8: Magic

Introduction

When your character takes an action in play, hopefully it makes sense to you. You can imagine it with some clarity, and you have an instinctive sense of how things work that allows you to have fun without overthinking it. Consider the number of calculations that go into punching someone: are your hands free? Can you move them? Are you close enough? Have you balled your hands into fists in preparation? We don’t stop and talk through those steps in play because we understand them implicitly to be part of the act of punching. This clarity thins as we move into areas outside common experience, but by and large, you can grasp the chain of action that goes into things.

Sufficiently misunderstood action is indistinguishable from magic.

Magic upends this. We don’t have the same foundation of experience to reference when we start throwing around thunder and lighting. So we try to find rules and logic that make the magical more familiar to us, and that’s something of a paradox. Magic is, by its nature, a creation of fiction, and writers and creators are more interested in how it helps them tell stories than any kind of internal rules. Games, on the other hand, need rules. The consistency of rules makes behavior—without rhyme or reason, it’s just madness. The good news is that there’s a sweet spot that you can aim for. While it’s true that magic is a convenience of authors, those who use it willy-nilly produce tepid, mushy fantasy. Giving magic rules is not just good gaming, it’s good fiction. If you can find the spot where those two priorities overlap, then you’ve got the workings of a great magic system.

The Basics

The simple test for this is whether or not your magic system makes sense without the game. This is backwards from the way a lot of games feel. Coming up with the mechanical basis for a magic system is a lot of fun, and it is often the first thing we do with a new system, but this largely ends up perpetuating magic systems we already know from games where ideas and rules don’t mesh. The greatest example of a magic system is “Vancian” magic, called such because it’s based off the books of the late, great Jack Vance, where wizards memorize spells, then forget them after casting. This should be familiar as the basis for magic in D&D, and whatever one thinks of its implementation in D&D and related games, it definitely instituted a number of rules—spellbooks, spells per level, and so on—to capture that idea. If you want to base your magic on Vance, then you’re picking some great source material. The trap to avoid is not to base your magic on someone else’s interpretation of Vance. To put it another way, magic is not just an excuse to add spells to your game. Magic says incredibly important things about your game and your setting, and if you don’t think those things through, you are going to end up with a thinly painted-on layer of magic that will quickly chip and fade.

What Is Magic?

So what is magic and how does it work? There’s no single answer to that, and while that’s rather the point, it’s also intensely frustrating. You could say magic is a way to do things that are otherwise impossible, or an alternate means of doing things that are possible, but that falls short. You could bust out some Arthur C. Clarke and just treat it as a different kind of science. You could treat it as a system of prices, risks, and rewards. You could consider it something that comes from someone else—someone horrible or wonderful, depending. You’d still be missing things, but for ease of application we’re going to seize upon a few key threads and boil it down to these five factors:

• Tone: Is magic a neutral force, a flavored force, or something with opinions?
• Cost: Does magic demand a price, a risk, or neither?
• Limits: Does magic follow strict rules? Is it flexible and open-ended? What are the limits on magic?
• Availability: Is magic universally available, so everyone in a setting might have it? Is it rare enough that only some people have it, possibly including all the PCs? Or is it rare enough that only one or two PCs might have access to it?
• Source: Where does magic come from?

Tone

The first factor speaks to the nature of magic itself. Neutral magic is a force, like electricity or gravity, which is simply implemented like a tool, while a flavored force either responds to or is inclined towards certain outcomes. The most common example of this is a magic that tends towards the dark and the light, and which perhaps operates differently at each end of the spectrum. In this case, the magic is not necessarily an intelligent force, but it has tendencies. For example, fire tends to burn, earth tends to be stable. Opinionated magic comes from someone. Maybe it’s a god or angel, maybe it’s a horrible monstrosity outside of time and space. Whoever they are, they have agendas, and magic is a tool for them to drive those agendas. There’s a lot of room for nuance here—the magic might be neutral in its use, but the source might be opinionated. On the other hand, if magic actually summons or channels these beings, then the actual manifestation of magic may be shaped by their opinions.

Cost

The second factor is one that speaks to the cost of magic use. For some, it is essential that magic have a cost, that there be tradeoffs made for power. They might be literal or symbolic, but when they’re present then the subtext is usually that power has a price. Contrast that with magic having some risk associated with it. As with price, this puts a natural limiter on the use of magic, but it speaks to a very different set of priorities, especially if magic is easy to come by. It might be blatant—such as spells having a risk of blowing up in your face—or it might be subtle—a steadily accruing toxicity—but it makes each choice to use magic a conscious one. As an aside, costs work well with flavored or opinionated magic, risks work better with neutral or opinionated magic—where the risk is “attention from the beings with opinions”. No cost is a curious option, and one to not take too literally. There’s usually some cost, even if it’s the price of a pointy hat and the opportunity cost of studying magic rather than getting that MBA. These are familiar, mundane costs. That’s why this approach works best with highly regimented neutral magic. It lines up well with “magic as science” thinking or very concrete lists of spells or effects—or rules for things like cyberware, which are basically differently skinned magic systems. Whatever the case, if there is neither cost nor risk, there is usually some other limiting factor at work, even if magic is fairly ubiquitous—such as limits to the types of magic a given person may use.

Limits

The third factor is a little bit of a cheat because it also speaks to the tolerances of your table. Strict magic systems, with spell lists and direct effects, appeal to some players, while more loose interpretive systems appeal to others. There’s also lots of room in the middle for systems that are open-ended in effect, but constrained by something like elements or spheres. Whatever the answer, this should help you think about is what magic can’t do. It is mechanically easy to make a system where magic can do anything—create a magic skill then let players roll it for everything that they can describe magically—but that tends to be very boring. Limits are a big part of what makes magic feel magical, and in turn are a big part of how they can be flavorfully implemented in play.

Availability

The fourth factor tells you something about the setting, sure, but it also answers a critical question about game balance and spotlight time. A magic system that is available to all players can be designed very differently from one that only one player is going to use. If only one character has access to magic, then it’s important that magic not be so potent that the character overshadows other players and steals all the spotlight, but also not so useless that the player feels like she made the dumb choice. If, on the other hand, everyone has magic, you have a lot more leeway. When everyone gets to be awesome, “balance” is less of a bogeyman.

Source

The final factor is the most and least important—it doesn’t matter much what the answer is, but it matters that you have one. The better you understand where magic comes from, the better you can understand what it can do and—sometimes more importantly—what it can’t do. You’re under no obligation to share this explanation with your players, and in fact this is an area where we actually encourage a little discretion. Not because you can’t trust players with this information, but because your magic system is going to feel a hell of a lot less magical after you’ve explained it all. A little bit of mystery is essential to the magical feel. Notice that none of these factors ask “What does magic do?” since the answer to that is another question: What does it need to do? Hopefully you have a grasp on that, because if you don’t know that, nothing else is going to work. “Because I need to have a magic system” is not a good enough answer.

Magic and Fate

The purpose of rules is to give you the tools to translate your speaking and imagining into a structure that lets them be shared. That presupposes that you have something you want to share. Fate is a representational game. That is, if you have an idea in your head, it provides you the tools needed to express that in play. Need characters to be able to do something? Make sure there’s a skill for that. Have a trick you want them to do? Create a stunt. Want to drive home a thematic element? Put an aspect on it. These same tools are available to you when you want to add magic into your game. But just like the rest of play, there is no one single right tool. Depending upon what magic looks like in your game, different mechanics may be the right way to capture it. The magic systems that follow serve two purposes. First, each one is a functional magic system that you can drop into your game or hack to serve your own purposes. That’s important, but it’s almost secondary to the other purpose. Each of these systems is also an illustration of how to apply mechanics to deliver a certain kind of effect. And that’s how we end up back at punching. If you know Fate’s rules well, then it’s easy to adjudicate a punching scenario, and only slightly more complicated to come up with your own system for fisticuffs. By the time you get to the end of this, the goal is that you will feel equally comfortable taking a magical idea that you’re carrying around and be able to translate it into mechanics with the same ease that you do more mundane challenges.

Skills as Magic

The skills are an easy avenue into magic, whatever skills you use. The main question to ask is whether it repurposes existing skills or demands the creation of a new magic skill. Each approach has specific strengths, and it’s worth thinking about them when designing a system. If you’re going to soup-up existing skills, then you end up with a bit of a challenge in covering all skills. You can, of course, opt to only make certain skills magical, but you need to be careful not to create super-skills this way. Creating a new skill can solve a lot of problems, especially since you can create multiple skills if you want to differentiate between magical disciplines. There’s also a subtle cost to it, since buying up that skill is going to mean some “real” skill gets neglected. While there’s no right answer, when in doubt, go with a new skill. Converting existing skills to magic is more labor intensive, and it’s something you should only do when you already have a clear vision you’re acting to serve.

Aspects as Magic

Aspects have two important roles in most magic systems, both as a gateway and as an expression. As a gateway, almost any magic system will demand that the character have at least one aspect that reflects their magical tradition or power source. While there are exceptions—such as those where “magic” is just a different coat of paint on technology—magic is usually important enough to the character to merit reflection as an aspect. Aspects are also a great way to represent the effects of magic. At the simplest level, it’s easy to do a magic system where magic simply expands the range of aspects that you can create through advantages and boosts.

Stunts as Magic

Stunts can absolutely serve as the basis of a magic system, especially if stunts simply do explicit things. More often, however, this is a good model for a powers system. This is a pointed difference, but powers are better suited to monsters and superheroes. Still, stunts can be a useful way to jazz up a magic system, but cost must be carefully considered. Often, a magic system has an intrinsic refresh cost, which makes picking up stunts dangerous. Either the cost should be adjusted or the stunts should really be worth it.

Extras as Magic

Extras are basically their own magic system as written. A magic system may provide explanations and justifications for specific extras, but the system itself is robust and easily used for any number of effects.

Systems

You want magic? We gotcher magic right here!

Stormcallers

Design Notes

Fans of The Dresden Files RPG will notice some similarities between this magic and the DFRPG’s Evocation rules. This is not a coincidence. This is a mostly-structured system with a bit of interpretive leeway within structured bounds. It depends upon a “Stormcalling” skill and at least one aspect. The source of magic is quite explicit, but the use is limited. As such it’s balanced so that it works even if only one player chooses to play a Stormcaller, but could still support multiples in a group. The default assumption is that non-Stormcallers use the optional Weapon and Armor ratings rules (see Fate Core page 277). If you’re looking to balance a Stormcaller against a group of non-Stormcallers, the Stormcaller forgoes such bonuses. If your game does not use the Weapon and Armor ratings rules, increase the Refresh cost from 1 to 2.

Description

Five Great Storms rage at the heart of creation, each large enough to shatter suns, but held in check in a precise dance of creation and destruction. Earthquake, Flood, Glacier, Inferno, and Thunder each represent limitless fonts of power, and mortal sorcerers have found ways to tap into these storms to power their own ambitions.

The 30-Second Version

Don’t want to read all the rules? Use this shorthand version:

• If your game uses Weapon/Armor ratings rules, reduce Refresh by 1. If not, reduce Refresh by 2.
• Pick a Storm type such as Earthquake, Flood, Glacier, Inferno, and Thunder, and take the aspect [Storm]caller—e.g. Earthcaller, Icecaller, etc.
• Buy the Stormcaller skill.
• Use the Stormcaller skill to attack, defend, and create an advantage, so long as the description of your action includes the element of your storm.

Mechanics

Characters able to tap into the Storms for power must do the following:

• If your game uses Weapon/Armor ratings rules, reduce Refresh by 1. If not, reduce Refresh by 2.
• Pick an aspect that reflects which Storm he is attuned to: Earthquake, Flood, Glacier, Inferno, or Thunder. This could be as simple as “Attuned to the Earthquake,” but it’s not limited to that. So long as the aspect clearly calls out the storm the character is tied to, the precise terminology is flexible.
• (Optional) Purchase ranks in the “Stormcaller” skill.

Aspects of Storm

The Storm aspects are obviously useful when making Stormcaller skill rolls, but they also carry some of the resonance of their specific storm. This takes the form of a passive effect, as well as specific things that aspect may be invoked or compelled for.

Earthquake

Earthquake topples mountains and thrusts new ones into the sky. To tap the Earthquake requires a deep core of personal stability, and while this can promote strength, it also can make it a little hard to pick up momentum.

• Passive Effect: Character never loses their footing, no matter how precarious, unless actively knocked down.
• Invoke: Endure—Any action depending on patience, resolve or endurance can benefit from the Earthquake.
• Compel: Delay—When quick action is called for, the Earthquake can compel a delay.

Flood

The Flood cannot be contained. It strikes from every direction with overwhelming force, subtlety, or infinite patience, always conforming to the needs of the situation. Nothing can stand against the Flood, and the only hope is to go along with it and hope for the best. Those attuned to its power share some of that flexibility.

• Passive Effect: So long as swimming is possible, the character can easily stay afloat as long as necessary, even sleeping in the water.
• Invoke: Flexibility—When doing something outside of the box, such as using a skill for something bizarre, use this for a bonus.
• Compel: Messy—Water is subtle and potent, but it also makes a mess. Compel to leave traces of passage when most inconvenient.

Glacier

Where earth stands, Glacier pushes ever on, inevitable and unyielding, shattering itself a thousand times until it breaks the thing in its path. Attunement to the Glacier gives the Stormcaller a portion of that inevitability.

• Passive Effect: Cold temperatures within the normal range do not bother the character.
• Invoke: Push—Whether it is to open a door or brush aside an underling, the character benefits when moving forward and pushing things out of his path.
• Compel: Overcommit—The Glacier does not corner well, and a Stormcaller of Ice may find himself staying too long with a given course of action.

Inferno

The Inferno consumes. Its appetite is endless, and there is nothing that is not fuel for its endless, roiling flames.

• Passive Effect: Hot temperatures within the normal range do not bother the character.
• Invoke: Destroy—Not fight or hurt, destroy. The Inferno is interested in nothing less.
• Compel: Consume—Resources, food, good opinions, and fortune, an Infernocaller has a bad habit of using them up without thinking about it.

Thunder

Those who distinguish between the Thunder and the lightning reveal they do not understand. Thunder is the sudden, powerful expression of force, be it the bolt that cuts the sky or the clap that makes it ring. Its callers share in that potency.

• Passive Effect: Your voice carries. If you can see someone well enough to identify them, you can shout loudly enough to be heard by them—and anyone in between—no matter the conditions.
• Invoke: Act Decisively—When quick action is called for due to a change in circumstances—not just round-to-round in a fight—then invoke this for a bonus.
• Compel: Overwhelm—Sometimes, delicacy, restraint, and precision are called for. Sometimes, a Stormcaller underestimates that.

