I’m going to be honest, gang. This was a tough hill to climb.

Welcome to Part V of my quest to design a solo fantasy roleplaying game with a bit more crunch and structure than most solo RPGs (at least the ones I’ve played before). Today we’re talking about magic systems.

Now, I’ll be honest–I am not the biggest fan of the “hard magic system,” especially in fiction. (That’s a whole article by itself.) But from a game design standpoint, when done well, they can be fun, intuitive, and offer mechanical and structural support to a style of play that most fantasy RPGs consider integral to their full package.

So let’s do one.

In a game with a tactical combat system as a distinct game structure (this applies to most RPGs), magic isn’t separate from combat; rather, it’s one option among many within combat. It’s going to look and feel slightly different in this game, since I’m using scene-based resolution for combat–combat isn’t always resolved in a single roll (though it often will be), but you’re also not making many tactical decisions along the way once you’ve decided to fight.

Imagine an old CRPG blobber where you’re confronted with a monster and given the choices “Fight” “Magic” “Item” and “Flee.” Magic is fundamentally a different mechanical action than fighting.

(It’s worth asking what it might look like if instead spells were integrated into the existing combat system. Spells would have to either 1.) feed into existing values like your Level, Strength, etc.; 2.) give advantage or disadvantage on the check; or else 3.) open up other possible end states besides “someone wins the fight.” That last one is potentially interesting but almost certainly too niche to really matter, and would really stretch how rules-lite and procedural the game could be. The second one conflicts with the environmental interactions I’ve already decided on. The first is just boring.)

We know that player characters will have an Intelligence score, an Arcana skill, and 3d6, one of which must be differentiated from the others somehow. What can we make with that toolkit?

A big thing to ask is whether I want predetermined spell lists, or some kind of freeform system where you stack effects. Spell lists are easier to grok and much more concrete, while freeform systems, while potentially more interesting and allowing for more player creativity, often require a GM to adjudicate. So while I initially set out to create a more freeform system, I think for this game a spell list makes more sense, otherwise players will have to make out-of-character decisions about how spell effects work.

I want the spell list to be constrained, with spells having a variety of uses. Based on the Backgrounds and character archetypes discussed in the last chapter, I know we want two types of spellcasting: wizard/mage/arcane spells, and cleric/priest/divine spells.

(For the divine spells, I may have Charisma play into a PC’s effectiveness with them. I’ve always liked this because of the religious meaning of the word “charismatic,” plus it gives charisma a combat role.)

The crux of this game is going to be generating encounters and obstacles, and using the tools on your character sheet to overcome them. So spells need to have clear utility in terms of what they allow a PC to do. This seems obvious, but beneath the surface what it means is that the spell lists need to be designed in such a way that they remove obstacles that the player is likely to encounter.

Take the example of a “light” or “floating torch” spell. This spell only makes sense if darkness is going to be an obstacle in this game. So, is it? And if so, does it require a subsystem, or can it be modeled through what already exists?

I do want darkness to be an obstacle. I included torches in the adventuring gear list, and while I could always go take them out, I think it’s an important staple of the genre to have to delve into the dungeon with a torch in one hand and a sword in the other. We’ll have a system for deciding whether an area is lit or not later; for now we’ll say that when taking any actions requiring sight while in darkness, you have disadvantage. Light-type spells eliminate that problem, and so have clear utility…

…unless you also happen to have packed a torch or two.

So assuming that spells are limited in some way, why would I waste a spell resource (mana, spell slot, whatever) on a Floating Torch when I can just use a real, physical torch? It removes the need to actually carry a torch, but is a gear slot really more valuable than a spell slot?

You could mechanically differentiate them by saying that holding a torch takes the place of a weapon, or shield, or something. While that makes sense as a constraint if you wield two-handed weapons like bows or great-axes, I don’t think it’s going to come into play otherwise; I don’t want to have to micromanage too many items when playing this game. So while the Floating Torch spell allows you to have light while wielding a bow or claymore or something, this will only be relevant to relatively niche builds like spellswords using two-handed weapons.

