Hi, I've lurked on these forums on and off for a while now, but this is my first time posting. Let me know if I'm doing anything wrong.

I am developing a magic system for use in a Fudge fantasy game I will eventually be GMing. For anyone who doesn't know, Fudge is a universal RPG 'engine' (previously bacronym'd to Freeform Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine), basically the bare-bones of a role-playing system.

I recently got inspired to work up what I consider to be an interesting fantasy setting with a (as far as I know) unique magic system. I have decided to use Fudge to run a short campaign in this system due mainly to its simplicity and support for modularity in magic systems, combat, etc. (that, and I have been wanting to try out Fudge for a while now)

Bare with me, I need to explain some of the world in order for the magic system to make sense.

There are two forces (not gods, although they do manifest aspects of themselves as all of the gods of this world) Stability and Chaos. Chaos is what drives things to change, to progress, to live and to die. Stability is what keeps things from changing, to remain, to stagnate (although not in the sense of water stagnating, that would be Chaos' department, seeing as it is a change from fresh water to stagnant water). Magic stems from Chaos. Thus, the sapient creatures closest to Chaos, the elves, to a degree, but especially the fey, have the ability to change the world around them by drawing on life force, which is the essence of Chaos. Fey are almost pure Chaos (as trolls are almost pure Stability), and are limited in what they can do only by how much life force they have to draw on.

To counter this, the trolls (after many years of deliberation and debate in the troll council) distilled some of the essence of stability, changing it into the crystalgems and gave them to the dwarves to use in their fight against the fey. (using stability-magic which I have no system for, but it basically equates to doing nothing, but doing it so profoundly that you use the latent power of non-action itself.)(the trolls don't fight themselves, they don't have the willpower to do sosmething so action-oriented)

When a fey comes into contact with a crystalgem, they fey's soul is sucked out of its (barely material anyway) mortal body and sealed into that crystalgem. What the trolls didn't anticipate (mostly because they aren't so good at the whole action-reaction concept) is that the fey would be able to communicate with, and draw life energy from, any sapient being that comes into contact with it's prison. The fey need life energy to live, they usually feed on the other sapient races, which is why they are disliked by even the elves, who are the most like them out of all the other races.

Enterprising humans who came into contact with these gems, and with the fey within, became the first mages. By telling the fey within the gem what they want done, and by allowing their bodies to be used as a life-force reserve and a focus, humans (and some elves) effectively have the ability to change the world as they see fit, for the small price of their life force, and a bit extra to sustain their fey familiar.

Here is where the truth (or lack thereof) and consequences come in for the PCs.

When we start the game, the PCs will not be able to start knowing magic, or anything about it. The players will know that we are playing so that I can test my new magic system, and that they will most likely all have the chance to use magic in-game, but that's it. They will not know any of the mechanics, or the back-story of magic in this world, due to it being a carefully guarded secret and when they come into contact with their first imprisoned fey, she will most likely be reluctant to reveal just where each bit of their life force is going (so that she can skim more than the allotted percentage demanded by trained mages).

As for consequences- life force is measured by age. Not years lived, but subjective years lived. Every time an imprisoned fey draws life force from a mage, that mage grows older.  Of course, I have also put together a rather detailed aging mechanic that ensures that this is a harsh price to pay.

So the PCs have nearly unlimited power, but by using it they grow weaker, and the price for the next spell becomes even more dear.

Charts:

Cost          Range            Target                Area (cubed)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1              touch              fey                    1 person/ 6 in
2              10 ft                elf                    2 people/ 1 ft
3              50 ft                human/none    5 people/ 3 ft
5              500 ft              animal              15 people/ 15 ft
10            1 mi                plant                50 people/ 100 ft
15            10 mi              dwarf                150 people/ 300 ft
25            100 mi            troll                  500 people/ 1000 ft
40            1,000 mi        inorganic          5,000 people/ 1 mi
75            10,000 mi      crystalgem        25,000 people/ 10 mi

Add up the cost for the range, target, and area of effect, the result is the number of years taken off of the caster's life. (plus whatever the fey nips for him/herself)
Effects against an unwilling target also add in the target's mind roll. Effects on the caster (human through which the spell is being cast by the fey) are cast at one less.

