Musings on a Dragonlance X Talislanta Magic System Crossover Nobody Asked For

Notice: What follows is a collection of ideas and guidelines rather than a fully realized homebrew system. It probably would have been faster and easier for me to just do that instead, but I just had to go and take a bird's eye view of the whole thing.

Dragonlance's Fifth Age, AKA the Age of Mortals, was a bit of a fanbase-breaker back when it was first introduced in the '90s. It was meant to usher in a new phase of the universe after the trilogy that was supposed to permanently cap the series off forever with no new additions instead got condensed into a single book (Dragons of Summer Flame) and hastily shoved out there. The backlash to the continuation and the direction of that continuation hit, and when they tried to roll those changes back to something closer to the status quo in order to appease the displeased part of the base, they ended up angering the other side of it. It was kind of messy.

One of the biggest changes to the universe (other than the gods "leaving") was the introduction of ambient magic in the forms of Wild/Primal Sorcery and its spiritual counterpart Mysticism, the latent magics of the planet itself that had been dormant ever since the days of the Greygem came and went. With the gods gone, it was allowed to resurface in the world and become usable by mortals who put their hearts and minds to it, without needing to rely upon faith in fickle gods or the practice of High Sorcery (which is just a different form of devotion to the moon gods at the end of the day). Why primal sorcery didn't return during the gods' long but voluntary absence after they dropped a meteor on Krynn, I'm not sure, but the end result is that a fundamentally different source of magic was introduced to the setting.

To put it simply, primal sorcery and mysticism act like arcane and divine magic in the loosest sense. Sorcery manipulates the physical forces and matter of the world and is divided up into disciplines that reflect that, like aeromancy and transmutation. Mysticism relies upon faith in oneself and sympathetically affects most things that are alive or possess some similar sort of essence, like through healing or necromancy.

Sorcery and mysticism effects don't behave like similar spells in normal systems of magic, though. There are no "spells" per se at all, save one's trademark effects and personal favorites. Each magic user spontaneously and creatively uses their magic in any way they can for the situation at hand, producing effects that are more narratively bounded than mechanically. It's kind of like how in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure everybody has one weird Stand ability that they use as creatively as possible in whatever situation they find themselves in, rather than just escalating in power level or picking up new tricks as the series goes along, like most shōnens do. On top of it all, when two or more sorcerers or mystics get together, they can freely blend and meld their magics together in order to make something new and even more powerful.

This is all pretty much anathema to a Vancian magic system based on spell slots, so despite my soft spot for it, the D&D 3E Age of Mortals campaign setting pretty uniformly fails to depict its ambient magic. The primal sorcerer was just a regular sorcerer, while the mystic was a stripped-down favored soul. Not bad classes by themselves, but big letdowns for the source material.

SAGA Magic

It wasn't always like that, though. Primal sorcery actually did get a lot of play in the Dragonlance: Fifth Age game for the SAGA System back in the day.

In contrast to the later d20 implementation, its lore and mechanics were integrated well and fleshed out, and coupled with the diceless card deck rules you played SAGA with, it was one of the more original magic systems ever printed by TSR. You come up with spells on the fly and determine how expensive they are to cast using an additive spell point system for stronger effects. Casting an instant healing spell for the maximum amount is going to be a lot more costly than casting a weak one that takes a half-hour, for example. There are sample spells provided in the books, but those are just to illustrate spell construction and provide players with models that they can then tweak to their specific needs.

But this was still the SAGA System, which means that all of 8 people ever played it, and the rest of the books in production got axed after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR out. So unless you want to painstakingly recreate a mechanic from a dead game that relies upon a peripheral card deck, ambient magic is just another one of those Dragonlance things you can't really do in-game that you can do in-story.

... Say, you know what else has a robust, freeform magic system where spell effects are determined by intent?

Talislanta Magic

Why hello there, new old friend!

I already went into it in my Talislanta retrospective of sorts, but depending on the edition you're looking at, magic works like this: there are a little more than a dozen magical disciplines called orders like shamanism, witchcraft, cartomancy, etc. Each order of magic is divided up into different "modes" that represent types of magical spells like attack, defend, heal, illusion, transform, etc. Each order has access to a few but usually not all modes, in keeping with the flavor of that order. Elemental magic, for example, doesn't have the heal mode because it's kind of difficult to treat wounds with a rock or a gust of air.

Magicians learn each order and mode combination individually, so they tend to have a limited repertoire that they must use creatively. Mechanically this is represented by the custom spell system where you can build your own effect by adding increasing difficulty modifiers to the spellcasting roll in exchange for better range, duration, numerical values, secondary effects, etc.

Aside from the mingling of two or more casters' abilities which is absent here, this is a pretty good approximation of how Dragonlance's ambient magic works. Wild sorcery and mysticism are already divided up into neat little schools and spheres respectively, so all one would need to do is assign a list of modes to each to start porting the system over to the d20 ruleset of one's choice. You could even use the 3E Gold Rush port of Talislanta for a few more ideas on how to implement it- just whatever you do, do not follow its example and tie spellcasting to a skill roll like in that edition. That way lies brokenness.

What follows are a few of my ideas on how to implement this mashup.

My Take on Schools/Spheres

The school and sphere lists can remain unchanged from SAGA, unless you feel that some of them are too narrow and would be best combined. Likewise, Modes from Talislanta can stay the same. They are as follows:

Wild Sorcery Schools: Aeromancy, Cryomancy, Divination, Electromancy, Enchantment, Geomancy, Hydromancy, Pyromancy, Spectramancy, Summoning, Transmutation.

Mysticism Spheres: Animism, Alteration, Channeling, Healing, Meditation, Necromancy, Sensitivity, Spiritualism.

Magic Modes: Alter, Attack, Conjure, Defend, Heal, Illusion, Influence, Move, Reveal, Summon, Transform, Ward.

Next, match the most appropriate Modes with each School and Sphere according to their flavor text blurbs. Some are more obvious fits than others.

• Aeromancy: Can manipulate air to create anything from a breeze to a gale. Example spells include conjuring concealing fog, clouds of choking vapor, bubbles of air for underwater travel, or flying through the air. Very powerful aeromancers can even influence the weather.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Cryomancy: Considered by some to be a hybrid of aeromancy and hydromancy. Can manifest great cold and conjure large quantities of ice. Examples include creating walls of ice, freezing rivers solid, and freezing enemies in place with frostbite.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Divination: One of the most common schools of sorcery on Krynn, used to gain information about the world. Examples include detecting traps, seeing magical auras on objects, and divining the past or a potential future. Cannot be used to read the minds of others, because only mysticism directly affects living matter.
• Modes: Reveal (inanimate)
• Electromancy: The rather basic domain of good old fashioned lightning bolts, with a few extra ideas thrown in to make it less of a one-trick pony. Examples include producing static electricity to sting and annoy people, or using electricity to generate an aura of light for visibility.
• Modes: Attack, Illusion (light)
• Enchantment: A deceptively simple-sounding school that lets you do a wide range of beneficial things to objects. Examples include giving enhancement bonuses to weapons and armor, or enchanting a crystal on the end of one's staff to shed light, etc. Permanent enchantments are not possible with normal sorcery.
• Modes: Transform (inanimate, but you also gotta bend the rules a bunch for this one)
• Geomancy: Manipulation of the earth and everything that can be found within it. Examples include conjuring stone walls, creating quicksand, or controlling gems, crystals, and even alloys that have been worked by mortal hands like steel.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Hydromancy: Power over water, although presumably not the water that makes up over 60% of most humanoid bodies by weight. Examples include pulling up drinkable water in a desert, creating favorable currents during a sea voyage, and otherwise manipulating water in its liquid state; ice and steam are more the purview of cryomancers and aeromancers, respectively.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Pyromancy: Flame, dear flame. It's unclear if this controls only the chemical reaction of fire, or other forms of heat transfer as well. Examples include heating homes, damaging enemies, scaring away beasts, and creating elaborate fireworks shows.
• Modes: Attack, Move, Illusion (light)
• Spectramancy: The magic of light and how it can be perceived. Examples include making a basic light to see with as in electromancy and pyromancy, extinguishing light sources, changing the color of lights, as well as the more interesting implication of creating illusions of light and shadow. Tucked away in this school is the implied subschool of umbramancy, if you ask me.
• Modes: Illusion (light & shadow)
• Summoning: The art of folding space like a Dune navigator, used in such a way that it appears the sorcerer is teleporting people or objects from place to place or creating them from thin air. Can be combined with other schools to summon monsters from other planes, such as a summoner/pyromancer pulling fire elementals from the elemental plane of fire.
• Modes: Conjure (just pretend you're teleporting items from elsewhere), Move, Summon
• Transmutation: Alchemy in the classical sense of transmuting one form of matter into another. Examples include turning one type of metal into another (a la the classic lead to gold trick), or more radically turning one form of matter into a completely different state if the sorcerer has access to multiple schools. A transmuter/geomancer/aeromancer can turn that stone wall into a puff of fog, for example.
• Modes: Transform (inanimate)
• Animism: The sphere concerned with living things in the natural world. Examples include communicating with plants and animals, although not natural creatures with "magical powers"- the kinds of things later editions of D&D would term magical beasts, probably. It also doesn't affect creatures with a Reason score of 2 or more in SAGA, which I think you could map to the 3 or more Intelligence threshold for sapience in D&D.
• Modes: Influence (unintelligent creatures), Reveal (unintelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
• Alteration: Shapeshifting, plain and simple. Examples include transforming oneself into an animal or monster like a wyvern, or disguising oneself as a different person. Particularly powerful alterers (alterationists?) can shapechange other people, whether willing or as a baleful polymorph kind of effect, and they can even assume the exact appearance of a specific individual.
• Modes: Transform (animate)
• Channeling: An incredibly specific sphere of personal physical ability score buffs. Examples include making oneself very strong, or as nimble as a cat, even beyond one's normal limits (if those rules are in use). Cannot be used to affect another person's physical abilities.
• Modes: Alter (physical)
• Healing: Another very simple sphere focused on curative arts. Examples include healing wounds and curing disease, though there is no mention of reattaching limbs or raising the dead because like in Talislanta, some things are explicitly beyond the abilities of ambient magic. Somewhat uniquely, the only sphere to have a mishap mechanic whereby the caster loses extra spell points or even suffer damage if a damage-healing spell goes awry. This doesn't affect curing diseases, poisons, etc. however.
• Modes: Heal (can't reverse)
• Meditation: The mental counterpart to channeling's physical buffs, allowing one to increase one's mental abilities. Notably, improving one's casting stat does not grant bonus spell points, similar to how temporary spellcasting stat increases don't affect bonus spells per day in 3E and later editions of D&D.
• Modes: Alter (mental)
• Mentalism: Telepathy by another name, and the "intelligent creature" counterpart to animism's connection to plants and animals. Examples include projecting one's thoughts into another person's mind, reading another's thoughts or memories, changing or erasing memories, inducing hallucinations, or controlling another's mind outright if the mentalist is extremely powerful (and unscrupulous).
• Modes: Influence (intelligent creatures), Reveal (intelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
• Necromancy: The opposite to healing. Examples include wounding or outright killing enemies, draining their life, or reanimating corpses to become temporary undead. Mostly forbidden on Krynn, although ironically it's less capital-e Evil than most forms of necromancy in D&D because there's no involvement with evil deities or torturing a being's soul.
• Modes: Attack, Heal (only to reverse into Harm), Summon (corporeal undead)
• Sensitivity: Like the divination school of sorcery, but again focused on living things. Examples include sensing magical auras around creatures, determining if someone is under the influence of magic, reading their nature and demeanor, and feeling echoes of emotions well after the fact. Can't read thoughts like in mentalism, however.
• Modes: Reveal (emotions, character)
• Spiritualism: The spiritual counterpart to necromancy's physical death and decay, appropriately enough. Examples include communing with the dead, or calling spirits back from the dead to create temporary incorporeal undead like ghosts. Less scorned than necromancy, but arguably has the potential to be more harmful because of how it influences souls?
• Modes: Influence (spirits), Reveal, Summon (incorporeal undead)