To make this work, we’ll have to give a greater risk to using a physical torch. For example, they can burn out in the middle of a dungeon, leaving you blind; on the other hand, a torch spell is guaranteed to stay with you until you go back out into the light. This pushes things back in the spell’s favor.

Another way to balance these things against each other is to impose a cost on the clearly better option. Casting spells will have to take something out of you, such as Spell Points or mana or something like that. Furthermore, we’ll have some kind of cost to learning spells–probably monetary, but we’ll put a pin in that for now. Thus, a Floating Torch spell is mechanically superior to a physical torch, but that’s okay because it’s a reward for investing into that playstyle (spending money or character creation resources, etc).

When designing spell lists, there were a few other considerations I needed to factor in. 1.) There should be spells that are applicable to all of my major game structures (dungeoncrawling, wilderness exploration, social interaction). 2.) The spells should thematically and mechanically support and open up specific character concepts for roleplaying. 3.) The spells need to play nicely with other systems and not require a whole bunch of additional rules or mechanics to make work.

With that in mind, and some heavy inspiration from old CRPG blobbers like The Bard’s Tale and Wizardry, here’s my initial spell list, with design notes in (italics and parentheses). There are 3 tiers for each spell list.

Arcane Spells

Tier 1

• Magic Missile — Deal damage, break wooden objects. (Precisely how spells deal damage will be worked out later. Allowing this spell to break objects gives it a clear utility in dungeoncrawling.)
• Marika’s Floating Torch — A floating torch illuminates your way until you take a rest/go outside. (Discussed above. Marika is the name of a sorcerer in the lore of my fantasy universe; for generic systems this can just be called Floating Torch.)
• Feather Fall — Can float gently to the ground from nearly any height without damage. (This is purely for dungeoncrawling purposes; I’m imagining a player falling victim to a pit trap being able to use this spell to negate the damage, but not to climb back out.)
• Dispel Magic — Sense and break magical effects and enchantments on non-living objects. (Combined with a sense magic effect to keep the list brief. I had to specify non-living targets, otherwise this could be used to clear status effects, which I don’t want as this is a non-combat spell.)
• Ignite — Start a small fire. (Generally a non-combat spell used to light bonfires, braziers, torches, and similar.)
• Hush — Makes you move silently, granting advantage on Thievery/stealth-related checks.
• Dazzle — An enemy has disadvantage against you in its next combat round. (This is helping me envision how spells will interact with the combat system.)
• Charm — You magically manipulate another’s mind to make them more disposed towards you. Grants advantage on a social check against a sentient target. You roll against their INT; if you fail, they sense the attempt and become Hostile. (I needed some kind of T1 spell that affects social interaction, and I like the idea of a befuddling wizard invading a foe’s mind without taking direct control.)

I’ll post the rest of the spell lists in a moment, but I want to note a few things. Only one of these T1 spells is directly combat-related, and that’s intentional. This is not a party-based game, so a wizard’s role as the “glass cannon” isn’t mechanically desirable here (there’s no tank to protect them). If you want to play a spellcaster, you’re going to need to also know how to defend yourself the old-fashioned way, or (because I don’t want to forbid the character archetype of a squishy wizard) be very good at avoiding combat and other physically dangerous situations. So the T1 spell list is devised around that.

