notXanathar
2019-12-10, 11:01 AM
I was thinking about how one might do rune magic without it just being normal spellcasting, since it's pretty hard to find a consensus on what it might be, and what I came up with was a new type of component. Then, having had a think about it I realised how much of a magic systems flavour can be encoded in the components its spells use. By contrast, the only change in flavour between spell slots and magic points is flexibility.
An example: the blood component (B). When you cast a spell with a blood component, you must be holding a weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage. As part of casting the spell take damage of the weapons type equal to 1 + the level at which you cast the spell. This damage cannot be reduced in any way. Alternatively the spell description may specify an amount of damage to take when you use such a spell.
See: no fiddling around with heightening spells by losing hp, or expending hit dice, or fiddly subclasses, or anything of that nature. just a requirement of some spells that you lose some HP to cast them.
I think that this would be really fertile ground for homebrew, although it would require some kind of narrative for it in a way that other things don't, in that you have to justify a major change to the magic system, and you would have to add a number of spells for it to make any difference to the game (unless you retcon some other spells).
Any thoughts?
An example: the blood component (B). When you cast a spell with a blood component, you must be holding a weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage. As part of casting the spell take damage of the weapons type equal to 1 + the level at which you cast the spell. This damage cannot be reduced in any way. Alternatively the spell description may specify an amount of damage to take when you use such a spell.
See: no fiddling around with heightening spells by losing hp, or expending hit dice, or fiddly subclasses, or anything of that nature. just a requirement of some spells that you lose some HP to cast them.
I think that this would be really fertile ground for homebrew, although it would require some kind of narrative for it in a way that other things don't, in that you have to justify a major change to the magic system, and you would have to add a number of spells for it to make any difference to the game (unless you retcon some other spells).
Any thoughts?