Notice: What follows is a collection of ideas and guidelines rather than a fully realized homebrew system. It probably would have been faster and easier for me to just do that instead, but I just had to go and take a bird's eye view of the whole thing.
Dragonlance's Fifth Age, AKA the Age of Mortals, was a bit of a fanbase-breaker back when it was first introduced in the '90s. It was meant to usher in a new phase of the universe after the trilogy that was supposed to permanently cap the series off forever with no new additions instead got condensed into a single book (Dragons of Summer Flame) and hastily shoved out there. The backlash to the continuation and the direction of that continuation hit, and when they tried to roll those changes back to something closer to the status quo in order to appease the displeased part of the base, they ended up angering the other side of it. It was kind of messy.
One of the biggest changes to the universe (other than the gods "leaving") was the introduction of ambient magic in the forms of Wild/Primal Sorcery and its spiritual counterpart Mysticism, the latent magics of the planet itself that had been dormant ever since the days of the Greygem came and went. With the gods gone, it was allowed to resurface in the world and become usable by mortals who put their hearts and minds to it, without needing to rely upon faith in fickle gods or the practice of High Sorcery (which is just a different form of devotion to the moon gods at the end of the day). Why primal sorcery didn't return during the gods' long but voluntary absence after they dropped a meteor on Krynn, I'm not sure, but the end result is that a fundamentally different source of magic was introduced to the setting.
To put it simply, primal sorcery and mysticism act like arcane and divine magic in the loosest sense. Sorcery manipulates the physical forces and matter of the world and is divided up into disciplines that reflect that, like aeromancy and transmutation. Mysticism relies upon faith in oneself and sympathetically affects most things that are alive or possess some similar sort of essence, like through healing or necromancy.
Sorcery and mysticism effects don't behave like similar spells in normal systems of magic, though. There are no "spells" per se at all, save one's trademark effects and personal favorites. Each magic user spontaneously and creatively uses their magic in any way they can for the situation at hand, producing effects that are more narratively bounded than mechanically. It's kind of like how in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure everybody has one weird Stand ability that they use as creatively as possible in whatever situation they find themselves in, rather than just escalating in power level or picking up new tricks as the series goes along, like most shōnens do. On top of it all, when two or more sorcerers or mystics get together, they can freely blend and meld their magics together in order to make something new and even more powerful.
This is all pretty much anathema to a Vancian magic system based on spell slots, so despite my soft spot for it, the D&D 3E Age of Mortals campaign setting pretty uniformly fails to depict its ambient magic. The primal sorcerer was just a regular sorcerer, while the mystic was a stripped-down favored soul. Not bad classes by themselves, but big letdowns for the source material.
SAGA Magic
It wasn't always like that, though. Primal sorcery actually did get a lot of play in the Dragonlance: Fifth Age game for the SAGA System back in the day.
In contrast to the later d20 implementation, its lore and mechanics were integrated well and fleshed out, and coupled with the diceless card deck rules you played SAGA with, it was one of the more original magic systems ever printed by TSR. You come up with spells on the fly and determine how expensive they are to cast using an additive spell point system for stronger effects. Casting an instant healing spell for the maximum amount is going to be a lot more costly than casting a weak one that takes a half-hour, for example. There are sample spells provided in the books, but those are just to illustrate spell construction and provide players with models that they can then tweak to their specific needs.
But this was still the SAGA System, which means that all of 8 people ever played it, and the rest of the books in production got axed after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR out. So unless you want to painstakingly recreate a mechanic from a dead game that relies upon a peripheral card deck, ambient magic is just another one of those Dragonlance things you can't really do in-game that you can do in-story.
... Say, you know what else has a robust, freeform magic system where spell effects are determined by intent?
Talislanta Magic
Why hello there, new old friend!
I already went into it in my Talislanta retrospective of sorts, but depending on the edition you're looking at, magic works like this: there are a little more than a dozen magical disciplines called orders like shamanism, witchcraft, cartomancy, etc. Each order of magic is divided up into different "modes" that represent types of magical spells like attack, defend, heal, illusion, transform, etc. Each order has access to a few but usually not all modes, in keeping with the flavor of that order. Elemental magic, for example, doesn't have the heal mode because it's kind of difficult to treat wounds with a rock or a gust of air.
