A Sorcerous Obsession

 

Sometimes, I just can't get something out of my head.  Back in the good ol' days of the blog, it would end up as a blog series.  Lately, since I need to curate my material more, I hesitate to just brainstorm on the blog, but perhaps that's a bad approach.  After all, the point of this blog is to blather on in a way that gets my juices flowing, which helps me to think, and helps you to think about your own setting, and often starts a conversation. So while this post may or may not result in some changes to Psi-Wars, it will be useful for me to get some thoughts straightened out, and perhaps to inspire you as well, dear reader.  Consider this less of an "article" and more a musing.

So here it goes: The though I can't get out of my head is "Does Psi-Wars need magic?"

Why Would Psi-Wars Need Magic?

Psi-Wars has psychic powers and divine favor.  Does it really need yet another powers system? What would "magic" add that psychic powers and divine favor already don't?  If you want to curse someone, you use your powers, or you call on God.  If you want to wiggle your fingers and mutter incantations, you buy your curse ability with some additional limitations, right? Or you add a bunch of ritual trappings to your divine favor and it feels like magic. An additional system would clutter things up.

And yet, it lingers, in my mind.  Why?

I've noticed a few things.  The first was a discussion about the nature of psychic powers and their expense.  There was an argument in favor of using Psi-As-Magic.  The argument was that psychic powers cost so much that you can't really get much in the way of flexibility and I personally find this to be true.  A wizard might be able to light a candle, put someone to sleep, remove a curse, and bind someone from speaking a particular truth, while a psychic rarely works that way. Magic users are broad and flexible while psychics tend to be narrow and focused.

If I can expand upon this point, I notice that people tend to invest deeply in psychic powers, and they tend to start to revolve conceptually around a single point.  For example, if you play as a telepath, chances are, you're going to buy a single telepathy ability.  For example, you might take Telerecieve.  You will begin to dump more and more points int Telerecieve, as it can get quite expensive, and you may begin to invest in the skill and its techniques.  You can easily invest 50 points in telerecieve and associated tricks.  And if you do decide to expand beyond that, it's more likely that you'll invest in another related telepathy ability, such as Telesend, or maybe Mental Blow, rather than something completely off-theme, like Visions or TK-Squeeze.  This is partially because of the way psionic talents work, but it's also conceptual. Once you decide to play as a telepath, you begin to think of your character as a telepath. With a limited number of points, and the high cost in abilities, you're not going to transition over into, for example, TK-Grab, because not only does your talent not help, but you'd need to invest a good 25+ points into it before you really started to see decent results in that new arena, and it wouldn't necessarily synergize with your Telepathy.

Magic, by contrast, seems to be more conceptually eclectic. We have less difficulty imagining a sorcerer who learns to magically open locked doors and also how to understand the language of birds.  They're just two different spells.  We may tend to focus our wizards in particular directions: one wizard might be more focused on fire while another on necromancy, but we also expect these spells to have a low buy-in cost: if igniting a flame or sensing a corpse is only a couple of points, then it's easier to justify a brief excursion outside of your central premise, because you don't need to make a major investment.

A magic spell is also more of a self-contained concept.  Like we might imagine a spell that lets a character understand the speech of birds, or determine who somebody loves.  It tends to be discrete, highly specific and done with great intention: "I cast detect love interest" and then you detect someone's love interest. Psionic powers, by contrast, are part of who you are. If you are a telepath, you can presumably sense what people are thinking without even meaning to.  You can reach out to another with just a thought. You need no special incantations or unique conditions anymore than a swordsman needs special conditions to will his hand to draw his blade. It's a part of you, and this is part of why it has a more ingrained conceptual element, and a higher cost.

