Magic

Bite-sized Review: Pyramid 3/01 – Tools of the Trade – Wizards

Getting an eBook reader means I finally have some more time to read through my extensive (and mostly unread) collection of GURPS PDFs. Since it’s mainly snatches in public transport and before bed, Pyramid proves to be better for this with its semi-short articles. Let’s see how long I can keep it up

Cover of Pyramid 3.01 - Tools of the Trade - Wizards. The Illustration shows a wizard with a staff riding a magic carpet.

Facts

Authors: Matt Riggsby, Sean Punch, Steven Marsh, Andy Vetromile, Stefan Jones, Matthew Pook
Date of Publication: 21/11/2008
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count:  48 (1 title page, 1 content page, 2 pages ads)
Price: $9 (PDF), $ 0.2 per page of content; Score of 8/10 ($500 Pyramid 3 Bundle: $4.10, $ 0.091 per page, Score 10/10)
Preview: https://warehouse23.com/products/pyramid-number-3-slash-01-tools-of-the-trade-wizards

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

The first issue of Pyramid 3 starts off with only two GURPS features (and “‘.’ Is For Full-Stop Drum” only has a two “monster” stat blocks that tie it to GURPS), which is way less than in later issues, where often only the Recommended Reading and Random Thought Table weren’t explicitly for GURPS. Most of the articles have a GURPS-y slant though in that the authors did think of the way magic would impact the world or stories. In my definition that makes it more “cheesy” (fluffy) than “meaty” (crunchy).

Theme-wise it’s solid, even though you could argue that neither a guildhall, nor being mysterious is a physical tool of the trade – but that’s splitting hairs. The only odd one out is the Full-Stop Drum, which still ties into GURPS Alphabet Arcane, which sort of ties it back to the tools motif.

Meat

The main meat article actually deals with flesh – more specifically undead flesh. “Necromantic Tools” by Sean Punch (5 pages) shows aspiring death mages how to graft undead arms to their bodies, how to make skull-tipped wands and a better way to deal with the usual zombie horde as an ally group (incidentally providing a considerable upgrade to the lackluster zombie template from GURPS Magic). The staffs are a little on the boring side, but the rest has a lot of meaty detail.

Apart from that, there are just the monster stats from the “Full-Stop Drum” and a couple of hints scattered through the other articles. The living zombies and the giant badger are nice, with the former being more generally useful.

All in all, nothing bad, some really good stuff, but not a whole lot.

Meat score: 7

Cheese

This is where the issue really shines. Matt Riggsby’s “The Guildhall of the Hermetic Brotherhood” (10 pages) shows what a magical disputation society come regulatory body / research fellowship might look like in a quasi-medieval fantasy setting. Despite the title, the focus is evenly split between the organisation and the building itself with the organisation being quite a bit more interesting. Disregarding the fact that guilds were normally not kingdom-wide organisations, Matt’s take on the whole thing is quite realistic and interestingly written. The guildhall fits the quite mundane nature of the society. Alongside the six pages of text we get four pages of battlemaps with hexes for the guildhall (more about those under sauce). The only thing that’s missing for me are the cellars, but depending on the town that’s not unrealistic either.

Steven Marsh’s “Tooling with Curses” (5 pages) veers into the more immaterial toolbox of wizards and more on the GM’s side too. We get three interesting, non-debilitating and somewhat abusable curses and three boxes and a lead-in on the more general topic of when and why to use curses. A very nice and tight selection, even though I’d have preferred one more curse maybe.

Next we get an (uncredited) instruction of how to fold a “Wizard’s Letter” (5 pages) with steps simple enough for me to follow. The example letter ties things back to the Hermetic Brotherhood again, which is nice. The letter is a neat prop, but nothing extraordinary. I’m a bit mystified as to why they provided the blank back of the letter too, but maybe they thought it was a nice parchment-y colour for printing out. I think there are better options for that, but let’s not quibble about a first issue.

