Thoughts on Porting/Adapting/Fudging The Banner Saga to Tabletop

The Banner Saga, or Post-Apocalyptic Oregon Trail Viking Tactics DX as I like to call it, was the first video game I ever saw crowdfunded. Though I lacked the money to participate in or experience it until almost a decade after the trilogy started, it has lived in my head in some form or another ever since. I have certain gripes about the lack of interactivity with the ancestral banner that gives the series its namesake, and questions about the way some of the cumulative choices pan out across the series, but I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay, story beats, and lavish artstyle throughout. Do recommend.

Often I wonder how I'd go about porting or adapting the game to a tabletop setting because for some reason I need the things I like to bleed into every other medium I like. But I never got around to trying before now because it feels like equal parts convoluted and "yeah, duh". But since I'm now the guy who spitballs Dragonlance x Talislanta mashups, it feels silly not to just go for it already.

Gameplay in TBS falls into three major categories that I will call combat, caravaning, and conversation.

Combat

Most of your time spent playing TBS is spent fighting or preparing to fight battles, in which individual characters take turns moving around a grid-based map and using abilities that reward planning and positioning. If you're familiar with the FinFan Tactics series or basically any Ogre Battle game besides The March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Calibur, you already know the basics.

Where TBS differs is the fact that every character has two separate "health" bars that have to be managed carefully, and a turn order system that encourages spreading the damage around, rather than defeating enemies one by one.

Because tactics video games and combat-heavy fantasy TTRPGs have so much shared DNA, I think that overall the TBS system can be ported to tabletop directly, with only minor adaptations to the turn and actions systems. The end result is something that feels quite different from combat systems where you roll dice for everything, but I think that's somewhat refreshing.

Stats

Every character in TBS, regardless of class, has the same stats in common. These are Strength, Armor, Willpower, Exertion, Break, Movement Range, and Attack Range:

• Strength (STR) is both attack power and health; you deal as much damage with attacks as you have STR, and once you reach 0 STR you're defeated.
• Armor (ARM) is a pool of damage reduction that decreases direct STR damage you suffer before being depleted. A 3 STR attack against someone with 2 ARM will remove the ARM first and only deal 1 STR damage.
• Willpower (WIL) is a pool of points you can spend on actions to improve them. 1 WIL = 1 extra tile of movement, 1 more point of STR or ARM damage, an enhanced version of an ability, etc.
• Exertion (EXE) is how many Willpower points you can dump into a given action. 2 EXE means you can spend up to 2 WIL on something at a time, etc.
• Break (BRK) is bonus damage that is always applied to attacks vs ARM, regardless of current STR level. 1 BRK means your attacks always deal 1 extra damage against enemy ARM.
• Movement Range is how many tiles you can move in a turn. Diagonal movement costs 2.
• Attack Range is how many tiles away you can attack from. 1 is most melee units, 2 is some spearmen and others with long reach, and 3 or more is most ranged units.

In addition, most characters have 0-1 Passive Abilities and 1-3 Active Abilities, depending on class and level.

Size is also a factor that comes into play, although I wouldn't call it a stat like the others. Size is usually either 1x1 tile for humans, or 2x2 tiles for big beefy Varl boys, with less common creatures taking up different configurations of space.

This facet of the game is very easy to port to tabletop. Most PCs and monsters should have pretty small, manageable stat blocks if you choose to stick with the level of individual mechanical complexity offered by in-game classes. A character could have something like this for most of their career:

Sindri Unnsbur, Human Spearman

STR 8, ARM 6, WIL 5, EXE 1, BRK 1

Move 5, Range 2, Size 1x1

Passive: Embolden - Each kill the Spearman makes encourages allies to fight harder, granting 1 Willpower to the Spearman and any adjacent allies.

Active: Impale - Skewer an adjacent enemy unit, doing normal Strength damage (100% chance to hit) before knocking it back. Impaled characters Bleed for 1 round, taking 1 Strength damage for each tile moved.

And that's it.

Talents

Alright it turns out I was lying when I said "and that's it" for character stats in this game. That's because in my first draft of this post I entirely forgot that Talents exist, and only got remound of them when I thought I was 90% done because I just so happened to scroll past a hyperlink to them on the wiki. (This is because I'm not only a bad writer but also a bad researcher.)

Introduced in the second entry in the series, Talents are secondary progression given as a reward after maxing out your stats. There are 2 Talents per Stat, but you can only select 1 to put any points in for each. That makes 10 Talents, each with 6 ranks that improve their passive benefits by some percentile value, usually +5/10% per rank. You buy the first 3 ranks with promotion points, and can find rare items that give a bonus of +1 to +3 to them in your travels.

Talents let you specialize your characters a little more, making them better at the existing combat systems without radically changing them:

• Hunker Down (ARM) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 ARM damage per hit.
• Tighten Straps (ARM) grants a 20-45% chance to regenerate 1 ARM per turn.
• Robust (STR) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 STR damage per hit.
• Artery Strike (STR) grants 10-35% added Critical Hit chance. (Double all STR damage, including WP expended on the attack. AoE attacks and attacks from passive traits can crit.)
• Defy (WP) grants a 30-80% chance to straight up ignore a killing blow but be reduced to 1 STR.
• Stubborn (WP) grants a 20% chance to regenerate 1-6 WP per turn.
• Dodge (EXE) grants a 5-30% chance to avoid STR attacks completely.
• Lucky Shot (EXE) grants 30-80% added hit chance.
• Exploit (BRK) grants a 10-35% chance to gain Puncture on an attack. (+1 STR damage per 2 ARM the target has lost that fight.)
• Divert (BRK) grants a 5-30% chance to entirely avoid an ARM attack.

