How to: Wu Jen Spellcasting

How to: Wu Jen Spellcasting

Wu jen is an arcane spellcaster class in D&D 3.5 that was introduced in Complete Arcane. Basically, it is a wizard with an oriental flavour. They typically are hermits, have certain taboos, have spellbooks, and specialize on spells of earth, fire, metal, water, and wood.

First, the entire wizardry framework can be found in this post. In short, all spells have college skills attached to them, improvisation can only be done by reading the spellbook, all spells should have somatic/verbal/material components in any combination, and can cost more than 1 FP.

Earth, fire, metal, water, and wood give us five colleges worth of scope limitation, and GURPS Thaumatology: Sorcery says that this is not a meaningful limitation. I tend to agree with that. Now here's a conundrum - Wood/Plant spells are forbidden to arcane spellcasters in my setting (and in Dungeon Fantasy too). What should we do then? Of course, you could just say that wu jens can cast these spells normally, but I am going to jump through hoops. Let's say that the wu jens can cast earth, fire, metal, and water spells as arcane spells (thus, they will have the Magical, -10% power modifier) and wood/plant spells as nature spells (thus, they will have the Nature, -20% power modifier). Employing the Either/Or Limitations rules from GURPS Power-Ups 8: Limitations, let's figure out the final value. (Limited Colleges, Earth, Fire, Metal, Water, -10% and Magical, -10%) or (Limited Colleges, Plant, -40% and Nature, -20%) = 0.2 x 0.6 = 0.12, and that can be rounded to -10%. Wizardly Study already includes Magical, -10%, so it is seamlessly replaced with this one with no cost adjustment.

Next, we have to include the taboos. The list of example taboos in Complete Arcane reminds me a lot of the example Vows in GURPS Basic Set. Thus, Wizardly Study and all spells get the Pact, -10% limitation that force the wu jen to take one major Vow or two minor Vows.

So, Wizardly Study takes -10% limitations, Plant spells take -30% (Pact + Nature), Earth/Fire/Metal/Water spells take -20% (Pact + Magical), plus cost/component limitations.

Thus, Wizardly Study (Wu Jen) costs 8.1 points for level 1 + 4.86 points/additional level.