Conjuration



Conjuration is the ability to create something from nothing. It is, along with Sorcery and Trump, the 'Shadow ability,' manipulating Shadow stuff (which is a combination of Order and Chaos) directly. Like Sorcery, it is slow and most useful when combined with other powers.

Changes and Modifications:

What I did: As with Sorcery, I made Conjuration essentially a refinement of other powers. It was primarily useful with Logrus or Pattern (though it would be very interesting to combine it with Trump or Shapeshifting). Since I was not using the Artifact rules from the DRPG, there were minor textual modifications (reprinted below) that removed much of the 'point' terminology from Conjuration. Conjuration was the most overlooked power of my campaign: while nobody purchased it during character creation, and only one character bought into it during play, several commented that they were impressed by the power and would have liked to have had it.

What I would do if I were doing it over again: Mostly, I think I was less than clear as to the potential of Conjuration. The rules you see below are also a slight power increase from the original rules given to my players. If the power remained unpurchased after those modifications, I'd probably reduce initial costs a bit.

Ten points of Conjuration allow you to create fairly mundane objects. Though they may be arbitrarily complex, they must follow the physical laws of the Shadow in which they are created, and will usually degenerate quickly outside of their creation Shadow (the exception to this is simple objects like sticks or swords: the more complex the object, the more sensitive it is to changes, and Conjured objects will literally fall apart if they are contrary to the physics of a place). Thus, while you could create a telepathy helmet in the Shadow Psy-place, it wouldn't work on Shadow Earth. Conjuration is slow, taking from 15 minutes to several hours, depending on the complexity of the object, to literally months for living creatures. Living creatures will also be mindless. All times decrease with additional skill.

If you have Sorcery and five more points, then you can get the ability to create "magical items," which can be used either to rack spells or to hold a spell within themselves. However, these items are still Shadowstuff, and local to the Shadow they're created in.

Several other options exist for Conjurers. For ten points (on top of the basic ten points), Pattern, Logrus, or Trump aspected Conjuration can be purchased. This allows the creation of much more durable items which have properties of the other power to them. Exact abilities will vary, but these items will be capable of most things that could be performed with Sorcery and the appropriate aspect to it. However, Conjured artefacts take rather longer to make than spells do to cast.

Conjurers who want to speed up their creation processes, and who have Sorcery and the ability to rack spells, may spend five points to get the ability to rack a Conjuraction, with pretty much the expected results.

Finally, for five points, the ability to confer traits onto an already extant item or creature can be purchased. The 'traits' in question must be conferable on items that are wholly Conjured (for example, if you had Pattern aspected Conjury, and purchased the conferability power, you could confer Pattern abilities on a tree or whatnot). This tends to be faster than Conjuring the item from scratch, but not as powerful.

Some other notes: While none of my PC's bought much Conjuration, several of my NPC's had exalted powers in it. These included the ability to use quantity modifiers (mostly named and numbered and Horde, in a rough manner) on their Conjurations, the ability to Conjure intelligence.

Combining Conjuration and Trump: Self teleporting creatures, anyone? Lots of fun. I didn't thoroughly explore this aspect of the power, since nobody had it.

Combining Conjuration and Shapeshifting: This gets very interesting once one hits the Shapeshift Others and Shapeshift Blood levels of Shapeshifting. The possibilities are endless, but a few I thought of off hand:

This page presents a modification to the Conjuration system presented in the Amber DRPG. In doing so, it makes reference to copyrighted material. Such references are incidental to the modifications, and are not intended as a challenge to their copyright status. Questions or comments can be directed to the maintainer at msulliva@wso.williams.edu.