I want spells to be interesting. I want encountering them to be truly memorable. I want them to have personality. I want them to be alien. I want a practical and interesting social combat structure, or minigame, to represent the sheer amount of work it takes to catch one. I came up with a procedure for this, but I found that it was so unwieldy that I immediately realised that I needed a computer to do it for me.
Prep procedure:
1. Get a copy of
this grid
in whatever format is most convenient for you. You want to be able to scribble
on it. That (unmarked) grid is player-facing information for anyone that knows
anything about spells.
2. Click this button. [This sentence will become a link to my next post which
will be a spell mutation generator]
3. Eyeball the results. Modify as you like. Maybe reroll it if you don't like
it. If it tells you to look at a particular wizard school,
open up this page, find that wizard, and - assuming that a school has got 12 spells with the
rarest ones at the highest numbers - take the LOWER of the two numbers in
parentheses and look at THAT spell.
4. Decide on the intelligence level of the spell. If you decide that
this spell is as smart as a normal person (which I think should be rare), you
can break away from this process immediately and play out any negotiations
with them as you would any NPC. Do you want to see the fighter get into an
argument with a talking rope while the wizard tries to break it up? I do.
5. Mark the the Needs you rolled on the table, and the point value of
each one. See how these Wants are grouped into three base categories? Decide
now on the personality and the appearance - these should flow naturally out of
what spell it is and those Needs.
Making a guess at what a spell might do from its appearance and behaviour
is a part of this game.
A spell might look like anything; it might look like an animal, vegetable, mineral, person, astral body, hairball, something a cat coughed up, an ordinary tool, something that a neural net created, a creature from Spore...
OK, your prep is done.
To be able to interact with a spell properly you almost always have to be able to usefully perceive its actual form. Some are plainly visible, some are not. ALL wizards have got some ability to sense them sufficiently. This ability can be developed with proper training or by doing irresponsible things to your eyes. Non-wizard spell-hunters carry a range of Doodads; each Doodad has a 1-in-6 chance of rendering a given spell visible (salt, a cat, and a layer of alchemical crystals stuck to a sheet of paper are the most common and cheapest types). Almost all spells become visible for a short period each day, but that exact time varies.
One attempt = 1 Turn (10 minutes). The wizard (that's how I'm just going to refer to the person trying to tame the spell) incurs a Stress just to try, as they begin the intense mental work of trying to utterly comprehend the being before them while simultaneously constructing a new space for them to live in and actually navigating the negotiations.
One Attempt == the wizard gets their Wis score in actions. An action may be used to try to meet a single Want on the chart (the Wizard is provided with an unmarked chart) or to ask a general question about what courses of action are more likely to be productive.
The wizard knows whether an action was successful or not. If they were successful but this did NOT yield any points, they are informed of that too.
The threshold that must be met or exceeded to win is usually the total number of available points -6.
If you FAIL, you can immediately retry by incurring an additional Stress. You can also lock any Wants that you previously achieved by taking yet another Stress (note that some Wants will stay locked for free).
If you SUCCEED the spell moves in immediately, taking the first slot that you put the Stress into. The rest of the Stress, you need to get rid of the hard way.