Upon arriving in the first nearby town, coated in a sea of snow and helping a woodcutter with smoke damage in their lungs, our band of extra dimensional vagabonds realizes very quickly that they have no money, no ability to read the local language, and no discernibly marketable skills in a pre-industrial feudal economy.
Will quickly scammed the local general store owner out of food and supplies using a handy pile of fake coins he keeps with him and the promise that they’re just foreign currency. Worth much gold. He immediately feels sorry about this and very regretful for taking advantage of a person but … starving, starswept travelers needs rations. And he just learned he has a marketable skill.
The party also soon realizes that one of the families in town has lost their young daughter. Not dead, she’s just missing. The party leaps to investigate with the help of a couple of local farmers. Very classic D&D style adventuring.
Late in the night, after tracking the kidnappers, the party realizes that the people that took this little girl are in full armor. They look a lot like the investigator that was first examining that burned dead body in the snowy field they appeared in. Maybe we shouldn’t be bothering these armored individuals that seem to be able to set up magical alarm traps …
Dungeons and Dragons and all Tabletop Gaming experiences are made greater when there is a sense of exploration. Of finding mysteries out and of learning the motives behind the interesting people. Of delving into dungeons that have hidden catacombs and unknown monsters.
Magic should, reasonably, be the greatest mystery of all. Manipulating energy and elements to create miracles and pull things out of nonexistence? How’s that work? Why can people do that? What are the limits?
But everyone knows the magic of Dungeons and Dragons. Unless you use the magic in an interesting way or build factions around the magic system and give them motivations and goals then the magic of Dungeons and Dragons is not actually mysterious. Magic has very clear limits. Magic has a set number of spells that exist and everyone knows what they can do. Magic in Tabletop Gaming has become a stagnant, known quantity that is as simple as electricity or chemistry (but way more fun than those dumb, nerd topics).
For Real 8 I didn’t want a magic system that was already known. I wanted systems of magic that could be understood in scientific ways but didn’t have a set spell that deals 6d8 fire damage and explodes in exactly a 20 foot sphere. I still wanted people to be able to throw fireballs because those are rad but I wanted it to be more unique than just a spell with a listed description.
Magic across classes also always bothered me. Clerics, Paladins, Bards, Druids, Rangers, Sorcerers, Wizards, and Warlocks have some slight differences but really are all different flavors of the same ingredients. Like a Taco Bell menu. They all basically have tortillas, cheese, meat, salsa, and lettuce in different proportions or maybe with an extra hard shell tortilla in their or a quesadilla as the tortilla for a burrito.
Magic in D&D means that everyone has a cantrip that deals damage comparable to melee weapon. They have some ribbon spells that are good for roleplay but largely accomplish the same basic tasks. Clerics have to pick which spells they can cast but they get all the possible spells. Wizards only have a finite list to pull from but they can learn from stolen spellbooks. Sorcerers get a few extra points to make spells weird. Warlocks only get a spell after they give their Patron a backrub and tell them they’re a good boy and everyone loves them.
I wanted magic to be something my players had to explore. Having unique magic systems meant that the players would discover the magic alongside my own discovery of the magic. If a rule didn’t make sense then it shouldn’t be written down. If a rule didn’t align with how physics and energy conversion works then where does the energy come from? We gotta figure that out!
Let’s take a look at some of the magic systems I made up:
- Protean Magic: Shapeshifters! Proteans bond their souls to animals, offering the animal to share their physical space in order to borrow the animal’s form on occasion. Stay too long in the animal’s form, though, and its spirit gains more control than the Protean’s spirit. Then they could be stuck in the animal’s form forever! Felt like Animorphs to me. I liked it.
- Clerical Magic: Not taking notes for someone and filing paperwork, the magic of the godly gods! Clerics chose 3 of the 8 possible gods and get powers they can use for a certain amount of time each day but if they break the rules of those gods they lose the use of those powers until they atone. The powers were cool like Teleporting places or giving off an Aura of Fear to those who are cruel.
- Pact Magic: There are 8 demons/devils that exist opposite of the 8 gods and they love to make deals with mortals for a sliver of their power. These powers were supposed to be perverted, corrupted versions of the Clerical Magic. So instead of Teleporting like Nightcrawler by just popping in and out of existence a Pact Mage actually tears a hole open in reality and walks through it, damaging the world and making it easier for demons to flood in. Instead of giving Fear to the evil people of the world you give Fear to the good people.
- Rune Magic: The world of Real 8 is made of 8 elements (convenient, right?). Those elements are the base magical components of existence and everything contains traces of these 8 elements: Aether, Earth, Body, Water, Spirit, Air, Mind, and Fire. Four Primal and four Esoteric elements. Rune Mages can see the energetic interactions between these elements and manipulate them as they see fit, so long as they don’t violate the laws of physics by creating energy out of nothingness. This magic was supposed to be insanely powerful and terrifying. A Rune Mage could cause a blood vessel in an opponent to burst. Cause their retinas to separate from their eyes. Boil them in their own tissues. Steal control of their mind and make them a puppet. Raise their skeleton and bind it with a demon’s soul or an artificial soul or whatever. Rune Magic was beyond comparably powerful and horrifying and shaped the world because of it.
- Elemental Magic: Rune Mages can access all 8 elements but some magic users in Real 8 only awaken to the Primal elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. Our group is also a big fan of Avatar: the Last Airbender, so my friend Scott wanted to be a Waterbender and I wanted that kind of magic to find a place in this world of my creation so we did just that. Elemental mages awaken to 1 of the Primal elements and have access to two of the others for supplementary work. However they are always shut off from the opposite element that they awakened to. So Water users can never use Fire. Earth users can never use Air. Vice-Versa.
- Alchemy: I’m really proud of the alchemy in Real 8. While trolling a Barnes and Noble I stumbled across the Moron’s Guide to Alchemy and bought it kind of as a joke. Turns out, Alchemy is kind of a cool science, particularly in a historical context. Early alchemists were absolutely trying to convert lead into gold and create an elixir for everlasting life but their science became more about changing the elements of the world into different forms. The first practical uses of alchemical science were to create dyes and etches for metals. The 8 elements of Real 8 are tangible things that can be distilled out of every periodic element in existence to create alchemical salts. Those salts can then be recombined into any form, allowing someone to change any object into any other object through scientific distillation and chemistry procedure. It led to some strange potions and ideas about how alchemy would interact with the human body. The most common use was a potion that could be applied to a wound. It couldn’t undo the damage and it couldn’t override the body’s nature procedure for healing but it could rapidly accelerate it, for better or worse. A big gash on the arm would suddenly become a scar in a handful of minutes, rather than bleeding out forever.
There’s your introduction to the magic of Real 8, my pet project and hopeful published work.
Sorry this update didn’t come on Wednesday of last week. I got surprised with a vacation that I really wanted to take and got to disappear from the world for a few days.
Patreon will be updated Tuesday with my conversion rules to allow 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons to be played with a deck of playing cards instead of d20’s. I’ll post a small teaser for blog readers tomorrow as well.
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