game design

Is AD&D 2nd edition still oldschool?

There was another discussion started by curious people from outside asking what the deal is with this OSR thing that some fans of Dungeons & Dragons keep talking about in their corners of the internet. Which is always great to see, as it means some new people have already caught interest and they want to be given a sales pitch. And as usual, once the initial questions had been answered, it went on with the typical nitpicky debates about what exactly is oldschool and what isn’t.

And big surprise: It actually went in directions that had me consider some new thoughts. It stil happens. Usually the assumed default cutoff point for oldschool and not oldschool is the shift of D&D from TSR to WotC and the first major overhaul of the rules with the d20 system. But as the discussion moved toward oldschool roleplaying being most importantly about how GMs set up the game and players engage with the game world, it had me wondering whether the shift might have happened even earlier.

The two things in contemporary D&D that for me set it the most apart from OSR gaming are character optimization and adventure paths. Character optimization as it exists today really started with the d20 system, but the idea of having a prewritten story that the players follow goes back much further. My first hunch was that Forgotten Realms set a precedent that became the TSR paradigm for the second edition of AD&D. The old first edition books seemed much less metaplotty than those from second edition. But when I looked it up, it turned out that Dragonlance, which was first an adventure and then a setting while simultaneously being a novel series, preceded Forgoten Realms by three years. This makes it seem more like the Realms where published as a setting in response to the shift already having taken place.

And then Black Vulmea at rpg.net brought up this little “gem”.

By 1986, you have Doug Niles writing in the 1e AD&D DSG, “The story you design for your players is just as important as the world setting you create. In fact, the story line may be the most important element in your campaign. In fact,* the DM’s function may be viewed as that of a bard or storyteller who creates the stuff of heroic fantasy . . .” followed by a five-page of discussion of ‘story structure’ that could be cribbed from a Learning Annex seminar on, “How to Write Short Fiction That Sells!”

So yeah. I am really not surprised that second edition is almost never talked about in an OSR context. This is very strong evidence that as far as TSR is concerned, the oldschool era was already done and over by 1986. Which is 14 years before the launch of the third edition and about the same time the Known World setting was worked over into Mystara.

The Specialist class in the Old World

Probably the biggest oddity of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess system that makes it stand apart from any other versions of the Basic/Expert rules of D&D is the specialist class. It takes the position of the traditional thief class but attempts to be a lot more than this narrow character archetype. LotFP really only uses the rules of D&D but does not attempt to retain its style. In fact, it very much gets away from that to be a more generic system. (Which is part of what attracts me to it.)

The specialist is an attempt at greater versatility. You can easily make your specialist a thief, but you don’t have to. By focusing on other abilities you can also use the class to represent a range of characters who would not outright be considered combatants. Which I find very interesting as a possible character concept in a 16th or 17th century campaign that is more about being smart than fighting battles.

But in a setting like the Old World? This setting is very much Sword & Sorcery with a more hopeful outlook. And Sword & Sorcery is all about… well, swords and sorcery. What’s a noncombatant character to do in such a campaign?

One of the nice things about LotFP is that every character can pick up any weapon and put on any armor and use them. A specialist who is dressed in armor and has a spear or bow in hand fights just as well as any nonheroic warrior. Better actually, with a +1 bonus to attack rolls. And as the character gains more levels, hit points and saving throws keep improving, so even without the bonus to attack that fighters (and scouts) get, you’re still not completely useless in a fight. Quite far from that, actually. As a specialist you won’t be the big ass dragon slayer your fighter friends are, but you’re not limited to stand in a corner and wait until the fight is over. In the LotFP system, clerics, dwarves, nd halflings (which are not classes in the Old World) all fight only just that good as well.