Andy Ventromile’s “Out of the Rough – Magic Gems in RPGs” (6 pages) is a short, but thorough system-neutral treatment of the use of gemstones in fantasy magic. It covers many aspects and, of course, the use of powerstones in GURPS makes this especially interesting to GMs and players in SJG’s house system, but everything is kept generic. Andy gets a little side-tracked in politics in the middle, but it’s still interesting stuff. Just would have liked to see such in a longer treatment. There are only six types of gems (and one of them is pearls) treated individually, so don’t come looking here for correspondences (you can find those in GURPS Thaumatology).

Stefan Jones’ “‘.’ Is For Full-Stop Drum” (3 pages and really awkward to quote something with so many apostrophes / quotation marks in a row) is the odd one out in this issue. It describes a clan-based swamp fisher society that while it uses magic and has some ancient magical history can really only claim a link to theme by way of being part of GURPS Alphabet Arcane. Spoiler: The eponymous drum is very much not a tool for wizards except in the sense of bringing about the apocalypse.

So how does it fare as a description of a society and its past? It’s a decidedly mixed bag. There is some interesting colour, but descriptors such as “savages”, a tradition of contests to gain more women and rigid separate gender roles weren’t en vogue in 2008 and certainly aren’t today. I’d charitably call it a homage to Lovecraftian and leave it at that. What can you do with the whole thing? Not much unless you really want to bring about or prevent an apocalypse, and not a very interesting one at that (but see the meat section).

“Random Thought Table – Seriously Mysterious” (2 pages) by Steven Marsh is thankfully quite a bit fresher and talks about why and how to make wizards look mysterious with a lot of useful tips on how to pull it off in game. Again, this is a generic article, but it’s quite easy to tie it in to GURPS and most systems that have skills. It’s more tricks of the trade actually, but it plays around with some common tropes, showing ways to subvert them. A very fun read.

The humour section was quite mixed again. Murphy’s Rules was fun (at the time) and it was nice seeing Frederick Brackin’s name in print again – a big GURPS fan and supporter, may he rest in peace. “Items Found in a Dead Wizard’s Satchel” made me chuckle, but the “Fnordplay” left me stumped – and I wasn’t the only one (title was fun at least).

For a second article Andy Vetromile gives us “Recommended Reading – Tools of the Trade” (2 pages), which at a first glance is more about wizardly boardgames, but the author does include some nice ways to use board-game materials in your RPGs as well as pointing out some interesting ways of working magic in Deadlands and Unknown Armies. Not an absolute must-read, but a nice little addition.

The second recommended reading “Wizards and Gaming” (2 pages) by Matthew Pook is about a (2008) review of wizardly TTRPGs (and a good helping of how wizards work in D&D, 4th edition). It hasn’t aged too well (e.g. even GURPS had a supplement about a magic school by now), but still has some interesting bits if you like older games.

“Last Words” (1 page) features an interview with Chad Underkoffler, which again gives some helpful characterisation tips – a nice way to close the issue.

All in all, there is some pretty good stuff in there with only five pages falling below average.

Cheese score: 8

Sauce

While the writing is above average to pretty good, the same cannot be said of the art. The cover is nice but was already seen in GURPS Fantasy. The humour page had one decent and new image and a tired old one and there are three more reused third edition illustrations that serve little purpose other than providing visual way-points. What else? There are the folding instructions for the wizard’s letter and while these are not especially inspiring they do serve their purpose better than many online tutorials I’ve seen. Then there’s the map of the Guildhall by Matt Riggsby. I’ve never been a big fan of his maps and this one looks straight out of a Campaign Cartographer 3 tutorial, but it does help with visualising the place. Also it can be used as a battle map. Minus points for not providing battle maps as an image file, though. Virtual tabletops were a thing back then too (and so were printers).

In the end this comes in slightly above average, which is still pretty good for GURPS standards, unfortunately.

Sauce score: 6

Generic Nutritional Substance

As far as roleplaying supplements about magic go, this one is pretty generic. It favours traditional fantasy, but not completely. Several articles can be used in many kinds of settings. It does pretty much require some sort of fantasy, though, being about magic after all.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 7

Summary

I remember not liking this issue much, when I first read it, but that might have been due to the fact that I loved the online Pyramid with its weekly offerings and disliked the map a lot. I might not have read it from cover to cover, because my time for that was rapidly diminishing. Re-reading it now, I’d say it’s a  roughly average issue of Pyramid 3. Certainly not the best entry point in the series, but not bad either and a fine zine in its own right. It’s more generically useful than many of the later issues too – even outside of GURPS.

