Magic Makes You Weak

Magic is addictive. It's raw power as no human in the real world can understand it. It's the ability to reshape existence itself according to your willpower. It's difficult, complex, hard to control, and absolutely addicting the way only power can be.

The most learned and ancient wizards jealously hoard their tomes of lore and their magical items like another man would guard his children, or his life's love. The lesser wizards look upon the treasure troves with avarice, and spend their nights dreaming of more power. It becomes all-consuming. They can't resist.

What once started as a healthy, hale, friendly young man becomes a bearded, angry delver, little more than a knowledge thief. Their backs are twisted from compulsively reading into the night, their hair goes grey from the sheer strain of learning more and more magic, of learning to summon and bind creatures from another world. They spend their life force, their very vitality to learn more. And it's still never enough.

It's never enough power.


--

In Rodiel, the more magic you have, the weaker your character is. It's not the other way around (although it can look like it, at character creation.) If you have even an inkling of magic, you are a wizard. The magic calls to you, and your character is helpless before its call.

In game terms, it means that even a wretched role on the dice has hope. You may be a weakling in comparison to the Achilles standing next to you and the Hercules next to him, but you're a wizard. In more basic terms, you have magical talent if your ability scores are all fairly low, with your magic being stronger the worse the rolls were. Somebody with rock-bottom stats has incredible magic, for example.

I think it could be fun.

RODIEL: SLAYERS

Designing slayers was fun. They're bloody, brutal, and mean, and their design really bears that out. Their backgrounds (presented here) really reinforce the idea that Slayers don't have a place in society. Whereas Sentinels make excellent guards and heros for the city-states of Rodiel, and Rangers are specialists, guides, foresters, and spies, Slayers live entirely to kill people. They're the Gilgameshes, the larger than life heroes that people really wish would go away until it's time to kill another monster. They generally fight with little armor and with whatever weapons are handy, although when it's time to choose they usually select an impossibly heavy weapon that only people of their calibre can bear to use.

More Slayer backgrounds should be forthcoming, but for now, just take a peek at these. I feel these really help to get a feel for the way Rodiel works. There's nothing wrong with imposing a little bit of setting on your players' characters- it's the easiest way to remind them that their characters are very much a product of their society.

SLAYERS

Red-Handed: You are a member of a mystic order of warriors who ritualistically tattoo one hand bright red, an agonizing process that takes days. But your faith in your mysticism allows you to recover one fatigue when you slay an enemy. If you do not consume the flesh of your enemies at the end of every battle, you lose this benefit, as the God of Blood you worship demands this.

Enormous: You are significantly larger than the average man. While your equipment costs half again as much as a normal man, you can carry twice as much on your person.

Motivated: A being of incredible vitality and spirit, you can deplete your fatigue past zero, towards a negative amount equal to your normal fatigue total. However, pushing yourself past your own limis means that you have to sleep an extra hour for each negative point until you have equalized your sleep debt.

Savage: You spit on effeminate and cowardly sorcerers- you know that with your lucky charms and observances of taboos you cannot be harmed by their ways. Your will counts for 1.5x normal when resisting magic- for as long as you follow a stringent and conspicuous taboo.

Demon-limbed: One of your arms is actually a hideous, begrimed demon parasite that's grafted to your chest. It is supernaturally strong and functions as an excellent example of the weapon of your choice of light or medium type. For obvious reasons, you cannot hold anything else in that hand. In addition, the parasite is not entirely under your control, and may decide to do its own thing at inopportune moments.

Rodiel: Continuation

Having a hard time figuring out where to take Rodiel, specifically what to do with the bard class. I have a feeling that it's going to be sticking point in my design.

Then again, there doesn't need to be a Will-oriented class, nor a specific singing styled class. Instead, I can dismantle what I have from bards, incorporate it into a different class, and then let Will be the generic "everybody should probably be good at this" sort of deal.

Alternately, I can move Will to Slayers (the red-handed berserkers sort of dudes), and then let the Toughness stat be the classless attribute, claiming that everybody should be as Tough as they can stand, since they're supposed to be heroes anyways. Which kind of makes sense.

And after all, bards can have any sort of fighting style. Sorry, but if you had your heart set on being a singing troubadour in the lands of Rodiel, you're either going to have to get lucky with the randomization or decide that your Sentinel has a taste for showtunes.

Other than that, though, the really hard part is deciding on basic game mechanics. I've got the ideas in my head, and I might end up ripping of D&D's mechanics and then making them my own sort of thing. The way I've got them working in the very vague prototype is a lot like Mazes and Minotaurs- you have four stats, and you roll under them every now and again when you have to. I'm trying to keep the system simple, because the best games are the ones that have a very tight focus and have rules that you can explain to somebody in ten minutes and then keep remembering them as you consume more and more alcohol or, for your abstainers, as the night grows longer and longer and everybody's about ready for bed.

Hopefully it pays off. Our hobby can never have enough system-light games about adventure!

Rodiel: Sorcerers

Sorcerers, as you'd know if you were listening to anything I'd written beforehand, are weak, twisted, and a little insane. The practice and study of magic is inherently perilous for the races of men, but the ambitious seek any source of power they can.

Sorcerers can have any other background and any other trait, but are identified by their unique Magic rating. Tracked separately from the other four statistics, Magic is inversely calculated from the sum of the other attributes- Sorcerers are either the pathetic wretches that were called to the obscene arts and are little more than servants, or driven individuals who are more than willing to lose their own sanity to gain dominion over others.

Regardless, there are a number of sorcerous disciplines available to players. A few examples follow.



