Wizardry: Complete Arcane Spells II

Wizardry: Complete Arcane Spells II

Accuracy is difficult. I already adapted Exacting Shot from Complete Adventurer to give +2 to attack rolls with a ranged weapons, and increased Accuracy would be worse despite the underlying advantage having the same cost due to hitting the -80% cap. Thus, I decided to make this one last longer, but provide a +3 bonus to Acc to compensate. Now the two spells should be competitive.

Body Outside Body is an interesting spell just because it uses an advantage that you barely ever see in use - Duplication. This is a powerful spell, but it has an appropriately high cost.

Chameleon is a simple illusion that lets the subject blend into the surroundings.

Cloud Chariot is a costly spell that lets you travel really fast but requires character point expenditure.

Cobra's Breath is a cone poison attack and the first time I'm using Blood Agent as an enhancement.

Commune with Spirit is mostly intended for the oriental wu jen class and shamans, but I see nothing wrong with adding it to the variant Spirit College that I'm using. This is the first time I'm using the Medium advantage.

Corpse Candle is a spooky spell with a janky build. Illuminates the area and outlines invisible and ethereal creatures.

Creeping Darkness is a mobile and shapeable variant of Deeper Darkness. In the original version, it also blocks sound, but I found it inappropriate.

Dancing Blade is a simple spell in concept, but not in execution. I tried to write something of a flowchart for how it is supposed to operate.

Mass Darkvision is just a mass version of Darkvision.

Wizardry: Complete Arcane Spells I

Wizardry: Complete Arcane Spells I

The next book on the list will be Complete Arcane. This one has a long list of new spells because it introduces three new spellcasting classes. There's going to be plenty of combat spells (this book introduced the wargame class, after all), but many of them probably are going to be redundant. We'll see!

Absorption is a self-only buff that lets you absorb other spells.

Anticipate Teleportation is a pretty cool spell that delays all teleportation effects in the area and reveals their destination.

Arc of Lightning is a unique lightning attack spell that causes a lightning bolt to run between two distant targets.

Arrow of Bone turns an arrow or a crossbow bolt into a deadly necromantic projectile.

Backbiter - now that's what I call a fun spell. I remember it being used in my D&D games of the past. It has a very unintuitive build under the hood.

Bands of Steel is a spell that conjures metal hoops that pin the victim's limbs to the torso.

Blackfire is an interesting necromantic spell with contagious effects.

Blades of Fire is a slightly unusual weapon buff spell that may affect two weapons at once and does not require gestures. Thus, you can use it when dual-wielding.

Blast of Flame is quite boring - just a wider and longer version of Burning Hands. But why not? I made it take longer to cast to prevent this spell from making its shorter version redundant.

Random Disease Generator

Random Disease Generator

Diseases in RPGs are very much underused. How many times have you seen Resistant/Immunity to Disease? And how many times have you seen a disease actually come up in the game? The answers are probably “occasionally to often” and “never”. It’s understandable – diseases are passive threats that, depending on their severity, either mildly inconvenience you or force you to rest for a long time akin to crippling injuries. If one PC caught a debilitating disease, then everyone has to wait for him to recover, or the GM just goes “Okay, you find a suitable priest, pay him $100, and he cures you. Let’s keep going.” Diseases probably work much better if you’re using 1:1 time. But I’m writing not to advocate for 1:1 time (mostly), but to tackle an adjacent problem – GURPS has barely any diseases statted up. There is one in GURPS Basic Set, some in GURPS Bio-Tech, and a couple in, surprisingly, GURPS Tactical Shooting: Extreme Conditions. In addition to that, GURPS has a generic “infection” that sort of makes things better. I did write up some D&D and Pathfinder diseases in the past, but how do you decide on what disease does the character catch?

A few days ago, I opened the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide and found a bunch of tables for random disease and parasitic infestation generation on the first pages. To be honest, they look pretty damn good, and they inspired me to adapt them to GURPS. As always, I’m not doing a 1-to-1 conversion, because GURPS has a different degree of granularity, and I have to take into account more parameters than AD&D did. I hope this will be useful!

Wizardry: Cityscape Spells

Wizardry: Cityscape Spells

I've forgotten Cancel Spells, so let's fix that. In addition, let's convert the few spells from the Cityscape splatbook.

Cancel Spells is not a D&D spell, but a GURPS Sorcery spell that is nonetheless very much necessary, so here it is. It's unique in that it's a universal spell that doesn't belong to any college.

Peacebond is a spell the locks a weapon to its sheath. This is not an offensive spell, but something cast by magical law enforcement who hate fun.

