Tag: Sorcery

Reintroducing the Deep Engine: A Backer Post

We need to talk about the Eldoth. Outside of humanity, has three “foundational races” that represent certain core elements of the setting: The Keleni and their faith in Communion, the Ranathim, their sorcery and the Cult of the Mystical Tyrant and represent the selfishness of Dark Communion, and the Eldoth, who represent the eldritch weirdness of Broken Communion. With humanity detailed, we can discuss the Glorian Rim and the Galactic Core. The Keleni and Ranathim give us the Umbral Rim. We cannot discuss the Arkhaian spiral without talking about that region’s most influential race: the Eldoth.

Specifically, we must discuss the Deep Engine. This is the “sufficiently advanced” technology that the Eldoth wove into the fabric of space-time via the horrors of genocide and the haunting energy of mass graves. They channeled the spooky power of these horrors to allow them to travel across the galaxy, power their civilization and win their wars until the Galaxy, appalled by the nature of their civilization, turned on them and destroyed them in the Monolith War.

The death of Eldothic civilization did not end the Deep Engine. The strange necropoli of cenotaphic monoliths continue to pinion the power of the Deep Engine, allowing anyone who has the correct access (legitimately or, more often, stolen via trickery, deception and physical intrusion into the Deep Engine itself) to generate specific technological effects. The Ranathim would call this Sorcery. The Eldoth would scoff at such superstitious and backwards perspectives, but we’re going to side with the Ranathim on this one and treat it as a unique form of Sorcery.

The Oldest Sorcery

The Deep Engine is an old element in Psi-Wars, dating back to the foundational Iteration 6. Back then, I attempted to cobble together a simple system using the Runes of Power system from GURPS Powers: Weird Powers, but it never really took off. I think people found it too complicated. The simpler “Daemon” system seems to have been more popular. I took one look at all of this and concluded that, obviously, the way to fix this was to make it even more complicated.

I am probably being too hard on myself, but the Deep Engine has a problem in that the concept it represents does not lend itself to a quick, casual treatment. It represents some sort of sufficiently advanced technology, but how does that technology work? It has a powerful “hacker” metaphor, where sorcerers are like “thieves in the night” who find a way to break into the Deep Engine. Well, how do they do that? And what happens when they fail? And how do people who have legitimate access differentiate from those who do not? How does the Deep Engine allow Eldoth, who cannot have psychic powers, to use Psychic Sorcery? And when I introduced the concept of Daemons, the represented avatars of autonomous processes within the Deep Engine: Occult AI, in essence. So how do they work? Can you fight them? And I talk about the Deep Engine “Breaking down,” but in practice, what does that do? I mean, certainly, I can represent in games the way I did in Undercity Noir with lots of ghosts and weird weather, but how can I codify it?

Answering all of the questions made it obvious that what I described was a Domain. What makes the Deep Engine complicated is not the system associated with it, but the weight of all of these ideas and how they interact with the world, and how to make them directly accessible to players. Could I take the inherent complexity of the Deep Engine and make it accessible?

Sorcery should, in principle, allow me to do that. If you can understand Chivare and the Deep Engine works the same way, then you can understand the Deep Engine. Simple anough.

So let’s add in some more complexity. To me, the coolest thing about Sorcery is free spells, ideally rewarded through research and study, or occult adventures or spirit quests. I can easily cobble together a a few different schools of sorcery and say “See? The Deep Engine.” But I wanted to offer “free spells” that sorcerers could explore. For this, I expanded the concept of the Deep Engine Locus and this idea of occult hacking that I called, in my system, “Induction” where characters can gain access to the inner workings of a specific deep engine locus and pillage its secrets at the risk of raising the ire of the local security Daemons. If I combine with this with a “glitch” system, I think I’ve completed the picture of what the Deep Engine should be.

That single paragraph makes it sound easy, but what we’re functionally doing is creating a second, layered world over the first that only Deep Engine sorcerers interact with. The Deep Engine was always going to be such a world, but making the whole thing is such an exhausting process. I’ve been working on it for well over a year now.

Recently, though, thanks to some help from Jose Fernandez, I was able to compile some of my thoughts into a straightforward manner and streamline everything into a single document which, I hope, is not too overwhelming. There’s still more to discuss, but it’s a beginning and enough that one could start playing a Deep Engine Sorcerer now.