Unlike in Talislanta where each discipline/mode combination has to be learned separately, here I've decided an ambient caster learns all spell modes when they acquire a school or sphere. They are not limited in the breadth of their magical ability, only the power of it. I think this is a fair change because unlike the disciplines of Talislanta, you just don't have that many modes per school here.

As I alluded to earlier, you can even mash a few of the more niche schools or spheres together if they feel too slight for someone to have to specialize in. For example, combine Channeling and Meditation into a single self-buffing 'Empowerment' sphere, or Animism and Mentalism into one 'Telepathy'. Likewise, maybe Electromancy could be folded into greater Aeromancy, or alternatively Pyromancy, since what is lightning but really fast sky fire?

From here you "only" have to figure out how the rest of spellcasting works, in the sense of how spell cost and spell difficulty are calculated. Just use Talislantan values if you're basing the system on that, or tweak them to be better suited to the math of your preferred D&D system. Caster level checks are a good starting point for that, if they exist. And speaking of spell cost...

My Take on Spell Power

One snag in this hackjob is that SAGA uses a spell point system, Talislanta lets you spam until you roll a bad mishap, D&D at large uses Vancian spell slots, and the Dragonlance books themselves do something completely different with regards to how much magic their casters can fire off in an arbitrary period of time. The first three are pretty self-explanatory, but the fourth might need some elaboration.

Keeping in mind that things and characters in Dragonlance are highly dependent upon the specific writer, what is often the case in the novels is that there is a physical component to spellcasters running low on magic juice. From clerics sweating and panting from the fervor of their prayers, to Raistlin up and keeling over like Elric before he got his clammy hands on Stormbringer, magic is a physically as well as metaphysically demanding practice in much of Dragonlance. From what I've read of the 5th Age (mostly Jean Rabe's goblin trilogy), that is true of primal sorcery and mysticism too.

That leads me to recommend a really weird thing as food for thought on the subject: this 3E rules variant of a rules variant that replaces spell slots with spell points, and then adds a spellcasting fatigue system on top of that.

Using the Vitalizing system, any caster who falls below 1/2 of their maximum spell points becomes Fatigued, and any who falls below 1/4th becomes Exhausted until they can rest to recover spell points as one would spell slots. But the reverse is also true; if a caster becomes Fatigued while at full spell points, they immediately drop to 1/2 until the Fatigued condition is removed. Likewise, someone who gets hit by Exhaustion plummets all the way down to 1/4th spell points until it's lifted.

You can probably add something similar to the spell point system found in the Player's Option: Spells & Magic supplement without too much fuss, if an AD&D version of the Age of the Mortals that never was is your goal.

If you go down some kind of spell points route (which I recommend for variable strength spells), this might be a cool thing to implement both for setting fidelity and to work (probably in vain) toward balancing casters somewhat. And speaking of casters as a discrete type of player character...

My Take on Classes

Talislanta and SAGA are classless, so in theory anybody can eventually pick up some magic if they have the ability for it. And I personally like that kind of system; it makes certain flexible characters in the stories far easier to realize than through most multiclassing (or gods forbid, dual classing) systems. Of course, classless is not a perfect fit if you're wanting to play an otherwise ordinary edition of D&D with more ambient magic-friendly rules plugged into it.

One way to go about this is to build full, homebrewed sorcerer and mystic classes. Which sounds a lot worse than it might be. Depending on the edition of D&D you're trying to use, that might be somewhat easy, or very convoluted.

Simplest might be to take the standard wizard and cleric chasses from AD&D or 3E, remove their default spellcasting, familiars, and/or domains and undead turning, and replace them with scaling school or sphere access as they level. Each might begin with 1 school/sphere plus extra for high casting stats, which would also influence bonus spell points. These would be Intelligence for sorcerers and Wisdom for mystics. I briefly considered Charisma for sorcerers like their 3E counterparts since there is some aspect of intuition or force of will that comes into play from my reading of things, but wild sorcery is also the kind of thing you can apparently teach in a traditional academic setting, if Palin Majere's Academy of Sorcery in Solace is anything to go by.

Additional schools/spheres may be acquired through leveling, perhaps with the aid of someone who already possesses that type of magic. How many schools/spheres should be attainable by max level depends on the kind of game you want to run, and the levels PCs are likely to reach; something tapping out at the midlevel range might best be suited for 3 or 4 schools/spheres max, but climbing up into the epic levels might justify near or total mastery of one's respective field of ambient magic.

... At this point out of a mix of brevity and spite I'm just going to call schools/spheres "scheres".

If you do create ambient spellcaster classes, might I recommend keeping the game limited to the decades when the gods were gone. Not because I like denying people the ability to play as the other classes, but because the added headache of managing all 4 types of spellcaster plus their various subclasses in a single shared setting feels like a little much to inflict on a DM.

If you're playing 3E or later editions, feats are another avenue for rewarding scheres. Maybe high-level knights, rangers, and other classes with partial spellcasting receive a free schere feat when they'd otherwise gain their first caster level. Or maybe it's keyed off of character level with certain other requirements so anybody can dabble in magic if they build toward it, preserving character class but divesting spellcasting from it.

I say 3E or later, but I'll be honest I don't know how to fit any of this into 4E, considering how different so many of its moving parts and powers in particular are. I'd love to see someone try and succeed, though.

Speaking of 4E, it might hold the secret to the other big, finnicky part of ambient magic...

The Question of Group Casting

Like most things, ambient magic is stronger when it's done cooperatively rather than alone. In SAGA this is presented through combined castings in which multiple practitioners of the same type of magic (i.e., no mixed parties of wild sorcerers and mystics) can pool their powers together to make a stronger effect that would normally be out of reach of any one of them. There are also coordinated castings, which are a bit more like a ritual involving non-casters who essentially use Aid Another on the main caster in order to assist them with their spell, which is generally easier and less ambitious than what you'd start a combined casting for.

The latter can be done fairly easily by just giving the caster a small bonus to their spellcasting check depending on the number of assistants, perhaps with a limit that scales with level. A novice sorcerer could only wrangle 1 or 2 ritual assistants at 1st level, but know how to effectively manage perhaps a dozen or more at high levels. Each participant offers them a +1 or some other small bonus to the roll.

The former has more possibilities. Maybe each additional caster involved in a combined casting increases the maximum level spell effect that one of them can cast, or everyone rolls a spellcasting check and the highest result is used, or they can divide an enormous spell point cost up amongst themselves evenly.