But when does a specialist actually do shine in this setting? When is a specialist better than any other characters in the party? I spend a good amount of time thinking about characters from fiction with dynamics similar to what I have in mind who would make good examples for the specialist class. There weren’t a lot but the two main examples I found are Leia from Star Wars and Naomi Hunter from Metal Gear Solid. And no, it’s not a coincidence: Almost all specialist type characters from pulp-style fiction I could think of are women. That’s how competent female characters in the 30s worked and how it was retained by works that aimed to capture the style. Which is not really a bad thing for a single character. It’s only unfortunate when you end up with all the men as warriors and all the women as clever manipulators. Some sharing between the two is all I want to see. But I think it’s actually a very interesting and fun character archetype.

One thing that almost all these characters have in common is that they are smart and good at talking, which is generally their primary special power. OSR type games usually don’t address that. And I am mostly very much in agreement with that. When you have a group of people together verbally discussing and describing the actions of their characters, then it becomes necessary to rely on abstract game mechanics to represent combat actions, but it makes little sense to do the same thing when their characters are talking. You’re already talking so just say what your character is saying. However, the side effect of this approach is that it really comes down entirely to the players how a conversation with an NPC turns out with the players’ characters making no difference. Having some kind of Persuasion skill for the specialist class would be nice, but it should also be in a way that does not negate the need and purpose of talking with NPCs.

A potential solution to this mismatch of goals is the Angry GM’s advice to not let the players roll any dice when the result won’t make a difference. Say the players talk to a chief and make an offer of alliance which the chief likes. Why roll dice if the players can convince him, he already wants to agree! Or the players make an offer that goes completely against the goals of an NPC. Again,it would be nonsensical to have a player mae a dice roll with a chance of only 2% to succeed. Instead a die roll should be made in situations when the GM just doesn’t know what should happen. Say the players make an offer or demand that the NPC doesn’t really care for but also isn’t fundamentally opposed to. That’s a good situation to call for a roll. For regular characters, the odds to make such a roll is only 1 on a d6, which will mean mostly failures. 1 in 6 is really quite bad so it really makes sense to only have the players roll on these things when you think it probably won’t work but they might get lucky. But specialists have the unique feature of being able to improve the odds of any such skill by one every level and become really good at it.

One benefit of such an approach to specialist skills is that players don’t get to say “I make a Persuasion roll”. In any situation the players first have to talk with the NPCs and at the end the GM decides, based on how the conversation went, whether the NPC has been won over or refuses, or if he wants a player to make a roll for Persuasion.

This is also the same way I approach the Stealth skill. Any character can attempt to be sneaky and for as long as they don’t get close to any guards or stay out of sight this will usually work, no roll required. Sneaking up on a guard in a lit empty corridor while he’s looking in the character’s direction is impossible. But occasionally you might have a player who wants to sneak right up to a guard while there is no loud noises nearby and it would be a minor miracle to pull off. That’s when a role is made. For a fighter with only a 1 in 6 chance this is grasping at straws, but there are many situations where this has to be good enough. But a specialist with a chance of 5 in 6 this might actually be a decent chance to take even without great pressure.

However, I think for my own campaign I am going to remove the option to bring a skill to a chance of 6 in 6, which means that on a 6 a second d6 is rolled and only a second 6 means failure. That’s a chance of failure of only about 3%, which really is too close to being negligible for me. Getting people who are on the fence to come around 80% of the time is already really damn good. You don’t need to be able to impove it to 97%.

War Cry of the Flame Princess: The Scout

I retroactively added this post to the WCotFP series.

Earlier this year many people have been writing about the cleric class being an oddity unique to Dungeons & Dragons that doesn’t really fit in most other fantasy settings and seems rather inappropriate. Priests in other fictional worlds never really look and behave like that, and especially in the early edition a great amount of spells are taken from biblical miracles. There seems to be some move to not use the cleric class and instead represent priests and shamans through alternate spell lists for the magic-user class. I am fully behind that.

That leaves you with the now very well established scheme of warrior, mage, and rogue, which you’ll find almost everywhere in fantasy gaming. And I have to say, I also don’t like rogues.

han-lando — Scoundrels on the other hand are a completely different story.

