Thursday, October 11, 2012

Magic: RPG, Ravnica: City of Guilds - 01


 I just love Ravnica. I want to gush about Ravnica. It's been the focus of many game design ideas between me and my friends. An RPG setting set in Ravnica would be amazing and I don't see anyone else making it, I want to make it to play in it myself. It's a big order to fill. Ravnica is an extremely fleshed out world and has a lot of lore and powers to balance. Ten guilds and the unguilded, five colors, numerous ranks in each guild and the interactions between guilds. Writing about Ravnica and designing for Ravnica gets my muse tingling and my fingers itching to work.

So I'm going to just write out loud a bit, some thoughts about Ravnica and a look at the system I've been working on. There are five colors in Magic: White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. Each have proficiency in three of the five major schools of powers. Physical, Mental, Spiritual, Temporal, and Energy. With these, there are five ways to manipulate them: Negate, Sense, Conjure, Alter, and Forge. Each color will use the schools in different ways. If you've ever played Legend of the Five Rings RPG, I'd be hoping to make it similar to that but with more limitations. In L5R, there are no restricted abilities or skills, but they are at a discount or penalty depending on which clan you're from. Crab clan have a history of fighting the Shadowlands so abilities related to that are cheaper. Scorpion are adept at deception so skills relating to those talents are cheaper for them.

In the Ravnica RPG, I wanted the there to be an abundance of magic and to have it be used in a variety of ways. The world is full of magic but not everyone is a wizard. Mana can be tapped by lots of people (and creatures) to help them in different ways. A common soldier may be very emotionally driven and passionate about their duty and access red mana or a studious lawmaker can focus his efforts and be imbued with blue mana. In the system, I wanted each character to have the choice of having access to magic or not. Either way, everyone has attributes (for ability scores like D&D) and mana pools (similar to rings in L5R). Casters are unique in that they focus their effort on manipulating their mana pools or using their mana more efficiently.

White is adept at Spiritual, Temporal, and Energy schools. They are adept at manipulating their magics with Negate, Sense, and Conjure. To throw out some random numbers, it might cost 3 mana to cast a warding spell. If it's of spiritual origin (let's say Divine Ward), it might cost 2. It's also a conjuration spell so it might give a boost of +3 defense instead of +2 defense. Also, the same school/focus may have drastically different spells. In addition, different colors that cast spells from the same school might do it in a different way.