The Stormcaller Skill

The Stormcaller skill is used to summon the power of the storm to do all manner of interesting—often harmful—things. The exact form this takes depends on the storm being called, but in general the Stormcaller summons the energy of the storm in question into being, then shapes it to his will. This could take the form of a cage of lighting, a hurled spike of frost, a ripple of force through the earth, or anything else that the player can think of. While there are specific rules and limitations on what Stormcalling does based on which storm is called, they share some basics in common. In each case, the force that is summoned must be expressed externally to the character doing the summoning in a literal fashion. That means Stormcalling does not allow a user to give himself the “Strength of Earth” to land a mighty blow, but it does let him hit something REALLY hard with a rock. Any description of effect must be couched in terms of how summoning, projecting, and crudely shaping the force in question can get said effect. Overcome: Stormcalling tends to be a bit crude for all but the most direct of overcome actions, such as knocking something down. But it definitely excels at that. Create an Advantage: The creation of advantages is a common effect of Stormcalling, summoning up walls of fire or opening up pits in the floor. The more concrete storms—Earthquake and Glacier—tend to be strongest at this sort of effect, as their efforts tend to be more durable. Most effects can be treated as a normal roll to create an advantage, using an aspect on the scene to reflect that advantage, but there are some special cases. Specifically, Stormcalling can be used to create a barrier of the appropriate element. In this case, the caller picks two zones and makes a check against a difficulty of 0. The result of the roll indicates the difficulty to bypass the created barrier. Other advantage effects depend on the specific element invoked. Attack: All the Storms are good at this. As a rule of thumb you can make an attack in-zone at no penalty, -1 per zone distance. These are normal attacks, but may have additional effects based on the Storm used. Defend: Elements may also be used to defend against attacks, parrying with weapons of ice or throwing up a momentary wall of water to intercept a blow. Specifics depend on the Storm used.

BARRIERS

Barrier is a shorthand term for some kind of obstacle between one zone and the next, such as a wall of ice. When a character attempts to penetrate, circumvent, or destroy a barrier, the value of the barrier is the difficulty to do so. In general, a barrier exists between two zones, but it is possible that a barrier might be longer, even completely encircling a zone. The creation of a barrier is a special case of creating an advantage using the Stormcaller skill. It creates a barrier equal to the result of the Stormcaller’s roll. So, if the character rolls a Good (+3), then the barrier has a value of 3. A character who rolls less than a +1 fails to generate a substantial barrier. Specific storms may modify this roll, or offer extra options. When an attack is made through a barrier, the defender may use the barrier’s value in lieu of a defense roll. The defender must decide before rolling, and using the barrier forgoes the possibility of a success with style. If the attack includes an attempt to bypass the barrier—by, say, jumping over it—then the attacker uses the lower of the two skills involved (the bypassing skill and the attacking skill) to make the attempt (unless, of course, an appropriate aspect is applied to streamline the bypassing). For example, a substantial wall of Ice (Great Barrier, +4) is thrown up between a Stormcaller and the angry Voidcaller one zone away. If the voidcaller throws a shadowbolt, the Stormcaller may forgo the die roll and effectively roll a Great (+4) defense result. If the Voidcaller leaps over the barrier and attacks with his sword, then he rolls the lower of his Athletics (jumping) or Fight (attacking), and the Stormcaller can still use his Great (+4) barrier defense to protect himself. One other important note: Barriers cut both ways, and the creator gets no special benefit attacking targets on the other side of his barrier—they benefit from the barrier as much as he does.

Earthquake

Overcome: If what’s being overcome is a physical barrier, and the caller beats the target to overcome by 2, then the barrier may be removed. Create an Advantage: Gain a +1 to rolls to create any barriers using the Earthquake. When creating a barrier, you may opt to take a -4 to the roll—making it a net total of -3—to create a barrier that completely surrounds a zone. Take an additional -1 if you also want to seal the top. Attack: You may only attack targets that are on or near the ground—low level fliers can still be struck with debris, so anything a standing person could hit with his hands is fair game. You may take a -1 to your attack to attack all targets in your zone (except yourself). For an additional -2, you may attack all targets in your zone and one adjacent zone. You may extend this effect indefinitely, so long as it is contiguous and you keep taking -2s. Defend: Earth is slow to respond, and is at a -1 to all defense actions.

Flood

Overcome: Receive a +1 to any attempt to overcome a physical barrier. Create an Advantage: Any barrier created with water diminishes by 1 per exchange unless the caller concentrates on it, taking -1 to all subsequent actions so long as the barrier is maintained. Attack: Damage from your attacks ignores any armor. You may take -2 to the attack and attack all targets in a zone (excluding yourself). Defend: No special rules.

Glacier

Overcome: If what’s being overcome is a physical barrier, and the caller beats the target to overcome by 2, then remove the barrier completely. Create an Advantage: Gain a +1 to rolls to create any barriers using the Glacier. When you create a barrier, you may actually create multiple contiguous barriers. Each additional length of the barrier—a “length” being a barrier between any two zones—reduces its rating by 1. So, if you got a +6, and wanted to create a 3-length barrier, it would have a rating of 4 (6 – 2, remembering the first one’s free). Attack: You can opt to do half damage, rounded up, to freeze the target in place. This creates a barrier to their movement with a difficulty to overcome equal to the damage dealt. Defend: If you succeed with style on defense, you may forgo the boost to increase any of your active barriers by 1.

Inferno

Overcome: If you overcome a physical barrier, reduce it by 1. Create an Advantage: Any barrier created with the Inferno diminishes by 2 per exchange unless the caller concentrates on it, taking -1 to all subsequent actions so long as the barrier is maintained. Anyone who fails to overcome an inferno barrier has the option to force their way through, taking damage equal to the number of additional shifts that a successful roll would have required. Attack: You may take -1 to the attack and attack all targets in a zone (excepting yourself). Defend: No special rules.

Thunder

Overcome: No special rules. Create an Advantage: Any barrier created with Thunder vanishes after 1 exchange unless the caller concentrates on it, taking -1 to all subsequent actions so long as the barrier is maintained. Attack: Thunder actually has two modes of attack: Chain Lighting: Bolts arc from target to target with precision. For each -1 you take, you may add an additional target to the attack. Range penalty is determined by the most distant target, -1 per zone from the starting zone. Thunderbolt: When hitting a single target, thunder claps as lightning strikes. If you gain a boost on your attack, you generate an extra boost of Stunned. Defend: No special rules.

Variations and Options

Deeper Understanding

Perhaps each Storm also has a corresponding Calm—Blaze, Mountain, Sea, Snowfall, and Wind. Some who have mastered a Storm may in time gain another aspect—costing 1 refresh—to reflect that Calm, which will allow them to internalize the strengths of the Storm to enhance themselves in a variety of ways as well as generate more subtle effects.

Multiple Storms

Nothing prohibits a Caller from attuning to multiple Storms; it simply costs one refresh for each aspect he takes.

Ritual Magic

It is possible to have the Stormcaller skill but no attunement to a storm. This is the status of many hedge practitioners. The advantage to this is that they may work with whatever storm they wish. The downside is that it takes a few minutes to do what a true Stormcaller can do in a single exchange.

Summonings

The Storms are not empty spaces. Beings native to each storm swim within them comfortably, and can be summoned to serve those who know how to call. See the system for an exploration of this.

Light and Dark Callers

Those who study such things suggest that there is an arc to the great Storms. Born of almost pure energy (Thunder), they coalesce (Inferno) and thicken (Flood) before hardening (Glacier) into something concrete (Earthquake). Or perhaps it is the reverse, beginning with base matter and ascending toward energy. In either case, it is theorized that there exist a sixth and seventh “Storm,” bookending the great Storms. Energy and Light at one end, with Stasis and Darkness at the other. There have been those who have claimed to tap these forces in a fashion similar to the storms, but they are a rarity, and much of their effort has been spent in conflict with one another over the question of which is the beginning and which is the end.

Voidcallers

For all their destructive fury, the Storms are part of reality, for they are both destruction and creation. On a cosmic level, they stand against the Void, the nothingness that seeks to consume all. Light- and Darkcallers tend to characterize their opposite in this manner, and there’s no telling what truth there is or isn’t to it. The Void is a force for destruction, and while it may not be malicious, those who dwell in it are, for it is the home to demons and monsters that would like nothing more than to consume the Storms, and with them, our world. See the section for more ideas on this.

The Six Viziers

Design Notes

The Six Viziers system assumes a flavored system of magic, for each nominal Vizier has its own priorities and tendencies, but they do not manifest concretely as beings with opinions. By and large, magic has no intrinsic cost, though there are social elements to it. This is balanced by its relative rarity (though it’s freely open to PCs) and the fact that it’s potent, but not overly flexible. It’s also a strongly structured system, with magical effects strictly outlined by the thematic boundaries of each Vizier (expressed through skills). The source of magic is the nominal Six Viziers. What exactly they are is an interesting question, and the answer to that could direct a campaign. In this setting, they’re the six constellations that serve the Empress, and they grant power to those with an affinity to them. Mechanically, this system hangs largely off skills, as the expression of the magic is in the enhancement of those skills. There are other elements—aspects act as a gateway to power, and the magical effects themselves are stunt-like—but this is basically a model for enhanced skills.

Description

The people of the Endless Steppe accept no dominion but that of the sky. Their people are scattered so far and wide that some wags say that this truth is the only thing they hold in common. And perhaps they are right—from the onion-domed towers of the River Cities to the Tent Nations of the Horselands to the walking towns of the southern jungles, the Folk of the Stars all direct their prayers and curses to those same stars. Most often, these are directed to the Six Viziers, the constellations that dance around in the court of the Empress, whose place in the sky is always fixed. Each one holds divine responsibility, and each carries righteous petitions to the Empress. While the constellations that make up the Viziers and their titles are generally agreed upon, there are many opinions beyond that point. They are named and represented differently from place to place. Depending where you are, the Giant might be depicted as a giant man crafted of stone, a maiden whose axe carries the fury of winter, or even an elephant. The tales of the Viziers—and even that name is contested in places—speak volumes about a people. From time to time, someone is blessed by one of the Viziers, and carries its mark in the form of a pattern in the shape of the appropriate constellation. The nature of these blessings varies. For a family in Achinst, the firstborn daughter of a particular family is always born marked by the Giant. A western monastery is run by a chosen of the Soldier, and it is said that mantle passes to any who defeat him in combat. There are stories aplenty, and little real sense of the truth of it. What is known is that each of the blessed gains power in accordance with the domain of the Vizier in question. The chosen usually seem to be well suited by temperament to the Vizier that chooses them, but it’s unclear whether that is a cause or effect of selection.

The 30-Second Version

Don’t want to read it all and just want to wing it? Do the following:

• Replace the Drive skill with Ride.
• Reduce your Refresh by 1.
• Pick which Vizier you’re marked by (Eye, Giant, Shadow, Soldier, Steward, or Villager) and take the aspect Marked by [Vizier] (as in Marked by the Giant).
• Describe where the physical mark is on your character’s body.
• When you use a skill associated with that mark, your efforts are magical, more like deeds out of legend than mundane efforts. This does not translate into a bonus, but it just means a generally more awesome outcome, depending on the situation.
• Eye: Investigation, Lore, Notice
• Giant: Athletics, Physique, Will
• Shadow: Burglary, Deceive, Stealth
• Soldier: Fight, Ride, Shoot
• Steward: Provoke, Rapport, Resources
• Villager: Contacts, Crafts, Empathy

Mechanics

Skills

This assumes a fantasy leaning, though not necessarily the standard European one. As imagined, it is more in the spirit of Russia—all of it—than anything anchored in Europe. In any case, this does require that the Drive skill be replaced with a Ride skill, which works much the same way, but with a different sort of vehicle.

The Vizier’s Mark

If your character is marked by a Vizier, reduce your refresh by 1. Characters marked by a Vizier need to have an aspect that reflects this, like Chosen of the Steward or Marked by the Villager. The exact naming of the aspect is up to the player, and if the player has a complicated relationship with the Vizier, this is a great way to account for it. Exactly what the aspect means depends upon the mark, but all marks have a few things in common. First and foremost, the character gains a physical mark somewhere on their body, in the shape of the Vizier’s constellation. The exact form and location varies—it might be scars, birthmarks, a silvery tattoo, or virtually anything else—but the shape is fairly consistent. Cosmetic and temporary marks are also popular among the unmarked in some places, but a true bearer of a mark can recognize another genuine mark with a single glance. The marked also always know where their constellation is, whether it’s daytime or even if it’s beyond the horizon. By itself, this is not much use for navigation, but combined with a little bit of knowledge, it can allow for an uncanny sense of direction. There are also social elements of being marked, though those vary from place to place. Usually, it’s a good thing, but being marked by an unwelcome Vizier may carry some bad baggage along with it.

The Marks

Each Vizier is summarized below. Some of the information is self-explanatory, such as other names and ways in which the Vizier is represented. Other elements have rules impact. Each mark has a virtue and a vice, and those are relevant to the use of the mark as an aspect. For example, the Giant’s virtue is Strength and its vice is Rage. The aspect Marked by the Giant can be used as if it was the aspect Strong or Rage. Each mark also has three “domains”—these are the skills that are tied to this particular Vizier. They provide the framework for which blessings—aka Stunts—the Vizier provides. They don’t have any strict mechanical meaning beyond sketching the shape of the Vizier’s domain—and providing some guidance for games that use different skill lists. The blessings themselves are self-contained rules elements. Characters choose two blessings from their Vizier. These do not cost any additional refresh, but remember that characters already spent 1 refresh to be chosen.

The Eye

Virtue: Observant Vice: Inaction Also Called: The Auditor, The Inquisitor, The Sage, The Spy, or the Watcher. Often Depicted As: A genderless robed figure, a male magistrate, a female wise woman, a female librarian, an owl, or an eye. Domains: Investigation, Lore, and Notice. The Eye observes and reports to the Empress. He sees all, and gives others the knowledge and insight they need to act appropriately. The Eye himself rarely acts directly. In some stories, it is because he is an agent of law—an investigator—who solves a mystery so that the appropriate authorities may act. In others, he is paralyzed by a desire to maintain his neutrality, or by knowledge of the potential harm of his own actions.

