Leaving Vancian Magic

Good riddance. I fucking hate you.

The high water mark for free-form magic in games is still Whitehack. This system—often fretted over for the very terseness and flexibility that marks its usefulness—enumerates 4 tiers of effect, their base costs in HP, and conditions that reduce or increase these costs.

Simple. Elegant. Too open ended for many. But hard to beat as a starting point for something beyond Vancian magic. Because I’ve been tinkering with my own Oddlike I will focus my writing on adapting this tiered system to these kinds of games.

Murkdice made a system of spell costs for Oddlikes that, while too granular for me and inspired by different source material, offers a similar approach to how I’ve been hacking Whitehack’s 4-tier cost system into an Oddlike skeleton. Draining Hit Protection seems is a little too punishing, but taking the cost out of Abilities seems both flavorful and fair.

I wanted to avoid inventory taxes for my concept. Magic wordings are not items and do not accrue fatigue. To offset magic’s power and flexibility, the wordings of Miracles must be quested out, tested, and written into their final wording before being cast. Trying to perform a spell effect that departs greatly from a wording will likely increase the cost to a player’s abilities.

I’m currently trying out tiers based on how weapon damage is scaled in Oddlikes. I’m calling this cost Weird because bending reality takes a strange and fateful toll.

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WEIRD

d4—nearly mundane effect, or cost lessened by favorable condition.

d6—simple effect just beyond what’s possible.

d8—powerful effect that defies natural law.

d10—raw display of power.

d12—casting in a place with unfavorable energies, or other magical duress.

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Finding and Crafting Magic

Magic may be sought out by rumor or learned from strange tomes and powerful wizards. I’d suggest something like Cairn’s growth to map the search for a new wording that can be cast once its final form has been realized.

So, if I’ve shaped a spell, worded as Phantasm, that seems like a d6 base cost to me. It sounds like we’re muddling someone’s mind and senses by misdirection just beyond what is possible through mundane means.

So, you wanna do a Phantasm

You have ambushed your foes in crystal caverns where light and shadow play strangely on mirror-like pools and iridescent mists. Normally, you roll d6 and mark it from your Willpower/Charisma/Heart/etc., but you, Marvaline the Obscure have taken the time to ambush in the perfect location for a phantasm to misdirect. Roll d4 you crafty so-and-so! Or, roll a d6 if you want to affect multiple targets!

Later, Marvaline’s been cornered by Gax The Interminable in the chambers of the Dread Stone of Kresch, which feeds on magical energies, and attempts her old Phantasm trick. That seems like a bad idea, dude! Roll d12. Maybe, if you sacrifice your treasured Gold Arm of Zzigogg you can lower the cost one step to 1d10.

Let’s Get Weird

In hacking together Whitehack with various Oddlikes I’ve absorbed over the years, I dream of folding Ability score damage and Hit Protection together, and reshaping an ingenious lil mechanic from Whitehack 3e to take their place.

Corruption in Whitehack is an optional rule that introduce tiers of consequences that grow more severe and last longer as a character’s corruption score grows. But even if you accrue Corruption, the consequences are only realized if a PC fails a save to clear the Corruption. There’s a similar mechanic in Suldokar’s Wake—Whitehack’s tragically under-read SF sister system and setting— that tracks both deadly physical harm, and the toll of manipulating nanites to do otherwise impossible tasks.

So, what does this have to do with casting free-form magic in your favorite Oddlike? It means when you track this harm to your Abilities, don’t subtract it from the Max. Write the total Weird you’ve accrued down where you’d normally write your Current Ability total. If you roll a 4 casting one spell, and later cast another for 3, you have 7 total Weird. But rolling below or equal to your Weird on a save is a failure until you save to clear it. And failing to clear it before it becomes equal or greater than, your Ability triggers a Peril (see below).

You may clear Weird by taking an action to make a save. If you roll equal or below you Willpower and above your Weird clear Weird to zero without taking further harm. If you fail, you still clear Weird to zero but you also mark a Peril. Unless you roll 20, in which case you die.

Perils are a consequence that the referee and player negotiate to fit the fiction at the moment things go wrong. Generally, Perils penalize a certain type of action based on fictional position when the Peril is given. Usually this is includes—but is not limited to—rolling Saves at disadvantage whenever the Peril is relevant and can be invoked.

Let’s go back the Dread Stone of Kresch that feeds on magical energies. Marvaline the Obscure casts a Phantasm on the Warlord, Gax the Interminable, which will add d12 Weird. She’s got a Willpower of 14 and doesn’t have time to take an action to try to clear her 3 Weird, so she roll the dice—what are the chances she busts!? Marvaline rolls a 12. Marvaline has gone bust.

If I were playing or refereeing Marvaline’s mishap I’d suggest a Peril like drained or addled. Either Marvaline is sapped by the Stone penalizing all future attempts at spellcraft, or her senses are plagued by illusions and waking dreams that make it hard for her to mind her surroundings.

Ultimately, drained seems to fit best and mechanical effects are agreed upon. Any time Marvaline wishes to work magic, she rolls a d12 for Weird, and any Willpower save to work magic is made at disadvantage. Weird is reduced to zero and Peril marked next to Willpower. If Marvaline escapes Gax and the Stone alive she must embark on a quest to remove the Peril she’s come under.

That’s right. This is gonna be some Earthsea shit. She’s gonna have to find out the true name of the Stone of Kresch from a dragon or something. It’s gonna be so. fuckin. good.

But maybe she decides not to. That’s fine, though she has incentive to search for a cure, because if she doesn’t before receiving two more Perils to her Willpower, she dies.

But Narrativism™!

I don’t fucking care, dude. I’m gonna Story Game so fucking hard. You thought this was an OSR blog? You thought I wasn’t a Troll?!?

ONLY FIRE CAN KILL ME

Or, like, make some random tables to generate Perils or something. I don’t know I’m not your mom.

Final Thoughts

None of these ideas are rigorously playtested so take ‘em with a grain of salt, but I think they’re fun. I intend to extend the concept to the other Abilities, with Perils representing increasingly injury and debilities to them. But this post was supposed to be about free-form magic, so that idea, and all it’s down-stream affects on Critical Damage and NPC statblocks, can wait for another time.

If none of this resonates but you still want free-form magic, the sensible thing to do is to use Block, Dodge, Parry's magic system, adapted (I think) from the GLOG spells for Cairn, and forget all about this blog post. I also have plans for a free-er-form version of these Magic Dice systems, but you will have to wait for me to ruin that for you.

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