daniel_ream
Legendary Pubber
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- Aug 29, 2017
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So I'm just finishing up the Legend of Eli Monpress series, which I'm enjoying greatly mostly due to the magic system (briefly, every inanimate object has a sapient animus that a wizard can communicate with and persuade to do things).
I'm lazy and can't be arsed to design a magic system that perfectly mimics the one from the series, but the Fate System Toolkit has a system that's very close: the Storm Summoners system. In Storm Summoners summoners can summon elementals of various sizes from any of five elements - Earth, Water, Ice, Fire and Thunder. There's another tier where a summoner can make a pact with an Elemental Prince for more power and the ability to summon a unique, named elemental of great power.
You can't hang an entire setting/series on "kewl magic system" though and there are some obvious holes that need to be filled:
I'm lazy and can't be arsed to design a magic system that perfectly mimics the one from the series, but the Fate System Toolkit has a system that's very close: the Storm Summoners system. In Storm Summoners summoners can summon elementals of various sizes from any of five elements - Earth, Water, Ice, Fire and Thunder. There's another tier where a summoner can make a pact with an Elemental Prince for more power and the ability to summon a unique, named elemental of great power.
You can't hang an entire setting/series on "kewl magic system" though and there are some obvious holes that need to be filled:
- The elements are based on the Five Storms of the original Fate Core magic system which is basically bending. Wood, Void, Air, and so on seem like obvious additions to the set but I can see it being challenging to come up with ways of making each element's elementals mechanically unique.
- Summoners aren't that powerful in absolute terms but elementals grant both versatility and a force multiplier. There need to be other setting elements that justify why summoners aren't the dominant power elite.
- The book series has Swordsmen with a capital S who wield "awakened" blades, swords whose animus is ancient and powerful and grant their wielder superhuman ability. The blades are created by Shapers, wizard-smiths who can create magic items by empowering their animus. That still brings things back to if-you're-not-a-summoner-or-have-a-pet-Shaper you're screwed, though.
- Fate Core has a pretty compressed power scale, so purely by mechanics a small force of heavily armed men or a handful of PC-level characters could probably take down a Summoner, making Summoners dangerous but not weapons of mass destruction.
- In the books wizards are kept in check by a Spirit Court that hunts down rogue wizards who abuse their power. It's mentioned several times that in the dim past there were wizard-kings that ruled via sorcerous tyranny and so the Court acts to prevent people from ever seeing wizards that way again, but it's never explained just how the mundanes of the world got out from under that system and what's stopping a cabal of wizards from just doing it again, beyond idealism.