Blessings

Investigation

The Pieces of the Puzzle: When you take a few minutes to study a particular item and its position, you can reasonably reconstruct the chain of events that led to it being there. This reconstruction will be accurate, though it will not reveal any more than the necessary details. For example, it might reveal that it was carried by hand at some point, but not by whom. The Vault of the Eye: You may look at a scene and recall it in perfect detail. In practice, this allows you to ask the GM questions about that memory long after the fact, and take your time performing Investigation rolls. This includes anything you might ask about if you were still in the same place and time, such as the contents of containers. If the answer to the question would require a skill roll—such as picking a lock to see a chest’s contents—you may try normally, as if you were still there. You may keep more than one scene in memory, but the cost of doing so is one fate point per scene already memorized.

Lore

The Blessing of a Thousand Tongues: You may learn any language quickly. With tutelage, it takes only a day. With only the opportunity to read or listen, it takes a week. If the source material is especially sparse, it may take as long as a month. The Eye Sees All Paths: You may not know everything, but you always know how to find out. When looking for a fairly specific piece of information, you may give the GM a fate point to be told the closest place you can go to find out, no matter how obscure or lost the information is. In short, you can never hit a wall when trying to find something out. There are no guarantees of how easy it will be to get the knowledge, but that’s what adventure is for.

Notice

The Eye Gazes in All Directions: You are never surprised. Even if it’s only by a moment, you are always forewarned of the unexpected. Stars Illuminate the Night: So long as there is the faintest amount of light, you can see as if it were a bright day. In the rare case of utter darkness, you can see as well as if you had a light source.

The Giant

Virtue: Strength Vice: Rage Also Called: The Earthshaker, The Laborer, The Pillar, The Titan. Often Depicted As: A stone statue, a frost maiden, an ogre, an elephant, or an ox. Domains: Athletics, Physique, and Will. The Giant represents strong hands put to good effort, but also represents strength going unchecked. Most often this strength is physical, but it goes deeper than that. It is said that it is the Giant who sets the heavens in motion at the behest of the Empress. In tales, the Giant is often portrayed as well intentioned and powerful, but not always in control of the power in those great hands. He is often in a secondary role to another Vizier—often the Steward or the Eye—acting in the service of greater discernment.

Blessings

Athletics

By My Hand, Set the World in Motion: Through a combination of speed, dexterity, and uncanny timing, you always have a path forward. In a static environment, this means that you are capable of crazy parkour-like movement to get almost anywhere that could be physically accessed. In a more fluid environment you are impossible to pin down or fence in, as you’ll always find the gap. Strides of the Giant: You run as fast as a horse, have a vertical jump equal to your own height, and can run for a day and night without stopping for rest—though you need to crash hard and eat a lot when you’re done.

Physique

Giant’s Appetite: You can eat anything without harm. Not just foodstuffs—if you can chew and swallow it, or drink it, you can safely consume it, and even gain sustenance from it. You may casually ignore poisons, decay, shards of glass, and similar inconveniences. As a bonus, flavors are very distinctive and memorable to you, which allows for disgusting tricks like comparing the taste of blood samples to see if they’re from the same source, as well as more useful tricks like identifying a familiar poison. None May Bind The Giant: If you are restrained or shackled, you may break those bonds, so long as they are natural or manufactured. No door or lock may withstand more than a single blow from you. Barriers with no opening take longer, but you are effectively an entire sapping team with nothing more than fists and feet and anything else you can bring to bear.

Will

The Mind Is the Greatest Mountain: So far as social skills are concerned, you do not exist. You cannot be swayed, befriended, intimidated, or otherwise moved. Your speech reveals nothing about you or the veracity of your words. For purposes of the Villager’s ability, your Deceive score is higher than the Villager’s Empathy. Never Broken: You gain a -8 physical consequence which recovers in the same way a -2 consequence does.

The Shadow

Virtue: Secrecy Vice: Greed Also Called: The Assassin, the Spy, the Taker, the Thief, the Trickster. Often Depicted As: A cloaked figure of either gender, the night wind, a humanoid shadow, a snake, a rat, or a raven. Domains: Burglary, Deceive, and Stealth. Depending on the time and place, the Shadow is either a roguish trickster or an ominous threat, and both views have some truth to them. The hidden hand of the Empress, the Shadow encompasses needful things best left unspoken. The place for such things is always uncertain, and unwelcome until the day they are needed, when their welcome is deep indeed.

Blessings

Burglary

The Accounting of Small Things: Once you have successfully stolen something small enough to fit in a pocket, it is gone until you choose to reveal it again. No amount of searching—or even stripping—will reveal the purloined item. You may only have one such item at a time hidden in this fashion. The Supplication of Locks: You need only whisper your name into a lock to attempt to pick it, as if using a full set of tools. If successful, the attempt takes only a moment. If unsuccessful, you may try again the old-fashioned way.

Deceive

Corroboration of Coincidence: Fate favors your lies with minor coincidences and circumstantial evidence that seem to lend them credence. You may apply a boost to the scene before you roll Deceive, so long as you can describe how it helps you look more honest. If successful, the boost turns into an aspect on the scene. The Name Is a Mask to the World: Any time after you hear someone’s name from their own lips, you may duplicate their face, voice, and manner until the sun has risen twice. You may never mimic the same person twice.

THE POWER OF NAMES Even those who don’t fully understand the nature of the Shadow understand that giving a stranger your name is a gesture of trust. How careful people are about this varies from culture to culture, but it is usually at least a consideration.

Stealth

Only the Wind Will See Me Go: At the cost of a fate point, you may exit a scene, passing from sight. Stealing Words from the Wind: You make no noise you do not wish to be heard. Not only does this allow you to move in absolute silence, but you can also use it selectively, such as speaking so only one person can hear you.

The Soldier

Virtue: Discipline Vice: Servitude Also Called: The Horseman, the Sword, the Warlord. Often Depicted As: A culturally appropriate warrior of either gender, a weapon, a lion, or a tiger. Domains: Fight, Ride, and Shoot. The Soldier serves through violence and war, with virtues of steel. The Soldier values cunning, bravery, and loyalty, but is perhaps a bit too easily led. Heroic stories of the Soldier tell of battles fought and won, but other stories put him on the other side from heroes for no reason other than blind adherence to an order.

Blessings

Fight

Army on the Edge of My Blade: You take no penalty—and grant no bonus—for being outnumbered, no matter how preposterous the numbers. Spears of Green Wood: You may train a body of troops—unnamed characters in a group of up to approximately 100—for a week and increase their Fight Skill by +1. You can repeat this multiple times, improving any given unit to a maximum of your Fight -2.

Ride

Only the Wind Beneath Us: So long as you maintain a good clip, any steed you ride may ride across water as if it were solid land, and may even ride across open air for a few hundred yards—after which the descent is akin to riding down a gentle slope. We Ride as One: You fight and act on horseback without penalty, and nothing can knock you off. Any time you would take a physical consequence, you can opt for the horse to take it instead—the horse having a similar consequence track to your character.

Shoot

To the Horizon: Anything you can see is effectively one zone from you when you shoot. To the Stars: Any missile fired into the air can land any place you know or near anyone you can name. Messages and small items can be delivered in this fashion. This cannot be used to launch an attack directly, but if fired with ill intent, it is entirely possible to kill a horse or unnamed NPC nearby.

The Steward

Virtue: Leadership Vice: Stubborn Also Called: Grandfather or Grandmother. Often Depicted As: A wise elder of either gender, a mastiff, or a snake. Domains: Provoke, Rapport, and Resources. The Steward is the ear that everyone speaks to and the voice that everyone listens to. While the Empress may rule the stars, the Steward is the one who makes things go on a daily basis. In stories, he’s an advisor or leader more often than a hero, though at times the Steward falls into the role of the wise traveller, teaching the community he visits lessons they should have already known.

Blessings

Provoke

Crown of Menace: You are too terrifying to be attacked. Until you make a physical attack in a scene, characters with a Will lower than Good (+3) simply cannot attack you. Those with sufficient Will to attack still flinch on their first attack, though, automatically missing. Walking with Storms: The mood of a town—or similar-sized locale—is what you want it to be.

Rapport

All Things in Their Place: You always know the power dynamic in the room, and you may insert yourself within it anywhere you desire. Use this with caution—while it impacts how people interact with you, it does not equate to actual authority, and placing yourself too highly—especially over people not used to being anything but top dog—can inspire an unpleasant response. The Truth of Who You Are: Every two minutes of conversation you have with someone reveals one of their aspects. However, for every two aspects you learn, you reveal one of your own to that person and anyone listening. Round down, so the first one you learn is free.

Resources

Rivers of Gold: Money is just a detail to you. Stripped naked and cast on a desert island, and you’ll be living in luxury in short order. Cast into prison, and you’ll be bribing guards in no time. No situation will restrict your access to your Resources skill. War of Papers: You can take action against organizations through indirect measures. Effectively you can fight on the level of any organization smaller than a nation without the need to recruit allies or have any organization of your own. Yes, this means you can effectively “kill” a city, or even an army, given enough time.

The Villager

Virtue: Endurance Vice: Short-Sighted Also Called: The Peon or the Citizen. Often Depicted As: A farmer, a milkmaid, a rower, a hammer, a plow, a mule, or a monkey. Domains: Contacts, Crafts, and Empathy. While the Steward is a wise leader, the Villager represents the wisdom and virtues of common citizens. His stories are those of the seeming fool who ends up triumphing in the end through simple, common values. His is the strength of the community.

Blessings

Contacts

The Bonds of Man Stretch to the Horizon: There is no place where you do not know someone, including places you have never been before. You will find a friend wherever you go. The Strength of One Becomes the Strength of Many: Once you begin a contacting effort, it becomes self-sustaining, as people you talk to talk to other people, who talk to others in turn. In effect, you will always get an answer; it is only a matter of time.

Crafts

The Conjunction of Form: You may combine materials in impossible ways, giving one the attribute of another. You may make paper with the strength of steel, or steel with the weight of paper. Doing so requires the two aspects—one for the material, one for the additional attribute—to be invoked simultaneously on the Crafts roll to create the finished product. The Tools Are Lesser than the Hand: You can produce master-craftsman-level work with the crudest of tools. With a proper workshop, you can create impossibly amazing devices in the finest da Vinci style.

Empathy

Architecture of the Heart: Reading a room is a triviality to you. Even more, you can spot the emotional lynchpins in a room and easily understand how actions would impact the mood. If you roll Empathy to read a room—difficulty Mediocre (+0)—count how many shifts you accrue. Over the course of the scene, you may ask the GM to tell you how people would react to any hypothetical scenario. You can do this a number of times equal to the number of shifts generated. The Inner Eye Sees Inner Truth: Without rolling, you can tell if another character is lying so long as the target’s Deceive is equal to or lower than your Empathy. In the case of high Deceive, you will know that you cannot tell, but will never receive a “false positive.”

Advancement

If a character succeeds in some great service in the ethos of the Vizier—no small thing, such a task could be the hub of an entire campaign—she may take a second aspect tied to the Vizier. She loses another refresh, and may choose two more blessings.

Variations and Options

As a baseline, this is a fairly mythic model of powers. Those marked by the Viziers are heroes of legend, but there are several options for how to alter this for other effects.

Power Level

The easiest way to power down these blessings is to make them require the expenditure of a fate point. If you want to increase their power, remove the refresh cost, and simply allow players to take more blessings—or possibly even carry more than one mark.

Structure

Six is a fairly arbitrary number of Viziers. The same skill-based blessings/stunts could be redistributed according to other schema. Perhaps, for example, there are eighteen major Arcana equivalents, each tied to one skill—characters bound to their Arcana might have the blessings for that skill. On the other hand, the Viziers could be discarded entirely, allowing players to simply pick a number of blessings.

Active Viziers

If the Viziers are actually active, thoughtful forces, the entire tone of the game changes. Not only will the Viziers be interacting more directly with their chosen, they’ll be engaged in their own internal politics. Active Viziers can be a potent driver of play.

Other Viziers

Perhaps there are other Viziers out there—secret constellations with powers and knowledge unknown to the world at large. Perhaps they are hidden enemies or lost allies. Or perhaps they are both.

Dark Viziers

The Viziers as presented are mostly positive forces, with their negative elements serving largely as a natural consequence of their strengths. But perhaps each Vizier is paired with a dark reflection, one who embraces the darker nature and only has some redeeming characteristics as an extension of that nature. These Dark Viziers may have their own agendas and champions, and best of all, there’s no guarantee that those bearing the mark are even aware of any difference.

The Subtle Art

Design Notes

Mechanically speaking, this system is an elaboration of creating an advantage. That is, it simply expands the scope of when, where, and what kind of advantages can be created. Because it’s much more low-key than other magic types, it doesn’t answer a number of the big questions. This makes it a magic system better suited to a game that is not itself primarily magical. In fact, it’s best suited to games where there is some question of whether magic is real or not, though in other games it may be a way to represent a “lesser” path of magic.

Description

When you imagine magical societies, the first thing to spring to mind may be ancient lodges and secret orders. Certainly those exist, but they don’t have much magic left in them—their own success tamped it out. Consider that the benefits of magic are ephemeral, while the benefits of collaboration, conspiracy, and partnership are concrete. For the kind of important, successful folks who meet in smoky rooms with dark woods and deep carpets, the magic is just window dressing. They don’t need to believe anymore, and in most cases, they haven’t needed to for a long time. There are exceptions. Most of these established organizations started out full of belief and strong intentions, but that belief faded under the weight of their own success. It’s easy to believe that your prosperity charms are helping your stock picks when you have no idea what you’re doing, but as you succeed—and learn—then the tendency is to start attributing your successes to your talent and smart picks. That means, as you get better, magic helps you less. As a result, most practicing magical groups are much more informal. Networks of friends, friends of friends, or loosely connected strangers sharing a common interest. Meetings mostly revolve around drinking, hook-ups, and couch surfing in cheap rented apartments. The simple reality is that magic has its strongest roots in the rootless. People who are smart and capable, but lack direction or any real purpose, gravitate to magic for the quick fix solution it represents. It’s an underground, and for some, it’s the best weapon available.

Magic and Reality

What’s important is that there is no “real world” proof that this magic works. The introduction of these aspects does not change reality in any real, repeatable way. Certainly, they tilt the scale a bit, but they do so within the realm of reasonable outcomes. To an outside observer, this “magic” looks a lot like confirmation bias. If you put a curse on someone and something bad happens to them, then it’s easy to take credit for it, but a cynic will note that bad things happen to people all the time. This can be rough, and as a result, believers tend to cluster together. They form subcultures where they can nerd out about what they’ve done, swap tips, and generally reinforce their belief that this is something that matters. In many ways, these groups are more important than the magic itself, but they are not what one might expect.

The 30-Second Version

Don’t want to read it all? Just do this:

• Buy a skill called “Magic.”
• Take a half hour in a dark room with someone’s name, a voodoo doll, or similar accouterments, and make a Magic roll to create an advantage against the target of the spell.
• Put an aspect appropriate to a curse or blessing on the target. It lasts for three days, seven if you succeed with style.