False Peacebond is the same, except that one individual chosen at the time of casting can draw the weapon freely.

Detect Weaponry is another spell for the fun police in impolite societies.

Impeding Stones creates an area of unstable terrain on rocky surfaces.

Leomund's Spacious Carriage creates a carriage and a pair of horses to pull it.

Secret Weapon gives a big Holdout bonus to hide the enchanted weapon.

Zone of Peace is an area of no-fun-allowed.

Summon Pest Swarm is the only druid-exclusive spell from the book and in GURPS... it's a bit counterproductive. The Nature power modifier makes the spell weaker in urban environments, but the spell only works in settled places, so there's no way to avoid the penalty. A cool spell for urban druids, however.

Wizardry: Frostburn Spells VIII

Wizardry: Frostburn Spells VIII

Suppress Flame is a weird spell. The effects aren't very strong, but it is a 6th-level spell that also requires an expensive and rare material component. Here, I drastically reduced the duration and removed the need for the material component.

Thaw is the inverse of Flash-Freeze.

Thin Air decreases atmospheric pressure in an area.

Wall of Coldfire creates a wall that deals damage of this exotic frostburn type.

Zone of Glacial Cold creates a zone of cold that deals damage and nullifies Infravision.

That's it, isn't it? No, we still have the epic spells! Well, at least one of them that I'd like to keep.

Coldfire Blast doesn't really feel like an epic spell. Just a frostburn fireball.

Druidic Spells: Frostburn Spells

Druidic Spells: Frostburn Spells

Now that I'm done with wizard spells from Frostburn, I still have to druidify some of them. The book actually assigned many spells to the druid spell list, but since I separated Cold/Ice and Water into two different colleges, most of the spells are not going to make it in. At least for now, because I like the concept of an arctic druid, but I want to restrict the list to "standard" stuff first. Aside from the adjusted spells from previous posts, there are new spells that are exclusive to druids, mostly related to weather manipulation

Dire Winter drastically lowers the ambient temperature for one day in a huge area. An expensive spell for powerful druids using cooperative magic or ritual casting.

Evergreen is a spell that makes plants (both regular ones and animated ones) resistant to cold for almost a week.

Fimbulwinter causes intense winter for 8d weeks. A very powerful spell where I had to stretch the rules a bit, but I think the result is fine, and the cost is appropriate for the effect.

Ice Age is an even bigger version of Dire Winter. I intentionally didn't include a character point cost because I think it would be too cheap if I did that. Now, it's a ritual casting spell that seems to have an appropriate cost. Don't mess with druid circles.

Wizardry: Frostburn Spells VII

Wizardry: Frostburn Spells VII

Mantle of the Icy Soul by RAW should cost 450 (!!!) character points for each casting!, but I think that 33 is more reasonable. After all, you are imbueing the subject with a 33-point meta-trait, and the spell itself is something of a point tax to be able to do that to others.

Meld into Ice is an ice variant of Meld into Stone. Ice is a category that is four times cheaper, so this spell is very affordable. By default, it also includes snow, so I had to remove this capability with a limitation.

Mindfrost is a weak damaging spell that freezes the mental pathways of the subject.

Move Snow and Ice is an ice variant of Move Earth. Ended up being a point more expensive due to the inclusion of snow.

Numbing Sphere is a cold variant of Flaming Sphere.

Obscuring Snow is a snow variant of Obscuring Mist.

Pass through Ice sounds like a variant spell, but it actually isn't. The swimming part is something unique and interesting.

Raise Ice Forest is interesting. Did you know that there's a formula to calculate a volume of a tree? No I do know that. A 15-foot-tall tree with a 5-foot-diameter trunk at breast height has a volume of 4.155 cubic meters or 146.733 cubic feet. With ice having density of 53 lbs/cubic foot, an ice tree would weigh 7777 lbs.

Shivering Touch is a melee cold spell.

Snow Walk is a simple buff that lets the subject move and fight on snow unpenalized.

Snow Wave may seem very expensive for what it does, but you can layer the created snow! This is a very powerful battlefield control spell.

Snowdrift is a snow variant of Ice Shape.

Snowsight is peculiar. How do you give yourself an ability to see unimpeded through falling snow? Penetrating Vision, even with Specific, even with Accessibility, Only falling snow would be extremely expensive. But think about it logically (*hits pipe*), if darkness is a kind of Vision penalty that is completely ignored by Dark Vision, why not create a variant advantage that ignores all Vision penalties for falling snow? I think that is sensible.