If you are planning on buying the Pyramid/3 Bundle for $500 you get an even better deal, but maybe grab some issues from the middle of its run first (or read them over a friend’s shoulder) to see whether it’s your cup of tea. Back in the day all of us online subscribers got this even cheaper as part of half-a-year subscription deal, meaning we paid less than $20 for $54 in product. I want to say that I still think this was extremely generous on the part of SJGames.

Total score: 7.3
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (40%), Cheese (25%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a meat-oriented book. A “cheesy” setting- or drama-orientied book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 7.65 (8.65 as Pyramid/3 Bundle)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells

It’s been only a six weeks since the last GURPS offering from Sean Punch and while I would still like to see a more tightly packed release schedule, I am more than content to wait if everything we get is the same quality as GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting – Caverntown and GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells, both of which plug some big holes in heroic fantasy line-up of GURPS.

GURPS Magic - Artillery Spells

Facts

Author: Sean Punch (a.k.a. Dr. Kromm)
Date of Publication: 17/05/2018
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 31 (1 title page, 1 content page, 1 index page, 1 page ad)
Price: $8.00 (PDF), $ 0.30 per page of content; Score of 4/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0154_preview.pdf

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

 

The GURPS Magic – XYZ Spells series are mini-grimoires. They always contain a large list of spells (50 in this case) and an introduction that helps the reader to put them into perspective. Unlike Plant Spells (a favourite of mine since I helped playtest it), Artillery Spells  doesn’t focus on a single college, but on a type of spell – namely those that allow a mage to damage and kill multiple low- to mid-threat foes. It is the counterpart to Death Spells which have a good chance of killing one worthy opponent in one fell swoop.

The spells cover most of the colleges with only Food and Knowledge being left-out, which is probably a good thing. Every college having a death spell was a bit weird already and I don’t think we needed more of that. GMs do get a lot of information about building their own artillery spells, so readers don’t need to worry that they’ll never see their favourite food fight spells.

The chapter on spell-building is five pages long and discusses both the types of spells that can be used as artillery and how to balance their stats. It’s deliberately not

The spells themselves form the majority of the volume (21 pages) and are unevenly distributed over the colleges with the elemental colleges usually getting more and the ones less commonly associated with damage-dealing less. A couple of helpful boxes on larger topics are distributed throughout this chapter.

Meat

There’s a lot of meaty rules goodness in this book, beginning with dramatically expanded ways for dealing damage to multiple opponents. Cones, emanations, bombardment, ricocheting shots, swarms, contagious damage, portals, damage that moves the targets around – it’s all in there. Indeed, the book goes a long way towards making damage-dealing spells less generic. There are some common themes like cones and repeating area damage, but many spells have unique and mostly entertaining mechanics.

The spells range from merely efficient, workmanlike spells like Improved Explosive Fireballs and Cloud of Doom to fast but unpredictable damage-dealers like Twisting Terror and Mana Storm to atmospheric spells like Vengeful Staff (think Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad-dûm), Doom Wish and Spirit Incursion.

There are mass mind-control spells that induce everybody to stab each other, psychic screams, magically-animated weapons that attack everybody in an area, huge fists that pummel targets from the sky, sun-light lasers, mine-fields, the whole shebang. A couple of spells are slightly edited versions of older spells that had been introduced after GURPS Magic, but most are completely new. As there are far more ways to deal damage over an area,  the spells feel much more unique than the ones in Death Spells. The spread also feels appropriate and there are a no obvious gaps.

A few of the spells are a little complicated (Collision, Sun’s Arc, Ironweed), but most of them are not much more complicated than what we’re used from former publications. Magery requirements are handled flexibly as is availability. The spells are almost all very hard (except for Self-Destruct) and Legality Class 1 or 0.

