I’m making a magic system for an NSR/ OSR RPG. It has a few things on the ‘must have list’.

System Goals

• The system should have clear rules to make simple spells, so players can use simple spell lists, or make creative spells on-the-fly.
  • Rules for making spells don’t have to be simple, because players will mostly just interact with the lists of spells.
• The system must have an underlying structure, and internal logic that makes sense in a Dark Ages setting.
• It has to produce a sizeable chunk of standard fantasy RPG magic tropes, like necromancy, clairvoyance, et c.
• The world should still ‘make sense’ - if spells impact trade and economics, then that’s okay, as long as the world remains coherent.
  • You can’t make lots of gold with magic, if gold is used as coinage.

The System So Far

• Each sphere is one of the four classical elements.
• Mages buy Magic Spheres as skills (rated 1-3).
  • E.g. Air 1, Fire 2.
• The mage can target that element with two effects:
  • Detect/ Identify (e.g. ‘Detect water’)
  • Alter (e.g. ‘alter fire’ and make a torch explode)
• Spend 1 additional mana point to ‘create’ something with magic (e.g. ‘Create rock’)
• Spend X additional mana to make the target ‘bigger’ (detect fire everywhere in a city, make all the air in the room noxious).
• Every sphere combination allows one additional target.
  • Water + Earth lets you affect life, so you can ‘alter life’ (and give a cat wings) or ‘create life’ (and make thorny bushes grow).
• Every mechanic will have a standard effect, e.g.:
  • If a spell can cripple someone, it will inflict a -1 penalty per Mana Point spent, to one Attribute.
  • If a spell can grant the target Damage Resistance, it grants 1 per Mana Point spent.

The conceptual phase is taking a lot longer than I thought, and there’s a lot of work to be done.

I like some of the oddities (fire and light will have to lumped in together - I think this makes sense).

Some of the oddities I don’t like

• It has no teleportation magic.
• I don’t want healing magic, but the chart is just screaming ‘Water + Earth makes healing’.

And a lot of it needs to be conceptually tighter (the bottom left corner makes less sense than the top right corner).

Here’s one that I’m exceptionally pleased with. I managed to steal from Star Trek, Robocop, and The Matrix all with one obscure paper magic spell: The Inkbound Phantome. This spell is merely one part of the process to forever entrap a spirit in the pages of a book, even allowing you to intrude on the charade.

Within the pages of a phantome a timeless hell unfurls. The boundaries of storytelling and magic blur to create a false dream that ensnares spirits, demons, and lost souls. Bound within the book’s enchantment, they become unwitting actors in a theatre of the mind, playing out the drama every time the book is read anew. The ink itself dances and shifts with every reading. The actual story and the physical circumstances of the entrapped entities are determined by the creator of the phantome. It is easiest to create a fictional tale, but it can also be an attempt to recreate true events. However, inkbound prisoners are only able to respond naturally to circumstances as dictated by their jailors.

These books are more than just a dark diversion, however. They can be read like a normal book, but Spice Rangers have also discovered that reading a phantome in conjunction with tincture of nilmahal and rabt-ke-patta, which together create vivid and spiritual dreams, one enters a dream realm that mimics the story. This can be thrilling and profound. They can bend the story and shape it around themselves, but if they break character the prisoners can awaken and perhaps escape into the reader’s mind. This can be especially dire when the prisoner is Demonic…

Phantomes contain a world of endless possibilities, where readers become both witnesses and participants in a tale that transcends time. The ink flows, the imprisoned spirits awaken again for a time, and the readers, with each turn of the page, indulge in an enchanted realm of words.

Process

First, Create Ink of Binding. Then, the magician must use it to write a book that defines the circumstances at play in the story, the character(s) that the imprisoned spirits will inhabit, detailing their personalities, memories, abilities, habits, and preferences, and the major events of the story. The number pages that are incorporated determines how many prisoners it can contain. To the imprisoned, a lengthier and more detailed manuscript will create a more credible illusion. Too few pages, and the characters will see through their charade and find it ridiculous. An overly simple or badly written manuscript will lead prisoners to rebel or go mad. Third, the bindings of the book must be obtained. Bones from a Vvurm are preferred, but the remains of any magical beast will suffice in creating the hard cover and spine. The pages of the manuscript are bound within this vessel, and then the phantome is ready to receive its inmates. A spirit, demon, or human soul must be captured and bound to the object. This spell does not do that, it merely creates the vessel.

Notes

It seems very likely that books such as these would be the perfect device for creating a daemonhost. All one needs to do is imprison the demon in the phantome along with the soul of the target host (with the vivid reading tincture), casting each in a story where the human willingly becomes a shadow, forsaking the light of Karna - and offering their body to the Demonic spirit in exchange for its allegiance to the author of the book. The trick is to end the dream at the correct moment, so that the agreement concludes in the vivid realization of what has been done. Daemonhosts in this setting always preserve the human soul within the host’s shadow, and a bit like Peter Pan’s shadow the human soul remains aware and able to move freely. They often try to interfere with the daemonhost, but the evil spirit who inhabits their body is able to physically interact with the shadow.

Also it is difficult to learn magic in the lands of Karnum, where the truth has no path. One of the ways to learn sorcery is to create a phantome with a nature spirit, or a demon, and place them in a story that would plausibly give them a reason to teach magic. A common storytelling device is to cast them as a lonely sorcerer or witch who falls in love with a wanderer, and offers to teach them magic in order to woo them. The reader must first read the book so that they can play the part convincingly, and then dream with the demon in hopes of receiving the true lessons. It is possible that the cambion Maerlyn D’Ambrosio was conceived in this way.

There are also judicial applications of the phantome. Imagine being sentenced to have your soul imprisoned in a phantome alongside scores of other condemned, and the story is an attempted prison break - only to have the prisoners discover the horrible truth at the end, again and again. Imagine again that you have been drugged with the dreaming tincture, and sentenced to read such a book. Some phantomes are used in the judicial process - severe punishment involves being sacrificed and turned into an inkbound along with hundreds of others. Each month your book, which is a tale of torment, is reread. You relive the suffering anew, and then a page is torn out which makes the illusion slightly less believable upon the next reading. This continues until the story collapses and you get to watch it all happen from a remove. Each retelling gradually makes the suffering more of a farce. Eventually the story ceases to make sense, and you lose your mind, and then your soul is released. One of the lighter punishments is being forced to read the book. A harsher punishment involves using the tincture and experiencing the torture along with the souls.