GURPS Hekinoe Sorcery: The Eighth Time Is The Charm

For ages an epic battle has been waged. The armies change and territory shifts, everything is constantly in flux. New contenders enter the fray, old leave. Etc. 

That epic battle is sorcery in Hekinoe and how precisely I should represent it, which is something I struggle with. Once again I find myself wanting to burn everything I've written to this point regarding it to the ground. Which is unfortunate. 

The problem is that so far, I've found things that work, but aren't perfect. Or things that work, but only fit the background material if you squint. There's no simple and easy X% per spell level, roll a d100 every time you cast a spell or use an item. That right there does everything I want it to. It's also a simple one line house rule and doesn't bog down gameplay with half a dozen additional rolls in the middle of combat. I have no problem whatsoever with the way the unreliability of sorcery is represented via Pathfinder's rules. Which sucks, because everything else about Pathfinder is fucking stupid. 

I want and need to finalize this before I can ever move forward with the GURPS Hekinoe/The Known World campaign book. Sorcery is too important to Hekinoe for me to leave it till the end. Additionally, I need to know what sorcery looks like before I can set down any concrete rules for Gifts and psionics as they are kind of defined by how they are different from sorcery. 

This is partly a stream of consciousness experiment and partly a notepad for ideas. I'd normally talk this shit out with a friend like Fred or Eric, but they don't know enough about GURPS for that to really be at all functional as an idea. So here goes. Yippee ki-yay.

What is sorcery? It's the act of using sorcerous energy to cause effects outside of the normal laws of physics and whatnot. 

What is sorcerous energy? It's a chaotic and super powerful external source of energy that living creatures (or at least creatures that were at one time living) can tap into.

How do they make it do stuff? It's guided by their willpower and training in various incantations and gestures and symbolic components.

What have we established so far? Sorcery uses IQ and Will as components of its casting. We've also established that it is not intuitive, so Pathfinder style sorcerers with magical bloodlines based on their undead lifeforce ability score have no place in Hekinoe. Cool. We've also established that it is an external energy source, so sorcerers don't use their FP or an Energy Reserve to pay energy for spells. This means that Sorcery (the Magery advantage) has to be bought with the External Sources Only limitation from Thaumatology. We've also established that spells require training and that sort of thing, so Hekinoe sorcerers need grimoires to study, but their spells are not based on spell slots or temporary memorization like Pathfinder is. Grimoires are more like reference documents. Spells and sorcery in general are complicated and full of calculations and preparations and that sort of thing. I'm thinking that going without your grimoire for a long as time probably incurs the effects of the Incompetence quirk. Since the grimoires are a reference document, having Eidetic Memory/the ability to memorize written information with perfect recollection negates the need for a grimoire.

Lets analyze this material a little further. External Energy Only, specifically. Ok. Ambient sorcerous energy is everywhere, except oceans, apparently. A sorcerer just has to concentrate and begin an incantation or what have you and the energy kind of appears in a swirling cloud of limitless potential around his head. Since external energy is everywhere and is easily accessible, the limitation value for External Sources Only needs to be low. I'm thinking -5% or 10%. Sorcerers can be cut off from ambient sorcerous energy, but it's rare and most of them are educated enough to know how to avoid that. 

Kusseth totally does not have a secret prison complex beneath Serethnem in the ruined pyramids of the Builders accessed via an underground rail system that they use to store all their sorcerers.

Sorcery is unreliable, why is that? Because it is infinite energy that a sorcerer is trying to guide and control with his mind and in the time it takes to shape a specific effect, there is a chance it will overpower his will and burst into existence through a partially or poorly shaped spell. 

How does a spell become more stable? Sorcerers bleed off excess energy by absorbing it into their bodies or by dispersing it through complex gestures and incantations and by focusing on and incorporating symbolic components into their spellcasting. The level of competence a sorcerer possesses also has an affect on a spell's unreliability. 

One thing worth mentioning is that in GURPS, if you don't succeed on the check to cast a spell, it fails and can critically fail and cause something disastrous. These critical fails in the regular GURPS rules are essentially the same concept as my misfires. Since misfires are such a big element of Hekinoe sorcery, I want to have Sorcery always be modified by the Radically Unstable Sorcery limitation.