Especially interesting are the spell-building guidelines (the good doctor deliberately didn’t call them a system), which give the GM good ideas for balancing their own spells and making sure the spells in the grimoire don’t upset their campaign. GMs also get hint on fitting damage effects by college. There are also boxes on defence and the ever-popular topic of spell maintenance. Kromm takes especial care to show the reader how to differentiate artillery spells from boss killers. You don’t want your goblin horde eradicator to take out the dark lord or the archmage by accident.

All in all, there’s not much missing here. Even the page-count is half a dozen pages higher than the previous volumes in the series, despite Death Spells having a similar number of spells.

 

Meat score: 8.5

Cheese

As this is a spell catalogue there’s not that much in the way of world-building information present. There are, however, boxes on how to introduce artillery spells to existing campaigns and how to fit them into a fantasy legal framework, how to frame a heroic self-sacrifice by dangerous spells and how to fit the new spells into divinely-granted spell-casting tied to Power Investiture. There are hints as to which spells fit which genres best, but the vast majorities are slanted towards generic fantasy with a good dash of dungeon-delving.

For a generic spell collection there is not much more you could ask for.

Cheese score: 6.5

Sauce

The writing here is less tongue-in-cheek than most of Kromm’s Dungeon Fantasy titles, but there are the odd joke or two. It’s mostly enjoyable, though it does get a bit technical in some of the spell descriptions.

The art is, while not great, at least appropriate to the spells mentioned, sometimes more than I would have thought possible with reused generic art from Dan Smith & Co. We get a whopping five black and white illustrations and the cover isn’t actually doing them justice. Still, it’s a far cry from what other companies or even enterprising freelancers like Douglas Cole and his Lost Hall of Tyr.

Still, it’s a good effort for our favourite system.

Sauce score: 6

Generic Nutritional Substance

There are probably few campaigns outside of traditional fantasy and Technomancer that will use all the spells presented here. There are, however, a fair number of spells that work in secret magic, illuminati and horror games. Whether a dozen spells are worth the price of admission, everybody must decide for themselves.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 6

Summary

GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells plugs a hole in the GURPS Magic system by presenting interesting damage-dealing spells that don’t all work in the same way and merely exchange damage types. Together with Death Spells it goes a long way of remedying one of the criticisms that are frequently levelled against the system, namely that its spells are boring and generic. It’s a good buy for everyone who likes the versatility of the system, but wants a little more flavour.

Total score: 7.7 (very good)
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (50%), Cheese (15%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a cheese-oriented book. A “cheesy” story- or world-building-oriented book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 5.85 (above average)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

 

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Fixing the GURPS Magic Framework

Fixing GURPS Magic is a two-part process and this post is merely going to offer ideas for the first step: fixing the general framework. A comprehensive bug-fix for GURPS Magic would have to review every single spell, many of which need more than just a quick once-over.

Cooking It up

There are three main problem areas in GURPS Magic and they’re all interdependent:

1) IQ + Magery beats investing points in spells
Unless you want to build a one-spell-pony, the rules-as-written don’t encourage you to invest more than a single  point per spell. IQ and a level of Magery may cost 30 points, but the number of interesting spells is great enough that most mages will have at least twenty spells in two or three colleges. Add in the general versatility of IQ and in-depth study of a spell will never make sense. Official builds from 3rd Edition supported this method with rare exceptions and 4th Edition’s Dungeon Fantasy follows that trend. Not only does this demote spells from real skills to quasi-perks, it invalidates a lot of interesting archetypes.

2) Generalists beat specialists
Magery is one of the traits with the greatest number of canon special limitations, but the one limitation we often see in fiction or the-other-game sees relatively little use on character sheets: One-College-Only. At -40% it offers a decent discount (and can be combined with other limitations), but reduces versatility by something fierce. Going from 800+ to on average 40 spells is not the main problem. The problem is lacking access to the main utility spells (Recover Energy, Magesight, Armor etc.) offering only measly 4 points / level in exchange. Tying maximum Magery to points invested instead of level alleviates this somewhat, but even then other limitations are the better option.

3) Everybody just aims for skill 15/20/25…
Arguably the biggest problem with GURPS Magic are the “free maintenance” break-points. While it is a cute idea to have an extremely skilled mage maintain spells for free, it does turn the game into “Buffing 101”. Combined with the fact that all spells (barring very hard ones) are likely to be at the same skill level this just makes generalists even more powerful − and boring.