The power creep provided by these Talents is mostly taken into account in the balancing of TBS, so even if your entire party hangs out unkillable at death's door with 1 STR for 80% of the battle, the battle layouts and AI are meant to remain challenging.

But porting TBS to tabletop messes with many of those finely balanced systems at least a little bit, which means that Talents could get extremely wonky late in the game. More Playtesting Is Needed to determine if you should fiddle with the values for some Talents, or just remove them entirely in favor of slightly deeper Class customization.

Class

Speaking of classes, those are the main way characters are differentiated from one another in TBS. They affect their starting stats, max stats, and abilities, and at a certain rank level (out of a max of 15) they can be promoted to one of two advanced class choices that grant them extra abilities. It's another extremely Tactics-esque part of the game, but not nearly as complex as most full-fledged examples of that genre.

There are several dozen classes in TBS, many of them unique to specific characters or party members, and many more available to NPCs only. You could port all of them directly over to tabletop without a hitch as long as you've sorted out combat (see below), but I think that would start to make combat very same'y-feeling when it's no longer just one person controlling the whole party, but a bunch of players in control of individual characters who can only use the same few moves over and over, and common enemy types become easy to identify and boring to deal with.

That's why I propose making classes slightly more complex.

At the very least, give players a few more abilities in their toolkit, and give them some freedom of choice in the matter. If you keep the trilogy's level cap of 15, consider giving them a choice between 2 new abilities every few ranks rather than just once, until they have 4 or 5 active abilities and may 2 passives by the end of their career. Lowering the level cap to something nice and even like 10 would correspondingly give you fewer abilities to pick or for the GM to design.

For example, give that spearman above the passive ability later on to reposition after using Impale, or maybe allow them to pick up a single ability from a different martial class to reflect them dabbling in other fighting styles to diversify their options.

Species

I want to include a little subsection here for something that is mechanically present in TBS, but never explicit: character species. You can never create a character in the computer game, so you're never faced with a screen explaining the unique traits each group of humanoid peoples in the game world possess. But they do influence how you use the units in battle.

(Minor spoilers for the types of playable characters available in TBS 3, if you want to skip ahead. I really wish Blogger had clickable spoiler tags as a built-in tool so I didn't have to try to parse through the solid wall of text that it spits everything into in the HTML view.)

Humans are bog-standard with the most variety of classes, unsurprisingly. Varl always occupy 4 squares because of their size. Dredge usually have a passive "Shatter" trait where dealing ARM damage to them causes a chain reaction that damages nearby Dredge allies. Horseborn have the speed and size of a horse, often moving farther than other characters and taking up 2x1 squares like Large (Long) creatures from the original print of D&D 3E. Etc.

If you decide that species is baked into class, you don't have to concern yourself with the details. But if you want to allow for character creation and customization where species and class are separate choices, it's worth keeping in mind the traits you would or wouldn't want to emphasize in your game.

For example, I'd be likely to drop the negative passive trait Dredge have because it mostly exists to add a layer of tactical satisfaction when you're fighting Dredge enemies in the video game, and it would feel kind of pointed and targeted if a Dredge PC was saddled with that all campaign; they'd already be dealing with enough extra trouble, by my reckoning.

Character Creation

I've kind of been beating around the bush on this one for a few sections, haven't I?

Character creation isn't a thing in TBS, which is completely normal for the genre. But outside of introducing somebody to a new game, just handing a premade character to a player doesn't quite light the spark, in my entirely unqualified opinion. TTRPG characters thrive more on either randomization or player customization, or a bit of both.

So if everyone at the table is creating a custom character, either give them a set number of bonus points to distribute amongst their stats (excluding Movement Range and Attack Range), or have everyone roll a small die like d4 or d6 and distribute that many points, with a max of +2 to any single stat so balance doesn't go completely out the window.

Then, either roll on your favorite random table or come up with a background for each character to finish them off. Maybe provide them with an appropriate item for it. A veteran huscarl might start with a scarred shield they used when defending their jarl from an assassination attempt, and that shield might fill the "armor" slot and provide some small passive bonus. More on items down below.

Titles

Heroic Titles are unique upgrades granted to each character after they reach rank 11, introduced in TBS 3. They buff the character with the title in some way, and they have their own renown tracks that improve them over time just like ranking up in one's class. Only 1 character can hold a given title, so in TBS it was important to match characters with titles that complemented one another, even if they might not have made the most thematic sense.

But in tabletop where each player has more agency, I think titles should instead be tied to how a given character has been played over the course of a campaign. It doesn't make much sense for the chunky varl bulwark to pick up Shadow Walker after a campaign spent being big, up-front, and imposing for example.

Personally I believe a player should have input on what title their character gets, or in creating a new title alongside the GM that would be appropriate for them. But you could also run the game so that the consequences of the characters' actions and their fame or infamy in the game world dictate what title they are known by, as an organic response to player choice. In either case there is more room for narrative consideration here that would be a shame to ignore in favor of pure min-maxing.

Items

TBS dispenses with armor and weapon slots or other traditional loadouts. Everybody can equip a max of 1 item at a time that provides some kind of passive benefit, often gated by character rank. The characters are otherwise assumed to always have all the necessities of their class; archers always have their bows, shield-bangers their shields, etc. 

That kind of abstracted, 'don't worry about it' inventory works well for what is shaping up to be a relatively rules-lite tabletop system, but at the same time there is room to expand to add customizability. Maybe increase the number of item slots to 3 or 4, with categories like arms, armor, and trinkets or accessories. Existing items from TBS can be slotted into the above, mostly as trinkets, and a few weapons and clothing can be added to round things out wherever the GM finds there's a lack of support.

