A_Veidt
Topic Author
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon 27 Apr 2020, 16:41

Controlling sorcery!

Sun 22 May 2022, 14:11

I love the magic system in Forbidden Lands. It's dangerous and powerful, sorcerers are rare and should not use magic for everything like in other settings. I also love the safe casting rules, allowing powerful sorcerers to use low level magic without risking eternal perdition in a plane full of demons.

Now, the limit of safe casting is that you can only use with 1-3 willpower at a time (depending on your rank and grimoire), so I was thinking of allowing additional overcharge dice reductions if the sorcerer takes damage to Wits equal to the rank of the spell for each overcharge dice they do not wish to roll. This would represent the mental effort of controlling the spell to make it 'safe', perhaps because they don't have their grimoire and it's a dire situation. Assuming that a sorcerer has 4 Wits, that's only 1 or 2 overcharge dice that can be eliminated between rests.

For instance, a sorcerer with rank 2 and a grimoire can spend 2 willpower in a rank 1 spell and decide not to roll any dice for overcharging by safe casting; but if they spend 4 willpower they would have to roll at least two overcharge dice. My suggestion is that they can take Wits damage to further reduce the number if dice in the overcharge roll, so in the previous example they can take 2 Wits damage and reduce the overcharge dice they must roll to zero. If the spell was rank 2, they would take 2 Wits damage but only reduce 1 die. If the spell was rank 3, they would have to take 3 Wits damage to reduce 1 die.

What do you think? Too safe or a good trade-off?

I have also seen an unofficial rule for the mishap tables by which you count the number of rolled banes in the overcharge roll and add -10, 0, +10, +20, and so on for each rolled bane to the mishap roll (so getting 2 banes would be rolling as normal in the mishap table, and rolling 3 banes would add +10). I like this rule because the more willpower you use, the higher the chances that you unleash forces beyond your control, but I think that it can turn out to be rather safe when you consistently only roll 1 overcharge die, so I'm thinking of adding +10 from the second bane onwards rather than the third (1 bane roll as normal, 2 banes roll + 10, 3 banes roll + 20, etc.). Can anybody share their experiences with this rule?

My goal would be allowing players a costly trade-off to control sorcery once or twice per day, while at the same time giving some weight to the amount of willpower spent over the safe casting limit (more power, more potential banes, worst mishaps)

Any opinions are welcome.

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