Sorcery I Like

Well, what do you know: a quiet moment around the old home front, for a change.

I'll be honest: I've (perhaps) had the opportunity to blog recently, just not the spirit. Just lots of things over-occupying my brain/attention. It gave me some peace to simply withdraw from the whole blog-o-sphere for a few days, rather than tread water with throwaway posts and comments. Not that this isn't (perhaps) a throwaway post, but there's enough quiet right now that I can sit and type-type-typity-type.

Mmm. With cup of hot coffee at hand.

Yesterday (or maybe the day before) I had the chance to read Clark Ashton Smith's second Xiccarph story, The Flower-Women (to give credit where credit's due, I only learned about Xiccarph after Maliszewski wrote about it a week or so ago). I like Smith's stuff, though I've read precious little of it (perhaps a dozen of his short stories). His work is reminiscent of other writers, though I recognize he was probably the influence on them, rather than the reverse. But his stuff is (usually) punchy and short, perhaps only slowed down by an expansive vocabulary that requires me to look up two-three words with every reading. 

[quick: who can tell me the definition of odalisque off the top of your head?]

I also like this bit about Smith's writing, aptly summed up by James in his (previously mentioned) post:

Smith is almost unique in the history of pulp fantasy for sympathizing with his evil sorcerers, or at least presenting their thoughts and perspectives sympathetically. It's what sets him apart from both Lovecraft, whose antagonists' motives are largely inscrutable, and Howard, whose dark magicians are never portrayed as anything but villains to be cut down.

I think it's fair to say that, for much of my life, I was one of those who tended to "root for the bad guy" both in story and film. Not always, but often enough. Many times over the years I found myself wishing the villain would triumph, the hero would be cut down (or disgraced), the evil plot would unfold according to its nefarious plan. However, this was certainly more the case when I was a kid...having (in later life) viewed films and such where evil did triumph, I confess that the result is generally unsatisfying.

[perhaps my initial rooting for bad was fueled by too much sympathy for Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester the Cat. My wife, to this day, HATES Tweety Bird, and I can't say it's difficult to understand why]

*ahem*

Anyway, black-hearted sorcerers have long been "my cup o tea;" I think it's fair to say that's part of my fandom of Moorcock's Elric stories, despite the general whininess of their protagonist (for me, his constant bitching-moaning is balanced out by his dark sense of humor and occasional bursts of action). But I like necromancers and black magicians of all sorts; when it comes to sorcerous characters, I become a BIG champion of the flawed, antihero type...a cardboard stereotype that I usually loathe in other genres (action films and supers comics, to name two).

I guess I just like my magic a little transgressive? I mean, sorcery transgresses the laws of reality, so shouldn't a sorcerer transgress cultural/societal norms (the laws of man)?

Eh. Not trying to get too deep here. The heart wants what the heart wants. The funny thing is this: with regard to Dungeons & Dragons, I have long said that my personal play style lines up far better with the fighter type than any other archetype. Even when playing another class (bards, clerics...even thieves) I tend to run my character like a fighter. Bold. Brazen. Hacky-slashy. My old DM famously precluded me from playing anything but a fighter in the last campaign she ran, because I 'always acted like a fighter anyway.' 

I've played a lot of too-loud "war priests" over the years.

Magic-user was the last class I was interested in playing...so much so that, with regard to D&D, I'd never run one as a PC until a Con game in 2019.

[okay, okay...I did play ONE wizard back in a SINGLE session of 3E/D20 years ago, but I gave him feats like "martial weapon proficiency" so that I could use swords, etc. Natch, I was doing Gandalf...and the DM quit the game in disgust when he saw I hadn't taken an "optimal build" for the character. One of the events that led to my disillusionment with that particular edition...]

HOWEVER, while I've generally stayed away from the magic-user class over the years, upon reflection (after reading The Flower-Women) I realized I actually had a hankering to play just such a character...a proper D&D (or, rather, AD&D) -style sorcerer. An old school magic-user. 

