Dreadful Sorcery - Notes on a surprisingly successful magic system (OSR)

Over the past few weeks I've been running Greg Gillespie's Dwarrowdeep for two separate groups, one online and one in-person. The guts of the system we've been employing is Basic Fantasy, precisely because it is so basic that it provides an excellent framework for me to hang a bunch of ideas off. Also because as a Brit of a certain age it reminds me a lot of Kwik Save's No Frills own-brand, which I have nostalgia for in an internalised traumatic way.

Same vibe.

Onto the skeleton of BFRPG I have tacked a half dozen hacks and amendments;

1. This death system from Papers & Pencils.

2. Thieves use the skill progression from LotFP.

3. Fighters use my technique system for doing weeaboo fightan.

4. Turn Undead has been expanded to Avaunt Chaos, affecting all supernatural beings of Chaotic alignment (most of them), and further expanding to Dismay Heretic, where a Cleric can turn (but not destroy) Chaotically aligned humanoids once they are past level 7 or have 17+ Wisdom.

5. Hit dice are rerolled each level, with the new HP total taken only if it is greater than the previous score.

6. Slot-based encumberance, with slots filled with Fatigue imposing a cumulative -1 penalty on all actions if they also contain an item.

7. Crucially, getting to the actual point of this post, the Magic User no longer uses Vancian magic.

To be clear, I haven't used RAW vancian magic for a while now. GLOG has been my gaming bread and butter, but I wanted to see how well it could be applied to an OSR as opposed to merely OSR-adjacent game. Furthermore I wanted to use it to encourage (read: force) PC magicians to employ their powers creatively and to invent new spells.

When a player wants to be a magician I give them two spells and two randomly generated magic words. Those two spells they start with are the only ones I will ever give them, every other spell they get has to be invented by combining magic words that they know, both the two random words and the words contained in the names of their starting spells. New magic words can be found by examining esoterica they find on their journeys - inscriptions on tomb walls, jade tablets left behind by long dead serpentman civilisations, the scrawlings of madmen who saw beyond the veil, echoes of the words the gods used to shape the world trapped inside a geode. That kind of jazz.

Magicians get one Magic Die per level, plus one for each point of Intelligence Bonus, if any. These are D8s rather than the traditional D6 because BFRPG uses Bigger Numbers than GLOG. Normal rules apply; they are wagered when casting spells, with those rolling in the upper 50% number range (5-8) being exhausted for the day. Spell parameters - damage, area, targets, etc. - are determined by the number of dice, the sum total of their rolls, the highest rolling die and sometimes the lowest. 

A magician can improvise a new spell once per game session. 

I want players experimenting and having fun with this system, but I don't want to give magicians the entire spotlight or have them taking up too much time in play. Once per session is plenty.

When improvising a spell they combine two or more words into a spell name and tell me what they want it to do. To, and, of, the, etc. are free, and they can use any form of the words they know; noun, adjective, whatever.

I then adjudicate a X:6 chance of the spell working as described based on how potent it is, how close it is to the meaning of the words, gut feeling and deep ancestral wisdom. If the chance is too low for the player's liking I will offer potential changes or drawbacks to raise the success chance, or they can just risk it and try to shoot for their ideal spell and roll a d6.

If the roll fails, something calamitous happens. If I'm feeling generous I roll the miscast tables from The Nightmares Underneath, if I'm not I roll a catastrophe from the Book of Gaub. 

If it succeeds then I spend 2 minutes writing the spell at the table for them. Magic Dice make balancing spells relative to eachother utterly trivial. Every spell, no matter it's function, affects the same amount of stuff in the game world as any other. Because of this I feel confident in my ability to quickly snap off a new mechanic with a minimum of fuss and trivialises what would otherwise be the rather treacherous process of comparing the effect to the standard set by the levelled spell system. 

Either way, their chance of success on a repeat try of the same spell goes up by 1. When it reaches 6:6 it is now a perfected spell and can be cast with a simple expenditure of Magic Dice without risk.

Spells and Words are stored in spell books. One spellbook takes up 1 equipment slot - normal books take up 1/3 of a slot, but grimoires are big baroque affairs - and holds 10 spells, 20 words, or a combination thereof. The book must be in your hand to cast the spells it contains.

Two case examples of how this has worked out in play;

Player 1 explicitly wanted to be a necromancer. I rolled them two spells from the Basic Fantasy necromancer spell list; Decay Flesh and Call Poltergeist, then  rewrote them using GLOG variables. I also generated them the random words Haphazard and Hurl. Over the course of play he also found the word Nebulous inscribed on the inside of the skull of a gnome wizard he skeletonised with Decay Flesh.

Spells Created after 2 sessions:

Poltergeist Flesh, to replace his missing left arm which had to be amputated below the elbow after his bicept got mangled by a crossbow bolt from the bandit leader Regg (who he also skeletonised). Replaces [dice] body parts with pale green ectoplasmic replacements that function just as well as a real one for as long as the dice remain invested, they are rolled when withdrawn.

And;

Nebulous Decay Flesh, which slew most of an orc warband that the party attracted after letting off a cacophony wand. Deals [best] damage in a [dice]*10' area each round a creature starts its turn inside the cloud of black grave mist it generates.

Player 2 didn't have a firm concept of what they wanted to be, magic-wise so I generated two entries from Skerples' big list of GLOG spells. The list wasn't numbered so I determined it by means of asking the player for a letter and a number. They ended up with Obedient Stone and Circle of Violence, and the words Lead and Bell.

Spell created after 1 session:

Violent Lead, pretty obvious right? Can turn a lead slingstone into a single-target magic missile for [sum]+[dice] damage, or a handful of lead shot into a 30' cone shotgun blast for [sum] damage to all within, save for half. Obedient Stone is not a bad weapon for a starting magic user, but having to run after it and pick it up for another throw is a bit of a pain, hence this rather more direct spell. He did get some good use out of having his stone trip up goblins in a dense corridor fight though.

Spells theorised but not yet created;

Circle of Obedience, an AoE Charm effect where the targets only remain charmed within a radius around the caster.

Circle of Bells, a perimeter warning system to wake the party up if approached while asleep.

Concerning Clerics

Clerics, by the by, still use the standard spell preparation rules, with the caveat that I switched to the advancement table from OSRIC. This is to both provide a contrast so I can tell how my experiment in this style of magic system is going and for lore reasons. I'm operating on a Moorcockian Order vs Chaos alignment dichotomy. Clerics are specifically agents of the Lords of Law, the loose collection of gods and powers who stand in opposition to entropy on the cosmic scale and in favour of civilisation on the local. The style of magic Clerics wield, which reinforces the natural order of things, making whole what is broken and ensuring that ne'er-do-wells are put in their place, is referred to as Law Magic. This isn't to say that the powers of Chaos don't have their own priests, it's just that they take their levels in Magician and wield the reality-breaking powers of Chaos Magic instead. I suspect at higher levels that Clerics will be able to cast more spells per day on average than a Magician of equal level, but a Magicians' spells will remain more potent, broader in scope and more flexible. Exactly what I want, making the two systems feel quite distinct. Time will tell, but for now everything is - quite to my growing shock and delight - going exactly as intended.