Age      Effects on Reaching
-----------------------------------------
50      -1 body
60      roll body for death vs Terrible
70      -1 other attributes
75      roll body for death vs Terrible
80      -1 body
85      roll body for death vs Poor
90      -1 other attributes
92      roll body for death vs Poor
94      -1 body
96      roll body for death vs Mediocre
98      -1 other attributes
100      roll body for death vs Mediocre
101      -1 all attributes
102      roll body for death vs Good
103      -1 all attributes
104      roll body for death vs Good
105      -1 all attributes
106      roll body for death vs Great
etc...

When multiple levels are passed at once, subtract all attributes, but only perform the highest saving throw (including all attribute modifiers that come into effect before it).

(oh, and a note about the saving throws - in Fudge you roll vs an adjective in a ladder which goes: Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, Good, Great, Superb, Legendary)

These tables will probably have to be modified for balance issues.

Do you think this will work as I'm hoping? Will it make the PCs stop and think about whether or not they can really afford to do that bit of magic, seeing as it may cost them their lives? Is there something inherently doomed to failure that I'm overlooking? Any and all feedback is welcome.

Most of the feel of this game comes from the fact that the players don't know any more than their characters do about the magic of this world (mages do magic). Nor do most people (not just humans, I'm including the trolls, dwarves, elves, and fey in this too) even know about the Forces on an intellectual level. Add to this a secret mage's guild, a secret anti-mage organization, and the fact that the fey themselves are trying to prevent the PCs from understanding everything that is going on, and you'll see why (unbeknownst to the players) the theme is Kelsior's motto from Mistborn: "There's always another secret."

(Mistborn is by Brandon Sanderson, I heartily endorse anything of his, but especially the Mistborn trilogy, if you like low fantasy with a kick, I suggest you check it out.)

I like it a lot.  I have a question though, "why stability?"  Order and Chaos might be cliche, but it's a cliche everybody loves.  Draping stability over "order" doesn't really change it's cliche nature, either, it just draws more attention to it.  Even with the cliche, your "fluff" is so fun, you really shouldn't worry about it at all.

"plus whatever the fey nips for him/herself" - why not just have it so *everything* they lose, is actually what the fey is taking? Kind of like, "I'll sell you a part of my soul if you do this thing for me (that you could do anyways)"  The way it is now feels too much like GM ad hoc, which is typically bad. (When taking a persuasive speaking class, I was told, "If you don't tell people what to think, they'll always come up with something other than what you intended.")

Do you think this will work as I'm hoping? Will it make the PCs stop and think about whether or not they can really afford to do that bit of magic, seeing as it may cost them their lives? Is there something inherently doomed to failure that I'm overlooking? Any and all feedback is welcome.

Warning! Monster Post Ahead!
You Have Been Warned.

I like it a lot.  I have a question though, "why stability?"  Order and Chaos might be cliche, but it's a cliche everybody loves.  Draping stability over "order" doesn't really change it's cliche nature, either, it just draws more attention to it.

why not just have it so *everything* they lose, is actually what the fey is taking? Kind of like, "I'll sell you a part of my soul if you do this thing for me (that you could do anyways)"  The way it is now feels too much like GM ad hoc, which is typically bad.

Your consequences seem too extreme, I can't see why anyone would use magic.

From what I can tell, to make an object glow 6" for 5 minutes, I'd lose 42 years of my life. (1 for touch, 40 for inorganic, 1 for 6".)  What you'll get are two extremes.  People who never use it, and people who treat their characters as suicide bombers.  Also, you're looking over some inherent parts of a spell, Duration and Effect.    If these aren't defined, why not just make a spell that permanently makes a sword that kills everyone that touches the blade, for 42 years off your life?   Once one of your players discovers how bad the consequences are, everybody will probably decide to not use it at all (unless they're very long lived races, like 1,000 yo elves.)

