Review: GURPS Magic: the Least of Spells

As I perused Warehouse 23 one day, I noticed this little gem had popped up: GURPS Magic: the Least of Spells.  Without thinking, I ordered it (I perhaps should have waited until the Backerkit survey for the PDF challenge dropped and ordered it at an effective discount, but oh well, we can review it now).  I've read it, so let's review it.

TL;DR: Is it worth your time and money? No, probably not. I actually enjoyed it, but I can't see how most of you will get much out of it.

The Breakdown

So, the Least of Spells has three chapters:

• Thinking Small: which introduces the concepts of the Least of Spells
• Clever Tricks: the spell list
• Making the Most of the Least: character concerns and how existing skills and advantages interact with the Least of Spells.

"Thinking Small" introduces us to the idea of the Least of Spells: they're IQ/A spells that anyone, even non-mages, can use. It includes new Mana rules that govern the Least of Spells (effectively, they count as one degree of mana higher), and they follow all other normal rules. It discusses the possibility of introducing these as prerequisites (and mostly dismisses the idea), a topic I'll revisit in my conclusion.

In Making the Most of the Least, they talk about a few standard tricks from Thaumatology, like invoking a particular language, and add a new Expert Skill that gives you detailed knowledge of the Least Spells; it also states that Thaumatology also knows all this information, and is also IQ/H, so I don't know why you'd ever buy this Expert Skill unless forced to.

The Spells

The spells break down by collage, and have just a handful, around two to three per college.  Roughly speaking, each of them is about the usefulness of a single perk. I'd like to reproduce a few, so you get a sense of what they're like. My intention here isn't to give you the contents of the book, just some material we can talk about:

Aid (A)

Regular

Caster can attempt the tasks under First Aid (p. B424) at
no penalty for a lack of equipment. Doesn’t confer First Aid
skill (defaults to IQ-4). Typically used for bandaging – but
those who can maintain it for free (skill 15+) might treat
shock.

Duration: 1 minute. Must be maintained throughout the
entire treatment to provide any benefit.

Cost: 1. Same cost to maintain.

Invoke (A)

Special

Lets caster utter the name of a demon, dead person, or similar entity in a way that’s guaranteed to be heard in Hell, on  the Other Side, etc. Rarely summons anything straight away,  but repeated casting may ensure that Something includes the  caster in future plans (GM’s delight).

Arguably the most profoundly unwise trivial spell. Also a
Gate spell.

Duration: Instantaneous, but many entities have long
memories.

Cost: 1. Cannot be maintained

Twinkle (A)

Regular

Produces a really tiny light, like a star in the night sky – or at
most a firefly. Whatever penalty Vision rolls would be at with
only the Light spell, Twinkle is -2 worse. Stays still unless the
caster concentrates on moving it; then it can travel at Move 1.

Duration: 1 minute.

Cost: 1. Same cost to maintain

Most spells are 1 fatigue, and take one second to cast, but some are different, like Badger Paws which costs 2 fatigue to cast and maintain, and takes 2 seconds, rather than 1.

My Thoughts

The first question I have is "Who is this for?" It seems these spells are intended for "mere mortals," like a Good Wife who knows how to heal a bit, can sense the weather, knows what ales you, or a sailor who knows a charm that helps protect him against the weather, or a cultist who knows how to invoke the name of a demon: he can't control it, but he can at least notify it of his presence.

Does the Least of Spells support this? Sort of.  I mean, I can literally create those characters, and none of them are deeply invested in magic.  It's not like you meet that sailor and you think "Wow, a wizard of the sea!" No, just like any sailor from this setting, he knows a few charms that hold the elements back, lets him hold his breath longer, and lets him keep from being as seasick.  We can create characters that fit this niche, and expand the magic of our world to include the sort of "folk magic" that everyone just uses all the time.

But I can't help but feel that the Least of Spells falls prey to, and accentuates, a lot of the flaws of GURPS Magic while, at the same time, trying to address them. Yes, GURPS Magic should have had a layer like this since the beginning; yes, the normal person should be able to cast magic.  But does this solution really work, or is it stymied by the structure of Magic?