... Oh hey, this chapter was supposed to be about actual combat, wasn't it?

Turn Order

Battles in TBS have a somewhat unique tempo. Where other games might use a speed stat or some other initiative system to determine turn order, TBS just uses your assigned party order. But every other turn in between your party members is the enemy's, at least until the end of combat phase called Pillage.

This creates a fast-paced back-and-forth between the player and the computer that intensifies rather than winds down the more units on one side drop; the last two remaining units on one team are suddenly much more mobile and active than they were in the first round of combat because now they have their fallen allies' turn slots, and if you didn't take precautions to weaken them beforehand, they're in a position to tip the scales the other way. I've never played it to be sure, but it kinda looks like chess from the outside.

Once the second-to-last unit on one team drops, Pillage mode activates, and all the units in the numerically superior team go in order before the lone survivor gets their single turn, making mop-up faster and easier and preventing really drawn-out and annoying last stands by either side.

The system is great for automated gameplay, but making the table keep track of two separate but threaded-together initiative cycles that will change in size over the course of combat without some kind of VTT aid feels like it could be a bit much.

That's why I offer (but don't necessarily recommend) some alternatives:

1. Add a speed or initiative stat. The character sheet for this 'game' won't be very cluttered, so one more box isn't a big deal. That value is your set position in combat order with no dueling rotations, meaning allies or enemies can come immediately before or after you, depending. This makes combat much more traditional.
2. Use group initiative. Everybody on one side goes at once, with attacks and effects resolving in the order that the party has put itself in, in order to empower players to coordinate and find a way to make the person who goes last just as valuable as the one who goes first. Maybe the whole party can spend WP up to their lowest EXE value to add a bonus to this roll.

Bear in mind that both of the above would render Pillage mode unnecessary, as well as change the metagame somewhat by removing the biggest incentive for the practice of wounding a bunch of units but keeping them alive until the very end so they don't give their turn slots to healthier allies.

Action Economy

TBS lets you move, then take a single action. Actions include STR attack, ARM attack, and using abilities, among certain other context cues. You can also Rest at the start of your turn before moving, avoiding doing anything to regain 1 WIL.

I see no reason to mess with this simplicity, except to suggest that you let characters move before or after acting. It just seems reasonable.

No Rolls Necessary*

There's basically no random chance or uncertainty involved in any actions in combat. Only a handful of abilities have randomized outcomes, like which nearby tiles get affected by certain AoE attacks, and those could easily be simulated by stealing the rules for when ranged attacks or thrown weapons go awry from your preferred ruleset, or circumvented entirely by just giving control to the caster.

Attack rolls aren't a thing either, outside of the very specific situation where a unit tries to deal health damage to another unit whose Armor is higher than the attacker's Strength. In that case every point of ARM above the attacker's STR confers a -10% miss chance (up to a maximum -80% to hit), easily resolved with a d10 roll or the like.

Overall this is the easiest piece to port to tabletop, to the point that it almost feels too simple. It's not a dumbing-down of combat, though- it just gives more room for other parts of combat to be more tactical, and lets all sides operate and strategize with a sense of confidence uncommon to tabletop, I feel.

Renown

Every enemy you deep six in TBS grants the character who dealt the killing blow 1 point of Renown toward increasing their Rank. It's essentially just combat XP and Level, but here all that matters is who deals the final point of Strength damage. In the video games this meant you have to carefully manage who struck the final blows how often, or else you could wind up with a handful of over-leveled kill-stealers and a bunch of massively under-leveled support characters.

That would be pretty annoying and cumbersome to coordinate with a whole party of live players, and unwittingly kill-stealing could disrupt the fun and maybe even cause some bleed-over, so it's best to drop that part of the mechanic for tabletop. Renown from combat encounters should be divided evenly, with unique rewards reserved for roleplaying, feats of exploration, out-of-the-box thinking, etc. and so on.

If you keep the upgrade track for characters' Heroic Titles, consider granting them 1 title Renown every time they act in accordance with that title.

Caravaning

The second biggest part of TBS (albeit a distant second as I look upon that wall of text up there) is the journey, heavily inspired by Oregon Trail and other lightly simulationist strategy games aimed at getting somewhere and managing your collection of rugged and/or hopelessly in-over-their-heads immigrants so you don't all die before you reach your destination.

I might've missed it in my playthrough a few years ago, but surprisingly I don't think TBS had any dysentery jokes.

Stats

Just like a party member, your whole caravan has stats that fluctuate during your adventure:

• Morale is the measure of your caravan's overall, well, morale. It represents your army and clansmen's mood and approval of your leadership, and it goes down from the drudgery of travel, up from resting, and up or down depending on your responses to special events. Morale gives you a willpower bonus or penalty in battle.
• Supplies are an abstract counter representing all the food, tools, weapons, and other resources your caravan burns through as it travels. Supplies are consumed each day of travel and every rest the caravan takes.
• Population is how many poor sods are following your banner at the moment. In-game they are divided up between clansmen, fighters, and varl. Fighters and varl contribute to mass combat encounters, while clansmen are the ordinary noncombatants caught up on all this mess and aren't often used directly as a resource by the game.

Let's break these down a little more separately than character stats before.

Morale

Morale reminds me of the sliding hope vs despair meters used in some LotR-inspired games, and it also mechanically incentivizes players to care about the caravan because their own self-interest and wellbeing are tied up in it.* Its 5-step scale can be kept as-is for tabletop, and whatever formulae are used to calculate it behind the scenes can be boiled down to moving ±1 along the track from major story beats.