So on the "little risk" side, I could make sparks shoot out the end of my finger all the time, and barely lose a day off my life.  But throwing that fireball? That's like 5 years.  Summoning a demon to wipe out a city? 80 years.

I was pursuing a similar goal in my magic system (capturing that feel of wonder and unpredictability), and solved it a different way.  The way I did it is, you roll your skill against the difficulty of the spell (with always at least a 10% chance of failure any spell, no matter how good you get.)  If you fail, you get "spell burn" and the magical energies burn away at your mind.  (Larger spells have more spell burn, so no matter how good you are, there's always a bigger risk with larger spells.)

You should check out Ron's game Sorcerer.  It's all about the consequences of using magic, too. 

Well, I have managed to take all of your wonderful, solicited, advice, and explain why I'm not going to use 99% of it. *chagrin* Sorry about that, you have actually really helped me by making me think of all of this (I spent an hour and a half on this post, most of it not typing, just thinking). And some of the stuff I put hadn't even crossed my (conscious) mind, so your post really was very, very helpful.

I do like the way Christopher Paolini dealt with this in Eragon. When he kills someone by essentially grabbing their life force and ripping it out of their body (and subsequently passes out from the strain, if I remember correctly), Brom (his mentor for those who haven't read the books) later berates him about his methodology, explaining that there are much easier ways to kill, by accelerating small pebbles into your opponent's head, for instance.

The way I see it, you're messing with changing the essential nature of things, once you get past that hurdle, the exact changes are trivial.

Sigh, Sorcerer is already on The List, along with two other RPGs, a T-shirt, and a set of Fudge Dice, with priority going Dice > Shirt > RPGs, and me on a college budget... (the shirt is for a d20 Modern campaign, it's not a gaming shirt, it's just a shirt my character HAS to wear, which I find is cooler if I, as a player, wear it)

The Eragon reference should have read:

I do, however, like the way Christopher Paolini dealt with this in Eragon{...}

Here it is! I was busier this weekend than I expected, but I finally got some time for serious thought on my design this evening.

Just to remind, I am not actually designing an entire game, just the magic system and setting (which go hand in hand), so the answers will be skewed that way.

[hr]

1. What is your game about?
The consequences of magic, and the discovery of the unknown for both the characters and the players.

2. What do the characters do?
Attempt to discover the nature of magic, without dieing in the process.

3. What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
The players are also trying to figure out magic. Since they begin not even knowing what the magic system is.

4. How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The setting is urban, mid to low fantasy. It is a custom universe that I designed to be different from most fantasy worlds the players would be familiar with. This should reinforce the idea that the characters and players know very little of all there is to know.

5. How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Character Creation is per vanilla Fudge. This reinforces that the characters (and players) know nothing about magic, how it works, or what it's nature is.

6. What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
The game rewards caution, and making sure you have as much information as possible before acting. Rashness is punished.

7. How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
Rashness is punished by the diminishing returns magic provides, as well as the catastrophes involved in doing things (politically) you don't understand the consequences of.

8. How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
The GM has most of the responsibility of narration and credibility. This is to help keep the players wondering about the unknown. It is very important that the world as described by the GM is consistent, knowledge is both a goal and a reward in this game, and it must be constant to be valuable.

9. What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
Keeps them guessing. Secrets are hidden by lies tied together with ignorance. In order to understand the game world, and to actually have any meaningful affect on it, they will have to come to grips with magic, its consequences and the various factions that revolve around the secret of its use, without being destroyed by it.

10. What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
Again, vanilla Fudge (roll 4dF, add to skill or attribute, compare to difficulty of task/compare to opposed roll). The only way magic can fail is if another mage is opposing you, in which case, whoever has the most life-force wins; loser dies.

11. How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
The game is NOT about resolving conflicts mechanically. It is about dealing with ultimate power that can make the most difficult tasks trivial. All meaningful conflicts will be resolved through dialog, either internal or inter-player (ie-deciding whether using a piece of magic is worth the risk, figureing out who to trust). The mage vs mage conflict mechanic emphasizes the idea of cost in two ways. First, loseing a magic duel is deadly, and is not to be entered lightly. Secondly, if you may eventually need to compete directly with another mage, you shouldn't use up your life-force, even if you can 'afford' it.

12. Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Negligably so far as mechanics go. I'm giving out maybe two EP per session to spend on character advancement. Once they start growing old, the players might even be declining more than they advance, overall. Most advancement will be thru gaining greater knowledge of the game-world and how magic works in it. Thru greater knowledge of magic, on the part of the players and the characters, the characters will become more powerful.

13. How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
Knowledge is the key to becoming more powerful, as is caution. Taking a risk and using magic will cause using magic in the future to be even more of a risk, and to have an even greater cost.

14. What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
A sense of being out-of-the-loop, of not knowing what exactly is going on, but striving to find out. A sense of accomplishment when they figure out a mystery. Also, a feeling that they need to choose between consequence-heavy power and impotent safety.

15. What areas of your game receive extra attention and color?  Why?
The background of magic, and the politics of the Mages guild and the anti-magic order. Because I want there to be a framework of mystery waiting for the players to discover, I want them to feel like there is a web of intrigue woven around them, and when they grasp the threads of that web, I want to be able to deliver.
Also, the personalities of the fey which provide the magic for the player characters. Because I want spell casting to be about interacting with this personality, about wheeling and dealing, promising and threatening the thing that allows them to do magic in the first place.

16. Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
The cost-benefit system of magic. The only way for me to find out if it works the way I'm hoping is to play with it and see what happens. I don't know if the players are going to love it or hate it, or if they are going to want to use magic all the time, or decide to solve their problems through mundane means.

17. Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
It allows the players to take part in the wonder of characters discovering the game world's rules. Not thru reading the book that came with the game, but in the same way the characters do, trial and error. It's not only other games that cannot deliver this, this game is a one-shot. I will be able to (and probably will) use the world and the magic system again, but the mystery and secrecy surrounding it will only work on a given group of players once.

18. What are your publishing goals for your game?
To play a short campaign with my gaming group, I have no asperations of eventually publishing outside of my own circle of friends.

19. Who is your target audience?
My regular gaming group. Actually, I could tell you the names of everyone who will play this setting, so I guess I know my target audience better than most get the chance to.

[hr]

Well, there it is. It did get me thinking about a few things that I wouldn't have considered otherwise.

Please post any questions, comments, concerns, advice..especially advice. It's rather tricky to get this right, as my initial playtesting will, by the nature of this idea, also be my final publishing.

~Jacob

Full Metal Alchemist or what!

I notice that you base part of the settings mystery on hidden rules. I have a suggestion of how to create that:

Layered exceptions.

Say you create simple rules in the magic system that almost always apply, but then add more fine tuned rules on top of those, then you are hopefully providing a structure that is easy to learn. If you can move from tables to concepts that define costs, then you have a more unconventional but hopefully more learnable system.

Secondly, the GM must play totally fair with the normal rules, total rules integrity must be preserved or the players start exploring the GMs head more than the setting.

Total rules integrity is a high price, as you'll need to make a system or situation guidelines that require no fudging from the GM. It is therefore quite amusing that you built this system in fudge! But there is a compromise you can make, by limiting the power of normal means, particularly by insuring that characters are often outmatched by the setting in conventional skill, you can keep the loose rules for the conventional stuff and make the magic the real focus of activities.

But if that is the case, how do you encourage people to use the magic system without making them suicide and pass on the crystal?
Fortunately, the experience system should come to your rescue; if someone is more skilled, then perhaps they can produce better effects, so you don't want to kill off your guys. That fits I think with your no. 2 on the list. Secondly, you could have a random factor in the ageing, using fudge dice, so that people cannot be sure of the exact consequences.

On no. 2, it seems that you neglected something you mentioned before, about people's reaction to the fey being alive and how they treat them. In that sense the fey should have a strong compelling personality, perhaps quite Dionysian (if ever there was a classic fey personality trait, that would be it!), and could give not only power but advice, usually irresponsible, so that the fey's way could be set against societies, embodying the chaos/structure dichotomy in even the smallest occasions.

