Heroic Magic
This is another long, poorly organized chapter. (It also has an impressively ill-fitting name, as much of the magic it covers is pretty villainous.)
By this point, the reader can deduce by context that this book overwrites most of how D&D does magic. They’ve seen terms like “ceremonial magic” and “eldritch magic”, but they don’t have any specific inkling of what these words mean. One might expect that this chapter would, at least, start on a strong note by finally laying its cards on the table. Instead, the very first section is a jargon-y clarification on how illusions work. No attempt to meet the reader halfway is made; you don’t even learn what ceremonial magic is for another twelve pages. (I will try to be more organized here, but no guarantees.)
Looking at the credits for this book and for ACKS core, the latter has three people listed as editors, but the former only has two “copy editors”. You can really tell. This book made almost three times as much on Kickstarter as Core did, so I wonder why editors weren’t hired.
Types of Magic
First, all the magic in this book is “eldritch”, which ACKS uses to mean “arcane but less showy”, hewing more closely to the sorts of magic you see in Howard and Tolkien. That’s a cool idea, I’m down with it. As with ACKS arcane magic, eldritch spellcasters know a potentially-wide range of spells, can retain only a small subset as a daily repertoire, and cast spontaneously from that repertoire. I want to emphasize that I really like how this “spontaneous Vancian” system works in practice, it’s one of the small changes ACKS makes that improves its quality of play.
As I said in the first post, there are three flavors of eldritch magic-users:
- Eldritch spellcasters don’t get any dedicated nomenclature, they’re just guys who happen to draw from the eldritch spell list. Only Nobirans (Aasimar), Zaharans (Tieflings), and Thrassians (lizard-men) get access to straight-up eldritch magic.
- Spellsingers are only allowed to be elves, they use mana points, and they can design and cast new spells on the fly, using the system in the Player’s Companion. If your reaction is “Wow, I can’t wait to see what clever solution ACKS utilizes for the time-problem of letting a player do a constrained optimization problem every time they want to do something, well.
- Ceremonialists cast eldritch spells in the form of rituals that generally take at least ten minutes to complete. Ceremonialists can do fun thematic things like perform ceremonies in combination with a bunch of other cultistscollaborators and improv ceremonies from musty old tomes they’ve just discovered, but their ceremonies can fail and make the caster be devoured by demons. Unlike other types of magic, characters of certain classes can learn ceremonial magic by choosing a specific proficiency.
There’s some complicated accounting (because of course there is) where, because ceremonial magic doesn’t require inborn talent to acquire, and it requires less effort to master, its classes get a faster XP progression than other eldritch magic users. This means that pure ceremonialists also get (slightly) better saving throws than pure eldritch spellcasters or spellsingers.
To its credit, ACKS realizes that the dynamic spells spellsinging system has the potential to make turns last orders of magnitude longer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t present a solution. The relevant passage is
Extemporaneous spellsinging can be a powerful tool, but it requires a significant degree of system mastery from the player and Judge to use… As magic is fickle and no mere mortal can always comprehend its workings, the Judge may veto or re-design any extemporaneous spell at his complete discretion where necessary for balance and fun.
As I (loosely) understand it, the Pathfinder Words of Power system tried to do something similar with spontaneously-generated spells, but the threads about it that I skimmed here didn’t give the impression that Paizo found a solution to the time-cost problem. If nothing else, spellsingers can restrict their attention to spells that actually exist, but it will probably vary person-by-person whether this feels like an unjust self-nerf.
In addition, eldritch spells is divided into flavors of
black,
grey, and
white. If you’ve ever played a Final Fantasy game or read a shitty Dragonlance book, you can guess how these work. What I like is that spell flavors don’t actually restrict a spellcaster’s set of learnable spells. So a naive lawful ceremonialist could come across a tome detailing the secrets of controlling undead, and then, in a tomb-crawl beset by hordes of zombies, call upon that ancient discovered ritual to save the party at the cost of damnation. It’s not an
original story, but it’s a
fun one, and the ACKS HFH better supports it than a lot of base D&D.