• Poor Morale gives each character -2 WIL
• Weak gives -1 WIL
• Normal has no effect
• Good gives +1 WIL
• Great gives +2 WIL

Remember to take advantage of morale as a nonmechanical tool, too. At the end of the day it's not just a bonus or penalty to a combat stat, but a representation of the whole caravan's mood and wellbeing. Let it factor into roleplaying and the way the characters relate to the rest of the caravan in ways that couldn't be done outside of a TTRPG.

If morale is low, maybe the referee should consider the next random encounter to be an inciting incident for an argument between families, factions, or a challenge to existing leadership positions; if it's high, maybe an unexpected good outcome to an otherwise bad encounter would be merited as everyone pulls together and comes through. Use it to humanize the caravan into more than just a faceless mass waiting to die of dysentery.

Morale is a good mechanic overall, and fairly simple to adapt to tabletop. The other two, on the other hand...

Supplies & Population

The interaction between Supplies and Population greatly benefits from being automated by the game. Dividing the former by the latter with different weight multipliers added to each of the three types of caravan followers to get your running counter of remaining days worth of supplies would be a serious drag on a tabletop game, as well as very out-of-place in a ruleset that otherwise doesn't have much math.

So I instead propose going with a non-simulationist mechanic, like for example depletion dice.

Every unit of time of travel (whether it be days like in TBS, or something longer like weeks) and every extended rest to heal up or improve morale is a roll on the Supplies die, and a result of 1 reduces its size by 1 step. From a max size of say d8 or d10 it can dwindle down to a measly d4, and perhaps even further to a d2 coinflip before food runs out and people start deserting from your caravan or worse. Conversely, successfully leading a foraging party or finding a hidden trove of resources increases the die size by 1 step in turn.

Similarly, Population has a die that increases as new people join the caravan and decreases as they settle down, desert, or die in large numbers. An increase in the Population die may call for a Supplies check to see if it drops in size or not. Population doesn't require daily checks like Supplies do, being reserved for bigger events like helping to resettle a village or fighting in a War (more on that below).

The basic idea to stick to is you only need to worry about big, discrete events so you don't have to stop the game to factor in a lot of little minutia, like how many hours of passive berry picking the characters did and whether it matters or not.

Events

The meat of caravaning gameplay is dealing with the events that pop up along the way to your destination, either predetermined by the plot and your previous choices in events, or randomly drawn from a table of possible events with different triggers. Events typically have two or more branching choices to make, with the outcome being anything from an increase or decrease in Supplies or Population, to entering battle or finding items, to even losing party members if your luck is bad enough.

Like random backgrounds or optional initiative systems above, events can be largely taken from existing materials in the form of random encounter tables from your favorite supplement. You can also trawl the TBS trilogy itself and repurpose its events in tabletop form, making them more open-ended prompts without set dialogue branches to fit the new medium.

War

War is a special kind of event where your caravan encounters a large, hostile force. It is a large-scale battle between two opposing armies that you dictate the overall strategy for, which in turn determines how difficult a battle your party has to fight, which determines the final outcome of the war. In TBS there are 5 options for how to approach a war:

1. Charge! - The most aggressive battle plan that is, ironically, also the safest for your caravan. The party charges into the fray and fights off the main force, facing a tougher than average battle while caravan casualties remain low.
2. Formations! - A balanced battle plan with an easier fight for the player but heavier casualties for the caravan.
3. Hold them off! - A very easy battle for the player but pretty considerable casualties for the caravan.
4. Retreat! - No battle for the player whatsoever and some really severe casualties for the caravan.
5. Oversee! - No battle, but with an outcome that varies according to several factors like caravan strength, party strength, and any specific follow-up commands given. It's kind of like the Auto-Resolve button in the Total War series, and casualties are often close to equal to Formations! on average, at least according to the wiki.

In all of the options leading to a player battle, you have the option to stick around longer and fight multiple back-to-back fights as you draw the enemy's best away from your army as reinforcements to the current battle. You don't get to reposition or heal in between fights, but you earn increased rewards and renown, and your caravan suffers less for it.

Combat can be resolved as normal, while you can probably have the party come up with more nuanced commands than the above based on where and why a battle is being fought. Let them find creative uses for topography or feints, or anything else theater-of-the-mind'y.

At the conclusion of a War (which you might just want to rename "Mass Combat" or "Skirmish" or something because describing a single battle as a "war" feels a tiny bit silly to me even if it is etymologically justified within certain Germanic languages the mythologies of which the game takes a lot of its inspiration from) you roll your caravan's Population die a number of times determined by the referee, probably based on how nasty the enemy army is. The players can reduce the number of forced rolls and therefore make it less likely for the Population to deplete by fighting multiple battles in a row, and by giving smart orders on a macro level. Morale level may also play a role in this.

If by some disaster the Population die drops from d2 to 0, it isn't necessarily a game over. Several chapters of TBS revolve around just a few lonesome characters, lost or otherwise bereft of their larger group, and that can offer a completely different flavor of game for a time.

The Banner

It's in the title, it's on every piece of cover art, you almost always see it flapping in the bitter breeze above your caravan. It has embroidered upon it the name of everyone who has ever lived and died in the clan, their deeds and struggles, and it will continue to grow until the end of the world. The banner is a central piece of the visual language and aesthetic of the series, but aside from a few scenes where someone is mending or adding to the end of the banner, or passing it down to their successor, the banner doesn't actually factor into the story much, and basically isn't present in the gameplay at all.

I feel like that's a missed opportunity for the series, but one you can rectify and take full advantage of in a tabletop setting.

