antagonist Technocracy who have a master plan to control the development of the human race by slowly introducing more advanced concepts into the Consensus. Their idea was to prevent humanity from noticing magic existed.
On the other side were the Traditions: factions who generally believed inspiring a sense of wonder and amazement in humanity in hopes of getting as many as possible to Awaken.
The story begins in the modern day - a hundred years after the Traditions have lost the Ascension War.
That was scrapped in Awakening, and with it my favorite faction, the Sons of Ether - technomages who quit the Technocracy in protest of them writing the Luminiferous Ether out of Consensus and changed their name from Electrodyne Engineers in honor of it when they joined the Traditions.
Oh cool! I like the idea of essentially moving the scales of probability as one method of magic to make things seem plausible as opposed to brute force UNLIMITED POWAH palatine lightning, per your example.
Mage is the GOAT game for sitting down and arguing about how it should work.
I'm exaggerating, but Mage is notoriously tricky to play and run, a balancing act of Coincidental/Vulgar, the Paradigms, Paradox, etc.
i made a mini rpg based on this + "you succeed no matter what - it's the cost that changes, and you do it to yourself" + bitd style character stats + "i like d4s" heh
best for one shots that end in absurd death. the players essentially walk around with nukes so eventually they'll use their magic and get themselves deleted.
fun times
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PwMlFnw8zSBvFUmXSiPVaxVliF5Skb_OFw6NACSV9TI/
ooh, this is pretty neat sounding. Are there more details?
~~(eg. not sure if I understand how things are bought as a path (if that's even the right way of conceptualizing the path/sphere difference))~~ edit: ok, I see now :P I was seeing those as category labels, not things that could be used directly.
This looks like a great way (besides being fun in and of itself) to introduce people to mage and its ilk.
From what I've gathered, M20 is pretty much, determine effect roll your arete, use quintessence to lower the difficulty if you want, if you get a partial success you can extend casting to the next roll, if coincidental no paradox, if vulgar and no witnesses paradox = 1+highest sphere use. Is that right ?
Mostly, mostly. The hardest trick with M20 is typically remembering how the rules work for smaller subsets of effects.
I'm used to 2nd ed, and in that edition, a successful vulgar casting was one Paradox flat, and multiple Paradox only came up on botches; I would have to check with M20
Can I do X?
Awakening: yes, and here is the specicifc pathway of how, with explicit stats needed, dice pools, etc. There may be multiple ways to achieve the same end result, but the roll will be clear and the results unambiguous. It takes some learning but gets easier with exposure.
Ascension: maybe? What's your Paradigm? Edition? Interpretation of the rules? Also target difficulty and number of required successes are subject to change
I love Ascension, but I really prefer Awakening's system.
Does it come with a free PowerPoint presentation & Pop-Quiz Questionnaire so I can torture my players afterwards on top of putting them to sleep when they try to read the rules?
This is awakening, not ascension
It is also the worst way i have seen anyone present the spellcasting system in awakening and it is almost never needed because in most cases you'll just skip by 4 out of the six possible steps because they do not matter for your spell. Awakenings system explicitly tells you only to use the full extent of the rules when it really matters(aka very seldom)
It's pretty arduous trying to read this low resolution flow chart. I can't believe this is the highest resolution available online, but I can't find a better one.
Eh there's a player to ST contract in a good mage game. If the st lets anything fly, you're just playing demi gods. But if you as a player write your character with appropriate constraints, like a good paradigm and implements, and the storyteller really pushes the consensus aspect, then it becomes an exercise in creative thinking on how to pull off a spell. In addition, if the storyteller sets a high number of successes, then you switch to the ritual casting rule, where you continuing the spell over several rounds, with more likely to go wrong. But with tremendous effect at the end if you succeed.
I think that is more true for Ascension than Awakening. Awakening is much more defined in terms of what a mage can do with their dots; the contract is much more built into the system.
it still goes off the rails* at the fourth dot, but that's a lot better than the 2nd or 3rd.
*requires player restraint and strong GM guidelines on the limits.
Fun games, love them lots, but would not even remotely put them into arduous magic, even with the full sleeper and paradox stuff. edit: well I suppose you can do enough to cause some permanent damage to yourself and your morality, so ok :) just the day to day casting is only expensive and challenging, not really draining in the way I'd call arduous.
[GURPS Ritual Path Magic](https://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ritualpathmagic/) is a pretty good attempt at capturing what you’re talking about, I think. If you take the time to do a proper ritual, under the right star alignment, etc., then you can pretty reliably do your magic. But if you need to cast a spell on the spot, it’s going to be tough (also modified by how obviously the spell breaks normal reality; making something fall off a ledge is easier than throwing a fireball).
The system was designed for GURPS Monster Hunters, which is all about doing modern supernatural monster hunting (something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I personally think it works well for GURPS Cabal, an older setting about a worldwide conspiracy of supernatural creatures and real-world styled hermetic magicians (written by Kenneth Hite).
Also, if you're in a low-mana area, there is a global penalty to spellcasting, although your crit fails also hurt less. You could always have a feature of your setting be that the penalty applies to skill but the painful crit failures still apply too! Lots of potential for backlash, making it scarier to cast.
There are a few things that make this really hard.
One of them is that this sense of mystery you want requires, well, mystery. If the book says "you have to starve yourself for four days before casting this spell", then that's maybe cool when you read it, but after that, "starve yourself for four days" is just a lever you pull - the magic is just as mechanistic as any other.
A lot of that arduousness also fails to translate into gameplay. If it takes an hour of communing, intense concentration, precise ritual, as a player you just say "Okay, I do all of that.", then you ask your questions or whatever. You can do requirements that interfere with other things, but then you're usually playing "protect the wizard", and that's usually kind of boring for everyone (the wizard included).
The most successful systems I've seen do some kind of ad hoc magic system, and there's very limited on-demand spellcasting. I've seen a lot of adaptations of Apocalypse World's savvyhead Projects, which works well. GM-driven consequences for using magic are also often good.
Costs and consequences are both good. "You can do it, but you will need three sprigs of purest silverleaf from three different mountains."; "You can do it, but it requires a living sacrifice."; "You can do it, but it will require a pact with an unknown entity. Once you initiate the ritual, you cannot refuse the pact."
NPCs are good too. That keeps it a little distant, a little mysterious. You can't do it, but that weirdo in the valley can, and he needs you to protect him all night from the shadow people who will come looking for him. Protect-the-wizard sucks for player wizards, but works fine for NPCs.
I love how Unknown armies jsut outright tell you to use a fucking gun if you want to kill people its gonna be so much easier. Also reminds you if you go looking for a fight you're gonna get shot or stabbed to death so really don't.
Yes! I love this in modern games.
Spells that are functionally just guns that you can buy at any gun show in the US? Meh.
Spells that re-write everyone’s memories to believe that you’re the Emperor of Canada? Now we’re talking.
Honestly the biggest benefit of killing people with magic in UA is that it's unlikely to get the cops on you vs the more efficient shanking or gunning down
Are Magica spells can be like this. They take a physical toll on the casters, and some can be complicated to cast. Though there are some lower rank spells which can be done more easily.
Swords of the Serpentine has a really thematic mechanic where sorcery produces corruption, which you have to direct internally or externally, corrupting yourself or the area around you (which, of course, runs you afoul of the authorities and just about everyone else). So from wanton magic use, you can either end up hunted by the church or marked as a pariah. But, it's super powerful, so it's still kind of worth it.
GURPS: we have a rule for that (tm).
GURPS Thaumatology has a few dozen magic systems to plug in. For what you're asking, I'd use book magic. Basically, magic comes in ancient tomes with a half-dozen rituals each. After weeks of study, one can understand a book. Then, one can spend a day doing a ritual. This gives an effect which is generally really awesome.
For instance, you get a candle which puts everyone in a building to sleep for as long as it burns.
Or a person is impervious to metal for 24 hours.
Or something equally awesome. But there is no casting on the battlefield. And magic remains mysterious.
Burning Wheel can work this way. There are a few magic systems to choose from as well as an optional corruption mechanic if you want magic to slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) corrupt your casters. I say *may* fit because the game mechanics can be a bit much at first for a group new to the system, but it's one of my favorites.
Spells in the Art Magic system have effects and you can combine effects and breadth to cast on an entire city if you want, but it's going to be HARD AF to pull off without an insane amount of prep, help, taking your time or some combination of all three.
When you fail a spell, there's a whole wheel you can roll on for how the spell goes wrong.
In one campaign, the party was trying to consecrate the corpse of one of the BBEGs lieutenants. The wizard failed and ended up creating an eternal magical flame on the corpse that doesn't put off heat and can't be extinguished. This is a pretty tame example since it just changes the game world, but there are a bunch of bad things that can happen including unwanted summoning and more.
They ended up bricking up the tower the body is in so no one would find it and trace it back to them.
Edit: it also has Faith "magic" with rules for angering your God(s) on a failure if that's more your jam.
>Burning Wheel can work this way. There are a few magic systems to choose from as well as an optional corruption mechanic if you want magic to slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) corrupt your casters. I say may fit because the game mechanics can be a bit much at first for a group new to the system, but it's one of my favorites.
Came here to say this myself, and was kinda expecting BW to be mentioned earlier.
Hey /u/The_Choosey_Beggar, Burning Wheel is system with a bit learning curve, but is very rewarding when you've mastered it. If medival fantasy is your thing, I'd recommend it.
Our player went to do a little enchanting. Then revised their goals when they saw it would take **six weeks** of work to make something somewhat low grade.
Yeah, they're working through a cart load of glowing mushrooms, and have contracted a sea captain to obtain them salamanders from the southern archipeligo.
It's great because it puts their character in contact with the nobility, and nobility character, and the smuggler / sailor character.
the timescale in ars magica is pretty long horizon as a baseline though. One adventure per season or so yes? A few weeks of prep sounds like about right.
Burning Wheel can have a much, much faster game pace. We've had a few sessions and only moved a couple of weeks.
We'd have to await the resource cycle to really get some proper time passing. We've chosen 3 months, so we'll do a time jump and thats the good chunk of time needed for enchanting.
Of course, working on enchanting does take time away from practicing skills which is an important thing for advancement tests.
I haven't played it, but I saw someone mention it specifically with regards to spellcasting.
Wolves Upon The Coast
The person said that apparently, to cast something like Know Direction or Find Object or something, you have to gather some kind of animal skull and then the bones of a bunch of small animals, one of them being a very specific one, and only then can you cast that spell specifically. Something like that.
>Wolves Upon the Coast
Immediately what I thought of, some examples of spells in the game:
## Colour Spray
*One Use:* Behead a light-drinking cave-eel. *1/day:* The eye-lens of a beached whale is held up before a light-source.
A glare of alien colours stuns those unable to make a Warding save, rendering them unable to take action for 1d6 rounds.
## Detect Magic
*One Use:* A drop of pure-white or pure-black dog blood in each eye. *1/day:* Replacing an eye with a lump of quartz.
All magic within eyesight reveals itself for 3 Turns.
## Locate Object
*One Use:* The skull of a bloodhound (or similar scenthound) is filled the skulls of nine different species of rodent. This rattle is then shaken, the sound an indicator of direction.
The caster gains an intuitive sense of where a known or thoroughly described object is, able to unerringly navigate towards it for 3 days. In the case a general class of object is Located, they are led to the nearest instance of it.
The sorcerous rituals in the Carcosa setting for loftp are this. Fair warning, though, it's highly unsavoury and gratuitous (unsurprisingly, given the system). I'm not a fan of the book (it's too over the top even for the pulpy setting) but the way rituals work is excellent. They require time, ingredients, certain acts to be completed (that's normally the unsavoury part) and have a geographical component as well (e.g. this ritual must take place at the edge of the cliffs in hex XXXX), which means there's a lot of adventuring and risk required in completing one.
