Showing posts with label spells. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spells. Show all posts

Monday, August 2, 2021

d6x6 Elemental Powers: Wood

 Inspired by this post by Red_Kangaroo.

All xylomancers are resistant to poison and illness.

1. Wood magic is about strength.

  1. Wood in your sight can't be bent or broken.
  2. Augment your strength with vines coiled around your limbs.
  3. Form self-repairing wooden plate armour around your body.
  4. Reactively form a protective wooden dome around yourself when attacked.
  5. Lift and swing massive logs and poles as if they weighed no more than a twig.
  6. Bring to life mannequins and totems which you carve from wood. They'll follow your commands, but are only capable of brute force, and not fine manipulation.

2. Wood magic is about endurance.

  1. Your skin is faintly green. Time spent in the sun makes you rapidly heal.
  2. Become tougher and more immovable the longer your feet are firmly planted on the same piece of ground.
  3. Tap a contiguous piece of wood to render it immovable and inviolable. The effect lasts until you apply it to a different piece of wood.
  4. Repair wounds - yours or another's - with wooden prostheses that work as well as flesh.
  5. Go without food or water or rest, and ignore severe injuries, as long as you remain in contact with living plant matter
  6. Care for a specific plant. If that plant grows ill, so will you. But as long as that plant flourishes, you cannot be killed.

3. Wood magic is about growth.

  1. Sing to plants to make them grow at visible speed.
  2. Snap your fingers to make a sapling instantly, explosively, destructively grow into a full-size tree.
  3. Dense and diverse vegetation sprouts in your footsteps. You have limited control over the kind of plants that grow.
  4. Grow to many times your normal height, with strength scaling more than proportionately. The extra mass sloughs of as leaf litter when you sleep.
  5. Cause dense roots to burst from the ground and ensnare a target, growing around them. Needs existing roots as a starting point.
  6. Extend and retract your limbs like Inspector Gadget. The extra length can take the form of either vines or hardwood.

4. Wood magic is about weird plant-themed whatsits.

  1. Emit soporific spores from flowers blooming from your skin.
  2. Organic material rapids decays under your touch.
  3. Implant a parasitic sprout into someone's body to parasitically siphon away their lifeforce.
  4. Absorb light energy into your skin and concentrate it without bound. Re-release all the light at once.
  5. Rapidly grow parachutes of cottony fibers.
  6. Exude sticky sap in place of sweat.

5. Wood Magic is about being in tune with nature.

  1. Step into a tree-trunk, and step out from any trunk connected to the same wood web.
  2. Meditate in a grove to gain tactile awareness of all the creatures therein.
  3. Speak to trees. Learn the strange things they've seen and heard.
  4. Plants and undergrowth don't hinder your passage. They bend out of your way while reaching to trip those who pursue you.
  5. Trees grow and slowly twist into shapes convenient for you. Chairs, spears, houses, etc.
  6. In exchange for tender care, Trees will relocate at your command. You need to shout; they're hard of hearing.

6. Wood Magic is about hurting people... with wood.

  1. Shoot seeds as projectiles from out of your palms.
  2. Cause impaling thorns to burst from nearby wood.
  3. Summon and swing whip-like vines.
  4. Staffs and polearms can grow and shrink in your hands.
  5. Summon razor-sharp and impossibly rigid leaf blades. 
  6. Stab a stake into something to destroy it utterly. 


Here is some visual inspiration: 1, 2.



Bonus: 6 more elemental powers to combine with Kangaroo's lists to make a nice round 200:

  1. The element of Storm: Call down a lightning bolt directly on your location.
  2. The element of Glass: Glass shards cannot cut you, and in your hands they can cut through anything.
  3. The element of Osmium: You can telekinetically move osmium with your mind. It's quite strong, and has impressive range, but only works on highly purified osmium (which happens to be the rarest of the precious metals).
  4. The element of Friendship: You can fire concussive beams of force from your palms that, in addition to knocking people off their feet and breaking their bones, also overwhelms them with an intense longing for companionship.
  5. The element of Flesh: Sprout nasty flailing tentacles.
  6. The element of Surprise: It's a gun. The surprise is that you can somehow own a working firearm in a magical psuedomedieval fantasy world.




Thursday, June 17, 2021

Fragmentary Powers v2.0 - A Tarot Deck Generator for Janky Superpowers

Use this to generate confusing and bizarrely conditional supernatural powers.

This is an expanded version of the previous post, tweaked to be used with a deck of cards.

Potential use cases:
  • Janky superhero one shots.
  • Store brand JoJo stands.
  • Clearance-sale magic items.
  • Use these powers in place of GLOG templates? Bad idea? Best idea?

To manually generate powers, draw three cards from a tarot deck, and consult the tables below. The first card determines the Triggering condition, the second determines how the power manifests, and the third determines what element the power applies to. If you're using a poker deck, then simply ignore the trump suit and Cavalier cards, and map the red and black jokers to the Fool and the Magician.

Here's a pdf version of the tables below.

