Dungeons & Dummies: Blood & Power, or How to Master the Arcane Arts

*DISCLAIMER*: this whole project and especially the magic rules look suspiciously like the SEACAT rules in the Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luka Rejec. This is totally by accident, unless Mr Rejec read my mind and ate my dreams of making the best ruleset ever, which I cannot in good conscience totally exclude (would explain why I stopped dreaming about games and started dreaming about everything bad I’ve done in the past year or so).
Anyway, check out the Ultraviolet Grasslands. They’re better than anything BWG will ever make.

If my words don't convince you I'm sure this cover will.
UVG Introduction by Luka Rejec.

If I don’t break down crying this time you’ll have a complete game perfectly working. Mostly working. Almost working.
This is how I run Magic and Spells. It's heavily inspired by Logan's Maleficarum, check it out if you haven't already.

I'm pretty confident this rules could be easily adapted to other ruleset if one wanted to. Feel free to do to so, and let me know if they were any trouble for your players.

These rules are somewhat dangerous, and if followed I'm pretty sure nobody in their right mind would ever try to cast spells, especially considering how lethal small blunders can be in my system. Usually, my players are not in their right mind so those rules just make everything much more interesting.

Wizard and his Skull Grimorie.
Occultist from Darkest Dungeon.

Point Me to the Spells:

Spells are ways to tap into the arcane and conjure the unthinkable out of sheer nothingness. Characters can cast any Spell that they want, as long as they have access to them.

Digression: Arcane powers are not occult powers. I make a big distinction in my games between them, but this is not actually very important and if you feel that it's  not suited for you games you can easily ignore it. It's almost totally a fluffy distinction (that is somewhat enforced by the rules by occult Profession but you can easily handwave it).

Spells are procedures, of both actions to perform and thoughts to hold to. These are stored in various forms and ways, usually very personal and diverse. A collection of up to 3 Spells is called a Grimoire. Grimoires can be books, collections of rat skulls, inscriptions on metal plates and so on. Each Grimoire weights like 1 item.

Casting a Spell requires an Action and a Spell Point. Characters have no Spell Points by default, but can gain some if they have Levels. Casting a Spell from a Grimoire that wasn't written by you takes an extra Action to find and fully understand it.

A character can always forego the use of a Spell Point by taking an Affliction. This always consumes an extra Action, and always risks causing a Doom.

Digression: Dooms are explained below. It's basically a very fancy way of calling a miscast, but they are also much more since they last like scars and I run by assuming people is scared shitless of magicians and other who dabble in Arcane matters.

Spells can be empowered by expending and extra Spell Point. Empowered Spells have different effects.

Extra digression #1: my basic assumption is that magic is a fundamentally unknown and extremely scary/showy business. I check for Morale and hostility when a spell is cast, with both enemies and hirelings having a chance of running away. Magic is something so esoteric and outside a normal person's possibilities that casting a spell is felt like a contact with something totally unnatural and beyond reality. I plan on expanding on that someday with my spin on level drain shamelessly stolen from Basic Red.

Extra digression #2:I have not thought about spell research rules yet. I actually do not want to include them, because spells are not something to be researched in the safety of your home but something to be found in the depths of the Heart of Darkness that are the Wilds and the Dungeons. People come back changed. Magic is a possible reason.

That's a little bit what happens here.
Source unknown.

The Dooms of Parnassus:

Dooms are unleashed when one fails to harness the Arcane energies. They are destructive for the unfortunate ones who fall prey to them, and for everyone around them.

Dooms have an immediate, terrible and short-lasting effect, and a permanent magical scar that lasts forever. The scars are unnatural and unnerving, and make most people uncomfortable just by looking at them. Those who know the nature of those scars are usually very hostile or very friendly to the unfortunate marked ones, depending on their attitude to Magic.

Digression: these are basically miscasts, magical mishaps or however you prefer calling them. They are meant to change the rules of the game for a certain time and force you to live with the consequences of the terrible sin of Magic. They leave permanent scars that forever mark you as Magic User, and even to those oblivious to the existence of Magic still feel very off and scary.

Each creature mad enough to try their hands at manipulating the Arcane has its own Doom. The first time you would be victim of your Doom, randomly roll for it. Every subsequent time, you always fall victim to that Doom you first rolled.

Digression: note your doom on your sheet. This is to speed up play, but it's not something I'm 100% behind. It would be silly to have people with a thousand different magical scars though, so maybe it's better like that.

Whenever you risk unleashing your Doom, make an Intelligence Saving Throw. If you pass it, you don't fall victim to it, otherwise the Arcane energies flow beyond your control and take hold of your very being. When you unleash your Doom, you lose the spell you were trying to cast.

You risk unleashing your Doom if at least one of the following is true:
-You cast a Spell you’ve never cast before
-You take an Affliction instead of using a normal Spell Point
-You cast a Spell from a Grimoire not written by you
-You cast a Spell that must be explicitly cast as part of a Ritual

Digression: lots of possible causes. They don’t cumulate, you still make a single Saving Throw and that’s it. It wouldn’t feel fair to make you roll for failure.

Dooms are no joke.
Panel from The Demon n.10 by Jack Kirby.

Here are 2 example Dooms:

The Calcareous Trumpets of Light:
Your eyes blacken and melt, leaving your eye sockets empty and each occupied by a bone tube with a small pearl in the back of it. The pearl progressively grows in the next d10 (d20/2) hours, becoming new eyes perfectly identical to the old ones. While your eyes are reforming, you are completely blind: you can only see calcareous deposits (like bones), ignoring completely all the other objects and materials in sight. You are effectively blind except you can see items made of bones, and creatures with bones in their body (which are the only thing you can see). They still need to be lit as usual to be seen.
Scar: Your original melted eyes remain on your face, like mascara ruined by crying. It can never be washed off.