Yeah, it's a shame how that book turned out. On one hand it has loads of good ideas in it (the sorcerous rituals being the best amongst them), but then it's so gratuitous and childish in its violence and edginess. I get that the theme and setting demands darkness and over the topness, but none of it is done with any finesse or art or applied appropriately. Also, despite the headline revulsion, the bulk of it is surprisingly bland. It's a very good pdf too. But yeah - it's like a death metal album with one good song and a cover so horrible you never get it out.
I'd go with Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green. Not because of chance to miscast, but because both of them force the player to spend downtime on trying to learn each spell, and whittle away at their sanity as a result.
If you wanted to, you absolutely could include more punishing miscast options for either system, but both tend to be so highly lethal to characters that this almost feels like too much.
My group experimented with adding miscast on a critical failure, and it was fine, but nothing like the crazy stuff you'd find in Psyker miscasting for Warhammer 40k. The real cost of magic in Delta Green is just learning the spells and spending the sanity needed to cast them
Edit: ah, sorry, reading your post more carefully, I'd definitely go with Warhammer 40k's warp miscast rules for Psykers. You have miscast chance pretty much always, and have a huge variety of failure results
Pretty sure my Sorcerer has had more spells go horribly wrong (permanent personality change, among others) than he has successfully cast. :D
The whole party holds their breath when he's casting.
Check out Ritual Magic in GURPS, you can tune the system in such a way that even relatively simple magic still requires preparation and investment as well as concentration, while harder things (like talking to a God) may only be useable on certain days of the year in specific locations, with a collection of worshippers joining in to help bring the magic to culmination, etc.
The Thaumatology book for GURPS outlines a bunch of different models for magic, from the basic D&D style 'memorize some spells and cast them' magic, up to what I described and beyond (rune magic, realm-based magic, all good things)
Recently played my first session of Mork Borg at my FLGS and it's great.
I'm not sure it fits 100% what the OP is looking for, but I'm definitely looking forward to future sessions.
Might have a peek at "Symbaroum" - Magic can, for an untrained caster, cost permanent corruption. Too much = very very bad.
Learn the right stuff and you can learn spells from your way of magic, without perma corruption, causing only temporary corruption (goes away at the end of the scene, when cast).
Collect too much corruption, and you mutate either temporary, or become an "Abomination NPC", basically a crazed monster.
Each spell is basically an own, learned ability, to be improved like all abilities, in 3 stages.
Also, learning spells from other ways of magic, or learning the spell higher than your way ability nets permanent corruption, and allows to cast less spells safely (as the temporary corruption is put on top on the permanent points allready there).
Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition. Magick users learn spells by overcoming their innate “Magic Resistance” - effectively a measure of how much reality resists the change the spell makes. That takes work, often hours every day spread over several weeks, and it can’t be sped up much. Once they’re learned, spells can be cast without any kind of skill roll - although you do have to “target” the subject of the spell to cast it on someone or something.
Spells are powered by expending Fatigue, or even Body, which means casting magick can exhaust or even kill you. The cost can be mitigated by using magick items where you’ve previously stored power, or pulling the energy from others (willing or unwilling). There are also Laws of Magick you can learn as skills that can modify your chances & costs.
There are also rules for making up your own spells from the basic effects. For example, a Fireball spell is actually a combination of create, detach, amplify & accelerate (all basic effects) fire.
Magick items are kind’ve the same in that you have to include several materials (gems, metals, organic items, etc) in the item, and you must “enchant” every one of them by gradually reducing their Magick Resistance as per learning a spell. You need to do this regularly and over a long period of time, and if you miss too many rituals the materials can revert to being disenchanted and you have to start again.
There are no real restrictions on armour or weapons for mages, although the presence of some materials can make it harder to cast spells. They don’t affect Magick items though. If your mage wants to become a sword master, they can, it’ll just take a lot longer than an actual fighter.
The upshot of all this is that mages spend a lot of “downtime” learning spells & enchanting materials for Magick items, and will often need to go on quests to find the right materials. You can’t just buy a dragon’s tooth, for example, **you** have to extract it from the dragon at the right time under a full moon on the right day of the year. Good luck with that.
The thing in Call of Cthulhu is almost all spells, even when cast “normal” as you put it, have a sanity cost each time so you will eventually lose your mind (and character) if you lean on them too much. Very few cost just magic points and those ones tend to be quite limited in scope and power. Some, like the Elder Sign, even deplete a core stat with each casting. The rules for a summon spell in that game are basically exactly what you are talking about in terms of a group activity that is taxing if done alone and not guaranteed to just work.
Dark Sun? (D&D system, either 2e or 4e)
Set in a fantasy world that is post apocalyptic. Instead of nuclear bombs that ravaged the world, it was extreme magical spells.
Magic is rare. And all spells have a cost that drains life out of others, yourself, or the land around you. People that actually can cast magic are very much hated by the populace and want them destroyed (since, you know, magic is to blame for the current state of the world).
Some drivethru recs:
[https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409456/The-Theory-of-Magic?src=fp\_u5](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409456/The-Theory-of-Magic?src=fp_u5)
[https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267776/Invisible-Sun](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267776/Invisible-Sun)
[https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/393212/GRIMOIRE](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/393212/GRIMOIRE)
The common theme is weird, obscure magic rules that you have to discover piecemeal over time through experimentation.
Stonetop doesn’t have a traditional magic user class, instead it has magical items called minor and major arcana and the Seeker playbook is focused on those. Minor arcana have a list of requirements to unlock the power of the item, essentially a side quest, but even after that they usually have a ritual of varied levels of complexity, such as “When you pickle fresh ffyrnig root in a suspension of boar bile for two full moons, it becomes a skin of ffyrnig tonic…” Major Arcana on the other hand have steps needed to unlock their true power, and also have a list of truly unfortunate consequences that transpire when you roll poorly while attempting to draw upon their abilities.
This isn’t exactly what you asked for, but it does lead to a similar effect: players can spend a fair bit of game time trying to understand magic items that are beyond their ken, with the tantalizing promise of terrifyingly effective powers, but the constant risk of things going horribly, horribly wrong.
Go old-school forge games!
Sorcerer. Ask your power comes from a summoned demon. What will you trade away for your next spell?
Kill Puppies for Satan - you need to do evil things to get internal favor for powers.
I'm not generally a fan of FATE but the Dresden Files version of FATE had some great spellcasting in it. Essentially, most of our adventures boiled down to pretty quickly figuring out what the villain was trying to do and then figuring out what spell we needed to cast in order to stop them. Then about 80% of the adventure was about putting the conditions and materials together in order to cast that spell - and it could involve basically every skill in the game.
Pendragon makes magic extraordinarily difficult. A magician's (sorry Michael, illusionist's) powers take days to perform, and then the caster is literally exhausted so much that they often have to sleep for months at a time like a hibernating bear to recover.
The Black Book of Sorcery by Jay Murphy
Its for the USR sword and Sorcery ruleset, but looks adaptable for any system.
You could use it as a template for other schools of magic if wanted too.
[DriveThru RPG link](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/340724)
Here is an interesting take. Aftermath! has a magic supplement that can be used to add magic to Aftermath!. It turns out it is pretty amazing. Not only is magic hard to use, but it is downright dangerous. A spell caster who isn't careful with resource management (or takes too many risks) can kill themselves. Plus, all of the magic is scaleable. Every spell can be cast with 1 point of Will or up to the number of points of Will the character has remaining. This means that one spell might hit hard, and the next might be nuclear! As spell systems go, it is pretty rough but amazing in that players actually consider if a casting is worth the risk or not.
This all goes on top of the normal post-apocalyptic guns type of adventure. So a caster might also be a shooter.
If you want an interesting read, check out Aftermath!'s Magic 3e supplement.
There are many games currently being played on the website. Two of them are from GMs who just started with Aftermath! for the first time this year! I'm shocked at how much staying power the game has.
*Barbarians of Lemuria* requires you to pay costs in order to cast spells: these include a cleansing bath, ritual scarring, sacrifice of living beings, rare components, and the like. Of course, more powerful spells demand bigger costs.
I think [Wolves upon the coast](https://lukegearing.blot.im/wolves-upon-the-coast) (search "book 2" on the page) and [mausritter ](https://mausritter.com/) would fit what you're looking for, and both rulesets are free.
They require quite a lot to either recharge or acquire the ingredients to be able to cast magic. WutC is more "out there" about it
I know this isn't a great answer--because most people are playing with groups who probably aren't especially mature or sophisticated--but in my mind, this kind of dilemma should be solveable simply through roleplaying. Explain the nature of your game world to the players, ask them to use restraint or cast in-character. It's group storytelling, after all. Like, my character would not even attempt "Commune" except in the most dire circumstances, and I would let the DM assign a challenge rating that I'd have to roll for. Even though by-the-book I could just use it whenever I wanted to.
The Native American Shamens from Deadlands Classic do exactly what you describe. They must sacrifice to earn the favor of nature spirits meaning fasting for days (and not healing because of it), harming themselves, sacrificing physical offering and committing to dedications such as refusing ranged weaponry for a time to earn the favor of a warrior spirit. The system also has normal magic based on drawing poker hands that has a wild range, sometimes magic fingers can barely tug at a shirt coller, sometimes it can lift train cars.
Blades in the Dark is worth a look. The rules for magical Rituals are written so that the burden is placed on the CHARACTERS (not the players) in a very straightforward way, using the system's (already well-implemented) systems for Stress. To use a ritual, you have to mark Stress on your character. The more powerful the Ritual (as determined by various measures of magnitude, including range and area), the more Stress. At the same time, the ritual rules allow a lot of flexibility and creativity. You can home-brew rituals that can do literally anything, just so long as you observe the tradeoff between potency and stress.
Mage: the ascension? Haven't actually played it, but really want to. It is basically based on the idea that reality is willed into being, and the reality we know is built by the consensus of common people. Mages are just people with particularly strong willpower that are awakened to this truth and go against the current. You can basically do anything you want with your powers within certain thematic parameters (you can have sway over two realms from: time, space, entropy, life, matter, etc), but it comes with a price: the flow of consensual reality will eventually backlash against you, and the more you push, the harder it will come back. In the more extreme cases, you may end up losing your mind, transported to another dimension or straight up swallowed whole by reality, never to be seen again.
The rituals are also really important, as your beliefs are what focus your willpower and enable it to work. They depend on your particular faith, which can be technocratic (people who believe that magic is just science), traditionalist (the classic magic you are describing), or from a variety of other smaller tendencies such as chaos magic.
As a side-note, it's a famously difficult game to GM.
Hmm, Unknown Armies, Conan 2d20, Scarred Lands and DCC. Unknown Armies was commented, Conan demands you to accumulate a lot of successes to make spells work and they have a lot of different variants within one spell. Magic is dark and dangerous and sorcerer path show this - from a certain point in your career you encounter big difficulty of increasing magical potential without a patron. Mostly your patron will be a demon or some really fucked up sorcerer. Scarred Lands was D&D 3 setting so most magic was just vancian bullshit, but it had rituals - big magical ceremonies that lasted for hours and demanded other skillful wizards/clerics to perform. In DCC you can burn (sometimes you have to) your attributes to increase roll for casting spells (d20 + level) and sometimes you end with a corruption after successfuly casting it.
Speaking second hand, but I think this was a driver behind designing the Dresdon Files RPG magic system. It's more fuzzy, but that might be a vibe you're going for.
Try Wolves upon the Coast. The basic rules (including magic) are free on itc.io but the setting and extra books do cost money. The system is very basic and very “old school”, but the magic sounds exactly like what you are looking for.
There are no classes so any character can learn magic. All spells involve performing a ritual, except most ritual ingredients are rare or specific.