These are the schools and a rough outline of what kind of things these schools affect. Within these schools, each color may only access one or two of them and have unique ones for their color (for instance, counter magic is almost exclusively blue and direct damage is almost exclusively red). Remember, this is a rough fleshing out and everything is subject to change. After each specific aspect of a school will be a few examples of how it works with different colors/manipulations. Here I will try to tie the schools to known magic as much as possible. In future installments, I'll try to link it to more RP related spells and abilities, and go into more depths as to how I'd like the magic system to work. So this will be a somewhat limited because much of MTG doesn't translate to RPG that well. Also I tried to keep examples in Mono-color to really flesh things out without having the issue of multicolor spells mucking it up as to what colors are meant to do.
  • Physical - The walls of homes and people inside are objects you can interact with. You can reinforce the structure or add additional walls as well as create a pit or harden your skin. 
    • Living - You can affect living creatures in some way. Affecting living things are harder than affecting the dead or objects as they have mana coursing through them. This can be used to conjure a homonculus which is living, but without the addition of Spiritual magic to imbue it with life force, it will be without a life force. You can also create walls and elements necessary for chemical reactions (such as gunpowder or water). You can't summon fire or lightning, or things like that. Those are in the school of Energy/Elemental.
    • Dead  - Affecting the dead is easier than the living but residual lifeforce still can make it challenging. Black will often substitute some 
    • Object - Bookshelves, walls, armor, scrolls. Objects are the easiest to affect of the physical school.
  • Mental - Of things affecting the mind. Black will pry information, blue will probe and expand their own mental abilities, and red will instill fury and empathy.
    • Skill - Grant or remove skills from the target. Enhance their combat capabilities or diminish their memories of such activities. This is mainly for muscle memory rather than physical prowess. So you can be more efficient at combat or improve your posture for running but it won't give you the stamina you need to maintain or strength to act. Most notably, it can grant/remove skills/key words but not enhance power/toughness that much (it can maximize your capabilities but not improve upon what you can naturally attain).
    • Emotion - The driving force behind many of Ravnica's residents. Manipulation of emotions can lead to terror, lust, and rage. It can be used to help yourself or harm others.
      • Conjure/Red - Incite Hysteria
      • Sense/White - Zone of Truth (D&D spell, think of a lie detector. But magical)
      • Conjure/Black - Smogsteed Rider (Grants fear)
    • Knowledge - Manipulation of the Knowledge domain will allow players to delve deep into their minds to find old knowledge as well as in other people. It can conjure fake memories and steal the thoughts of their enemies, as well as put someone into a mental prison if one should desire. (Thoughts of changing the name of this school to something else. Any ideas?)
  • Spiritual - This school deals with energies that tie directly with mana itself. Through faith one can tap into these powers for their own ends. Empathy between two energies can be a result of empathy. Life force itself which exists as a form of mana can be twisted and improved if one should choose.
    • Faith - To go against logic and putting your trust into an often unseen force. Angels, demons, Gaea, whatever it is that drives you can bless you and help you (or harm others). 
    • Empathy - This allows you to. in one way or another, touch someone's feelings. This is different from Mental/Emotion in that it's about feeling something that the subjet feels. For those raising animals, tending a garden, consoling victims to a crime, you'd want to use Empathy to understand them (or vice versa) rather than to control/change how they feel. 
    • Life Force - 
  • Temporal - This school manipulates the movement of objects.With an offensive use you can bind a target in a time void or counter spells by inhibiting parts of it so the whole thing doesn't come together. Temporal magic is the 
    • Time - Time magic allows you to counter spells, grant haste, bind enemies, and delay spells. In D&D, you are able to delay a fireball and adding Time magic would result in this effect. This is also the school you would tap into if you wish for things to be uncounterable.
    • Taxing - Taxing can be used to interfere with spellcasting or actions. The best way to think about it is that Taxing magic adds a mana cost or stamina cost to perform actions. Spells that are suspended are put on a 'temporal' tax and can be altered with taxing magic.
    • Transport - The magic of creating and blocking portals. This allows players to move themselves or others as well as summon
  • Energy - 
    • Elemental - Fireballs, rock slides, water elementals, walls of ice. Manipulation of the elements. Don't really feel examples are necessary. 
    • Enchantment - This is used to make spells permanent ala Enchantments from the game.
Some of you might notice that there are multiple ways to recreate the same spell. Blinding the enemy and hiding yourself can yield the same results just as a strength drain of 2 points is as good s a strength boost of 4 points sometimes. That's one of the great but terribly difficult part of the game to balance and try to keep interesting. I'm sure being able to cast -everything- is a fun prospect but from a gameplay point, it's not good if everyone can do everything. 

I want some spells to be easier to cast depending on what schools and manipulations you have. Sure, there's Lightning Helix at WR, but Essence Drain i also the same effect. Thus, specific schools/colors will be easier and have known spells which will grant you them at a discount or improved effect.

Another thing to consider is that there are a lot of effects that would be useful in an RPG setting that is not used in Magic: The Gathering. Conjuring food, consoling a grieving widow, creating a bond between players/NPCs and invisibility are all much more versatile in a RPG setting. Several spells would be increased/decreased in cost accordingly. Stone Rain is much more powerful and needs to be nerfed (plus the setting would have natural resistance such as anti-magic wards or protection wards), as well as other extremely destructive spells are weakened or omitted (brushfire, acid rain, anarchy, all cards that are too powerful).

Sense and Forge are not given a good showcase here as they are less combat oriented schools. Sense allows you to search or hide yourself or spells you cast. For instance, if you summon a fireball, there will be residual magic showing the spell was conjured from the blind eternities and your personal essense shall also be imprinted. With a high forge, you can make it appear to be someone else who cast the spell or hide what spell was summoned. With a sense, you can hide your mark or the spell's mark or make it more apparent (perhaps altering someone else's spell to be very detectable). In addition, sense magic can be used to find stealth or detect forgeries, read minds or emotions, detect temporal displacements. Forge can be used to make copies of a mage's personal mark, copy documents, take on the disguise of another person, or object.



