GURPS: Church and State Magic
Discussion of Magic use and rules in Church and State.
Traditions
Magical understanding falls under 7 broad theories of how they work. Thaumatology skill must specialize in one of the traditions and this affects spell availability. Generally, all beginning spells in the colleges are open to all mages in all traditions. Advanced spells in a college are only available to a tradition that specializes in that college. The traditions came about slowly, and more advanced magic (including the colleges of meta-magic and gate) are fairly new in history. The first colleges of magic developed were animal, plant, and weather. Traditions bear a name of one of the icons associated with their founding, or the patron of their art. Protection and Warning (P&W) is a major college for all traditions. Traditions (with their main colleges) are:
Hearth and Field- (Enkul), named after one of the first heroes, a great hunter who slew the Tarrasque. Plant, Animal, Food Sky- (Usirius), named after a first hero who sailed around the Boden Sea. Weather, Air, Light and Darkness (L&D), Sound Earth- (Oldar), named after the great engineer and builder who during the Quani empire built many of the most important religious monuments. Earth, Making and Breaking (M&B) Discovery- Ampul, named after the Lord of Light. Fire, L&D, knowledge, mind control Life- Animal, Plant, Healing, communication and empathy Deception- Mind control, Illusion, Sound, L&D Body- Healing, Body Control, Movement
Styles and Schools
Alternate Rules
Using most of the rules from Chapter 2 of GURPS: Thaumatology (TH).
Characters can take Ritual Magery or Spell based Magery. The are different advantages. Either may learn symbol (rune) magic. In either case, Magery levels cost 10 each, except level 3 which costs 15 points and grants the use of Threshold Based magic (TH p. 76) in addition to fatigue based casting. At Magery 3, he begins with threshold 0 and recovery 2.
Magical Styles: Feel free to use GURPS: Thaumatology: Magical Styles to create styles for schools and teachers. I will add a couple. The biggest advantage is quicker access to perks. Normal mages only get to buy a perk for every 20 pts of spells. Stylists can buy one of their style's perks for every 10 pts in the style.
Staff Spell: Normally requires all living or once living material; can now be used with weapons made of mostly living or once living materials. Specifically this adds dueling polearms, spears, and other similar weapons that mass much more wood to metal. Most weapons under axe/mace do not qualify.
Ceremonial Magic: (I reserve the right to throw these rules out if too unbalancing.) Normally requires the leader to have a 15 skill. In C&S you only need a 15 effective skill level. Energy for skill can be used to buy the skill level needed, as well as conditional modifiers from Thaumotology. Participants input is also changed. 15+ skill (NOT effective) can add as much as they can channel, 12-15 can add up to 1/2 of what they could channel, and below 12 can do 3. Rules for energy input for those without magery is unchanged. Ceremonail magic uses the long distance range modifiers and not the normal -1 per hex.
Healing spells: Healing spells only heal HP damage cause by anatomical damage, much like an orthopedic surgeon, not HP damage caused by disease, poison, or other effects. Resist Poison/Disease now only give a bonus to HT roll equal to pts applied. Cure Disease and Neutralize Poison now have specialties which are broad categories; i.e. for poisons, can choose paralytics, insects, reptilian, plant based, respiratory, etc; disease could choose influenzas, staph, GI tract (cholera and dysentery), pox, etc.