Midnight Setting & Spheres of Power

[Ualaa]

I'd like to run a campaign using the 3.x Midnight Setting.

Spheres of Power/Ultimate Spheres of Power doesn't have an Arcane/Divine break.
The setting however has limitations on magic.

Divine Magic is blocked, except by the evil priests of the dark god Izrador.
Further, there is no access to the Astral or Ethereal planes, not to any of the Outer Planes.

The setting says these type effects fail:
- Contact Other Plane (type effects)
- Any teleportation type effect
- Any raise dead type effect
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If you were picking spheres, which would you consider to be blocked entirely (Astral/Ethereal/Outer.Plane dependent or Warp/Raise Dead type effects)?
-- Conjuration
-- Divination (the Divine half of the Sphere)
-- Life (Breath of Life / Raise Dead type effects)
-- Warp

Would Light's "Incarnate Glow" where you're affected by Ghost Touch weapons be blocked, or just very similar to Ethereal accessing effects?
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And then which would you consider to only be available to the opposition (who get their divine magic from the dark god)?
-- Death
-- Life

Any others?
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Any input would be great.

[StSword]

Have you thought about traditions?

Do you want to stick with the things as presented in Midnight, or are you looking to extrapolate?

Like maybe some divine casters turned to Blight magic, parasitically funneling the life of the world around them to maintain their power. Or would you rather just stick to no divine casters beyond the big bad's?

[Ualaa]

Reading through the campaign book now.

The Dark God was cast out of the heavens.
He did something that cut off access to the heavens.
Pretty much he's the only source of divine magic.

I have the 2nd edition (as a PDF, from Drive Thru RPG).
That updates the setting to 3.0 edition of the game.
We're playing Pathfinder.

And using a lot of Spheres and Path of War.

I kind of prefer to go with the setting as much as possible.
But not entirely.

For example the setting says to do away with spell casting classes entirely.
Then to use their own few classes in their place.
And you can pick up a few spells with feats.

The sphere system already has the option for feats for Basic, Advanced or Extra Magic Talent.
But while magic use is risky (it's users are hunted), I don't especially want a no magic setting.
It seems to be very low magic and virtually no magic items.

Nothing is really set in stone.
The campaign hasn't started yet.
I picked up a bunch of the PDFs for it, and am a third of the way through the first (main campaign book).

Magic being kind of restricted.
No divine stuff, except the evil priesthood... that might just be Life & Death spheres?
Quite a bit of magic doesn't work; they have a long list of spells and keywords that aren't applicable.
In the setting hit points and spell points are drained as magic is cast, so requiring the Draining Drawback makes sense.

In the setting, magic is feat locked and not done by class, which I don't especially like.
It would be lots of feats to have relatively few spells.
On top of that, casting magic kind of "pings" an area that magic was cast in.
And the dark priests have supernatural creatures that can smell the scent of magic for a time on the caster.
If they catch you, they try to kill you.

Pretty oppressive setting.
The analogy is a much darker and oppressive Ravenloft.
Based kind of off of Lord of the Rings, a century after Sauron's complete victory over The Fellowship and all others.

Any ideas are awesome.
At this stage I'm gathering information, not much has been decided.

[StSword]

Well with spheres you really don't need to have magic classes per se, you could use spheres of might and when it comes out spheres of guile classes and take advantage of the "a talent is a talent is a talent" aspect to allow players to have magic if they want.

The magic blacksmith is a staple of legend, scholars knowing magic well of course, Tinkers with tricks that blur the boundary between technology and magic, for Strikers supernatural martial arts are a thing, that sort of thing.

For that matter you could add incompatible energies to a tradition and their use of spheres would not be magic- clockwork wonders, alchemy, runecraft, lycanthropy, supernatural martial arts, hypnotism, lots of options that don't have to be magic if you want a more forgiving setting.

And if you are already porting in paths of war, yeah, you want a more forgiving setting. :)

[Saintheart]

I don't have any experience with Spheres, but the way Midnight is basically constructed is that player-accessible spells are down to Core only, the cleric class can only be taken by agents of the Dark God (i.e. NPC only), and any spell which is Cleric-only can't be taken by PCs, full stop. (Not to mention that clerics, i.e. NPCs, have access to Core plus every other splatbook, explicitly.)

Access to magic is much, much more restricted in practice, and that's pretty much by design since the writers of Midnight realised pretty early on that for a grimdark setting where the bad guys hold virtually all the cards, third edition magic as written simply is too uncontrollable, so they dropped a nuke on it.

