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 SPECIAL
EFFECTS
Special Effects include magic,
miracles, powers, psionics, cybernetics, and mutations—all of which are
covered with detailed rules.
Origins
I developed the magic
system first, and used its final success as the basis for other Special
Effects. The key thing I wanted was to make sure that characters could
choose how their wizards worked. There's too much to go into here, but
suffice it to say, a room full of mages all casting the exact same spell
will do so with custom ranges, radii, areas of effect, damage, etc.
according to what is called Increments & Effects. I/E Skills are what make
wizards different in how they cast various spells. Even two
equal-power mages might do completely different things with the very same
spell.
Magic Disciplines
Then come the Disciplines,
which are what make wizards different in what they cast. Wizards
need certain Disciplines to work certain spells. For example, in order to
cast a fireball spell, a wizard needs DIS: Elemental Fire. To cast a
lightning bolt spell, he needs DIS: Elemental Electricity. To cast a
teleport spell, he needs DIS: Dimensional. Disciplines represent schools
of magic that can be learned, and wizards can even master them by
purchasing them multiple times, greatly increasing their power in certain
focused areas.
Designing Spells
Here's the really fun part.
Designing a spell takes minutes—or under a minute, once you've gotten
good at it. You check a few boxes to choose required Disciplines, drop in
some quick math based on what you want the spell to do, and add any
special switches, such as Fast Cast (cuts casting time down), Hang (casts
it up to the last word, so you can launch it in a hurry), or Reversal
(reverses a spell's effects). By default, all spells require gestural,
material, and verbal components, but you can even buy those away. Now
tally up the Purchase Cost and Casting Cost, and you're done. In the time
it took you to read this paragraph, you could have designed a spell.
I kid you not, we've sat around for
hours just designing spells before—particularly when we got the system
working fine, when we spent about a week and piles of spell sheets. You're
going to love this.
Other Special Effects
Others work in similar ways,
although things like powers don't rely on I/E Skills of the character;
rather; specific I/E levels are bought for specific powers. In the same
brief time it takes to generate a magic spell, you can generate miracles,
power, and psionics. But there are other features, such as extreme Skills levels or heightened Category/Quality
Scores for those superhuman heroes of comic-book fame. Cybernetics lets
you enhance your character with technological upgrades from bionic limbs
to brain implants. And this is all just the basics in the core rules.
Stunts
Those with Special Effects
can also purchase special Skills called stunts. Magic Stunts such as group
magic, rune magic, dispel magic, and volley were considered separate
spells in other games. But there are others, such as Powers Stunts, which
are ways a hero with a power has learned to do other side effects with his
powers, possibly by combining their effects.
Specials Sheets
To make it easy, there's a
blank sheet you can copy for every type of Special Effect: spell sheet,
miracle sheet, power sheet, psionic sheet, cybernetic sheet, and mutation
sheet. We'll even have them on this site as PDFs, so you can easily print
off copies as you need them.
You won't believe the possibilities
with the Special Effects system. It offers the most comprehensive and powerful
mage-conjuring, hero-generating, psionicist-thinking, six-billion-dollar-man-building, holy-guy-creating, malformed-creature-mutating system ever put
together in an RPG. It doesn't compare to anything else like it because there is
nothing like it. You'll likely have just as much fun creating spells
and powers and psionics as you will playing the game. We did!
Rolegamer Democracy -
What's this?
This was a big one. Many
gamers who stuck to one classic game system were content to choose spells
set at certain levels as they always had been, but anyone who had played
many systems knew there were much better systems out there. People wanted
magic and powers that were easy to use, and that they could customize. So
I gave them a way to build them from scratch, quickly and easily. And it's
fun!
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