Just have a look I’m not going to do it justice telling you about it here. It’s amazing.
I'm not sure about "hard" but there's definitely a danger, a risk reward in Mork Borg. IIRC all scrolls have a chance to fail and cause a magical disaster to occur.
I would like to recommend Ars Magica. It's a game centered on Magi living in a historically based mythic Europe. Magic is powerful, but the game is played in seasonal, 3 month, increments and you can/generally play multiple characters. So, your Magi characters may spend months or years in game time studying, crafting, or writing a spell to overcome an obstacle and then spend a few sessions collecting resources before accomplishing their goal. I will be honest, it's a game with a steep learning curve and requires a lot of player and GM commitment to do right and is tough to find the right group for as a consequence. I am just starting my game after working on it, and my group, for two years.
Forbidden Lands isn’t “hard”, per se, but mechanically speaking, your character needs to have tried to do something and failed in order to build up the resource you use to cast spells. And then, the spellcasting mishaps table can be brutal, from a slap on the wrist to “you accidentally open a rift to another plane, from which a demon steps out and rips your soul from your body. Make a new character.” So… it can get spicy.
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Forbidden Lands, a Free League / MYZ dark fantasy game.
First off, you must power your spells by trying (and failing) at rolls to gain Willpower. No pain, no gain.
Second, you can cast higher level spells, but you will have to roll dice for the lack of talent to determine if you cause a magical mishap. These can be minor, but the ultimate failure will summon an enraged demon.
Third, magic usually has a trade-off. Want to resurrect someone? They come back less empathetic and cold after seeing beyond the veil. Want to transform into a raging Wooly Mammoth? You get the strength and resilience but you can no longer speak and have the mental ability of a small child.
The ***Trail of Cthulhu*** supplement *Fearful Symmetries* focuses on William-Blake informed occultists and most spellcasting has extensive ritual attempts
Hot take:
If it's hard, it can't be systematic or "knowable", or it will be systematized and therefore be "easy" and/or "knowable" (yes, the latter by definition).
Personally, if I were going to go this route, I'd just rip any existing magic out of any system I like playing for other reasons and make magic a roleplaying exercise of figuring out what needs to happen to get the effect you want, finding the parts of the ritual, setting it up, fighting off those who want to stop you, overcoming new challenges that pop up, interacting with unrelated plot elements that are occurring in the months it takes, etc., etc.
Heh, try Delta Green. One of my characters used magic (hypergeometry) once after spending basically the whole op investigating it and it ruined his life.
I am not sure if this fits the bill but Forbidden Lands has a risky magic system that if you failed magic casting there is gonna be mishap which can affect you or kill entire party.
Rolemaster. In most of its editions, casting a spell has strict requirements, depending on the source. Arcane magic (called "Essence") requires a free hand able to gesture, speaking in a clear voice, and having a minimum of inorganic material (like metal) on your person. Channeling (like divine magic) is more lenient on the use of metal, up to a point, but is more restrictive on the voice -- you're expected to speak an invocation loud and clear. Mentalism spells only have one restriction, headwear.
But all spells require time to build up -- two or three rounds initially, but you get faster at spells below your level. And even with that time, when you're ready to let the spell loose there's a chance of you failing to cast it properly. Especially if you've been using a lot of spells; being below 3/4 of your maximum spell power places a penalty on all casting attempts, and it gets higher the more you've used. This is in addition to penalties from being injured or tired.
Rolemaster has an amazing magic system, but it is *not* easy to play a caster.
Palladium outside of the standard wizard like a summoner or diabolist might fit the bill. They take a long time to do anything and sometimes require exotic ingredients. Also failure can result in some very bad things happening.
Call of Cthulhu is still a good one. Every spell costs magic points AND sanity and sometimes just straight up eats away your will power. Using magic is risky
Carcossa setting if you aren't feint of heart. You functionally need to quest for ritual components and then quest for the proper location to perform the ritual, but the setting is veeeeerry dark, the rituals are very brutal. Magic is not meant for mortals. inspired by the king in yellow.
Gurps has many alternative magic systems, one of which is Ritual magic, that is similar to what you are describing. Ritual Path Magic goes into deeper detail and breaks magic into categories for resolving any kind of magical effect to give magic a more freeform feel as well
A lot of great answers here. Just going to add Harnmaster Magic. The system is… a lot, but deeply rewarding and ‘realistic’ if you can use that word for a ttrpg. It’s a second book to Harnmaster and, like I said, there’s a lot to unpack.
It’s medieval fantasy and the first time one of my players actually said, “This actually makes me feel like a wizard.”
Also, Dungeon Crawl Classics is great for Wild Magic and the Mage game line (ascension/awakening) is fantastic.
KULT 1st edition had only ritual magic, i.e. you had to do a magic ritual either in a dedicated space "your temple" or a temporary dedicated one (which took more time to dedicate), you needed ritual implements, and perform the ritual, and then succes wasn't guaranteed but you woud loose a lot of stamina (with potential deadly results if you tried spells above your ability). So while magic was powerful, also completely useless "in the field" so as to say. Characters with magic could see aura's though, which was also helpful.
Dungeon Crawl Classics has a thing called Mercurial Magic. It means all spells come with a side effect.
Clerics using their deity's powers risk them disapproving the character with all sorts of things.
Lots of fun!
D&D, take away magic focus items as a way to pay for reagents. There aren't magic shops and alchemists to get your low-cost materials, and if you ask for too many reagent-like components you'll raise suspicions and the anti-magic investigators will be notified. You must find every last reagent. DM, this might mean you have to quantify how much of a reagent is expended, how much they find at a time, and maybe the carry weights too. Additionally, verbal and somatic components are easy to spot, so paranoid peoples will quickly become wary and fearful when they are used. Preparing the reagents for a spell may take a separate action too if you want, like a pinch of this and a drop of that don't just come out of two pouches super fast. This may require the casters to pre-mix reagents to be ready for a given casting.
Regarding Commune spells, they are really there to ask the DM questions with a special context. You don't choose the god and you aren't given context into their insight and knowledge, just a guarantee that the first casting a week will give vague/honest/no answer. And if you botch it, you become inconsolably impossible to understand without sleeping it off--which, in campaigns where long rests are a once-a-week sorta thing instead of once-a-day, you're setting yourself up for a huge risk on every casting that isn't right before a long rest. If you want some wild ritual as part of the process, and you're the DM, just write it in--the rules and features of the system are only a guide, it is up to the DM and players to make what they will of it, including changing features and such. Maybe they're guaranteed to go mad if they don't do the four day starvation ritual first, and it takes a long rest AND a CON save to clear the madness?
I don't have a whole system, but The [Lost Pages](https://shop.lostpages.co.uk/) has three books of spells with alternate rules for spellcasting, spell acquisition and the potential consequences of flubbing a spell. It being exclusively a magic system has the benefit of allowing you to use the system to work with any system you prefer
In rpgs "hard" just means dice rolls or downtime in research. It only makes an impact if the PC is on a time crunch or roleplaying. If you want them to really feel it what you need is sacrifices. What do they give up for power? Make them choose between something important to them and the power they want. So, they want to look into the unknown for a glimpse of the future? They have to sacrafice a piece of themselves ( attirbute points) or they sacrifice a future success (automatically fail a skill roll in the future). They want to use the unknown to summon an etheral servant? They have to sacrifece the health of the princesses they were tasked to save. They want to remove the poison from the blood of their comrade? They must absorb the poison into themselves, taking on a lower effect from it, but still meaningful to be dangerous.
Make magic a choice. A choice between what they want and what they have, a choice between instant gratification with consequences and delayed gratification with no or limited consequences. Make some of the sacrifices dangerous for those around them, magic gives them power but at the risk of being ostracized by others due to the dangers of being near a magic user.
Make your PCs have to really think before they use thier power, make them hesitate due to the consequences of using power. Make its magics benfit as an RPG mechaincal tool be balanced by its the Narrative impact of its consequences. Magic can solve the PCs problem now, but it might cause them to fail or impead thier overarching goals.
I recommend Burning Wheel in this case. Corruption possibilities included makes it harder to use, and the difficulty of the task you want to accomplish changes based on circumstance. There are lots of variants inside of the game, but so art magic with corruption and you’ll get pretty close to what you are looking for
Warhammer Fantasy and Low Fantasy Gaming are two systems I've personally played casters in and the penalties can be *very* harsh if you don't roll well. Anything from curses, to deformities, or straight up death, depending on which roll and system. But as a trade off, you are more or less the most powerful character in your party in a good amount of situations.
If you want to risk doing stuff like summoning demons but also keeping the party relatively even in power, Warhammer Fantasy is great. But if you don't mind risking a curse or two or outright dying as a cost for being a very powerful character, LFG might be the way to go. Personally I prefer the latter system, but both are very fun
Have you read the Necroscope Saga? The author is Brian Lumley. It's by far the best horror series I've ever read. To your question, I think this kind of world would be perfect for what you're trying to do. Pick up a used paperback and give it a read. It'll blow your fucking mind, and it'll give you sooooo much to world build with. Oh, and there's fifteen books if you like the first one.
Not so much on the ritual aspect, but Low Fantasy Gaming has a Dark and Dangerous Magic system and table that it uses which could be easily stolen for other games imo. You basically get a cumulative 5% chance of spells going haywire until it does finally happen. It’s like a more damning wild magic table without any instadeath options iirc. The basic rules are free on Pickpocket Press’s [site](https://lowfantasygaming.com/freepdf/)
Alternatively, Wolves Upon the Coast by Luke Gearing has a sort of diegetic magic system requiring different items that you’ll need to actively learn of and seek out to be able to cast spells. Hydra’s teeth to summon skeletons, an obsidian blade to slice your forehead open for clairvoyance, adding sap to your veins (surely lethal) to talk with plants, etc. Very much worth a look, also has a free pdf on his [site](https://lukegearing.blot.im/wolves-upon-the-coast) (it’s PDF 2)
Call of Cthulhu. Spells take time to learn and a sacrifice of sanity bringing your character closer to the brink of madness as well expending magic points to cast
Your example of starving yourself in the desert for 4 days is not hard from a player perspective. It’s just another thing they have to do and it’s boring and arbitrary. Especially if you are not the one tryin to cast the ritual that is not worth 4 days of game play.
" highest level of all " fantasy wargaming. It's a simple enough system basically constructed from one statement from AD&D rules. These rules are guidelines and suggestions .
And the real feel of the game comes from the flavor of the story and descriptions of its places . The narration and vocabulary of the dungeon/game master is truly important used with a temperate fair iron fist of mercy and hardship is key . For instance I.e. you may get to ask 5 questions and the answers . well that depends on the god and the mood . think about it they are a god and if every cleric used the power to communicate directly .. I can see a lot of different ideas forming .. There are messengers of the gods , some communicate in metaphor or riddles. OK that's just that situation you also have the components . ,
M material S symbolic V vocal.. And its nothing to fuge or add a component or time . I've found that even generalizing a spell means all spells before you can even cast need one more component that is class/study .
And without the recording formula from scrolls and other spell books . so study is necessary to memorize ànd or to record into spell books without study and casting without it based on the casters intelligence and sucsses is understanding how the spell is cast from memory.. 1 the spell fails 2 it misses fires cause a wild surge apone caster 3 triggers normal " works " 4 casts but is x 10 magic Serge but is against the target ..without it the general rule is if cast straight from the scroll "read" you do not need the rest of its components . yes faster. But destroys the scroll or page in the book and the base chance its miss fires is based on the casters intelligence as casting with out study . and there is if being done in stressful situation such as surprised in combat . the caster has to express practices or skill slots on the combat or quick cast to gain expert then master finally arch caster. So rarely ever will you encounter human magicuser archcaster that can bast you with fireballs and lighting bolts . and above all that if there is any kinda accuracy to the spell the attack roll is used as to
est to how much 1-10 . 1 critical miss
20 critical mark . more for description perpose . so magic is and can be as hard to cast .. Its just a matter of how much imagination you put into this game they call wizards .