That's on top of the fact that even using magic or possessing any magic item is against the law and punishable by death by the Dark God's agents, which they're scarily well-adapted to enforce since they basically have familiars that just Detect Magic everywhere they go. In terms of the intended power level of the average party in the campaign, it's perhaps telling that of all the default PC classes, only the Barbarian and Rogue were left unaltered and work as-is. Everything else was nerfed, flat-out removed, or given back as a much less strong PrC. The setting is geared toward magic being more difficult to use and more difficult to make versatile.

Point being - Midnight is already a major hack of the as-is third edition system to such a point that you're just about playing a different game. This is one of its biggest points in favour and why it sold enough copies back in its heyday to spawn about 14 splatbooks and a direct-to-video movie. But if you're talking about introducing Spheres you are bringing a hacked 3.5 ruleset into a hacked 3.5 ruleset. That's something to proceed with caution with, and frankly I'd suggest maybe playing Midnight as-is rather than trying to work out how Spheres' balance interacts with the massive changes that Midnight introduces. Or at least you've gotta think carefully about what sort of tone and campaign you want; if you're planning on using Spheres as some way around Midnight's massive retardation of magic, then you might want to consider whether you really want to run a Midnight campaign. Just saying: Midnight is geared both in fluff and mechanics to make the PCs desperate freedom fighters against an enemy that is very difficult to win against. If you make casters anywhere near as capable or as versatile as they are in a standard 3.0 or Pathfinder game, it has a good chance of breaking Midnight.

[StSword]

If you make casters anywhere near as capable or as versatile as they are in a standard 3.0 or Pathfinder game, it has a good chance of breaking Midnight.

Spherecasters are in my opinion the Pathfinder successor to Dragonfire adepts and Warlocks.

So above martials, but not so prone of taking a game and breaking it over their knee.

At 20th level, a human full caster spherecaster like say an Incanter, the sphere Wizard equivalent, would have 25 sphere talents, barring feat expenditure. A human 20th level Sorcerer in Pathfinder could know 60 spells plus cantrips at that same point. So yeah a Sorcerer can have almost as many tricks up their sleeves just from their favored class bonuses.

So making spherecasters as versatile as Vancian casters was really not a priority, you see. Spherecasters are more like say Fairy Tail, where individuality is the order of the day as opposed to swiss army knife magic.

Although in Midnight I'd certainly suggest keeping the evil clerics regular old Vancian casters, because in Midnight it's fitting for the bad guys to have access to CODzilla.

[AsuraKyoko]

Spheres as a system overall does a good job of making characters of roughly the same power level across the board. Naturally there are some options that are significantly stronger than others, but classes are roughly within one tier of each other, including the Spheres of Might classes. I've also found that it does wonders for modeling other fantasy settings for which vancian magic doesn't fit, like Lord of the Rings (or most other fantasy settings, honestly).

[SangoProduction]

It's a low magic setting.
I would restrict everyone to non-casting classes / archetypes, and if they want to cast, take the feats to do so.
Maybe double the spell point cost of traditionally divine-like spheres like Life and Death (although arcane can do it, it's less common).
Spheres of Might does give a nice baseline power to martials (although it definitely does assume you're using some tricks to raise said power). Therefore lack of magic items isn't that bad. Same with the automatic progression alternative rules.
But you did say it's supposed to be oppressive, so such "easing of restrictions" might not actually be what you want. (I know. Rich coming from me. But still.)
All that said, if you are still looking to use Spheres, and want more players, I would not mind playing.

[StSword]

I think people are over reacting a bit here.

The Channeler class from Midnight gets more spells known than a spherecaster gets magical talents-

channeler- Starts with one spell for free from magecraft feat.

Starting at level 2 they get two bonus spells per level, so that's up to 38 spells known there.

Starting at level 2, and every three levels after that, they learn a new spell from their free spellcasting feat, for another seven spells known.

If the versatility of a Channeler doesn't break the setting, I fail to see how spherecasters with less versatility are going to break the setting open like a piggy bank.

Midnight is low magic, it's not Grimm Tales.

[Ualaa]

Thanks for the input everyone.

My players all optimize and are very tactical... same group for over 30 years now.
They voted for Midnight, over Tomb of Abysthor into Slumbering Tsar or Sword of Air or Zeitgeist.

I'd like to make it a challenging setting, as it seems to be intended.

I was tempted with a 15 point buy, but...
The scarcity of magical items and that buffs frequently won't be a good idea, probably 20 point buy.

Overall low magic, although players can choose magic classes if they want them.
The anti-magic guys can hunt magic use, so that is always going to be potentially bad.

Without access to the Astral, Outer Planes, Ethereal or Inner Planes, a bunch of magical type effects just aren't possible.
The setting suggests banning: Blink, Etherealness, Dimension Door, Teleport, Tree Stride, Gate, Plane Shift, Astral Projection, Rope Trick, Bags of Holding/Portable Holes, Monster/Summon Nature's Ally, Planar Ally, Planar Binding or anything similar to those effects.
For spheres, probably nothing from Conjuration or Warp.

