How to play a pure sorcerer

[davecake]

12 hours ago, Pentallion said:

I understand where Davecake and Jeff are both coming from and I wonder if either realize that sorcery as it is right now is still so broken when you reach a certain level and sorcerors have several levels of power.  

I totally do understand that. I think the play balance issues with sorcerers are very weird now (having deliberately inherited the same issues from RQ3), it is definitely possible to have a sorcerer that is powerful enough to present play balance problems, but difficult to do that (or even make a character that is roughly equivalent to Rune Lords and Priests in general effectiveness) while still being fun to play. My main point about their flexibility being too constrained is it makes them dull. 

[davecake]

5 hours ago, Jeff said:

As an aside, you'd be surprised how popular Lhankor Mhy is. I've seen far more LM characters over the years than Humakt or Storm Bull.

While I’ve seen more Humakti than Jeff, I’ve seen about as many LM than Storm Bull. It is a relatively popular PC cult. Nothing to do with sorcery though (can’t actually recall an LM sorcerer PC). Some people do enjoy playing the scholar.

And realism be damned, it is all very well to say that realistically successful scholars are going to be those who devote decades to careful isolated study. PC scholars should be those who explore the unknown, take risks, do interesting things, and succeed (perhaps largely because of the assistance of their more heavily armed colleagues, but gaming is a group activity), and as a result unearth new knowledge and ancient secrets. I know in any game I run with a scholar PC the new (relatively generous) Book rules will see frequent use, with books as regular rewards for PC efforts, to compensate for the (relatively ungenerous) research and training rules. 

[davecake]

11 hours ago, styopa said:

I think this 6 page thread shows that people want sorcery to be a part of gameplay, not a gnostic machina backdrop whose only impact on the world are some long-duration buffs. 

Yes! 

I think my main difference with Jeff is that I very much want sorcery focussed PCs to be fun, playable, and relatively on a par with their fellows. I find the attitude that this just will not ever be something the rules try to make possible to be inexplicable - it’s effectively saying in entire cultures the rules will punish you for being interested in their magic and core cultural concerns. 

I’m perfectly willing to accept that such PCs would be atypical or exceptional for their culture, but that is part of being a PC.

[davecake]

6 hours ago, jajagappa said:

I did though have a pair of Carmanian sorcerers in my old campaign.

I’ve had a couple of Carmanian sorcerer PCs, and both were viable fun PCs. The Spolite Necromancer was particularly pleased when that graverobbing ability he’d put on his character sheet was directly used in play. 

One was in HQ, one using Mythras. Notably I don’t think either would have been a very viable PC under RQG rules. 

[davecake]

As far as Ars Magica goes:

- magic have more spells they can cast than sorcerers, and quickly improve to the point they can have quite a repertoire. This usually includes a few combat useful spells

- they can usually manage quite a lot of utility magic spontaneously, so are interesting to play in problem solving sort of situations. 

- there is a whole chunk of the game that gives them a wide range of interesting things for them to do in their downtime, between adventure, time. There are lots of choices to make of really, and it really becomes a whole game within a game that interacts with the adventure side in interesting ways. This could be done with RQG, and there are some rules along these lines, but it hasn’t yet. 

- it’s not the need for sorcerers to focus, or the need for sorcerers to prepare, or the emphasis on most sorcerous improvement being out of adventure, it’s that these aspects are overdone or not developed, or approached in a way that just isn’t fun (there probably are people for whom developing a ‘schedules and spreadsheets’ mini game for your long Duration casts is a kind of fun, but not many). 

[Mugen]

On 8/23/2019 at 10:04 AM, Mugen said:

When Mongoose's RuneQuest was released, I toyed with the idea of a Sorcery system that was based on rune skills, and allowed the sorcerer to directly use the rune's power and create his own spells through the use of a few skills.Very similar to Ars Magica, with Rune skills as Forms and sorcery skills as Techniques.

As a matter of fact, I think I would still use this approach if I wanted to create a Sorcery system based on what RQ:G brought.

Needless to say, the runes-as-object part is to be discarded, but I think a system based on Techniques and Runes (as defined in RQ:G) as skills could work.

Learning a spell would require having the runes and techniques skills attached to it, and casting it would require rolling under the lowest skill.

[Joerg]

Other than saving on the required magic points (and hence casting time) that come from the doublings, there is hardly any benefit from knowing more techniques than Command. As a sorcerer, you have the choice to be either fast and focussed or flexible and slow and MP-hungry.

18 hours ago, Jeff said:

An 18 INT sorcery has 7 Runes and Techniques they can learn. So pick Fire, Earth, Movement, Fertility, Combine, Summon, and Command. That gets you Death, Stasis, Separate, Dispel, and Tap (albeit at double cost).