And this brings us to the second unique element I see: where psychic powers seem mostly based on innate potential, magic seems mostly based on knowledge.  To be sure, psychic powers involve skill and training, but the premise of psionics is that your character can read minds (or see the future or heal with a touch, etc), and they need to train this inherent talent, and then they can expand its power and flexibility. It is like a super-power. Magic, by contrast, is more about knowledge of the world.  We usually see wizards as somehow set apart, typically by the magery trait, but in principle, if one wizard can do something, another wizard can do it, all that separates them is knowledge. The specifics here vary: magic could be an inherent force in the world and those with magery are just more naturally attuned to it, or magery is sort of a single "power" that all mages share, but in the end, what differentiates one wizard from another is not what their potential talent is, as these are more-or-less the same for all wizards, but the strength of that talent and the number of secrets they have mastered and their understanding of the lore of the setting.

If a psychic is a super-hero, a wizard is a scholar (and someone who uses Divine Favor is a conduit and a pawn of vast powers they can never fully control).

And Psi-Wars definitely has this niche.  We have two traditions that are literally magic users: the Zathan sorcerers and the Chiva witches. Both are associated with the Umbral Rim, but when you start looking very close at things like the Asrathi Witchcat traditions, or people who use the Deep Engine, or archaeologists who go out looking for arcane secrets in lost ruins, and it starts to feel like there's a real niche for a character with a broad and eclectic blend of smaller, more subtle powers that are based more on knowledge of a tradition and secrets than of a discipline and body of techniques for a specific power.

What Would Psi-Wars Magic Look Like?

For the sake of argument, let us say that I have convinced you that Psi-Wars needs magic.  Okay, now what?  What would it look like?

First, some hard constraints. I don't want to use GURPS Magic; there's a reason I reference sorcery in the title.  Psi-Wars is heavily invested in advantage-based effects, and magic would threaten to short circuit that.  Also, the work in creating a bunch of advantage-based spells is made much easier by the fact that so many effects already exist in Psi-Wars.  Presumably, whatever rules this magic works by would somehow be related to the phenomenon of psionic powers and communion, as they're all extensions of the same sort of thing.  Ergo, the ability to heal people or curse them would look similar if it were a psychic power or a divine favor or a magic spell.  So, we'd use Sorcery, though perhaps a heavily modified version, or perhaps even entirely unique.

Second, I don't want a bunch of independent systems for each magical tradition.  Whatever this would be would fold the Deep Engine, Chiva witchcraft and whatever else I come up with, as much as possible, into a single set of rules.  If something doesn't fit into that set of rules (Perhaps Morathi Witchcraft is best treated as just a discipline focused on Probability Alteration), it should fit into one of the other existing rule sets of Psi-Wars.  Rather than proliferating systems, I'd want to use this approach to streamline things.

So, if we want to use a single system, what system should we use?

Sorcery is the obvious choice.  It's advantage based magic. So we just use that, make some new spells and we're done, right? Sorcery can even handle multiple traditions.  We have alternative rituals and we can set up spell lists unique to particular traditions.  Easy.  In fact, one of the things that really draws me to this is struggling with the idea that a lot of psychic powers feel like all of them should be alternate, but then you run into "but technically," like you might want to read someone's mind while also healing them, and this ties into the "innate trait" nature of psionic powers.  They're there and they're always a part of you, but the ability to will one particular minor ability at a time seems a very applicable approach to tackling this problem.

But just using Sorcery out of the box might not be the best fit.  For example, it lets you cast spells quite quickly, and the point of this would be to create a system whereby people are always chanting and waving their hands around. We might also look for other ways to differentiate it from psionic powers.  For example, I rather like the idea of spells taking awhile to prepare.  To my eye, what the occultist of Psi-Wars do looks more like Path/Book magic than straight up sorcery (or vanilla GURPS Magic). It's probably slow, patient and weak compared to psychic powers, but makes up for that weakness with broad flexibility.  

Fortunately, Sorcery is more than flexible enough to allow us to rework it.  The core premise is that you have some advantage that you pay full cost for, and everything else is an alternate to that one advantage. You can improvise with that core advantage, somehow, if need be.  And you have a standard modifier that represents the basis by which all spells work.  In the case of sorcery, the core advantage is a modular power, and the modifier is "It's magic and it always costs 1 fatigue." Our version could replace the modular ability with something else, if we wanted, and use the Psionic modifier rather than the Magic modifier, and we could change the rules on the fatigue-based spell casting (I lean towards requiring chanting and rituals by default, and perhaps some additional preparation, but I'd have to think about it).