Before I search for possible solutions, let’s look at what GURPS Magic does right − something that’s not done very often, but if it was a whole lot of garbage, why even try to fix it?

1) Spells are skills
This fits a lot of tropes in fantasy fiction. While some wizards are masters of improvisation, many do indeed use spells and invocations learned by rote. Even if they can be varied, that often has strict limits. What could and should be changed, though, is that spells are all based on the same attribute and can never be of easy or average difficulty. Some existing spells could also be changed into techniques based on similar spells.

2) You’ve got to learn to walk before you can run
Prerequisite trees are logical in a way that immediately resonates with players. Of course, you need to learn how to conjure little flames before you start throwing around fireballs. The individual trees might not always be completely logical (or easy to follow), but the concept is sound. This comes to the fore when some spells (especially the Weather college) need solid grounding in two or more colleges. This could be expanded even further

3) Great talent can overcome restrictions
One of the few changes 4th Edition introduced what that a high level of Magery can overcome built-in restrictions of spells − and also limits your damage output. This idea is basically sound, but suffers from the fact that virtually all PC mages will have the maximum allowable Magery level.

4) Competence has its perks
While they weren’t added until many years after the release of GURPS Magic, the addition of Magical styles and style perks offer the GM great tools to make their casters unique.

Tying these together this brings a couple of changes to mind:

1) Fixing attribute costs is a good start.

2) Next is disassociating Magery from its talent bonus. Ten points for +1 to all spells was never balanced and if we make IQ more costly, it’s even worse. Instead Magery costs a flat 10 points per level (including level 0) and does only do two things: It allows you exceed levelled or energy-based limits on spells and it allows you to learn more powerful spells.

3) This new Magery is complemented by Talents for single colleges, which cost either 5 to 15 points per level. Talents act as Magery for their respective colleges, but also give a skill bonus in addition. The combined number of Magery levels and Talent levels has a maximum. You can either have broad access to all spells and little talent or loads of specialised talent and a little access to more powerful spells outside that sphere.

4) Skill level has no influence on ritual requirements and maintenance costs. Instead both are tied to relative level and voluntary penalties. With a relative level of attribute −2 you simply cannot cast a spell without words or gestures, with attribute −1 you can try either at a −4 penalty each. Similar, you can try to save on maintenance costs by taking a −4 to effective skill per point of energy − a chancy thing for resisted spells.

5) Casting costs are reduced according to Margin of Success.

The Finished Dish

GURPS Magic is a complicated beast and therefore the finished rule tweaks are a bit more elaborate than usual.

Magery and Magic Talent

Magery costs ten points per level (including level 0). It allows you to exceed limits on effect as per GURPS Magic p. 9. A certain level of Magery is also part the prerequisites of most advanced spells. Without Magery 0 or a corresponding Magic Talent you cannot cast spells. Magery might or might not allow you to recognise magic items on sight or touch as per B 66, but the GM can treat this as a setting switch. Magery never gives a skill bonus or reduces studying time to learn spells.

Magic Talent costs five to fifteen points per level (excluding level 0) and gives all the benefits of the Magery within its respective college. A mage with Magery 0 does not need to buy any zero-level Magic Talents, but it is possible for a mage to have no Magery whatsoever and only rely on Magic Talents. In that case each Magic Talent +0 costs 4 points. While this is rarely cost-effective for more than two levels it opens up some ways to get more Magic Talent than usual (see below).

Magic Talent Cost by College
Air 10 Light/Darkness 5
Animal 5 Making/Breaking 5
Body Control 15 Meta 5
Communication/Empathy 5 Mind Control 15
Earth 5 Movement 10
Enchantment 10 Necromancy 10
Fire 5 Plant 15
Food 5 Protection/Warning 10
Gate 5 Sound 5
Healing 5 Technology 10
Illusion/Creation 5 Water 15
Knowledge 10 Weather 5

In each campaign there is a maximum cost for combined levels of Magery and Magic Talent. In a typical fantasy campaign like Banestorm this might 50 points. That’s enough to buy for example Magery +3 and Magic Talent: Fire +2. Alternatively it could buy Magery +1, Magic Talent: Food +4 and Magic Talent: Movement +1. Or it could buy Magic Talent: Mind Control +2, Magic Talent: Healing +2 and Magic Talent: Knowledge +1 without any Magery whatsoever.