The thief class for D&D was a later addition that didn’t exist yet in the first release of the game but was added very soon after. And in hindsight this move made many people angry and was seen as a move in the wrong direction. But the effect that the introduction of the thief meant that fighters and mages no longer had any reason to try to deal with traps or scout ahead because now there was someone who was always much better at it then them is not my main problem with the archetype. The original thief class had a clear identity but soon people wanted the thief to be good at fighting as well which lead us to the current form of the rogue. And rogues don’t really know what they want to be. The thief aspect has largely vanished and instead we have a fast fighter with light armor, who does huge damage with special attacks, or could be an archer. That takes away almost everything the fighter had left except for heavy armor. In a campaign with knights that’s not necesaarily a problem, but when you play in a setting that doesn’t have heavy armor or huge weapons, what is left? This was one of the reasons that made me pick Lamentations of the Flame Princess as my current system of choice, as its specialist class is meant to be neither great at fighting, nor required to be a thief.

But still, I am not fully happy with that. For my Old World that is full of barbarian warriors and made for adventures mostly set in the wilderness, the specialist seems a bit too flimsy to represent a hardened adventurer and the fighter too simple to represent the more skilled and sneaky hunters. On Dragons Gonna Drag, Justin presented the idea of merging the fighter and specialist classes together. But I really like classes and am already down to only three of them, so my idea is to do something similar but opposite.

drow_xendrik

One of the greatest idea I’ve seen for the warrior, mage, rogue archetypes is in Star Wars Saga Edition which has the soldier, scout, scoundrel, and noble classes as a spectrum of different approaches to fighting character and skilled characters. Neither the scoundrel nor the noble are exactly thieves, and the scout is something different than just a fighter/thief. And so I decided to come up with some kind of scout class that represents a more sneaky kind of warrior than the fighter.

One idea I’e seen a while back is that the halfling class would make a pretty good base for a Basic ranger. And while looking around for some more ideas I discovered that this is pretty much exactly what Adventurer Conqueror King did with the explorer class. It’s pretty much the B/X halfling with a different name. That’s also what I ended up doing.

Level	Hit Points	Attack	Bushcraft	Stealth
1st	6	+1	3 in 6	2 in 6
2nd	+1d6	+1	3 in 6	2 in 6
3rd	+1d6	+2	3 in 6	2 in 6
4th	+1d6	+2	4 in 6	3 in 6
5th	+1d6	+3	4 in 6	3 in 6
6th	+1d6	+3	4 in 6	3 in 6
7th	+1d6	+4	5 in 6	4 in 6
8th	+1d6	+4	5 in 6	4 in 6
9th	+1d6	+5	5 in 6	4 in 6
10th+	+2/level	+5	6 in 6	5 in 6

Creating a scout class for LotFP turned out to be pretty quick and painless. The basic frame is once again the halfling class with the addition of an attack bonus half that of the fighter (other classes im LotFP always remain at +1) and the saving throws taken from the dwarf class (which covers a wider range of levels) and reduced by 2. Since it’s a scout class, the Bushcraft skill of the halfling is retained, but it also gains the Stealth skill with a chance of 1 lower than Bushcraft and not the flat 5 in 6 chance in wilderness environments that halflings have. A scout also can make a sneak attack for double damage with no option to increase like a specialist does.

And there you pretty much have it. I am considering giving also a 2 in 6 chance for Search and Climb, as it would fit the theme, but right now I am somewhat uncertain whether that might be a bit too much. Compared to the fighter the higher saves should even out with the lower hit points, which leaves all the skills compensated only by the reduced bonus to attack. But overall I am very happy with the class and it really took only about an hour to make, including research.

A case for Hope & Heroism

This probably should have been my first post on this subject and not the third, but now I am getting around to it and hopefully clear some things up for the future, as I think this is probably going to be something of an ongoing theme here.