Tier 2

• Fireball — Fire damage
• Lightning Bolt — Lightning damage
• Icicle — Frost damage
• Poison Spray — Poison damage
• Hypnotic Ray — Roll 1d6 + Int vs a target’s 1d6 + Int. If yours is higher, they fall asleep.
• Breeze — You have advantage fighting targets using ranged weapons, and are freed from paralysis. (Each of these effects is too marginal to be its own spell, in my opinion, but combining them makes it a spell I’d at least consider learning.)
• Magic Weapon — You enchant a physical weapon so that it becomes a spellcasting focus until your next rest. (I had this idea because I want characters to have to use a wand, staff, grimoire, or something of the sort to actually cast spells. This allows spellsword-like characters, at a cost, while encouraging more “standard” spellcasting characters.)
• Haste — You have First Strike in your next combat round. (Cribbing a little from Magic: the Gathering; I realized that since combat resolution is simultaneous, the First Strike ability helps me enormously in things like haste effects and ranged weapons, so I threw it in here. This will be another boon to spellsword-type characters.)
• Silence — A creature you target cannot speak or cast spells. (An RPG classic.)

One thing to notice here is that the damage-dealing spells in this tier are going to be mechanically identical except for the element they do. I want elemental weaknesses, which are a staple in fantasy games like this, to be simple and very impactful. You’ll need to learn all of them to cover every possible enemy type you’ll encounter, which will be a large monetary/skill investment.

Tier 3

• Prismatic Ray — Deals damage of whatever element is most advantageous. (Negates the need to learn all of the elemental spells, so in order to be balanced Tier 3 spells will have to impose a much heavier cost to learn or cast.)
• Teleport — Teleport to a place you have been to before. (Escape dungeons, return from the wilderness, etc.)
• Levitate — Fly or float to a location you can see. (Upgraded version of Feather Fall. Possible combat applications–does it give you advantage against opponents without ranged weapons?)
• Dominate — Roll 1d6 + Int vs a target’s 1d6 + Int. If you succeed, you dominate their mind and can command them to do something for you. If you fail, they turn Hostile. (Upgraded, and much more sinister, version of Charm. Probably only good for evil or morally dark-gray characters, but hey, I want to support that.)
• Magic Mirror — Copy any spell or magical effect that you can see.
• Mage Armor — For an entire combat encounter, your AC is as if you were wearing Heavy Armor.

That’s the whole Arcane spell list, as of now. (I might tweak it later or add to it if I have any good ideas.)

Before getting to the cleric/priest/divine list, I’ll sketch out how I’m imagining magic working. I’m going to use a simple Spell Point system; a spell costs its Tier in Spell Points and Spell Points are replenished when you rest. (I don’t think I’ll do the 5e thing of separating long rests and short rests, but we’ll see.)

The simplest way to increase spell points is by having them be equal to your Level. The problem is that is somewhat dissociated, since non-casters will have a Spell Point rating, and a character who decides to start spellcasting at 6th Level will automatically have 6 Spell Points when they should realistically be a novice.

This minor dissociation isn’t the worst thing in the world, but I’m going to see if I can design around it with a similar level of simplicity. I have two possible ideas.

Idea 1

An alternative would be to have something like a “spellcaster level” that works like the combat level but only for spells. It’s a slight amount of crunch/mental load, but I could live with it. The real problem is then we’d need some kind of mechanism for how to raise your spellcaster level.

Since learning spells is completely diegetic in this game (you learn spells by paying to studying at an arcane library or something similar) I think we can get away with having your spellcaster level also rise that way. We can also tie it to your combat level so players can’t luck themselves into a spellcaster level of 10 when they’re way down at 1st level.

So here’s what I’m thinking: characters have a Combat Level, and a Spellcasting Level. Combat Level rises through gaining XP from winning battles and works as described in the combat system article. Spellcasting Level determines your Spell Points (and possibly some other things). If your character begins knowing spells, then you have an initial Spellcasting Level of 1. If your character doesn’t know any spells, your Spellcasting Level is 0. To become a spellcaster, you need to purchase some kind of apprenticeship–you’re basically paying to become trained in spellcasting. After that, you pay again for training to increase your Spellcasting Level by 1 level at a time. These payments should be pretty hefty so that players can’t just breeze through them and will actually have to explore dungeons and use their spells to gain enough money to pay for the training.

