Toward a Ritual Magic System, Part 3.6: Other Designs

Posted: 2024-10-10
Word Count: 1485
Tags: openquest ritual-magic rpg writing-rpgs

Table of Contents

Apropos of nothing, I’m going to address why I’ve chosen this particular design for the Ritual Magic System, and why I’m designing one at all.

Existing Work

While as stated previously the major inspiration for the system comes from the magic system for King Arthur Pendragon, 4th Edition, I’m drawing from a number of other systems I’ve seen and liked over the years, including:

  1. Barbarians of Lemuria and Everywhen, Sorcery
  2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG, Sorcery
  3. Carcosa (Lamentations of the Flame Princess), Sorcery
  4. Castle Falkenstein, Sorcery
  5. D&D 3.5 SRD, Incantations
  6. Stormbringer 1st Edition, summoning demons
  7. Ghosts of Albion, Magic
  8. GURPS Thaumatology, Book/Path Magic, Energy Accumulating variant
  9. The Laundry RPG, Sorcery
  10. A Magical Medley (Fudge), “Occultism” system
  11. Mythras, Animism

Features I like include:

So why don’t any of the above systems suffice?

Witchcraft: An Alternative

Renaissance, based on OpenQuest 1st Edition, has a “Witchcraft” system that at first blush looks ideal. Cakebread & Walton even renamed and adapted it for Dark Streets and Pirates & Dragons. In brief it works like this:

While I like the outlines of this system, I didn’t like the details.

  1. MAG is almost like Essence in my system. However, MAG strictly constrains parameters of one’s magic, while a lucky Essence roll can yield more power than average.

    (As an aside, I’m still fiddling with how Essence relates to an OpenQuest character’s attributes and skills. Currently I’m simplifying it to POW/4, but that does mean a character can only raise their Essence by raising their POW. I may simply allow characters to raise their Essence separately, for a lower cost than four points of POW.)

  2. In Renaissance Witches only learn a number of spells equal to their INT. I’m not going to constrain my system with an arbitrary attribute value, although I am toying with soft limits on the number of disparate spells a Ritualist can cast off the top of their heads.

  3. In Renaissance spells aren’t written. In mys system spells usually are written, and a Ritualist can refer to the written form while performing a ritual.

  4. In Renaissance, The casting time is one combat round plus the time it takes to prepare the ingredients and any rituals required. As I specifically wanted a ritual system, mine will list the time to complete a ritual … but giver certain “rituals” the ability to be fast-cast by a practitioner with a specific talent.

What My System Offers

While I partially explained my motivation early on, and touched on its advantages above, I’m going to risk repeating myself:

  1. “Ritual Magic”, as the name implies, takes time – minutes, hours, maybe longer – as well as specific objects, places, times of the day/month/year, and so forth.

  2. Anyone can attempt a magical ritual, although certain people are more adept at using ritual magic than others. Being good at ritual magic requires a mix of innate talent (Essence) and continuous study and practice (Lore).

  3. The prospective ritual magician must only find a Ritual, and gather all the resources required to perform it, within the game world. Having more people participating in the ritual makes it more likely to succeed, and makes it effect stronger.

  4. Performing a ritual requires no memorization. One can freely refer to notes in a grimoire, chapbook, or otherwise easily legible handy reference. A dedicated ritualist can still use memorization (and more exotic techniques) to remove their dependence on external references, but doing so imposes other limits.

  5. Rituals are organized into Traditions. Each Tradition includes certain basic rituals and ritual operations that are drilled into the student, such that they can recall them without effort and even improvise variations on “standard” rituals.

In short, this Ritual Magic system resembles pre-RPG notions of how magic worked (or was alleged to work).

The mechanics I’ve chosen have the following features:

While the best magic system may be none at all, I felt the need for some structure if player characters were performing rituals. D6-based Lore checks and Essence checks provide lightweight, system-independent, predictable mechanics, while the emphasis on finding rituals and their requirements in the game world emphasizes exploration and planning in a way most magic systems simply gloss over.