Magicians learn each order and mode combination individually, so they tend to have a limited repertoire that they must use creatively. Mechanically this is represented by the custom spell system where you can build your own effect by adding increasing difficulty modifiers to the spellcasting roll in exchange for better range, duration, numerical values, secondary effects, etc.
Aside from the mingling of two or more casters' abilities which is absent here, this is a pretty good approximation of how Dragonlance's ambient magic works. Wild sorcery and mysticism are already divided up into neat little schools and spheres respectively, so all one would need to do is assign a list of modes to each to start porting the system over to the d20 ruleset of one's choice. You could even use the 3E Gold Rush port of Talislanta for a few more ideas on how to implement it- just whatever you do, do not follow its example and tie spellcasting to a skill roll like in that edition. That way lies brokenness.
What follows are a few of my ideas on how to implement this mashup.
My Take on Schools/Spheres
The school and sphere lists can remain unchanged from SAGA, unless you feel that some of them are too narrow and would be best combined. Likewise, Modes from Talislanta can stay the same. They are as follows:
Wild Sorcery Schools: Aeromancy, Cryomancy, Divination, Electromancy, Enchantment, Geomancy, Hydromancy, Pyromancy, Spectramancy, Summoning, Transmutation.
Mysticism Spheres: Animism, Alteration, Channeling, Healing, Meditation, Necromancy, Sensitivity, Spiritualism.
Magic Modes: Alter, Attack, Conjure, Defend, Heal, Illusion, Influence, Move, Reveal, Summon, Transform, Ward.
Next, match the most appropriate Modes with each School and Sphere according to their flavor text blurbs. Some are more obvious fits than others.
- Aeromancy: Can manipulate air to create anything from a breeze to a gale. Example spells include conjuring concealing fog, clouds of choking vapor, bubbles of air for underwater travel, or flying through the air. Very powerful aeromancers can even influence the weather.
- Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
- Cryomancy: Considered by some to be a hybrid of aeromancy and hydromancy. Can manifest great cold and conjure large quantities of ice. Examples include creating walls of ice, freezing rivers solid, and freezing enemies in place with frostbite.
- Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
- Divination: One of the most common schools of sorcery on Krynn, used to gain information about the world. Examples include detecting traps, seeing magical auras on objects, and divining the past or a potential future. Cannot be used to read the minds of others, because only mysticism directly affects living matter.
- Modes: Reveal (inanimate)
- Electromancy: The rather basic domain of good old fashioned lightning bolts, with a few extra ideas thrown in to make it less of a one-trick pony. Examples include producing static electricity to sting and annoy people, or using electricity to generate an aura of light for visibility.
- Modes: Attack, Illusion (light)
- Enchantment: A deceptively simple-sounding school that lets you do a wide range of beneficial things to objects. Examples include giving enhancement bonuses to weapons and armor, or enchanting a crystal on the end of one's staff to shed light, etc. Permanent enchantments are not possible with normal sorcery.
- Modes: Transform (inanimate, but you also gotta bend the rules a bunch for this one)
- Geomancy: Manipulation of the earth and everything that can be found within it. Examples include conjuring stone walls, creating quicksand, or controlling gems, crystals, and even alloys that have been worked by mortal hands like steel.
- Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
- Hydromancy: Power over water, although presumably not the water that makes up over 60% of most humanoid bodies by weight. Examples include pulling up drinkable water in a desert, creating favorable currents during a sea voyage, and otherwise manipulating water in its liquid state; ice and steam are more the purview of cryomancers and aeromancers, respectively.
- Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
- Pyromancy: Flame, dear flame. It's unclear if this controls only the chemical reaction of fire, or other forms of heat transfer as well. Examples include heating homes, damaging enemies, scaring away beasts, and creating elaborate fireworks shows.
- Modes: Attack, Move, Illusion (light)
- Spectramancy: The magic of light and how it can be perceived. Examples include making a basic light to see with as in electromancy and pyromancy, extinguishing light sources, changing the color of lights, as well as the more interesting implication of creating illusions of light and shadow. Tucked away in this school is the implied subschool of umbramancy, if you ask me.
- Modes: Illusion (light & shadow)
- Summoning: The art of folding space like a Dune navigator, used in such a way that it appears the sorcerer is teleporting people or objects from place to place or creating them from thin air. Can be combined with other schools to summon monsters from other planes, such as a summoner/pyromancer pulling fire elementals from the elemental plane of fire.