Or, you can take a page out of 4E's book and implement a system of elaborate Ritual magic that may or may not require appropriate schere access of all its participants. Unlike magic which is freeform, you might want to keep rituals limited to a specific list so the party can't absolutely rip the campaign in two- unless you want to make sure they have the tools to do just that.

In any of the above cases, I'd say required casting time is automatically longer or even the max time possible, to reflect the amount of time it takes to coordinate with others and set up a group casting/ritual. Unless you want a game in which spellcasters can completely break power scaling and use the rest of the party as nothing more than ambulatory batteries and buff bots, of course. Which, to be fair, is nothing foreign to D&D.

The Question of Armor

An incredibly specific thing I fixated on for about half the time I spent working on this post was the question of whether or not primal sorcerers should be allowed to wear armor. They're technically arcane spellcasters, but they have many differences from the robed wizard orders of the moons, not to mention the magic-users in many other D&D worlds. So it's not unreasonable that they might be able to wear armor, too. And this is true, to some extent, depending on which source you're reading.

Dragonlance 3E makes it clear that primal sorcerers are just regular old sorcerers, subject to all the same limitations. That means no armor proficiency to start, and Arcane Spell Failure % for any armor they do wear anyway. The SAGA system, meanwhile, is classless and ties many proficiencies to different ability codes. So as long as your sorcerer draws cards for a high enough Coordination and Physique, they can wear or wield pretty much anything in the game while casting magic (assuming they also got a high enough Intellect of course). Just to make sure that wasn't an oversight and there should be some kind of armor limitation, I trawled through dozens of sample NPCs until I found the Plainsman named Ironhawk, who is not only an accomplished ranger-type clad in leather armor, but also proficient in a school of sorcery (pyromancy) and a sphere of mysticism (animism).

Thank you, weirdly Rambo-looking indigenous dude.

The books, meanwhile...

Well, I haven't really read many of them, as my series on the Stone-Teller trilogy explains. But from a cursory glance over the (admittedly sparse) Dragonlance wiki, it feels to me like most wild sorcerers conform to the unarmored stereotype, but it isn't necessarily enforced in-universe. One big exception is the formerly Takhisian Knights of the Thorn, who often wear the same plate armor as their nonmagical knightly fellows. Ultimately it's up to you whether your game's sorcerers should be wearing more than a tunic or not, but I think they could get by with at least light/leather armor, or at least not suffer any outsized penalties for wearing it if they acquired proficiency through multiclassing or the like.

Mystics, on the other hand, are depicted as being able to wear many kinds of armor like their clerical counterparts across much Dragonlance media, though sometimes it stops at medium armor before they break out the full plate, as in 3E.

At least one question in all of this has a simple answer!

Mastering the Runes: A World of Warcraft d20 RPG Class Handbook Written in the Wrong Decade for No One

A wizened old dwarf chisels symbols of power into her ornate hammer. A defiant orc beats his fists together until his body is struck through by tattoos crackling with arcane might. A night elf knits herself into the thrumming weave of leylines underfoot in search of lost knowledge. A tauren gently coaxes life back out of a land ravaged by war and demon-fire, painted fur rustling in the breeze.

These people each come from vastly different walks of life in search of radically different goals, but they all share one thing in common: the art of rune-casting, that first and most enduring of the Titans' gifts.

They are all Runemasters, and their power is woven from the ancient magic that undergirds Azeroth herself.

Click Here for the Runemaster Handbook

-

For a bit more context...

It's an old shame of mine that I still play World of Warcraft. It's not one of my worst shames—not even in my top 10 (which no, I will not be listing here)—but it’s still not something I'm proud of. For the record, my shame stems from the fact that my subscription money supports an abusive company and its despicable little overpaid executives, not that I still casually enjoy WoW; you should all know by now that I have dull, trash tastes.

Despite those misgivings, I’m still fond of the world of Azeroth. It’s by-the-numbers kitchen sink pop-fantasy done in a maximalist visual style and tone that evoke the feeling of "Fisher-Price toy set but for grownups", and it's been copied and emulated so much over the decades that it sometimes evokes Seinfeld-esque disgust for being so quaint and unoriginal nowadays, despite originating many of those styles, tropes, and moods. But it introduced me to online gaming and fandom in a way that has shaped much of the creature I have become. It gave me a hobby, friends and loved ones whom I still play with to this day, and perspectives I'd otherwise lack; I can’t not care about it on some level.

Fortunately for me, the kind of nostalgia I get for my earlier memories of Warcraft doesn’t involve me running Molten Core on a private German permadeath server for the millionth time or some such. Instead, it makes me turn toward the weird peripherals from the early days of the IP; the spin-off board games, the card game from before they came up with Hearthstone, the handful of comic books and novels I managed to read, etc.

And World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game is right at the top of that list.

The WoW RPG is the d20 tabletop port of WoW published under the Sword & Sorcery label, which included many properties during the early 2000s OGL craze that I call the 3E Gold Rush. It’s also the sequel to the Warcraft RPG, which makes it one of those rare instances where two editions of a game were both made for 3.5E rules, rather than one being made for 3.0E and the other updating it by +0.5.

Let's get it out of the way now that 3E d20 was never a good match for anything Warcraft. 4E and 5E came a little closer to capturing the feeling, but nothing short of a bespoke system made from the ground up would ever "feel" like WoW, and I doubt Blizzard will ever bother with that. But that's okay, because I'm happy to explore and fiddle with the failed attempt, and find everything about it that I like.

I should probably save the rest of the history talk for an actual blog post on the subject, and just get on with my point: I decided to kill two birds with one stone by turning this trip down memory lane into an exercise in good old-fashioned class handbook creation.

I have never made a handbook before in my life, and I don’t think anyone on the internet has ever written extensively on my subject here, so let’s bumble around in the dark together shall we?

1d20 Nonmechanical Curses

Maybe the maker of that ancient artifact phoned in the work that day. Maybe that witch was in a real hurry to get to their broom cycling class. Whatever the cause, the result is the same: you've been cursed, but not detrimentally. It won't kill you, or severely hamper your rolls and abilities from moment to moment during an adventure. Heck, it probably won't physically hurt you all that much. It can even be dispelled with whatever means to Remove Curse you have access to.

But until then, it is going to be one hell of an annoyance.

