Knowledge to make Wizard's Staff and Grimoire

[Thot]

Isn't it a bit weird that the knowledge to make a Wizard's Staff or a Grimoire is somehow transferred by becoming a Magician, and that there is no skill that actually contains that knowledge? Wouldn't it have been easier and quicker to just define a skill "Magic Lore", and require it to be at xy% to include the knowledge to build these things? What is the rationale there?

Edited July 6 by Thot

[Peter Fitz]

Presumably it's assumed that there is more than pure constructional knowledge required to make such things. Anyone with basic woodworking skills could make a staff, and any bookbinder could make a book, but presumably if you have the additional skills necessary to breathe the magic into these things, then you are ipso facto a magician.

[Nozbat]

I hadn't thought much about it @Thot as I tend to run low magic worlds. 

Off the top of my head, I'd go for a ritual magical skill in making both. The wood might need to be some specific piece aligned with the nature of the would-be wizard, it would need to be cut from a specific part of the tree (heartwood?) or even bargained for from the tree? (needs to be given up voluntarily to retain its power?). It would need carved by a master-woodworker. All this before it is imbued with the magical aspect. I'd say it would be an epic quest to make a staff.

Pg 91 BRU:GE notes the cost should be prohibitively high and suggests that a wizard must be successful to afford one and it is a sign of authority, skill and experience.  I think  therefore you would be justified, in terms of game mechanics, that a wizard should attain a level of skill to be able to afford and make one. Further, if it is a sign of authority, then the wizard should possibly be in a position to have apprentices, journeymen and qualified wizards who he is responsible for.

The Grimoire might be easier but should also be the best materials. Maybe different parchments or skins for different spells? Maybe it's like fixing colours into cloth.. the spells need to be 'fixed' or they fade and disappear over time? This is something an apprentice might start and add to throughout their career?

My go to text when I am in doubt is Terry Pratchett and his Unseen University. This might not be a good starting point for some but Terry was excellent at using every classic meme and then adding a few more.

Make your own rules up as to what suits your campaign.. but I'd make it a challenge 

 

[Thot]

1 hour ago, Peter Fitz said:

[...] presumably if you have the additional skills necessary to breathe the magic into these things, then you are ipso facto a magician.

Yes, but my question is: Why are those additional skills not named as skills in the game? Wouldn't that have made sense?

Obviously I can just add it, of course. But I am curious as to why that was omitted.

[Nozbat]

5 minutes ago, Thot said:

Why are those additional skills not named as skills in the game?

BRU:GE are the basic core rules that you can add to or subtract from .. and magic is not (as yet) developed 

 

[NickMiddleton]

18 hours ago, Thot said:

Yes, but my question is: Why are those additional skills not named as skills in the game? Wouldn't that have made sense?

Because they didn’t exist in the original source material is my guess.

Magic in UGE is adapted from Worlds of Wonder: Magic World : which doesn't mention Grimoire at all and says this about the staff

”A magician may pay an enchanter to have a staff made for him. The ritual will take about six months of the magician’s time and he will have to pay for the enchanter’s upkeep and expenses at a rate of around 1.000 silver Crowns a month. The magician cannot make other commitments because he must assist in every stage of the ritual, and the final ceremony will cost him a point of POW, permanently subtracted from his characteristics. A magician who gains a staff is officially a sorceror.”

And elsewhere in the same rules (WoW: MW) it explicitly says those rules do not cover “enchanters”. So it doesn’t document the enchanters process / rules at all.

Sorcery in UGE is adapted from Elric!   which does mention Grimoires, but not staffs per se, and in that system (source and in BGB / UGE) does not have specific Spell/ Magic Skills but does have a hard requirement of a minimum POW stat.

18 hours ago, Thot said:

Obviously I can just add it, of course. But I am curious as to why that was omitted.

I defer to Jason, but my guess is that it was a detail that wasn’t picked up when originally adapting the sources to be the BGB#; or if it was, it wasn’t judged a big enough issue to delay delivery of the finished MS. And when Jason was revising the BGB to create the UGE, similarly I imagine it either was missed or not judged to be worth the time / effort to resolve, given that as others have said the BGB / UGE are a baseline framework.

# I certainly don’t recall it coming up in the discussions of the BGB I was party too as one of the group of informal commentators Jason had convened back then: but it was nearly twenty years ago!

Edited July 7 by NickMiddleton

[Lloyd Dupont]

At the risk of doing some shameless self-promotion, I posted a complete and independent power system recently, and it has magic item creation rules!

Although, it's not quite compatible with the usual BRP magic system, being quite different enough...

it's also untested and very new, I am coming with little tweaks every few days I have not yet uploaded...