Hopefully adding in more of a social context should also give people more of a reason not to blow up their guys, perhaps because instead of doing things for grand causes, they are doing them for their village, their family and friends.

I'd caution against encouraging caution (!) because that can lead to everyone going, "I don't know, you do something!" and play grinding to a halt. There are ways to do it, but players really need frequent feedback if they are to learn and explore, which means the feedback can't wipe them out!

JoyWriter wrote:
Say you create simple rules in the magic system that almost always apply, but then add more fine tuned rules on top of those, then you are hopefully providing a structure that is easy to learn. If you can move from tables to concepts that define costs, then you have a more unconventional but hopefully more learnable system.

Secondly, the GM must play totally fair with the normal rules, total rules integrity must be preserved or the players start exploring the GMs head more than the setting.

JoyWriter wrote:
But there is a compromise you can make, by limiting the power of normal means, particularly by insuring that characters are often outmatched by the setting in conventional skill, you can keep the loose rules for the conventional stuff and make the magic the real focus of activities.

JoyWriter wrote: Full Metal Alchemist or what!

Well the FMA reference was more a visceral reaction than anything else, but one of the things that ties together the series is the laws of alchemy and the brothers growing understanding of how they work. Also the way they deal with physical matter seems pretty close to your description too.
In terms of the actual FMA alchemy system, it basically works on changing the shape and form of matter, but not material constituents, so you might get that poison sword you mentioned, but all kinds of other creative things too.

The formula is definitely a good start, and one element I love in magic systems is if it is more difficult to do stuff in other people's personal space, as if they own that space to some extent. Obviously this means that water in the lungs is a harder trick! Basically, you can layer the rules so that many of the abusive effects are taken care of, but preferably in a way that reflects on the character of the fey themselves.

For example you could have the vision of the fey beyond the crystal be limited, along with their ability to influence. This way players can learn something in one area and have it pay off in another. But the idea of Fey being finicky about personal space sounds really stupid given how you have defined them, so I'm not sure how to work it.

Now all this begs the question of where the limits are coming from; if the fey are just giving people power to get them hooked, surely the first one would be free! Or in other words if they are just trying to get as much as possible then the price would always be based on that particular fey's estimate of how much the character wanted it, not on general rules. So the general pricing structure should probably be inherent in the fey's containment, perhaps every time they reach outside the crystal the effort drains them, so they want to get a bit of profit each time.

It might be cool to mythologise the measurements a bit, so it's a year for every grasp-length, but that produces very different ranges from your geometric version, so I'll leave that for the mo.

lilomar wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the GM must play fair within the normal rules, could you explain?

Reading about this and applying Full Metal Alchemist to the mix, I have a few thoughts regarding what you guys are talking about.

In Full Metal Alchemist, a main plot element is that a human is only (This list of minerals) and that with the laws of "Equal exchange", you could just bring a person back to life, right?  WRONG!  There's a part of 'alchemy' (science) not explained, which is like the human soul.  In the series, they're trying to figure out how they can balance the laws to overcome this hidden problem. 

So, what if you did this (also, this would eliminate your GM's bias).  What if you came up with a bunch of rules, and a very simple set of rules.  First, the players would understand the simple rules.  However, the other rules you came up with are secret... even from you!  Whenever a players casts a spell, you randomly select a rule and read it.  The players would than also learn about the rule, as well, perhaps. 

So, for example, the Fey at the beginning is generous.  As a simple guideline, the Fey will carve out a bit of their life for a spell, any spell at all.  All it will cost you is one day off your life...

The next spell that player casts, well this spell has the added rule of, "A spell targeting a troll takes an additional 15 years off your life."  But the player isn't targeting a troll, so they don't know that.

Then they cast another spell, and this spell has the added rule of, "A spell cast at a range of 1 mile or more costs an additional 10 years off your life."  Ouch, the player is doing this, and suddenly loses 10 years off their life!

Just another thought for ya.