- Modes: Conjure (just pretend you're teleporting items from elsewhere), Move, Summon
- Transmutation: Alchemy in the classical sense of transmuting one form of matter into another. Examples include turning one type of metal into another (a la the classic lead to gold trick), or more radically turning one form of matter into a completely different state if the sorcerer has access to multiple schools. A transmuter/geomancer/aeromancer can turn that stone wall into a puff of fog, for example.
- Modes: Transform (inanimate)
- Animism: The sphere concerned with living things in the natural world. Examples include communicating with plants and animals, although not natural creatures with "magical powers"- the kinds of things later editions of D&D would term magical beasts, probably. It also doesn't affect creatures with a Reason score of 2 or more in SAGA, which I think you could map to the 3 or more Intelligence threshold for sapience in D&D.
- Modes: Influence (unintelligent creatures), Reveal (unintelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
- Alteration: Shapeshifting, plain and simple. Examples include transforming oneself into an animal or monster like a wyvern, or disguising oneself as a different person. Particularly powerful alterers (alterationists?) can shapechange other people, whether willing or as a baleful polymorph kind of effect, and they can even assume the exact appearance of a specific individual.
- Modes: Transform (animate)
- Channeling: An incredibly specific sphere of personal physical ability score buffs. Examples include making oneself very strong, or as nimble as a cat, even beyond one's normal limits (if those rules are in use). Cannot be used to affect another person's physical abilities.
- Healing: Another very simple sphere focused on curative arts. Examples include healing wounds and curing disease, though there is no mention of reattaching limbs or raising the dead because like in Talislanta, some things are explicitly beyond the abilities of ambient magic. Somewhat uniquely, the only sphere to have a mishap mechanic whereby the caster loses extra spell points or even suffer damage if a damage-healing spell goes awry. This doesn't affect curing diseases, poisons, etc. however.
- Modes: Heal (can't reverse)
- Meditation: The mental counterpart to channeling's physical buffs, allowing one to increase one's mental abilities. Notably, improving one's casting stat does not grant bonus spell points, similar to how temporary spellcasting stat increases don't affect bonus spells per day in 3E and later editions of D&D.
- Mentalism: Telepathy by another name, and the "intelligent creature" counterpart to animism's connection to plants and animals. Examples include projecting one's thoughts into another person's mind, reading another's thoughts or memories, changing or erasing memories, inducing hallucinations, or controlling another's mind outright if the mentalist is extremely powerful (and unscrupulous).
- Modes: Influence (intelligent creatures), Reveal (intelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
- Necromancy: The opposite to healing. Examples include wounding or outright killing enemies, draining their life, or reanimating corpses to become temporary undead. Mostly forbidden on Krynn, although ironically it's less capital-e Evil than most forms of necromancy in D&D because there's no involvement with evil deities or torturing a being's soul.
- Modes: Attack, Heal (only to reverse into Harm), Summon (corporeal undead)
- Sensitivity: Like the divination school of sorcery, but again focused on living things. Examples include sensing magical auras around creatures, determining if someone is under the influence of magic, reading their nature and demeanor, and feeling echoes of emotions well after the fact. Can't read thoughts like in mentalism, however.
- Modes: Reveal (emotions, character)
- Spiritualism: The spiritual counterpart to necromancy's physical death and decay, appropriately enough. Examples include communing with the dead, or calling spirits back from the dead to create temporary incorporeal undead like ghosts. Less scorned than necromancy, but arguably has the potential to be more harmful because of how it influences souls?
- Modes: Influence (spirits), Reveal, Summon (incorporeal undead)
Unlike in Talislanta where each discipline/mode combination has to be learned separately, here I've decided an ambient caster learns all spell modes when they acquire a school or sphere. They are not limited in the breadth of their magical ability, only the power of it. I think this is a fair change because unlike the disciplines of Talislanta, you just don't have that many modes per school here.
As I alluded to earlier, you can even mash a few of the more niche schools or spheres together if they feel too slight for someone to have to specialize in. For example, combine Channeling and Meditation into a single self-buffing 'Empowerment' sphere, or Animism and Mentalism into one 'Telepathy'. Likewise, maybe Electromancy could be folded into greater Aeromancy, or alternatively Pyromancy, since what is lightning but really fast sky fire?