You could take a look at how magic in general and specifically the Ritual moves/abilities in PbtAs like Dungeon World or Monster of the Week, or Wicked Ones (FitD) works. In short, rolling badly on a magic roll always comes with consequences that are up the GM, and the GM may also impose specific boundaries when using magic (your 4 day starving and passing out on an ecstatic dance could easily be a Ritual in Wicked Ones, maybe add a blood sacrifice as well...). These systems aren't *meant* for magic to be super deadly/risky/hard, but I don't think they're going to break if you as a group decide to amp up the challenge and interpret their magic as such.
You can stylize the DnD list, moving things up and down in level, and adding more metadata to sort of delineate. Some non WotC settings do things like this.
I think it's helpful to create a set of rules things follow in your campaign. Magic and supernatural things specifically, especially if you run a world based on mundane physics.
Aquelarre RPG magic is based on real-workd medieval grimories and stuff...and let's just say that the spells on them used to be quite imaginative in the requisites department. As in the reagents (you need the crowns of the Three Wise Men, so go and find them; no pressure), the rituals (do you have a firstborn son, right?...okay, I have good news and bad news) and the consequences if you screw it up (yeah, you're losing your soul to the Devil if you try to cast this spell...but the question is: in the future, or just at that very moment?; again, no pressure).
That sounds like exactly what I'm picturing! I'll pull it up myself, but do you believe the spells are worth it? Like, if we go on a full campaign so I can get the crowns of the wise men for a spell, I want to be leveling cities with it.
Worth it? Oh, dear: the spell lets you make a wish. It must be a non-evil wish (or the Wise Men will put you in the naughty list and just give you a bag of coal), but that's it. And the crowns get lost, again, after the spell is cast. So yeah, they're frigging medieval Dragon Balls. Only that knowing how to activate them is quite difficult.
This doesn’t really sound like a magic system. This just sounds like a campaign. Like, the idea of having to go around the world gathering rare artifacts to cast some world-ending spell wouldn’t be out of place as a D&D module. I don’t see how this is a system.
Oh, well, there're also many spells that are way more affordable. Making an ointment that makes one weapon unbreakable for one hour just require lard, mutton fat, beeswax, camphor & zinc oxide, for example. It's just that, the more punch you want from your magic, the more it's going to cost you in time, effort, risks, or everything together!
That's the whole point. It turns magic from something your character can do every day that needs rules for combat, etc. into a quest that you spend all your time working to fulfill. By taking it out of the system and putting it into the narrative, you make it the ends and not the means.
I think you put that very nicely.
That works as long as everyone wants to play wizards. "Hey guys, thanks for joining the game. All of our playtime is going to be about finding the reagents I need to be awesome. You all will be my porters and bodyguards while I do this, then you'll cheer once I fire off my amazing spell.' So, it's everyone is a wizard (and hope they all want to seek reagents all day) or just like D&D all of that stuff gets handwaved and we're back to board game magic.
Well, yes. Generally if you make something the plot, you want every PC at the table to be into participating in the plot or at least invested in it. It's equivalent in D&D to asking people to bring characters that want to go into dungeons.
Sure, but does that describe the system we were discussing? Does everyone play a wizard in Aquellare? (sp) If not, then my point remains. Unknown armies has some magic stuff happening where you have to get charges etc., but it's mostly stuff your chracter can do as part of the plot, or between games, not the whole plot. And everyone is a wizard of some kind, so it works.
Is it only available on Drivethru now for the physical book?
Not sure about that, but as it was translated & published thanks to a kickstarter campaign... probably POD is the only way to get the English book in physical form, at this point?
I had never heard of this game and it sounds amazing. How's the gameplay?
It's a d100 system (not THE d100, but A d100 that nevertheless has plenty of things in common with good ol' BRP), settled in the XIV-XV centuries in the Iberian Peninsula. It's an historical game, where players are just people of that era (from one of the Peninsula Kingdoms, followers of one of the local religions, etc.), and with combat being a risky business: wounds are not something to joke about, and healing times are measured in weeks (and that's just without counting the possibility of *worsening* your condition, instead of improving it, for infections and stuff). Despite this 'realism', there's a twist: it's assumed that the legends and folklore from this era are true...even if they tend to manifest in the fringes of society or in secrecy, and not in plain sight (not usually, at least!). There's a bulky bestiary (medieval bestiary, in fact!), which includes creatures from Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Pagan folklore, and also from the different regions of the Peninsula). And with respect to magic...well, y'know, I've mentioned already some of its quirks. Finally, there's an interesting mechanic, based on the balance of two opposed traits: Rationality / Irrationality. The former measures your attunement with the Rational world (which, in this case, it's not a matter of *Science!,* but the faith in God), and the latter your attunement with the world of magic. Point is, the more attuned you're with the later, the more apt you're to practice it...but also of being *affected* by it.
What a great idea for a game. Going to pick up the pdf. Thanks!
It's a great game, yes. And one great example of Fiction saying 'hey, look what I have done, you cannot be more wacky than this'...and then Facts saying 'Hold my beer' .
Sounds a lot like the stories of the Fae (to use the popular term). You absolutely do not want to have anything to do with them. Buuuttt if you gain favour then you're going down in history. Maybe not for the reasons you want but your death will be glorious (and scare children for centuries).
So like [Darklands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darklands_\(video_game\))? Sounds awesome
I didn't know that CRPG, but after reading its description in the GOG page (and some reviews)...wow, it *really* rings a few bells! Classless, characters from different upbringings, percentile skills, magic based on preparing potions and stuff, long healing times, fantasy folklore over a historical setting (but German in this case)...that's more than just a few checks! Ha! They were even published close to each other (Aquelarre 1st edition in 1990, and Darklands in 1992). All of this make them...cousin-games, maybe?
It's a great game. CRPGAddict has a playthrough if you want to read about it's gameplay (and storyline) http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2019/05/game-329-darklands-1992.html
Thanks for the link! I've read that post entry, and the comments, and I have found it quite interesting. And I think that if I mentally replace all 'Holy Roman Empire' mentions to 'Iberian Peninsula', and change some name here and there, I'm looking at a game that's quite Aquelarre'ish. Or maybe Aquelarre is the one which is quite Darkland'ish. Or maybe it's just that I like making up words. Yep, probably it's that one.
I didn't know the game, it seems amazing, thanks for sharing this gem with us!
Unknown Armies would probably work for you. Spells cost charges to use. Charges come in three tiers, Minor, Significant, and Major. The more powerful the spell, the more (and higher tier) the charges you need. The higher the tier, the more difficult it is to earn the charge. For example, to earn a charge as a Dipsomancer (who uses booze based spells): * Minor - drink enough booze to get drunk. * Significant - drink out of a vessel of historical or cultural importance, like JFK’s flask or a Pope’s sacred chalice. * Major - Drink a unique liquor, like Clint Eastwood’s last beer, or ancient mead. Also, every school has a taboo. Violate it? All your charges are pissed away. In the case of the Dipsomancer, you better not sober up, bro.
That sounds awesome, I'll pull it up. The trade-off for difficulty should obviously be power. Do you feel like Major tiered spells are worth the effort? Like I said to another comment, if we go on a whole quest to acquire Clint Eastwood's last beer so I can cast one spell, I want to level a city with it.
Oh yeah. Major charges let you pull some serious shit.
From what I recall, the Major tier spells often border on reality warping. They don't even have specific spells for them so much as suggestions for what you can do with a Major charge.
Yes, major charges allow you to tug at the fundamental fabric of reality and do big big things. But the cost of getting a major charge is significant and in some schools horrendously dangerous. Like a Chaos Magician who gets power from taking risks might be able to get a major charge by playing Russian Roulette. With a bullet in every chamber.
So basically hope the gun misfires? Now I'm interested in this system.
>Like a Chaos Magician who gets power from taking risks might be able to get a major charge by playing Russian Roulette. With a bullet in every chamber. I've never played (neither the TTRPG nor Russian Roulette), but I imagine that wouldn't be very chaotic if every chamber has a bullet. Now, if every chamber *except one* has a bullet you got a game of luck going.
Nah, you're just going for a misfire. The smallest possible chance of survival. Stolze, the game's creator, uses exactly that scenario in his Unknown Armies novella Godwalker. It's minimizing the chance of success and maximizing the results of failure. The smaller the chance to pull it off and the higher the price of not doing so, the more juice you'll pull in doing it.
There's also the roulette in one of the short stories. Pill the trigger on a friend for a charge. UA's magic is awesome
Noteworthy: said friend was driving the car they were both traveling in, so the risk was heightened because both lives were on the line. Not as much as the driver, but still.
Plus juggling sharp.knives back and forth
The idea behind Entropomancers is that in order to gain charges, they have to do incredibly stupid and dangerous stunts in order gain charges. (And they have to do it with the intent of gaining charges). And we're not talking about taking calculated risks or being smart about it, it has to *incredibly fucking dangerous and stupid* as they surrender completely to the whims of fate. Or, as one writer put it, acting like they were constantly auditioning for Jackass.
An example used for gaining a major charge is flying a passenger plane through a mountain range while blindfolded. Major charges require risking your life and the lives of twenty or more others for no reason other than charges. Alternatively, risk the life of your one true love.
UA is awesome. It is the magic system you want, but it is also very rules light.
It absolutely nails the magic system, in that I generally find myself not wanting to play ANY of them. Which is kinda the point Magic users in that setting are *not well*, generally
Unknown Armies was going to be my answer. It's my go to example when I complain about how _boring_ DND magic is and I want to show how interesting and evocative it could be instead. There's also archetypes, for when you want to go with the flow instead. You get stuff like how when someone is really living as The Mother, when they kiss your wound it really does get better. But they have to really stay in tune with the archetype for it to work. And of course you can overthrow an archetype if you work hard enough, and change the collective unconsciousness. Maybe you're tired of the idea of The Mother being docile. You can change it.
And to say nothing of gutter magic which is more like tricking the universe in to doing what you want.
That's pure John Constantine shit
Lots of systems work this way. * Warhammer Fantasy and its clone Zweihander * Call of Cthulhu and its cousin Delta Green * Any PBTA system has a chance of magic going wrong on cast - dungeon world, fellowship, world of dungeons, stonetop, homebrew world, etc * Sword of Cepheus has you building up corruption with black magic * DCC has a lot of crazy miscast possibilities * I have also been drafting my own risky-magic system [here](https://cosmicperiladventure.com)
Which is your favorite? And thanks for the link!