Mechanics

This system adds one skill: Magic. Its description follows.

Skill: Magic

Magic is the skill of placing blessings and curses upon a person or place. While the skill itself is generic, its specific manifestations are not. A practitioner must have a set of rules and trappings that they follow to use magic. Those rules may be based on a real-world practice, be totally made up, or anywhere in between, but they must be consistent and they always demand time, effort, and ritual. There are other limitations listed below. Overcome: There are few useful obstacles that magic may overcome, though many practitioners think otherwise. It’s a common misperception that the Magic skill can be used to “detect” magical workings, but this is really no more reliable than guessing. The one concrete use for overcome is to overcome the skepticism of others. The Magic skill also represents how well you “sell” the idea of magic, or at least your belief. This works like a very specific sort of use of the Deceive skill—even if the character doesn’t feel he’s deceiving anyone. Create an Advantage: The primary activity with the Magic skill is creating an advantage. Assuming a single target—a person, or a thing perhaps as large as a house—about a half hour’s time, and the appropriate ritual trappings, the roll is made against a difficulty of Average. So long as the character gets a success, then the target gains the aspect of the blessing or curse—see below for details—for three days and three nights. Further modifications follow:

• If the target is not present, then the difficulty is increased from between +1 to +3. +3 if the target is merely named, +1 if a powerful symbolic tie to the target is present—their blood, a treasured possession—and if it’s not clearly either, then a +2 is appropriate.
• If the target is large—a small group of less than a dozen or a large place like an office building or park—difficulty increases by +3. That’s the maximum size that a spell can actually work at, though most practitioners are unaware of this, and every year, hours of magic get wasted targeting the GOP, the Dallas Cowboys, and hipsters.
• Some spells have a secondary target, such as a spell that makes your boss mad at someone. The absence of that secondary target similarly impacts the difficulty—+0 if present, +3 if you only have a name, as above. The one qualifier is that if the secondary target can be made to accept some token of the spell—a potion, a trinket—then they are effectively “present”. Such tokens must be used within three days.
• Success with style extends the duration to a week.
• No target can be the subject of more than one spell at a time. The newest spell replaces the existing ones.
• Some blessings and curses have their own additional modifiers.
• A spell on an area effectively creates a scene aspect that can be used normally by anyone in the location.

Attack: There is no such thing as a magical attack. Defend: There is no such thing as a magical defense.

Spells

Aspects put on a target are generally referred to as blessings or curses, depending on their intended effect, but collectively, they are all considered spells. These are not an open-ended list—there are a fixed set of spells, and the knowledge of them is the currency of the magical community. Spells are complicated enough that they are very difficult to commit to memory and still get exactly right, so they are kept in notebooks, databases, and other archives. Poaching another magician’s spellbook can be informative, but it can also be about as useful as their organic chemistry notes—even if they haven’t actively obscured them, they can be very idiosyncratic to understand. And, of course, there’s no real way to distinguish between a spell that’s a dud and a real one. For clarity, the target of a spell is the person, place or thing it’s being cast on. Sometimes a spell will also have a subject, a person, place or thing which will be the focus of the spell’s effect on the target. For example, a love spell to make Jake fall for Andy would be cast on Jake (the target) focused on Andy (the subject). Annoyance: The target rubs people the wrong way. If the spell has a subject, then the target of the spell is more easily annoyed by that subject. Charisma: While related to love, this turns it on its head by improving the target’s general presence and demeanor. It’s sometimes a subject of ridicule—specifically, ridiculing those who would need such a spell—but it sees a lot of quiet use. Clarity: Popular among those who fancy themselves sophisticated magi, for many this spell is their morning cup of coffee, sharpening their thoughts and senses. It’s also a popular “counterspell,” used to remove curses. Clumsiness: You know those days where you dropped a glass, spilled your coffee in your lap, and ripped your shirt on a latch? This makes for that kind of day. Confusion: People tend to misunderstand the target—or get easily lost if it’s a place. Love: One of the most well known but also most contentious spells, especially when used with a subject. Without a subject, it simply makes the target more friendly towards the world, but with a subject, it inclines the subject toward the target. A lot of people view this as skeezy at best, and date rape at worst. It’s a touchy topic, and a number of magicians get around this by explicitly casting dud spells. Health: The magical equivalent of fizzy tablets with vitamin C and zinc. Luck: This is the most common spell in circulation, and it can take the form of good or bad luck. Obscurity: The target is easily overlooked—by the subject, if appropriate. Whether this is a blessing or a curse depends a lot on your perspective. Prosperity: Another popular blessing, financial things fall the target’s way. It’s rare that this turns into a large windfall, but it can show up as a loan extension or a free beer. Rage: Small things annoy the target more than usual, as if they’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed. If the spell has a subject, then the target of the spell is more easily enraged by that subject. Safety: Keeps the target—or area—safer than it would be. These are not all the spells available, but they should provide some insight into the tone of any additions.

Magic Stunts

By Rote: You may pick three spells that you know well enough that you don’t need to consult your notes to cast. Evil Eye: You can attempt to put Bad Luck on a target with nothing more than an obvious gesture. This lasts only a day. Interior Decorator: You may call it feng shui on your invoices, but it’s all just decor. If you put a spell on a place, you may arrange the furniture and decorations just so. If you do, the effect lasts for up to a season—or until someone rearranges the furnishings.

Variations and Options

But Does It Work?

It is entirely possible that this “system” is a lie. Magic doesn’t actually do anything, and it’s all wish fulfillment and confirmation bias. A GM could even pull this on a player, by quietly not accounting for the aspects they appear to create. That is, by and large, a terrible idea. It really hoses the player and undercuts their concept—unless they also like the idea of it being fake. If you want to emphasize this idea—even if you don’t want to embrace it fully—then things that make the magic impossible to prove make great compels.

Jazzing It Up

It’s also possible for this to be a more overtly magical system. In that case you can introduce odd, improbable, or super weird effects. This will require expanding the spell list to include more concrete things like “food rots when you touch it,” and it also makes spells something that can be concretely perceived by the magic skill. In this case, the duration of effects should be extended to a lunar month.

Combat Curses

Assuming a more overt style of magic, a variant on this would allow for “combat casting” of blessings and curses. This is very different from the traditional image of the mage casting lightning bolts, but it suits lower magic settings very well. In this case, spells can be cast on any target in sight, and by and large, this allows for colorful create an advantage effects. By default, these must be invisible effects, but can still cause bad choices to be made, weapons to miss and so on. However, if the GM deems it appropriate, then certain color may be allowed to make these overtly magical—such as a fire priest creating fiery advantages.

Wizards’ Duels

If combat curses are supported, then so are wizards’ duels. A wizards’ duel occurs when two wizards meet and choose to lock eyes, entering battle, which uses Magic in lieu of Fight and inflicts mental damage until one or the other is taken out. To an external observer, all that happens is they lock eyes, then one collapses—possibly dead, depending on the decision of the victor. To the two wizards, the battle can take any form. Sometimes, beings of greater power can be drawn into a duel by mortal magic. This requires some preparation on the part of the human practitioner, such as the creation of a focus object. These clashes still occur mostly in the ether, but they might involve a flashier exchange of energies or other effect. In such a case, if the greater power loses, the result is rarely fatal, but the being may carry a consequence forward.

Storm Summoners

Design Notes

This is an expansion of the “Five Storms” magic system described in the Stormcallers . It’s a self-contained system, so it can easily be pulled out into its own game, but it can just as easily be used along with other Five Storms magic systems to create a more complete system.

Description

Each of the Five Storms—Earthquake, Flood, Glacier, Inferno, and Thunder—at the center of reality is home to a myriad of beings who call those deadly environments home. To the layperson, this means elementals—beings composed of the element of the Storm but possessed of intelligence and intent. While these are the most numerous beings of the storms, they are only the beginning. Elementals make up the foundation of what passes for an ecosystem within the Storm. Most numerous are the barely intelligent wisps, tiny beings of elemental nature. Each successive tier is more potent but less numerous, until a threshold is reached where the creatures begin taking on distinct forms and natures. These often resemble fantastic versions of mundane creatures, while some of the most potent resemble humans. There are princes and queens among these beings, and the most potent of them are said to rival the gods themselves. With the right skill and tools a Conjuror can summon elementals to do his bidding, with a danger that corresponds to the potency of the being summoned. However, the greater beings of the Storms are out of reach of any mere Conjuror. Summoners are distinct from Conjurors because they have struck a bargain with one of the great powers of a Storm, and may use that bargain as leverage with the greater beings of that Storm. However, all such bargains come with a price.

The 30-Second Version

Don’t want to read all the rules? Use this shorthand version:

• Buy a Conjuration Skill.
• Do some rituals to summon an Earth, Fire, Ice, Lightning, or Water elemental at a difficulty from Average (+1) to Great (+4). That’s the difficulty you need to reach, and that’s the skill it operates at. It will last for a week. You may keep one at a time.
• Elementals come in 4 sizes:
  • Wisps (Average, 0 stress, no consequences) are little fist-sized orbs. They’re not bright, but they’re fast and sneaky and follow simple directions.
  • Drudges (Fair, 0 stress, 1 mild consequence) are dog-sized, stronger than they look, and able to carry heavy loads or do simple work.
  • Servitors (Good, 2 stress, 2 mild consequences) are human-sized and roughly human-shaped, take orders well, and make adequate soldiers.
  • Attendants (Great, 3 stress, 1 mild and 1 moderate consequences) are powerful beings that take on aspects of the Storm, so they look kind of awesome.
• If you make a bargain with a great being to be more powerful, then:
  • Reduce your refresh by 1.
  • Take an aspect Bargain with the Prince of [pick a storm]
  • Change your Conjuring Skill to a Summoning Skill.
  • You can now summon a Superb (4 stress, 2 armor, -2/-4/-6 Consequence) elemental creature of your description with a successful roll. You can still do regular conjuration with your bargained element, but why would you?

Mechanics

This system adds two skills, and a number of aspects to reflect summoning magic. It also adds a number of specific aspects to reflect bargains with the powers of the Storms.

Skill: Conjuration

Conjuration is the art of summoning elementals from the Five Storms. It is a slow practice, and demands the creation of a summoning circle and the use of appropriate sacrifices to gain the service of one of these creatures. Anyone may take the Conjuration skill with no refresh cost. Overcome: Conjuration can be used as a Lore skill related to the creatures of the Five Storms. It can also be used to renew the bond of an already-summoned elemental without the time and effort spent on the initial summoning. This simply requires an overcome roll against the rating of the creature—see the elemental summary table on the next page.

• Fail: The creature is immediately released, and it will flee or fight, depending on the situation and how it has been treated.
• Tie: The bond is not renewed, and will expire normally.
• Success: Renew the bond for a week.
• Success With Style: Renew the bond for a month.

A Conjuror can also dismiss a bound elemental at will, so long as it is within his presence. Create an Advantage: Summoning an elemental is a specific sort of advantage creation. Doing so requires a summoning circle and an amount and type of sacrifice based on the being to be summoned. For a Wisp, a handful of interesting material will suffice, but an Attendant will be much more demanding. Roll against a difficulty based on the type of creature being summoned—see the next page.

• Fail: The creature is summoned, but immediately breaks free. Wisps and Drudges tend to run for it—causing problems elsewhere—while Servitors and Attendants may turn on the Conjuror if they sense an opportunity.
• Tie: The elemental appears, but will only perform a single service taking less than a night.
• Success: The elemental appears and is bound to your service for a week.
• Success With Style: the elemental appears and is bound for a month.

Attack: Conjuration may be used as an attack skill against summoned creatures, with “damage” serving as progress towards banishment. Defend: Conjuration may be used to defend against attacks by summoned creatures. This defense may be enhanced by staying within a circle, with the value ranging from +1 to a hastily drawn circle of dirt or salt to +4 for a mathematically perfect circle of precious metal covered in ancient runes of power. The character’s rating in Conjuration is also the limit on the number of elementals that he may have bound at any one time. Their combined difficulties cannot exceed his conjuration score, so a Great (+4) Conjuror could control four Wisps, or one Wisp and one Servitor, or some other combination totaling up to four. It is common—if noisy—for a Conjuror to have multiple elementals summoned at a time.

Elementals

Elemental Summary

ELEMENTAL	RATING	STRESS	CONSEQUENCE
Wisp	Average	0	None
Drudge	Fair	0	-2
Servitor	Good	2	-2/-2
Attendant	Great	3	-2/-4
Named	Superb	4	-2/-4/-6

ELEMENTAL Bonuses

ELEMENT (STORM)	WISP	DRUDGE, SERVITOR, OR ATTENDANT	NAMED
Earth (Earthquake)	None	+2 Stress	+4 Stress
Ice (Glacier)	None	Armor:1	Armor:2
Fire (Inferno)	None	Weapon:1	Weapon:2
Water (Flood)	None	Additional mild consequence	Additional mild consequence, Armor: 1
Lightning (Thunder)	None	Attack range 1 zone	Range 2

For most actions, most elementals have only a single skill: [X] Elemental, and its level is equal to their rating, so a Wisp of Fire’s default skill is “Wisp of Fire: Average (+1)”. Certain elementals have other specific skills, but in the absence of those, an elemental rolls either its core skill or its core skill -2 for other actions. All elementals have the ability to blend into their native element, gaining a +4 to Stealth so long as there is some present for them to vanish into. Additionally, they receive benefits based on their element as outlined in the Elemental Bonuses table.

Wisp

Looking like a fistful of their element, Wisps possess little power or intelligence. However, they are the simplest of elementals to summon, and they are well suited to simple tasks, especially those where Athletics or Stealth are called for—they receive a +4 to both. They are almost useless in a fight, however, having no stress boxes and no ability to take consequences. Differences by element are largely cosmetic between wisps, but their variations can get quite exotic. Wisps are the elementals most likely to be found in nature, and many who have lived away from the storms for too long have “gone native,” adopting characteristics of native flora and fauna. These “native” wisps can be bound like any others.

Drudge

An elemental body the size of a dog, the Drudge is not any brighter than the Wisp—and is often dumber—but is substantially stronger and more patient. They receive a +2 to Endurance and to any Physique roll related to carrying loads. They are well suited to performing long, boring tasks, but are not great combatants, having no stress boxes and only able to take a -2 consequence.

Servitor

Servitors are human-sized and often a rough approximation of humanoid in shape, having some number of arms and legs, though rarely any kind of head. While not geniuses, they are smart and capable of following complicated instructions or of fighting on their master’s behalf. Servitors have 2 stress boxes and can take two -2 consequences.

