noble sorcerors

[reverancepavane]

My sorcery system, for those who didn't clue to the significance of having nine ranks of spells, was based on That Other Game™, since my original fantasy campaign was based on that game (there wasn't that much of an alternative available when it started). The nine ranks of spells (I always thought it was more impressive to say that one was "a Mage of the First Rank, capable of wielding the Very forces of Creation and Destruction, able to Summon forth the Denizens of the Outer Dark and Command them to My Service."), delineated the possible scope (effect, duration, range) of the spells, on the theory that each represented a higher "astral plane" that the sorceror could reach. The higher the plane, the more fundamental and far-reaching (in both time and space) the effect. The actual rank of the spell was the minimum rank required to enable each aspect of the spell (although certain effects gave added bonuses to the effective range and duration). All in all, it hewed fairly closely to the standards set by That Other Game™ (after, all, if I couldn't chain Flesh to Stone, Rock to Mud, Destroy Water, and Gust of Wind together, how could people tell I was upset?). Knowledge of spells was handled by the various Arcane Knowledges. If you had the appropriate Arcane Knowledge you could cast the spell. If you didn't, you could probably still cast the spell by making an appropriate justification of how you would use that knowledge to cast the spell (the length of required rationalization indicated what penalty would be applied to the effect rank of the spell). Certain Knowledges were restricted by Circle, but since those Knowledges also represented spells with high Effect ranks there wasn't much effect. For example, Time, Life, and Death were all Inner Circle Knowledges. [Incidentally all sorcery was illusion (in that it was not real). Only wizardry could actually create something which could not be dispelled.] But I've always been tempted to embrace the Nobilis miracle system as a fantasy magic system. The Arcane Knowledges would cover the Nobilis domains of the spells, and the Level of Miracle translates across to the spell rank. For example a sorceror with the Arcane Knowledge of Roads could do the following things: Spell Rank Spell Effects 1st Spells of Greater Transformation. Make the roads of a small country twist like serpents. 2nd Spells of Greater Destruction. Make it impossible to get to a place by any road. 3rd Spells of Greater Creation. Make a one mile long road that reaches from America to Australia. 4th Spells of Greater Preservation. Make the road someone is on endless. 5th Spells of Lesser Transformation. Redirect a road so it leads somewhere else. 6th Spells of Greater Divination. Know about any interesting travellers who have used the road.   Spells of Lesser Destruction. Make someone lost. 7th Spells of Lesser Creation. Create a new road that lead to one's destination. 8th Spells of Lesser Preservation. Make a road seem much longer. 9th Spells of Lesser Divination. Know the direction to anywhere. This does have the advantage of making sorcery much more of an Art than a Science, which is what I want (unfortunately the mechanics of delineating spell ranks tended to encourage a much more mechanistic approach to the art of sorcery), but I suspect it is a bit too loose for my tastes now that I think about it. Ponders, but grows increasingly doubtful. Incidentally, the remaining aspect of the old sorcery system was that of magic points. Whilst these started off as a reserve of manna for the use of casting spells (as is the case of most spell systems that use them), they eventually transmuted to represent the maximum amount of "magical strain" that a sorceror could safely undertake before the astral energies started overwhelm them and bad stuff happened (in effect, becoming negative magic points). Magic point "expenditure" not only limited the spells that could be cast, it also affected the casting times, and encouraged the use of rituals to allow the sorceror to help disperse the excess astral energies. [Most of the sorcery system and philosophy of magic grew organically during the old campaign. One of the fun things in that campaign was the players of magic users investigating exactly how magic worked (one of the side effects of "you need to spend gold on professional development projects to get xp for it"). As they tested various thesis by proposing interesting experiments, they started to determine the underlying philosophy behind magic, which then affected the teachings of subsequent generations.]* [* Almost as much fun as the players whose characters built dungeons for the benefit of future generations of adventurers (although they had more prosaic reasons for doing so, like protecting their own treasures from aforementioned fellow-adventurers). At least one dwarven clan earned it's income purely from consulting and supervising dungeon design and construction.]