  • Fixed Spells - There will be many spells that are -much- easier to cast, as being a powerful caster is really difficult. Creating your own spells reliably is a skill itself and most players don't have the time or experience to dedicate to a cause (most are hypergenius status or book worms stuck in a library). So with some random numbers, trying to cast a Lightning Helix might cost 7 mana, but if are adept at Red/White magic in the schools of Energy and Conjuration, you might have it cost only 4. And if you are part of Boros Legion, you can study their very fine tuned version and have it reduced even further.
  • Names and Powers - Many spells will have new names because how they are represented in the card game does not translate well to an RPG. Teleport makes you unblockable, but of course it's far more powerful and different in an RP setting.
  • Keywords and Spell Simulation- Tried to make sure every keyword could be represented here. First/Double Strike can easily be represented with speed or skill as a physical or temporal modification. Discard/Draw abilities are attacking or tapping into a knowledge pool. Recursion is a form of reanimation, reinstilling life force or magic into bodies, as bodies are vessels for magic to take form. Creature removal spells can be simulated in 100 ways: Physical combined with negate/conjure/alter, energy to create dis-favorable scenarios (such as a lightning bolt), temporal to rapidly accelerate aging or putting them in a time stasis lock. Trample is probably going to be a modification of Physical form (and can be attained naturally with high strength and stamina), Flying is quite easy to understand, Defender is going to be more of a stance for characters rather than always on, Morph would actually play really well in this system. Landwalk will just give bonuses in certain terrain (or ignore penalties), Flash will just be quickened spells, flanking will be a trained skill, Cumulative upkeep can be a self imposed penalty to maintain a spell. There's a lot to consider and figuring out what needs to be implemented and what doesn't need to be added is a great struggle.
  • Lands -  Players form bonds with locations either through interaction or magical binding rituals. Lands are not exclusive to one player unless they decide to break the bonds with other players and ward their runes. For example, several people may have emotional ties to the Sacred Foundry. Having spent much time there, they create a bond with that location and feel empowered when there, granting them Red or White mana.
  • Global Enchantments - Most are just local enchantments that affect a specific area. An enchantment of emotional stability at a bar where fights could easily break out. A zone of silence at a place of worship. An emblem of vision to grant guards far vision while manning a tower. A large scale spell is much more difficult and gets exponentially more expensive.
  • Summon versus Conjure- I want there to be a drastic difference between real things and conjured things. Conjured things are fabrications created from the blind eternities where Magic is unpredictable and chaotic. You can summon a goblin beast with no soul from there much easier than one with intelligence. The difference is like creating Akroma which has intelligence as well as raw power and a standard goblin is astronomical. However, conjuring a being (with or without a soul) is different than an actual summons. Summoning is taking someone that exists and bringing them to you. It's much easier to summon a real person than conjuring one of equal abilities. However, the target must be willing or the spell is much harder to cast. 
  • Top Heavy Game - This is definitely a top heavy game like GURPs is. But once complete, I hope the play sessions are very easy (also like GURPs). Spells are not really made 'on the fly', as you have practiced and trained to learn spells. You can make minor tweaks perhaps to best suite your situation (altering a ward against red to ward against blue) without much busy work, but major changes (turning a shock into a pyroclasm) is drastically different.
I really painstakingly searched through all of the card database for the game to try and make this system work as much as possible. As it is, it's a really loose framework and not a functional system yet. It's easy to say "Sure, a fireball is Conjure - Elemental (Fire)" or "Invisibility is Physical - Sense to blind other people to my presence", but making a system that works well off of it is a tall order. 

This is a big project and it's mostly been a solo one at that. Some insights from friends help out but just talk has made it really hard to keep up. Getting some work done on (digital) paper, some actual content in writing so that it can be worked on and tweaked is really necessary. I've got other documents like every keyword in the game (needs to be updated since AVR/RtR), and lots of unique spells from Ravnica to try to see if it can be properly emulated in this system.

It's taken me almost a week to finally post this and there's still plenty I can edit but you know what they say about art. It also happens to be true about design. It's never finished. So here it is, my work in progress. There's no numbers to or actual mechanics to judge so far but keep an open mind. I have a strong affection towards the source material and wish to be as true to it as I can. Less Tom Hewlett ala Silent Hill, more Firaxis games ala X-Com. And if you don't like the new X-Com, pretend I used an example that you did like. And if you like the new Silent Hill games, then I'm sorry.

Making friends on day one! *sigh*
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