Releasing the Deep Engine

Because the Deep Engine is such a big topic, I must break it up into pieces. There are four “primary” schools of Deep Engine Sorcery. This release will include the first of the four: Whisper Sorcery, the sorcery that manipulates the telepathic neurocomm communication system the Deep Engine uses, which enables the sorcerer to “hack” into the Deep Engine and act as a communication relay hub for his friends. This release also comes with two smaller “Protocol” schools, Polarity Protocols which manipulate electro-magnetic fields and sub-atomic charges, and Subliminal Override protocols, which manipulate the subconscious, instinctive “lizard brain” of most organic beings. With this release, I’ll see what my feedback is like if this is a disastrous approach, or what changes I can make to make it more straight forward.

The future releases will expand both the available spells and protocols and the domain of the Deep Engine. The current plan is:

  • Daemonic Sorcery and additional details on the Daemons of the Deep Engine, and at least two more protocol sets.
  • Cenotaphic Sorcery and more details on the physical Deep Engine components and eldothic technology and at least two more protocol sets.
  • Glitch Sorcery and more detail on whatever remains for the Deep Engine (Glitch Daemons will probably drop with Daemonic Sorcery), at least one sample “Deep Engine Pattern,” and ideally the remaining Protocol sets.

I suspect I can release once every two months, but we’ll see.

These will start as Backer Posts, but they are previews and will eventually be available to all readers. They’ll be available for all $3+ subscribers; I may make it available for $1 $3 (Patreon will not allow cheaper than that, sorry) as a single download on sites that allow that sort of thing. This drop includes: Deep Engine Sorcery, Deep Engine Loci, Whisper Sorcery, Polarity Protocols and Subliminal Override Protocols. The total content is a bit over 25k words.

Feedback

If you are a reader, I would very much appreciate any feedback I can get. In particular:

  • What did you think?
  • Can you understand it?
  • Do you think you could make a Deep Engine Sorcerer?
  • Is the Deep Engine induction roll simple enough that it doesn’t slow your game down?
  • Do you think the 6-protocol libraries of the Deep Engine Loci? Do you think they’re large enough? Should I add a set of “common” protocols to each?
  • How do you feel about the Daemonic Security Response system?
  • How do you feel about the Glitch system?
  • What are you missing in the system?

There are several components I’d like to add as we move forward, but I don’t want to sheer weight of it to slow it down, and then drop a 150k word bible on everyone and demand they read the whole thing to understand it. It should be at least tolerably playable now with these three schools of sorcery.

Sample Loci

One of the core elements of the Deep Engine is that it involves interaction between the sorcerers and loci of the Deep Engine. It would be helpful to have at least something to play with. Without a huge array of protocols, the scope must be necessarily narrow, but here’s three Deep Engine Loci located on Kronos that Deep Engine sorcerers might start with. The details for how these stats work can be found in the Deep Engine Locus document.

These loci are not final, and subject to change.

The Shield Spire

This central spire of Grand Nexus is the most prominent and powerful Deep Engine locus on Kronos. It is the one to which most Deep Engine sorcerers on Kronos are aligned.

Power: 15

Glitch: 6 or less (Critical Failure)

Glitch Theme: Corruption

Protocols:

  • Electron Beam (Polarity)
  • Anti-Polarity Field (Polarity)
  • Polarity Cycling (Polarity)
  • Subliminal Cloak (Subliminal Override)
  • Dominance Aspect (Subliminal Override)
  • Local Aversion (Subliminal Override)

Connected Loci: The Storm Spire (Kronos), the Dead Spire (Kronos)

The Storm Spire

A spire located at the heart of the “Eye of Kronos,” a perpetual hurricane that sometimes brings it torrential rains into Grand Nexus.

Power: 12

Glitch: 12 or less (15+)

Glitch Theme: Surge (Secondary: Noise)

Protocols:

  • Neural Network Investion (Polarity)
  • Pulsar Beam (Polarity)
  • Wrench Portal (Polarity)
  • Polarity Affinity (Polarity)
  • Polarity Overcharge (Polarity)
  • Polarity Storm (Polarity)

Connected Loci: The Shield Spire (Kronos), the Dead Spire (Kronos)

The Dead Spire

A spire located in the arctic region, it is widely considered lethally haunted, and restricted from common travel.

Power: 9

Glitch: 15 or less (14+)

Glitch Theme: Dead (Secondary: Ice)

Protocols:

  • Fear Blast (Subliminal Override)
  • Subliminal Pariah (Subliminal Override)
  • Sleeper’s mark (Subliminal Override)
  • (Three hypothetical Necrokinetic Protocols)

Connected Loci: The Storm Spire (Kronos), the Storm Spire (Kronos)

What Even Is A Word of Power?