[Nozbat]

57 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

At the risk of doing some shameless self-promotion,

I think you can be as shamelessly self-promoting as you want after reading that @Lloyd Dupont

[Lloyd Dupont]

2 hours ago, Nozbat said:

I think you can be as shamelessly self-promoting as you want after reading that @Lloyd Dupont

if you are interested I will update the document, I managed to add a few perks that improved and build the sensation of powerful fighter with perk such as multishots, [domain] smite and the additional combat special effect (inflict) advantage (for the weapon masters perk). Although, combat special effect is a mythras thing, it is similar (but not exactly the same) as having a better level of success in a combat differential roll.

[Nozbat]

Yes.. I'm always interested in what others think and write. I'm using a BRP variant at present but had used Mythras for my Anglo-Saxon campaign a few years ago. I will get back to that at some point when the players start playing their children in the aftermath of the Battle of Badon. Not a good time to be a West Saxon.

[Lloyd Dupont]

21 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

Yes.. I'm always interested in what others think and write. I'm using a BRP variant at present but had used Mythras for my Anglo-Saxon campaign a few years ago. I will get back to that at some point when the players start playing their children in the aftermath of the Battle of Badon. Not a good time to be a West Saxon.

Ha, found the way to automatically save with the PDF bookmark (which was the main thing making me lazy ^_^)
So same link, updated version!

I added just a few things, but I think the overall player satisfaction might improve greatly! 😄 (like 3 improved combat perks)
I got some interplanar travel idea which are not listed though (but I guess this one is not that important...)

Won't be testing for a while since I am also working on a Master of Orion (scifi) settings and (shortish) spy thriller adventure first, and also a friend is taking turn at GMing right now.

Edited July 8 by Lloyd Dupont

[Lloyd Dupont]

BTW just updated the magic system 🙂

Both for document clarity, and fairness: as in being a Wizard should cost more XP.

 

[Mugen]

Yes, such a skill would be needed. But Magic has already so many skills... Sorcery, on the other hand, has too few of them, so it would not be a problem.

I think I'd make an Enchant skill for this, which could also be used to create items containing one of the spells known by the wizard, at a cost of 1 permanent POW.

I would also drastically reduce the number of skills in Magic. Skimming to the list, I think I'd need 4 :

• Elemental Magic : Fire, Frost, etc.
• Mind Magic : Control, Telepathy, etc.
• Energy Magic : Ward, Couterspell, perhaps Blast (it could be the same as Enchant above), etc.
• Body Magic : Heal, Wound, Change, etc.

When you'd first learn a spell in one of these lists, you'd also learn the associated skill. Then, when you learn another spell in this list, you can cast is using the skill you already learned.

 

[Atgxtg]

On 7/6/2024 at 9:24 AM, Thot said:

Isn't it a bit weird that the knowledge to make a Wizard's Staff or a Grimoire is somehow transferred by becoming a Magician, and that there is no skill that actually contains that knowledge? Wouldn't it have been easier and quicker to just define a skill "Magic Lore", and require it to be at xy% to include the knowledge to build these things? What is the rationale there?

I think NickMiddleton is on the right track. BRP was cobbled together from previous Chaosium RPGs, and the source for wizards staves, Magic World,  didn't have such rules. Probably because it was a 16 page book.

RuneQuest 3 did have rules for making magical items similar to  the wizard's staff. In RQ3 the caster had to know the proper ritual spell to create the item (in this case Magic Point Matrix so the staff can store magic points) and then had to successful perform the ritual by rolling against their modified Enchant skill.  The caster could increase the chance of success by spending more time preparing for a ritual. They could also add all sort of "conditions" on the enchantment, such as limiting who could use the enchantment, who could be targeted, area effect, and so on.

But RQ3's Magic Book is four times the size of the entire Magic World Book and only has to cover magic.

[Thot]

Well, as BRP UGE is free (though I really like the layout and material quality of the book), one will certainly not complain, but adding a more explicit element for this part would have been a good idea.

But I am not sure I buy this explanation. In Magic World (and its cloning donor, Stormbringer 5e), the amount of text for these kinds of things is not less than a spell would have been. Using a spell or specialized skill would just have fit into the system more organically.

 

Not a big deal, obviously, as it's trivial to add. But it's odd.

[Atgxtg]

10 hours ago, Thot said:

But I am not sure I buy this explanation. In Magic World (and its cloning donor, Stormbringer 5e), the amount of text for these kinds of things is not less than a spell would have been. Using a spell or specialized skill would just have fit into the system more organically.

Sorry wrong Magic World.

The Magic World I'm referring to it the 16 page booklet that was part of the Worlds of Wonder RPG from 1982. Worlds of Wonder bundled three settings (Future World, Super World and Magic World) along with the orginal version of BRP, a 16 page  booklet that was a heavily streamlined and simplified version of RuneQuest rules. The Magic World supplement from 2012 is a very different and much larger book for a very differnt and much larger version of BRP.

The original Magic World was about 16 pages long and covered:

• character creation
• new skills
• encumbrance
• weapons
• damage bonus
•  critical hits and fumbles
• terrain and other situational modifiers
• magic system and spell lists
• stats for various races and creatures
• some sample magical items
• a short introductory adventure and setting

As you can see, space was limited.  If they were to include something along the lines of the enchantment rules from RuneQuest 3 (which hadn't come out yet) then it would have taken up 3 or 4 pages of the book,- although they might have been able to squeeze in into two pages due to different font sizes used and spacing. 