First off, emphasize how important it is in-universe. It is a symbol of leadership in many ways, always being carried by the de facto leader(s) of the caravan, exchanging hands and passing from one generation to the next at various points as the plot demands. It's not a formal symbol of the chieftain, but an implicit recognition of an individual's guidance by the whole community. We don't see it happen in the video games, but losing or allowing the banner to be damaged could be a cultural faux pas so great that it's the grounds for removing someone from leadership; "if you can't keep our past safe, how can we trust you with our future?" and the like.

Second, think of ways to gamify that value. Maybe capturing the banner is an explicit goal of the enemy in many Wars that could cripple the caravan's morale until it's taken back. Maybe risking its safety to carry it aloft can have the opposite effect in a high-stakes event. Maybe the party can't cash in their renown to rank up or acquire heroic titles until the caravan has had time to rest in safety, long enough for the weavers to add this latest chapter of the community's story to the banner and cement their trials and achievements in cultural memory. You could make a whole event out of the subtleties of language and imagery that go into each weaving, and use several of those to bookend major arcs of the table's journey.

Conversation

Just roleplay, duh.

But seriously, the depth, tempo, and tone of storytelling and decision-making is entirely up to you and the table. It's both the easiest and the most challenging thing to port over because you can no longer rely upon the series' pretty solid writing, but that's okay; this whole exercise has been to give you the tools to tell your own Saga with, not to follow in the footsteps of Rook, Alette, Iver and co.

I hope this was a readable and enjoyable deep-dive, and that you can create something beautiful from these messy building blocks.

Assuming I don't cannibalize this to create my own FKR game like I have half a mind to now that I've read this whole post over, of course.

* I don't know why I give hypothetical players so little credit in my writing. My assumption that many of them will need to have a subsystem reminding them to care about the meeples is unfair upon further reflection, and also kinda stupid considering how many stories there are of parties latching onto the tiniest throwaway NPC the referee had no plans for. But I'll keep that part in for the edge cases.

I Did a Thing for a Heartseeker Game Jam (And Also Am Still Alive)!

Oh, hey.

I kind of vanished for a few months there, didn't I?

I didn't plan on that, and had a few things lined up, but I guess somewhere between the new medications, crushing ennui, and the occasional terrifying explosion of real paying work, posting fell between the gaps.

But I'm back with something to show for it, and it gives me the opportunity to talk about other people's work too.

There are only about 5 days left on it as of writing, but an open-ended game jam for Heartseeker is going on right now!

I've written about my fondness for the cozy old school microRPG in previous years, and I was stoked to learn the creator had put out an open invitation for people to make stuff for or with the game's newest edition. I submitted my own single-page supplement to the jam a little while ago, filled with a few old ideas and a whole bunch of whatever struck my random fancy in the moment.

Unfortunately my fancy involved pretty gross mythical creatures this time around.

Anyway. Check the jam out, maybe contribute your own mini bits to it, or join the Heartseeker community. They've got a Discord server too, though I haven't gathered the willpower to enter a people place and check it out yet.

Earning XP Through Community Investment

(Misleading Clickbait Title: Elevate Your D&D Campaign With Orgies, Inc.™!)

A few times on this blog I've fiddled with alternate XP systems for OSR-type games, usually in a very surface-level and indirect way that does little more than gesture at other people who already explored the concepts much more fully years before.

This time, I plan to do better with the idea.

What orgies have to do with my aspirations of doing better, I'll explain in a moment. But rest assured it's nowhere near as interesting or even eyebrow-raising as you're thinking.

Today's post concerns the 10th issue of Dragon magazine, from all the way back when they still spelled its name with a "The". Content Notice for people reading along with the archive.org copy above in SFW environments: there are elf-presenting nipples visible on page 5. I suggest covering the art with a nice, beige window or piece of construction paper depending on reading device, if necessary.

In this issue Jon Pickens debuted one of two alternate experience systems for D&D which would release that year, the other being Dave Arneson's in The First Fantasy Campaign. Unlike Arneson's rather dry title for a gameplay aid, Jon's article goes under a title that would not be out of place in today's world of clickbait, which is an impressive feat for 1977. Though, I guess advertising has always been preying on the same parts of the human psyche, just using different tools throughout the ages.

Orgies, Inc.

"Orgies, Inc." inverts the OD&D standard of experience points being awarded equal to the number of gold pieces in treasure looted from the dungeon and brought back to civilization. Instead, XP is awarded only when gold pieces are spent in a way that effectively removes them from the game without direct benefit to the players. So, coming home and blowing all that gold on a new stronghold or obtaining magic items wouldn't count toward leveling up. The article provides a list of possible income-burners, ranging from religious sacrifices whose entry ends midsentence, to philanthropy, to spell research- the last of which is cheating a little, since you actually can get material (magical) benefit out of that option.

The orgies do eventually appear, at the bottom of the list. The actual description is simultaneously tame and outlandish, glossing over the activity as "lusty indulgence in wine, women, and song" at a tavern which can somehow last as many days in a row as the participants have points of Constitution, costing up to 500gp per day. I know the PCs are meant to be larger-than-life pulp action figures in this kind of game, but when the system gives normal human beings a Con of 9-12 by default, it suddenly makes the world look way more like Oglaf than Conan.

There's also the issue of level scaling that butts up against that 500gp/day limit real quick. At low levels a weekend or a week of wild partying at most will be enough to level everyone up, but as the required XP amounts climb into the tens and hundreds of thousands of experience points per level, you're suddenly looking at weeks or months spent doing nothing but orgying or recuperating from said orgies. Which sounds exhausting at best and downright hellish at worst, if the DM doesn't provide multiple gold burners for the PCs to switch it up with.

If you'd like to know more about other attempts at "carousing" XP systems over the years that we won't be looking at, I recommend this post from Yore. Another Content Notice here, some of these early systems had gross and coercive implications about whom a PC could "wench" with.