From here you "only" have to figure out how the rest of spellcasting works, in the sense of how spell cost and spell difficulty are calculated. Just use Talislantan values if you're basing the system on that, or tweak them to be better suited to the math of your preferred D&D system. Caster level checks are a good starting point for that, if they exist. And speaking of spell cost...
My Take on Spell Power
One snag in this hackjob is that SAGA uses a spell point system, Talislanta lets you spam until you roll a bad mishap, D&D at large uses Vancian spell slots, and the Dragonlance books themselves do something completely different with regards to how much magic their casters can fire off in an arbitrary period of time. The first three are pretty self-explanatory, but the fourth might need some elaboration.
Keeping in mind that things and characters in Dragonlance are highly dependent upon the specific writer, what is often the case in the novels is that there is a physical component to spellcasters running low on magic juice. From clerics sweating and panting from the fervor of their prayers, to Raistlin up and keeling over like Elric before he got his clammy hands on Stormbringer, magic is a physically as well as metaphysically demanding practice in much of Dragonlance. From what I've read of the 5th Age (mostly Jean Rabe's goblin trilogy), that is true of primal sorcery and mysticism too.
That leads me to recommend a really weird thing as food for thought on the subject: this 3E rules variant of a rules variant that replaces spell slots with spell points, and then adds a spellcasting fatigue system on top of that.
Using the Vitalizing system, any caster who falls below 1/2 of their maximum spell points becomes Fatigued, and any who falls below 1/4th becomes Exhausted until they can rest to recover spell points as one would spell slots. But the reverse is also true; if a caster becomes Fatigued while at full spell points, they immediately drop to 1/2 until the Fatigued condition is removed. Likewise, someone who gets hit by Exhaustion plummets all the way down to 1/4th spell points until it's lifted.
You can probably add something similar to the spell point system found in the Player's Option: Spells & Magic supplement without too much fuss, if an AD&D version of the Age of the Mortals that never was is your goal.
If you go down some kind of spell points route (which I recommend for variable strength spells), this might be a cool thing to implement both for setting fidelity and to work (probably in vain) toward balancing casters somewhat. And speaking of casters as a discrete type of player character...
My Take on Classes
Talislanta and SAGA are classless, so in theory anybody can eventually pick up some magic if they have the ability for it. And I personally like that kind of system; it makes certain flexible characters in the stories far easier to realize than through most multiclassing (or gods forbid, dual classing) systems. Of course, classless is not a perfect fit if you're wanting to play an otherwise ordinary edition of D&D with more ambient magic-friendly rules plugged into it.
One way to go about this is to build full, homebrewed sorcerer and mystic classes. Which sounds a lot worse than it might be. Depending on the edition of D&D you're trying to use, that might be somewhat easy, or very convoluted.
Simplest might be to take the standard wizard and cleric chasses from AD&D or 3E, remove their default spellcasting, familiars, and/or domains and undead turning, and replace them with scaling school or sphere access as they level. Each might begin with 1 school/sphere plus extra for high casting stats, which would also influence bonus spell points. These would be Intelligence for sorcerers and Wisdom for mystics. I briefly considered Charisma for sorcerers like their 3E counterparts since there is some aspect of intuition or force of will that comes into play from my reading of things, but wild sorcery is also the kind of thing you can apparently teach in a traditional academic setting, if Palin Majere's Academy of Sorcery in Solace is anything to go by.
Additional schools/spheres may be acquired through leveling, perhaps with the aid of someone who already possesses that type of magic. How many schools/spheres should be attainable by max level depends on the kind of game you want to run, and the levels PCs are likely to reach; something tapping out at the midlevel range might best be suited for 3 or 4 schools/spheres max, but climbing up into the epic levels might justify near or total mastery of one's respective field of ambient magic.
... At this point out of a mix of brevity and spite I'm just going to call schools/spheres "scheres".
If you do create ambient spellcaster classes, might I recommend keeping the game limited to the decades when the gods were gone. Not because I like denying people the ability to play as the other classes, but because the added headache of managing all 4 types of spellcaster plus their various subclasses in a single shared setting feels like a little much to inflict on a DM.
