Sorcery



Sorcery is one of the oddest of the powers. It's hardly so much a discipline as an eclectic grouping of knowledge about how energy flows. Essentially, the rites of Sorcery are about channeling energy, using the substance of shadow (which is a combination of Order and Chaos). Thus, Sorcery allows its wielder to do more interesting, complex, powerful things with what power they have, but does not provide any power in and of itself.

Changes and Modifications:

What I did: My campaign was not heavily Sorcery-oriented, so I definitely wasn't interested in giving Sorcery the power it had in the Merlin series, or even Amber DRPG. Basically, for this campaign, I wanted Sorcery to be an adjunct to other powers. That is, it wouldn't do much by itself, but it could make the powers you otherwise had much more useful.

What I would do if I were doing it again: I loved how Sorcery turned out for this game. I wouldn't change a thing. If I were running a more Sorcery oriented game, I would probably reduce its dependence on outside powers.

Sorcery isn't really very useful by itself. Ten points is the cost for Basic Sorcery, but there's a bunch of bad news associated with it. The first is that you don't have much of a power source for your spells. Just your own Psyche. Which means that you can't do spells which involve tossing a bunch of energy around (ie, no fireballs). You also can't do spells which involve mental contact with people outside of your line of sight, spells which involve teleportation, spells which involve any sort of cross-Shadow movement, or spells which change your own or other's shapes. These are all abilities that won't be available until you combine Sorcery with other powers. What you can do is cast spells to allow you to see invisible constructs, unravel other's spells (potentially), create mental contact within line of sight, or do something like mentally knock someone unconscious. Of course, the last requires a Psyche advantage.

More bad news is that I maintain the book's concept of racking a spell, and of Lynchpins, and of long casting times. With the basic ability, you don't know how to rack spells at all. For five additional points, you can learn to rack the spells, but you still probably won't have anything to rack them on. You could rack them on an artifact prepared for that purpose, if you have one, but you can't create one. And anything that you find in Shadow probably won't work outside of that particular Shadow.

However, the end is in sight. Suppose you have both Sorcery and Logrus or Pattern. These are powers that allow you access to a ton of raw power, and have these interesting mental constructs... The long and the short of it is that, for an additional 10 points, you can buy Pattern or Logrus aspected Sorcery, wich will, first, allow you to rack your spells on your mental images of the Pattern or Logrus, and, second, allow you to use the power of the Pattern or Logrus in your spells. At low abilities in Pattern and Logrus, this still isn't a whole lot of power, but it's better than just your Psyche. Furthermore, this opens up the possibilities of using aspects of your Pattern or Logrus abilities in your spells. If you have both Pattern and Logrus, you can get both aspects of Sorcery, but each is a seperate 10 point expenditure. You can rack any number of spells on the Logrus, but only 12 on the Pattern. However, spells on the Logrus degrade quicker.

Some other notes: Spells racked anywhere eventually degenerate, so don't think you'll have the ones you racked a month ago. If the object on which spells are racked is subjected to stress, the spells will fall off it, so if you use your Pattern to block the flow of Primal Chaos, don't expect to use any spells you had racked on it at the time. I generally avoid rigorously specified lynchpins, preferring to just wing it.

Combining Sorcery with Trump: Trump being, in my cosmology, not a power source, combining Sorcery and Trump is somewhat different than combining Sorcery and Pattern or Logrus. The standard ability (which I recommend as an Exalted power not available during character generation) is 'Trump-Like Effects.' This allows you to do in spells what you can do with Trumps, most notably teleportation, long distance mental communication, and long-distance scrying. Note that the latter two may be available through high levels of Pattern or Logrus and the appropriate aspect to one's Sorcery. I charged 12 points for Trump-Like Effects, and it required at least 15 points in Sorcery and Trump through Draw Trump.

Combining Sorcery with Shapeshifting: We didn't do much with this, but some thoughts are instantaneous, spell-triggered form changes, racking spells on your own body, the ability to generate more power with your body than before, or combinations of Shape Shift Other and Sorcery.

This page outlines a modification to the Phage Press/Roger Zelazny magic system detailed in the Amber DRPG. Some copyrighted material is used here without permission. Such use is incidental to discussion of private use modifications, and is not intended as a challenge to their copyright status. All original material on this page is © 1998 by Epoch. Permission to copy, but not distribute, this material is granted for private game purposes only. Questions and comments can be directed to the maintainer at msulliva@wso.williams.edu.