Clan Hoards

I'm more interested in the 4th item on this list of gold sinks, however. The so-called Clan Hoard option allows characters who are dwarves or "other clannish folk" to gain XP by donating treasure to the heavily guarded public hoard owned and operated by their clan. No private individuals may make withdrawals from the hoard, and as the article puts it, the money is effectively taken out of the campaign.

This system interests me for a few reasons, not least of which being the implied lore of a public hoard operated by each dwarf clan. That terminology suggests a form of public ownership and public funding that the clan as a whole may dip into and benefit from, distinct from the private estates of wealthy clan members or a treasury owned by whatever hereditary ruler one might expect to be in a dwarf-hold in 1970s D&D.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it because I've been doing a lot of writing about working class dwarves over the past few months, but with that one line this option implies a very different society and political system than what was common in fantasy fiction at the time. And I think that's neat.

I also just like the mechanics of the system for the way they could transform a campaign and reorient it around a community. It isn't the only sort of donation a person can make under these rules- I did mention philanthropy earlier on. But philanthropy conjures a very specific mental image (for me at least) of detachment, both from the needy and from the underlying causes of need: rich folks getting a park named after them or preventing a bad harvest from getting worse, but stopping short of systemic change, and junk like that.

The clan hoard, meanwhile, keeps the PC(s) connected to their community. They have to return home (or at least meet representatives abroad) in order to turn their wealth over, which encourages them to establish their base of operations at home rather than off in some chunk of wilderness recently scoured of all inconvenient life and deeded in the fighter's name.

That creates opportunities and complications you might not get from a traditional dungeon or hex crawl. For one, you have a whole lot more NPCs you're likely to run into regularly, none of whom are necessarily beholden to the players as hirelings or serfs. Different families, groups, or factions within the community can bring different flavors and friction to social interaction. Events beyond the party's control can pop up at unexpected times. If they return from a long adventure only to find a natural disaster has struck or there's a dispute going on, more than just a monetary donation will be needed to resolve the community's problems (and unlock that sweet XP). Even the least personally-engaged PC has a stake in all of it to some degree, which keeps gameplay varied and fresh.

What to Throw Out

There are a few minor parts of Pickens' take on the system that I don't like. For one, the clan hoard necessarily being limited to clan-based societies limits its applicability in a (to me) unrealistic way. Lots of societies in real life can form intricate systems of social cohesion, cooperation, and resource management beginning from radically different starting points, that would nonetheless let them arrive at the same place for this kind of mechanic. It should be even more so for fantasy, I think.

Second and less nitpicky is the idea that the money is effectively removed from the campaign once it's donated. I think that's a lazy way to handle it, akin to the religious sacrifice mechanic where all the wealth basically goes up in a puff of smoke on the altar. It doesn't feel meaningful or impactful to the fiction.

What to Add Instead

I think even if the money is permanently taken out of the hands of the PC—which is totally fine—its impact should still be felt. The PCs should see evidence of what it's being used for and what goes on in the community as a consequence.

The most obvious way to do this to me is by reflecting each character in the way the community grows, since it's the mechanism by which those same characters grow more powerful. Take each PC's character class, background, or other defining features into account and consider how that might affect the place as they grow more prominent.

For example, the fighters might grow stronger because the money has been invested in community defense with a training ground, armory, and maybe some kind of citizen militia is set up. At low levels the fighters would be training alongside the other newbies, but at higher levels of experience—literal and narrative—they might be the ones doing the organizing instead. Similarly, a magic-user's need for specialized tools and a place for magical research might spur the creation of a larger archive or public library in town.

With this little change, the PCs are no longer leveling up and growing stronger through their mix of dumb luck and Main Character power, but through the opportunities provided for them by their community. It makes the game a more social RPG with a greater emphasis on reciprocal relationships, although the potential for exploitation in the form of dungeon delving in order to acquire the wealth in the first place does still exist.

Community XP

The simplest way to implement this system is by doing as Jon Pickens did, and have each character level up independently according to their own XP track once they've contributed enough of their personal wealth to the community. One might reasonably assume wealth and therefore XP is divided up evenly and/or equitably between PCs in the spirit of cooperation this whole thing is meant to foster, but there's always room for character competition or friction in a story about people like this.

If the table doesn't enjoy lopsided leveling tracks common to OSR games and the minimal impact it can have on moment-to-moment play, you can remove everyone's leveling track and instead give one big XP bar to the community as a whole. This can represent the amount of gold stored in/being utilized by its version of the public funds hoard from earlier on, standard of living for the average person, urban or economic development, or some other nebulous indicator of growth. Remember, money locked up in the personal fortunes or private properties of rich jackasses contributes nothing.

Alternatively, if you like the milestone leveling that seemed to get popular with the advent of D&D 5E (or at least I was ignorant of it up until then), throw out all the bars and XP and tie the milestones to various public works initiated by the community. This could take the form of funding building projects or the acquisition of certain skills or resources and the like.

More hands-on involvement from the PCs like labor hours or direct participation in planning/advising on the project could also count toward the goal, making it better for games with less of an emphasis on dungeon crawling. You could also probably assign a GP value to characters' workhours if you want to use that in combination with XP tracks; after all, is adventuring not already a form of wage labor?

Once a goal has been reached by whatever means with the indispensable aid of the PCs (not because they're better than everybody else but because the story kind of hinges on them), a level-up may be had.

Leveling Tables

Each level-up, a PC gains all the generic benefits: increased HP, attack ability, etc. This represents a mix of their own personal growth from adventuring, and what their community helped foster in them during downtime.