This system reminds me of the level-up system in the old Ultima and Might & Magic games, which are big inspirations. In those games you’d pay trainers to level up; this is just that, but applied only to magic. I may later add extremely rare ways to increase your spellcasting level without this training, to simulate completely self-trained mages, but these methods would have to be extremely difficult in some other way and basically rewards for taking certain actions. I like this as the base system.

Idea 2

This one is far simpler. In this system, your spellcasting points would be equal to your INT + your Arcana skill.

This does give us the problem again that a non-spellcaster character technically has spell points, but I think we can handwave that fairly unobtrusively by understanding that that’s the amount of spell points that character would have if they were a spellcaster. Spell points are a heavily abstracted mechanic anyways; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with just saying that the smarter and better-studied you are at magic, the more spells you can cast before “burning out” mentally or whatever.

I’m going to test both of these systems out and decide which one is final later.

Anyways…

As for how casting actually works in combat, what I’m thinking is that when combat begins each character can cast 1 spell. (Monsters who cast spells will have it noted on their stat block.) If combat continues past round 1, you can cast a different spell. This will probably make spellcasters very powerful, which is as it should be, but I’ll also add some kind of surprise mechanic that negates your ability to cast a spell every single time (this’ll be fleshed out when we get to the Advanced Combat section).

With all that out of the way, here’s a cleric/priest/divine spell list.

Divine Spells

Tier 1

• Iron Fists — You fight unarmed as if wielding a weapon. (I’ll have to flesh this out in the Advanced Combat section, but the intent is to allow for “monk” type characters who fight unarmed.)
• Bless — You gain +1 to your next 1d6 dice rolls. (I like +1 instead of advantage for a spell like this because it’s a very minor benefit. Having it apply to a random number of rolls also simulates the fickle and inscrutable nature of the gods granting the blessing.)
• Turn Undead — Roll 1d6 + Chr vs an undead’s 1d6 + Chr. If you succeed, the undead is Turned and flees from you. (A genre classic.)
• Glare — Blinding white light illuminates darkness and blinds foes, causing disadvantage. (Can be used like a torch or in combat, making it better than the Floating Torch spell in some circumstances. I’m thinking of Gandalf blasting the witch king with light to shield Faramir’s riders returning from Osgiliath.)
• Bind — Roll 1d6 + Chr vs an undead or infernal creature’s 1d6 + Chr. If you succeed, the target cannot move while in your sight.
• Guidance — Divine power shows you the way. You have advantage on any navigation check in the wilderness. (This shares a name with an absolutely busted D&D spell, but functions differently. Here it’s focused on wilderness exploration–I want to make navigating the wilds a part of gameplay with potential for getting lost, discovering new things, etc. I’m also thinking of Inigo Montoya praying for guidance to find the Man in Black in The Princess Bride.)
• Waterstride — You can walk over a body of water without sinking. (That’s right–Jesus Christ himself was only a 1st-level spellcaster in this game.)
• Liberate — Remove paralysis, petrification, binding, etc. from a creature, including yourself. (I’ll have a final list of status effects later; the point is that these are all the ones that freeze or trap or paralyze a creature. I’m imagining that it can also be used in non-combat encounters; for example, you come across a person who’s been turned to stone and can use this to rescue them.)
• Bless Water — Turn a small amount of water (up to 1 bottle) into Holy Water. (Holy water can be used as a weapon, tool, or object interaction against undead and infernal creatures.)