This damnation is game-mechanically represented via a corruption point system for eldritch magic. The basic form shares similarities with the 3.5
Heroes of Horror: You gain corruption points for learning and casting black magic, and for using grey magic against Lawful and Neutral people. Once you get enough corruption points (a threshold based on your Wisdom), your alignment shifts toward Chaotic, and you start to accumulate mutations and disfigurations. You can force yourself to retain your original alignment at the cost of more mutations.
Heroes of Horror rather infamously introduced a prestige class that let you break the RNG by acquiring enough corruption, but ACKS avoids this mistake. Corruption is fairly easy to acquire, never beneficial, and, in certain circumstances, getting too much of it can kill you.
Uniquely among eldritch spellcasters, ceremonialists also have
traditions, which ACKS uses to mean “a thematically suggestive concept that isn’t utilized to its fullest”. The presented traditions are:
- Antiquarian
- Chthonic
- Liturgical
- Runic
- Shamanic
- Sylvan
- Theurgical
You read that list, and you’re like “fuck yeah everyone’s going to have custom spell lists and feel incredibly differentiated, this is the best book ever”.
That is not the case, and every ceremonialist goes off of the same base spell list. The book really wants to you use custom spell-lists for each tradition and religion:
EXAMPLE: Balbus, an ecclesiastic, has advanced to 2nd level, increasing his repertoire from one to two 1st level ceremonies. He visits the local Temple of the Winged Sun and impudently inquires of his Patriarch whether he might learn choking grip or weave smoke. After a stern lecture on upholding Light and Law, Balbus is offered a choice of illumination or command word.
but it’s unwilling to do the grunt work for you. This is frustrating, but it mirrors the frustration of base D&D (and ACKS), where every cleric draws from basically the same spell list. An area where the game does go the distance is by giving each tradition a different set of ceremonial implements. These don’t have game mechanical effects, but they’re still appreciated. Each tradition gets a bunch, here’s a sampling:
- Antiquarian: small cauldron
- Chthonic: scourge
- Liturgical: rosary
- Runic: rune-carving knife
- Shamanic: animal clippings and parts
- Sylvan: candle set
- Theurgical: ceremonial sword
Spells that fail and go boom
In most D&D games, the failure mode of casting a spell isn’t “failing to cast the spell”, it’s “casting the spell but not affecting anyone”. This is not the case for a lot of eldritch magic in this book: on-the-fly spellsinging and all ceremonies have the risk of blowing up in the caster’s face. This risk is increased by accessing magic beyond what you would normally be able to cast, or (for ceremonialists) trying to complete a ceremony in combat time instead of in exploration time. On-the-fly spellsinging is easier when you’re chilling in a Dominions 3 site, and ceremonies are easier when the caster has a tradition-specific trinket, has
cultistscollaborators with them, or is willing to go slowly. For ceremonialists, failing enough spell rolls (referred to as “gaining stigma”) can cause them to lose the ability to cast further, until they rest.
In 3e-inspired games like Iron Heroes, this sort of sword & sorcery was often based off of skill checks. This never goes well, because the 3e skill modifier system is broken and unpredictable. In this, the difficulty of an on-the-fly spellsong or ceremonial magic always boils down to the caster’s level and key ability score. Now, the target numbers are a bit on the harsh side. At first level, a spellsinger might only be able to do a spontaneous 1st-level spell effect on a 1d20 roll of 12+, and a ceremonialist might be looking at 8+. If you’re willing to buy talismans and take a Performance proficiency, you can get an additional +2 to your roll. I’m generally okay with this level of reliability, it matches the setting assumptions.
But ultimately, if you’re playing a game of this genre, you want your spellcaster’s failures to have the potential to either drive your character insane or TPK the party, and you want the rest of the party to be sort of afraid of you because of that. In the HFH, confirmed natural 1s on spellcasting rolls trigger
mishaps: rolls on a random of table of bad things, with the general severity of the bad thing determined by the power of the spell you were attempting. To this book’s credit, it has a bunch of random tables of bad things, determined by a character’s tradition. These effects can be very bad. A spellsinger example is:
You accidentally open a gate to the elemental spheres. An 8 HD elemental appears adjacent to you and attacks.