The player also rolls on the [Great Big Table of Community Upgrades]. This is a general table that everyone has access to regardless of class, background, etc. An upgrade is checked off after being rolled, and repeats are rerolled unless specifically noted in its entry. If XP curves are flattened so every character levels up at the same rate, or the table uses milestone leveling like the above, the whole party rolls at once.

The table can just be a regular old d100 or similarly large roll. Example:

Nergui advances to 2nd level and rolls on the table. They roll a 46, which means that greater investment in local food resources has given the community a Food Surplus. Rations and meals are always available for purchase in town, the population is healthier and well-fed, and rolls on the Complications table (more on that below) that result in famine might be cancelled out/ignored.

Later, Nergui advances to 4th level and rolls 46 again. This upgrades Food Surplus into Improved Nutrition, which improves the general quality of life for the people, gives the community as a whole a bonus on rolls to avoid plagues spread by malnutrition, and also gives the PCs a +1 to their next Hit Point roll.

Alternatively, the table could be much more narrow and use a smaller die such as d10 or d20, with higher results being better, but also gated in tiers by being far higher than the die size naturally allows one to roll. Only one roll is made per level for the whole party, but the party's total level is added to the roll. Example:

The party reaches 3rd level. Because there are 4 of them in the party, they add a +12 modifier to the community roll. This increases their roll of 10 to 22, kicking it up to the 20-25 tier. They roll 1d6 for the tier and get a 2, netting their community the Minor Magic Shop upgrade. This makes minor magical trinkets available for purchase in town. Or, if the table refuses to break the 'no buying magic items' taboo, each PC is gifted 1 (and only 1) minor magic item for all their help around town lately.

In addition to the Great Big Table, each character has their own Class/Background table that represents how their own personal contributions have affected the community. These should be smaller than the general table, but they can be full d20 or even d100 tables if you're feeling motivated/masochistic enough. Example:

Nemo the cleric advances to 5th level. They roll on the cleric table and get Local Devotees a second time. This represents the growing community of their coreligionists in the area, and allows Nemo to upgrade the little roadside shrine they had previously constructed into a modest temple/sanctuary/sacred grove/etc.

Opposite the table of Upgrades is the table of Community Complications. This table is rolled on whenever upgrades are rolled for, representing the unexpected incidents or setbacks that go hand-in-hand with the community growing and changing over time. They don't have to be straight-up penalties; the complication can instead be an encounter the party/PC is forced into, with consequences resulting from how well they handle it. Example:

The party advances in level and rolls 14 for complications. A climate-appropriate natural disaster strikes the community, forcing it and the party to devote considerable time to cleanup and repairs. This might strengthen bonds between survivors, or cleanup might uncover a hidden secret somewhere.

Characters could have their own personal complication tables, again dependent upon class, background, or anything else relevant to the campaign. Depressing!Example:

Outis the tiefling advances to 6th level and rolls the Not Welcome Here complication. Their growing fame and apparent acceptance within the community has drawn other tieflings to live in the area recently. Their more visible presence has riled up the local bigots, who only tolerated Outis as "one of the good ones" up to that point. Now an incident is about to occur, and needs intervention.

You could also put together some kind of cumulative group level complication table in the interest of maintaining pointless symmetry with the group upgrade table mentioned above- I know I'm certainly tempted to do that. But I'm unsure how high the stakes should be for something like that. Where does it top out? Plague? Invasion? A wizard tripping and spilling the entire contents of their forbidden tome collection out on the sidewalk? I'll leave you to decide that one.

I realize this still isn't an actual system, but I do hope that this offering of bigger- and crunchier-than-usual breadcrumbs might be useful in designing a community-oriented progression system of your own.

Musings on a Dragonlance X Talislanta Magic System Crossover Nobody Asked For

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.
• Modes: Alter (physical)
• 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.
• Modes: Alter (mental)
• 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).

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!

Kharakhan Sage (Archetype for Talislanta 4E)

 

KHARAKHAN SAGE

“Eat something, you’re all skin and bones. Almost short as a Marukan...”

Your people are dying out. Your clan knows it, and they know you know it, but you can’t bring yourself to say it. Trade with the Orgovians is drying up as you empty the ruins of their secrets. The ogriphant herds are thinning. And the Araq have grown more aggressive of late- if such a thing is even possible. You’ve sent some of your clan to work among the smaller peoples for food, but what they bring back still isn’t enough. Others haven’t come back at all. Their fates weigh on you almost as heavily as the children, hungry and weak as they are. You can’t take it anymore. So you won’t. You are Sage of this clan, and that means they look to your wisdom and guidance in hard times. You’ve begun plumbing the secrets of the Drakken runes yourself, ponderously thumbing through ancient knowledge in search of something, anything that can bring your people back from the brink. It suits you, trusting to forgotten magic. You worship a Forgotten God, after all. At least, that’s what the smaller peoples call Kron the Mighty. Forgotten even as you speak his name, dead yet still walking. A slow grinding down into nothing, like the desert wind on rock. Your people will not go the same way. Either you will wrest a life out of these wastes—true life, loud and joyous and bold—or the whole world will know your passing.

Appearance:

10'-15', 1,000-1,200+ lbs. Dusky gray-black skin, once-massive physique turning lean with age, wizened features, graying hair hastily and distractedly tied back.

Attributes:

STR +5, DEX -4, PER +5, CHA +0, CON +6, SPD -2, WIL +6, INT +0, CR +1, HP 40, MR +2

Skills:

Natural Magic: < 3 Modes of choice > +2, Battle Maul +2, Brawling +2, Healer +3, Herb Lore +2, Cook +1, Etiquette +2, Oratory +2, Artificer +3, Salvager +4, Pilot (war wagon) +4, Survival +3, Low Talislan, native dialect, Drakken glyphs, fluent

Special Abilities:

Skin serves as one point of armor; fist inflicts DR 6 + STR; uses giant-sized weapons or uses two-handed weapons of normal size in one hand; detect scent of Men at range of 50 feet.