The Left Hand of Fate:
Your left hand shrinks, as if dried, and feels like charcoal to the touch. It becomes independent from you for the next d4 (d20/4) hours, animated by an arcane wind. It has 1 of 4 objectives chosen randomly each time (d4, d20/4):

1. Injure you and others, it attacks once each 10 minutes inflicting an Affliction (either on you or on somebody near you).
2. Prevent metal items from being used, +1 to the Difficulty of each check involving metal items, and they are always subject to Wear when used.
3. Steal heat from this world, it throws itself (and you) on every fire and heat source in close proximity, you take an Affliction and make a Dexterity Saving Throw to not fall in it and catch fire.
4. Bring everyone back to the Void. It will whisper spell fragments, causing everyone in a 120’ radius to risk unleashing their Doom if they try to cast a Spell. You have to make an Intelligence Saving Throw every hour to not involuntarily cast a random Spell from your Grimoire. If you do, you immediately unleash the Doom of a random creature up to 120’ away from you.

You can’t do anything that requires 2 hands until the Doom is over.
Scar: your left hand comes back under your control, but its appearance does not revert.

Digression: your eyes go DOOT DOOT (you can only see the bones of your friends, no facial expressions or clothes, and you can’t see anything else at all) or your hand wants you dead (in many funny ways). Both are pretty bad things in the middle of a dungeon. Both are scary to witness and both leave ugly scars that you will probably want to hide from others and from yourself, if you’re anything like me. So both are pretty good Dooms overall.

Rituals require patience and courage.
The Condemned from CHIN CHIN'S RETURN by Filthy Frank.

The Ropes of Ritualism:

Spells can be casted as parts of a Rituals. Spells casted in a Ritual never unleash a Doom if the ritual is completed correctly. A Ritual requires a day (8 hours of work) of preparation for each Spell Point used in the Ritual, and requires the participants to invest at least 3 Spell Points each day in it. For every 3 extra Spell Points invested each, the final spell gets an extra Spell Point.

If any of the participants invest Spell Points by getting an Affliction, they risk unleashing their Doom. If that happens, all the progress of the day is lost, and the Doom is normally invoked. No more than 1 Spell Point can be invested that way, however by instead receiving a full Injury 3 Spell Points can be inserted.

The Ritual can be sabotaged, attacked or interrupted. If so, when the Spell is cast, every participant risks unleashing his Doom, and the Spells risks being subverted or corrupted.

Digression: no explicit rules for corrupting spells or disturbing rituals, because I want to see what people comes up with when the local cult is unleashing Cthulhu. Maybe a spell corruption table would be nice, but I’m too lazy for it right now.

At the end of the Ritual preparations, it can be performed anytime as long as the group preparing it does not move away from where it was prepared. Performing a Ritual takes an hour for each Spell Point to be casted. Some Spells can only be casted safely as part of a Ritual.

In order to cast the Spell as part of the Ritual, it must have been fully and properly copied on the Grimoire of one of the participants, along with specific instructions for the Ritual casting of that Spell (which take up space as a single Spell). Spells that can be only cast safely as part of a Ritual don’t have an additional set of instruction for that.

Extra Digression #3: expect Ritual-only spells to use a lot of Spell Levels and have scaling effects accordingly. If they are cast outside a Ritual, they should be limited to a single spell level (and cause your Doom). Also expect some to have a minimum number of Spell Points to be casted, because you can’t just summon mini-Cthulhu.

Magic items are the keys to the door of greatness.
Pyromancer from Dark Souls.

Conduits and Catalysts:

Some items can become conduits for Arcane powers. These items are known as Catalysts. Catalysts can take any form and have any function (including no function at all, like a wooden stick that blows bubbles out of one end).

Catalysts are difficult to recognize as such. They have no discernible quality until activated, except for maybe some eccentricity left by their maker.

Activating a Catalyst usually requires knowing its true nature, and focusing on it to control the flow of Arcane energies. They are usually imbibed with Spell or similar reality-defying effect. They require an Action to be activated if you know their activation method.

Once activated, a Catalyst can either be used to channel its powers (usually it has a limited number of uses) or it can be drained of power to receive a single Spell Slot. Drained items can’t be used anymore. Some Catalyst are only used to store Arcane powers, and have no practical use beyond that.

Catalysts of immense power.
Venerable Dreadnaught from Warhammer 40k.

Digression: this is the true reason why seasoned wizard go around with useless magic junk. Even a belt that shows sparkles when you wear it becomes a source for that single extra spell you will use to defeat your archrival.

Extra digression #4: Ancient Catalysts of course tend to house ancient forgotten dangerous spells, so they are really sought after, while “newer” ones are rare and usually do just stupid stuff (if they actually work at all). No crafting rules for now for the same reason as spells. Also, make something up for uncovering the true nature of Catalysts. I guess a “Discover True Nature” spell would be in order. I was actually planning of making it part of my level drain rules, but since they aren’t there yet I guess you’ll have to make do.

I wonder why the fuck I’m still alive:

Spells and other Dooms will come as I write mage guys. You had no idea in what shape those few simple concepts were before I wrote this post, so please bear with me. I will dump a few other subclasses, then I will probably start writing actual interesting stuff now that everybody knows how I roll.