Tier 2

• Cure Light Wounds — Remove half of a creature’s current damage, including your own. (This made me realize I want to have damage add up, rather than subtract HP. Works better with the system where HP=level.)
• Pacify — Roll 1d6 + Chr against a hostile target’s 1d6 + Chr. If you succeed, they are no longer hostile. (I have some ideas about a disposition system to determine NPC and monster attitude towards the player, but that’ll come later.)
• Protection from Elements — Choose an element (fire, frost, thunder, or poison). The next time you take damage of that element, on a roll of 4-6 it is negated, 1-3 it is halved. (I like that one spell lets you choose what element to use, but that there’s a 50% chance it’ll only be partially-effective.)
• Divine Charisma — You have advantage on your next Chr roll. (I was going to limit this to social rolls, but I think letting it work in combat is okay too. After all, you’d have to cast it first, then survive a round of combat to cast your spell with advantage.)
• Celestial Ray — An attack dealing holy damage to undead and infernal creatures. All other creatures take half damage. (Finally we have a damage-dealing priest spell, though if you want to deal full damage to non-undead, non-infernal foes, you’ll have to wait till Tier 3.)
• Cure Disease — Cure a target of any normal disease. (We’ll have to define what ‘normal’ means later.)
• Negate Skullduggery — Instantly neutralize a trap.
• Holy Weapon — A weapon becomes holy until your next rest, dealing double damage to undead and infernal creatures.

Tier 3

• Holy — Cleansing radiance strikes all targets, dealing double damage to undead/infernal creatures and regular to all others. (This is a direct ripoff of my favorite Final Fantasy spell. It’s a much better version of Celestial Ray.)
• Cure Major Wounds — Remove all of a creature’s current damage, including your own.
• Smite — The next time you deal damage, you deal that same amount again in holy damage. (So undead/infernal creatures actually take triple damage, because they take regular damage, then Holy damage, which is always doubled against them. I’m having a hard time imagining this spell not one-shotting any undead or infernal creature.)
• Divine Protection — The next time you take damage, on a roll of 4-6 it is negated, 1-3 it is halved. (A better version of Protection from Elements.)
• Landstride — You travel over land at great speed, avoiding encounters if you wish and arriving rapidly at your destination. (For wilderness exploration.)
• Babble — Speak any language fluently for the length of one conversation. (For social encounters. I also like the pun on “Babel.”)

…whew. That’s a bit larger of a spell list than I initially wanted, but I think for now it covers everything I’d like to do with this system at its baseline level.

What I like about it, and the way this game is shaping up, is that it’s modular. I can release the base game (everything that’s part of these articles) for free and then later create “spell packs” or “monster packs” or thematic packs to slot into it. One thing that’s somewhat missing is a list of spells for playing a witch-type character–y;know, brewing potions, inflicting curses, getting your foe’s little dog, too. You can kind of approach this by mixing spells from both lists, but it isn’t dedicated. I think that’s fine for now; the point of a freeform, classless system is to see how you can use what’s here to create certain character archetypes.

The last thing for now is to determine how damage is dealt, and how to actually learn spells. We’ve already touched on the last part (you’ll need to pay someone to train you), but it’s not going to be automatic–your Int and Arcana have to matter. So we’ll say that in addition to paying, you’ll have to pass an Arcana (Int) check to learn new spells. T1 spells will be DC10 (Professional), T2 will be DC13 (Challenging), and T3 will be DC16 (Master). Because paying lots of gold only to fail this check will suck, we’ll say that if you fail, then you lower the DC to learn that spell by one step (Master to Challenging; Challenging to Professional, Professional to Average) for the next time. Sounds fair to me.

The most straightforward way to do damage would be to tie it to your spellcaster level as we do with regular combat damage, but I don’t honestly like that very much–it makes elemental advantages pretty meaningless unless for some reason you’re fighting a monster much stronger than you. I think for this one all spells will deal 1d6 damage–the point of different spells is that they use different elements, so you’ll really need to be taking advantage of a monster’s weaknesses to get the most bang for your buck. (It also harkens back to OD&D, where all weapons dealt exactly 1d6 points of damage.)

So very weak monsters will basically always die to damage-dealing spells. This works for me because there aren’t actually that many damage-dealing spells–most spells are designed to give you some kind of advantage in combat (or other interactions).