Equipment:

Loincloth; sandals; cloak; armor of boiled land lizard hide; battle maul; giant-sized tools; pouch with herbs; sack of food; bone, stone, and tooth jewelry; ogriphant steed; giants based in the Wastes may have access to a war wagon; 30 gold lumens in ancient Kharakhan artifacts.

Half-Orc, Half-What?

My previous post converting half-orcs from AD&D to OD&D remound me of the weirdest piece of half-orc lore from the early editions: that there are many types of half-orcs, of which only a tiny fraction are ever seen, and even fewer made playable. According to the 1E Player's Handbook:

"Orcs are fecund and create many cross-breeds, most of the offspring of such being typically orcish. However, some one-tenth of orc-human mongrels are sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human. Complete details of orcs and cross-breeds will be found under the heading Orc in ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, MONSTER MANUAL.

As it is assumed that player characters which are of half-orc race are within the superior 10%, they have certain advantages." 

- PHB,  17

Turning to the Monster Manual as directed:

"As orcs will breed with anything, there are any number of unsavory mongrels with orcish blood, particularly orc-goblins, orc-hobgoblins, and orc-humans. Orcs cannot cross-breed with elves. Half-orcs tend to favor the orcish strain heavily, so such sorts are basically orcs although they can sometimes (10%) pass themselves off as true creatures of their other stock (goblins, hobgoblins, humans, etc.)." 

- MM, 76

Besides using the word mongrel to describe people, the bit of yikes that always stuck with me was the assumption that playable half-orcs belong to the "superior 10%" that was human enough to pass, and therefore acquire character class levels. The parallels to real life racism and the practice of passing are obvious, but at the same time I suspect this bit was most directly inspired by the nebulous and mysterious groups of half-orcs and goblin-men sneaking around Eriador before and during the War of the Ring in Lord of the Rings. Coincidentally, if you read those passages aloud back-to-back, you can actually hear Saruman the White's skull calipers clicking and clacking in the background as he brews up the perfect squint-eyed southerner to go spy on Bree.

This 10% assumption continued on into AD&D 2E with the Complete Book of Humanoids years later, which is extra weird because everybody and their flind-bar was getting buffs and class levels in that book, including full orcs. The tiers of hybridity only vanished in the Player's Option line where half-orcs were presented without pretext alongside half-elves and half-ogres, at the very end of AD&D's lifespan. But all of 30 people actually read those books farther than the wonky sub-ability scores, so I don't know how much of an impact they had.

I don't mean to imply these are the only half-orcish creatures anywhere in AD&D; only that they're the only playable ones. The ogrillons (orc/ogres), neo-orogs (orc/ogres again except created by Thayan wizards for Science™ this time), tanarukks (orc/demons), and boogins (orc/quaggoths) are all there in their various splatbooks doing their own NPC'y, usually but not exclusively villainous thing. Then there are the losels who are half-orc, half-baboon, and all about to be purged from my brain with a judicious application of bleach.

Anyway, I've decided to bring a few more horcs to the table, figuratively and literally. The traits below can be dropped into existing half-orc chasses, but they don't conform perfectly to any one edition; take them as inspiration for whatever Old or New School game you happen to find it useful for.

D20	Half-Orc, Half...
1	… Goblin. Lean, green, lanky, and janky. Hide as level-3 Thieves.
2	… Hobgoblin. Upright, stern, and imperious. +1 to Saves vs fear and Morale of Hirelings.
3	… Bugbear. Unnervingly quiet for their size, scruffy. Move Silently as level-3 Thieves.
4	… Ogre. Certifiably bigg with two 'g's. +1 to Strength for the purposes of Encumbrance, Open Doors, Bend Bars, etc.
5	… Troll. Only moderately warty. Recover twice as much HP through natural means (rest, a source of regeneration, etc.)
6	… Giant. Roll d6 for Hill, Stone, Fire, Frost, Storm, or Cloud. Throw and catch (25% chance) rocks as sling bullets.
7	… Gnoll. Shaggy and feliform. Keen sense of smell allows Tracking, base chance 50%.
8	… Kobold. Leathery, snaggly-toothed. Ugly-cute. Can compress into very small spaces.
9	… Koalinth. Sleek, scaly and fanged. Can hold breath for Con rounds.
10	… Cyclops. +2 to Reaction Rolls with religious orcs for being “Omens of Gruumsh”. Also surprisingly good at cheesemaking.
11	… Alaghi. Hirsute bordering on furry, may have little horns. Huge, meaty fists deal 1d6 damage.
12	… Minotaur. Definitely has little horns. 75% chance not to get lost underground or indoors.
13	… Satyr. Particularly bacchic. Goat legs give +25% movement when able to leap and bound.
14	… Grimlock. Bat ears and deeply recessed eyes. Sharp hearing gives -1 to Surprise.
15	… Norker. Rindy and toothy like a dried-out old walrus. Improve natural AC by 1.
16	… Gnome. Speak with Animals 1/day, but only with wolves, dire boars, and similar.
17	… Dwarf. Built like a green cylinder of bone, muscle, and attitude. +1 to Saves vs magic.
18	… Halfling. Sometimes mistaken for tusked goblins. +2 to Saves vs ingested poisons, and hungry enough to need it.
19	… Elf. A magical impossibility. Also, icky. Resistance and door detection as human/elves.
20	… Mongrelfolk. A visual and mechanical mishmash of 2 of the above, rerolling repeats.