Sorcery: Shadow Magic

Sorcery: Shadow Magic

Tome of Magic probably is my favorite supplement for Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. It presents three distinct and unique magic subsystems and has amazingly well-written flavor. Pact magic deals with binding vestiges to your soul and gaining their abilities. Shadow magic is all about the shadows of all things, be they living or abstract, like magic. Truename magic allows the user to manipulate the world with the universal true language. Mechanically, only the first third was well done, the other two thirds range from underwhelming to unplayably broken. First, I'll present here a way to convert shadow magic into Sorcery.

Powers: Psionic Enchantment

Powers: Psionic Enchantment

Crafting, and crafting of magical items in particular, for me was one of the most confusing things. Enchantment rules from GURPS Magic could only be used for standard magic spells and didn't provide any guidelines beyond that. Then Pyramid #3-46 came out and presented us the Metatronic Generators. Up until the release of GURPS Thaumatology - Sorcery I thought that there's nothing better than the Metatronic Generators. By statting up some magical items both as Metatronic Generators and as Sorcery items (using spells or simply the advantages I wanted) I came to a conclusion that magical items made using the Sorcery enchantment system generally are more expensive, which could be a good thing if you want to make magic items rare. But what about psionic items? Here's my take on psionic enchantment using Sorcery as a basis:

Powers: Metacreativity

Powers: Metacreativity

I like psionics. But who doesn't? GURPS Psionic Powers is an amazing supplement, that provides tons of interesting powers, abilities, and modifiers. We all are used to the telepaths, tekes, pyros, espers, but those who came from D&D may notice the absence of the metacreativity power. In Dungeons and Dragons psionics is often associated with ectoplasm and crystals. Why? I don't know, but I would like to know. But anyway, here's my take on the metacreativity power in GURPS.

Powers: Control Magic

Powers: Control Magic

GURPS Powers offers the players and the GMs a new interesting advantage - Control. While being versatile and not vague for most of the controllable substances, it is much more difficult to define when dealing with abstract concepts, such as time, space, or magic.

Monster: Ankheg

Monster: Ankheg

Let's do something simpler - a bug monster. The ankheg is a burrowing giant ant-like creature that can spit acid twice a day. These bugs are big, tough, and their acidic bite is nasty. From all the monsters posted until this moment, I've only used ankhegs against my PCs. One of the akhegs got two of its legs cut off with a two-handed sword and then impaled through the skull, and another one survived a bullet through its face from a TL4 pistol, attempted to run away, but got immobilized by a divine spell and then beaten merciless to death with a mace by a cleric of a deity of peace, mercy, and healing.

Monsters: Angels

Monsters: Angels

From front to back - astral deva, planetar, solar

Angels are powerful good outsiders. Biblical angels have a 9-rank hierarchy, and some of the angels have weird non-humanoid forms. For example, the ophanim are wheels with multiple eyes. But D&D prefers generic-looking humanoid angels.

Sorcery: Angelic Spells

Sorcery: Angelic Spells

The next monster entry is going to be angels. D&D angels have many spell-like abilities, and many of the existing Sorcery spells fit, but some spells I've had to make myself. They aren't really anything special. Aid is a simple buff that improves durability and bravery. Continual Flame allows sorcerers to earn for a living being an illuminator. Lesser Restoration and Remove Disease fit very well for clerical "sorcerers" or other magical healers. Plane Shift literally opens up new worlds for sorcerers. Personal Invisibility allows a sorcerer to go unseen, and See Invisible allows him to see sorcerers using Personal Invisibility. Speak with Dead can provide answers when you wanted to intimidate a person with a fireball, but instead burned him a bit too much. Power Word: Stun is just a simple, but useful and showy spell.

Sorcery: More ethical spells

Sorcery: More ethical spells

While statting up some monsters, I've noticed a lack of basic alignment-based spells in Sorcery. The following spells may be useful for sorcerers that use variant moral magic rules from GURPS Thaumatology, particularly so if Sorcery has a divine nature.

Monster: Allip

Monster: Allip

The art looks kind of cool

Now this is an infamous D&D monster - a slayer of many 3rd-level adventurer parties.

Monster: Achaierai

Monster: Achaierai

In this post, I want to take a closer look at a weird monster that I’ve never actually used in D&D or GURPS – the achaierai. Yes, I looked up the pronunciation. These sentient, goofy looking four-legged birds inhabit the plane of Acheron, where they hunt everything that moves. Their depiction varies from edition to edition, but I prefer their 3e incarnation, where they at least have something like a short body instead of being a huge head on legs. So, let’s get to work and see if there is anything interesting there.

Imbuements and Sorcery: Align Weapon

Imbuements and Sorcery: Align Weapon

Alignment is an eternal topic for discussion and debates in the D&D/Pathfinder community. Thankfully or not, GURPS lacks such a thing by default, but GURPS Thaumatology offers some spells related to ethical categories. Personally, I do not use alignments in my GURPS games, but for the purpose of ethical categories-based spells and effects I assume that some creatures, objects, or areas have an ethical aura. For example, when playing in a D&D-style setting the outsiders, characters and items with divine abilities, sacred/unholy places have an aura that represents their cosmic alignment, and this aura can be detected by some abilities. If you use Detect Evil, you can detect a cleric of an evil deity (even if the cleric in question isn't evil himself; maybe he's just appeasing an apocalyptic deity to prevent the destruction of the whole world?), a demon, a devil, but not a simple criminal.

Monsters: Aboleths

Monsters: Aboleths

Their original art doesn't really make them look very intimidating.

I decided to update my very first blogpost – the aboleth. I really like aboleths, they are one of my favorite D&D monsters, and I even picked up Dominions 3 because that game had an aboleth nation. So, who are the aboleths? They are huge fish-like beings with tentacles that drip slime that suffocates air-breathers, but also gives them ability to breathe water, making them dependent on the aboleth for survival. The aboleths possess a racial memory that makes them a great repository of knowledge, as they have been in this world even before the gods. Highly-intelligent, they also have an array of psionic abilities. There are multiple subtypes of aboleths, but I am not going to cover them all in this post, only some of them.