Treasure: Ring of Protection

Treasure: Ring of Protection

A staple of all fantasy treasure piles is this simple magic item - a ring of protection. I used it to see the price differences between different enchantment systems - Sorcery, spell-less Sorcery (when you simply enchant the advantages required without using a predefined spell), and Metatronic Generators (from Pyramid #3-46). You can see the Armor spell in GURPS Sorcery - Protection and Warning Spells.

Powers: Incarnum, Part 2 - Totemism

Powers: Incarnum, Part 2 - Totemism

Here's the second and last part of the incarnum power. This one deals with magical beasts instead of moral principles and forces. Totemist provides an additional special chakra - the totem chakra. Almost every soulmeld grants the character a natural attack when bound to the totem chakra. The totemist class in D&D was essentially a build-your-own-monster class, and was quite fun to play. Let's see my attempt at converting it!

A GCS library with all soulmelds can be downloaded here.

Powers: Incarnum, Part 1 - Meldshaping

Powers: Incarnum, Part 1 - Meldshaping

Magic of Incarnum was released quite late during the lifetime of D&D 3.5 and contained a whole new "magic" subsystem with three new classes, tons of options. The wielders of incarnum (raw stuff of souls) create semi-permanent magic items on their bodies and bind them to their chakras to gain additional benefits. In addition, incarnum bears a moral flavor, and this fact makes this power more appropriate for settings where good, evil, chaos, and order powers are clearly defined. I liked everything about this book - the mechanics (eve though some options were quite bad), the lore, the flavor, the art, and I can't recommend it enough even if you don't play D&D. While converting this subsystem to GURPS I've encountered many problems. In this state it doesn't look like an exact mechanical duplicate of the original subsystem, but it still looks quite unique and different from all other powers.

A GCS library with all soulmelds can be downloaded here.

Powers: Channel Energy

Powers: Channel Energy

"Traditional" fantasy clerics usually at least somehow interact with the undead. In D&D clerics can turn or rebuke undead. This ability can easily be represented with the True Faith advantage, Turn Zombie spell from GURPS Magic or GURPS Thaumatology - Sorcery. But in Pathfinder RPG clerics channel positive or negative energy, depending on their alignment. This energy heals the living and harms the undead or vice versa. Since there's no positive energy or negative energy damage type in GURPS, such abilities are more tricky to build than usual.

Sorcery: Blood Magic

Sorcery: Blood Magic

And now let's take a short break from the D&D conversions. Dominions 4 is one of my favourite video games. It's a fantasy turn-based strategy with a vast amount of nations, monsters, and spells. The most unique magic school in the game is the blood magic. It requires a special resource - blood slaves that must be sacrificed. Most of the spells of this type of magic deal with madness, bloodletting, blood boiling, healing, and, most importantly, summoning demons and TMWNMTK.

Blood Mage Spell List can be found by following the link.

Sorcery: Pact Magic

Sorcery: Pact Magic

And here goes the last magical subsystem from Tome of Magic converted into Sorcery. This one is much more different than the others, as the spell consist solely out of various Alternate Forms. The basic idea was taken from the Spirit Vessels section in GURPS Thaumatology. I list every single D&D 3.5 vestige ever printed, but with no fluff. Better get Tome of Magic and read it, because the fluff is superb (and the implementation too, if you're interested in the mechanics).

Sorcery: Truename Magic

Sorcery: Truename Magic

As I said in the previous post, Tome of Magic provides three magic subsystems. Truename magic is rich in flavor, but suffers from terrible implementation. I remember one player and I were playing some homebrew "fixed" truenamers in D&D and had a lot of fun.

It looks like the authors came up with these subsystems by capitalizing on one of the spell components. Shadow magic only requires gestures, and truename magic requires only magical words.  But truenaming also had this unique thing - every utterance had an additional reversed version of itself. Here's my attempt at bringing this system over to GURPS.