Incantations in E6

[Yogibear41]

looking for some general advice on incantations and implementing them in e6 to do things like raise dead and other higher level spells that are not available.

I have some ideas of my own but I would like to get some input from others on their opinions.

In addition if anyone knows of a handbook or something dealing with incantations in general or even specifically for e6 that would be amazing.

Thanks for the help. :smallsmile:

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Incantations are always very specific. If you need to bring Fred the Fighter back from the dead, you would have to research an incantation specifically to raise Fred, and that incantation could not raise anyone but Fred. Granted if Fred dies a lot you may really get your money's worth out of it, but it's not usable for anything but to raise that one guy.

[Yora]

What people often call the weakness of Incantations is that they are very easy to pull off once you have obtained knowledge of them. However, in an E6 game, I don't think that is much of a problem. The effect is the same as giving the PCs a scroll of Raise Dead, but the casting is a lot more elaborate and made to look much more like a big deal.
Just include material components that are difficult to obtain and that allow you as a GM to decide when the PCs can get their hands of them or not. 5,000 gp worth of diamonds are not something you can just buy in a store in an E6 world.

I think the important thing is to keep the creation of new incantations entirely to yourself and don't allow PCs to create customized incantation for their current needs. There are ways to reduce the skill DCs almost as low as you want to and in theory even low level characters could pull off extremely powerful incantations. But if you design all the available incantation and don't allow PCs to modify them, there is no real threat of things getting out of hand.

Good spells to turn into incantations are:
Atonement
Binding
Break Enchantment
Contact other Plane
Control Weather
Dimensional Lock
Forbiddance
Heroes Feast
Planar Binding (chaos)
Planar Binding (evil)
Planar Binding (good)
Planar Binding (law)
Plant Growth
Scrying
Simulacrum
Trap the Soul
Raise Dead

The important thing is to make them expensive every time they are performed. Every time the players want to use an incantation, it has to hit them where it really hurts, their purse. Especially in an E6 game, where there is a good chance that money won't be very tight to begin with. This is a very effective way to prevent them from spamming the incantation at every opportunity. Also, the outcome should be unclear. If you can pay 10.000 gp to solve your problem for sure, players will be likely to do it. If the chance is only 60% and otherwise the money is just wasted, they won't be as eager to try it. This goes especially for divinations. A divination incantation should at best be able to give some good hints and pointers, but never a straight answer.

[avr]

There's a couple here (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?206323-E6-The-Game-Inside-D-amp-D/page49) but I get the idea that people often find incantations too much work to stat up. Also, people writing stuff for E6 tend to be fans of feats for everything.