That character I played back in the 2019 convention? Probably the best time / most fun I've had as a player in a loooong time. And just to re-tell an old saw (for folks who don't want to read the old post):

• We were using Holmes Basic rules, MINUS the wonky combat (no double attack daggers!).
• PCs were rolled randomly at the table (3d6) in order; I took magic-user only because I didn't have the stats for anything else.
• My one spell was protection from evil and it was expended in the first room of the dungeon.
• I spent the majority of the three hour time slot with 1 hit point (due to being wounded) and no spells.
• I was only slain by another party member at the end of the session for (reasons).

And it was still a great time. Despite my character's fragility and lack of "usefulness" (sleep spells, charm spells, combat ability, etc.) I was able to contribute and...many times...take the lead on our eight-man band of misfit adventurers. I used the character's multiple languages and negotiating ability, I used poles and oil and torches, I preceded others into trap doors and tight spaces (okay...probably a little foolhardiness there, but not much to lose in a con game), and I was able to help direct attacks...and throw the occasional dagger...such that we didn't lose a single party member over the course of the session. And that's with 1st level characters and zero healing magic.

I was the only magic-user in the party.

The challenge of playing such a character is/was fairly exhilarating. Trying to find ways to be useful (without getting killed) was far more challenging than other (D&D) games I'd played: games where I had lots of hit points and/or good armor and a feeling of invincibility (at least for the first hit or so). I can only imagine the fun that could be had with the increased effectiveness (more spells) and survivability of playing such a character in the Advanced version of the game...it's not difficult to visualize the manifestation of an "imperious sorcerer" the likes of Maal Dweb. Gradually, of course.

The main difficulty, as always, is finding the right Dungeon Master. *sigh*

I've messed around over the years with a lot of different design tweaks for the D&D magic-user. Most of these have ended up being nothing but junk. What follows are my current "house rules" for the magic-user class in my home game (if not otherwise stated, rules are as per 1E PHB/DMG):

• Magic-users begin the game with three 1st level spells, randomly determined (per the DMG). 
• There is no read magic spell; magic-users can read magic-user spell scrolls automatically.
• All spells known may be cast once per day; a particular spell may not be cast more than once per day (no multiple memorizations of a single spell).
• New spells are added after training upon reaching a new level of experience; new spells are presumed in the cost for training. Preferred spells are chosen by player and then diced for based on Intelligence (per PHB). Spells from spell scrolls and spell books may not be added to the magic-user's repertoire of spells...a magic-user knows what he/she knows.
• Spell books are part talisman, part grimoire, part journal/scientific notes. Study of the spell book is needed to regain spells. Spell books can be prohibitively expensive to replace; losing (stealing) one's spell book is akin to losing (stealing) one's power. Magic-users will endeavor to recover lost (stolen) spell books (and will punish thieves with great vengeance, if possible).

We've been using these rules for a while now (a couple years) and they work for us; i.e. there haven't been any complaints. I'm sure long-time AD&D players will recoil at the thought of NOT having the option of adding "extra" spells to their spell book; in practice, it's been a non-issue (and it's a lot more convenient to simply HAVE the spells available then to need to search them out). The bonus spells at 1st level provide additional effectiveness to the new character, and the randomness and single memorization clause ensures creative use of even the most "worthless" spell (all spells are precious commodities to be treasured by the first level magic-user). 

We have yet to see a thief reach 10th level (or any high level illusionists/rangers) so it's hard to say how their abilities to "read (magic-user) magic" will interact with these rules. As it's a bridge we've yet to cross, I'm content to leave the issue alone and continue with what works...for now.

As an aside: spell-casting dragons in my world know spells as a magic-user equal to their hit dice (a red with 10 HD, for example, would know spells as a 10th level magic-user). This makes dragons considerably more magical...at least the ones that can use magic (I've toyed with the idea of making ALL dragons speaking and magic-using, but I like the idea of there being more "vermin-esque" dragons who are ignorant...and mundane...threats to civilized folk). For me, in addition to dragons being more sorcerous, this helps justify the dragons' hoards, as magic-users pay them in coin and treasure to be trained in higher level spells (what "magic schools" there are being few and, often, strictly regulated).