Now: can damage-dealing spells miss? This bears on action order. Non-damage-dealing spells have to be applied before the actual combat roll, or else they’re pointless. But if we do that for damage, then damage-dealing spells are going to be auto-win buttons for many combat encounters if they can’t miss.

On the other hand, if they can miss (or fail, or whatever), then there has to be a mechanic for determining that, probably some kind of magical skill check or spellcasting check. While I love spellcasting rolls in Shadowdark, they don’t play nice with the spell point system I’m using here. They’d also really bloat what’s supposed to be extremely fast and simple combat.

So I don’t think spells should be able to fail or miss (unless countered, or something like that). If damage-dealing spells are always successful, should they be applied before, or during, a combat round?

I’ll have to test to be certain, but right now I’m leaning towards applying them before. I already decided there will be some kind of surprise mechanic so that you won’t always be able to get a spell off before combat begins, and I don’t think Spell Points will be able to bloat too far into the double-digits. If we do my 2nd system (where they’re equal to INT + Arcana) then they’ll cap at 12, which seems reasonable. So a total of 4 Tier-3 spells before having to rest…doesn’t exactly let you mow through entire armies without taking a scratch. (As long as we can avoid the 15-minute adventuring day.)

What about damage reduction/mitigation/soak/etc? Armor increases Armor Class in regular combat, but that doesn’t play into spells. Should it help against spells at all?

The main reason I’m thinking about this is that it doesn’t feel super great to be able to one-shot anything up to Level 6 with a Tier-1 spell (Magic Missile). On the other hand, damage being calculated by 1d6 kind of simulates the idea that some damage is avoided/mitigated (and you won’t be dealing 6 damage /that/ often). It’s dissociated because it’s not related to anything in-universe, but the effect feels right.

Plus, adding a bunch of fiddly rules to armor/magic interactions would probably be annoying in practice.

I think this will have to be handled on a case-by-case basis with certain armors only when it’s intuitive. Leather armor should probably reduce fire/lightning/frost damage (giving it a clear utility to offset its lower AC bonus), because that makes sense. It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to grok that.

Similarly, I think any metal armor should protect against Magic Missile. This is slightly harder because Magic Missile doesn’t really correspond to anything in the real world (we all know leather insulates against electricity), but it’s basically an impact from a magical ball of force.

In terms of balance, it also stops you from rolling a character with 11 Spell Points at 1st-level, learning Magic Missile, and blasting your way through low-level dungeons.

So yeah, at low levels, if you know Magic Missile, you can slay those Level 1 Dire Rats without them getting a claw or bite off. But if you come up against a bandit in chainmail, or a goblin in scale, you’ll need a higher-level spell.

The only bloat this adds to the system is that some enemy stat blocks will need to have an armor tag– “Leather” if they have leather armor, and “Metal” for metal. That’s it, just a one-word tag–the actual stats of the armor are still just factored into the AC, so you don’t need to know stats or anything like that. (Obviously, these effects apply to the player too.)

Okay, that’s the skeleton of our magic system. To summarize:

• We have two spell lists of three tiers each: wizard/arcane, and priest/divine.
• Characters have spell points that recover on rest. Spells cost their tier in spell points to cast. Spell points are based on a “spellcaster level” or the sum of INT+Arcana (testing will determine which feels better).
• Damage-dealing spells all deal 1d6 damage, but elemental advantages come into play to make some better/worse in different situations.
• Armor can reduce spell damage by half depending on armor material/element.
• You can cast spells outside of combat at any time. In combat, you can cast once per combat round.
• Effects from spells (including damage) are applied before the combat roll is resolved.
• You have to buy training to learn new spells, and pass a skill check with a DC determined by the spell’s tier. If you fail, then you have to pay to try again, but at a lower DC. (There will likely be other ways to learn spells as well, but this is the primary way.)

With this section finally, at long last, out of the way, we can move onto the next part–what do we actually do with all this stuff? How do we take these mechanics and make adventures out of them?

Back to Part I