I hate apologizing for being sick, because it feels like an excuse, but I offer it as an explanation for my absence. I have been wrestling with a bad viral infection for a month. It’s still bad enough that I can’t work, and I’m taking it easy, but one of the things I do when I take it easy is write what I want as a sort of soothing comfort, so I’m producing material, just not releasing it. My apologies for that. I will be back up and running at some point, and then more material will come out! I have not abandoned the project.

But I had a thought that I wanted to explore further, and a blog post seemed a good way to do that, and a way to show you that I’m still alive.

The Deep Engine and Words of Power

So, I’m working on Deep Engine Sorcery, and I’ve hit some breakthroughs. I’m reaching the point of actually releasable content, so that’s exciting. I have at least one nearly fully realized school of sorcery for it, in fact, though I want at least two more smaller ones before I reveal it, because all of this interlocks in a way that needs to be presented in a block before people understand what’s going on (why is my sorcery sooo biiiig?!).

One of the original ideas I had for the Deep Engine was the Word of Power, originally from GURPS Cabal, but repeated in GURPS Thaumaturgy. Because the written and spoken word, information, is so essential to the Deep Engine, giving it a “Word of Power” system to the Deep Engine felt like an interesting idea. The original intent of a Word of Power is that you’re speaking in the Language of God that He used when creating the world, and thus creating similar effects, but uncontrolled (because, you know, you’re not God). I don’t think I can justify such an extreme take with the Deep Engine, but I love the idea of the occult tactical nuke, and I can’t think of a better place for it than the Deep Engine in Psi-Wars. Perhaps they’re some form of Priority Override, where you trigger a massive, uncontrolled response from the Deep Engine, sort of like how with a computer, you can use Power Word “sudo.” Power Word: Kill has an entirely different connotation in a Linux system! (“sudo kill -9!”)

So while I’m not 100% certain I’ll include it, I really like the idea, but whenever I try to use it, I run into some problems.

Continue reading “What Even Is A Word of Power?”

Wiki Update: Relic Knights!

My new (new) job is settling into place, and seems to be rather relaxed (despite, or perhaps because of, being such stressful work?) and I’m recovering from the seasonal flu, but all told, I think I’m hitting my stride again. Knock on wood, but I think next month we can go back to the usual cycle of Psi-Wars releases.

As part of that I made an effort to get back to my flow of releasing relics. I’ve sent the Grimshaw Relics to Backers. They can pick them up here:

I have some more relics, but they’re not yet ready. Grimshaw was rather complex, especially the Grimshaw Dossier. These include:

  • The Grimshaw Signet: The ducal mark of House Grimshaw has the secret ability to break past any Maradonian biometrics.
  • The Inquisitor’s Sword: The force sword of Tae Grimshaw, probably; it erases its own history, and destroys files on systems it strikes.
  • The Crown of the Usurper: The coronet of Shio Daijin during his ill-fated attempt to claim the throne of the Alexian Dynasty as a “regent” and kicked off the War of the Four Houses.
  • The Grimshaw Dossier: A ghostly file that seeks to reveal the crimes of House Grimshaw which manifests itself on digital systems, despite the best efforts of shadowy figures to destroy the file.
  • The Riddle Sphere of Janus Daijin: A strange alien artifact that houses the mad mind of Janus Daijin

But for the rest of you, I’ve added the following:

  • Relic Sensitivity, a rare psionic power allowing the psychic to manipulate relic energy.
  • Relic Knights, and a generally updated Relic Sorcery school, now with a Buff index
  • Updated House Korenno to give them an option to be Relic Sensitives, and House Grimshaw with their Sorcery (The house, founded by a wizard, of people who can shoot other people with lightning, was always going to have some sorcerers)
  • Ninja Weapons are finally out.
  • By request, the templates for ghosts are on the wiki too.

That should cover everything. There may be another update, but this hit all the points I really wanted updated. Enjoy!

Let’s Build A Spell List: A Tradition

Wizard Guild, Ragnarok Wiki

So, we’ve worked out our domain, and we’ve worked out our standard spells. The next step is that we need to integrate that spell list with other spell lists into a broad tradition or style, a practice of magic.