On top of that, traditional divine magic is only going to be available to the bad guys.
Divine magic could be Death, Divination (Divine, but not Sense), Life, and Protection spheres.

Our group typically plays with:
- Ultimate Spheres of Power, Champions of the Spheres, Spheres of Might, other sphere stuff that wasn't updated by USoP; generally if a (Expanded Options/USoP) caster archetype is available, it has to be taken
- Path of War, Path of War Expanded, and we were allowing Medic but that likely isn't appropriate in this setting.
- Ultimate Psionics has been available, but it might be easier to disallow (since it is seldom used anyway) rather than figure out which effects are disallowed... I like to give options, but psionics allows easy healing, which goes against the theme of the setting.

The heroic paths have some features, but a lot of Vancian stuff and most of it from a prior edition.
I'm leaning towards just not including those.

In the setting, magic items are exceedingly rare.
For a century, an occupying force that essentially has constant Detect Magic, has destroyed almost every magic item they've come across.
So not a lot of magic items.
For the setting to be challenging, probably avoid Automatic Progression.

The economy is a barter based system.
For game terms, it uses Value Points (VP).
Depending on your area of the world, and the resources they have there, some things are vary in value.
Beyond starting gold, none of which can be saved if unspent, it is going to be a barter system... with value only for things that enhance survival.

I like the idea of the languages as well.
Quite a few languages, and no real common tongue.
Pidgin, Competence and Fluent levels depending on skill ranks.
Illiterate without a feat for each language, if someone wants to read rather than just speak.

[StSword]

If you like the concept of paths, you might want to look at Samurai Sheepdog, it has "convergences" inspired by Midnight, for the Pathfinder system. But you know, ignore that if you don't care.

It also has a class based on the Midnight Legate appropriately called the Midnight Legate in Book of Many Things.

Do you not want a magic item equivalents, or do you just think Automatic Progression is too powerful for the game you want?

Grittier Rules by Eridanus Books has rules for psychogenic magic item replacements- Like a family heirloom that supposedly has kept the family alive for generations might be a sword that gives a +2 morale bonus to hit because the player believes it works better than other swords, or the "magic charm" from the village wise woman might give a morale bonus to resist disease, because everyone knows that old woman knows things.

Mythic Heroes by Bad Axe Games uses the action point optional rules from 3x and expands them by giving player characters "mythic archetypes" based on Jungian archetypes that gives more options, so a character might be a Hero, Trickster, Oracle, etc.

[Kitsuneymg]

For spheres, probably nothing from Conjuration or Warp.

On top of that, traditional divine magic is only going to be available to the bad guys.
Divine magic could be Death, Divination (Divine, but not Sense), Life, and Protection spheres.

Keep protection. That’s wall of force, mage armor, shield, etc. Ban Fate. Fate is all the divine/alignment based stuff. Maybe just ban consecrations and words, but keep motifs. I could see keeping those, but the others should be bad guy only.

[StSword]

Honestly all this talk about banned spheres just seems odd to me.

The Midnight Channeler has animate dead in its spell list, have detect magic in their spell list, has both summon monster and summon nature's ally in their spell list, has the cure spells in their spell list.

And barring the banned spells of course, can pick up druid and ranger spells, because Midnight doesn't differentiate from druidic style magic or arcane magic, categorizing both as channeling magic.

So if the goal is to be true to Midnight, well, then banning abilities casters explicitly can do in Midnight is a counterintuitive move.

If it's about desired power levels, well I don't know.

I've never actually had experience with a game that used both SoP and PoW.

But just looking at things, I wouldn't think spherecasters need much nerfing, if any, for the sake of PoW martials.

Honestly, spheres of power fits right in Midnight, a system of magic that doesn't differentiate between spell lists and anyone can pick up, in a setting in which anyone can pick up magic and largely doesn't differentiate between spell lists.

It's Path of War that seems like the odd man out here.

In a setting in which martials can do as much damage as a fireball spell, I have no doubt that the Emperor from Star Wars expy would have Legates scouring the country side to kill those with Detect Fighting Magic as a class feature.

Honestly, Spheres of Might seems like a better fit setting wise. Or Necromancers of the Northwest's Books of Martial Action 1 and 2.

Obviously ignore me if you'd have to pry the Path of War from the cold dead fingers of one's players.

That being said, have you taken a look at the Voltaic Class from Lost Spheres? It's a lower powered path of war class that runs off of stamina, and learns new maneuvers through an "Eureka!" style inspiration system.

So you might want to take inspiration from it for tweaking PoW to make it seem like an organic part of the setting.