It discusses prerequisites in brief, because the reality is that if Magic was written today, these spells would be included as the bottom tier of spells: the first spells a sea wizard learns would be those anti-storm charms.  This creates a weird dissonance in the text, where you see spells like Twinkle or Ember that are clearly Light and Ignite Fire but, gosh, I guess having a light that provides candle-flame illumination and moves at Move 5 is too powerful for a non-wizard to use!  And why can't we get a "Weather Sense" spell? There are always "Good wives" complaining that they can sense a coming storm "in their bones," and Weather Sense is an Average skill that gives +2.  So why can't we get that as a Least Spell? Because we already have Predict Weather which expects you to have Magery and at least 4 Air spells.  Oops.  So we're already hampered by the existence of spells that should be the Least Spells, and so we need to dig deeper into a lower level layer and create even weaker spells than some of the weakest spells in GURPS Magic.  It's like if someone wanted to add a layer under Cantrips in D&D, you get spells like "Cleans your clothes, but only as well as a cheap brush and it takes an hour, and only works if you're not watching it!"

Second, how many points do people expect to invest in these?  One of my big complaints about GURPS Magic is that most spells aren't skills but glorified perks.  I believe that it something is a Skill it should behave like a Skill: people should strongly consider investing a lot of points into it, it should be broad enough that people would consider getting techniques, and so on.  In general, GURPS Magic tends to assume everyone spends only a single point in a skill: if you can spend 20 points in spells, you'll probably have 20 spells.  I say "Probably" because some spells are worth the investment and Thaumatology introduced rules for adding variation to spells via techniques, which means people might really create unique spells like homing fireballs or something.

But with the Least of Spells, I can't imagine someone investing heavily into them.  When you break them down, they're perks, and some (like Twinkle) are worse than perks, because a proper perk would have been a different spell (Light).  Actually, they're all worse than perks, because they grant you the equivalent of a perk, but they cost fatigue, take time to cast, require your hands to be free and for you to be able to speak and won't work if there's No Mana or someone is counterspelling you.  You are literally better off buying Accessory (First Aid Kit) [1] than Aid, as they're literally the same thing, on the latter costs fatigue and takes time to cast and might fail.  So why would you pay two points for it? You wouldn't.

But what if you needed to? A typical use-case for these spells is "some average person who wants a little bit of magic."  Say we have our hedge witch who studied at the feet of her Cunning Folk Grandma and knows Twinkle, Aid, Test and Find Ingredient. If she's IQ 11 ("A clever girl") that buys her Skill-10 in each, which means she'll fail 50% of the time. One of the core problems with this model is it assumes people don't have magery, and one of the functions of magery is to act as a talent.  If the same character had Magery 3 and spent 1 point in a Hard spell, she'd have Skill 12!  She'd have 13 in a Least spell but why would she invest in a least spell? Why buy Twinkle when you can buy Light?  You might say "Well, take the Hedge Wizard Talent," but gosh, if I'm going to dump 20 points into getting +4 with Least Spells, why not spend 15 points to get Magery 1 and have access to everything at +1?

Taken together, this means that characters who use this magic will suck at this magic, which means to be good, they need to either dump a bunch of points into their perk-level abilities (2-4 points), or invest in the sorts of traits that negate the need to use the Least of Spells.  There are some legitimate cases, like brilliant scholar with no Magery who is studying some occult things.  If you have IQ 15, one point will buy you skill 14, and that's pretty good.  And access to otherwise unreachable traits (such as the ability to Ping a God in a setting where no other means to do so exist for such a character) might be worth a considerable investment.  Or maybe someone's concept is a Hedge Witch who doesn't know real magic, because the player explicitly wants to play around with these little spells. But these are niche edge cases.

