Steampunk - Magic Revisited

David,
In some ways, I think we've come up with very similar things. Essentially, you're saying that a mage has to determine the "difficulty" to control the spell. (IE, something like 1-5) Now, since we're driving with the breaks, a difficult spell would be something like "unlock lock" and an easy spell would be "blow up the door." In yours, you had "mojo" whereas, I had "skill." Mine doesn't decrease, but that's lets ignore that for the moment. Ok, than you have the pool of "control", which I called focus.

In mine, when you roll, you only have a chance of losing control. That chance is greater for harder spells. This sort of simulates the GM rolling to see what goes wrong. If you lose control of the spell, first you lose your control pool. After that, something bad happens. To keep things simple, I just had the mage lose HP. However, I like the idea of the spell going wild instead. I'm going to steal that. *yoink*

As for spell lists, the *initial* magic I was creating was wizards, stodgy bookworm types. I figured that they have spells they learned from a common knowledge. That's part of the reason I have spell lists. But to give it flexibility, I'm adding spell components and custom made spells from multiple components. This is for people who don't have that great of an imagination for spells.

The second magic system I was making is for "sorcerers" or natural spell casters. These guys are going to have no spell list and pure flexibility on their magical abilities. But this system will come easy after I have the first one down.