Those two sections tell us a few things. Willpower (Will) has an affect on how unreliable spells are, as does the amount of energy put into them. It also establishes that sorcerers are taught to bleed off energy into their bodies and through incantations and various components of spellcasting. So those aspects are already factored into the baseline unreliability of a spell. We also see that skill level has an affect on the unreliability of a spell. So more energy equals more chance of misfire, higher Will reduces it, and skill level reduces it.

Part of the difficulty of managing spells and sorcerous energy and unreliability stems from the fact that a sorcerer has a limited amount of attention to spend on doing the various things in the process of casting a spell. I feel like if a sorcerer had the ability to focus multiple minds on a spell, it should make it easier to maintain a spell's integrity. One of the issues with having limitless energy for spells available is that the value of ceremonial sorcery (a bunch of sorcerers get together and pool their resources) is limited in the GURPS rules. I feel like group castings and rituals and that sort of thing have a place in Hekinoe. I want them in Hekinoe. So I think having multiple casters managing a spell would reduce its unreliability. I also think having a familiar to aid you in concentrating on a spell would reduce its unreliability. Basically this amounts to multiple spellcasters and the Compartmentalized Mind advantage reducing a spell's unreliability. 

I guess I don't say it outright, but absorbing sorcerous energy into your body is how sorcerers end up with mutations. The mutation aspect has taken a variety of forms in my campaign. The current version, which I really like, simply states that a sorcerer must have mutations value at the same value as their Sorcery advantage. The mutations can be disadvantage, quirks, perks, and advantages, but their value must also meet that of their Sorcery advantage. They still pay and gain the normal character points for their mutations.

Ok, I think we've kind of sort of hit upon the key component of misfires all of a sudden. I've always treated it as a skill check determined by location with a few situational modifiers. But I think it needs to be an attribute check, Will specifically, modified by a few situational modifiers. In the most recent incarnation of GURPS Hekinoe sorcery I've fucked about with mana levels and such, which isn't really appropriate and I kind of only did because I could kind of sort of make an argument for it. A sorcerer can access as much energy as he wants, it's all over the place. Saying he can only draw 10 energy to him per second is kind of dumb in retrospect. If this energy is truly limitless, once a sorcerer begins casting a spell it should all just be accessible to him. It's not like it has mass or there's a take a number queue where all the little infinite energy molecules are hanging out waiting to be called to go up to the counter. 

Even if Will is the key to maintaining stability in spells, it doesn't mean it's not part of the casting attribute anymore. Even if learned incantations and proper forms are a key component of casting a spell, willpower still helps a sorcerer shape it. So in addition to Will being a component of the sorcerer's attribute for spells, it is the attribute used for misfires as well.  

Since we're calling Will the misfire attribute, that means misfire is checked by a 3d roll. This presents problems because it is a very narrow margin for determining success, failure, and applicable modifiers.

Misfires occur when a spell is cast (when a sorcerer finishes the process of casting) and the longer a spell persists, the more unreliable it becomes. This means that when you are casting an instantaneous effect (like a fireball) the misfire is checked for when you finish casting it and throw the fireball at something. This also means that short term duration spells and permanent enchantments become unstable the longer they exist, but they only misfire when their effects are actually used. So being unused for years can make an enchanted sword very unstable, but it will only misfire when used to attack (if enchanted for accuracy) or it deals damage (if enchanted for increased damage), etc, etc.

This is how it always starts. I get a solid core concept I like, then we have to account for enchantments and high energy cost spells. A spell is more unstable depending on how powerful it is. If we're looking at the explosive fireball spell cast by a character with a Sorcery of 4, he can put between 2 and 24 energy into a spell. If he wants to create a a wand of fireball, that is going to run 1,200 energy to create.

In the past, I've made the argument that the base amount of energy to cast a spell (2 for explosive fireball, 1200 for enchanting a wand to use explosive fireball) has no effect on base misfire chance. The reasoning here is a bit of a handwave on my part, I admit. The reasoning is as follows: a spell wouldn't exist if someone didn't figure out a way to make it work, despite its energy cost.

Additionally, I kind of hit upon an idea last night (we've reach the second day of me working on this post, by the way). With low energy spells, you've got this infinite potential of energy trying to rush into the coffee cup sized outline of the spell you're creating. With high energy spells and enchantments, you've got a much larger vessel for the energy. You're trying to achieve a bigger or more widespread effect, so this vast infinite energy is trying to rush into a lake sized vessel rather than a coffee cup. Squinting slightly and saying because game, I think I am ok with this justification.