EDIT: Let me jump in the midst of my diatribe here to point out another use-case that might not be obvious from the idea of this as the domain of "Hedge Magic."  The point of "everyday" magic is that everyone can use this, so what this means in practice is that if you're running DF, suddenly your Knights and Swashbucklers can cast spells too.  A cat-folk knight can cast Twinkle in an area of total darkness, which means he can see at +0 (he has nightvision) but everyone else is at -2.  Or a swashbuckler might cast Anticipation before a duel.  We do still have the problem that none of these characters are optimized for this: a knight has IQ 10 at base, which means he needs to spend at least 2 points on Twinkle to get a 50/50 chance of success, so the utility of these spells remains very marginal at best, but that is anotehr use case.

Finally, what's with all the niggling little details? Why does Badger Hands take 2 turns to cast and cost 2 fatigue? Would it be over powered to let someone become a smidge better at digging for 1 fatigue and 1 second? If you had a standard applied across the vast majority of the spells, then people wouldn't need to look them up, but the book insists on having teeny tiny differences that are just enough that you'll feel the need to double check the book.  Why?

EDIT: I do want to note that in some places, the magic does give you pretty considerable benefits, like one spell that lets you learn something about a magic spell, which costs 10 fatigue. It's pretty powerful for a "Least" Spell, and thus deserves the high fatigue cost.  I just don't understand why this must be the case for Badger Hands, which is as low in utility as Oven Mitt, yet is twice as expensive and takes twice as long to cast.

So this book creates a need for a certain sort of character to make a bad CP investment, and for a certain sort of player to spend time (any time at all) looking up the detail to a spell that honestly doesn't matter a whit.

A lot of Kromm's work lately has felt like a growing pressure on GURPS itself, the sort of pressure I tend to associate with an impending release of a new edition, where the authors are becoming frustrated with certain aspects of the game and wish to pull free of them, but remain constrained.  GURPS Magic isn't a bad system, but it's stuck in a very Fantasy Trip paradigm, while GURPS is migrating towards a DF paradigm, one that would benefit from a superior treatment of the Least spells, as well as integration of many of the concepts found in Thaumatology.  If we had Trading Energy for Enhancements and Techniques built into Magic, if we treated these as Easy Spells and had integrated defaults, this would feel a lot better.  As it stands now, though, it feels like an odd patch that dangles off the edge of Magic, begging to be integrated into a more complete and modernized Magic System.

Conclusion

Despite me bad-mouthing it with that little rant, I don't think this is a bad book, and I'm not stomping my foot and demanding my money back.  I'll probably make use of it!  It has uses: it's great for fleshing out the capabilities of minor NPCs, and adds fodder to anyone looking for a new variation of the magic system.  It wouldn't be hard to implement some of the changes I suggest above.  The game won't break if we make them Easy, turn some of the more modest standard spells (like Ignite Flame or Light) into Least Spells, built these into prerequisites and allowed the to be Cast at Default.  It was worth my money (it wasn't very expensive) and time to read it.

But man, I'm really deep into setting design and mechanics and rule creation.  This is what I do.  I'm esoteric. You are probably less esoteric. You might be looking for some spells for your GURPS Horror or Fantasy game, or for your wizard. In 90% of all cases, I doubt this book has anything that would seriously interest you, and frankly, you could get the same effect by taking Perks, giving them a casting time of 1 second and a casting cost of 1 fatigue and making them IQ/A or /E rather than /H and calling it a day. 

This is a good concept and it's executed as well as can be expected given the constraints placed upon it. It's just that those constraints prevent this from being a useful product to 90% of the audience its intended for.  I'm glad this book exists, but I find it frustrating to contemplate overly much.  Like Power-Ups 9, it feels more like a reason to fix GURPS than a book to use with GURPS.

So unless you're really into low-scale and mundane magic and are looking for some inspiration, I'd give this one a miss.  It's trying to do a good thing, but I don't think you'll get much use from it, in most cases.

The Best of the Worst

I went over the spells again last night in more detail, and while most of them are the "this is nice flavor," a few jumped out at me as actually quite good, and that itself might be worth a discussion.