If you're playing 3E or later editions, feats are another avenue for rewarding scheres. Maybe high-level knights, rangers, and other classes with partial spellcasting receive a free schere feat when they'd otherwise gain their first caster level. Or maybe it's keyed off of character level with certain other requirements so anybody can dabble in magic if they build toward it, preserving character class but divesting spellcasting from it.
I say 3E or later, but I'll be honest I don't know how to fit any of this into 4E, considering how different so many of its moving parts and powers in particular are. I'd love to see someone try and succeed, though.
Speaking of 4E, it might hold the secret to the other big, finnicky part of ambient magic...
The Question of Group Casting
Like most things, ambient magic is stronger when it's done cooperatively rather than alone. In SAGA this is presented through combined castings in which multiple practitioners of the same type of magic (i.e., no mixed parties of wild sorcerers and mystics) can pool their powers together to make a stronger effect that would normally be out of reach of any one of them. There are also coordinated castings, which are a bit more like a ritual involving non-casters who essentially use Aid Another on the main caster in order to assist them with their spell, which is generally easier and less ambitious than what you'd start a combined casting for.
The latter can be done fairly easily by just giving the caster a small bonus to their spellcasting check depending on the number of assistants, perhaps with a limit that scales with level. A novice sorcerer could only wrangle 1 or 2 ritual assistants at 1st level, but know how to effectively manage perhaps a dozen or more at high levels. Each participant offers them a +1 or some other small bonus to the roll.
The former has more possibilities. Maybe each additional caster involved in a combined casting increases the maximum level spell effect that one of them can cast, or everyone rolls a spellcasting check and the highest result is used, or they can divide an enormous spell point cost up amongst themselves evenly.
Or, you can take a page out of 4E's book and implement a system of elaborate Ritual magic that may or may not require appropriate schere access of all its participants. Unlike magic which is freeform, you might want to keep rituals limited to a specific list so the party can't absolutely rip the campaign in two- unless you want to make sure they have the tools to do just that.
In any of the above cases, I'd say required casting time is automatically longer or even the max time possible, to reflect the amount of time it takes to coordinate with others and set up a group casting/ritual. Unless you want a game in which spellcasters can completely break power scaling and use the rest of the party as nothing more than ambulatory batteries and buff bots, of course. Which, to be fair, is nothing foreign to D&D.
The Question of Armor
An incredibly specific thing I fixated on for about half the time I spent working on this post was the question of whether or not primal sorcerers should be allowed to wear armor. They're technically arcane spellcasters, but they have many differences from the robed wizard orders of the moons, not to mention the magic-users in many other D&D worlds. So it's not unreasonable that they might be able to wear armor, too. And this is true, to some extent, depending on which source you're reading.
Dragonlance 3E makes it clear that primal sorcerers are just regular old sorcerers, subject to all the same limitations. That means no armor proficiency to start, and Arcane Spell Failure % for any armor they do wear anyway. The SAGA system, meanwhile, is classless and ties many proficiencies to different ability codes. So as long as your sorcerer draws cards for a high enough Coordination and Physique, they can wear or wield pretty much anything in the game while casting magic (assuming they also got a high enough Intellect of course). Just to make sure that wasn't an oversight and there should be some kind of armor limitation, I trawled through dozens of sample NPCs until I found the Plainsman named Ironhawk, who is not only an accomplished ranger-type clad in leather armor, but also proficient in a school of sorcery (pyromancy) and a sphere of mysticism (animism).
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| Thank you, weirdly Rambo-looking indigenous dude. |
The books, meanwhile...
Well, I haven't really read many of them, as my series on the Stone-Teller trilogy explains. But from a cursory glance over the (admittedly sparse) Dragonlance wiki, it feels to me like most wild sorcerers conform to the unarmored stereotype, but it isn't necessarily enforced in-universe. One big exception is the formerly Takhisian Knights of the Thorn, who often wear the same plate armor as their nonmagical knightly fellows. Ultimately it's up to you whether your game's sorcerers should be wearing more than a tunic or not, but I think they could get by with at least light/leather armor, or at least not suffer any outsized penalties for wearing it if they acquired proficiency through multiclassing or the like.
Mystics, on the other hand, are depicted as being able to wear many kinds of armor like their clerical counterparts across much Dragonlance media, though sometimes it stops at medium armor before they break out the full plate, as in 3E.
At least one question in all of this has a simple answer!