So on this topic, enchantments and how they degrade is tied to the length they have existed. It's also tied to the physical strength of the material the enchantment sits in. Fragile materials have more unstable enchantments than tough materials. Unlike regular misfires, enchantment misfires just cause the enchantment to explode in a burst of flame, sometimes rupturing the item.

I envision this happening because there is no conscious will shaping the effect. When a sorcerer casts a spell he is focusing his will and using it as forceps to grab a hold of sorcerous energy. I envision enchanted items in Hekinoe as very runic in nature. Using symbolic runes, the sorcerer makes it so that the energy stored in the weapon is guided by the ruins when the weapons enchantment is activated. Similar to the way sorcerer's use sorcerous energy guided by their spells, the runes on an enchanted item form a shape and the energy of the item's enchantment just flows into those shapes when the enchantment activates. So when an enchanted item is used and misfires, there's no real shape to the energy, and that energy is trapped within something, so it just kind of explodes as heat and light and pressure.

So these explosions will do burning damage, because fire. They'll also do crushing damage because blast wave. They'll also do cutting damage because shrapnel. I definitely want the strength of the explosion to be dependent upon how much energy goes into the enchantment. The shrapnel damage is purely from the physical remains of the enchanted object exploding, so that only happens if the object is destroyed and it shouldn't be too excessive as its not like its going to split apart like a suitcase full of tiny ball bearings.

So at its most base level the explosion damage from an exploding enchanted item looks like: 1d cr ex +1 burn [1d cut]. The crushing and burning damage are dealt directly to the object and if the object is destroyed, the shrapnel damage also occurs. I've seen item enchantments as high as 25,000 energy, so if we do something like every 200 energy in an enchantment increases the crushing and burning damage by 1d/+1 we can conceivably go as high as 250d6 crushing plus 250 burning damage. An explosion's radius extends out to two times the damage dice of yards. So we'd be looking at a radius of 500 yards for that 25,000 energy exploding enchanted item. The damage gets reduced based on the number of yards you are from the point of origin, but still. Yeesh.

Major Sorcery tl;dr

• Spells use (IQ+Will)/2 (round down) as their attribute.
• Misfire uses Will as its attribute.
• It is a learned skill, not an intuitive one based on magical lineage.
• Must have External Sources Only limitation at -5% or -10%.
• Must have the -10% or -30% version of the Radically Unstable Sorcery limitation.
• Sorcerers write down their spells and such in grimoires, which are basically large reference documents. They must be referenced to keep information fresh and clear, but going without them only incurs the effects of the Incompetence quirk for spells they cast. 
• If a sorcerer has the Eidetic Memory advantage, he no longer needs a grimoire as a reference document. 
• A sorcerer must have a number of physical mutations with a points value equal to the points value of their Sorcery advantage. 
• Misfire chance is increased by the amount of energy used to cast a spell. 
• Misfire is unaffected by the base amount of energy used to cast a spell. 
• Misfire chance is affected by skill level of the spell in question. 
• Misfire is checked for when a sorcerer finishes casting a spell. Non-instantaneous spells and long term enchantments become more unstable the longer they exist and such spells only misfire when their enchantments are used, but they don't check for misfire more than once per minute. 
• Misfire chance is reduced by having familiars/Compartmentalized Mind and having multiple participants in ceremonial sorcery.  
• Misfiring enchantments do 1d cr ex +1 burn [1d cut], but only do shrapnel damage if the item is destroyed. The misfire explosion deals damage directly to the item, ignoring DR. 

So that's our tl;dr of sorcery. You'll see it is titled Major Sorcery. That'll make more sense tomorrow. Let's see if we can further finalize them. The first bullet points, spells use (IQ+Will)/2 as their attribute doesn't get much simpler so we can move beyond that. 

Misfires using Will as an attribute needs to have a pin put in it. We can establish right now that misfire checks will be based on Will so you'll be rolling against your Will to prevent a spell from misfiring. We'll need to hash out situation modifiers and that sort of thing before we can establish a baseline value for misfires. Remember though that sorcery in The Known World is very deep in the unreliable section of Hekinoe's sorcery spectrum and Orcunraytrel is very deep in the reliable section. 

Learned skill, not intuitive lineage based one is pretty self explanatory. 