Thursday, March 25, 2021

A handful of random tables about magical whatzits

d6x6 Random Mundane Materials

1 2 3 4 5 6
1 Dirt Tin Stone Ethanol Chitin Hair
2 Silk Copper Sand Soap Rope Skin
3 Water Silver Diamond Nacre Pykrete Bone
4 Grass Gold Glass Grease Graphite Giblets
5 Shellac Iron Rust Treacle Cement Blood
6 Mold Lead Mud Honey Rubber Meat



d20 Random Magical Materials with Impossible Properties

  1. Dirt
  2. Skywood: Dense, hard wood which resists the pull of gravity. Grows as trees which float through the air, carrying along clumps of earth tangled in their roots. Wicker panels of the stuff are used to craft flying ships.
  3. Adamant Glass: Cloudy gray glass, impossible to sully or scratch. Impervious and impenetrable to all forms of chemical or magic, meaning it can be used to entrap ghosts, spells, and other spirits. Really easy to melt, though, and can shatter violently.
  4. Vermillion Ichor: Like red-tinged quicksilver. Constantly jitters in place. Imbues anything it’s placed into with elan vital, compelling it into motion and imbuing it with will.
  5. Magnets
  6. Shimmersilk: Lightweight fluttering cloth of indeterminate form. Appearance changes based on the viewers’ expecations
  7. Alkahest: Universal perfect solvent, seperates things into their constituent components without otherwise damaging or changing them.
  8. Tomberstone: Stone which hates the heavens. Dark violet with streaks of iridescent yellow. When directly under an open sky, it pushes downwards with immense force. When covered, behaves like normal stone.
  9. Chornolyst: Magical kudzu. Thick sticky pitch-black sheets which grow rapidly over surfaces in the presence of mana and bright light. Rapidly dies and rots in their absence. Tough but flexible. Highly flammable. Technically edible.
  10. True Vitriol: Green-Red crystal with a greasy lustre. Eternally burns with an unquenchable putrid flame. Powerful heat, but irritating headache-causing flickering light.
  11. Ectoplasm: A versatile stringy substance that can be regurgitated by skilled experts. A sort of physical manifestation of the soul which responds to the emitter’s will. Is capable of fine manipulation and interaction with a wide variety of magical phenomena. The main drawback is that any damage to the substance has drastic psychic health consequences for the person who squeezed it out.
  12. Philosopher’s stone: Turns mercury into silver on contact, lead into gold, reverses aging, frags trolls, etc.
  13. Slarmbe: Insulates from time. Kind of a salty amber-tinted jelly. Kind of just a zone of shimmering air. Kind of makes you go cross-eyed to look at it. The thicker it covers an object, the more slowly that thing advances through time. Can be arduously moved by prodding it with a long stick.
  14. Solidified Nimbus: Like the cartoon version of a cloud. Soft and moldable. Cold to the touch. Drips water out of the bottom when squeezed. Accumulates static electricity.
  15. Null: Absorbs energy practically without bound. Unworkable and immovable in its pure form. Can be dissolved and alloyed to produce immovable rods and similar wonders.
  16. Impressionable Flesh: Raw animal matter in its most magically pure state. Often mistaken for a species of pale grey ooze. Assimilates small bits of detritus and small clumps of organic matter. When it comes into contact with a larger body of living flesh, it merges into and assumes the form of that flesh. Potent for healing, and can even restore lost limbs. Contraindicated for head and spinal injuries, under penalty of execution.
  17. Demoncore: Densely malevolent metal, brimming with alchemical power. Capable of poisoning those who merely stand near it, or providing a near limitless source of arcane energy.
  18. Voidmetal: Sticks to shadows and vice versa
  19. Pureglass: Perfectly invisible stone.
  20. Song-glass: Frost that dissolves into radio static whispers divine secrets.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

GLOG: Spells Bound to Minor Magic Items: Replace your spellbooks with something the barbarian can also use.

Here's an enjoyable aesthetic:




In the opening to the Harry Potter series, we see Dumbledore, the most powerful wizard alive, use a a little trinket to do his dark deeds. Instead of just willing the street to be dark, he comes prepared with a nifty little piece of artificery.

The first Harry Potter is full of this kind of device-based magic. The Deluminator, the invisibility cloak, the remembral, the philosopher's stone, everything in the quidditch trunk. Does Harry even use a wand to cast a spell during the film?

As the movie series goes on, magic shifts towards being more about laser gun fights. Pew pew. But in Deathly Hallows, the snitch and deluminator make a suprise comeback, and additional hidden abilities are retconned revealed.

I like this vibe. Let's adapt it to tabletop rpg magical items. 


Each item below has two abilities -- a "cantrip" and a "spell".

The cantrip is a magical effect which can be used freely and repeatedly by anyone with even the slightest bit of magical experience, or even by the magically ignorant if they fiddle around with it for a few hours.

The spell is a more powerful effect, maybe taken from your standard wizard spell list, and can be used by anyone magically powerful enough to actually cast spells. Using the item's spell will deplete its charge, preventing either the cantrip or spell effect from being used until the next dawn.

I'm using GLOG-style magic, where spells are levelless and limited by the caster's pool of "Magic Dice". (See here or here for an explanation, and here for the full ruleset I'm using.) Anyone with Magic Dice can spend them to activate the device's spell effect, using the same system as if they had that spell in their head instead of in their hands.

If you adapt this concept to a system with leveled spells, then allow the device's spell-effect to be activated by expending a spell slot of the appropriate level.



On to the list! 

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Wizard Pets! Eight Delightful Magically Engineered Creatures to Help Make Your Wizarding Tower feel like A Wizarding Home.

The Whole Menagerie. Wizard Shown for Scale.
Each of the following critters is made by some mad wizard to help with domestic tasks. Each exhibits some helpful behavior comparable to a cantrip. And each is capable of casting some sort of spell if a spellcaster touches it and focuses on feeding it some of their magical energy. (For GLOG, this would be Magic Dice; for a typical system, you would expend a spell-slot.) Think of them kinda like scrolls, but more huggable.