Attendant

Attendants are what most people imagine elementals to be, some element of the Storm given life. Larger than a person, they look to be a walking whirlwind of the Storm they come from. They are also intelligent, able combatants. Attendants have 3 stress boxes and can take a -2 and a -4 consequence.

Elemental Bargains

A Conjuror can enter into a bargain with one of the powers of the Storm. Doing so allows him much greater power over the elementals of that domain, but it also comes with a steep price. The Conjuror is now a Summoner, limited to only that element, and he is now obligated to an alien being of great power and questionable motives. Despite these prices, the power that comes with these bargains means there is never a shortage of those seeking them, though not all who do so survive the process. Tread carefully with the Princes of the Five Storms. Mechanically, the bargain takes the form of an aspect that reflects the bargain. It can be invoked to assist with summoning and conjuration—as well as name dropping, in certain quarters—and it can be compelled in any way that serves the interest of the other party in the bargain. This may vary from arbitrary-seeming stipulations—like the necessity of carrying a particular token—to taboos—the Prince of Magma hates baths!—to visitation rights. The player may choose to break a bargain—losing benefits, and immediately getting jumped by any summoned being he has bound—but doing so makes an enemy—and just for reference, The Enmity of a Prince of Thunder is a great replacement aspect! The player and GM should work out the details of the other end of the bargain. The generic option is that it be with a Prince or Queen of the Storm, with titles like “Prince of Magma,” “Lady of Icebergs,” or “Countess of Forked Skies,” but the options are genuinely endless. A bargain reduces the character’s refresh by one. It is possible to cut more than one bargain, but doing so pretty much guarantees that from that point forward you will be ground zero for proxy fights between those two Storm Courts.

Skill: Summoning

The Summoning skill replaces the Conjuration skill when a character makes a bargain. It is at the same level, and works in a manner identical to the Conjuring skill with the following changes:

• The character may only summon creatures from the Storm that he has a bargain with.
• Summoned elementals no longer demand a price.
• Failed summonings now always result in the creature fleeing.
• The character’s skill is treated as 4 higher for the purpose of how many elementals he may have bound at a time.
• The character may now summon and bind a named elemental creature based on the patron of his bargain. The nature of this creature is part of the identification of the patron. Named creatures are specific sorts of fantastical beasts—firebirds, lightning armadillos, or whatever else the player and GM agree seems cool.
• These named elementals are of Superb rating, have 4 stress boxes and -2/-4/-6 consequences, as well as their elemental bonus—see the table, above.

Elementals in Combat

Handling a single elemental in addition to the character is not too onerous, but an accomplished Summoner or Conjuror may be running around with several elementals, and trying to handle each one in combat invites huge bookkeeping hassles. For this reason, a Conjuror can use a variant on the Teamwork rules as follows:

• The basic attack and defense is determined by the most powerful elemental the character controls. It receives an additional +1 for being under the direction of the character.
• Creating advantages and overcoming difficulties still use the character’s skill, but +1 per non-Wisp elemental in the fight, if it’s an effort the elemental could help with.
• Elementals act as an additional pool of consequences for the player. Any time he would take a hit, he may lose elementals as if he were taking on consequences as follows:
  • ˏ Drudge: -2
  • ˏ Servitor: -4
  • ˏ Attendant: -6
  • ˏ Named: Any single value

Variations and Options

Borrowed Power

A Summoner with a Storm Bargain may buy the Stormcaller skill as if she were a Stormcaller and use power borrowed from her patron. However, there are limits on this. She cannot use Stormcalling while her named creature is summoned, and any time she use Stormcalling they forgo the +4 benefit to the number of bound creatures she can have. On the upside, she can sacrifice any non-Wisp elemental for a +1 to a Stormcalling roll, though this bonus does not stack. This does not require any additional refresh.

Wisp Masters

It is possible that some Conjurors forgo the broader aspects of conjuration in favor of specialization on Wisps, both for their utility and for the underground culture of Wisp battles that has become so popular. In this case, replace Conjuration with a Wisp Training skill that still governs how many wisps a character can control but does not allow the summoning of wisps. Instead, it allows the binding of “wild” wisps, those who have been trapped in the mortal world long enough to adopt creature-like forms. A Wisp Master finds and captures these Wisps then domesticates them into Battle Wisps and trains them to fight. In an example of the Bronze Rule, Battle Wisps are still Average creatures with no stress boxes and no consequences so far as their interaction with the rest of the world goes, but within their own ranks they are finely gradated. That is to say, each Battle Wisp can have a full set of skills, powers, and abilities usable in battle with other wisps, and within those battles, those differences matter a great deal. But to an external observer, the most potent and least potent Battle Wisp are about on par.

Training your Battle Wisps

Battle wisps start with 2 stress boxes, one mild consequence, and 4 skills at Average (+0): Strength, Speed, Skill, and Toughness. (Yes, there’s a skill called Skill. Cope.) These are, respectively, used to make attack, overcome, create an advantage, and defend actions in Wisp combat. Toughness is also the defense against attacks. Wisps may earn advances by winning battles, or through training. Exactly how advances are earned depends on the situation, but each advance may be spent to:

• Increase a skill. All skills can be increased to Good (+3). One skill can be increased to Great (+4) and one may be increased to Superb (+5).
• Increase resilience. An advance can be spent to add a -2 consequence, increase a -2 consequence to a -4, or increase a -4 to a -6. The maximum consequences for a Battle Wisp are -2/-4/-6.
• Buy an upgrade. Upgrades include:
  • ˏ Shell: +1 Armor.
  • ˏ Tough Shell: (Requires Shell and Good Toughness) +1 Armor.
  • ˏ Breath Attack: Can attack two targets at once.

There are many more upgrade possibilities. In general, treat them as a simple sort of stunt. In any situation except battling other wisps, the wisp still effectively has an Average skill level, no stress, no consequences, and no upgrades—except in a purely cosmetic sense. This remains true no matter how many advances the wisp has earned.

Voidcallers

Design Notes

As with Storm Summoners, this is nominally tied to the larger Five Storms magic system, and similarly, it’s designed to easily stand alone. Although in this case, it may stand somewhat further afield. This is the magic of the dark and terrible things that lie outside the boundaries of reality. Classically, it’s the space for unimaginable yet clearly tentacled horrors, but the hope here is to ground it a little bit more. Drawing on sources like Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces novels, the idea is that one does not need to lean so heavily on the crutch of the “unknowable” to come up with disturbing stuff. It would be easy to say that this is magic for villains, but that would be doing you and yours a disservice—to say nothing of the disservice to the villains. This is magic that comes at a horrible, nigh-inhuman cost, but nigh-inhuman is not quite the same thing as inhuman. The cultists who summon dark things are not simple nutjobs looking to destroy everything. They want something, and there’s a price they’re willing to pay. What they want and the price they pay can make them very hard to distinguish from some heroes.

Description

No one is sure what the Void is. There’s some literature that suggests that it’s everything that’s not the universe, while other works suggest that it’s the end of the universe at the scale where time and place are indistinguishable. To some it’s simply hell. Whatever it is, it’s a bad place. Dark in every sense of the word. Sometimes someone trips into the edges of it, and if it doesn’t kill them outright, it marks them terribly. Thankfully, this is rare. The Void doesn’t interact with the world unless one really goes seeking it out, and even then it’s pretty hard to find. In fact, it would probably be utterly impossible to find except for one dangerous truth: there are things there that want to get out. There is no one description of what these things are and what they want. Some are little more than animals, albeit animals possessed of horrific powers. Others are clearly possessed of some level of intellect, from sub- to trans-human. The smart ones are an obvious threat—they seek means to make it easier for humans to find the Void, offering bargains and seeking to spread knowledge best left hidden. Their endgames differ. Some clearly move toward crossing the threshold into our world, others seem to seek to draw others into their own dark courts. Others are simply a mystery. Still, the threat of the animals is not to be underestimated—the threat they present is often ecological. A single creature may be no great threat, but given time to breed and spread, they could represent an extinction-level event. But they’re just so darn useful. Power from the Void takes a number of shapes. Most commonly, it is in the form of summoning and binding some useful creature. So long as proper precautions are taken, these creatures can usually be kept quite safely, but precautions often have limits. This is doubly true for very powerful creatures. They are no harder to summon—though binding them is another matter—and they will actively seek to circumvent whatever restrictions are put upon them. Sometimes actual power can also be gained from dealings with the Void. This can take the form of knowledge, such as a spell or trick, or more direct power, usually through the form of some sort of infection. That latter can be just as bad as it sounds—there is no guarantee that the power you received today is not the thing that makes you explode in a flurry of flesh-eating worms tomorrow.

The 30-Second Version

• Find the instructions for performing a dark summoning.
• Roll Lore against the difficulty of the summoning. After the fact, you add whatever bonus you need to the roll to make it a success. The GM gets 1 Doom Point for each +1 so granted.
• You use the horrible thing you have summoned to your own benefit and the detriment of the world.
• GM spends Doom Points to make your bad idea even worse.

Mechanics

There are two different mechanical considerations for dealing with the powers of the Void. The first is the question of how contact is made, how things are summoned, and so on. The second is how the effects of those things are expressed.

Summoning

It sounds mundane, but summoning something from the Void is roughly comparable to assembling a big piece of furniture. You have extensive directions, and if you follow them exactly and have all the right tools, they should produce the result promised. Unfortunately, in even the best of circumstances, this stuff can be confusing. The author is rarely a skilled technical writer and, let us not forget, is the kind of guy who writes a book about how to summon unholy monstrosities. This is actually why anyone who knows anything is skeptical of “spellbooks.” Anyone who is trying to make a book out of this stuff has got pretty suspect priorities, and there’s no real guarantee that any of it is going to work. There are a handful of known spellbooks that are floating around in numbers enough to be recognizable, and it’s a useful survival skill to know which ones are bogus. And even then caution is called for—it’s far from uncommon for practitioners to seed their books with known bad rituals. The real treasures are notebooks. The reality is that sloppy practitioners are dead practitioners, and the ones who survive for any period of time document the hell out of everything—success, failure, and otherwise. Unfortunately, notebooks tend to be personal chicken scratch at best and enciphered at worst, so nothing is ever easy. All of which is to say that in many cases, the difficulty in figuring out how to summon something is less about the actual difficulty of the task, which is usually fairly easy, and much more about getting a good, reliable set of instructions. This limitation is the big reason that even successful practitioners usually only have a few tricks up their sleeve. Each new summoning they learn requires a period of basically playing Russian roulette, with escalating stakes. So, the actual act of summoning is a Lore roll to see how well you follow instructions, as well as how well you take precautions, apply your judgment to the proceedings, and generally proceed with caution. Assuming the ritual that you’re using is correct—and there’s no guarantee of that—then there are two difficulties in play: the difficulty of the actual ritual, and the difficulty of parsing the ritual from the text. For tracking purposes, these are the summoning difficulty and the parsing difficulty. As a rule of thumb, the summoning difficulty is usually fairly low, even for powerful creatures. Remember, they want to come here, and the only real challenge is doing so safely. The much higher difficulty is parsing the directions. Summoning difficulties tend to be consistent, but parsing difficulties totally depend upon the source material. The lowest parsing difficulty can be equal to the summoning difficulty. In either case, both difficulties are unknown to the player. To actually perform a summoning, the character must make all appropriate steps as laid out in the ritual, and then make a single Lore roll against both difficulties. After the roll:

• If the player beats neither difficulty, the spell either doesn’t work, or it works without proper safeguards, and whatever you summoned is now on the loose. This is totally the GM’s judgment call, depending upon how much fun she would have with that.
• If the player beats the summoning difficulty but doesn’t beat the parsing difficulty, the spell works! Just like it’s supposed to! More or less.

Make a note of how much the player missed beating the parsing difficulty by. That value is converted into the GM’s Doom Points. Note that this is explicitly beat the difficulty—a tie will still accrue one Point. Doom Points are the currency of things that went wrong. They might be small or subtle, they might be big and painful, but they’re not immediately evident, and they can be revealed at the GM’s leisure.

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For example: Dave attempts a ritual with a summoning difficulty of Fair (+2) and a parsing difficulty of Fantastic (+6). He rolls a Great (+4) so the spell works, but the GM accrues 3 Doom Points, because Dave would have needed to roll 3 higher to beat the difficulty.

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If you succeed with style on a ritual, you succeed without Doom and the parsing difficulty drops by one point for subsequent efforts at the same ritual. This cannot reduce the parsing difficulty below the summoning difficulty, and it only applies to you. Anyone else must still use the parsing difficulty of the original notes—or your notes, if appropriate.

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So why is summoning so “safe” for PCs? Basic game design. Don’t make a magic system where the spells might kill you, but are useful if you succeed. That’s a totally reasonable control from the perspective of “realism,” but it’s terrible from a play perspective. Magic is Chekov’s gun—if you introduce it, someone will use it, and then it’s on you to try to make it work, either way. In this specific case, it is much more interesting to have players deal with the consequences of success. That can be worse than dying, and no one needs to roll up a new character. At least, not right away.

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Huge Rituals

The rules so far presuppose summoning small- to medium-scale beings from the Void. There are bigger creatures, and they can also be summoned and bound. The actual rules and difficulties do not change, but the requirements for the ritual are usually far more extravagant. Isolated mountaintops, circles of gold chain, a thousand paper cranes with their wings dipped in the menstrual blood of a killer, stuff like that. As with normal summons, the roll is not the essential part of the process—and, in fact, the rules are the same—it’s all the stuff getting to that point that matters. This may seem counterintuitive—if bigger things are trying to come through, why do their rituals take more componentry? It’s just a practical consideration—think of the ritual as scaffolding. The bigger the thing you want to bring across is, the stronger the scaffolding needs to be—and that’s before you start considering the binding element. Of course, many of these things are big, smart, and powerful enough to find loopholes. Some have created, or lead to the creation of, artifacts—mirrors, statues, monkey paws, puzzle boxes and the like—that can open the way for them. Thankfully, these usually are limited in some way; otherwise, the creature would probably have already come through. But they make excellent fishing lures, so to speak.

Binding

A summoned creature can’t do much of anything. Part of the summoning is binding it, at least if things are done right. Basically, the Summoner must release it—in whole or in part—to benefit from its abilities. For dumb creatures, this just means breaking the circle and letting them do their thing. For more intelligent creatures, it means releasing them to use their powers under strict ground rules. Technically, these things are pretty Faustian about their bargaining. They generally can’t negotiate—unless, of course, they can—but they will try to exploit any holes in the limits placed upon them. However, nothing is less fun than coming up with precise wording for these things, so don’t demand it. GMs should ask for player’s intent, and then respect it. Doom Points and natural consequences should provide more than enough complications.

