Sorcery: Alternative Colleges

Sorcery: Alternative Colleges

GURPS Magic divides its hundreds of spells into 24 colleges of magic, which is a lot. GURPS Thaumatology has an entire section devoted to alternative college framework, because what works for one game might not work for the other. It even suggests making different college trees for different spellcasting traditions - that might add a lot of flavor. In this post, I'll tell you what colleges are changed in my games, and what colleges are added.

For Sorcery-based magic, colleges are important when defining the scope of a magical tradition or a character. I guess some other traits may refer to colleges, such as limited Magic Resistance or Resistant, but that's minor.

Here's what I do:

1. I add the college of Metal, introduced in Pyramid #3-91, removing all the metal spells from the Technological college, and removing all metal effects from some of the Earth spells.

2. GURPS Magic: Plant Spells introduces the variant Fungus college, and I use it too, just to make surface-dwelling druids feel a bit different from the Underdark druids that live in the mushroom forests.

3. I also introduce some colleges of my own making - Poison, Time, Gravity, Force, and Spirit. Poison and Time are quite distinct from the rest. Force borrows a lot of spells from the colleges of Movement and Protection & Warning, adding some new spells in the mix. Gravity has a lot of intersections with the Force college, but it still maintains a distinct feel. Spirit is a variant of the Necromantic college, mostly intended for shamans. It removes some death-related spells, but add some other soul-related spells that were not in the Necromantic college.

4. There's also spells that do not belong to any college. These consist of spells that just do not feel thematic enough to assign to a college. Some of them may be accessible to wizards who have no scope limitation, and some of them have a divine nature (for example, Sense (Ethical Category)) that are only available to clerics and other divine spellcasters.

And here are some thoughts on potential new/altered colleges:

Some of the "double" colleges can be split. For example, Illusion and Creation is a quite small college whose spell grouping might not make sense for some games. In such games, you should be able to split it into the Illusion college and the Creation college. However, you'd have to expand the spell selection. Or, for the purpose of limitations, you can treat any "half"-college as, well, half a college. Light and Darkness can be split in two. Making and Breaking too (however, there's more Making spells there than Breaking ones). Protection and Warning can be split, but I wouldn't do that. Communication and Empathy probably shouldn't be split either.

If we open up GURPS Grimoire for the third edition, we will see some suggestions about moving all the electircal/lightning spells from the Air and Weather colleges into its own Lightning college. The book also suggests splitting the college of Water (it's a huge one!) into three - Water, Ice, and Acid. I'm strongly considering doing just that.