Hope & Heroism isn’t any kind of established fantasy genre. I actually made it up just this week.

bender — I am going to make my own fantasy genre…

Why do such a thing? Isn’t that really pretentious from some nobody who hasn’t published anything yet? Well, yes it is, but I think there’s still a good reason. When I gave up on the d20 System and the kind of fantasy RPGs that are being published by Wizards of the Coast and Paizo a few years back, I went from Myth & Magic through Castles & Crusades and Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea to Barbarians of Lemuria and on to Fantasy Age. But eventually I came to the venerable Basic/Expert rules of D&D that are even older than I am and the most simple system I’ve ever seen (after RISUS). And looking for a version that comes with sensible modern improvements like increasing AC (Decreasing AC is dumb! And it was dumb back in 1974!) I eventually chose Lamentations of the Flame Princess over Basic Fantasy (It was the thief skills that won me over.)

That’s how I got in contact with the LotFP adventures and their Weird Fantasy style, and I found something that I’ve always been missing in RPGs. I am still not really sure what it is, but I think it’s an appearance of some kind of greater cerebral depths that sets them apart from regular fantasy elfgames. Sure, a lot of the earlier stuff was junk, but I still appreciated the effort and could see the honest attempt to be something more. But Weird Fantasy is not what I really want out of a roleplaying game. It’s all soo bleak and grotesque in a way that just doesn’t seem fun. Interesting certainly, and probably fascinating, but not fun.

Another effort to take D&D type games in another direction away from just killing people and taking their stuff and then patting each other on the shoulder that happened a few years before the whole OSR thing gor of the ground was Green Ronin’s Blue Rose setting that they marketed as Romantic Fantasy. A term freshly invented to summarize the kind of fantasy novels it draws from and give an impression of what people can expect from them. But again, though I appreciate the attempt, the execution is not what I am looking for. Even though I had been looking for ideas to get some of my mostly female friends who are interested in fantasy but not about monster slaying into RPGs, Blue Rose clearly wasn’t the way to do it. It’s peaceful egalitarian setting of love and respect always seemed just way too sappy to me.

But now just a few days back I read a very interesting post that describes Romantic Fantasy as something broader than just princesses and unicorns and girls falling in love with dashing heroes and heroines. And I think Joseph’s approach to thinking about fantasy that follows the ideals of Romantic Fantasy lines up very much with my own. What I am calling Hope & Heroism is basically the same thing that he describes as Romantic Fantasy.

So why not just go along with that and call it Romantic Fantasy, too? Because for everything outside of Blue Rose and its source material, it’s a really awful term. The word romance has become so closely associated with love stories these days that few people even know about its earlier meaning. I think the last time it was used to simply mean Fantasy as it had been for centuries before was with the Planetary Romance genre, which today is much better known as Sword & Planet. For Blue Rose the association with love stories is not a problem because that interpretation also works. But for everyone else the term Romantic Fantasy is much more of a liability than a benefit. Of those people who encounter the term Romantic Fantasy for the first time, only those intrigued by fantasy love stories will even take a second look at what you’re presenting. It won’t gain you an audience but probably lose a lot of potential readers. Something else is needed and after discussing it for a few days with other people the term Hope & Heroism emerged as the most popular substitution. I am not a big fan of X & X titles, but it just emerged that way and once you’ve started using a term for a while it feels odd to change it. But other than that I think it’s a pretty good one. It’s snappy, it says what it is about on the tin, and you can use it in a sentence as a descriptor in a way that makes grammatically sense. So Hope & Heroism it is. What is it really about?

It really starts with my idea of an ideal fantasy hero and the kinds of conflicts that make for meaningful fantasy stories. What does that include in practice?

The heroes seek to restore peace and order over destroying evil.
The heroes get involved when witnessing injustice.
The heroes aim to be examples to others.
The conflicts have sources that won’t go away by killing the enemy leader.
Mercy and offerings of peace will pay out in the long run.
Violence can help to get out of a tight spot but will always mean more trouble down the line.
The antagonists have various reasons to fight and at least some of them can be persuaded to change to other methods.
Heroes will sometimes fail, but having tried is what matters.
The heroes give and risk more than can be reasonably expected of them. (That’s what makes them heroic.)

