Magic Systems for CraftWork and Beyond

CraftWork is intended to be flexible and systems adjacent. This means that some hacking and adjustment will be needed to make it fit the way you want at your table.

Levels are a part of CraftWork, but they are also easily extracted in order to fit a levelless system such as Wonder and Wickedness or Knave. Levels make it super easy to adapt to 5e or OSE, since spell levels are baked into those magic systems.

However, for 5e you would need to convert casts into slots. You could do this per level, or you could just continue using the charts in the player's manual per level of MageCraft, ignoring the CraftWork notion of casts altogether. 

Some folks have asked, 'what about warlocks or what about specific schools of magic from 5e?' Within CraftWork, and at your table, just bake in one or two special rules to carve out space for these kinds of visions. Perhaps a character has more flexibility in casting closer to the Edge then is specified; that gets them closer to a 5e warlock. Whatever Being they have a pact with grants them an additional spell or ability, or a unique one. A Wizard accepted to the School of Evocation automatically gains the Sculpt Spell skill and a bonus to their fireballs or ice bolts.

You are folding things in, layering in specificity as it relates to the world that is growing at your table. Your game does not look like someone else's game, and your magic is your own.

My Gaming History to 1990

We were talking the other day about when we started playing particular games, so I started pitting memory against releases, gauging duration and intensity.

Personal RPG History

Dramatis Personae

Me: Will (1962 - Present)

Ted: my younger brother (1964-2017)

Dad: my father, Alan (1931-1996)

Mom: my mother, Anita (1939- 1975)

All the players: James, Bear, Mike, Tim, Randy, John, Rick, Tina, Bob, Natalie, Sho, and all my students.

Chainmail Dad purchased and gave Ted and I the copy, probably in '72, and we immediately transformed our train table into a fantasy battlefield.

D&D original brown books '74 Again, Dad purchased the box set, I don't remember where, and gave it to us in Urbana, Illinois. I was in a combined 7-8 grade at my HS. 

We played intensely with each other and with friends, filling graph and hex paper with our worlds.

Metamorphosis Alpha '76 I bought this at a record store (?) in C-U. We played this extensively, as it slowly supplanted D&D. We moved to the farm that year when my Dad remarried.

Traveller 77 I bought the original black box set that summer or fall and definitely moved away from D&D and MA, with D&D returning briefly in the 90's and then in 2018.

Little Wars came as a Christmas gift in 1977 and we adapted it to fantasy, using spring loaded cannons and a growing collection of miniature Fantasy figures (mostly Ral Partha), with Ted more involved than I, a trend that continued throughout our lives!

I bought Gamma World in '78, and played briefly, but Traveller was already my main campaign/game, since you could always have abandoned colony starships and devastated worlds inside Traveller, so MA & GW just became subsumed.

During this time Ted bought a number of board games including Dragon Pass ('77 or 78), SPI's Wizards ('78? though it came out in '75), and Magic Realms ('79). The latter two saw heavier play than the first.

RuneQuest in either 78 or 79. Ted ran this extensively for several years until he switched to Call of Cthulhu. He gave RQ to me in '80 or '81, and I have run my world for 30+ years; It slowly eclipsed Traveler.

Call of Cthulhu became Ted's RPG of choice to run and collect when it came out in '81, but he was always drawn to miniatures and board games more than running RPG's. 

By this time we were both in college. I was running RQ, and less and less Traveller, weekly through the late 80's and playing in Call of Cthulhu and a Morrow Project homebrew with friends in Madison and Urbana. Ted and I played on vacations, summers, etc through the 80's.

Takeaways

My first is that for all of its veneration and iconization, especially recently, we really didn't play D&D for that long, hopping quickly to the next iteration, combining, and then settling in, in a way, to a couple different games.

My second takeaway is that we played worlds, not systems. Games and campaigns took place in worlds we built, designed, and evolved. Traveler was not the Third Empire; RuneQuest to me was never Glorantha. The game systems were always just starting points, rough frameworks or sets of possibilities with which to build worlds, and then flesh them out, test them, cement the possible into reality through the play at the table. Over time each game became a large collection of notes, maps, index cards, and character sheets, associated with a handful of xeroxed charts, cropped and assembled to serve our purpose.

To be continued!

This Game

The following bears repeating...

This is a game about interacting with this world as if it were a place that exists.

Killing things is not the goal.

There is nothing that is "supposed" to happen.

Unknowability and consequence make everything interesting.

You play as your character, not as the screenwriter writing your character.

It's your job to make your character interesting and to make the game interesting for you.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

The answer is not on your character sheet.

Things are swingy.

You will die.

(By Gregory Blair, Brian Harbron, FM Geist, Zedeck Siew, Brian Murphy, Dirk Detweiler Leichty and Daniel Davis)

To which I would add...

Roles/Goals

Make the world seem real.

Play to see what happens.

Make the player's lives seem dangerous, interesting, and heroic.

Support player safety.

Vision & Design

Embarking on this Zine project leads, once again, to an intersection of my vision loss, at this point with design. In conversations with the designer working on the project with me, the question of art direction obviously arose, and there were samples of other work that we looked at. The drafts I had rendered, ineffectually at best, had a very clean, sparse look to them, contrary to most of the samples. 

I buy a lot of zines, and the current trend in RPG design seems to be in an opposite direction, tending towards the dark, grim, and forboding, or towards highly designed and colorful interfaces. Because of my vision loss, the current aesthetic hotness ramps up inaccessibility, though I can definitely see the appeal!

So what to do? Do I follow the wave, even if it means not being able to fully appreciate, let alone fully discern, the graphic design of my own product? Do I push, or insist, on a design that is accessible to me, but that others find uninteresting or unappealing? How does accessibility, visual accessibility, fit with the world of Knock, Mork Borg, and other cutting-edge publications? What are the interesting, design forward, user-friendly, accessible models that I/we can lean on, or draw from, for this project?

The first example, and I'm sure there will be others after I post this, is Luke Gearing's Volume Two Monsters &. It is riffing off of traveler, but also hazy in the background, and this choice resonates throughout the work. It is direct, easy to read, and simple to operate.

Once, Again, Into the Brink

Well, five years, new name, new scene, less vision, radical shifting gaming approaches, and lots of new directions. Perhaps the biggest shift since I last posted has been the loss of vision. Miniature games are now few and far between, in part because of the pandemic, but primarily because I can no longer make out many of the details or figures on the board. I have stopped painting for the same reason.

However, as I have adapted in the past, I continue to adapt now. I have shifted over to role playing games primarily, running multiple groups through a new and evolving world, The Dim. I've put together a cool little Zine, CraftWork, to make manifest how I think about role playing games at the moment, and that should be out in the world within the next couple of months. More on that later!

As far as directions in this venue, I can definitely see using it as a place to post additional content for the Zine, to address new changes and adaptations and disability issues in gaming, and, obviously, to share other sources and approaches that I find interesting.