1. Power Word: Faucet Nose - Whether it's a localized area of damaged capillaries or an incredibly minor bleeding disorder, nosebleeds have gotten much more common for you. The constant, red seepage is a bane to your wardrobe, a pain to stop, and it can be caused by the most insignificant stimuli: sneezing, chewing, rubbing your eyes, looking down too hard to tie your shoes...
2. The Feeling of Spiderwebs - You constantly get the feeling that spiderwebs and other creepy, clingy things are surrounding to you. Tickling your earlobes, tangling around your fingers, working their way under your clothes and then surprising you when you move. Sometimes they even skitter, and then people look at you funny when you start to flail and pat yourself down.
3. Fungus - A puffy, discoloring fungal infection takes root in your body. Hands, feet, scalp, any and/or all of them are affected. Skin scars, nails crumble and split, bubbles of empty skin rise here and there, and your body's pH gets all kinds of out-of-whack. Topical solutions help for a few minutes at most. In hotter weather, you even start to reek of vinegar.
4. Botched Speaking Cues - Communicating with people is hard for everyone; especially for you. You're always about a quarter of a second off from everybody else, either cutting people off without meaning to or interrupting them just as they begin to speak again after a lengthy pause.
5. Ichthyosis Vulgaris - Your skin dries and cracks into a mosaic of tessellations resembling fish scales. You flake constantly, and often grow raised patches of accumulated dead skin that look scabrous and dirty. No amount of exfoliating and moisturizing will hide this for long, and you leave a little dusting of human detritus wherever you go. If the climate is especially dry, you can even split open and bleed during vigorous activity. Despite the name, it does not give you a fish's swimming or water breathing powers.
6. Always Slightly Tilted - Maybe it's your brain, your terrible posture, or the room you're in. Everything feels off-center, tilted, wrong. And no amount of fidgeting and adjusting will fix that. It doesn't significantly impact your proprioception, but can you really trust your senses as much as you used to?
7. Unspeakable Names - Let's face it, you were never good at remembering names. But now the universe is conspiring to put you in situations that highlight that inability. Whether it's shouting them across a battlefield or announcing them at an award ceremony, you're drawing a blank, and someone is already slightly offended.
8. First Place You Looked - Whenever you lose something, it is invariably in the first place you looked. But you don't realize that until you've gone back over every spot on the list two or even three times, scouring every inch in increasing desperation until you move one incidental little object aside and realize the lost something had been there that entire time, in the face of all logic.
9. Temperature Sensitivity - You know that one friend who's always just a little chilly, even in the dead of summer? Congratulations; that's you now. Your body has embarked on a lifelong war against the thermostat and the consensus of everyone else in the same space as you. Sure, it's still possible to feel comfortable, but those moments are fleeting and hidden in the paper-thin margins between extremes.
10. Constantly Shedding - You start growing a lot of hair very quickly, even if that's something you shouldn't be physically capable of. But dashing your dreams of lumberjack beards and/or Rapunzel hair is the fact that it breaks or falls out just as quickly. Everywhere you go, you walk amidst a halo of broken ends fluttering in the breeze. You leave a trail of hair that collects into tumbleweeds if you aren't on top of cleaning up after yourself. And it will catch and snag and rip on everything.
11. One Leg Longer - One of your legs lengthens ever so slightly, after a few hours of accelerated growing pain in your shin. It only grows an inch or so; not enough to see at first glance, but enough to disrupt your locomotion. You walk with a pronounced up-and-down bob that can be mistaken for a pretentious swagger, and it always puts more stress on one knee and shoe sole than the other.
12. Noisy Joints - Heyyy, what's poppin'? It's your knees, pal. Your joints snap, crackle, and pop more than mediocre breakfast cereal with every move you make. It doesn't exactly hurt, but the feeling is unpleasant; as are all the younger people around you suddenly asking if you're alright (read: too old) to be doing this by yourself.
13. Wandering Food Allergy - First it starts with a pit in your stomach. Then it progresses to cold sweats. Finally you embark on a night-long adventure in nonstop infinite bowel-voiding. And here's the kicker: the thing that causes it changes randomly, day-to-day, week-to-week, maybe even midmeal!
14. Manual Breathing - Every moment of every day, you have to breathe manually and consciously. You're fine while you're asleep; no sleep apnea here. But as long as you're awake, it's up to you to keep resetting that 3-minute timer until brain death. Which means that you often forget while you're busy, and then you have to suck in great gasps of air during such laborious tasks as sitting still and thinking.
15. Smell Your Own Nose - You become acutely aware of the smell of your own nose. No, not something in your nose, but the interior of your nostrils themselves, suddenly risen up from the background of your body's ambient odorscape to contend with all other smells. And it is as unpleasant as it is difficult to articulate to other people.
16. Transcended Spotlight Effect - That old comfort, the idea that everyone else is too preoccupied with their own nonsense to care about yours, is dead. Staring at you gives everyone sudden, epiphanic clarity into just how fine they are, and how okay this all is. It's just you who's freaking out. You're the only one. And they're judging you for it. What the hell is your problem?
17. Lightning Limbs - Your extremities fall asleep so quickly and easily, you think they might each have a case of narcolepsy with separate triggers. They don't sleep for long, and you're unlikely to trip or drop anything from it. But the waves of cold pins and needles are an unwelcome wakeup call most times.
18. Bibliophobia - You feel an acute sense of anxiety, worthlessness, and borderline dread whenever you have to read something longer than a few paragraphs. You remain as capable and able to read as you were before, but now the whole experience is a painful chore. What if you interpret the text wrong, or forget everything you just read?
19. Creative Tinnitus - Buzzing, humming, chirping, squeaking, rattling; all manner of different sounds, and none of them real. For whatever reason your brain has decided things get too quiet, and will on occasional supply noises of its own. The plain old ringing of yesteryear was obnoxious, but at least it was predictable and recognizable.
20. Nonsense Homophones - Your first language starts to feel... not so first. Words begin to stick out at you as strange jumbles of phonemes and conjugations. Was that person saying things were wonderful, or were they asking for 'one derfle'? Why do they give you funny looks when you say you 'derstand' and need things repeated? Perhaps you need a resher for your reef.

The Spell-Handler's Guide to Magic

Howdy, 'zardner!

So you're lookin' to become a certified member of the Wizened Pardnership of Spell-Handlers?

Well you should thank your lucky stars, because you've come to the right place! With this handy little primer, you'll have everything you need to embark on your journey to become a trained spell-handler, breeder, or even arch-rancher!

Let's begin by going back to basics, and answering a few simple questions about the nature of magic. If you have any aspiring young buckaroos nearby, now would be a perfect opportunity to introduce them to the topic of spell-handling as well!

To start off, what is Magic?

Magic is a blanket term for the huge and diverse range of bodily functions produced by Spells.

What are Spells?

Spells are small, domesticated creatures belonging to the phylum carmenifera. Each species of spell produces a magical effect unique to itself. It is the job of the spell-handler to rear and harness spells for their magic.

What can Spells do?

Why, plum near anything! A better question to ask would be "what can't spells do?" Even then, the Wizened Pardnership believes that it should be even more precise to ask "what can't spells do yet?"¹

What is a Spell-Handler?

Spell-handlers (also known as "wizards" or "'zardners" for their association with the Wizened Pardnership) are specialists trained to rear and care for spells. They are the foremost experts on the theories and applications of magic, and often serve as pillars of their community besides.

How do Handlers use Spells?

Spell-handlers form lifelong² bonds with their spells that grant them the trust, familiarity, and know-how to coax magic out of them. This is sometimes called "casting" because many magical effects involve the spell ejecting substances from its body, sometimes at impressive ranges. A skilled spell-handler knows how to get their Fireball to sneeze, how to shake their Daylight just right, how to stimulate their Cure Wounds' musk glands to express healing goo on their pals, and so many other marvelous tricks!

What is Spellcare like?

Handlers have a robust set of daily obligations toward their spells. They must ensure that each spell is given proper food, water, exercise, and attention. If they are adventuring together, the handler must also tend to any injury or fatigue suffered by their spells, and keep any others from befalling them. Proper spellcare avoids waste and ensures that spells and their magic can be relied upon when they are most needed.

Why do Spell-Handlers go adventuring?

There's only so much a body can learn in class or in front of books. At the end of each handler's initial training period they enter their Journeyman Years, in which they gain practical experience and know-how about magic in the real world. Oftentimes this may be done by working at a string of ranches away from where they studied. Less common but more famous are the handlers who go a-venturin', often for the same reasons anyone else does: for excitement, challenge, and opportunity!

How long do the Journeyman Years last?

On average, handlers-in-training spend 2-to-3 years on the road. Some prodigies may complete this period in as little as 1 year, while slow-goers may take as long as 3-and-a-half or 4 years, depending on the details of their contract.

Contract? What contract?

Every spell-handler-in-training negotiates an education and employment contract at the start of their career. The contract outlines a mutually beneficial split between training, and making use of that training. Teaching someone how to handle spells is an expensive process, after all, and the educating institution has to make a return on its investment somehow. And that is why after a gap period, all spell-handlers return to their alma mater to work and repay the awesome opportunity that has been provided for them, as set forth in their voluntary and mutually agreed-upon contract.

Isn't that kind of like Indentured Servitude?

Haha, what?

Nothing, nevermind. Do Journeyman Handlers befriend their Spells?

'Friend' is a strong word that has many connotations incompatible with the realities of spell-handling. Spells are not pets, and handlers are not pet-owners. It is a serious working relationship in which attachment is unbecoming of someone of the handler's office, which requires executive decisions in the interest of the whole community.

Do Spells grow attached to their Handlers?

Unfortunately the spell-breeders have yet to breed attachment out of most spell strains. They are prone to mistaking grooming and cordiality for affection, and may respond in kind, even to the inconvenience of its handler.

But there is a silver lining: this makes spells great for ranch-sponsored petting zoos. Bring your kids!

How many Spells can Handlers have at a time?

As many as they can handle!

C'mon now buckaroo, you walked right into that one.

Jesting aside, the number of spells in a handler's repertoire can vary greatly depending on their individual responsibilities and skill level. Many folks go their entire lives with just 1 or 2 handy spells by their side, while some mavens have been known to handle a dozen or more at a time!

How do Handlers carry all their Spells?

Spell-handlers invariably rely upon the invaluable spell-kennel for all their on-the-go magical needs. A spell-kennel is a container for a spell meant to be convenient and accessible for the handler carrying the kennel, and cozy for the spell inside. Anti-magic lining³ and a convenient feeding port ensure that no day is too long or too arduous for a prepared handler.

What do Spell-Kennels look like?

Spell-kennels may take the shape of backpacks, bandoliers, folding organizers colloquially known as "spellbooks", and many other styles depending on individual needs and preferences. They may project an air of style, confidence, or simple, workmanlike professionalism to suit the handler. The beauty of the spell-kennel is that it is whatever you want it to be!

While supplies last, of course.

Can't Handlers keep Spells outside of their Kennels?

Technically they can, but any handler worth their salt would know better than to let their spells flop around all willy-nilly. It poses a needless inconvenience and risk to the handler to have their spells not immediately at-hand and under their control. Besides, most spells would not be able to keep up on foot.

Why can't some Spells walk?

The marvels of selective breeding have only been achieved by making a few very carefully considered sacrifices across the many diverse breeds of spells. One consequence is that many breeds of spells possess vestigial limbs that are no longer functional for locomotion- which makes it all the more important that the world have plenty of licensed spell-handlers to help take care of them.

Where do Handlers get their Spells?

Most spell-handlers receive their spells from the spell-ranch where they were currently are employed. If that is impossible or impractical, such as the case is with spell-handlers working abroad, they may acquire replacement spells from any nearby ranches or independent breeders at their convenience.

What is a Spell-Ranch?

Spell ranches are the centers of all things spellish. They are where spells are raised, new spells are created, spell-handlers learn, and countless members of your communities work, all to build a better and brighter future together. You could call it a farm that grows spells instead of crops, but to call it just a farm is to sell it woefully short. It would not be hyperbolic to say that the modern spell-ranch is the cornerstone of society.

