Der PigDog's PigBlog

This post gives new magic rules inspired by Ars Magica. It's written for my own fantasy heartbreaker, but it should be compatible with most or all OSR games. Try using this in place of your Magic-User's normal magic rules, or add these as variant casting and spell-learning rules for a different casting class. These rules offer supreme flexibility and extensibility for a sort of magic grounded in magical traditions. I provide links to the traditions at the bottom of the post. These rules also model spell research, including the creation of brand new spells, better than any I have seen in any OSR game. What a spell is A spell is a combination of a noun and verb, spoken out loud, plus some gestures and effort. Your specific magical tradition is going to give you the specific list of nouns and verbs that can combine to form a spell. The same noun-verb combination can be used to cast a bunch of different spells; the noun and the verb just give the basic family of effects. For instan...

Skimmed through the Ars Magica book Hedge Magic this morning. Pretty much every hedge tradition listed there is more interesting than the default Hermetic magic. It's a better use of my time to adapt these cooler magic rules than the main ones. These are simpler, too! An image of a Gruagrach from the Ars Magica book on hedge magic. Might as well pretend this is "fair use" You won't be able to use this without the material in the Ars Magica conversion basics . Gruagrachan (how do I decline this noun? gotta look it up at some point) magic is inspired by the Picts and druids and all that. Roll 4d18 (lol) for your starting spells (see below for spell descriptions) and take "some practice" at every skill necessary to cast the spells. If you've got two spells using the same noun, bump up the skill level by 1. If all your spells use the same verb, bump up the skill level by 1. Blessing of Urban Wisdom for the Rustic Blessing of the Swordsman's Expertise St...

In this post, I give a unified procedure for resolving tasks in games. This procedure has a low handling time, but it is extensible and flexible enough to model tasks at many different scales of abstraction. It has been extensively play-tested, by myself and others, used without much difficulty in over 200 sessions. Basic procedure Use the following procedure to model a simple, isolated task, with a binary outcome. Define the task. Assign the task a base difficulty as a score TN/D . " D " is the die size you're going to use (for instance, 6, 10, 20), and " TN " is the target number; you want to roll TN or lower on the die. Also assign the task a period, the time required to complete it. Adjust for situational factors. Count up situational advantages and disadvantages. Cancel one advantage for one disadvantage until only one type remains or neither applies. Assign bonus dice for remaining advantages and penalty dice for remaining disadvantages, 1 die each. Ro...

 I have thought a lot about this while waiting for Eero to write up his CWP and thought I might put mine in the ring first. A lot of it is based on the stuff I've seen in the RPG Theory discord, but not all of it. Some small preparatory notes. The skill system, whatever it is, and the task "system", are totally separate. Their formalisms are just not the same. The task "system" is not a system at all, it is a vocabulary with which you can construct individual task resolutions. Various tasks are so different it would be nonsense to treat them all the same. Simple skill system In the simple skill system, you either have a skill or you don't. What the skill is is completely free-form; anything you can be good at is a skill. At any point, you can declare that you had a skill the entire time, if the skill is consonant with your background and current situation. If you want to train a new skill, go train it, for however long that would take. Maybe the skill requi...