Limitations and Enhancements affect these costs. All special modifiers for Magery work for both advantages except for Limited Colleges, which is only available for Magery, and One-College Only, which is now superfluous.

Higher and lower maximum costs are possible, but the system starts to breaking down at 80 to 90 points unless you have a considerable number of spells requiring Magery/Magic Talent +4. It’s generally a bad idea to allow any Talent give more than +6 bonus so that sets another limit on how high you want to go. At 20 to 40 points the system still works fine, but requires mages to make some hard choices. Less than 20 points are probably not a good idea.

Ritual, Energy Cost and Casting Time

All three of these are tied to both relative level in a skill and how well he can cast it. Ritual grows less elaborate with higher relative level, but does never vanish unless the mage makes a conscious effort and takes a penalty. Maintenance costs can be lowered by taking a penalty, but only if the mage has a high enough relative level. Casting time can be lowered in the same way. Casting costs are dependent on Margin of Success.

Relative level Standard Ritual1 Reduced Ritual2 Cost Reduction Casting time5
Casting3 Maintenance4
Attribute −3 Extremely Elaborate − −1 per 5 MoS − −
Attribute −2 Elaborate − −1 per 4 MoS − −
Attribute −1 Normal No Words or No Gestures −1 per 4 MoS −5 per energy −5 per second
Attribute +0 Normal No Words and No Gestures −1 per 3 MoS −5 per energy −4 per second
Attribute +1 Subtle No Words and No Gestures −1 per 3 MoS −4 per energy −3 per second
Attribute +2 Subtle No Words and No Gestures −1 per 2 MoS −4 per energy −2 per second

1 The words and movements normally required for casting the spell:
Extremely elaborate: Requires sweeping movements of both arms and legs − both hands must be free − and shouted words (base hearing distance: 6 m), which give a clear indication of the spell being cast. Base casting time is multiplied by five.
Elaborate: Requires movement of both arms and some body full body movement − one hand and both legs must be free − and loudly spoken words (base hearing distance: 4 m), which give some indication of the spell being cast. Base casting time is doubled.
Normal: Requires gestures with one hand and clearly spoken words (base hearing distance: 1 m), that give those with Thaumatology an indication of the spell being cast. Normal casting time.
Subtle: Requires subtle gestures with one hand and whispered words (base hearing distance: ½ m), that give those with Thaumatology an indication of the spell being cast. Normal casting time.
2 Eliminating either ritual words or ritual gestures gives a skill penalty of −4, eliminating both gives a penalty of −8.
3 Every full multiple of the given margin of success reduces casting (but not maintenance) costs by 1 energy. MoS is always figured from effective skill, including penalties from reduced ritual, maintenance or time.
4 Maintenance costs can be reduced by 1 energy for every multiple of the penalty taken.
5 Casting time can be reduced either by one second or 10%, whichever is better. Casting time can also be increased to get a bonus to effective skill: x5 gives +1, x20 gives +2, x60 gives +3.

The Leftovers

That’s the basic framework. You still need to look at every spell and decide whether it should be easy, average or hard − very hard spells can stay that way − and whether it wouldn’t be better served by using Will, Perception, Dexterity, Health or even 10+High Manual Dexterity as the controlling attribute. This will be a long and tedious process, but the results should be worth it. While doing that, spells can be balanced against each other, made compliant with 4th Edition concepts (e.g. no absolutes), tagged with keywords, checked for incongruent prerequisites and maybe put into different colleges. It’s probably also a good idea to reduce the number of spells by declaring some to be techniques based on similar spells, too.

As for tweaking the presented rules further, you could fine-tune the costs of Magic Talent per college to cost one point per 5/6/7 spells (minimum: 5 pts.). Or, going into the opposite direction, even declare all 15-point colleges to cost only 10 points. As it is, they are a bit less attractive at the moment, but be aware that a mage with Magery +0 and Magic Talent: Mind Control +4 can be pretty darn effective.

The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy