The Colleges from Arcane Wisdom

The unpublished Arcane Wisdom (until TSR's 3rd edition of DragonQuest) included three additional colleges for DragonQuest:  Lesser Summonings, Rune Magics and Shaping Magics.  The first two colleges provide the adventuring adept with some alternatives while Shaping Magics provides a means for NPC and PC adepts to create magic items ranging from the mundane to very powerful artifacts.  Though true for pretty much all magic colleges the DragonQuest GM should familiarize himself with these colleges before introducing them to his campaign.

The Entities Colleges of DragonQuest

This post looks at the three Colleges found in The Entities branch:  Necromantic Conjurations, Black Magics and Greater Summonings.  When you need your traditional fantasy bad guys, Adepts from these colleges fit the bill.  While other colleges can be used for evil purposes, these Colleges are all touched by the Powers of Darkness to a lesser or greater extent.

In the 3rd edition of DragonQuest released by TSR they pulled both Black Magics and Greater Summonings.  I don't really hold it against TSR as there was considerably more public scrutiny on their products than on those released by SPI or any other publisher.  I consider it more important that they finally released the Arcane Wisdom colleges in the 3rd edition as this made them more available to the DragonQuest fans.  Anyone who really cared about Black Magics or Greater Summonings already had a previous edition with the missing colleges.

The Elemental Colleges of DragonQuest

ELEMENTAL COLLEGES

From Magic System Designer's Notes:

These adepts use mana to penetrate their respective elemental planes releasing power stored there and altering their element on this plane.

The DragonQuest rules don't comment on this but many of the spells in these colleges create a quantity - usually temporarily - of their respective elements.  I've always assumed that in most cases the spell is actually pulling those elements from the elemental planes into the Adept's own plane.  At the end of the spells duration the conjured material returns back to original plane.

For me the Elemental Colleges, except for Fire Magics, have never felt particularly "elemental".  I expect them to focus more on the manipulation of the elements than on interacting with what fauna might inhabit that element.

There are some inconsistencies between the Colleges as well.  Air, Water and Fire have Binding as a General Knowledge ritual and Summon/Control of Elementals as a Special Knowledge ritual.  Earth however has Binding as a Special Knowledge ritual and Summon/Control as a Special Knowledge spell that is ranked for the Summon and Control aspects separately.  Air has Resistance to Cold which grants Magic Resistance to Cold spells but reduces damage from Fire spells.  Fire has Fire Resistance which grants Magic Resistance to Fire spells and reduces damage from Fire spells not Cold.

On to the Colleges...

The Thaumaturgies Colleges of DragonQuest

Decided I would just go through and do quick and dirty reviews of the various Colleges of DragonQuest.  Going to break it up into multiple part by the original three branches and then those in Arcane Wisdom.

Disclaimer:  My opinions are my own and I'm not saying that other DragonQuest GMs or players are doing it wrong if they disagree with my assessments.  While many of my comments do point out what I consider to be flaws or shortcomings in the Colleges and spells that shouldn't be taken to mean that I think the overall magic system is itself badly flawed or broken.  On the contrary, I think DragonQuest's system of ranking spells individually and having multiple Colleges is brilliant.

So without further ado - on to The Thaumaturgies.

A Look at Area-of-Effect and Wall Spells in DragonQuest

The various magic colleges of DragonQuest have a number of area-of-effect (AoE) and wall spells. The way that the area affected by each spell is determined varies considerably with some using a radius of effect, some are in square feet and some are in cubic feet. Several of them make me think that either the creator of the spell was fuzzy on area versus volume or perhaps an editor came along later and failed their math skill check. I also wonder why most of these spells didn't use a whole hex as a base for the affected area. After all DragonQuest assumes a hex grid for combat. Using formulas that pretty much guarantee that you'll always have partial hexes covered seems like an odd choice to make.

DragonQuest Special Damage Chart

Looking at one of my older DragonQuest rule books I noticed I had made a correction in it to the [18.2] Special Damage Table.  I generally just do the math in my head to calculate the Grievous and Endurance damage ranges and so rarely look at the actual table.  I had forgotten about the change I had made and why I had made it.  Well the table as published in all three editions has a mistake that affects two of the ranges of Modified Strike Chances.

Characteristics in DragonQuest

Like all Role-Playing Games DragonQuest has a set of characteristics that represent a characters physical and mental attributes and capabilities.  In DragonQuest there are 6 primary characteristics determined by the player during character creation from a pool of Characteristic Points. These are:

• Physical Strength (PS)
• Manual Dexterity (MD)
• Agility (AG)
• Endurance (EN)
• Willpower (WP)
• Magic Aptitude (MA)

There are two derived Characteristics:

• Fatigue (FT) - Determined by Endurance
• Tactical Movement Rate (TMR) - Determined by Agility

One Characteristic with a fixed starting value:

• Perception (PC) - Starts at 5 (8 for Bantam 2nd ed. or TSR 3rd ed.)

And an Optional random Characteristic:

• Physical Beauty - Determined by 4d5+3 roll.

All of these have some impact on a characters abilities in combat, their skills like Ranger, their ability to use/cast magic and just generally surviving the cold, cruel world.  The degree of that impact varies quite a bit between the various characteristics.  Below I provide some detail on how and where a characteristic is used as well as some comments about them.