How Legend In The Mist makes magic mysterious again (by rejecting D&D-style spells)
Guest Author: Coleman Gailloreto
If magic is common and reliable, can you still call it magic? This question lies at the heart of the magic rules of Legend In The Mist, a new “Rustic Fantasy” roleplaying game from Son Of Oak. Read on to learn how Legend In The Mist fuses gameplay with worldbuilding to create a fantasy setting different from the usual Dungeons & Dragons campaign; a world where magic is mysterious, dangerous, and all the more special for it.
Their literary inspirations, for starters.
The backstory for Legend In The Mist speaks of an lost age of magic, a time of grand kingdoms whose rulers wielded the art of Thaumaturgy. Then came a disaster that unleashed monsters on the world and reduced civilization to ash. By default, campaigns of Legend In The Mist take place a few centuries post-disaster and puts players in the shoes of hopeful villagers who venture beyond their town walls to explore the ruins, mysteries, and magic of the long-gone age.
In some ways, Legend In The Mist is an RPG that rejects D&D-style magic; its character creation system lets players make PCs that don’t fit the usual RPG classes, and its “Rustic Fantasy” themes mandate a world with few, if any, magic shops or wizarding schools. At the same time, Legend In The Mist’s adventure-friendly world is a lot like the “Points of Light” setting from D&D 4th edition and does let players create fireball-slinging wizards and faith-healing priests.
So what truly sets the magic systems of Legend In The Mist apart from the magic systems of D&D?
Their literary inspirations, for starters.
RPGs Like D&D Use Dying Earth Magic
Get right down to it, and the magic system of Dungeons & Dragons (and all the other fantasy RPGs it inspired) had two big sources of inspiration.
The first one? The Dying Earth stories of fantasy author Jack Vance, where far-future wizards would memorize magical formulas, then forget them as soon as the spell was cast. This “Vancian Magic” became the template for the academic “Magic-User” and the pious Cleric in early D&D and influenced many other magic archetypes in future editions.
The other inspiration? Artillery rules from the tabletop war games that D&D evolved from. Pre Dungeons & Dragons, most war games simulated historic battles, i.e. the Napoleonic Wars. Then Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, added a fantasy supplement to his 1971 medieval war game called Chainmail. There, he described Wizards who could cast a “fire-ball” spell with the area effect of a catapult and a “lightning bolt” spell with the damage effect of a heavy cannon.
These two concepts –– “Spells as Ammo” and “Wizards as Artillery” –– are baked into nearly every D&D-inspired fantasy game, which almost always features game settings where magic is commonplace and treated like a technology. Great if a GM wants to run an RPG campaign about a magical Industrial Revolution! Less great if a GM wants to run a campaign in a world where magic’s a dangerous mystery.
…While Legend In The Mist Uses Folkloric Magic
Page through any real-life medieval grimoire, hedge witch journal, or scrap of old Egyptian Papyrus, and you won’t find spells for casting fire balls or hurling lightning bolts. Mostly, you’ll find rituals, amulets, recipes, and chants that assert power over fairly mundane things: spells for finding love, summoning animal servants, repelling theft and sickness, or winning at dice, and even spells that summon demons to give the magician a free liberal arts education!
The magic in Legend In The Mist draw lots of inspiration from these real examples of magical folklore, plus the sorcerers seen in old myths and medieval romances. Additionally, the game mechanics from Legend In The Mist’s core book encourage players to make their own magic, ranging from grand elemental invocations to “rustic” crafts centered around gathering herbs or learning true names.
How To Build New Magic In Legend In The Mist
The Fundamentals of Magic chapter in the Legend In The Mist core book explains how the magic works in the game’s Mist Engine system and gives players who want to make new magic systems the following steps:
- Create tags that define the magic: character creation in Legend In The Mist revolves around picking four big Themes that define who the fantasy hero is. To define a magical theme, assemble a list of descriptive tags that show how the magic works in general and specific way (for example: “Invoking of True Names,” “True Names of Natural Forces,” “True Name of the North Wind”).
- Add tags that describe acts of magic, i.e. whether it require chanting, gesturing, gathering ingredients, brandishing wands, and so on.
- Add tags for skills the magic requires: secret knowledge, weaving, cooking, dancing, singing, and so on.
- Add tags that describe the magic’s downsides: things such as elemental weaknesses, ritual requirements, physical tolls on the caster’s body, social obligations, oaths, taboos, etc.
- Define the magician’s Quest: a conflict or journey the magician embarks on to master, keep, or abandon their magic.
One other way to customize magic in Legend In The Mist lies in how the game treats failure. In classic fantasy RPGs, a spell like “Fireball” generally has two effects: either it hits the target and deals damage or it misses and does no/half damage. Legend In The Mist, in contrast, gives game masters a larger range of possible consequences for bad magic-casting dice rolls: the spell might go out of control, have unwelcome side-effects, etc.
Legend In The Mist’s Eight Sample Magic Systems
The Legend In The Mist core book also has a list of eight optional “Ways of Magic” that players can select, tweak, or hack if they want to make a magician PC on the fly:
- Alchemy & Herbalism: a naturalistic magic centered around brewing potions, medicines, poisons, etc. Requires special ingredients, special recipes, and downtime to concoct.
- Fey Patronage: magic taught or bestowed by the fickle Fair Folk, with a focus on illusion, trickery, visiting other worlds, etc. Requires good relations (and minimal debt) with one’s fey patron.
- Landshaping: channeling energy from the land in order to manipulate its primal elements. Requires a healthy, flourishing landscape that’s not energy-depleted.
- Runic Invocation: finding, deciphering, and combining magic symbols to make magical sentences. Requires a knowledge of the proper runes, quests to find new runes, and some way to inscribe them onto people or objects.
- Shapeshifting: turning into tiny critters, large beasts, other people, natural phenomena, etc. Requires discipline to resist the instincts of the adopted form.
- Sorcery: raw, powerful magic fueled by the magician’s own life-force. Requires special gestures/words and harms the sorcerer if the is botched (the magic style most like Wizards and Sorcerers from D&D).
- Spirit Binding: bargaining with or shackling spiritual beings so they’ll perform magic on the caster’s behalf. Obliges magicians to find/defeat new spirits and struggle to keep the bindings from breaking.
- Witchcraft: a magic of long elaborate rituals, centered around divination, blessing, cursing, and enchanting. Requires extended prep time, places and times of power, sympathetic links to the target, etc.
Conclusion
Legends In Mist charts a different path from the magic systems seen in D&D and other RPGs by bringing magic back to its folkloric roots. Which isn’t to say that players of Legend In The Mist are forced to portray magicians who are “historically accurate!” With the Mist Engine’s flexible character creation/game rules, it’s easy for gamers to create magician PCs with mysterious powers that are fun to use and create stories full of wonder and consequence!
Legend In The Mist’s core book available on Drivethru RPG and the Son Of Oak website.