Non-Handlers work at Spell-Ranches too?

Of course!

Spell-rearing is a multidisciplinary market, and it wouldn't behoove a ranch to have nothing but academics running around the fields sweating buckets. Anyone from any walk of life has the skills necessary to help keep a ranch running. Many towns and villages receive the majority of their employment from nearby ranches, all of which are solemnly grateful and duty-bound to provide for them in turn.

It may be hard for the layman to see it, but ranch hands know that they are essential: every spell fed, ditch dug, and pen mucked is a step toward prosperity and magical progress, and it fuels each and every one of their boundless hearts with a burning purpose that the Pardnership is plum gobsmacked at, even to this day.

I heard some Spell-Ranch workers are trying to unionize due to alleged mistreatment.

"The Wizened Pardnership and its affiliated spell-ranches are not anti-union, but they are not neutral either. They will boldly defend their direct relationship with their workers as something that is in the best interest of the worker, the ranc [sic], and the community. They do not believe unions are in the best interest of the ranch, the community, or—most importantly—the worker.

Spell-ranches optimize themselves to work best according to the core values of dependability, innovation, and efficacy, without which the world would not have such revolutionary wonders as brand-new spells."

Hang on, let's back up. How do you create "new" Spells?

So glad you asked!

An important part of spell-breeding is selecting for desirable traits. By paring the right spells of the same species together, those traits can be brought out and enhanced, made even more wonderous than what nature endowed them with. This is how you get new, subtle variations between spells of the same class; the kinds of things an outside buckaroo looking in might call different "ranks" of spells, though the reality is far more nuanced.

Alternatively, a skilled breeder may hybridize two different spells together into an all-new spell that combines some of the traits of each parent, or even results in something entirely new to magic and science.

It isn't as simple as plopping two spells down in the same room and waiting for the magic to happen, of course. Conditions must be carefully controlled, and a lengthy period of stabilization and strict testing follows all successful attempts.

What is Stabilization?

Stabilization is the process by which a new spell's magico-genetic structure is made stable enough for the specimen to be viable, as well as safe to handle. Failure to run a new spell through proper stabilization protocols is dangerous: it may behave erratically, attempt to self-terminate, discharge its magic uncontrollably, or even spontaneously explode.

Do some folks still try it anyway?

Regrettably yes, there are some bad actors among us who would disregard the wisdom of the Pardnership and pursue their own agendas in spell-breeding without oversight, putting themselves and their communities at risk. We condemn them in the strongest possible terms.

What should be done about that?

It is for the stated reasons above that unauthorized spell hybridization has been made strictly illegal in most jurisdictions. It is your civic duty—as well as the professional and moral duty of all 'zardners everywhere—to report any suspected cases of spell-breeding or related activity to local law enforcement.

We don't want another Larrold's Ridge Incident, now do we?

What Happened at Larrold's Ridge?

The Larrold's Ridge Incident was a tragic ████████ ██ █████ ███████ ██████ ██████ █████████ at an uncertified independent facility rapidly █████████ ███████ ██████████████ resulting in large-scale destruction and the almost complete loss of all ████ ███ ████████ within a 3-kilomile radius.

For more information, contact ███████████ at ████████████████████████.

Wow, I feel kind of unsafe right now. How can we trust Magic?

By trusting the Pardnership!

The Incident was shocking in its size and severity precisely because of the efforts of the Pardnership; otherwise, it and events like it would be far worse and far more frequent. But by putting the best and brightest minds in spell-handlerdom together, we can work to prevent such things from happening. It is thanks to these fine folks that magic remains and will continue to be a net positive and a force for good, both in your communities and across the world.

Trust us. We will protect you.

I feel much safer now, but I am not a certified Spell-Handler. How else can I help support the Pardnership?

There are many ways to help support the Pardnership, and they can all be done at the local level. You can volunteer your time at a local ranch, support the Pardnership by purchasing some of its marvelous products, or just be a good citizen and attend to the civic duties morally incumbent upon all of us. Keep the world clean and friendly, and make sure to report any feral spells you find!

Feral Spells? Aren't all Spells domesticated?

Almost! While most spells have been bred in captivity and virtually all extant species have been selectively bred from their wild ancestors, there are many feral spell colonies across the world. These "wild magic" populations are the result of domestic spells escaping captivity or being abandoned by negligent handlers, then reproducing in the wild. Wild spells should only be approached by certified spell-handlers with trap-neuter-return training, as they pose a potential danger to bystanders and their communities if agitated.

If you believe there is a feral spell colony in your area, please contact your nearest ranch.

Wait! I saw someone using Magic without a Spell. How is that possible?

Easy now, buckaroo. There are many spell-based products commercially available nowadays. What you may have witnessed was the proud owner of a spell-egg, magical wand, or staff showing off their shiny little slice of modernity.

What is a Spell-Egg?

Simply put, a spell-egg is an egg laid by a spell!

More properly, commercially available spell-eggs are unfertilized eggs that contain enough residual magic from the spell that laid it to allow it to be used as a sort of disposable single-use spell. The effects produced by eggs pale in comparison to what a live spell can do in the care of a handler, but they offer a wide range of options and conveniences to the layman.

How does one use a Spell-Egg?

Simply break open the shell of an egg to activate its latent magic. This may be done either by throwing the egg at the spell's intended target or, in the case of spells intended for oneself, by cracking that bad boy open and sucking the yolk down like a real Hoss.

Always consult the expiration date on spell-eggs before use. Do not purchase if shell is broken. Report any health code violations to your local ranch.

What are Magical Wands & Staffs?

Wands are a spectacular invention designed for the discerning non-handler who wants dependability and scalability out of their magical products for the best price. Through generations of selective breeding, certain spells have been designed to fit inside an enclosed space as small as a piece of wood or ceramic tubing without food, water, or air for months on end before reaching a natural expiration date.

Staffs are functionally identical to wands, except they are enlarged to hold up to a half-dozen (or more!) spells at once.

How does one use a Magical Wand or Staff?

Wands and staffs need only be activated with the proper gesture or phrase in order to effect its magic. This may be done several times depending on the size and type of the product in question. Once the spell within has been fully discharged of its magic, the wand may be disposed of in any way that is safe and convenient for perishable goods.

Vendors are required by law to supply suitable activation instructions with every purchase. Do not attempt to open wands or staffs or activate opened ones. Check your local ordinances.

Are there any sources of Magic other than Spells or Spell-Based Products?

We understand that in this modern age there is a growing sense of conscientiousness surrounding the use of spells, stemming from ecological, ethical, and dietary concerns. For those whom it concerns, it may be pleasing to know that a group of researchers is hard at work inventing a synthetic form of magic for experimental use. But R&D is a slow process, and Big Egg has one hell⁴ of a wizard lobby. In the meantime, remember that all available spell-based products are guaranteed safe and sustainable.

This has all been very enlightening, but I want to learn more.

You're in luck! Chances are, you have a world-class education in spells just a stone's throw away from home. Every Pardnership-affiliated spell-ranch has an information and admissions office ready and waiting to receive you and all your questions, curiosities, or concerns. Take a guided tour of the ranch, join community outreach programs, or apply for preliminary screening interviews to become the spell-handler of your dreams.

You'll know you're in the right neck of the woods when you pass the statue of our beloved mascot, Blorpy the Excarnating Illiquation spell.

Have a good'un, 'zardner!

¹ Such as create gold. No known magical effect can as of yet spontaneously generate gold, nor convert another substance into gold. But the fine folks at R&D are hard at work, and thanks to their ceaseless self-sacrifice and the hard work of their communities, a breakthrough could come any day now! The cost will be worth it. Literally.

² Lifelong for the spell, that is. The average life expectancy of a spell is 6-8 months, depending on species. Particularly long-lived specimens can exceed 2 years. Parents are advised not to get spells as children's pets.

³ Made from only the most high quality spell stomach lining using state-of-the-art rendering and polymerization techniques.

⁴ Literally. Since they successfully bred the Infernal Gulper (binomial name pending), portals to the underworld have been opening left and right. Watch your step, pilgrim!

Troika: The Spellsponge

You aren't sure if you were lucky or unlucky when the witch-hunter's spell fizzled out upon your bare skin with an inelegant schlorp. On one hand you escaped immediate, agonizing death. But on the other hand, everyone within sight of the incident couldn't shake the feeling that maybe the fanatic's suspicions about you were not completely baseless.

You've been on the run ever since. Not because you're still being hunted, although that certainly is one motivator. No, you wander because that fateful day awakened something in you. A thirst for magic that isn't academic, nor megalomaniacal, nor power-hungry. Well, maybe it's a little hungry. A hunger for spells, the look and feel of them, the sensation of intuitive knowing that fills you when you're around magic.

That ineffable feeling has sent you wandering far. Maybe somewhere in the feeling of sublime wholeness, you'll find out just how and why you randomly soak spells up like a sponge.

Or maybe you'll get to freak out another inquisitor.

The Spellsponge

Nishat by Ron Koza (formerly hvit-ravn)

Possessions

• Travelworn Cloak, stitched and patched in many colors.
• Walking Stick, inexpertly carved out of boredom.
• Knife, more for the outdoors than the battlefield but still quite sharp.
• Idiosyncratic Trinkets & Charms which don't actually do anything supernatural but help you make sense of the world and your aberrant relationship to magic within it.
• A Map scribbled with notes on local wizard schools, temples, ley-lines, etc.