The External Sources Only limitation is going to only be -5%. It's almost no limitation on a sorcerer's ability to access their sorcery. 

The Radically Unstable Sorcery limitation is pretty self explanatory. Doesn't really need to be hashed out that much.

The grimoire thing feels like it could be a decent gadget based limitation to the Sorcery advantage, but I'm not sure. Typically applying gadget limitations means you lose the advantage if the object tied to it is lost or broken, which is not really my intent here. Rather than the Incompetence quirk, I think I'm going to go with just a -1 to effective skill level. So if you lose your grimoire it's just a -1 to the skill level of your spells. I'm going to say that it's a cumulative -1 per week (ten days) a sorcerer goes without his grimoire. I'm also going to say that the sorcerer can make an IQ check with a -1 per week without his grimoire to avoid that penalty. Since sorcery depends so much on learned and memorized mechanisms, I'm going to say that grimoires may be reconstructed from memory at a rate of one spell per day. 

It might be way simpler to just get the Eidetic Memory advantage. Heh,

You have to have a mutation points value equal to your Sorcery advantage points value. These mutations can be advantages/perks or disadvantages/quirks and you pay and gain the normal values for them. When figuring out the value of your mutations for these purpose, just treat them as whole numbers. So 5 points of the Sorcery advantage could be equaled by a 5 point advantage or disadvantage or by 5 quirks or perks or some combination. It's wonky and slightly complicated. Get over it. 

Misfire chance is increased by the amount of energy used to cast a spell. As we've previously said, the base cost of a spell does not have any effect on the misfire chance of a spell, regardless of its cost. So I think what I want to do is say that every full multiple of the base cost by which you exceed the base cost (returning to my fireball, that would be 4 energy for the explosive fireball and 2400 for the wand) you apply a cumulative -1 to the effective skill level of your check to resist misfire.  

Skill level reduces the risk of misfire of a spell. Originally I was going to apply modifiers to misfire chance based on skill level, but that is actually already factored into skill level with spells. See, as your skill level with a spell increases in GURPS you reduce to amount of gestures and incantations you need to make, as well as the amount of energy you have to spend on the spell. This reduction of energy costs already handles reducing the chance of misfire. 

Misfire is checked for when a sorcerer finishes casting a spell. That seems pretty simple right? Kind of. The specific issue I'm thinking of is created sorcerous creatures. I call them sorcerous constructs in my campaign book. Technically speaking, they are using the sorcery that created them every moment they exist. With enchanted items, I don't really want them checking for misfire more than once per minute and I think I feel the same about sorcerous constructs. 

With multiple casters/Compartmentalized Mind, I think I want to grant a +1 to effective skill to resist misfire for every doubling of casters/compartments. So two casters/compartments increases the effective skill level to resist misfire by 1, four casters/compartments by 2, eight by 3, etc. Familiars enter into this because I plan to describe an option for sorcerers with familiars that grants them the Compartmentalized Mind advantage while in the presence of their conscious familiar. 

Back to Will as the misfire attribute. So we have your Will score as how you check for misfires, specifically how you resist them. So we've established a few ways to modify how easily you resist misfire. If we hop back to our explosive fireball example, the base cost is 2 energy for a 2d explosive fireball. Doing something like a 6d explosive fireball (which is about how much damage a mildly deadly lightning bolt does) costs 12 energy and incurs a -5 penalty to resist misfire. If we're dealing with a Will score of 14 (Will is based on IQ, but only costs 5 character points to increase, so it's not hard to imagine a Will of 14 for a sorcerer), that's needing a 9 or less on 3d to throw that ball of fire. Which is only a 37.5% chance of successfully resisting misfire. 

My goal here is to make the check to resist misfire in The Known World use Will-3 as its default with Orcunraytrel as a straight Will check as its default. If we use Will-3 as the default and apply the additional -5 from energy usage we are now looking at a character with a Will of 14 (which is an exceptional Will for a human) throwing that explosive fireball and resisting misfire on a 6 or less, which is a 9.3% chance of resisting misfire. In Pathfinder Hekinoe, a fireball spell only has a 12% chance of misfire, which is an 88% chance of not misfiring. 

Hmm. Maybe if we do something like for every 5 or 10 energy beyond the base cost it applies a -1 to effective skill to resist misfire. That would equate to a -2 or -1 and using 14 from our example we'd resist on a 9 and 10. Hmm. I think I might have something. What if the base cost does not modify misfire at all, but every multiple of your Will by which you exceed the base cost of the spell incurs a -1 penalty to effective skill when resisting misfire? So with a Will of 14, one to fourteen energy beyond the base cost gives -1, fifteen to twenty-eight is -1, and so on. I actually kind of like that. It goes along nicely with Will/willpower being extremely important to sorcerers keeping their spells and sorcerous energy reined in. So jumping back to our explosive fireball, we have a base chance to resist misfire of 11 or less, and spent ten energy beyond the base cost of two for the spell, which falls in the -1 range for our Will of 14, leaving is with a 10 or less on 3d to resist misfire when casting this explosive fireball. 10 or less on 3d is a 50% chance of success, and 6d of damage is a pretty good shot at killing or incapacitating humanoid creatures in GURPS. 

With misfiring enchantments, I think I'm going to stick with a base of 1d cr ex +1 burn [1d cut] damage when they misfire. I'm also going to base it on multiples of 250 energy. So 1 - 250 is 1d cr ex 1 burn, 251 - 500 is 2d cr ex 2 burn, etc, etc, etc. The base skill to resist misfire for enchanted items is going to be as normal (Will-3 for The Known World, with normal modifiers for energy beyond the base cost and such). The skill level of the item to resist misfiring will take a -1 penalty for every year the enchantment persists, but will also be modified by the material enchanted. I'm thinking a fairly small range -2 or -3 to +2 or +3 with iron and steel being the 0 range and wolf-iron and paper being the extremes of the range. 

Major Sorcery tl;dr v2.0

• Spells use (IQ+Will)/2 (round down) as their attribute.
• Resisting misfire is done at Will-3 in The Known World. 
• It is a learned skill, not an intuitive one based on magical lineage.
• Must have External Sources Only limitation, -5%.
• Must have the -10% or -30% version of the Radically Unstable Sorcery limitation.
• Sorcerers write down their spells and such in grimoires, which are basically large reference documents. Every week a sorcerer goes without being able to reference his grimoire he gains a cumulative -1 to his effective skill level with all his spells. He may make an IQ check with a -1 per week he has gone without his grimoire to negate this penalty for one week.  Grimoires may be reconstructed at a rate of one spell per day. 
• If a sorcerer has the Eidetic Memory advantage, he no longer needs a grimoire as a reference document. 
• A sorcerer must have a number of physical mutations with a points value equal to the points value of their Sorcery advantage. Mutations may be advantages/perks or disadvantages/quirks and you pay and gain the normal points values for them. When totaling the value of your mutations up to compare to the value of your Sorcery advantage, treat your mutation points values as whole numbers, not negatives and positives. 
• Misfire is unaffected by the base cost of energy necessary to cast a spell. Base cost is the smallest amount of energy necessary to cast the spell.
• Energy spent to cast a spell beyond the base cost of a spell incurs a -1 cumulative penalty to effective skill level to resist misfire for every multiple of the Sorcerer's Will spent. 
• Misfire chance is affected by skill level of the spell in question due to the effects of skill level on the energy costs of a spell. 
• Misfire is checked for when a sorcerer finishes casting a spell. Sorcerous constructs, non-instantaneous spells and long term enchantments become more unstable the longer they exist and such spells only misfire when their enchantments are used, but they don't check for misfire more than once per minute. 
• Effective skill to resist misfire is increased by 1 for every doubling of casters or compartments for the Compartmentalized Mind advantage involved in the casting (2, 4, 8, etc). Sorcerers with familiars will have a special option to gain the Compartmentalized Mind advantage. 
• Misfiring enchantments do 1d cr ex +1 burn [1d cut] per 250 energy spent on the enchantment, but only do shrapnel damage if the item is destroyed. The misfire explosion deals damage directly to the item, ignoring DR. The item's chance to resist misfire when used is based on the normal chance to resist misfire with normal modifiers. The skill level to resist misfire decreases by 1 for every year the enchantment persists and is also modified by the durability of enchanted materials with iron and steel being the normal range, wolf-iron by a +3 to effective skill level to resist modifier and paper being a -3 to effective skill level. 

Holy fucking monkeytits. That's it. I'm done. I have been working on this for hours now and there's still another section I need to do. And I still need to proofread it. And I still need to do the same fucking shit for Gifts and psionics. 

Fucking a.