Category Archives: Rules

Magic Monday: Double illumination

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Confanity

– Two for the price of one this week! Variations on the basic “light spell” theme. The second owes a pretty obvious debt to Gandalf’s staff in Lord of the Rings. Werelight The caster summons a small ball of light … Continue reading →

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Magic Monday: Finally, a spell!

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Confanity

Sight from Darkness Three hundred and nine number the words of Ekarmadedgon’s Whisper. Eleven of them, recited slowly, will bend the caster’s eyes: they will catch the light, not of this world, but of its Shadow, and see all things in … Continue reading →

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Magic Monday: Introduction to YAOSC

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Confanity

+What is YAOSC? YAOSC is Yet Another Old School Clone. The name is a joke; the important thing to know is that this is an adventure game of wilderness exploration, dungeon bashing, and perhaps a little social climbing in a … Continue reading →

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Magic Monday: Undoing, part 2ing

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Confanity

So last week we talked about counterspelling and dispelling rotes (normal “spells” in the D&D magic paradigm). This week we’re talking about the same for rituals and gnosis. Rituals This is magic-as-natural-philosophy. Like a chemical reaction or a Rube Goldberg … Continue reading →

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Magic Monday: Undoing

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Confanity

Unlike Necropraxis, I’m not building this system on a base of Vancian magic, in which (even without spell levels) each bit of magic is like a bullet that you load, fire, and are left without. So while the post linked … Continue reading →

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Magic Monday: governed by skills

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Confanity

One of the funkiest tasks in making a fantasy game has got to be the magic system. Rules for travel, combat, and any number of other mundane tasks can be modeled on real-world data, as in Justin Alexander’s famed breakdown … Continue reading →

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Magic Monday – opening thoughts

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Confanity

So my current “fantasy heartbreaker” is YAOSC. As a grad student with a baby, I don’t have time to do more than take it out and putter around with it a little every now and then. But recently* this post at … Continue reading →

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A sliding scale of stabbing

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Confanity

Tabletop RPG idea of the day: a system for resolving attacks in combat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything exactly like it. Background: One standard for making an attack is the attacker rolling dice to overcome a static defense … Continue reading →

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A How for Pow (RPG magic)

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Confanity

What would you give up for magical powers? Your health? Your physical strength or speed? Your sanity? Your ability to connect with the people around you? Here’s an idea for an alternate, relatively system-neutral rule for magic in RPGs. The … Continue reading →

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Fiddling with XP, part 3: Apologia and Addendum

Posted on July 15, 2014 by Confanity

Last time, I outlined a rough proposal for an alternate XP system for a class-and-level RPG. This included how the DM determines awards and how the players can work to adjust their individual awards, and then how those numbers might … Continue reading →

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