Advanced Skills

    3 Second Sight

    2 Awareness

    2 Intuition

    2 Spell - Random

    1 Spell - Random

Special

When you witness a spell being cast or are targeted by a spell, you may Test your Luck to learn that spell as if you had trained a new Advanced Skill to rank 1. Additionally, if the spell is targeted at you and you succeed your Test, you "soak up" the spell and it does not affect you. You may attempt this once per week per spell. You can't use this ability on a spell you already know.

Mechanical Musings: A Couple Random House Rule Concepts I've Never Used

Title says it all. I don't really play games, but I often think about playing games, and these are some ideas that have crossed my mind in those times. I haven't experimented with any of them or fleshed them out into tables, and you can probably find a half-dozen other blogs that go into much better and greater detail about any particular one of the concepts I play around with, but it's my show damn it.

Combat is Terrifying: When the characters aren't starting off as experienced combatants, or when your game is intended to be low-combat but still dangerous, consider emphasizing how frightening combat and both sides of violence really are.

Force attacking PCs to make wisdom/will/vs paralysis/etc. saves before they even roll to hit AC or cast an overtly harmful spell, because sudden and decisive violence is not a reflex most people exercise regularly. Failure means they hesitate or even freeze. And if they are themselves the target of an attack, a certain amount of damage or debilitation suffered should call for a save vs. fear because holy crap that hurt and that's your blood!

The PCs have to succeed (or maybe fail) a certain number of saves or endure enough rounds of combat overall to get desensitized to inflicting and being subjected to violence, and thus stop having to roll. Martial characters like fighters might get a bonus to these "ruthlessness" saves according to their to-hit bonus, or they might automatically desensitize at a certain level. And even when a character has reached that point, consider the mental toll it takes, and the stress it causes long-term.

Make sure enemies that aren't all battle-hardened or utterly single-minded automatons also deal with some of this in the form of morale checks for major setbacks or just for being green recruits. Remind players of the NPCs' human(oid)ity, and offer avenues for diplomacy or escape often.

Obviously don't do something like this without the whole group's consent beforehand. As I write this, I realize it might cleave too close to PTSD, which is very real for some people.

Journey and Destination: Instead of leveling up according to the number and lethality of the things you kill, the value of stuff you steal, or the narrative beats of a GM with more important things to do than balance an EXP checkbook, you gain experience by the literal milestone. This is most useful when travel and discovery is the central thrust of the adventure. Leveling up can happen overnight while camped, or maybe take the form of sudden insights of "road wisdom" as they leave an area.

Requiring that the party keeps moving in order to keep (mechanically) growing discourages them from settling down in one place for too long and becoming stale, stagnant, and/or feudal tyrants. Either give XP per the kilomile or other unit of measure traveled, or grant it in larger chunks depending on the length or difficulty of the paths the party chooses (or is forced) to take. In the event that they're moving over trackless wastes or acting as the trailblazers, consider awarding XP per region/landmark discovered, or map hex explored. Retreading old territory doesn't grant any experience unless they make a discovery they missed before.

If you need to positively incentivize them sticking around long enough to actually do stuff in every area instead of just scratching the surface like highly armed tourists, grant bonus experience for fully delving into the area's subsites, like ruins or a cave system, so that it guides them toward quests or bonus objectives. Finding the magma antechamber gets them the experience, but solving the fire lich's chronic loneliness gives that experience satisfying meaning. Or to give a negative incentive, slap the party with a stacking road-weariness debuff if they're being too shallow or moving on too quickly.

Communal Leveling: You're only as strong as the community you help cultivate and protect. PCs don't directly power up from doing or experiencing anything out in the field. Nobody levels up. Rather, they bring their experiences and resources back home to their base (or their caravan/nomadic camp if you want to use this with the above travel rules) to help it grow and prosper.

Different specialized buildings can be constructed, NPCs are attracted to the community, and existing relationships strengthen over time. From these, the PCs will gain their information, equipment, upgrades, training, etc. that were previously gated or inaccessible. And if the PCs ever start to neglect their community or take its services for granted, they risk misfortune befalling the place and/or its inhabitants, and making those services unavailable again.

And unless it's part of a big, endgame culmination of plot and progress, don't let the characters outright take control of the community. Doing something like taking public office and greater responsibility in recognition of their contributions is fine, but make sure they remain accountable to their fellows- fantasy is one of the few places where we get to make that happen without a lot of canvassing and/or revolution, after all.

The PCs are important, even vital organs of the whole, but this is not another stronghold for them to rule over. These are friends, family, and neighbors.

Moar Depletion Dice!: Instead of just making a sword break on a Nat 1, have the blade chip or bend first so that it's still usable, but not as effective until it gets a serious whetstone'ing. To-hit can take a penalty, but also that d8 damage drops to a d6. If the game uses a hit dice recovery during rest mechanic, maybe suffering some critical hits slashes those dice until the PCs manage a very long rest. Interrupted concentration or fizzled spells reduce their numerical effects by dice sizes, too. And all of these stack, to create an experience of gradually rising desperation as abilities and resources are depleted.

Basically anything that isn't a d20 has the potential to get reduced through injury or wear and tear. An entire mishap table can be constructed from these, offering a less permanent and gruesome alternative to the detailed maiming of some injury tables- or a complementary system to integrate into them, if your players are Hidetaka Miyazaki-level masochists.

Unless something obvious escapes me, this rule leaves most non-variable utility, save-or-die, or save-or-suck spells and effects unaffected, since there are no dice involved to deplete. It can still impact other facets of the characters or creatures who use those types of abilities enough to not be an all-the-time issue, but keep in mind that specialist wizards and their ilk might stand out as even stronger than usual.

Natural; Not Divine: The source of power that rangers, shamans, druids, et al draw their magic from is categorized as primal rather than divine.

... That's basically it, I just want it treated as unique and special.

I had forgotten all about the D&D 4E power categories until I started reading Keith Baker's old Eberron backlog and found that he has continued to apply the primal distinction to druids in his version of Eberron, not as a mechanical label but to help characterize a very distinct set of animistic practices and traditions as separate from the usual monolatry and organized religion you find in a D&D-inspired world. I just find it neat and wanted to share that.

The Falling City

"The Falling City" is just one of several descriptive exonyms used by travelers and scholars. Others include Fallingrock, The Howling City, The Agglomerate, The Boulder, The Pebble, etc. None of them are especially clever, but all are true in part. For what it's worth, the city's denizens (commonly dubbed "fallers") merely call it "home", or "The City" at most.

The aforementioned rock is a collection of natural stone and mortal-made debris several kilomiles in diameter. It is approximately bullet-shaped, with a flattened top and tapering bottom. The "city" portion of the Falling City is located on the flattened top. The whole thing is held together by a small well of artificial gravity constantly maintained by the city's magic-users.

Without that, the City would be torn apart as it falls through the Chasm.

The Chasm is several times wider than the City, and by most accounts infinite in height. Most of the time it resembles an approximately circular rock tunnel, but it is known to deform into more jagged or esoteric shapes and materials at times. Rarely, it will widen out into massive vaults that offer strange and alien vistas before inevitably tapering back inward. Dim, ambient light comparable to an overcast day seems to suffuse the whole Chasm without source- nothing outside of the City casts a shadow.

It is unknown what, if anything created the Chasm, or if it even exists in a conventional sense.

The City perpetually falls through the Chasm at several times the terminal velocity it should be- what limited observations that can be made from the City suggest that its underside glows orange-hot from friction. The same blanket of spells that keeps the rock together also keeps a breathable atmosphere on top of the city, though the bubble is not thick enough to block out the low, constant howling of the wind whipping past the edges of the rock. Toward the middle of the rock it's little more than background static like any city has.

Under ideal conditions the City is stable and centered in the Chasm with no wobble, tilt, or rotation to its fall. As gashes and scrapes along the rock's flanks can attest, ideal conditions are not always met. Course correction requires immediate and immense effort on the part of all able spellcasters lest the City be dashed to pieces.

There is no way in or out of the Chasm—and by extension, the Falling City—except by way of teleportation spells (oftentimes a misfiring one, at that). The fact that it doesn't seem to connect to any other plane in the multiverse supports the argument that it is its own self-contained demiplane. Where on the "map" that is, is a mystery.

How it remained unknown by the larger multiversal community up until fairly recently suggests that the plane was either created recently, or is just very well hidden. This is reinforced by the fact that divine magic tends to fizzle out in the City- not even the gods seem to know where it is. Meanwhile, arcane and primal magic work more-or-less normally.

The citizens of the Falling City maintain that the City has been around for millennia at least, epochs at most.

Every neighborhood seems to have a different origin story for the City and the Chasm, influenced by local culture and history. Some believe that both have existed since before the dawn of time, and will continue to exist after all else has ended. Others maintain a small hero-cult dedicated to the original mages and geotheurges who either created the City and the Chasm or transported the City into the Chasm in order to save it from some impending disaster. Evidence for each is murky enough that many choose to believe whichever they fancy.