• Stinkguard: Okay, this is a classic "What's the utility for that?" spell that has a pretty niche effect... but it's an effect I noticed while working on the Gaunt for Psi-Wars, one I borrowed from the Undead Ooze of Dungeon Fantasy: the regions inhabited by masses of Synthetic Flesh would stink to high heaven, and I wrote the Saruthim to be largely resistant to the effects of the stench.  This means that Stinkguard would actually have a lot of utility in Psi-Wars, and because I borrowed this idea from DF, from certain DF encounters as well. It's a good example of how "situational" doesn't necessarily mean "near useless" depending on the context of your campaign!
• Blend In: This is essentially just forgettable face with a casting cost, but you can cast it on others or turn it on or off, which makes it a slightly more attractive option than just taking forgettable face.  Stand Out has a similar, but inverted, effect. I think I would add a penalty to the first for attracting attention and a bonus to the latter for the same.
• Ack: Short for "Acknowledge," a common IT term (at least, that's where I know it).  This is actually the sort of thing the Least of Spells is perfect for: if you send someone a telepathic message, it'd be nice if they could tell you that they got it, but most people don't have the magic to do that.  Ack allows them to.  It's a good trick.
• Emergency Staff: This is a good spell, no doubt, though it feels odd as a Least spell, as most non-wizards would have no use for it.  Still, the ability to grab any stick and use it to cast staff spells is nice.
• Magician's Minion and Sorceror's Stand-In: One of the really good use cases for the Least Magic are cultists, minions or minor assistants to a wizard who have no magic of their own, but want to help.  These are pefect for htat.
• Test: This is a pretty specific case, and you might be better off in the long term investing in Diagnosis, but that might not be an option depending on TL, and it stands in for modern diagnostic testing in a lot of ways, and in a setting where the game only focuses on a few diseases ("Tomb Rot,") this can be quite handy.  All of the Healing spells strike me as worth looking at, and fit very nicely on an NPC healing witch (with a dash of Esoteric Medicine), or for non-magical characters who want to help with magical healing in a pinch.
• Disbelieve: If you've got a game heavy on illusions, this is pretty nice.  Granted, it has a ton of limitations on it(it only works on Simple Illusions and Illusion Shells, and Phantasm in some cases), but if those pop up a lot (you fight the fae often), it might be useful for everyone to learn. A good concept for the "Least" as it's a spell an everyman would find useful.
• Shadowplay: This is another example of a spell with limited utility that has a pretty specific niche that most people wouldn't learn, but the people who would learn it might not be innately magical. In this case, Shadowplay might allow you to fool others into thinking someone stood behind them, or was running away, or just otherwise create a distraction. There are several voice-throwing or sound-throwing spells with similar utility.
• Thaumatomancy: 10 fatigue to get the answer to one question about existing magic. This is great, as most non-mages will have little recourse to learning the details of a curse or what the nature of a particularly well known (in scholarly circle) ring of power, etc. For one point, an IQ 12 character could have Skill 9 in Thaumatology, or they could have skill 11 in Thaumatomancy.  There's an interesting set of trade-offs between the two, and Thaumatomancy will probably end up as a good "stop gap" for a group lacking a wizard, but who need an info dump on particular magic in their game.
• Use Item: This is a must-have for non-wizards if you've got access to the Least Spells in your game and the game has a lot of magical items.
• Cushion: This has some interesting mechanics for helping you during a fall.
• Invoke: This is a must have for cultists.  Sure, the book tells you it's a dumb idea, but in a sufficiently rich setting with a wide variety of gods and spirits, it might not be so dumb, and it's often the only recourse for diabolists and shamans who lack Magery.
• Anticipate: This one is stupidly good. Any warrior could benefit from it, especially in settings where characters often fight other equally skilled opponents. It's the sort of spell that a layperson would want to learn, and it's good enough that investing more than one point is definitely worth it (though more than 4 is dubious)
• Storm Shelter: This isn't a huge bonus or benefit, and in a lot of cases won't matter, but it's a wonderful example of the sort of spell the average sailor would absolutely want to know. As much of the point of this spell list is to represent the sort of charms "realistic" magic would have.