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ryguysolis
2009-12-01, 01:23 PM
Has anyone made or attempted a magic system based on L.E.Modesitt's "The Saga of Recluse" system. I'm toying with it after revisiting the books recently and it seems fairly decent.

For those not familiar with the books the magic system is based on an order/chaos axis where order wizards reinforce thing, strengthen, and create while chaos wizards breakdown, degrade, and destroy. Consequently Choas is more offensively powerful and inheirently dangerous while Order is more defensive and "safe" for use.

More to come on my own ideas when I'm not on the clock, until then, anyone else thought about this or a similar concept?

Melamoto
2009-12-01, 02:00 PM
D&D already has something to allow this in place, although it doesn't use it. Spells can be given an alignment, and can only be cast by people of that alignment. If you cast such a spell when it isn't your alignment, then your alignment automatically changes to match it.

As far as game balance goes, it may shake things up a bit. No more Lawful blasters or Chaotic buffers. Using Alignment to dictate ability is flawed in that it restricts roleplay. Still, if the players want it, then it should be used.

The Glyphstone
2009-12-01, 02:02 PM
D&D already has something to allow this in place, although it doesn't use it. Spells can be given an alignment, and can only be cast by people of that alignment. If you cast such a spell when it isn't your alignment, then your alignment automatically changes to match it.

.

Where did you find that rule? Clerics are prohibited from casting spells with an [Alignment] tag opposed to their alignment. Anyone else can cast an [Alignment] spell just fine, and while it is an act of said alignment, it's an incredibly minor one, and not at all an instant alignment shift...

@OP: The best solution would probably be that - assign the [Chaos] or [Law] descriptors to spells you think would be Chaos or Order-specific, then apply the Cleric-specific ban on casting things opposed to your alignment to all casters period.

Edge of Dreams
2009-12-01, 02:06 PM
A magic system like that might be more suited to game with rules that are more story oriented or where magic is more free-form. I'm thinking of Mage: The Awakening, and Nobilis particularly. To make a list of spells and then label each one order or chaos could work, but it'd get annoying and there'd be spells that don't fit either side that you'd have to arbitrarily pick or throw out.

Ravens_cry
2009-12-01, 02:31 PM
Has anyone made or attempted a magic system based on L.E.Modesitt's "The Saga of Recluse" system. I'm toying with it after revisiting the books recently and it seems fairly decent.

For those not familiar with the books the magic system is based on an order/chaos axis where order wizards reinforce thing, strengthen, and create while chaos wizards breakdown, degrade, and destroy. Consequently Choas is more offensively powerful and inheirently dangerous while Order is more defensive and "safe" for use.

More to come on my own ideas when I'm not on the clock, until then, anyone else thought about this or a similar concept?
Order can be more safe, but it has it's own drawbacks. Overuse can leave you blind. And it's users tend to be taciturn, stubborn, unyielding. Still, if it could be implemented, it sounds like an interesting idea I would love to explore. I haven't read many of the books, pretty much just Wellspring of Chaos. I love the universe though.

JeenLeen
2009-12-01, 02:37 PM
The Resonance system from Mage: The Awakening seems to fit with this. There's not an actual mechanic for it (at least in the version I've read), but as you use magic, it leaves an imprint on you that slowly builds up.

If you increase how much Resonance you get and refluff/alter the way magick works, you could have mages start neutral but slowly become chaotic or of order. The Entropy Sphere should be particularly interesting, as it governs decay and order.

Also World of Darkness: the Werewolf book has a particular element of order verses chaos in its Wyrm, Wyld, Weaver Trinity. (Well, all WoD has that to a degree, as far as I know, but I think Werewolf goes into it the most.)

I'd recommend looking at those rulebooks and drawing from/altering it to fit your needs.

Devils_Advocate
2009-12-01, 06:18 PM
For those not familiar with the books the magic system is based on an order/chaos axis where order wizards reinforce thing, strengthen, and create while chaos wizards breakdown, degrade, and destroy. Consequently Choas is more offensively powerful and inheirently dangerous while Order is more defensive and "safe" for use.
I'm going to try to address several possible interpretations of of what you're saying, without meaning to attribute any particular interpretation to you.

You cannot objectively make something more like itself than it already is. To increase one quantity associated with an object is to decrease the corresponding opposite quality: To make something more large is to make it less small, and vice versa. Furthermore, things are not absolutely large nor small; one thing is larger than another thing, and the second thing is smaller than the first thing. So the formulation that order magic bolsters things' qualities and chaos magic degrades things' qualities doesn't really work, because "qualities" is too broad.