Doom Points

Doom Points are a rough currency to keep track of all the things that the character didn’t account for. Think of them as infernal loopholes, a bucket of things just waiting to go wrong with a summoning. Basically, they give the GM carte blanche to make the situation worse—not that she can’t do that anyway, but spending a Doom Point shifts the blame nicely. A few things that might be done with a spent Doom Point:

• Allow the creature to use a power outside the scope of the binding, even if only a little at a time.
• Allow the creature to summon other creatures.
• Allow the creature to establish contact with someone else, someone who might be interested in a better deal.
• The creature’s mere presence imposes a scene aspect on its environs, in a steadily growing radius.

Rituals and Aspects

Aspects seem like a great way to guarantee a safe ritual and avoid that whole GM doom thing, and they technically are. But there are a few things to consider. When you do one of these summonings, you are doing something terrible. Every possible thing you could bring across is an abomination, and a threat to the world. When you invoke an aspect to help you do that, you may well be tainting that aspect. We all understand doing bad things for good reasons, and that may be the motivation that drives someone to summon. But when you make that decision, you cross a line, and you are saying something profound about that aspect. That says something about your character, and it also says something about how that aspect shows up in play. Once you open the door to doing abominable things in the name of love, you have invited the GM to see how far you are willing to go. And maybe that’s awesome. That may be exactly what you want to see in play—it’s a great, powerful theme. But we mention it here so that you walk through that door with both eyes open.

Creatures and Powers

And here’s the harsh reality—there is no way to fully catalog all the possible expressions of these horrible things. We’re going to provide a lot of examples, but the reality is that for this, you should look at every Fate build you can for ideas. These are all one-offs, and if the rules for a particular creature don’t work with the rest of the game, this will be one context where that makes sense. This is your opportunity to go absolutely nuts. The only limiter is that you want to include some checks to prevent a total party kill as soon as the nasty thing gets loose. This may mean limiting the range of bad things to ones that can be dealt with. It may mean making sure your characters have certain defenses. It’s just something to be mindful of.

Sample Creatures

Wound-Eating Beetles

Summoning Difficulty: Fair (+1) A little bit longer than a man’s thumb, these beetles have white, soft shells, like they’ve just emerged from some cycle of growth, but it never hardens. To use it, simply let it walk around on your skin for a while—it’s gross for a few moments, but then you won’t even notice it’s there. Literally. Unless you really, actively put some effort into trying to find it, you’re simply not aware of it, no matter where it crawls. If you don’t know to expect it, it’s just one of those creepy momentary sensations that passes quickly. The beetle gets its name for its ability to eat wounds. It undoes things on a small scale, and it mechanically has a very potent effect: once per day, its owner can remove one physical consequence, effectively erasing the injury. After it’s eaten three such wounds, it will lay a little egg somewhere on your body—which will go similarly unnoticed—and in a week, another beetle will hatch and be walking around unnoticed—and able to eat additional wounds. If, on the other hand, a beetle goes for a week without a wound to eat, it finds sustenance elsewhere, and eats one of its host’s aspects. This doesn’t cause any direct change—things aren’t forgotten or removed, they just matter a lot less. Once all of a person’s aspects are eaten, they pretty much yield to a listless ennui punctuated by occasional moments of intense activity or self-harm—quickly eradicated—in an attempt to get a grasp on something they lost and cannot find. Their homes grow messier and more crowded with stuff, coming to resemble nests with paths radiating out from the glow of the television. Not coincidentally, such waste-filled environments are friendly to the beetle, which use the mess to travel more safely away from their host—as they are easy prey for boots and predators—to find new hosts, preferably sleeping ones who will never notice their new guest. Beetles are not a huge threat on their own—even an unchecked infection rarely extends beyond a single building. However, they are also symbiotic with many more aggressive invaders or infections. A human turned monstrous killing machine is dangerous, but one covered in wound-eating beetles is a whole other problem.

Lightning Worms

Summoning Difficulty: Good (+2) There’s a longer name for this thing, but it’s a mouthful. It looks like a cross between a lightning bolt and a centipede that never slows down enough so you can get a good look. It cannot sustain itself for long in stasis, though it can be kept in a properly prepared glass jar. Released, it is a flash and a bang, dangerous as a lightning strike, then gone. If, however, it’s released into something it can travel through, like a power line, it can maintain itself indefinitely. It can crudely manipulate electronic devices in this fashion, and can strike like a cobra from any point of electrical exposure—light sockets, outlets, and the like. Such a strike—Superb (+5) vs. Notice, Weapon:7—is a potent weapon, but disperses the creature, and many practitioners use them as fire-and-forget weapons. If one gets free, it tends to occupy a “nest” of wires, such as a house or office—they seem to have trouble travelling long distances across the grid. The only obvious sign of this is bizarre electrical oddities, at least until the creature spawns. A small lightning worm is the size of a true centipede and will crawl out of outlets, make its way into any electronics it can find—usually small gadgets—and stay there until connected to another grid where it can grow and eventually produce its own brood. If not, it will grow until its bonds can no longer contain it, then kill the next person it sees. Either way. Setting aside the infrastructure threat these things represent, they have one other bad habit—fresh corpses make for a really interesting set of wires to them. Living things don’t hold much interest to them, but a recently deceased body possessed of a sophisticated nervous system? It’s like a party. A shambling, not-dead, crackling, taser-touch undead party—at least until it burns out. The worms can be rough to spot, but completely cutting off the electricity kills them dead.

Lazarus Eyes

Summoning Difficulty: Good (+2) A white sphere, roughly the size of an egg, this creature is harmless and inert much of the time. If, however, it is put in the eye socket of a recently deceased person, it will extend tendrils into the brain and cause the body to begin regenerating. Provided that the flesh—and most importantly, the brain—is largely intact, then over the course of the next 12 hours, the person will be restored to life. If the brain is not intact, then the body will reanimate and just shamble about until it starves and dies again. Creepy, but mostly harmless. But if the brain is intact, then the person is really back—personality, memory, the works. The only different is that the Lazarus Eye can never quite match the original eye color, so the eyes are mismatched. The problem is, the Lazarus Eye lives on brain matter, and there are only two possible ways to get it—from the host or from someone else. The primary method is to drive the host to eat brains—or, secondarily, eat the host’s brain. This hunger may start with animals, but eventually they’ll be driven to cannibalism to get human brains. The brains of the recently deceased will suffice for a while, but will never sate the hunger like a fresh kill—or better yet, a still living meal. However, this doesn’t change the essential nature of the person doing this—they are doing this monstrous thing, fully aware that it’s monstrous, but they need to do it. They can’t stop, they can just take steps to not go after their friends and loved ones. And the Lazarus Eye supercharges their adrenal system, enhancing their reflexes and generally helping them become the apex predator they need to be—+1 to all Physical skills, -1 to all non-sensory Mental ones. It also lays a few eggs in their stomach, which can come up through the mouth should the host need it, such as to save a loved one or to help a loved one join them, so they can be safe. If the Eye isn’t fed regularly—once a month at the outset, but more and more frequently as time goes on—then it starts turning to the only food source at hand, eating its host’s brain, usually starting with memories and higher functions. When this happens, the result is a primal killing machine—+3 to all Physical skills, -3 to all non-sensory Mental ones—cracking skulls with its bare hands and scooping out the innards. If starved further, the Eye and the host both burn out.

Freet

Summoning Difficulty: Great (+3) A corruption of ifrit, these beings look like toads made of fire, but their fire rots and darkens as it burns, the opposite of purifying flame. As beings of energy, they are hard to physically harm, but are damaged or dispersed by clean water. It has no stress boxes or consequences, but it ignores any damage except immersion or heavy splashing, like a fire hose—it’s akin to putting out a bonfire (albeit one that’s trying to eat your face), though doing so will profoundly pollute the environs. When summoned, a Freet is usually sent after a target to kill them. Freets have effectively Great (+4) Fight and Stealth skills. If they successfully attack a target, they inflict a Burning Rot aspect on the target—a terrible, painful infection that slowly consumes the target. Until the aspect is removed, the character takes 1 stress every day, and cannot naturally recover stress or consequences. The only way to remove the aspect is to destroy the Freet and any spawn. Speaking of spawn, Freet lay their eggs in fires, little sparks that add a bit of bad odor to the flame. After three hours, the fire extinguishes, spawning a number of unbound Freets based on the size of the fire. A fireplace might produce one, while a forest fire could produce dozens.

The Dapper Gent

Summoning Difficulty: Poor (-1) He goes by many names, and summoning him is simply a matter of saying the right one in the right context. He will, however, only appear on his timetable, and once you have summoned him, he may visit you any time you’re alone. The Gent is the subject of many stories, but they have a few threads in common. He’s not physically present, and he may often appear only in reflections, as a shadowy outline, or in other impossible ways, though sometimes he simply appears normally. He is thin, though his complexion is a matter of some debate, and he is always dressed well, if oddly. He comes to a Summoner when they are alone, though the meaning of this has more to do with who notices them than literal solitude. He has appeared at parties and other large events where it is possible to be lost in a crowd, though no one but his erstwhile partner ever sees him. The Dapper Gent would like to help. He can’t physically do anything to help, mind you, but he knows a lot. He has a bottomless well of secrets, both arcane and mundane, and he’s happy to share. And he’s equally up front that he will require the occasional favor in return. The favors are fairly benign-seeming, though savvy practitioners have noted that they usually revolve around preserving and protecting information and rituals about the Void that might otherwise be lost. It is rare that he points his partner at those rituals directly, possibly because he benefits more from keeping his partner in the dark. One common favor is to “make an introduction” and teach someone else the Dapper Gent’s name. One may always refuse to do the favor, and the Gent will politely take his leave and not return. Unless, perhaps, you find yourself in very dire straits sometime later, at which point you may find the price has gone up substantially. For some, this is the extent of this slightly disturbing relationship, a little tit for tat, and nothing more. But it grows more complicated for those who he finds interesting. If you interest the Gent, he grows all the more helpful, and his help opens big doors, and with those come big problems. And those problems have a way of getting worse and worse until what you really want is a way out. And that is something the Dapper Gent is happy to provide. No one knows what happens after that.

Mineo Toadstool

Summoning Difficulty: Good (+3) When summoned, it’s a remarkably ugly, pustule-covered toadstool, perhaps a foot high. Rest your hand on it, and a similar pustule will appear on your hand – painless but disgusting. Lay that hand upon a sick person—or yourself—and the sickness will leave them, as the pustule seals up, and a smaller Toadstool grows on the back of your hand. It may be removed—painfully—and planted, where it will eventually grow as large as the first. So long as the Toadstool is planted and remains healthy, the disease remains in remission, though the health of all subsequent toadstools depends on the health of the first. One unpleasant addition—the diseases still run their course while within the Toadstool—their abrupt return includes all progress of the disease from the intervening time, often to terrible and dramatic effect. The Toadstool can also heal injuries, even repair traumatic injuries, but this is somewhat more problematic. The cured character looks fine on the outside, but internally, the “healing” is in the form of spongy yellow fungal growth that functions as the replaced flesh. This is not directly harmful—unless it has replaced brain matter, in which case the results are unpredictable, but rarely good. However, those healed in this fashion constantly generate spores. Mushrooms grow where they sleep. These are mundane, if poisonous, mushrooms, but they speed the general decay that the Mineo Toadstool brings. The mere presence of a Mineo Toadstool is unhealthy—not for the summoner, but for the general area. One is not so dangerous—flu might be a bit nastier in town, but not really noticeably. With each additional Toadstool, it gets worse. And as a bonus, if anyone dies while receiving the benefit of a toadstool—that is, while their disease is in remission—another Toadstool grows on their grave.

Variations and Options

Keeping It in Check

So, if the Void is so dangerous, why haven’t we lost the numbers game yet? Sooner or later something is going to come through, multiply exponentially, and scourge the planet. It’s just math. There are a couple of possible answers, any or all of which could be true. First, the world itself moves to reject the Void. Gaps heal over time, old summonings become useless through overuse, and there’s just a steady tendency toward keeping the Void out, which offsets its continual efforts to get in. Second, the world is not just humans. In a magical world, this might mean fae, spirits, or even gods who take steps to stop the worst incursions, but even in a reasonably modern world, it’s true. The big giant brains that humans are so proud of are also a reason that we’re vulnerable to so much of this stuff. A creature that can drain the color from your soul and leave you craving human flesh to fill the Void might be absolutely devastating to a small town, but to a coyote it’s still a delicious snack. Animals are less impressed by existential threats, and it would be disturbing to count the number of times the world has been saved by rats and spiders. Last, there may be people who actively work against this stuff. Stamping out information is hard, but not impossible, and this has all the earmarks of a good secret war. The need to control and destroy information while still staying aware of it and capable of responding is almost paradoxically hard. From such things, great stories are born.

Making Your Own

Now that you’ve seen a wide array of examples, here’s your opportunity to make the game your own. This should be a simple process, but that’s never the whole story—it’s one of those things that seems complicated at first, but gets easier and easier each time you do it, until you get to the point where it’s so instinctive that it’s hard to grasp how it was ever a problem. Wherever you are on that arc, hopefully we’ve got something here to help you out.

Balance

First, set aside your notions of balance. It’s an important concept, but not the way it’s usually used. Balance does not exist in the abstract—it is a specific element of play, and should always be looked at through the lens of play. Nothing is imbalanced on its own, it is only context that makes it so. A power that makes one character an omnipotent god might seem unbalanced, but when all the characters have it, that’s the foundation of a really neat game. It’s all about context. If so, how do you balance your power designs? Think about three things—balancing them within the group, within the setting, and within play.

Group Balance

When you design a power system, you need to make one of the following assumptions:

• Only some characters will use it.
• Every character will use it.

If you are designing a power that only some characters will use, then you need to think about how that power compares to other things that characters can do and what characters are trading off to get that power. At its simplest, this means you must have a compelling answer to the question “Why wouldn’t I buy this power?” Stormcallers is designed with this in mind. The reason you wouldn’t buy Stormcalling is because you’d need to sacrifice a skill slot—and an aspect—to buy in, and since Stormcalling is mostly combat-applicable, it’s a fairly equitable tradeoff. Even that carries the assumption that there are also things like weapon and armor rules in play. Without that assumption, Stormcalling is just a superior combat skill, and there’s no reason not to take it. But notice that the trick of balancing that came from another part of the game itself. This is illustrative of something important about balance within the group—the purpose is to make sure that each player remains active and engaged. If you make one part of the game much cooler than the rest, then you should expect players to gravitate to it, and either support that or find other ways for them to be cool. If you go the other way and assume that all your players will take a power, the sky’s the limit. You’ve diminished the risk of any one player overshadowing the others. Six Viziers is designed this way, and it illustrates the strengths and dangers of this approach. The abilities of the system are incredibly potent, and would be horribly spotlight-hogging in a game where only one character had them, but since everyone has similar potency, that’s not a danger. However, because the powers are so potent and diverse, care has to be taken that none of them dominate the game. Nothing makes either approach better than the other—the logic of your power system will usually reveal whether it should be some-characters or all-characters. But that distinction needs to be clear to you when you design it. A system that tries to do both is one begging for abuse and inconsistent results.