A Few Other City/Chasm Theories Include:

• The Chasm is the intestine of a Cosmic Earthworm that devoured the City's world long ago. The day is eagerly awaited when the Worm excretes the City onto a paradise built on solid ground and/or midnight soil.
• The Chasm is a very long circular loop that the City flies laps through. Glowing magical beacons are fired into the Chasm walls at intervals in the belief that someday the City will pass them by again and prove the theory true.
• The City is the leftover pocket domain of a dead and forgotten god. The citizens are fated to reincarnate within it for all eternity until they achieve moksha.
• The Chasm is actually an illusion projected around the perfectly ordinary City to keep its limits and its denizens imprisoned. Their jailors are an omniscient, vaguely malign conspiracy of NIMBY wizards and disgruntled suburban planners.
• The Chasm is actually a one-dimensional string in the process of propagating itself into empty space to form a brand new universe, and the City is a proto-particle that will help form new matter there. There's more to the theory than that, but most people mentally check out here.
• The City isn't falling down through the Chasm, the Chasm is flying up around the City, maaan.
• The Chasm is not infinite in length at all, and in fact its end is coming up very, very soon.
• Everyone in the City knows its history and the nature of the Chasm exactly, but refuse to give any details to outsiders because the mystique attracts tourists.
• Once there were many cities and other islands of life falling through the Chasm. Now only the one City remains, and the council knows why.
• All of these questions and more could be answered if one were to just ask the secretive natives hiding in the Chasm wall.
• The City was once a piece of masonry connected to a "Bridge" before it broke off and slipped into the "Under". Whatever that means.

Whatever its origins or nature, the Falling City is surprisingly accommodating despite its eminently hostile locale. It is arranged in a roughly circular plan with a combination of wide-open common spaces and narrow streets with efficiently stacked buildings. Being unable to build outward, the city builds vertically to account for the slow upward crawl of its population, which is no more than a few thousand. High-rise buildings are cheap, but soundproofing them against the constant howl of the Chasm is not.

The city is divided up into a half-dozen districts, each of which has a seat on the council that gives the city its veneer of government. Since most citizens of the Falling City have at least enough magical talent to create matter from thin air and live self-sufficiently, there are few limited resources for a central government to justify itself by consolidating and (mis)managing. The council mainly exists to organize the will of its citizens to prevent or repair damage to the city, treat with visiting outsiders, and pass judgement on criminals.

There are two punishments used in the Falling City; community service, which is used for the vast majority of offenses and ranges greatly in length according to severity, and Unfettering.

Unfettering is quite simple: a group of the city's most talented mages stand in a circle around the condemned in an open space. The mages suppress the city's magical anchoring effect around the individual for several seconds; the individual then proceeds to exit the city limits in a very expedited fashion. A cleanup crew is typically kept on-hand, on the off-chance that anything is left of them afterward.

Unfettering is exceedingly rare, fortunately. It is meted out only by council consensus when an offender has been found guilty of premeditating grievous harm upon their fellow citizens, or threatening the integrity of the entire city- practically speaking, both charges are one and the same. No one has been intentionally ragdolled to bits upon the skyline in decades, and no outsider has ever been judged so, no matter how clueless or rude they can be.

And there have been many outsiders in the Falling City, ever since access was first accidentally gained during the Conjuration Crisis of █████████. Visitors are frequent, though few mortals stay long enough to acclimate to the extra atmospheres of pressure and the complete lack of a day-night cycle. The city tolerates these planar tourists and enjoys their business for the time being, so long as they can pay in magical curiosities not available in the Chasm.

Natives of the City don't much care to leave their home, meanwhile. They may visit other worlds and planes, but to date no fallers have voluntarily moved out of the City. It might be just a hunk of rock screaming through the abyss, but isn't that most people's homes at the end of the day?

Thanks to many tourists, a handy list of interesting places and sites to visit in the Falling City has been compiled. It is always expanding or shrinking according to whim. The current interesting sites include but are not limited to...

Visitor Center: An ornate, almost garishly decorated building quite at odds with its neighbors, located centrally in the City in order to attract even the shortest of adventurer attention spans. It is what the sign says in a dozen-and-a-half languages (the length of which is growing every week); City Visiting Center: Planar Visitors Please Register Within! Within, a large lobby plays host to staff offering local resources to outsiders or educating them on the finer points of city law and culture. A small group of abjuration and conjuration specialists nicknamed the Shunters also stands by to protect citizens and visitors both from any hazards of planar travel. They're the closest thing to cops the Falling City will tolerate having.

City Hall: Unlike the Visitor's Center, most outsiders can't find this place for the life of them without direction, and some citizens are even prone to forgetting its location. Not because it's hidden in any way, but because of how utterly unremarkable the building is. Only the crowd that gathers outside of it in anticipation of important or potentially amusing meetings is any indication that this is the seat of government in the Falling City.

Tiriyab's Twirls: An experimental entertainment house that operates within a warded zone of partially weakened tethering. This allows anyone inside to move around in a low- or even zero-gravity environment. Games, performances, and drinking abound. The different open-air levels of the establishment are serviced by "twirls", rotating rings that function like lifts or conveyor belts. All of this is overseen by the eponymous Tiriyab, who is otherwise known for perfecting (and closely guarding the secret to) an at-will short-range teleportation spell which they use to navigate their business quickly. A recent arrival in the city, a former contortionist and thief-acrobat, seeks to earn permanent residence and work as a performer under Tiriyab (and perhaps also steal the spell).

The Spiral: An access tunnel that winds down into the rock from the surface like a massive corkscrew. It houses a modest undercity that mainly services the ever-rotating staff of magic-users tasked with maintaining the integrity of the rock by channeling power straight into its floors and walls. It's also a pleasant little getaway from the (admittedly already pretty subdued) hustle and bustle of the city's surface. The tunnel supposedly goes all the way down to the "tip" of the rock, but the temperature is so high down there that none but the most skilled magic-users ever visit, and even then it's only to make sure nothing is melting or harboring unexpected trouble.

Beloveds' Embrace: One of the small shrines dedicated to honoring some of the hypothesized founders of the Falling City; in this instance, the magical power couple known as Quy & Hnah. As the legend goes, when the arcanist and the geomancer married, they also wedded their arcane and earth magic together. This formed a potent mix that allowed them to raise and build whole continents in the mythic time before the Chasm, and ultimately led to the founding of the City. The shrine's votaries keep an extensive canon of Quy & Hnah's adventures for the public, mostly told in the form of parables on ethics, magical practice, and healthy partnerships. The shrine gets slightly more traffic than normal these days, after a popular albeit shallow and trend-chasing travelogue author mistakenly identified Quy & Hnah as the gods of the Falling City. Visitors typically leave the quaint little street-side alcove feeling slightly underwhelmed. A visiting cleric—exceptionally rare in the void of divine energy that is the Falling City—has recently arrived on what they claim is a sacred mission to preach about Quy & Hnah abroad. The shrine keepers are... perplexed by this.

"Wobblespike": A tower that has the dubious honor of being the tallest point in the City. Gravity is weaker and the atmosphere is thinner here. Unique within the Falling City's architecture, it is made primarily of metal. This allows the tower to bend slightly with the windy Chasm turbulence it is exposed to, rather than just breaking apart. Hence the somewhat silly nickname. The lower levels see small amounts of mixed use, while the top only ever has a motley assortment of researchers and/or diviners trying to learn more about the Chasm from that vantage point. An air elemental in a copper suit has recently taken up temporary residence on the roof, where they "record" the wind with the aid of a strange metal rod.

The Antiquarium: A shop that began as a modest establishment for hobbyists who collected and traded interesting minor magical items. Since the arrival of the first planar visitors, it has become a growing hub of people seeking grander and less cozy acquisitions. Up to this point all dealings and visitors have been peaceful, but the neighborhood around the Antiquarium grows antsy about the increasing numbers of traditional enemies and opposingly aligned outsiders, not to mention all the magic weapons and dangerous wands. The matter—as well as whether or not to post a few Shunters in the area— is soon to be brought to the City Council.

How Disenchanting: Much like the Antiquarium, this place unexpectedly earned a whole new life as more planar travelers trickled in. What began as a municipal box with a slot on the front for recycling magical junk has evolved into a thriving city-owned business. Adventurers, it turns out, tend to hoard literal tons of stuff in those Bags of Holding and Portable Holes of theirs. Many of them will gladly pay a small processing fee to have their old magic items broken down into raw magical extract, useful for spell components or item creation. The Falling City keeps a percentage too, of course.

The Meander: Vegetation and "wildlife" are present all throughout the Falling City, in private gardens and on more hospitable streets. But to get a taste of true envelopment in nature, most fallers take a stroll through this large park and garden. Named for its winding pathways, this park holds several plant and animal species unknown elsewhere in the multiverse, lit up and sustained by small artificial suns that lazily float through the groves. Since they can't survive in the Chasm, scholars theorize that they were originally taken from another world that has since been destroyed, or perhaps they were bred from wizard experiments like so many other monstrosities. A druid(?) who calls themself the High Orinthologue is squatting studying the local bird genera here.

