Also Truenamers are hilariously broken in so many ways.
Which is so sad. One of the first characters I came up with (which, thankfully, didn't see any play) was a Truenamer. So many forms of fantasy media feature the "words have power" trope that I usually enjoy.
There are a few overhauls floating around the internet that might be worth looking into, if you ever plan on statting one up.
In my opinion, the ne plus ultra of the "words have power" trope is probably Ars Magica. The rest of the system takes steps to accommodate players having alts and downtime that can complicate the mechanics, but having a set of nouns and verbs to make magic happen flexibly is spot-on for encouraging creativity and just feeling like a wizard for once.
I swear it's pure coincidence that we've just had a whole bunch of posts about Amber, but I mentioned the concept of lynchpins before, which are right on point with this.
Amber has Power Words, but they're a very limited form of magic. Powerful, but not versatile. Very simple and direct. Fundamental stuff.
Then there's Sorcery.
The idea with sorcery in Amber is magic is a set of instructions woven with energy. Depending on the complexity and power of the spell, they can take from minutes to days to prepare, and can do literally anything given the requisite research and prep time. But this makes spellcasting really difficult to apply practically. Most situations where you need a fireball don't allow you several hours of prep.
So in the Amber universe, spells can be "hung". They're described as a weaving of power and information. Energy with a set of instructions. You can gather that energy with an incomplete set of instructions, and store it in a receptable, to be completed when you actually want the spell effect to happen. The gaps you leave in the instruction set are referred to as "lynchpins". If you prepare your spell cleverly, you only recite a couple words, and unleash the effect of the spell you had prepared.
The tricky thing is knowing exactly how incomplete to leave the spell, because they have to be incredibly specific. The spell's instructions have to include every detail of what, when, where, why, and how. If you don't leave lynchpins open for things like the target of the spell, the duration or termination conditions, the tailoring to the magical properties of the world in which you're casting it, etc, then you risk not being able to adapt the spell to the situation in which you need it. But if you leave too many variables open to close up in order to cast it, then your spell isn't really appropriate for the kind of situations where you likely need them. You need to prepare them cleverly. And they require maintenance, as hung spells fade over time.
I lined up the spoken signatures and edited them into a spell. Suhuy would probably have gotten it down even shorter, but there is a point of diminishing returns on these things, and I had mine figured to where it should work if my main guesses were correct. So I collated it and assembled it. It was fairly long -- too long to rattle off in its entirety if I where in the hurry I probably would be. Studying it, I saw that three lynchpins would probably hold it, though four would be better.
I summoned the Logrus and extended my tongue into its moving pattern. Then I spoke the spell, slowly and clearly, leaving out the four key words I had chosen to omit. The woods grew absolutely still about me as the words rang out.
The spell hung before me like a crippled butterfly of sound and color, trapped within the synesthetic web of my personal vision of the Logrus, to come again when I summoned it, to be released when I uttered the four omitted words.
... I resolved, though, to lay in a decent supply of spells the first chance I got, both offensive and defensive, on the order of the one I had primed against my guardian entity. The trouble is that it can take several days of solitude to work a really decent array of them out properly, enact them and rehearse their releases to the point where you can spring them at a moment's notice -- and then they have a tendency to start decaying after a week or so. Sometimes they last longer and sometimes less long, depending both on the amount of energy you're willing to invest in them and on the magical climate of the particular shadow in which you're functioning. It's a lot of bother unless you're sure you're going to need them within a certain period of time. On the other hand, a good sorcerer should have one attack, one defense, and one escape spell hanging around at all times. But I'm generally somewhat lazy, not to mention pretty easygoing, and I didn't see any need for that sort of setup until recently. And recently, I hadn't had much time to be about it.
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Topic: Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: COBRA!!! (Read 939788 times)