All right, the coffee pot is empty and the brew in my mug is considerably cooler than when it was first poured (and the house is not nearly as quiet...the wife is wanting me to make lunch), so I'll sign off for now. Hope y'all are having a good January.

: )

Talisman

Regarding Friday's post on spellbooks...

Additional thoughts have been percolating in my brain. Please allow me to share.

The first thing that occurs to me is that any "problem" I have with spell books is only really a problem when it becomes a problem. Me worrying about it ahead of time is...well, silly. Except of course that if the physicality of a wizard's tome is important, then I want the players to worry about it, too (i.e. 'How am I going to lug this thing around?'). Requiring players to think about such real world issues...similar to having them think about issues like light and food and encumbrance...helps with the immersive experience of the game. But for the game itself, it's not all that important...unless it suddenly becomes important (due to a particular book-wrecking situation during play). Whether or not the character has the book in her backpack, or safely hidden outside the dungeon only otherwise matters if you're allowing wizards to rest and recuperate their spells in the Underworld which is a sketchy stance to take as a DM for a variety of reasons.

A second thought about why the size, presence, or need for spell books matter is that it directly ties to how magic-users acquire spells in one's game. Can players steal enemy spell books and add their pages to their own? Can the players' own books be stolen? Spell books quickly become the most precious treasures in a wizard's hoard. Does a lich need to study a spell book? Sakartha, the vampire lizard king needed one...and it proved quite a valuable find to my players back in my old AD&D days. On the other hand, B/X magic-users only know as many spells as they can cast...taking an enemy's spell book certainly hamstrings the caster but adds nothing to the player's own store of knowledge.

Which leads me to my main (if not final) "thought of the day:" it seems to me that one could interpret the wizard's spell book as something largely symbolic, a talisman the mage requires in order to use (and re-use) her spell knowledge. A talisman is nothing more than an extremely personal (and, thus, magically invested) object that is sacred to the spell caster; losing a talisman denudes the character of her magical abilities...capturing a talisman puts the wizard at a person's mercy (and destroying it severs her powers completely).

Typical Talisman

Plenty of talisman examples from fiction come to mind: the wizard Vector's monocle in Wizards & Warriors (stolen by Blackpool and used to control the mage). The staves of the Istari-wizards in Tolkien (and how Gandalf's breaking of Sauruman's staff destroys his powers). Galen's amulet in the film Dragonslayer. The stolen wand of Rastafyre the Incomparable in the Lythande story The Incompetent Magician...even the secrets of the Blue-Star mages themselves could be classified as a talisman of sorts, one that carries no physical weight but whose loss carries far more consequence (destroying the magician's power completely).

I could wrack my brain for other examples...it was a common plot element of the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, requiring the protagonists to recover some ring or wand or amulet in order to restore a wizard's lost powers. The magic hat of the the magician character Presto would certainly count as a talisman by my definition.

Would Sauron's ring count as a talisman? Probably. So might the matrix stones of the laran gifted in Darkover or the medicine bag of a Native American shaman (which seem to me an inspiration for the former). Would Stormbringer qualify as a talisman for Elric? Maybe...but Elric's a special case in a lot of ways. But you could probably count Princess Eilonwy's "bauble" (from the Prydain books).

The point is, there are a lot of things that can serve as a talisman, all largely symbolic. A spell book need not be different: it represents the work, thoughts, and accumulated knowledge of a mage in a world that (presumably) has a fairly low rate of literacy. It need not actually contain "magic spells" but, rather provides the same sense of security and comfort and pride as the phallic power represented in a staff or wand.

