Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Some Magic College Variants for DragonQuest

A while back I made some changes to the Air Magics and Earth Magics colleges and these are the ones I use for my campaigns.

Changes to Air Magics

Additional situational modifier added at -10%.
Added two Talents, Detect Fumes (T-2) and Speak to Avians (T-3).
Replaced G-4 Communicate with Avians with Far Sight.
Changed G-6 Conjuring Mist to produce more useful quantities of mist.
Replaced G-7 Summon Avians with Protection from Magical Cold
Replaced G-8 Detecting Fumes with Free Fall
Replaced Q-2 Purifying Air with Binding Air
Replaced S-4 Controlling Avians with Flight
Changed S-6 so that damage is reduced by armor.
Changed S-11 Snow Simulacrum to a ritual, R-3
S-12 to S-14 move up by one
New S-14 Spell of Lifting
S-15 Wind Walking removed
S-16 & S-17 move up by one.

Changes to Earth Magics

In the DragonQuest rules this was kind of two colleges in one with Pacifistic and Druidic branches. To me, neither felt like an elemental college so I fully split it into two separate colleges with Earth Magics being more elemental focused and the other, Natural Magics, being a Druid/Shaman type college.

The majority of spells and rituals were changed or replaced for the revised Earth Magics.  See the PDF for more details.

Natural Magics kept the General Knowledge spells of the original college and adds T-2, Pass Without Trace.  Ritual of Finding Totem Animal (Q-2) added which complements S-13 Animal Form.  Most Special Knowledge spells replaced and R-1 changed to Calling the Wild Hunt.

The revised/changed colleges can be grabbed on the Downloads page.

Feedback is welcome!

4 comments:

  1. Phil,
    Like the Fly spell. Free Fall is interesting but maybe it should be a Talent? You can fall a really long way in the 5 seconds it takes to prepare a spell (far more than it would take to kill a humanoid on a relatively unyielding surface). Lol, here is a splat calculator:
    https://www.angio.net/personal/climb/speed.html

    Any particular reason why you chose to remove summon/control avian spells?

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    1. re: Fly spell

      It just made no sense to me that an Air magics college didn't have a fly spell but Celestial and Necromancers(!?!) did.

      re: Making Free Fall a Talent

      I could see doing that or the Adept could invest it in an item.

      re: summon/control avian spells

      Same reason I removed summon/control spells from Earth Magics. I don't see them as "elemental" spells. I left the summoning/controlling to the Natural Magics college and Lesser Summoning of course. Note that Fire Magics doesn't have an equivalent set of spells and in my not completed rewrite of Water Magics I took them away as well.

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  2. Also like adding the clarification that armor should be taken into account on the Ice Javelins spell. How about the Diamond Javelins spell?

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    1. Armor would apply there as well. Technically the statement isn't needed as [18.4] says, "When purely magical energy is involved, any damage is subtracted first from Fatigue (Endurance only when Fatigue is exhausted), but is not absorbed by armor. Other damage types, also subtracted from Fatigue, are absorbed by armor." But I've seen the question come up many times and it seemed like a good idea to include it in the spell description. Just missed putting it under Diamond Javelins.

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