It also gets you Water and Darkness (at double cost, each), leaving out only Air and Moon. Personally, I would have left out at least one of those techniques, and taken a form rune instead (e.g. Man, Beast or Spirit), as Command alone already gives you all the other techniques at double cost.

 

Switching the role of runes/techniques as binary flags and spells at skills to the inverse situation:

4 minutes ago, Mugen said:

As a matter of fact, I think I would still use this approach if I wanted to create a Sorcery system based on what RQ:G brought.

[...]

Learning a spell would require having the runes and techniques skills attached to it, and casting it would require rolling under the lowest skill.

Does this system still allow using inferred runes (i.e. neighboring elements, opposed powers) or techniques? If not, a sorcerer like this would quickly become a one trick pony. If it does, is the full skill applied to inferred runes/techniques, or is the skill halved for that? (MP still doubled?)

[Mugen]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Does this system still allow using inferred runes (i.e. neighboring elements, opposed powers) or techniques? If not, a sorcerer like this would quickly become a one trick pony. If it does, is the full skill applied to inferred runes/techniques, or is the skill halved for that? (MP still doubled?)

Honestly, I didn't think about it. Both options are valid, but keep in mind that that version requires a lot less skills.

[Jeff]

Sorcery in RQG has only one actual skill per spell - your skill at casting that given spell. Runes and Techniques are not skills - they are things you either understand or do not.

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, Mugen said:

Honestly, I didn't think about it. Both options are valid, but keep in mind that that version requires a lot less skills.

If you take Jeff's example, your character would have to learn seven skills (runes, techniques) and then to acquire a number of spells without any future skills. Any spell would use at least two such skills.

Do Sorcerous Runes and Techniques in your proposal get experience checkboxes? If yes, which of the two or more skills you use for a spell will receive the check?

And how do you plan to tell sorcerous rune mastery apart from your score in the runes?

This bunch of question illustrates why the course taken by RQG has less design problems.

 

RQG as is has one skill per spell. Even if you double the current number of sorcery spells through developments of your own, the number of spells a sorcerer will have memorized will be low, the number he has learned (and probably inscribed) will not be that much higher. A sorcerer with eight or nine spells will have to learn one or two skills more than the sample sorcerer from earlier.

 

All of this said, I do think that grimoires should be a thing in RQG western sorcery. I don't quite know how, yet - possibly give a greater starting ability for spells from that grimoire. Possibly reducing one doubling penalty for an inferred technique or rune. Possibly allowing to infer an extra rune (from a short list of runes connected to the grimoire) if the character doesn't have that rune (yet).

[davecake]

27 minutes ago, Joerg said:

All of this said, I do think that grimoires should be a thing in RQG western sorcery. I don't quite know how, yet - possibly give a greater starting ability for spells from that grimoire.

I’ve been thinking that, as most Grimoires/schools seem to based around a single Rune,  that if you have mastered the Rune you may develop a skill in the grimoire/school that applies to all spells in that grimoire. So your Debaldan could actually know a bunch of Water spells, your Furlandan a bunch of Spirit spells (mostly anti-spirit spells really), and so on. It doesn’t change game balance much - the power of spells is based on other factors, Free INT doesn’t change, sorcerers are still relatively specialised, but the number of spell effects they can cast is significantly expanded so sorcerers are much more interesting to play. 

 

[Lordabdul]

If I were to modify the sorcery rules a bit (and I would definitely want to), I would want to strike a balance between "you gotta learn each spell as a separate skill" and "all spells are based on runes/techniques, so you just spend points in runes/techniques and all your spells go up".

The way I see it is very similar to how musicians work, for instance. You can learn a specific song very well (spending points in the specific "skill" for that one song), but you can also build up a repertoire of techniques (e.g. finger picking/tapping/bending on guitar, ghost notes/double kick/snare roll on drums), and build up a repertoire of styles and structures (chromatic/pentatonic/blues scales on guitar, shuffle/funk beat patterns on drums). When you couple that with some general "musical sense", which is a mix of innate sensibility and musical culture, you can, in absence of any particular skill for a song, just "wing it" and play along a lot of songs just based on your mastery of styles and techniques.

In magical terms, and more specifically RQ terms, the "general magical sense" might be CHA or POW, styles/structures/techniques might be similar stat scores for each rune/technique, and then spells are like specific songs. So even if you don't have any points spent in a particular spell, you would get stat bonuses from your CHA/POW, and from the runes/techniques involved in the spell, effectively giving you a potentially viable default score in that spell skill... no idea yet if it would be the total, average, or lowest of those stat bonuses, I'm really thinking out loud here. But the goal here is that you would be able to improvise spells based on your "academic/theoretical" understanding of sorcery, although that wouldn't compete with someone who studied that same spell specifically. I might even come up with "crude vs refined" forms of each spell, or somehow make it so that people who master a spell well enough can better control its effect and/or its form... like, for instance, a success under half the skill ("hard success" in CoC terms) might let you cast the more "refined" version of the spell or something, which means maybe you don't need to gesture/talk to cast it, or something.