Is this a new genre? Not exactly. This is not a new branch in the taxonomic system of fiction genres. This is much more like a new circle drawn on an extremely messy Venn diagram of fantasy styles. Hope & Heroism is a group of certain qualities that have been existing in works for ages. Nothing new has beem created, only discovered. And it might not even be new. The link I put above shows at least one person did it before me.

The type specimen of what I think of as Hope & Heroism is the movie Princess Mononoke. I thknk it has everything that I consider important. Other great works that I consider great examples are the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the TV shows Avatar, Seirei no Moribito, and Rune Soldier; the videogame series Mass Effect (at least when following mostly the Paragon path) and the main plotlines of the games Witcher 2 and Witcher 3 (there’s way too much combat between scenes for my taste). My love for Mass Effect was actually reason I got interested in doing more with fantasy than just destroying evil monsters.

From what I’ve seen in recent years, there seems to be a lot of people looking for something more in RPGs. Both Weird Fantasy and Romantic Fantasy are probably too niche to ever become widely popular. But I think Hope & Heroism is much closer to the RPG mainstream and might be of interest to a wider range of people. I think it’s certainly an approach worth sharing and a convenient name for it could only help. Who knows, maybe it’ll catch on over time?

XP in campaigns of Hope & Heroism

When it comes to RPGs that are meant to result in campaigns that follow a certain style or genre, one of the strongest incentives to get players to play along with the concept is the way the game awards experience points. Since the 2nd edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the early 90s, giving the players XP for defeating enemies has become well established as the most common and perhaps default method of character advancement. Often it is never questioned at all but it’s far from being the only option.

Giving XP for winning fights sends a very strong signal to the players: Go and find any enemy you can and defeat all of them, or you will be at a disadvantage later. It’s a mechanic that tells players not just that it’s okay to fight everything but that they are supposed to fight and defeat everything. Not doing so effectively results in a penalty.

An interesting alternative used by earlier editions of D&D is to give only a small amount of XP for defeating an enemy in combat but a much bigger XP reward for leaving the dungeon with treasure. With a combat system that makes fights pretty dangerous and death a constant risk, taking enemies on head on isn’t such an attractive choice. Instead the option to steal a treasure without a fight looks much more promising. 70 to 80% of the reward for only a fraction of the risk? That sounds like a really good bargain. In some cases avoiding any kind of confrontation becomes the best choice. What are you going to gain from fighting wolves who don’t have any money? The potions and spells to heal the wounds from such a fight could have been much better spend on letting the party steal more treasure. It seems somewhat strange that stealing gold makes a fighter fight better and become more durable, but then it’s just as nonsensical that a wizard would learn new spells from hurling sling stones at enemies. XP are always an abstraction of heroism, they can’t really represent skill training.

When I was looking for interesting Sword & Sorcery games a few years back, one very interesting one was Atlantis The Second Age. In this game players get XP for attempting cool and amazing stunts. And they get full XP regardless of success or failure. It’s so simple but also brilliant. As a GM in a Sword & Sorcery campaign you want the players to play larger than life heroes who do crazy awesome things. Players don’t want to risk their characters getting hurt with nothing to show for the effort. So if you give XP only for successful stunts they will only attempt it when they are reasonably certain they will make it. Playing it safe is not the Sword & Sorcery way. Doing cool stuff that is excessive and out of proportion is the way things are done. Giving full XP even for failed attempts to be awesome encourages players to go looking for opportunities that could serve as a pretext to do something cool. If they fail they get hurt, but you also get hurt when fighting an enemy for XP, so it’s fine.

I really like this approach of both old D&D and Atlantis. Reward the players for acting in ways that match the genre of the campaign. You don’t have to ask the players to do it and you don’t have to explain to them what you want them to do. Players also want to play their characters in the way they see fit, it’s not the GM’s place to tell them what their characters should be doing. But when you reward certain behaviors this does change. Players will adjust their perception of the campaign and image of their character so they can gain more benefit from the way the game handles character advancement. Most players are pretty happy to play a wide range of different characters. But they will make their choice based on what they expect the campaign to be like. Once that choice is made, the GM telling the players what they should be doing is just not done. But seeing the XP reward system in action can make players adjust what they want to play. If you explain it from the start before character creation that’s even better.

