More On Sorcery 101

This post is going to be about sorcery in my campaign, buckle up. Magic is unreliable in my world, untrustworthy, and prone to mutating living flesh into pretty much anything imaginable. It runs the gamut from acidy spit to shadow powers. This is a vast departure from "normal" magic in a DnD campaign setting. I'm going to blow your mind here in a second. Buckle up more.

Magic isn't broken.

Here's the thing, Eric has wanted in the past to fix magic or modify it in a way to stabilize it in a permanent fashion that allows him to utilize magic items freely and without any of the flaws I deliberately placed in the whole system. He wants to take a campaign feature I instituted for a specific reason, and make it fit his version of DnD. Magic is the way it is for a reason, and trying to fix it would be like trying to fix oxygen in our atmosphere to make it work better or some such.

Magic is not in any way broken, it is exactly as I envisioned it performing in this world. When compared to a conventional DnD campaign, yes, it is broken, but Hekinoe is not a conventional DnD campaign. Sorcery is an external power source that humanoids can draw on for power to shape with their desires and willpower. The true source of this is not in any way shape or form known or understood, it is just sorcery to its practitioners. It can be manipulated and shaped and controlled, but never completely, thus the misfires and such. There is too much energy in sorcery for mortals to control, so they must bleed it off via incantations and complex gestures, or through training regimes designed to improve their control. Sometimes a spell has so much power that it misfires to release the excess energy or afflicts the caster with some unnatural condition related to the type of spell he cast.

So, I've written this before, but I feel the need to reiterate it. I deliberately made magic the way it is because I wanted players to shy away from sorcery of any kind, then I created various background material reasons for why magic operates the way it does. The reason for doing so is because I love psionics. For too long I have felt that psionics was kind of the red headed step child of DnD. I could list a dozen or two reasons why I feel this way, but at this point I feel it is irrelevant. Things are the way they are. 

Because of my personal beliefs I have altered the way magic works in my campaign to make psionics more appealing. Psionics, like the upgrade system, is one hundred percent reliable and safe. Regardless of the original intent of my plan to fuck over magic, I really like the way it turned out. The various misfire effects are neat and fun to create. It is a pity no one, aside from Lance, opted to play a psionic class though. They're pretty cool and I really like some of the stuff that Dreamscarred Press is doing, I mean, they're no Malhavoc Press, but they get the job done.