Edited August 30, 2019 by lordabdul

[Mugen]

17 hours ago, Joerg said:

If you take Jeff's example, your character would have to learn seven skills (runes, techniques) and then to acquire a number of spells without any future skills. Any spell would use at least two such skills.

Do Sorcerous Runes and Techniques in your proposal get experience checkboxes? If yes, which of the two or more skills you use for a spell will receive the check?

And how do you plan to tell sorcerous rune mastery apart from your score in the runes?

This bunch of question illustrates why the course taken by RQG has less design problems.

Well, this is just an idea, and not a fully designed rule... It's normal most questions you ask don't have answers at this point, and not having those answers does not mean those are "design problems".

[Mugen]

17 hours ago, lordabdul said:

If I were to modify the sorcery rules a bit (and I would definitely want to), I would want to strike a balance between "you gotta learn each spell as a separate skill" and "all spells are based on runes/techniques, so you just spend points in runes/techniques and all your spells go up".

The way I see it is very similar to how musicians work, for instance. You can learn a specific song very well (spending points in the specific "skill" for that one song), but you can also build up a repertoire of techniques (e.g. finger picking/tapping/bending on guitar, ghost notes/double kick/snare roll on drums), and build up a repertoire of styles and structures (chromatic/pentatonic/blues scales on guitar, shuffle/funk beat patterns on drums). When you couple that with some general "musical sense", which is a mix of innate sensibility and musical culture, you can, in absence of any particular skill for a song, just "wing it" and play along a lot of songs just based on your mastery of styles and techniques.

I would do the same I'd do for weapon skills (or any skill category, in fact) : a few relatively broad skills with specializations.

Not sure how how many skills I'd use, and where the separation line between skill and specialty should be, though.

First solution would be to have one big "Sorcery" skill and one specialty per Rune.

Another would be to have one Skill per Rune and one specialty per spell. 

A third one would be to have 2 levels of specialization (1 per rune and 1 per spell), but I think it's too much...

Not sure how I'd handle Techniques...

[Grievous]

On 8/29/2019 at 9:17 PM, lordabdul said:

That aligns pretty well with how I view sorcery, yeah. As mentioned before, it's basically the Ars Magica fantasy of "wizards as alchemists", who spend most of their time indoors, in their mysterious tower at the edge of the village, only occasionally coming out to provide a few services to the farmers and merchants in exchange for some mana or other resource.

To that degree, I think the critically important innovation that Ars Magica brought to the table is popularizing the "troupe play" as a way around the fact that, indeed, such wizards don't make great adventurers -- they don't do much "in the heat of the moment" because it's all about preparation, work, research, etc. When they do cast something on the spot, the only reason they have such amazing spells is because they spent the past entire year pre-casting those spells with the right rituals, on the right days, using the right ingredients, etc. And that's why you only play your wizard once every 4 adventures or so in Ars Magica (the rest of the time you play their servants/bodyguards/messengers going out on missions for them).

I'm really hoping for a future RQG sourcebook on sorcerers, and I'm really hoping it takes Ars Magica's angle and carries it forward some more. But as they stand, in my opinion, the RQG RAW on sorcery only need a few tweaks, some extra elements/bonuses/MP rules/etc., and a whole bunch of cultural/RP flavour to achieve that fantasy (but that's a whole different game than RQG is right now, so that's probably why Jeff is hand-waving it a bit from the current Dragon Pass-centered editorial line)

I was haunted by this idea of sorcery in Runequest/Glorantha and just wanted to give it another moment in the sunlight. I think there's some real juice in that and i would be an interesting expansion of the game/theme whenever we do move to look at more Western focused supplements.

[Joerg]

4 hours ago, Grievous said:

I was haunted by this idea of sorcery in Runequest/Glorantha and just wanted to give it another moment in the sunlight. I think there's some real juice in that and i would be an interesting expansion of the game/theme whenever we do move to look at more Western focused supplements.

There are some things about the visibility and ritual of sorcery that I might have liked to expand upon. Perhaps visuals like glowing letters in the medium inscripted by the sorcerer, like those long shutter time photographs, allowing the opposing sorcerer B to start an inscription (and incantation) to counter whatever sorcerer A is brewing up.

There are at least two cases of sorcerous duels resulting in world-rending side effects - the duel of Yomili and Halwal at the Red Ruins in Tanisor, and the Night of Horrors which squared off Lunar regimental sorcery against Orathorn regimental sorcery. This is about huge spells interrupted or turned away into twisted magical energies, completely going out of control.

The sorcery system I would like to see should have something like this. But then, there is a lot work to be done on Malkionism from the writings in Revealed Mythologies and Middle Sea Empire that require considerable re-interpretation and re-phrasing (at the very least) while at the same time keeping that history of Glorantha intact (after all, that is what the situation in the Guide grew from).