When I had abandoned XP for defeating enemies, the new approach I used was to tie character advancement to completing goals. If the players accomplish the objective without getting into any fights they still get the same XP as if they slaughtered everything that moves. But if they failed and could not complete the goal their characters did not advance. This seemed like a good idea and worked quite well for a long time, also because it rarely happened that the players failed completely. It was somewhat based on the ideas of Lamentations of the Flame Princess where getting into fights with nightmare creatures is a certain way towards a quick and horrible death.

But now that I am working on methods to run a more heroic campaign of bold warriors confronting evil, this approach doesn’t seem right anymore. Caution, careful planning, and cutting your losses isn’t the kind of behavior I want to promote with Hope & Heroism. I want something more like Sword & Sorcery with heroic bravery. And I think the way Atlantis approaches XP is the way to go.

What things are expected of heroes in a campaign of Hope & Heroism? I think they should race to the rescue of people in danger, intervene when witnessing injustice, and be an example to others. It’s a style in which it seems very appropriate to treat it as more important to try than to succeed. I want the players to give it their all even when the odds are dismal. “Nah, sorry. This looks too tough for us” isn’t something that players should be saying. So the mildly radical idea is this: Player’s get full XP for an encounter any time they take a risk to save someone or confront villains. Doesn’t matter if they fail or if they have to flee or surrender. It’s the effort that counts. But they only get XP for encounters if it’s to advance an attempt to restore peace and order and save people from danger. Getting into any other fights or dangerous situations without need doesn’t get them any XP.

But of course, any encounter has other consequences beside XP or no XP. Trying to save someone and failing might mean they get no reward and no recognition. Confronting villains will likely gain them new enemies regardless of which side loses the fight. Trying to talk opponents into changing their behavior but leaving with no success will affect how others think of them. In some situations it might be best to not get involved and accept that the odds are stacked against the PCs. But if they risk it anyway, the players always get at least the XP for it. There is always the temptation to interfere even when it’s against the players’ best interest. And for a band of courageous heroes this seems very appropriate to me.

(And now I realized I have to determine XP values for all my monsters. Damn.)

Blood Magic

Blood Magic has very much fascinated me since I encountered it in Dragon Age six years or so ago. I wanted to have something like that in my own setting since all the way back when I started planning it. Since then I learned a lot more about how magic works in the Thedas setting and it actually is mostly demonic mind control. Not really much blood involved. But I most liked the idea of blood magic not being fundamentally evil and one of the first blood mages you encounter in the series is actually a pretty nice and also average guy. That had always had me want to have blood magic in my setting and the idea of using blood as a power source instead of some ethereal mana or mental energy is also really cool. It’s much more savage and primitive than arcanists in their libraries playing with astrology. Perfect for a Bronze Age barbarian setting.

But the whole time I never developed the idea further than that, always keeping it off for later. Because I just didn’t have any good idea how blood magic could be different from regular magic and my magic system kept changing all the time anyway. Now I do have a magic system that I really like (but still got not around to write out in full) and with the rest of the setting being already very far along it’s really getting time to finally tackle it.

How it works

latest Magic in the Old World is based aroud the idea that the being of any creature is a single entity of spirit and body, but that it extends beyond the boundaries of the physical form that is seen with eyes or felt through touch. The physical forms of creatures and things have clear boundaries, but the immaterial aspects do not. They just weaken with distance and eventually blur together with the essence of everything else. (Similar to gravity or magnetic fields.) Most beings only have mental control over their own bodies and minds, but since everything is connected and the spirit has no clear boundaries, it’s possible to take control over things outside the physical body and even over other beings’ bodies and thoughts through a contest of wills. This control over other creatures or things is magic, as it is used by all witches, shamans, and spirits. One important limitation of magic is that it only works when the caster is actively taking control. When the control ceases, the magic ends. It’s also not possible to use magic against creatures who are not nearby, unless a spirit is send to visit people and use it’s magic on them. It is also the reason why magic objects can not be created; they can only come into existance naturally.