[isn't the wand thing kind of a big deal in the Harry Potter books? It seems to me that there's a lot of wand stealing and wand breaking plot points in that series...if memory serves]

Changing the magic-user's spell book requirement to a talisman might make the character a little too similar to the cleric class (whose "holy symbol" amounts to the same thing)...on the other hand, that might be a good thing. How does one's magical power grow, exactly? The gods gift the cleric with power as she gains experience in their service. The wizard...needs to find (or create or steal) spells?

Far easier (and perhaps more interesting) to make the different spell-casters all "magic-users" of different schools. Mechanically (i.e. rules-wise) they're still interesting: clerics have (mostly) different magic, lesser in some ways, but powerful in others. Wizards have more variety and raw power (perhaps), but don't have the support of a church or followers...it's still the path of the outsider and individual, even those who belong to a particular magical order.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. I'd even consider something like the theft of one's talisman resulting in a diminishment of power (say one-half level?) rather than a full loss of spell ability. The 14th level wizard without her staff is still a potent force, but with it she can literally move mountains. Well, hills anyway (using the move earth spell).

My final thought on the subject is this: a fighter who loses her weapons can still fight, a thief who loses her lockpicks can still perform other thief skills, and (in both cases) acquiring replacements are a small cost to the player. Same holds true for a cleric's holy symbol (assuming you require the symbol for clerics to use their abilities). Placing the magic-users power in an encumbering stack of paper...very, very expensive paper...feels exceptionally punitive to me.  And I'm not someone who is particularly about "making life easier" for the players.

Anyway...still thinking about it.

Spell Books

One of the problems with having with more than a decade's worth of posts is that every time I sit down to write up my latest thoughts on a subject already broached, I have to read back through all the posts I've already written on the subject.

Well, I suppose I don't have to...I could just fly off the handle (my usual m.o.) and let the chips fall where they may. But the fact, there are still folks showing up to Ye Old Blog and reading my ancient posts, and my conscience tells me I should strive for some level of consistency, at least enough to say "my feelings on such-and-such have changed since 2011" or whatever.

[really! Last week, I had someone commenting on a post I wrote back in 2014, while still living in Paraguay. And this week, I had an email from a French blogger who wants to translate some 2012 entry I posted about abstracting armor rules]

So it was this morning that I was combing through the 50+ posts on magic-users I've made over the years, looking to see what I've written on the subject of spell books. Also, had to check the 60+ posts on "spells." I'll be honest...I got pretty bored with the exercise and, quite frankly, there wasn't much there that stood out anyway.

I'm considering cutting spell books from my D&D game.  Since my family will probably be rousing themselves from slumber soon, I'll try to be as succinct as...well, as I ever am (not that succinct, I realize)...in explaining my thought(s) here:

#1 My journey with magic-users has come a looooong way since I started this blog. Prior to blogging, I never gave much thought to magic-users at all: I didn't play them in other people's games, and the few who showed up in my own game weren't anything too spectacular (they were infrequently run and frequently died). Plus, it had been so long since I'd run an old school game, my memory was probably on the "hazy" side. Once I started blogging, I started running/playing games again, and this led to all sorts of hare-brained ponderings on the class.

#2 To sum up my thoughts on "what I've learned about magic-users over the years" (through actual play): The class is nicely balanced. The class should probably start with multiple spells (2-3) instead of one. Vancian system = good idea. Removing spell duplication (memorization of 2x fireball or 3x sleep, for example) improves versatility and encourages creativity and proactive thinking in players. Knife-fighting mages are somewhat distasteful (personally), but a "necessary evil" and well-modeled by the magic-user's poor combat skills.

#3 In older edition games (i.e. pre-1983, i.e. pre-any edition I enjoy playing), spell books are poorly defined/described, if at all (we'll leave aside the physical dimensions specified for AD&D in 1985's Unearthed Arcana tome). We know magic-users have spell books. We know that they study the books (in the morning) to regain their daily allotment of spells. We know it's one of the things that distinguish the magic-user from other classes (save, perhaps, the illusionist subclass). Most everything else about the spell book, however, is pretty much unknown and (thus) often ignored in actual play.