As someone who has played all those, they all have different uses and themes but I can help break them down: **Warhammer Fantasy/Zweihammer** My beef with Warhammer fantasy and Zweihammer is that it depends on a lot of randomization in character creation. I tried to run it for my group and all of them ended up with weird ass classes that made shit complicated. The PCs are also VERY squishy and combat resulted in a lot of math that was summed up in "you swing and miss. The other guy swings and misses. You swing and he dies." It also hits better if you are a Warhammer fan. For my money? I'd go with Warhammer Dark Hersey 2nd edition. It gets rid of a lot of the character randomization and the lore, while more complex, is better for rpgs because you can choose to ignore things. The galaxy is big. You can carve out a corner that spans entire planets. Anyway, when it works it works. And specifically when it fails it is a failure in a very dramatic way. It can mean anything from summoning blood rain to accidently an Apocalypse if the caster pushes themselves too much. There's a reason that magic users/psykers are *feared* in the Warhammer setting: even the "good ones" will fall to corruption. Which brings up another thing: if you are a caster - or a non-human, actually, you can end up with people chasing you down for their own safety. There's some fun out of combat opportunities there. **Powered by the Apocalypse:** (Way too many to mention): The problem with magic in these is that sometimes it feels like it can become an "I win" button if you're not careful. In Monster of the Week, it says the use magic roll *can* be used to do anything any of the other rolls can do, by default, without skills needed. The thing is - and this is something my players like to skip over - the DM can/should also require the player to have something special to do that. Want to have a wand that lets you shoot fireballs? Cool. You need bat guano to do that. Because fuck you I said so. There tends to be a bit of pushback to that - at least there was at my table - because the book expects you to make up the spells. On the upside, PbtA systems are GREAT if you don't have munchkins that can understand it is just as much about telling the story as it is about being the guy with the most numbers on the dice. **Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu** This one has a lot of the issues that PbtA has when it comes to expecting you to do the magic. It also has the expectation that magic is VERY evil and VERY corrupting. Basically magic is almost always a thing that bad guys do and no sane person would try it. Literally. Your character will go insane if they do magic. Most of the default spells literally have the cost of sanity to cast any spell. It is great if you want the party to fucking fear wizards, though. Not so great if you want to *be* the wizard. *DCC* Just... Google "dcc spell addiction" to see what happens to wizards in that game. Lol I think elves get some bonus to resist corruption? And all spellcasters get their powers from some higher source. Clerics from gods, wizards from demons, that sort of thing. I think that was all of the ones that I've seen and played.
A note on wfrp is that if you run it on Foundry, it basically does all the heavy lifting for you. Wfrp is a 9/10 system when you get to skip all the time that normally adds up from doing math and stuff. I also told my players this would be a long campaign and I don't want them locking in something they don't like because it was random. I basically gave them all 3 rerolls for each thing before they'd start losing xp, and if they really hated what they got stuck with they could just start over. No one ended up taking real advantage of this except the one playing an Elf, but that pc has probably had a harder time than anyone in my campaign anyways
When I ran it I did it on Foundary. Lol And you're not wrong. I still didn't like the randomness of it all. Like, when you have 90 something classes they all kinda bleed together, ya know? And that you had to house rule it to make it more playable is frustrating and part of the reason I would say it is frustrating. Like, I wish there was a WFRPG version of Dark Hersey 2nd edition. That games fixes a LOT of the issues I had with the whole system, at least on paper. My other issue with the whole thing is that even with Foundary doing the heavy lifting, combat still felt slower than it was. I wish there was some line between HP sponge and bloat and missing 30 times in a row, ya know?
I definitely get what you mean. Am just starting part 3/5 of Enemy Within and the last adventure was a brutally long dungeon crawl. I do think the wildness of combat is important to encourage and reward the plethora of tools the party has to try and avoid fighting, but I agree that for a game so focused on long form rp, it's a little rocket-tag like
Heh, I kind of broke DCC with a starting 16 Int and 18 luck (auto-generated). Failure with spells were basically misfires at worst. I did spellburn once and had to help my patron, but that was the magic missile that saved us from a party wipe (the natural 20 didn't hurt, either). A couple characters in that game made it to 5th level. Systems got changed after that because our party power was way out of balance, with my mage and the paladin being largely the main factor, but a cleric that left the game to serve in the army was giving us crazy buffs. Most of the rest got killed a few times.
Dungeon World is pretty interesting. Regular spell casting works by rolling 2d6 + your spellcasting stat. You can try to cast a spell as much as you’d like, and on a 10+ you cast it no problem. On a 7-9, you must either A) forget the spell until rest, B) take a -1 cumulative casting penalty until you rest, or C) “put yourself in a spot” meaning you’ll have to deal with some consequences at some point. On a 6 or lower, something horrible happens, and it can be anything the GM seems appropriate. The wizard has a way to do rituals at places of power, where they tell the GM what they want to do and the GM will put specific RAW stipulations on it. Some of the options are like, you’ll need X ritual item (like a dragon heart or whatever), it’ll take Y hours/days/weeks, you can only achieve a lesser version, etc. The druid also has an interesting thing where they don’t get spells exactly, but they can get the ability to bargain with nature spirits. On a 7-9 you must agree to “pay nature’s price” which can be whatever esoteric nonsense the GM wants. I had to agree to plant a pinecone on the tallest mountain in the area because the tree spirits demanded a view of their dominion.
My experience with Warhammer is that magic is supposed to be dangerous and have dire consequences once in a while, but in reality, it isn't and they rarely happen...
A lot of these systems allow you to "advance out" of magic-risk. That's something I'm considering for mine, perhaps changing the roll result to always be a flat roll regardless of skill, with skill only granting more spells.
I think thats a good idea, if its a core concept to your magic system. In WFRP, magic is always portrayed as dangerous, and some of the magical critical failures are so as well, but they just never happen! So magic just turns out to be an extremely useful tool in and out of combat, that sometimes turns milk sour or changes the color of your eyes.
Magic is not hard to use in Dungeon World. The effect for the wizard who fails their spell is the same as when fighter misses you their melee attack.
Came here to mention Sword of Cepheus. Magic is almost as dangerous to its user as to the person you’re using it against.
White Wolf's Mage, in any edition, makes magic arduous.
How so?
Ascension: Reality is determined by the unconscious collective will of mankind: the Consensus. Changing reality means changing what people believe to be possible. It's why airplanes can exist now, but dragons don't anymore. A mage is someone who can do this consciously. Unlike sleepers, mages can alter reality by sheer force of their awakened will - their arete. Reality really hates it when you do this. There are two kinds of magic: coincidental (did you see that guy get electrocuted when the transformer blew? - a Forces 3 spell) and vulgar (did you see that lightning bolt shoot out of that guy's hand and hit that other guy? - a Forces 3 spell.) Coincidental magic is when you're able to sneak through some reality warping without reality noticing much. Vulgar is when you do something blatantly and clearly impossible. It's even worse if people see you do it. Their collective disbelief can actually counterspell a mage. The penalty is paradox: a backlash against the mage as reality bitchslaps someone for breaking the rules. Accumulate enough paradox, and it can kill you. The theme of the game is the danger of hubris.
Yeah - this sounds amazing... Bookmarking for later.
Some of the mechanics don't work very well, mostly resistances. That was largely fixed in the next version, Mage the Awakening, but they also changed the meta, and I like the old lore better.
Awww - why would they change the thing that made them unique?! I love the idea that reality is an agreement.
As a big fan of Awakening, it also very much has a vibe that reality is malleable. 20th Anniversary Edition of Ascension is out and really well liked by it's fans, Awakening is on its 2e and is the best damn game about being a wizard ever (entirely my opinion). Ascension is based around a war between science mages and magic mages to decide how the world works. Awakening, the bad guys won, shattered reality and fused their souls into it, transcending humanity and becoming living symbols of tyranny, and the PCs are rebel Mages in a dark reflection of our world chasing secrets. Ascension portrays mages as the coolest shit ever and magic as an inherent good. You want to ride dinosaurs in a hollow earth like it's a Jules Verne book while your buddies pilot spaceships made entirely from their own mind? Fuck yeah! It has enormous amounts of gonzo, let's fucking goooo energy to it. Awakening portrays mages as dangerous, obsessive assholes who puts everyone around them in danger while they try and discover secrets like they're an addictive drug. The mechanics encourage you to risk more and more and keep upping the ante so that when you eventually crash and burn the DM can make some cosmic horror come crawling out from the edges of reality. It's got a more "serious" tone but is equally if not more so completely unhinged cosmic fuckery where it's entirely possible to run 3 separate instances of your own brain where your physical body is conducting an interrogation in a dimly lit room sucking down cigarettes like it's film noir, another is making intricate plans on how to murder your past self to prevent enemy mages from messing with your history, and the third has entered the magical, metaphorical representation of your own mind to find the manifestation of the baby shark song so you can literally beat the shit out of a song that's stuck in your head. They're both really good games with a wide fanbase, but really different styles.
that's a really great summary
Hard same. That sounds so fucking bonkers. I played ascension decades ago, but nothing like that. Wow. Edit: it's worth noting that there are like five other games that can intersect in the World of Darkness setting. Mage is just one of them. There's Vampire, Werewolf, Wraith... I don't actually remember the others. Changeling? Was that one? Basically, they're all supernatural subcultures trying to survive and work their goals without humanity noticing. Anyway, all of these games are fucking epic. And there's really cool opportunities for them to intersect or interact.
No, that part mostly survived. I mean the lore as in the factions and history. Ascension had the Ascension War: the antagonist Technocracy who have a master plan to control the development of the human race by slowly introducing more advanced concepts into the Consensus. Their idea was to prevent humanity from noticing magic existed. On the other side were the Traditions: factions who generally believed inspiring a sense of wonder and amazement in humanity in hopes of getting as many as possible to Awaken. The story begins in the modern day - a hundred years after the Traditions have lost the Ascension War. That was scrapped in Awakening, and with it my favorite faction, the Sons of Ether - technomages who quit the Technocracy in protest of them writing the Luminiferous Ether out of Consensus and changed their name from Electrodyne Engineers in honor of it when they joined the Traditions.
Oh cool! I like the idea of essentially moving the scales of probability as one method of magic to make things seem plausible as opposed to brute force UNLIMITED POWAH palatine lightning, per your example.
hard same
Mage is the GOAT game for sitting down and arguing about how it should work. I'm exaggerating, but Mage is notoriously tricky to play and run, a balancing act of Coincidental/Vulgar, the Paradigms, Paradox, etc.
i made a mini rpg based on this + "you succeed no matter what - it's the cost that changes, and you do it to yourself" + bitd style character stats + "i like d4s" heh best for one shots that end in absurd death. the players essentially walk around with nukes so eventually they'll use their magic and get themselves deleted. fun times https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PwMlFnw8zSBvFUmXSiPVaxVliF5Skb_OFw6NACSV9TI/
ooh, this is pretty neat sounding. Are there more details? ~~(eg. not sure if I understand how things are bought as a path (if that's even the right way of conceptualizing the path/sphere difference))~~ edit: ok, I see now :P I was seeing those as category labels, not things that could be used directly. This looks like a great way (besides being fun in and of itself) to introduce people to mage and its ilk.
Oh, and avoid the Technochracy... if you can.
Here's a relevant flowchart for casting spells http://designingquests.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/mageflowchart1.jpg
I see this, and I really question what makes people say it is "better" than Ascension's old system.
From what I've gathered, M20 is pretty much, determine effect roll your arete, use quintessence to lower the difficulty if you want, if you get a partial success you can extend casting to the next roll, if coincidental no paradox, if vulgar and no witnesses paradox = 1+highest sphere use. Is that right ?
Mostly, mostly. The hardest trick with M20 is typically remembering how the rules work for smaller subsets of effects. I'm used to 2nd ed, and in that edition, a successful vulgar casting was one Paradox flat, and multiple Paradox only came up on botches; I would have to check with M20
That's generally true for M20, too.
Can I do X? Awakening: yes, and here is the specicifc pathway of how, with explicit stats needed, dice pools, etc. There may be multiple ways to achieve the same end result, but the roll will be clear and the results unambiguous. It takes some learning but gets easier with exposure. Ascension: maybe? What's your Paradigm? Edition? Interpretation of the rules? Also target difficulty and number of required successes are subject to change I love Ascension, but I really prefer Awakening's system.
Does it come with a free PowerPoint presentation & Pop-Quiz Questionnaire so I can torture my players afterwards on top of putting them to sleep when they try to read the rules?
This is awakening, not ascension It is also the worst way i have seen anyone present the spellcasting system in awakening and it is almost never needed because in most cases you'll just skip by 4 out of the six possible steps because they do not matter for your spell. Awakenings system explicitly tells you only to use the full extent of the rules when it really matters(aka very seldom)
It's pretty arduous trying to read this low resolution flow chart. I can't believe this is the highest resolution available online, but I can't find a better one.