Consequences

Okay, so say I've convinced you, we bring Sorcery into Psi-Wars and rejigger it a bit.  What changes in the setting?

The first thing I think you'll notice is that Psi-Wars already has Magic: it has the Deep Engine, which is an advantage-based, modular-ability based power system that requires deep mastery of various skills. It's ritual magic, just a weird and bespoke one.  We'd want to fold that into this system, and so the net effect is that we wouldn't actually be expanding the game into a new direction so much as standardizing the mechanical concepts behind the Deep Engine, and then generalizing them for a broader audience.

The second thing is people would shift away from psychic powers and towards sorcery.  But who? I don't think Maradonian nobles would shift.  Psionics makes sense for them.  And I don't think Akashic Oracles would shift: it makes sense for them to naturally have ESP.  I don't think most aliens would change either: the Mogwai, Keleni and Ranathim aren't magic, they're psychic.  This is their innate talent.

I think what you'd see, though, is a push for a new character type: the occultist.  We'd split off a template from the Psion and the Mystic, someone who specifically uses magic.  And that pulls a lot of pressure off the Mystic template.  Suddenly, we have three "mage" templates: those who have 100+ points in psychic powers (the Psionc), those with 100+ points in Communion (the Mystic) and those with 100+ points in magic.  The question I would have is "would they feel different" but to my eye the differences look obvious: psions deal with experiments and fight like super-heroes and have strict focuses, mystics meditate and spend time with god and call down massive, uncontrollable miracles, and occultists use a variety of subtle powers based on their knowledge of forbidden secrets.  So I don't think you'd lose your niches.  I think you'd more cleanly define one.

But is this really just a template for Deep Engine users? Can we conceive of other traditions? Well, Chiva magic makes sense.  These are your Dathomir Witch expies.  But if the Deep Engine types are manipulating the Deep Engine, what are Chiva witches manipulating? Small-scale psionic powers? Dark Communion? If they're manipulating Dark Communion, can we have a "necromatic" sorcery that manipulates Broken Communion? That actually makes more sense than manipulating Dark Communion, as we know Broken Communion will just randomly do things and there's no reason you couldn't just tap directly into that.  If they're manipulating subtle psionic tricks, such as everyone has the potential to unlock very small psychic powers through study, then why not have a Neo-Rational version of that? If Fringe Rationalists believe in detailed study of these strange energy fields and would create repeatable processes to ensure that they can manifest the same effect again and again, do you get "Weird, Secret Lab Techno-Magic?"  Is that something we want?

How would we define these? Well, for the most part, unique traditions would have unique rituals and unique "spell lists." Especially strange ones, like the Deep Engine, might have a different underlying skill and the core advantage might be slightly different.

And what about Zathan sorcerers? Would they have their own tradition? I would argue they wouldn't.  The point of Zathan sorcery is that it's a "magpie tradition." It steals from all the others, so it would blend the Deep Engine with Fringe Rationalism and Broken Communion Necromancy.  I'm not sure specifically what that would look like, but probably access to the spell lists of several traditions, and special tricks and advantages that allow for unique synergies.

Sorcery When?

I don't know if this is a good idea or not.  I always worry about adding more complexity, and I wrote this blog post to sort out my thoughts.  After writing it, though, my guts says there's a niche, and a lot of my struggle with the Mystic Template has been trying to jam the mechanics of psionic powers and communion into the niche of magic and sorcery.  Having a third powers system that's specifically aimed at this specific thematic niche would make the mystic template _much_ easier and make the occultist concept more satisfying to play.  But I'd need to tinker with it more to make sure it works the way I'd like it to, and I want to get a sense of how the community would feel.