I mean, things like weight, bulk, and dimensions of such a tome should be incredibly important. I still haven't gotten around to penning my (planned for 10 months now) post on encumbrance, but I'll give you the TL;DR version: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF YOU DO NOT TRACK ENCUMBRANCE. Yes, that is a purposeful riff on Gygax's famous admonition regarding time (see page 37 of the original DMG). As I said, it deserves its own post...one of these days.

I think back to my own youth, hauling around my own "spell books:" the four or five AD&D hardcovers I used to create the "magic" of my own campaign. A backpack with 20-30 pounds of books was just how I rolled in those days...on foot, on bicycle, or on the bus. I would carry my books everywhere...certainly to my friends' houses, but also to school and back...never knew when one might have the time to do some quick reading (or even gaming). The city bus to my high school in downtown Seattle was a long one (including a transfer/wait in the University District)...close to two hours round trip every day...and I would spend most of it reading. Even when I stopped playing D&D proper, I was still carrying a ton of RPG books (in addition to school texts).

There would have been little room in my backpack for rations and rope, had I been an adventurer, let alone treasure.

Per OD&D, a magic-user has one spell book for each level of spells obtained...thus a 12th level wizard would have six books total. The DMG lists the encumbrance of a "book, large, metal-bound" as 200 coins (20#). In both OD&D and AD&D, a backpack has a capacity limit of 300 coins, meaning only one such book could be hauled at a time...and this is born out later in the UA's description of the "standard" spell book ("traveling" spell books, also described in UA, are a different matter, each having 6# of encumbrance and a quarter of the spell capacity of the sturdier "standard").

But does a spell book need to be this bulky and magnificent a tome? How about a diary or journal or a handful of scribbled notes. The kids and I were watching the still entertaining 1968 film Blackbeard's Ghost the other day, in which an 18th century witch's spell book is discovered: a small packet of pages rolled up and concealed in the handle of a bed warmer. Each spell has a small description of what it does, along with the incantation needed to pronounce it...what more does a spell-caster need, really? A normal (i.e. "untrained") person isn't going to know the gobbledy-gook words a wizard needs to say to bring a spell to life, and the wizard herself will need to study (and silently practice) the words many times before she can recite them from memory...probably a task that should be done daily, given the odd twisting of the tongue required (these spells aren't written in Greek or Latin).

Anyway, it doesn't really matter because (as I said) in actual play, the spell book concept is generally glossed over...at least until someone remembers the thing at a most inconvenient time. "Hey, wouldn't that subterranean river risk getting the pages of my spell book soaked?" or "Hey, does that dragon breath have a chance of destroying the contents of my backpack (including, like, ALL my magical knowledge)?" In a recent game, my son's magic-user was captured and thrown in a prison cell. While he was able to escape both the cell and the dungeon, he did so without his backpack of equipment...which we figured had been the place his spell book was stored. This ended up being a huge pain in the ass for the player (though it was eventually resolved).

Here's the thing: I realize the image of the wizard studying her ancient tomes is an iconic one. I realize the book-learning helps distinguish the character from other spell-casters, and that it is tied to intelligence (the ability score) in much the same way that prayerful meditation is tied to wisdom. But is it really worth the fuss? That is to say: if I said 'the spells you know are the spells you know' and allowed a wizard to cast each once daily without any spell book at all, would the character class suffer? Not even that: would actual play suffer? Would the game suffer, for me NOT making magic-users carry/own spell books and NOT making them study/memorize spells every morning (though still limiting them, mechanically, to the fire-and-forget Vancian style play we know and love)? Would it be weird to NOT distinguish magic-users from other spell casters by removing this anchor known as the spell book? Would it be bad?

All right...the kids are up (actually, they've been up for about 40 minutes...distracting me ever since), so I need to go cook some breakfast. More on this later.