I’m using the word “Tradition” to mean a magical style for your sorcery school. It will consist of one or more collections or schools of spells, and all the supporting skills and traits of that style. If you’re following my model of a single “Casting Skill” per school, then your tradition would have all the casting skills associated with your spell schools. If you’re using a more traditional Sorcery approach, then it has all the Talents of your school. It also has a mess of perks and advantages that are appropriate to yours school.

I’m portraying this as a 1-2-3 process, but that’s because blog posts tend to be sequential, and it’s more or less how I did Chivare, but even then, Chivare had its broad concepts worked out in advance of its spell creation. It’s fine to have an idea for a tradition, or even to know all the details of a tradition, and then fill in the niches in that tradition with your spell lists, such as knowing you want an elemental wizard tradition, and working out what elements you want, and then using those to create your domains and then creating your spells. So you could see this as your first step, rather than your last step. I will also admit to often being at a loss as to where to put this step properly, as in practice I tend to go back and forth: tradition design informs spell design, and spell design informs tradition design, and it makes me loath to talk about my system, because I can reveal a particular spell list, but you lack the context of where that spell list will sit and how it will interact with the other spell lists, until all the spell lists are done and you’re looking at the whole cohesive tradition. You just do the best you can. it’s not a linear process. You will bounce back and forth. And this bouncing back and forth isn’t necessarily a problem: you’re creating a structure in which it is easier to work.

To create your tradition, answer a series of questions about your tradition of sorcery and its interaction with the world.

There are really two pillars to all traditions of sorcery that you must consider. The first is what that tradition’s place in the world is. How do people interact with the tradition and the domain, and what do they they think about it? The second is, given that it is a “style” of sorcery, how is it learned? After all, the point of a “style” is to guide a player in buying and building their sorcery. So what does the development of a sorcerer look like?

Continue reading “Let’s Build A Spell List: A Tradition”

Wiki Update: Chivare

Aka Lithian Witchcraft

It’s not wiki week. “Just post Chivare directly on the wiki” won the Wiki Week poll on SubscribeStar, so up it went this week. There was… a lot. Let’s go through it. I’ll start with the links, and explain everything after.

  • The Chiva Template, which is what this is all about, of course, so now we can play a proper, fully defined Psi-Wars sorcerer.
  • The Apprentice Chiva Sidekick: Or maybe you don’t need a full sorceress for your game, maybe you just want an apprentice or a minor character. This came up surprisingly often in my games, so I prioritized a sidekick version of the template.
  • Chivare as Power-Up: The templates are based on the “Estoric Style” of Chivare, which was probably the largest “style” I’d ever written and I didn’t even bother with an original GURPS style martial art. When you dive through the DF magic styles, each one takes up a page and they still feel abbreviated. Styles are bigger than GURPS lets on, and Magical styles are EVEN bigger, so I just opted to go straight for the power-up structure, as that’s what most of my readers use. If there is a call for it, I’ll see if I can distill it into a single “List o’ traits” style, but it’s a lot of work and I’m not sure it’s necessary.
  • Chivare Guide: Oh is that a lot? Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry, I wrote a handy guide to help you pick out what spells you might want and to walk you through the structures within Chivare.
  • The Schools of Sorcery: Oh you thought we were done? Ha ha, no.
    • Abomination Sorcery: Sorcery drawn from the monsters of the Umbral Rim, including:
    • Blood Sorcery: Sorcery for healing, harming and tracking distant targets through their blood.
    • Primal Sorcery: Sorcery for dealing with animals, herbs and wild place.
    • Shadow Sorcery and Shadow Demons: Spells for protecting others from ghosts, psionics and bad dreams, while also manipulating shadows.
    • Star Sorcery: Sorcery for dealing with stars, fortune, destiny and the divine.
    • Spookiness: A system for treating permanent spells as a “mutations” as inspired by After the End, so that the more magic you have on you, the weirder and more magical you become.
    • Amulets: Of course, Lithians have all sorts of superstitious gegaws that they wear, so naturally they would also have enchanted amulets. These are the most mass-produced ones.

I think that hits all the highlights. There’s also Fenthere or Krokuta Shamanism scattered through everything, which gives our space hyenas an alternative approach to power beyond just drugs.

Continue reading “Wiki Update: Chivare”

Let’s Make a Sorcery Spell List: Standard Spells

Yesterday, I discussed the creation of a domain, what GURPS powers calls a “Focus,” the thing our magic will manipulate and master. Today, I want to focus on the other half, what GURPS Powers calls the “Source.” If we’re talking about Fire Sorcery, this is the Sorcery half. In this section, we actually create the spells.

We tend to think of Sorcery as already a system, but to paraphrase Enraged Eggplant, GURPS Sorcery isn’t a system, it’s a framework. You can sort of use it out of the box, but you’re going to have to build a lot of specific advantages, the actual spells, and this means considering how magic works. That is, you need to think about how a generic sorcerer in your setting operates and what they can do. Once you have that, though, actual spell creation goes pretty quick: you take your domain and mash it through your standard spell list, and bam, you’ll have 90% of your completed spell list. You get this down, and you’ll be a spell-creating machine.

Continue reading “Let’s Make a Sorcery Spell List: Standard Spells”

Let’s Build a Sorcery Spell List: Domain

A while ago (I think a few months now), Enraged Eggplant took a look at my Psychic Sorcery system, which was a plug I did not expect, and it was part of a broader discussion on GURPS Sorcery in general and I had decided to post a response, but the conversation rapidly evolved, and I didn’t have time to catch up. What came out of it for me, though, was the realization that a lot of people struggled to write spell lists from scratch, especially for something like Sorcery, so I thought I would sit down and discuss some of my techniques and approaches and what I think has worked well and what hasn’t. It was going to be one post, most of which was already written, but I kept adding more and more stuff, and so this post came out first.

In particular, I’ve been playing a lot of Cultist Simulator lately, which is definitely one of my favorite occult games of all time. In particular, I love the magic system, and when someone asked me why, and specifically what you could do with it, I paused and said “Well, you can summon stuff?” and it occurred to me that the magic system of Cultist Simulator barely did anything. This got me to thinking about the power of domain. I’m sure I’ve discussed this before, so forgive me if I repeat myself, but my big takeaway from Cultist Simulator’s magic system is that you don’t need a wide variety of spells if what the spells do is interesting. That is, the quality of the domain of magic is more important than the quantity of spells, which is great, because it can minimize the number of spells you have to make.

So I wanted to talk about domains using Cultist Simulator as an example, and extrapolate it out into what I think tend to be pitfalls I see other magic systems make. In this post, I won’t make any magic spells at all, but I think by the time I’m done, you’ll be persuaded that a light touch is often enough, and we’ll have a better foundation for building spells later.

Continue reading “Let’s Build a Sorcery Spell List: Domain”

A Wiki Roundup

Someone commented on how much they enjoyed this Wiki Week, but Wiki Week was actually last week, technically, and I didn’t get around to it, and I did update the wiki with a lot of new material, so they had a point. So while I feel like I should really break this post up into two posts, one a discussion of what I put out on Wiki Week, and another on design notes on monsters, I think I’ll just accept her point, and bundle everything into one big post. If nothing else, it saves me time.

The big highlights, in summary are:

Continue reading “A Wiki Roundup”

Wiki Week Update: Relic Sorcery and House Tan-Shai

It’s been a long Wiki Week! As noted before, the winner for Patreon was Sorcery. The winner for SubscriberStar was House Tan-Shai. I’ve been discussing Sorcery all week, but let me drop the major wiki week updates here and then discuss the design notes after the jump.

Continue reading “Wiki Week Update: Relic Sorcery and House Tan-Shai”

The Themes Of Psychic Sorcery

Sorcery isn’t a system of magic, it’s a framework of magic. It’s up to you as the GM to provide the details of the structure and details that turn it into a true magic mystem.

Enraged Eggplant

Previously, I introduced the basic essentials of Sorcery and its rules, but rules are just the basis for how the system will run. What makes magic genuinely interesting are the options it opens up, and how those options interact with one another. That is, the spells and the structure.

I’ve talked a lot about my disdain for flexible magic systems, because I tend to believe magic is as defined by its limitations as its options. If you can just up and murder your hated enemy instantly, most people will do just that. If we instead say that to kill an opponent requires knowing their name, or eye contact, and that every time you use magic to kill, there is some sort of “price” you must pay, some karmic scale that must be rebalanced, we start to get some of the interesting choices and “counterplay” that makes a game fun. Limits, thus, allow for interesting gameplay and problem solving.

Okay, but what sort of “gameplay” and “interesting choices” do we want? Since I’m working essentially with a blank slate, I can do whatever I want within the limits of what would be appropriate for the Psi-Wars setting. So, in this post, I’ll lay out some of my design goals and inspirations, so you’ll get a sense of what direction I went with my magic.

Continue reading “The Themes Of Psychic Sorcery”