Setting Balance

Setting balance may seem like a strange idea, but it’s critical to good power design, because power design is setting design. Your power rules are an assertion about how the world works, and you need to think them through as such. Questions you need to consider include:

• Who can use the power system?
• How many users are there?
• How proficient/potent are they?
• How does the power impact the role of people who wield it?
• What are common results of the power in the setting?
• What are large-scale results of the power in the setting?

Obviously, the more tightly you constrain the power, the less you need to worry about these things, but that runs the risk of the power feeling like an overlay on the setting rather than a true part of it. As a bonus, the more you think through the logical ramifications of the power, the better you will be able to balance it—in every sense of the word. Voidcallers is a great illustration of a magic system balanced against the setting. Note that there are very few mechanical checks on the use of magic in Voidcallers—it’s almost all setting elements, both in terms of the behavior of practitioners and the impact of powers. Anyone can use the power, so practitioners put up hurdles to keep others from using it, and in doing so, hide information about their numbers and proficiency. The impacts of the power are all pretty terrible, but are—so far—held in check by luck or good intent. Change that, and you change the power. Pro tip: Want to shake up a game idea? Look at the answers to your setting balance questions and change one of them, and see what it does. For example, there’s no large-scale result of power in Voidcallers by default, but what if you change that? What if something ate Manhattan? Something so big and awful that it could not be covered up or hidden? What changes then?

Balance in Play

This is largely an extension of balance within the group, but it hinges on the question of how the powers drive play. Some games with powers are largely about the powers in question, such as supers games, or magi games in the tradition of Ars Magica. Other games, like classic adventuring or horror games, simply fold powers into the larger shape of play. Figure out which one your system does, and tune your powers appropriately. On a more practical, mundane level, pay attention to how the actual play of your system works at the table. If the mechanics demand more of your attention—because they require more rolls, for example—then it’s a good chance that power is sucking attention away from non-powered players. This can be addressed through thoughtful GMing, but better if it’s not a problem in the first place.

Your Toolbox

What follows are a number of incomplete magic system components. Some are ways to generate power, others are potential effects and outcomes. Strip them for parts, add them together, or take them apart to see about building your own systems.

Limits

Channeling

For skill-based magic, add a “Channeling” skill. When you want to do something magical, you use the channeling skill to summon up the power and—hopefully—release it. To do this, use a create an advantage action. In this case, the advantage you’re looking to create is a Summoned Power aspect. When it comes time to cast the spell—presumably on your next action—make a roll with a skill of Mediocre (+0), but use whatever bonuses you accrued in the advantage creation step—so, generally, you’ll get a +2, +4, or +6 through stacked free invocations and potentially paying a fate point. So far, so good—generate mana, generate an effect. Now to get a little bit more fiddly.

• If you want to cast the spell in one action, then you need to use an aspect—either for free, or by spending a fate point—without gaining the +2 bonus. This makes fast casting pretty shaky business. There may be a stunt that allows you to fast cast for free.
• Difficulty for channeling is Mediocre (+0), difficulty of actually casting depends on the spell. In either case, a result less than Average means the power has gotten out of control. The character takes mental stress equal to the difference between the roll and 0.
• Optional rule (Burnout): Casters may opt to pre-emptively take a consequence as part of the roll. In this case, the consequence box is checked, and the spellcasting roll gains a bonus equal to the amount of stress that consequence would usually prevent.
• Another optional rule: If you want the risk to be on the channeling side rather than the spellcasting side, then do the following. Have the channeler’s player declare a level of success, anywhere from Fair (+2) to Epic (+7), then roll an overcome against that declaration as a difficulty. If his roll falls short, he takes stress equal to the difference between his roll and his declared level of success. If the roll succeeds, then he uses that level of success for his actual spellcasting roll. The rule about needing an aspect or a stunt for fast casting is still in effect, so he’ll want to generate a boost, buy a stunt, or have a fate point handy for that.

Fated Mana Points

For a system that requires the expenditure of a fate point to do something magical, change the way refresh rules work. Each time refresh reduces by one, offset it by granting the character one mana point (MP). MPs refresh the same way that fate points do, and can be used to fuel spells or enhance magical skills, but cannot otherwise be used as FP. “Magical” aspects can generate MP rather than FP when used as ritual limitations. Exactly what those limitations are depend on the nature of the magic, but they might include things like saying daily prayer or forgoing armor. If the magic system uses more mana points, it’s easy change the refresh conversion rate—so a single drop in refresh might pay out 2 or 3 MP.

Blood Magic

Every point of physical stress a character takes generates one MP. Each physical consequence taken increases MP by its shift value—so a mild consequence generates two MP—as long as the consequence is a suitably bloody injury. MP remain until used for magic or until the stress or consequence is recovered.

Borrowed Power

Humans have the ability to manipulate magic, but not the ability to generate it. Power must come from other things, such as items, places, or beings of power, but each has its own unique prices and requirements. In this model, the term “magi” is used generically to represent those who use power, but it could just as easily be priests, sacred warriors, mystics, druids, or whomever else is appropriate for the setting. In all the cases below, pairing the source of power with an aspect makes it more robust. Non-aspected power sources are far more subject to disconnection at a GM’s whim. Items of Power can contain a small amount of mana, but must be kept on hand and used in conjunction with spellcasting. The vast majority of these are expendable trinkets or components, which provide their charge and then are useless. The creation of such trinkets takes a day’s effort in an appropriate environment—such as a lab for an alchemist, a forest for a druid and so on—a moderate cost, and a roll at Great (+4) difficulty. Success fills the item with one MP, and success with style fills it with 2 MP. A character can only maintain a number of such items equal to the numeric value of their magic skill. And yes, this means that stealing rival magic foci and locking them away is a great way to steal a rival’s power. It is also possible to create a more powerful item, one that replenishes itself daily. Doing so requires a month’s effort at great cost, and a similar difficulty. A magi may only have one such item, which makes it even worse if it is stolen. Places of Power grant mana to those who are attuned to them according to the specific rules of the place. Most often, they grant a single MP at sunrise each day, which must be used that day or lost at the next sunrise. However, certain places of power have unique benefits (such as granting extra MP, allowing the mage to keep a reservoir of 3MP, or allowing the attuned mage to breath underwater) or limitations (MP only usable for fire magic, all MP lost if you kill a seagull, etc.). Once the character has attuned to a location, the benefit remains in effect indefinitely, though many locations grant extra benefits if the character is actually present, most often with accelerated mana gain. However, getting and keeping attunement is rather tricky. Places of power are hotly sought after by magi and other magical beings, so there is usually a current owner with a vested interest in the place, especially since most places of power have a limit on the number of people who can attune to it. But even without worrying about such guardians, it is not always obvious how to attune to a particular place, so knowledge and research may be required. You will lose your attunement to a place of power if someone else attunes and kicks you out, either by taking your slot—if the place is at capacity—or by actively removing your connection. Details will depend on the location. As such, places of power are greatly valued by mages, but are also drivers of much magical politicking and bargaining. No one wants to spend all their time protecting their places of power, but everyone wants as many attunements as they can manage to get, and that balance is the linchpin of many a magical cabal. Beings of Power offer many of the benefits and qualifiers of places of power, but they skip the middleman. The mage cuts a deal with a being of power, agrees to abide by its rules, and gets a certain amount of power—and possibly other benefits—in return for the being getting constant insight into that power’s use, and allowing the being a constant connection to the mage—a connection that may well see use in further bargaining. The exact nature of beings of power can vary—gods, spirits, totem beasts, fae lords, axiomatic universal constructs, or nearly anything else might be a being of power. The trick with such beings is figuring out how to get in touch with them. For some, it’s easy, but for others, it may involve uncovering some deep secrets. There is nothing that keeps a magi from forming pacts with multiple beings, at least until those pacts come into conflict with one another. At that point, the player may discover that breaking these pacts also has a price.

Effects

A lot of these make reference to rolling a magic skill, but take that with a grain of salt—it doesn’t mean that there must be a magic skill. Rather it means that whatever skill you determined to control magic should be used here.

What’s in the Hat?

Whether it’s because the hat is magical or because its wearer has talent is unimportant—the key is that the wearer reaches into the hat and pulls out something. The rules for it are straightforward: Effect 1: At no cost, the character can pull out useless, color items. If the character spends an action pulling out useless things, they get a +1 bonus on any roll related to practical conjuration on their next action. Effect 2: At a cost of 1 MP, the character can produce something useful but unexceptional, such as a weapon or the right tool for the job at hand. There’s no skill roll associated with this, it’s just an enabler for subsequent skill rolls. Effect 3: At a cost of 2MP, the character may pull out something large, dangerous, or strange, which allows him to use his magic skill in lieu of another skill so long as he can physically describe how the object allows for the specific roll. For example, a giant hammer might make an attack, a spring might allow a jump, a cloud of smoke might allow for stealth, and so on. If you’ve used a particular trick before, take a –2 to the roll. Effect 4: At a cost of 3MP or more the character can draw out a creature or automaton capable of independent action. This is a skill-based extra—the caster selects the form of the creature and its primary skill, and the GM fills in any secondary skills as needed. At 3MP, this creature will have a Fair (+2) apex skill, which can be increased on a one-for-one basis by spending extra MP. Once the level is settled on, the caster makes a magic roll with a difficulty equal to the level of the creature. If the caster fails, the creature is still summoned, but it has a number of unexpected complications equal to the margin of failure. One or two complications might be inconvenient, but three or more is likely to produce an out-of-control threat or other big problem. Effect 5: A character may also spend all remaining MP (minimum

1. and make a “blind grab.” This pulls out something big, dramatic, and one way or another, it ends the current scene, but the GM determines the exact details. When this happens, the GM secretly rolls a single dF. On a [+], the resolution works out in the player’s favor—a whirlwind carries them to safety, her enemies are turned to frogs, and so on. On a [-], it works out against the player in some way—she ends up capturing herself, or making the situation worse. On a [ ], the situation changes dramatically, though not necessarily for the better or worse—enemies are turned into different kinds of enemies, the landscape turns into candy, and so on.

Tweaks

While this is traditionally a hat, there’s no reason it can’t be a cloak, a pouch, or something similar. It’s also possible to use this model to represent large, glowing energy constructs of the sort favored by comic books. In this case you remove effect 5, the bonus from effect 1, and make a failure of effect 4 require more MP (on a one-for-one basis). To cosmic it up, you could reduce the cost of effects 2 and 3 by one step. This is very close to sorcery as an all-purpose skill, but for certain genres—like supers—that may be apt. With a change in color, this also becomes an excellent system to handle certain sci-fi gadgets, especially ill-defined, all-purpose tools, even those with a bit of sonic to them. In this case, the physical manifestation is replaced with technobabble and interaction with technology. Effect 0 is an array of accidental electronic effects, effect 1 is largely unchanged, but effect 3 basically allows for “magic” to be used as super-hacking, doing anything that the local equipment is capable of. Effect 4 only applies when there’s an existing unit to take over—like a robot or cargo loader—and Effect 5 is pretty much off the table, unless the GM really likes “what happens if I push all the buttons?” scenarios.

The Six Profanities

Contrary to the crude suggestion, the six profanities are actually the names of six of the greatest devils of hell. Their names cannot be sufficiently encompassed by tongue or pen, but each has a distinct icon that can grant a fraction of their dark power. The power is easy to use—it need only be permanently inscribed onto living skin via tattoo, branding, or scarification to grant the power—but the knowledge of such marks is wrapped in secrecy. It is rumored that only the devils themselves know the secret, and they take the form of mortals to share it, in the hopes of snaring souls. The profanities have many names, most unprintable—we’ll use the more common names here, though that does not guarantee that everyone will call them that. Arrow allows the user to perform line-of-light teleportation to a maximum range of about 100 feet (3 or 4 zones). The character’s body needs to be able to traverse the distance, so the teleportation may go up, or over a pit, but it cannot go through a wall or grating, and will stop short of hitting an obstacle. This process only requires one to take a step, so a character may actually cover great distance by “skipping” along multiple jumps in sequence. Each jump costs one MP. Ironskin provides protection from physical harm. When the character takes physical damage, he may retroactively spend MP to gain armor equal to the number of MP spent. Additionally, if the character knows a blow is coming with more than a moment’s notice, he may spend 3 MP to steel himself against it and ignore all damage. While this is of no use in a fight, it can be useful for hard landings or staying the executioner’s blow, but beware that the protection only lasts for a heartbeat. He may survive the impact of an oncoming train, but that doesn’t guarantee he’ll survive the landing as it knocks him off the tracks, or worse, drags him under the train. Pomp grants the power, for 1MP, to converse with any dead body that is still in good enough physical shape to speak. Convincing the corpse to do anything other than scream is a different problem entirely. Rider allows a character to spend 1 MP to “jump” into the mind of any mammal in her line of sight. While in its mind, she has no access to its thoughts nor control of its actions, but she has access to its senses, and may ride along for about two minutes. The player may opt to spend an additional MP to perform another “jump” to another target within her line of sight. This also extends the ride for another 2 minutes. Additional 2-minute periods cost 1 MP each. While this is happening, the character’s body stands helplessly, staring into space, making her easy prey. Sight grants awareness of supernatural phenomena, though it’s erratic. When magic is afoot, the character gets a tingle, and may spend 1 MP to get details regarding what is going on. The sight can also carry prophetic visions or dreams, though those are usually more disturbing than useful. Terror generates an aura of terror around the character for 1 MP. The aura lasts for the duration of the scene, and the character’s attacks may inflict physical or mental stress, as desired. Animals with any level of self-preservation will not enter the same zone, and will do whatever they can to leave it. For an additional MP, the character may look a thinking target in the eye and use intimidation to create a Fear of [Character] aspect on them. If successful, he may freely invoke that aspect for the remainder of the scene. If a character doesn’t have enough MP to use a power, they can still do so, but at risk to their soul. Pick an aspect and underline it—the character gets the MP they need, but that aspect is now tainted. In the fiction, this means it twists in dark ways when it comes up, and mechanically it no longer produces fate points when compelled, instead granting one MP. Such tainted aspects offer up dark compulsions at times, so the power that comes with the taint comes at a great risk.

Tweaks

There may be more powerful versions of each mark, though what is required to get them is best not discussed. Arrow: For 2 MP, range can be increased as far as can be clearly seen. Ironskin: Unarmed blows now strike like a metal weapon, and the character may add +2 per MP spent to any feat of pure strength. Pomp: For 3 MP the character may animate any body in physically good enough shape to move for a scene. It will follow basic instruction, and while it’s not much in a fight, it’s pretty freaking creepy. Rider: At a cost of 3 MP per jump, the character’s physical body disappears. It reappears behind the last subject. Sight: For 1 MP, a character may discover something hidden about a person or thing. There is no guarantee it’s what she wants to know, and it’s only one use per target. Terror: By spending an additional 1 MP (2 MP total), the character can increase the intensity of his aura of fear. He now inflicts mental damage equal to any physical damage he inflicts when he attacks.

Pieces of Power

Let’s assume you’ve got an idea for a magic system, and it makes sense on its own. You can explain it in normal language, and you have a rough sense of how it’s going to work in your game. Now it’s time to start thinking about mechanics, and how to represent your system in the game. As a first word of caution, don’t feel obliged to solve every problem with a mechanic. If your magic system is easily described and clearly understood, it may require nothing more than a skill or two to represent facility with it. Be careful about immediately jumping to the mechanics—make sure there’s a real problem before you introduce a mechanic to solve that problem, and your finished product will be much stronger. When it comes time to introduce a mechanic, there are two things that the mechanic needs to do—or at least consider—an outcome and a limitation. Outcome is obvious—you want to be able to throw around fireballs, so the effect handles things like how you target them, how big they are, how much damage they do, and so on. The limitation is less sexy, but more important: it answers the question of why you would do anything but throw fireballs. What’s important to note is that the entire effect may not exist in only one place in the rules. It will often be threaded into other rules in ways that are often obvious once you look for them, but are easy to overlook if you don’t think about them. Magic systems tend to be constructed with limitations serving as a frame for outcomes. That is, there will be a broad set of rules that control when and how magic can be used—what spells are known, how often they can be cast, who can cast them, and so on—while the rules for outcomes, like blowing things up with fireballs, are often smaller pieces of rules-text, limited to that particular spell and those like it. This may seem like a very fiddly distinction, but if you’re designing your own magic system, then this is something you really need to get your head around. The second dial gives you immense power and flexibility when you do your own design, because it lets you choose the axis of change. As an example, consider the classic system of memorizing spells to cast them. The container—and by extension, the biggest limiter—controls what and how many spells a character can cast, while the outcomes are the individual spells. This allows for a lot of versatility, because you can change the limitations without changing the outcomes—perhaps by introducing another character class that gets the same spells at a different rate—or change the outcomes without changing limitations, by adding or removing spells. Changing outcomes is no big deal. Swapping out a spell is easily done and easily fixed, and it’s a great way to do cool things. Changing the limitations is a much bigger deal, full of potentially unexpected consequences. It’s also where the real power of hacking lives. Perhaps more importantly, if you understand this division, you understand how you can build an entirely new magic system by changing one or the other, rather than needing to rebuild entirely from scratch.

Limitations

Limitations usually take one of two forms—use or opportunity. Limitations of use impact who can use magic, while limitations of opportunity speak to how and when magic can be used. The first thing to consider when thinking about a magic system is who can use it. In fiction, the answer might be “anyone,” but even then it will probably need some form of representation. Setting aside limitations within the fiction, the gateway for using magic usually takes the form of one or more of the following:

• A new skill
• A specific aspect
• A stunt
• Refresh cost
• Opportunity
• Resource cost

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Stunts and Refresh Notice that we treat stunts and refresh as two separate things. This is because they are separate building blocks, and while the default build says a stunt costs one refresh, that’s just one build. If you’re constructing your own system, then you have the freedom to handle them differently. This opens up a lot of doors in terms of what a stunt is. Practically, a stunt is its own little rule—or rule exception—and while their number and nature are restricted by refresh cost in the baseline, you can break free from that structure. As an example, Stormcallers and Six Viziers both effectively give a bundle of stunts, and only charge refresh for the bundle, basically providing a discount for the thematic grouping.

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New Skills

Although adding a “magical” skill seems like the least expensive option to allow magic, bear in mind the opportunity cost—the character is giving up some other skill to pursue magic, so there is a tradeoff. It is possible to fold magic into one or more existing skills, but if you do that, then you’ll probably also be demanding some other cost.

Specific Aspect

Requiring a specific aspect is both very potent and rather trivial. Obviously, aspects say a lot about a character, but unless the required aspect is particularly boring—and why would you want that?—then it’s not much of a cost. That is not to say there’s no point in requiring an aspect. Magic often has a setting component, so an aspect can reinforce elements of the fiction. Aspects can also be used to illustrate a choice in a setting with multiple favors of magic, especially if your expectation is that all characters will have magic of some sort. In this case, aspects are less about cost and more about differentiation, which can be very robust.

A Stunt

Stunts make for a nice, obvious gateway into any system of magic, and much like different aspects might be gateways into different styles of magic, so might different stunts. For example, if you’re using a magic system that requires magic points, different stunts might represent different ways to generate those points. Of course, since stunts can also be the outcomes of a magic system, you get the potential for some sophisticated interplay. It is entirely possible to build a “tree”-style magic system using nothing but stunts that depend on other stunts as prerequisites. Such systems are fun, but they often take a lot of bookkeeping to construct well.

Refresh

Refresh is probably the most serious cost, and it carries a lot of potential meaning—specifically, what does the loss of refresh mean? When we introduced the idea of refresh in The Dresden Files RPG, it served two purposes—it provided for characters with a wide range of power by trading freedom for that power, but it also underscored that the line between man and monster was a slim one, and that it was possible to be consumed by your power—that is, reduced to zero refresh. While there is no obligation to make zero refresh mean the exact same thing, the key is that a zero refresh represents a loss of agency. Mechanically it means the character is basically unable to do anything but what their aspects dictate. Something implicitly part of a magic system are the different meanings loss of agency can have. It could mean character death to go to zero refresh, certainly, but it is often more interesting if it means the character is swept up in their magical nature, as such characters make great villains or foils down the road. The catch is that while refresh as a cost should feel like the danger of the slippery slope, that’s not the reality. Dropping to zero refresh is basically a player choice to retire the character, not something that actually comes up in play. If you’re okay with that, then cool, but if you really want it to be a danger in play, then you’re going to need to find a way to make the choice come up more often.

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In a system where each magical aspect reduces refresh by one but increases magic points, you might rule that a character can always choose to “sell out” one of their aspects, converting it to a magical one, thereby increasing their mana pool. Additionally, at the moment this happens, have a character’s stress track and mana pool restored to full. Now you have a reason for this to happen in play, as the character surrenders to their power to win an unwinnable fight.

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Opportunity

One interesting option for limits on effects is to require that they are not universally available, but rather depend upon the appropriate opportunity. Opportunity may be defined in a wide variety of ways, but largely fall into one of two categories. World opportunities are those that depend upon elements in the game setting. Spells might only be cast at certain times or places, or in response to certain events. This is a classic trope for a lot of horror fiction, where things may be called “when the stars are right.” World opportunities tend to operate more like plot hooks than anything else, because they drive play toward those opportunities. If the dead can be revived in the Lap of Shialla, then that’s a great reason to go there. If the Dark One can only be summoned during a lunar eclipse on the Plains of Blood, then the adventure pretty much writes itself. However, world opportunities are pretty restrictive for players—world opportunity is a very high cost of magic, and if it’s the only way to do things, then you probably need no other costs. Not to say that it’s unplayable—it can work very well in conjunction with high Lore characters—but it’s got very specific restrictions. Alternatively, world opportunities can be used in conjunction with another magic system to transcend the usual limitations of magic—so spells that are more powerful, or otherwise impossible, might be castable under the right circumstances. Structurally, this is still pretty much just using magic as a plot hook, and that’s fine. Gameplay opportunities are another approach entirely. In this case, something involving game rules must happen before magic is possible. This could be intentional, such as spending an action summoning power, or incidental, such as an ability that makes boosts do something unique. Intentional opportunities tend to just be speed bumps to magic, and as such, they’re very popular as balancing mechanics. The thinking goes that if magic can be used less often, it’s okay if it’s more potent. Sadly, this approach has some hidden weaknesses. Frequency is a poor thing to rely on for balance because it’s feast or famine—it tends to mean that a caster’s player is either bored, doing nothing but gathering power, or overwhelming. If you pursue a model like this, try to find a way to make the non-casting part of casting to be fun and engaging as well. One trick is to allow “charge” to accumulate throughout more interesting action. Alternately, magic can be a colorful expansion to the existing rules. Consider using magic to expand default outcomes. If you attack with Earth Kung Fu, then a boost might get you an aspect, but it might also knock your opponent back a zone. This can seem a little counterintuitive, if a player thinks in terms of “I want to knock him back,” but it makes much more sense when you think of it in terms of expanding normal capabilities. There is also the matter of access opportunity, which exists more in the realm of character creation. Magic might require a magic skill or an appropriately magical aspect, as have been discussed previously.

Resources

Resources involve a more literal cost to casting spells. The classics include mana, spell points, or expendable spells, but are not limited to that. A spell might require invoking an aspect—and casting the spell rather than taking the +2 bonus—taking stress, or even taking consequences. Obviously, the price tag will impact the frequency of magic use. Resources can also add an extra level of color to a magic system—perhaps resources aren’t always needed, but can be used to make magic more potent. Things like stress and consequences can be fun for this, representing powerful, dangerous magic. One caveat, though—try not to hook this into explicit combat magic. When it becomes a math problem of “I can take X stress to do Y stress to opponents,” then it feels a little less magical. Resources and opportunities can overlap a bit in the area of player skills. A secondary skill roll to generate mana requires both a resource (mana) and an opportunity (the secondary skill roll). This may seem muddy, but it’s actually a good thing—tying more of the character’s elements together is a good thing. One other obvious resource is fate points, and it’s reasonable that they fuel magic just the same way that they do aspect invocations. You might even make “mana” into a subcategory of fate points.

Effects

We’ve talked through all the things that can control the use of magic, but what can magic do once you use it? In terms of fiction and color, the range of possibilities is broad indeed, but for the moment we’re looking at the mechanical tools we have for expressing mechanical effect. Although it’s possible to create entirely new mechanics for these things, it’s best to start with the building blocks that we already have. As with limitations, there’s a core list of elements we can build from:

• Fiat
• Aspects
• Skills
• Stunts
• Stress & Consequences
• Extras

Fiat

This is a fancy way to say “you describe something and it happens.” There are huge swaths of magic that can be covered by this. In some cases, this may be all that’s necessary, especially if the table is comfortable with it, but it’s a potential source of discomfort when expectations begin to differ. Still, there are a lot of effects that are best handled as fiat, even if they’re mechanically important—the magical effect may be a gateway to other rules. For example, if magic allows a character to breathe underwater, that’s a fiat effect—it’s simply true. There’s no need to assign an aspect or a skill to represent it, unless some other element of the spell—like an inability to breathe out of water—comes into play. You could assign an aspect that never gets invoked or compelled, but the effect is much the same. That said, once the character is underwater, there are still other mechanical elements to engage—athletic skills, for example. Magic with mechanically trivial fiat effects can still be insanely potent or important in a setting. Consider something like eternal youth—there aren’t a lot of mechanics involved, but it’s an effect that could drive an entire campaign. The fact that fiat effects don’t require you to think about mechanics means that you should think all the more about the non-mechanical elements.

Aspects

Aspects can be a lot like fiat, but carry just a little bit more weight. If all the aspect does is reinforce the “officialness” of a fiat element, then that’s fine, but you can also hang mechanical effects off of them. A lot of these effects can be covered with the usual rules for invocations and compels. Magic just tends to allow for greater flexibility in terms of the logic and color of aspect use, and while that may not seem like a lot on paper, it can actually be incredibly robust at the table. That said, it’s entirely reasonable to use magic to add additional effects to an aspect invocation or compel. These additional effects may be fiat, or have specific mechanical effects. An aspect like Shadow Step might be invoked to cross many zones at once. An aspect like Armor of the Light might be invoked—and used up—in lieu of taking a consequence. One thing to consider is whether or not the effect creates a new aspect or adds a new effect to an existing aspect. Sometimes the logic of the effect makes the answer obvious, but when in doubt, try to extend an existing aspect. Not only does this reduce aspect bloat, it strongly encourages engaging with existing aspects.

Skills

Magic can be used in lieu of skills, and in fact one of the most common simple systems of magic is to use a magic skill in place of another skill, such as throwing around bolts of force as the functional equivalent of a weapons skill. This is fine as far as it goes, but it only holds up so well as a general-purpose tool. More interestingly, magic can be used to expand the scope of existing skills, moving them into the realm of the supernatural. These might be simple expansions of capability, such as perception skills extending awareness into the infrared or spirit realm, or they might be mechanical hooks, like “The Hammer of Terror,” altering the weapon skill so that when you generate a boost, you also inflict mental stress.

Stunts

Magic can add stunts or alter existing stunts, but the most common use you’re going to see for stunts is the addition of magical stunts—stunts that have magical effects that are often more potent than normal stunts, but which are offset by costs or requirements. The most obvious example of this is a stunt that lets you do something magical, like line-of-sight teleportation or turning into a rat, but at a cost. The cost may be as simple as the expenditure of mana points or may be something complex and ritualistic. Because stunts are such self-contained rules elements, the components of cost and balance are much closer to the surface than in other approaches, so it’s important to think about them from square one.

Stress and Consequences

An easy and obvious effect of magic is to fiddle with stress and consequences. Healing magic may recover them or protection magic may increase capacity. Just be careful that this doesn’t make magi into bulletproof juggernauts—unless that’s your intent.

Extras

Magic is a great way to get permission for an extra. Whether it’s summoning a hound of fire or calling lightning down to crackle along the length of your sword, extras can be a reasonable way to handle them. If you do this, it’s a great illustration of how to “plug in” a magic system. The extras rules are quite robust, but they’re also very open-ended. If the entirety of the magic system was just the ability to create extras, they would quickly get out of hand, so some sort of limitations are in order. The limitations that you use should be consistent enough to feel like a coherent magic system. If you make sure that each new extra makes sense in the context of existing ones, you will find that the logic of your magic system can emerge quite organically.