This could feasibly happen at first level, in which case you are dead. Failing at a Chthonic ceremony could yield:
Your soul is surely damned by what you have wrought. You gain 8d6 additional
corruption points. If this leaves you at your maximum corruption, then you must save v. Death or die due to the shock to your soul.
or
You fall into a necromantic torpor. A wish or miracle can awaken you immediately;
otherwise you will awaken in 1d10 months. You do not age while in torpor.
A negative outcome of a Liturgical or Theurgical ceremony could be:
While performing the ceremony, you glimpse the Logos, the words of creation. You must save v. Spells or become feebleminded. A dispel magic from a 9th+ level caster can remove the effect.
Other failures can age you, destroy your equipment, or explode and damage you and those nearby.
The natural comparisons within the "OSR" for this sort of thing are LotFP and Dungeon Crawl Classics.
- LotFP has a notorious first-level summon spell that's like ten pages long and has the potential to drown the entire campaign world when cast, but most of its magic is otherwise fairly standard, albeit spooky-themed.
- For ACKS HFC, you can very easily kill your character with a mishap, but you'll only cause a TPK in special circumstances (e.g., the party is huddled around you hiding from monsters while you try to summon an eagle to carry everyone to safety, but then you explode).
- DCC gives each of its spells a table of "ways casting this can go very wrong or very right" effects that gets used every time the spell is cast.
- For ACKS HFC, the wacky mishaps tables are abstracted up to the tradition list, and they come into play less often, so they're less intrusive.
These sorts of riskful mechanics aren’t for every player or every playgroup, but I admit that I fucking love them.
Dominions 3 Sites
ACKS Core introduced the “sinkhole of evil”: a small region of the world that has been permanently corrupted due to violence or magic or whatever. The HFH extends the idea naturally to “pinnacles of good” and “places of elemental power”. Within these places, the sorts of spells you would expect to be super effective are super effective, and the sorts of spells you would expect to not be very effective are not very effective. If you’re a Lawful spellcaster who has learned and used a bunch of black magic, you really care about pinnacles of good, because they’re the only by-the-book way to remove your corruption points.
The book suggests occurrence rates for “places of elemental power” and justifies them as follows:
Note: The Judge may wonder how we decided how many places of elemental power there are in the world. On our own Earth, there are 11 naturally-burning eternal flames, 600 active volcanoes, and 1000 active geysers in the world—that suggests 1,611 places of elemental fire spread across the earth’s 5,300,000 square mile land mass. That’s one place of elemental fire per 3,295 square miles. Since each 6-mile hex is 32 square miles, that’s one place of elemental fire per 102 hexes, or about 12 places on a typical 1,200-hex regional map.
Spells
Finally, there’s a list of spells: fifteen per spell level for black, sixteen per spell level for grey, twenty-seven per level for levels one through three for white, and twenty-two per level for levels four through six for white. Some are taken from Core ACKS or the Player’s Companion, but a lot are new. The general theme of “eldritch magic is subtle” is maintained throughout: so
fireball and
lightning bolt don’t appear, but
call lightning does, as do classics like
hold monster,
glitterdust, and
invisibility.
Invisibility is now a fourth level spell, so it’s rarer than in most D&D. The differences between magical flavors are also maintained: White magic gets a
call of [foo] series of spells, any of which summons nearby creatures (wolves, bears, sperm whales) to willingly serve the caster. Black magic gets a
conjure [foo] series of spells, any of which calls an extraplanar creature to serve as the caster’s slave, but the slave will turn on the caster if they lose their concentration.
Conceptually, I don’t think this chapter does anything you haven’t seen before. “D&D, but the magic feels like Conan” is an obvious concept, and a lot of people have tried their hand at it. But the implementation here is generally good, and it probably makes this book’s overall existence worthwhile. Next: monsters, and maybe treasure. For those of you who have played Iron Heroes or Conan d20 or other sword-and-sorcery hacks, I would be curious to hear how this seems to compare.
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.