Maybe order magic increases positive qualities, and chaos magic opposes it? Largeness, hotness, and brightness are examples of what I mean by positive qualities, with their "opposites" smallness, coldness, and darkness being mere lacks of the corresponding positive qualities. You can't get any colder than absolute zero, for example; absolute cold is just a total lack of heat. These opposites, then, are negative qualities.

But heat is a positive quality, and heating things up enough breaks them apart, which is what chaos magic is supposed to do. Order magic is supposed to hold stuff together, right? So maybe order bolsters negative qualities. But that makes order destructive in a different way: Apply enough of it to something and you wipe it out of existence, having eliminated everything about it. So it seems that the positive/negative dichotomy is orthogonal to the creation/destruction dichotomy.

Maybe chaos magic promotes change, and order magic prevents change? But to bolster something's resistance to change is itself to cause a change in said thing. In fact, any spell you cast, and more broadly anything you do, has to be a change. Action, by its very nature, is transition from one state of affairs to another. If nothing changes, nothing happens. So, at best, order magic would be changes that prevent other changes. And if Order, in this context, is taken to cover all acts of creation, it's not even strictly that. It includes all changes where a thing wasn't there before, and now it is there.

Also note that, in the real world, where mass is conserved, creation and destruction are just flip sides of the same thing. Matter is rearranged, destroying its old form and creating its new form. You need to bring in magic to defy this balance and create without destroying or vice versa; to produce an arrangement of matter from nothing, or nothing from an arrangement of matter.

Speaking of actual physical quantities, it might be simplest to have chaos magic increase entropy and order magic reduce entropy. If order magic decreases total entropy, then it would be more magical than chaos magic in the sense that it would oppose a real-world physical law. On the other hand, if order magic still increases total entropy and chaos magic just only ever has the direct effect of increasing entropy, then it seems that order magic would have to allow you much less freedom in what sort of entropy it produced, to keep you from being able to just use someone you dislike as "fuel" for a spell.

(I recall reading that the Book of Vile Darkness has rules for using souls as spell components, allowing you to replace a trivial amount of XP (meh) and destroy an enemy's soul forever (WOAH!).)

But even then, order magic could be more versatile by allowing you to create mundane implements of destruction, and then just use those to blow away whatever is bothering you. So maybe what balances order magic is that it's harder than chaos magic. That especially makes sense if it decreases total entropy, since then chaos magic embraces and works with a fundamental tendency of the universe, while order magic actively opposes and fights it.

awa
2009-12-01, 06:56 PM
are you looking to base it on the early works where chaos = bad or the latter books with chaos and order not having the same degree of black and whiteness. In some of the most recent books order mages were creating massive explosions by draining the order out of objects and having them explode.

Personally i agree that a more free form magic system would work better for the magic of recluse system becuase most of the diffrent magics were just doing a couple of things in diffrent ways with diffrent degrees of force over and over.

Shyftir
2009-12-01, 07:03 PM
I've been thinking about this for a long time. I think the best solution will be similar to the psionic power point system, or perhaps the "channeling" for Wheel of Time d20.

Of course you restrict abilities based on Choas or Order. The campaign world would lack any meaningful good or evil alignments, as there would be no real demons or anything. Neutral is still possible, both as "grey" wizards and/or the "druids" and people who just aren't really aligned either way.

You'll need to create new classes, standard ones won't work at least not where magic of any kind is involved. I would consider forcing players to roll to find out what amount of talent with magic they have, possibly with a second roll for with what force they have said talent.

Like I said, this has been in my mind a looong time.

PairO'Dice Lost
2009-12-01, 07:48 PM
are you looking to base it on the early works where chaos = bad or the latter books with chaos and order not having the same degree of black and whiteness.

Technically, they have the same degree of "black-and-white-ness": order is black, chaos is white. :smallwink:

What I think would work best is a sort of sliding scale from "pure order" to "pure chaos" where a character falls at one point on that scale. Doing more orderly things puts you closer to pure order and vice-versa for chaos. Based on where you fall, you get access to different abilities and your power with those abilities fluctuates. So a pure chaos wizard could chuck really powerful chaos-bolts and a pure ordermage could turn sticks into adamantine, but a druid could do both at a less powerful level.

Mechanically speaking, let's say pure order is 100 and pure chaos is 1. Each character is generated with an "alignment rating" (or whatever) from 1 to 100 (either chosen by the player or generated with d%). Every power has an alignment number from 1 to 100 to denote who can use them; a power with rating 20, for instance, would need someone of rating 20 or lower to use, and an 80 would need someone with an 80 or higher. Power scales based on your rating as well, so someone using a rank 80 power would get more out of it with a rating of 99 than with a rating of 81.

Heading back to the dorm, more later if I think of it.