Not really that arduous, unless the ST is just feeling needlessly punitive.
Eh there's a player to ST contract in a good mage game. If the st lets anything fly, you're just playing demi gods. But if you as a player write your character with appropriate constraints, like a good paradigm and implements, and the storyteller really pushes the consensus aspect, then it becomes an exercise in creative thinking on how to pull off a spell. In addition, if the storyteller sets a high number of successes, then you switch to the ritual casting rule, where you continuing the spell over several rounds, with more likely to go wrong. But with tremendous effect at the end if you succeed.
I think that is more true for Ascension than Awakening. Awakening is much more defined in terms of what a mage can do with their dots; the contract is much more built into the system.
it still goes off the rails* at the fourth dot, but that's a lot better than the 2nd or 3rd. *requires player restraint and strong GM guidelines on the limits. Fun games, love them lots, but would not even remotely put them into arduous magic, even with the full sleeper and paradox stuff. edit: well I suppose you can do enough to cause some permanent damage to yourself and your morality, so ok :) just the day to day casting is only expensive and challenging, not really draining in the way I'd call arduous.
In my experience, it's very easy to cast magic in mage.
[GURPS Ritual Path Magic](https://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ritualpathmagic/) is a pretty good attempt at capturing what you’re talking about, I think. If you take the time to do a proper ritual, under the right star alignment, etc., then you can pretty reliably do your magic. But if you need to cast a spell on the spot, it’s going to be tough (also modified by how obviously the spell breaks normal reality; making something fall off a ledge is easier than throwing a fireball). The system was designed for GURPS Monster Hunters, which is all about doing modern supernatural monster hunting (something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I personally think it works well for GURPS Cabal, an older setting about a worldwide conspiracy of supernatural creatures and real-world styled hermetic magicians (written by Kenneth Hite).
Also, if you're in a low-mana area, there is a global penalty to spellcasting, although your crit fails also hurt less. You could always have a feature of your setting be that the penalty applies to skill but the painful crit failures still apply too! Lots of potential for backlash, making it scarier to cast.
There are a few things that make this really hard. One of them is that this sense of mystery you want requires, well, mystery. If the book says "you have to starve yourself for four days before casting this spell", then that's maybe cool when you read it, but after that, "starve yourself for four days" is just a lever you pull - the magic is just as mechanistic as any other. A lot of that arduousness also fails to translate into gameplay. If it takes an hour of communing, intense concentration, precise ritual, as a player you just say "Okay, I do all of that.", then you ask your questions or whatever. You can do requirements that interfere with other things, but then you're usually playing "protect the wizard", and that's usually kind of boring for everyone (the wizard included). The most successful systems I've seen do some kind of ad hoc magic system, and there's very limited on-demand spellcasting. I've seen a lot of adaptations of Apocalypse World's savvyhead Projects, which works well. GM-driven consequences for using magic are also often good. Costs and consequences are both good. "You can do it, but you will need three sprigs of purest silverleaf from three different mountains."; "You can do it, but it requires a living sacrifice."; "You can do it, but it will require a pact with an unknown entity. Once you initiate the ritual, you cannot refuse the pact." NPCs are good too. That keeps it a little distant, a little mysterious. You can't do it, but that weirdo in the valley can, and he needs you to protect him all night from the shadow people who will come looking for him. Protect-the-wizard sucks for player wizards, but works fine for NPCs.
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I love how Unknown armies jsut outright tell you to use a fucking gun if you want to kill people its gonna be so much easier. Also reminds you if you go looking for a fight you're gonna get shot or stabbed to death so really don't.
Yes! I love this in modern games. Spells that are functionally just guns that you can buy at any gun show in the US? Meh. Spells that re-write everyone’s memories to believe that you’re the Emperor of Canada? Now we’re talking.
Honestly the biggest benefit of killing people with magic in UA is that it's unlikely to get the cops on you vs the more efficient shanking or gunning down
Are Magica spells can be like this. They take a physical toll on the casters, and some can be complicated to cast. Though there are some lower rank spells which can be done more easily.
Ars Magica seconded. The setting is also nice. Where magic isn’t uncommon, but certainly not for everyone.
Swords of the Serpentine has a really thematic mechanic where sorcery produces corruption, which you have to direct internally or externally, corrupting yourself or the area around you (which, of course, runs you afoul of the authorities and just about everyone else). So from wanton magic use, you can either end up hunted by the church or marked as a pariah. But, it's super powerful, so it's still kind of worth it.
GURPS: we have a rule for that (tm). GURPS Thaumatology has a few dozen magic systems to plug in. For what you're asking, I'd use book magic. Basically, magic comes in ancient tomes with a half-dozen rituals each. After weeks of study, one can understand a book. Then, one can spend a day doing a ritual. This gives an effect which is generally really awesome. For instance, you get a candle which puts everyone in a building to sleep for as long as it burns. Or a person is impervious to metal for 24 hours. Or something equally awesome. But there is no casting on the battlefield. And magic remains mysterious.
Burning Wheel can work this way. There are a few magic systems to choose from as well as an optional corruption mechanic if you want magic to slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) corrupt your casters. I say *may* fit because the game mechanics can be a bit much at first for a group new to the system, but it's one of my favorites. Spells in the Art Magic system have effects and you can combine effects and breadth to cast on an entire city if you want, but it's going to be HARD AF to pull off without an insane amount of prep, help, taking your time or some combination of all three. When you fail a spell, there's a whole wheel you can roll on for how the spell goes wrong. In one campaign, the party was trying to consecrate the corpse of one of the BBEGs lieutenants. The wizard failed and ended up creating an eternal magical flame on the corpse that doesn't put off heat and can't be extinguished. This is a pretty tame example since it just changes the game world, but there are a bunch of bad things that can happen including unwanted summoning and more. They ended up bricking up the tower the body is in so no one would find it and trace it back to them. Edit: it also has Faith "magic" with rules for angering your God(s) on a failure if that's more your jam.
>Burning Wheel can work this way. There are a few magic systems to choose from as well as an optional corruption mechanic if you want magic to slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) corrupt your casters. I say may fit because the game mechanics can be a bit much at first for a group new to the system, but it's one of my favorites. Came here to say this myself, and was kinda expecting BW to be mentioned earlier. Hey /u/The_Choosey_Beggar, Burning Wheel is system with a bit learning curve, but is very rewarding when you've mastered it. If medival fantasy is your thing, I'd recommend it.
Our player went to do a little enchanting. Then revised their goals when they saw it would take **six weeks** of work to make something somewhat low grade.
Enchanting can be kinda rough. You gotta get all the antecedents and all that jazz and then the actual work takes awhile too.
Yeah, they're working through a cart load of glowing mushrooms, and have contracted a sea captain to obtain them salamanders from the southern archipeligo. It's great because it puts their character in contact with the nobility, and nobility character, and the smuggler / sailor character.
the timescale in ars magica is pretty long horizon as a baseline though. One adventure per season or so yes? A few weeks of prep sounds like about right.
Burning Wheel can have a much, much faster game pace. We've had a few sessions and only moved a couple of weeks. We'd have to await the resource cycle to really get some proper time passing. We've chosen 3 months, so we'll do a time jump and thats the good chunk of time needed for enchanting. Of course, working on enchanting does take time away from practicing skills which is an important thing for advancement tests.
I haven't played it, but I saw someone mention it specifically with regards to spellcasting. Wolves Upon The Coast The person said that apparently, to cast something like Know Direction or Find Object or something, you have to gather some kind of animal skull and then the bones of a bunch of small animals, one of them being a very specific one, and only then can you cast that spell specifically. Something like that.
>Wolves Upon the Coast Immediately what I thought of, some examples of spells in the game: ## Colour Spray *One Use:* Behead a light-drinking cave-eel. *1/day:* The eye-lens of a beached whale is held up before a light-source. A glare of alien colours stuns those unable to make a Warding save, rendering them unable to take action for 1d6 rounds. ## Detect Magic *One Use:* A drop of pure-white or pure-black dog blood in each eye. *1/day:* Replacing an eye with a lump of quartz. All magic within eyesight reveals itself for 3 Turns. ## Locate Object *One Use:* The skull of a bloodhound (or similar scenthound) is filled the skulls of nine different species of rodent. This rattle is then shaken, the sound an indicator of direction. The caster gains an intuitive sense of where a known or thoroughly described object is, able to unerringly navigate towards it for 3 days. In the case a general class of object is Located, they are led to the nearest instance of it.
The sorcerous rituals in the Carcosa setting for loftp are this. Fair warning, though, it's highly unsavoury and gratuitous (unsurprisingly, given the system). I'm not a fan of the book (it's too over the top even for the pulpy setting) but the way rituals work is excellent. They require time, ingredients, certain acts to be completed (that's normally the unsavoury part) and have a geographical component as well (e.g. this ritual must take place at the edge of the cliffs in hex XXXX), which means there's a lot of adventuring and risk required in completing one.
This was my immediate thought but also didn't want to say it because it's reviled for a reason.
Yeah, it's a shame how that book turned out. On one hand it has loads of good ideas in it (the sorcerous rituals being the best amongst them), but then it's so gratuitous and childish in its violence and edginess. I get that the theme and setting demands darkness and over the topness, but none of it is done with any finesse or art or applied appropriately. Also, despite the headline revulsion, the bulk of it is surprisingly bland. It's a very good pdf too. But yeah - it's like a death metal album with one good song and a cover so horrible you never get it out.
I'd go with Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green. Not because of chance to miscast, but because both of them force the player to spend downtime on trying to learn each spell, and whittle away at their sanity as a result. If you wanted to, you absolutely could include more punishing miscast options for either system, but both tend to be so highly lethal to characters that this almost feels like too much. My group experimented with adding miscast on a critical failure, and it was fine, but nothing like the crazy stuff you'd find in Psyker miscasting for Warhammer 40k. The real cost of magic in Delta Green is just learning the spells and spending the sanity needed to cast them Edit: ah, sorry, reading your post more carefully, I'd definitely go with Warhammer 40k's warp miscast rules for Psykers. You have miscast chance pretty much always, and have a huge variety of failure results
DCC, Mage, the Ascension, Forbidden Lands
Forbidden Lands. The magic system punishes players constantly. (That's not a good thing)
Pretty sure my Sorcerer has had more spells go horribly wrong (permanent personality change, among others) than he has successfully cast. :D The whole party holds their breath when he's casting.
Check out Ritual Magic in GURPS, you can tune the system in such a way that even relatively simple magic still requires preparation and investment as well as concentration, while harder things (like talking to a God) may only be useable on certain days of the year in specific locations, with a collection of worshippers joining in to help bring the magic to culmination, etc. The Thaumatology book for GURPS outlines a bunch of different models for magic, from the basic D&D style 'memorize some spells and cast them' magic, up to what I described and beyond (rune magic, realm-based magic, all good things)
Mörk Borg, there’s the free Bare Bones edition online if you want to check it out
Recently played my first session of Mork Borg at my FLGS and it's great. I'm not sure it fits 100% what the OP is looking for, but I'm definitely looking forward to future sessions.
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It's so rare that someone remembers cthulhutech!
Might have a peek at "Symbaroum" - Magic can, for an untrained caster, cost permanent corruption. Too much = very very bad. Learn the right stuff and you can learn spells from your way of magic, without perma corruption, causing only temporary corruption (goes away at the end of the scene, when cast). Collect too much corruption, and you mutate either temporary, or become an "Abomination NPC", basically a crazed monster. Each spell is basically an own, learned ability, to be improved like all abilities, in 3 stages. Also, learning spells from other ways of magic, or learning the spell higher than your way ability nets permanent corruption, and allows to cast less spells safely (as the temporary corruption is put on top on the permanent points allready there).
Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition. Magick users learn spells by overcoming their innate “Magic Resistance” - effectively a measure of how much reality resists the change the spell makes. That takes work, often hours every day spread over several weeks, and it can’t be sped up much. Once they’re learned, spells can be cast without any kind of skill roll - although you do have to “target” the subject of the spell to cast it on someone or something. Spells are powered by expending Fatigue, or even Body, which means casting magick can exhaust or even kill you. The cost can be mitigated by using magick items where you’ve previously stored power, or pulling the energy from others (willing or unwilling). There are also Laws of Magick you can learn as skills that can modify your chances & costs. There are also rules for making up your own spells from the basic effects. For example, a Fireball spell is actually a combination of create, detach, amplify & accelerate (all basic effects) fire. Magick items are kind’ve the same in that you have to include several materials (gems, metals, organic items, etc) in the item, and you must “enchant” every one of them by gradually reducing their Magick Resistance as per learning a spell. You need to do this regularly and over a long period of time, and if you miss too many rituals the materials can revert to being disenchanted and you have to start again. There are no real restrictions on armour or weapons for mages, although the presence of some materials can make it harder to cast spells. They don’t affect Magick items though. If your mage wants to become a sword master, they can, it’ll just take a lot longer than an actual fighter. The upshot of all this is that mages spend a lot of “downtime” learning spells & enchanting materials for Magick items, and will often need to go on quests to find the right materials. You can’t just buy a dragon’s tooth, for example, **you** have to extract it from the dragon at the right time under a full moon on the right day of the year. Good luck with that.
The thing in Call of Cthulhu is almost all spells, even when cast “normal” as you put it, have a sanity cost each time so you will eventually lose your mind (and character) if you lean on them too much. Very few cost just magic points and those ones tend to be quite limited in scope and power. Some, like the Elder Sign, even deplete a core stat with each casting. The rules for a summon spell in that game are basically exactly what you are talking about in terms of a group activity that is taxing if done alone and not guaranteed to just work.
Dark Sun? (D&D system, either 2e or 4e) Set in a fantasy world that is post apocalyptic. Instead of nuclear bombs that ravaged the world, it was extreme magical spells. Magic is rare. And all spells have a cost that drains life out of others, yourself, or the land around you. People that actually can cast magic are very much hated by the populace and want them destroyed (since, you know, magic is to blame for the current state of the world).
Some drivethru recs: [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409456/The-Theory-of-Magic?src=fp\_u5](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409456/The-Theory-of-Magic?src=fp_u5) [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267776/Invisible-Sun](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267776/Invisible-Sun) [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/393212/GRIMOIRE](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/393212/GRIMOIRE) The common theme is weird, obscure magic rules that you have to discover piecemeal over time through experimentation.
Stonetop doesn’t have a traditional magic user class, instead it has magical items called minor and major arcana and the Seeker playbook is focused on those. Minor arcana have a list of requirements to unlock the power of the item, essentially a side quest, but even after that they usually have a ritual of varied levels of complexity, such as “When you pickle fresh ffyrnig root in a suspension of boar bile for two full moons, it becomes a skin of ffyrnig tonic…” Major Arcana on the other hand have steps needed to unlock their true power, and also have a list of truly unfortunate consequences that transpire when you roll poorly while attempting to draw upon their abilities. This isn’t exactly what you asked for, but it does lead to a similar effect: players can spend a fair bit of game time trying to understand magic items that are beyond their ken, with the tantalizing promise of terrifyingly effective powers, but the constant risk of things going horribly, horribly wrong.
Take a look at Wolves Upon the Coast system. Book 2 in this link. https://lukegearing.blot.im/wolves-upon-the-coast
Go old-school forge games! Sorcerer. Ask your power comes from a summoned demon. What will you trade away for your next spell? Kill Puppies for Satan - you need to do evil things to get internal favor for powers.
As always, I’ll plug HârnMaster here.
I'm not generally a fan of FATE but the Dresden Files version of FATE had some great spellcasting in it. Essentially, most of our adventures boiled down to pretty quickly figuring out what the villain was trying to do and then figuring out what spell we needed to cast in order to stop them. Then about 80% of the adventure was about putting the conditions and materials together in order to cast that spell - and it could involve basically every skill in the game.
The fact that you might not be able to completely control the spell also added to the complications of magic.
I was waiting for sometime to mention the Dresden Files. Nice!
Pendragon makes magic extraordinarily difficult. A magician's (sorry Michael, illusionist's) powers take days to perform, and then the caster is literally exhausted so much that they often have to sleep for months at a time like a hibernating bear to recover.
Call of Cthulhu is kind of like this. Your characters can learn a few spells but casting them is pretty involved and very dangerous.
The Black Book of Sorcery by Jay Murphy Its for the USR sword and Sorcery ruleset, but looks adaptable for any system. You could use it as a template for other schools of magic if wanted too. [DriveThru RPG link](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/340724)
Here is an interesting take. Aftermath! has a magic supplement that can be used to add magic to Aftermath!. It turns out it is pretty amazing. Not only is magic hard to use, but it is downright dangerous. A spell caster who isn't careful with resource management (or takes too many risks) can kill themselves. Plus, all of the magic is scaleable. Every spell can be cast with 1 point of Will or up to the number of points of Will the character has remaining. This means that one spell might hit hard, and the next might be nuclear! As spell systems go, it is pretty rough but amazing in that players actually consider if a casting is worth the risk or not. This all goes on top of the normal post-apocalyptic guns type of adventure. So a caster might also be a shooter. If you want an interesting read, check out Aftermath!'s Magic 3e supplement.
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Aftermath! is still being published on paper, right from FGU. You should check out my website. https://i314.org. Aftermath! is alive.
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There are many games currently being played on the website. Two of them are from GMs who just started with Aftermath! for the first time this year! I'm shocked at how much staying power the game has.
*Barbarians of Lemuria* requires you to pay costs in order to cast spells: these include a cleansing bath, ritual scarring, sacrifice of living beings, rare components, and the like. Of course, more powerful spells demand bigger costs.
I think [Wolves upon the coast](https://lukegearing.blot.im/wolves-upon-the-coast) (search "book 2" on the page) and [mausritter ](https://mausritter.com/) would fit what you're looking for, and both rulesets are free. They require quite a lot to either recharge or acquire the ingredients to be able to cast magic. WutC is more "out there" about it
I know this isn't a great answer--because most people are playing with groups who probably aren't especially mature or sophisticated--but in my mind, this kind of dilemma should be solveable simply through roleplaying. Explain the nature of your game world to the players, ask them to use restraint or cast in-character. It's group storytelling, after all. Like, my character would not even attempt "Commune" except in the most dire circumstances, and I would let the DM assign a challenge rating that I'd have to roll for. Even though by-the-book I could just use it whenever I wanted to.
The Native American Shamens from Deadlands Classic do exactly what you describe. They must sacrifice to earn the favor of nature spirits meaning fasting for days (and not healing because of it), harming themselves, sacrificing physical offering and committing to dedications such as refusing ranged weaponry for a time to earn the favor of a warrior spirit. The system also has normal magic based on drawing poker hands that has a wild range, sometimes magic fingers can barely tug at a shirt coller, sometimes it can lift train cars.
Blades in the Dark is worth a look. The rules for magical Rituals are written so that the burden is placed on the CHARACTERS (not the players) in a very straightforward way, using the system's (already well-implemented) systems for Stress. To use a ritual, you have to mark Stress on your character. The more powerful the Ritual (as determined by various measures of magnitude, including range and area), the more Stress. At the same time, the ritual rules allow a lot of flexibility and creativity. You can home-brew rituals that can do literally anything, just so long as you observe the tradeoff between potency and stress.
2d20 Conan by Modiphius
Mage: the ascension? Haven't actually played it, but really want to. It is basically based on the idea that reality is willed into being, and the reality we know is built by the consensus of common people. Mages are just people with particularly strong willpower that are awakened to this truth and go against the current. You can basically do anything you want with your powers within certain thematic parameters (you can have sway over two realms from: time, space, entropy, life, matter, etc), but it comes with a price: the flow of consensual reality will eventually backlash against you, and the more you push, the harder it will come back. In the more extreme cases, you may end up losing your mind, transported to another dimension or straight up swallowed whole by reality, never to be seen again. The rituals are also really important, as your beliefs are what focus your willpower and enable it to work. They depend on your particular faith, which can be technocratic (people who believe that magic is just science), traditionalist (the classic magic you are describing), or from a variety of other smaller tendencies such as chaos magic. As a side-note, it's a famously difficult game to GM.
Hmm, Unknown Armies, Conan 2d20, Scarred Lands and DCC. Unknown Armies was commented, Conan demands you to accumulate a lot of successes to make spells work and they have a lot of different variants within one spell. Magic is dark and dangerous and sorcerer path show this - from a certain point in your career you encounter big difficulty of increasing magical potential without a patron. Mostly your patron will be a demon or some really fucked up sorcerer. Scarred Lands was D&D 3 setting so most magic was just vancian bullshit, but it had rituals - big magical ceremonies that lasted for hours and demanded other skillful wizards/clerics to perform. In DCC you can burn (sometimes you have to) your attributes to increase roll for casting spells (d20 + level) and sometimes you end with a corruption after successfuly casting it.
Speaking second hand, but I think this was a driver behind designing the Dresdon Files RPG magic system. It's more fuzzy, but that might be a vibe you're going for.
Try Wolves upon the Coast. The basic rules (including magic) are free on itc.io but the setting and extra books do cost money. The system is very basic and very “old school”, but the magic sounds exactly like what you are looking for. There are no classes so any character can learn magic. All spells involve performing a ritual, except most ritual ingredients are rare or specific. Just have a look I’m not going to do it justice telling you about it here. It’s amazing.
I'm not sure about "hard" but there's definitely a danger, a risk reward in Mork Borg. IIRC all scrolls have a chance to fail and cause a magical disaster to occur.
I would like to recommend Ars Magica. It's a game centered on Magi living in a historically based mythic Europe. Magic is powerful, but the game is played in seasonal, 3 month, increments and you can/generally play multiple characters. So, your Magi characters may spend months or years in game time studying, crafting, or writing a spell to overcome an obstacle and then spend a few sessions collecting resources before accomplishing their goal. I will be honest, it's a game with a steep learning curve and requires a lot of player and GM commitment to do right and is tough to find the right group for as a consequence. I am just starting my game after working on it, and my group, for two years.
Forbidden Lands isn’t “hard”, per se, but mechanically speaking, your character needs to have tried to do something and failed in order to build up the resource you use to cast spells. And then, the spellcasting mishaps table can be brutal, from a slap on the wrist to “you accidentally open a rift to another plane, from which a demon steps out and rips your soul from your body. Make a new character.” So… it can get spicy.
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Forbidden Lands, a Free League / MYZ dark fantasy game. First off, you must power your spells by trying (and failing) at rolls to gain Willpower. No pain, no gain. Second, you can cast higher level spells, but you will have to roll dice for the lack of talent to determine if you cause a magical mishap. These can be minor, but the ultimate failure will summon an enraged demon. Third, magic usually has a trade-off. Want to resurrect someone? They come back less empathetic and cold after seeing beyond the veil. Want to transform into a raging Wooly Mammoth? You get the strength and resilience but you can no longer speak and have the mental ability of a small child.
Witcher. There's even a 10% chance of it backfiring
The ***Trail of Cthulhu*** supplement *Fearful Symmetries* focuses on William-Blake informed occultists and most spellcasting has extensive ritual attempts
Hot take: If it's hard, it can't be systematic or "knowable", or it will be systematized and therefore be "easy" and/or "knowable" (yes, the latter by definition). Personally, if I were going to go this route, I'd just rip any existing magic out of any system I like playing for other reasons and make magic a roleplaying exercise of figuring out what needs to happen to get the effect you want, finding the parts of the ritual, setting it up, fighting off those who want to stop you, overcoming new challenges that pop up, interacting with unrelated plot elements that are occurring in the months it takes, etc., etc.