The Scrape: Once upon a time during a particularly deadlocked and petty disagreement between districts, the City drifted slightly off course and struck an unexpectedly large protuberance from the Chasm wall. It cleaved off a chunk of the City's rim, taking streets and city blocks as well as all their occupants with it. It was the largest disaster ever recorded in the history of the Falling City. The site has since been reinforced to prevent erosion, but much of the visible damage has not been touched since that day. This shell of a neighborhood long-gone has had a memorial statue installed on its outskirts as a reminder of what can happen when the survival of the City is taken for granted.

Koilotheism: Walkers of the World Beyond

 When a world ends, there are often survivors.

Despite the scale and severity of the destruction that the death of a god can cause, a few generally escape unscathed thanks to sheer, callous luck.

Most die shortly thereafter, either in mourning or on the hellish march into the wastes.

A few live on past that point, thanks to the cruel hand of fate. It becomes their lot then to throw themselves upon the cold mercy of another hollow god-beast's passengers, in the hopes that they be welcomed into the fold.

Some people, for whatever reason, do not elect to prostrate themselves in the path of thousands of tons of rampaging stone.

Instead, they set off on their own path. They become the Walkers of the World Beyond.

Who?

Any castoff can become a Walker, though some are more likely than others.

The most likely candidate for the unlucky life of a Walker is a Watcher.

Watchers are the people most exposed to the outside world, spending the majority of their lives in the crags and tunnels of their god's rocky skin. In some communities they are treated like professional soldiers deserving of regular cycles between leave and active service. In others, they are considered a separate caste of people who should rarely, if ever, enter their god's Hollow.

Regardless of context, Watchers are always in possession of the best knowledge of the wastes around their god-beast. They know the paths, the limited resources, and the dangers- the many, many dangers. If a god falls and the Watchers avoid being crushed, or if some other upheaval leaves them without a home, they become the most able and perhaps even willing to brave the World Beyond.

Far less likely are the common folk: Hollow dwellers. The passengers who rarely if ever leave the placid confines of their god's empty mind are, overall, ill-equipped to handle the physical or psychological challenges of existence outside of what is both figuratively and literally their whole world.

This does not completely preclude them from survival in the wastes, of course. The incalculable widths and depths of a god's unconsciousness hosts many diverse dreamscapes and societies. If the powers that be in a particular koilos has deemed it fit, the Murmurers have helped sculp desolate landscapes which are not a terribly far cry from those of the World Beyond. And if the nation is a sharply stratified one, rest assured the least affluent and most persecuted groups will wind up in those parts. In this unlikely way, survivors are forged in the furnaces built by those who hold them in such contempt.

Rarest of all Walkers are individuals with some talent for the Murmur and the Hum.

Normally, this high sensitivity to the Hum directly leads to a Murmurer's death from the psychic backlash of of a god-beast's demise. Their deaths are often very loud, and very explosive, and can easily lead to chain reactions which cause even greater destruction. This can explain--though far from justify--a fraction of the bondage and scrutiny Murmurers are often held in.

Some survive the death of their god and vessel, and though most are killed either as consequence or out of fear of Dissonance, it is at least possible for a Murmurer to set out into the Wastes. To what end is unknown.

The only group who has essentially no chance of survival outside of one's koilos is one who was literally born of it. The practice is rare, and requires a highly skilled and controlled tradition of Murmuring, but mortal life can be harmonized into shape from the Hum of a god. These beings act like mundane humans in every way, and are often treated as equal persons- not that that is saying much, depending on the koilos. Some may be slaves, others kings. They can even reproduce after a fashion resembling that of humans, though their children are also concocted from the psychic energy of their originator.

The major difference is that when these Godborn die or leave home, they leave behind no bodies. They dissipate into their base elements on the spot and rejoin the koilos, accompanied by a vague and forlorn-sounding susurration.

When a god dies, every one of its godborn is simultaneously extinguished. Large populations of them can often lead to god deaths of truly explosive proportions, their shockwaves able to be felt across the wastes.

Where?

Anywhere but here.

Resources are excruciatingly scarce in the World Beyond. Where vegetation and potable do water exist, they are not likely to remain for very long. Life is like a fickle rodent, poking its head out of one of dozens of holes leading to its burrow. This can be an especially jarring discovery to anyone whose god-mind provided all sustenance, or even suspended its passengers' need for it.

Living outside of a koilos therefore calls either for ceaseless itinerancy, or impeccable conservation- oftentimes both. Fortunately, the world is utterly massive. There is always new and unknown land to venture into. Unfortunately, all of it is almost uniformly desolate with the same few pockets of solace amid deserts, crags, brackish seas, and stranger landscapes. Whatever ruined the World Beyond was truly massive--almost incomprehensible--in scope and intensity.

Perhaps the best path to follow, or at least one that is as good as any other, is one left by others. There are hints and suggestions across the world of former habitation, of the migration of foot-people. Sometimes a strange landmass sighted in the distance by Watchers is actually a shelter built by Walkers. More explicitly (and tragically), unfamiliar human corpses sometimes turn up in the wake of a koilos after it has rampaged over a hill or crag.

If the lucky ones are learned from, perhaps they might guide you somewhere. They might even lead you to a crossroads of wanderers, where words and goods are exchanged far more freely than between passengers. The hardest lesson for many new Walkers to learn is that the stranger from over the horizon might not be your enemy.

Why?

People tend to have purpose thrust upon them in this world. They may be psychic nourishers of the koilos, protectors of a god-beast, rulers or administrators, or Murmurers. Everyone fits- everyone is forced to fit. Those who don't, simply cease to be.

When a person who has spent so long as a vessel for their station in life finds themselves suddenly emptied of it, they tend not to react positively. Many of them crack, and few who do ever uncrack. But those who either keep themselves together, or cobble a semblance of themselves back together, often attack this new crisis with a vigor they never knew themselves to possess. They have to acquaint themselves with novel new forms of purpose, such as staying free of old bonds, or living for oneself for once. Freedom--true, awful freedom--often leads to profound changes in a person.

It can be as intoxicating as the certainty and security of a slowly grinding hierarchy.

Other, more grounding motivators also exist. One is highly unlikely to survive the World Beyond alone. Whether they are cemented by blood, suffering, or coincidence, families are a rare and precious resource that few are willing to part with once they get a taste.

More rarely, this familial bond extends further outward. It dulls a bit, intensity sacrificed in the interest of broad reach. But the communities it creates are unlike any that exist anywhere in any koilosphere. They grow to fulfill needs and strike a delicate balance between forces in a very direct and approachable fashion, unlike the distant hierarchies of home. Here, you won't be executicated--that is, excommunicated from the governing religious body in an overwhelmingly lethal manner--just for hashing out a disagreement with the spouse of one's neighbor, or similar banal acts.

Communities out on the wastes are never large- just a few dozen individuals pushing the envelop on how large a population can be sustainably scavenged for. But they offer the rarest and most vexing sensation in the world to those who struggle alongside them: hope. Hope for normalcy, hope for the land, hope for the future, or even just a vague and ill-defined infection of it.

Dissonance

Not all who wander are lost, but all those who stay behind absolutely are.

As brutal as the march into the wastes is, staying behind when a god dies is often far worse.

When a god dies, its mindscape quickly tears asunder and shunts the vast majority of its contents out onto the dead earth. That does not mean that they cease to be, however. Fragments of a god's psyche can and do persist long after it has died. They are no longer contained within a placid mind, and they tend to bleed out of the cracks in the dead beast's titanic corpse over the ensuing centuries. Godborn unlucky enough to die in the explosion can languish this way, starving and dwindling as they haunt the area like specters.

These fragments are often highly erratic in nature, able to influence nearby phenomena and people to devastating effect. They are like palpable waves of fever dream washing over the sand and rock. This unrestrained deific energy will pool wherever it can, and mortals have always been excellent vessels. The person does not need to have previously attuned to the god, nor do they need to demonstrate any sensitivity to the Hum at all. The dying echoes will fill in whatever it can until that is all that is left.

So it is that Resonance becomes Dissonance.

The most obvious evidence of a dissonant area is the way the land warps and changes. Sand twists around itself and rises up into glassy horns. Rock crumbles and grows spongy. The air dances around and loses all uniformity, with complete vacuums accompanying highly localized fog banks or storms.

Just as the land is altered, so too is the mind of anyone who dwells overlong in those places. Of course Dissonance doesn't turn anyone it pools within into a raving, violent lunatic. As evidenced by the wars between and within dogmatic passenger cultures, startling violence is and has always been the expertise of the terribly sane.

What it does, is greatly warp one's mindset into something that is not conventionally human. There is a reason most Murmurers are kept under such excruciatingly tight control by their communities- prolonged exposure creates quirks. Context, both for the self and the rest of the world, gets greatly shaken up by immersion in Dissonance. This alien worldview makes interfacing with more hidebound societies impossible, leading the latter to shun the former at large.

Not all see it as heresy or madness, however. Some, mostly the mobile Walkers, regard it merely as a byproduct of trying to stay put- a minor issue not of their concern, to be given little more than distant pity. Others, such as residents of the precious few permanent settlements that survive and even thrive in the wastes, see it as a form of enlightenment. Some go to great lengths, going on pilgrimage to seek out the graveyards of fallen gods where Dissonance is still strong.

What would happen if a talented Murmurer communed with such a location is not known.

Hidden Grave by Kevin Hou