[davecake]

11 hours ago, Joerg said:

the Night of Horrors which squared off Lunar regimental sorcery against Orathorn regimental sorcery.

The Lunar regimental magic can involve sorcery, but I think is mostly not. 

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, davecake said:

The Lunar regimental magic can involve sorcery, but I think is mostly not. 

True, the Lunar College of Magic has experts from all paths of magic (except draconic). This was a battle against the Pentans, well known for their shamans and solar magic, which means that their own solar magicians and shamans would have been active neutralizing the Pentan magic. The Pentans know this, and brought the Orathorn sorcerers as their nasty surprise. The Lunar response would have been what?

[Qizilbashwoman]

8 hours ago, Joerg said:

True, the Lunar College of Magic has experts from all paths of magic (except draconic). This was a battle against the Pentans, well known for their shamans and solar magic, which means that their own solar magicians and shamans would have been active neutralizing the Pentan magic. The Pentans know this, and brought the Orathorn sorcerers as their nasty surprise. The Lunar response would have been what?

... to start losing and then the Mask panicked and tapped his Moon Rune as a Chaos rune, then did what we colloquially refer to as "stepping on His own phallus"

[davecake]

It should be entirely unsurprising that the core magic of the Lunar College of Magic is Lunar divine magic, supplemented and extended by Illumination, because thats the core magic of the Lunar Empire and Lunar religion. Both descriptions of the Lunar Minor and Major Classes, and the example of She That Strikes From Afar in the bestiary, support this. They have Lunar regimental spirits, priests of various Lunar deities some of whom are mindlinked to the wyter, and the majority of magicians discorporate and spiritually travel with the wyter, supporting it in attack. This includes Jakaleel shamans and sorcerers (mostly from the Irrippi Ontor cult), but their core magic is priestly, and almost all their magic is Lunar. The Major Class magicians in particular are all experienced Illuminants, and so are likely to supplement this with being members of multiple obscure Lunar cults, plus use of Chaos and some Red Goddess cult special magic. 

Of course the LCM includes other magic - I think the Spell Archers include many Solar priests, particularly Yelm the Elder, and the Comet Seers are star magic users, probably largely Buserian sorcerers. 

But even these are outnumbered by the specialist units of other Lunar magic. The Crater Makers. The Seven of Vistur I tend to think of as Lunar sorcerers - mostly experts in long slow powerful ritual. The Blue Moon School. Of course The Crimson Bat.

And besides the Bat, a lot of Chaos forces bolster the LCM covertly. In particular the Vampire Legion. It's not clear how widespread this was in Hon-Eels time. 

20 hours ago, Joerg said:

The Lunar response would have been what?

To double down on the most powerful core Lunar magics and to use their Chaotic powers. And while it was horrible, it was largely successful, destroying nomad power for generations. 

I don't think there was all that much sorcery involved on the Lunar side, though it's always in the mix.

[Qizilbashwoman]

54 minutes ago, davecake said:

And while it was horrible,

let's be crystal clear that Chaos ate the Red Emperor, his entire family including his children, and Hon-Eel while trying to protect the latter group.

This is during the Mask period, so this is when his bloodline is partisan; I can't remember which House this Mask came from.

I know he can respawn but canonically he accidentally nuked himself. This is one of the truly great moments in Lunar history. I fully believe the Tork Sultanate is ultimately responsible for the downfall of the Lunar Empire (as much as I hate the Great Man theory of history).

Edited October 18, 2019 by Qizilbashwoman

[seneschal]

(Reads thread title.  Blinks.)

Um, whatever gave you guys the impression that sorcerers are pure?  😱

Read any fairy tales lately?

[davecake]

On 10/18/2019 at 2:59 PM, Qizilbashwoman said:

I know he can respawn but canonically he accidentally nuked himself. This is one of the truly great moments in Lunar history.

Yeah, wasn’t a great result for the Emperor himself. Not so bad for the Empire, though. Nomads weakened for generations, Empire does fine right up until the Dragonrise and that Argrath fellow. 

And accidentally nuking yourself is what happens when your go to power move is unleash Chaos. I suspect the Orathorn sorcerers are still trying to put things back together too. 

[Qizilbashwoman]

6 hours ago, davecake said:

I suspect the Orathorn sorcerers are still trying to put things back together too.

Canonically are we even sure any of the Orathorn necromancers even survived the battle?

[metcalph]

50 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Canonically are we even sure any of the Orathorn necromancers even survived the battle?

The description of Orathorn in the Guide ("They have ventured out of their lair only once, to their regret, in the campaign that culminated with the Nights of Horror". p372) makes it sound like at least some survived.  FWIW I'm still stunned at how close Orathorn is to Gonn Orta's Pass.