Blood magic is one way to get around this limitation. Instead of maintaining control over an enspelled target, a blood mage weaves the spell into the target’s blood, whose life force will then power the magic instead of the mages mental energy. Blood magic keeps working regardless of how far the target moves from the blood mage and the spell can continue potentially for as long as the target lives. Masters of blood magic can even weave spells into the blood of their target that will remain dormant until certain conditions are met and they perform their true enchantment. Having some of its life force consumed by a blood magic spell causes the target to be slightly weakened, depending on the power of the spell. But usually the effect is too small to be a clear sign of blood magic, with the target only being slightly more tired or faster out of breath during strenuous activities.

A more well known use of blood in the casting of magic is as an alternative power source to the mental energies of a blood mage. Wrestling control over another person’s body or thoughts is one thing, but actually draining life force from living creatures is much more difficult. Usually this is done by complex rituals and the use of various potions that allow apprentices and acolytes to give their masters access to their mental energies. A simple shortcut to this is to simply tear the blood out of a living creature’s body and use the life force it still carries. This gives a blood mage a great boost to his power when casting a spell. It’s still a difficult thing to do, especially in the middle of a battle, so often blood mages draw on the life energy within their own blood.

Since the corrupted energies that animate undead are very different from the life force of living beings, they are neither affected by it, nor can they use it.

What it does

Aside from giving a blood mage a boost in power from draining life force from a living creature, blood magic can be used to put long lasting enchantments on living creatures. One common use is to make the target creature a permanent slave that has to obey the blood mage’s orders. It’s similar to a powerful charm spell but the ideas planted into the targets mind do not fade away as it remembers its own thoughts and memories.

Alternatively a blood mage can give a creature specific orders to be performed under specific circumstances without it even knowing that such an enchantment is in place. Unlike a spirit following around a victim, such enchantments are very difficult to detect by other witches or shamans. Blood magic can also be used to permanently alter memories. Such enchantments are very difficult to break and require a shaman who knows exactly what he’s looking for. Blood mages familiar with the process can break it just like any other spell.

Instead of manipulating a creature’s mind, blood magic can also make changes to the body. Blood mages can give their servants and henchmen great strength and resilience which they retain even without the spell being actively maintained. Since the magic power to maintain these spells is entirely drawn from the creature’s own life force and not the mental energy of the caster, such enchantments tend to take a significant toll on its health. Giving greater strength to heroes for an important battle can often be more than a worthy trade, but guardians who are kept permanently enchanted often live for only a few years. The enchantments keep them strong until the very end but eventually they just fall over dead as desiccated corpses.

How it is treated

Blood magic is not an inherently corrupting or more harmful form of magic but usually seen as one of the darkest forms, similar to sorcery. Tearing the blood of a creature from open wounds is an incredibly violent process compared to the casting of other spells and it’s easy to see why it is especially feared. The effect it has on the bodies and minds of creatures that have been heavily enchanted with blood magic also gives people plenty of reason to regard blood mages as nothing more than savage sorcerers. Blood magic is more common among the more wilder and isolated clans of the Old World and often associated with the witches of the Witchfens, which gives it a reputation of being primitive and brutish though it’s actually a very advanced magical art.

Blood magic also has a much greater potential for manipulating people’s thoughts and controlling their minds than ordinary witchcraft, wich makes known blood mages even much more mistrusted. Even those powerful ancient witches and high shamans who know the secrets of the red art rarely trust their students with such powers and the lack of teachers makes it a very rare skill outside of clans who practice it openly.

RPG implementation

Except for the blood draining ability there are no specific rules for implementing blood magic as a game mechanic. It simply allows blood mages to make their enchantments permanent without any special costs or mechanics.