BOOK OF DEATH: You know the forgotten lore of Black Quaanesh, a grim demon of the South Seas. You may call upon your patron in exchange for the souls of those you have ensorcelled. In a pinch, your own soul may be bargained for as well. Your magic is powerful for cursing your foes and blasting their minds to a stupor.


BONECHEWER: You are no sorcerer of the black depths, but a respected shaman of the Grey Gods. Your powers are useful for mending wounds and broken bones and for removing venoms, but precious little else. You require your fetishes and focii to work magic, and are useless without them.


CONJURATION OF LENSH: Your talents tend towards the conjuration of spirits instead of the crude will-work of others. You have a power that has a blood-debt to you that you may call upon more often than others, but for the rest of the spirits, you must strike a fresh bargain each and every time. Each deal is more dear than the last, so an intelligent conjurer is judicious with his powers.


ELEMENTALIST: Yours are the powers of the sky, the sea, and the great mountains to which you are bound. By imparting a measure of your soul into the magics you weave, you are capable of affecting the raw stuff of that around you. For each element you have bound to you, you must obey stringent rites that maintain your purity in the eyes of the elemental spirits that have granted your powers.

Rodiel: Sentinels

In Rodiel, the city-state champions are broken up into four roughly basic styles, each encompassing a basic attitude towards combat (and determining very little else about your character by design). The Sentinel is one of them.

Sentinels are the stalwart warriors who help guard the weaker member party members from harm. They prefer to counterattack instead of strike, to deflect instead of advance, and to stride where others might run. They wear down their enemies by simply lasting longer and being tougher than anybody else. Sentinels aren't "tanks", that use some sort of gimmicky "threat" or "guarding" mechanic so that the "damage" classes can do their thing- they're just as deadly as the flashier Slayers. They just like to fight differently.

This is the style that you'd use to model hoplites, legionnaires, and other soldierly types that rely more on skill at arms than raw savagery. Where a Slayer is red-handed and bloody, a Sentinel is measured and precise, although not necessarily calm.

Every character has to roll on the Random Background table, as normal, to determine a facet of their character that will affect their play for the rest of their character's lifetime. Since this game is designed around tournament module styled one-off games in addition to being rolled randomly, I'm not too concerned about balance. Instead, we're looking for interesting things that add to the spice of the game. A couple of random Sentinel backgrounds follow:


BEASTMASTER: You have a special relationship with an unusually intelligent animal. This can be any non-magical animal you desire. If your companion is slain, it will take you weeks to find and train a new one.

MYRMIDON: You have been called through the ages in your nation's time of need by incredible magics. If slain, you regenerate entirely within one day, and you have no need for sleep.  Your other bodily functions are as normal. You are immediately destroyed if the circlet is removed from your brow or destroyed, as it is the artifact holding you through the ages.

MIGHTY THEWS: You are a musclebound barbarian, and your Might counts as 1.5x higher than what it actually is. Unfortunately, you are also a bit of an idiot, and cannot understand how to use any device more complicated than a door without having it explained to you multiple times.

BLADE-BORN: You are a master of all kinds of weaponry. Lesser warriors hear of your feats of arms and tremble. If you would miss an attack, roll it again. You are so confident in your abilities as a swordsman you disdain the use of armor, declaring it for knaves and ruffians with no skill at arms.

Inverse Ratios or Something Like That

I'm doing a couple of fun things with character generation in Rodiel that I think are kind of nifty, and that I'd like to share with you. This way, even if Rodiel doesn't take off the ground, at least I'm still sharing my ideas with the world. 

The first thing is inversely relating your character's mundane stats (think the Big Six in D&D terms, if you would) to your magical ability. That is to say, the more pathetic your character's physical stats are, the better your character is at magic. This does two things. 

One, it provides a very real safety valve for characters "rolling low." I know it's not oldschool, but I've never liked the amount of importance placed on rolling well in old school games, and it's usually one of the first things I house-rule away. All characters use the same rolled array and place them as they like, and I don't care who rolls them as long as the right number of dice are rolled the right number of times. I'm a big softy, and I'll even allow a single reroll. Why? Because I don't want inter-player envy, and I want them to specialize and strategize before the game starts. We can get into that later.

The second, and in my important more interesting way, is that it ties into the settings. In Rodiel, magic isn't a benign force to be used and discarded with apparently no ill effects (a la D&D, Runescape, every japanese RPG ever, really most settings that feature magic), it's an arcane, unhealthy force that's addictive and draining. By having your character, an established sorcerer/shaman/mystic, come into play with weaker muscles, trembling hands, a weak back, and a wandering mind, you establish that magic is dangerous. It's powerful, yes, but look at these people! Their skulls are cadaverous and they're blank eyed; they're thin to nearly skeletal and have a hacking cough that produces maggots, they're constantly twitching and muttering to themselves- magic is dangerous. Your magic using character has great power but at a great cost, as well.

I rather like it. Rodiel is turning out to be a lot of fun to write so far. 

Rodiel Reborn

This morning I woke up and it was exactly the right temperature in my house. My blue curtains caught the light and bathed me in an icy chilliness, and suddenly I had to write.

So I did.

I wrote a bit about Rodiel, and hopefully a quick, hideous PDF of vaguely how to be a city-state champion exploring the bizarre heavens will be up in a couple of days. My favorite thing about writing roleplaying stuff, honestly, is the serious fact that I don't care one whit if anybody else in the world plays them- for me, the fun is always in the writing. And I'm enjoying writing what I've created with this.