Power Word Magic

 

I often struggle with the depiction of Magic in RPGs, and I was prompted by a recent exchange on Bluesky with Josh of Rise up Comus to share some of my thoughts in the form of a blog post. 

Magic in stories is often free-form, and while its power is usually limited, its application rarely is. In RPGs however, magic is often quantified in very specific spells, that do one single thing (at least in the paradigm of games descended from DnD). One particular egregious example is the iconic Fireball spell of fifth edition D&D, every part of it is very proscribed, you always throw a fireball of exactly the same strength (unless you upcast it). If you play the game rules-as-written, it is likely that your wizard can cast fireballs, but is unable to magically light a candle without burning the house down. Contrast for instance with the Fire Bolt spell, which essentially does the same thing, throw fire", but weaker. Again, your wizard might be able to cast Fireball, but not the weaker Fire Bolt! This makes no sense to me: if you know how to throw fire with magic, it should be your magical power and skill limiting you, not the arbitrary demarcations of spell statblocks. The pre-defined spells feel artificial and gamey, limited by game design rather than what makes sense diegetically (an exception to this is Prestidigitation, which I think is a great spell, offering the type of freedom I would expect a magic user to have).

I am currently noodling around with a game, Mistwalker, which I am sure I will mention here again, and one of the things I want to put in is a more free-form magic system, based on Power Words similar to e.g. the True Names of Le Guin's Earthsea stories. The system in its current form reads as follows:

Power Word Magic

A Power Word Wizard keeps Power Words in their grimoire. These power words allow them to focus their magic and cast spells easier. More complicated, or powerful, spells require more words, and the more of these are known to the caster, the easier the spell will be to cast. If the wizard does not know a word, they can focus their mind on the concept as a substitute, but the spell will be more difficult to cast.

The base difficulty of casting spells with ‘imprecise’ words is DC 10, plus 5 for each unknown word. This is harder under pressure, or easier in completely relaxed circumstances.

Creating spells from your mind is tiring work, each spell cast adds +1 to the spell DC for future spells, with an additional +1 per unknown word used, until the next rest.

Example: A wizard has cast 2 spells today, one of them required an unknown word. The DC for the next spell will then be 13, before other modifiers.

Unless special circumstances apply, the roll to cast spells is a magic check, so power word wizards benefit greatly from higher know and their magic proficiency.¹

If time and materials are available, the wizard can draw a magic circle to help focus the target of a given spell.

Power word wizards are often on the hunt for new power words to add to their grimoire. However, this process is not as simple as writing down the spelling. The wizard must meditate on the word to truly internalise its meaning, before they can use its power, a demanding and time-consuming process.

If the wizard fails the magic check to cast a spell, roll on the spell failure table on the opposing page to determine the effect.

Example: A wizard knows the words “move” and “object”. They can easily use these words to get the cookie jar down from the shelf that is too high to reach. However, when a boulder blocks their way, this is insufficient, as they would need to string together “move large object”. Not knowing the power word “large”, they have to focus their mind more, making it more difficult. Fortunately, only one world is unknown, making it a fairly easy challenge.

Magic is fickle, however, and almost always has a risk of going wrong. “Move object” is not particularly precise, and a lack of concentration could easily lead to another object being moved instead of the cookie jar, or the cookie jar moving away from, rather than towards the caster. Wizards are therefore always on the lookout for more Power Words to add to their grimoire, letting them do a wider array of magic, or increasing the precision of their spells.

 

1 The skill system in Mistwalker is based on Songbirds 3e, which is in turn descended from the attribute scores + skill proficiency system used in D&D 5e. In Mistwalker, Know is an attribute and Magic is a skill.^↩