But to include it, they would have had to drop several pages of useful stuff  for something that wasn't supposed to be used during play, and put in enough rules to prevent it being abused (players making lots of staves). 

We could adapt the RQ3 enchanting rules. They are mostly compatible with BRP, but a magic point storing device costs more that 1 POW. in RQ,  so we'd need to tweak the rules a little to make the staff work. Probably allow sorcerer to attune one item to hold POW in magic points for only 1 POW point.  Additional Magic point storing devices would pay the normal cost (one for one).

 

 

[Mugen]

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Sorry wrong Magic World.

The Magic World I'm referring to it the 16 page booklet that was part of the Worlds of Wonder RPG from 1982. Worlds of Wonder bundled three settings (Future World, Super World and Magic World) along with the orginal version of BRP, a 16 page  booklet that was a heavily streamlined and simplified version of RuneQuest rules. The Magic World supplement from 2012 is a very different and much larger book for a very differnt and much larger version of BRP.

To add to the confusion, the Magic rules in the BGB/BRUGE are from Magic World (1982), and the Sorcery rules are the same as the ones in Magic World (2012) (even though they're originally from Elric!)...

[Mugen]

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

We could adapt the RQ3 enchanting rules. They are mostly compatible with BRP, but a magic point storing device costs more that 1 POW. in RQ,  so we'd need to tweak the rules a little to make the staff work. Probably allow sorcerer to attune one item to hold POW in magic points for only 1 POW point.  Additional Magic point storing devices would pay the normal cost (one for one).

Sandy Petersen's Rituals rules for RQ3 changed the MP Matrices so that they could store more than 1 MP per POW.

Spirit Magic created a MP storage equal to the points in the spell, whereas the Sorcery equivalent used the spell's Intensity.

Mythras also has the Store Manna spell, which can be used to create MP storages, but needs to be paired with abmn Enchant spell to be permanent, reducing one's MP maximum.

In BRUGE Magic terms, the Spell level could be used to set the MP capacity.

Maybe the maximum amount one can store into MP matrices should be set to his POW, to avoid abuse and Sorcerers carrying dozens of MP storages.

[Atgxtg]

3 hours ago, Mugen said:

To add to the confusion, the Magic rules in the BGB/BRUGE are from Magic World (1982), and the Sorcery rules are the same as the ones in Magic World (2012) (even though they're originally from Elric!)...

Yeah, the waters get pretty muddy. For instance the last edition of BRP was RQ3 with the serial numbers filed off.

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, Mugen said:

Sandy Petersen's Rituals rules for RQ3 changed the MP Matrices so that they could store more than 1 MP per POW.

Spirit Magic created a MP storage equal to the points in the spell, whereas the Sorcery equivalent used the spell's Intensity.

Mythras also has the Store Manna spell, which can be used to create MP storages, but needs to be paired with abmn Enchant spell to be permanent, reducing one's MP maximum.

In BRUGE Magic terms, the Spell level could be used to set the MP capacity.

Possibly. Or you get 1D6 per POW as with armoring enchantment. Or maybe 2 for 1 or even 3 for 1.

 

Or maybe we have a special case rule for sorceror staves (and summoner's braziers of power), the lets them store power for 1 POW but can't work with other magic storing devices. T&T has a similar storing devices and a wizard is limited to only one at a time. 

Maybe instead of a magic point matrix enchantment it could be a special spell (Create Staff) similar to Create Familiar but with different limits .

 

2 hours ago, Mugen said:

Maybe the maximum amount one can store into MP matrices should be set to his POW, to avoid abuse and Sorcerers carrying dozens of MP storages.

Or making them and handing them out to their friends. In RQ2 POW storing crystals weren't a big problem because you couldn't make them, one find them while adventuring. Plus you'd only replenish your POW every day so there wwas a practical limit to how many points of stored POW you could really have with you, since everybody had battle magic, so you couldn't just squirrel away a few points each day and accumulate  a huge amount of MPs.  So a GM didn't have to worry about the PCs carring dozens of them.

Original Magic World kept it in check with with only the staff avaible to most characters and higher spell point costs compared to RQ2. The sorcerer's staff mostly was there to help offset the higher point costs for magic compared to RQ2. Even then magic was somewhat problematic, with casters being able to one-hit kill most NPCs with a 5 point spell. I suspect the much hated FreeINT came about to try and reign in the magic system.

RQ3 made MP storing items cost a lot of POW limiting the rate of accumulation.

 

But with UGE, with magic mostly limited to spell casters, the ability to make magic point storing objects cheaply could become a problem. Especially with the different Powers systems. Not all of the subsystems play nice with each other.

So I can sort of see why they didn't include some sort of enchanting process.