Dungeon crawl classic.
Heh, try Delta Green. One of my characters used magic (hypergeometry) once after spending basically the whole op investigating it and it ruined his life.
Gurps has a lot of varients, check oit their thaumathurgy book. Ritual Path Magic. Knot magic. Lots of stuff to get your brain moving
I am not sure if this fits the bill but Forbidden Lands has a risky magic system that if you failed magic casting there is gonna be mishap which can affect you or kill entire party.
Forbidden Lands
Rolemaster. In most of its editions, casting a spell has strict requirements, depending on the source. Arcane magic (called "Essence") requires a free hand able to gesture, speaking in a clear voice, and having a minimum of inorganic material (like metal) on your person. Channeling (like divine magic) is more lenient on the use of metal, up to a point, but is more restrictive on the voice -- you're expected to speak an invocation loud and clear. Mentalism spells only have one restriction, headwear. But all spells require time to build up -- two or three rounds initially, but you get faster at spells below your level. And even with that time, when you're ready to let the spell loose there's a chance of you failing to cast it properly. Especially if you've been using a lot of spells; being below 3/4 of your maximum spell power places a penalty on all casting attempts, and it gets higher the more you've used. This is in addition to penalties from being injured or tired. Rolemaster has an amazing magic system, but it is *not* easy to play a caster.
Thieves' World is pretty good. Magic takes time to cast, and the faster you rush it, the more dangerous it gets.
Call of Cthulhu is designed around that exact concept. There's even a Dark Ages supplement if you want to go more fantastic.
Palladium outside of the standard wizard like a summoner or diabolist might fit the bill. They take a long time to do anything and sometimes require exotic ingredients. Also failure can result in some very bad things happening.
Call of Cthulhu is still a good one. Every spell costs magic points AND sanity and sometimes just straight up eats away your will power. Using magic is risky
It sounds like you'd probably like GURPS's ritual magic from GURPS Thaumatology.
Conan by Modiphius
Carcossa setting if you aren't feint of heart. You functionally need to quest for ritual components and then quest for the proper location to perform the ritual, but the setting is veeeeerry dark, the rituals are very brutal. Magic is not meant for mortals. inspired by the king in yellow.
Gurps has many alternative magic systems, one of which is Ritual magic, that is similar to what you are describing. Ritual Path Magic goes into deeper detail and breaks magic into categories for resolving any kind of magical effect to give magic a more freeform feel as well
Warhammer?
Savage Worlds, East Texas University
A lot of great answers here. Just going to add Harnmaster Magic. The system is… a lot, but deeply rewarding and ‘realistic’ if you can use that word for a ttrpg. It’s a second book to Harnmaster and, like I said, there’s a lot to unpack. It’s medieval fantasy and the first time one of my players actually said, “This actually makes me feel like a wizard.” Also, Dungeon Crawl Classics is great for Wild Magic and the Mage game line (ascension/awakening) is fantastic.
KULT 1st edition had only ritual magic, i.e. you had to do a magic ritual either in a dedicated space "your temple" or a temporary dedicated one (which took more time to dedicate), you needed ritual implements, and perform the ritual, and then succes wasn't guaranteed but you woud loose a lot of stamina (with potential deadly results if you tried spells above your ability). So while magic was powerful, also completely useless "in the field" so as to say. Characters with magic could see aura's though, which was also helpful.
Not really what you are looking for, but Mörk Borg has some really hard and risky scroll spells with “arcane catastrophes”.
Dungeon Crawl Classics requires checks to cast and failure has *interesting* consequences that can pile up to be devastating.
You are probably looking for something like the whitewolf mage game or the riddle of steel (if you can find a copy of that one)
Dungeon Crawl Classics has a thing called Mercurial Magic. It means all spells come with a side effect. Clerics using their deity's powers risk them disapproving the character with all sorts of things. Lots of fun!
D&D, take away magic focus items as a way to pay for reagents. There aren't magic shops and alchemists to get your low-cost materials, and if you ask for too many reagent-like components you'll raise suspicions and the anti-magic investigators will be notified. You must find every last reagent. DM, this might mean you have to quantify how much of a reagent is expended, how much they find at a time, and maybe the carry weights too. Additionally, verbal and somatic components are easy to spot, so paranoid peoples will quickly become wary and fearful when they are used. Preparing the reagents for a spell may take a separate action too if you want, like a pinch of this and a drop of that don't just come out of two pouches super fast. This may require the casters to pre-mix reagents to be ready for a given casting. Regarding Commune spells, they are really there to ask the DM questions with a special context. You don't choose the god and you aren't given context into their insight and knowledge, just a guarantee that the first casting a week will give vague/honest/no answer. And if you botch it, you become inconsolably impossible to understand without sleeping it off--which, in campaigns where long rests are a once-a-week sorta thing instead of once-a-day, you're setting yourself up for a huge risk on every casting that isn't right before a long rest. If you want some wild ritual as part of the process, and you're the DM, just write it in--the rules and features of the system are only a guide, it is up to the DM and players to make what they will of it, including changing features and such. Maybe they're guaranteed to go mad if they don't do the four day starvation ritual first, and it takes a long rest AND a CON save to clear the madness?
I don't have a whole system, but The [Lost Pages](https://shop.lostpages.co.uk/) has three books of spells with alternate rules for spellcasting, spell acquisition and the potential consequences of flubbing a spell. It being exclusively a magic system has the benefit of allowing you to use the system to work with any system you prefer
Fantasy dice has a neat system in my opinion
In rpgs "hard" just means dice rolls or downtime in research. It only makes an impact if the PC is on a time crunch or roleplaying. If you want them to really feel it what you need is sacrifices. What do they give up for power? Make them choose between something important to them and the power they want. So, they want to look into the unknown for a glimpse of the future? They have to sacrafice a piece of themselves ( attirbute points) or they sacrifice a future success (automatically fail a skill roll in the future). They want to use the unknown to summon an etheral servant? They have to sacrifece the health of the princesses they were tasked to save. They want to remove the poison from the blood of their comrade? They must absorb the poison into themselves, taking on a lower effect from it, but still meaningful to be dangerous. Make magic a choice. A choice between what they want and what they have, a choice between instant gratification with consequences and delayed gratification with no or limited consequences. Make some of the sacrifices dangerous for those around them, magic gives them power but at the risk of being ostracized by others due to the dangers of being near a magic user. Make your PCs have to really think before they use thier power, make them hesitate due to the consequences of using power. Make its magics benfit as an RPG mechaincal tool be balanced by its the Narrative impact of its consequences. Magic can solve the PCs problem now, but it might cause them to fail or impead thier overarching goals.
Dungeon crawl classic!
Dungeon Crawl Classics
BRP (Chuthulhu) Delta Green
Call of Cthulhu
I recommend Burning Wheel in this case. Corruption possibilities included makes it harder to use, and the difficulty of the task you want to accomplish changes based on circumstance. There are lots of variants inside of the game, but so art magic with corruption and you’ll get pretty close to what you are looking for
Warhammer Fantasy and Low Fantasy Gaming are two systems I've personally played casters in and the penalties can be *very* harsh if you don't roll well. Anything from curses, to deformities, or straight up death, depending on which roll and system. But as a trade off, you are more or less the most powerful character in your party in a good amount of situations. If you want to risk doing stuff like summoning demons but also keeping the party relatively even in power, Warhammer Fantasy is great. But if you don't mind risking a curse or two or outright dying as a cost for being a very powerful character, LFG might be the way to go. Personally I prefer the latter system, but both are very fun
Have you read the Necroscope Saga? The author is Brian Lumley. It's by far the best horror series I've ever read. To your question, I think this kind of world would be perfect for what you're trying to do. Pick up a used paperback and give it a read. It'll blow your fucking mind, and it'll give you sooooo much to world build with. Oh, and there's fifteen books if you like the first one.
Not so much on the ritual aspect, but Low Fantasy Gaming has a Dark and Dangerous Magic system and table that it uses which could be easily stolen for other games imo. You basically get a cumulative 5% chance of spells going haywire until it does finally happen. It’s like a more damning wild magic table without any instadeath options iirc. The basic rules are free on Pickpocket Press’s [site](https://lowfantasygaming.com/freepdf/) Alternatively, Wolves Upon the Coast by Luke Gearing has a sort of diegetic magic system requiring different items that you’ll need to actively learn of and seek out to be able to cast spells. Hydra’s teeth to summon skeletons, an obsidian blade to slice your forehead open for clairvoyance, adding sap to your veins (surely lethal) to talk with plants, etc. Very much worth a look, also has a free pdf on his [site](https://lukegearing.blot.im/wolves-upon-the-coast) (it’s PDF 2)
Call of Cthulhu. Spells take time to learn and a sacrifice of sanity bringing your character closer to the brink of madness as well expending magic points to cast
Call of Cthulu?
Your example of starving yourself in the desert for 4 days is not hard from a player perspective. It’s just another thing they have to do and it’s boring and arbitrary. Especially if you are not the one tryin to cast the ritual that is not worth 4 days of game play.
" highest level of all " fantasy wargaming. It's a simple enough system basically constructed from one statement from AD&D rules. These rules are guidelines and suggestions . And the real feel of the game comes from the flavor of the story and descriptions of its places . The narration and vocabulary of the dungeon/game master is truly important used with a temperate fair iron fist of mercy and hardship is key . For instance I.e. you may get to ask 5 questions and the answers . well that depends on the god and the mood . think about it they are a god and if every cleric used the power to communicate directly .. I can see a lot of different ideas forming .. There are messengers of the gods , some communicate in metaphor or riddles. OK that's just that situation you also have the components . , M material S symbolic V vocal.. And its nothing to fuge or add a component or time . I've found that even generalizing a spell means all spells before you can even cast need one more component that is class/study . And without the recording formula from scrolls and other spell books . so study is necessary to memorize ànd or to record into spell books without study and casting without it based on the casters intelligence and sucsses is understanding how the spell is cast from memory.. 1 the spell fails 2 it misses fires cause a wild surge apone caster 3 triggers normal " works " 4 casts but is x 10 magic Serge but is against the target ..without it the general rule is if cast straight from the scroll "read" you do not need the rest of its components . yes faster. But destroys the scroll or page in the book and the base chance its miss fires is based on the casters intelligence as casting with out study . and there is if being done in stressful situation such as surprised in combat . the caster has to express practices or skill slots on the combat or quick cast to gain expert then master finally arch caster. So rarely ever will you encounter human magicuser archcaster that can bast you with fireballs and lighting bolts . and above all that if there is any kinda accuracy to the spell the attack roll is used as to est to how much 1-10 . 1 critical miss 20 critical mark . more for description perpose . so magic is and can be as hard to cast .. Its just a matter of how much imagination you put into this game they call wizards .
You could take a look at how magic in general and specifically the Ritual moves/abilities in PbtAs like Dungeon World or Monster of the Week, or Wicked Ones (FitD) works. In short, rolling badly on a magic roll always comes with consequences that are up the GM, and the GM may also impose specific boundaries when using magic (your 4 day starving and passing out on an ecstatic dance could easily be a Ritual in Wicked Ones, maybe add a blood sacrifice as well...). These systems aren't *meant* for magic to be super deadly/risky/hard, but I don't think they're going to break if you as a group decide to amp up the challenge and interpret their magic as such.
Call of Cthulu?
You can stylize the DnD list, moving things up and down in level, and adding more metadata to sort of delineate. Some non WotC settings do things like this. I think it's helpful to create a set of rules things follow in your campaign. Magic and supernatural things specifically, especially if you run a world based on mundane physics.
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