The Lore of Fire

 We enter the circle at midnight

Monosophia

By rubbing your palms together, you can produce…

• (1 Secret) …sparks

• (2 Secrets) …a candle flame

• (4 Secrets) …a torch flame

• (8 Secrets) …a bonfire

You can be burned by fires of your own making.

Secrets of Fire

1. Fires within [SUM] paces burn faster or slower. Down to a smolder or up to an explosion that extends [HIGHEST] paces.
2. Blow through a flame to extend a cone of fire [SUM] paces for as long as you exhale.
3. Sculpt fire, within a space no greater than the span of your arms. It continues to burn, but the flames hold the shape you give them for [SUM] minutes. (Make a torch into a fiery sword.)
4. Material that would normally be flammable becomes resilient to fire (or the reverse); up to [DICE] times the amount of material that could be carried in a single arm. This effect lasts for one exposure to fire. (A person takes two arms to carry, unless you’re freakish strong.)
5. Swallow a burning coal without harming your throat. At any time, you can breathe out a cloud of smoke [SUM] paces in radius. All dice remain committed until you do so.
6. Call a fire to leap from its current home within [SUM]x10 paces to a new roost that you touch. The new home must be large enough to hold it; a bonfire will not migrate to a torch.
7. Remove [DICE] of the following from a single fire (lasts until the fire goes out, max [SUM] hours unless cast with 3+ dice):
• Heat
• Smoke
• Light
8. Light one flame from another. For [SUM] hours, you can project your sight, hearing, voice, and image through the link between the fires. If you use a Secret of Fire while touching one of the flames, you may choose for it to take effect as if you were standing in the other flame. If you use 3 or more dice, the effect instead lasts for [LOWEST] days.
9. Carefully prepare two ritual pyres. Light one while standing atop it to vanish and appear in a roar of flames atop the other. If the other pyre has been disturbed, you are instead consumed. Even on a successful transport, you suffer burns based on [HIGHEST]:
• 1: As if walking into a bonfire.
• 2-3: As if leaping through a bonfire.
• 4-5: As if jumping over a campfire.
• 6: As if standing a pace from a campfire.
10. Thrust your hand into the heart of a fire. It compresses into an uncut nugget of red glass in your palm. The fire erupts again when the glass shatters or after [HIGHEST]…
• (1 die) …heartbeats
• (2 dice) …hours
• (3 dice) …days
11. Imbue a fire with mind. It lasts for [SUM] hours, as long as it has fuel. The fire is friendly toward you, and has the size and intelligence of…
• (1 die) …a mouse
• (2 dice) …a dog
• (3 dice) …a man
12. Feed a part of your body to the flames, and use no Secrets of Fire for [SUM] days. You suffer no ill effects from the body part’s loss until the fire goes out, which it will not do unless extinguished. You also gain another benefit for as long as the body part burns, based on the number of dice invested and the body part sacrificed:
• 1 die
• Hair, fingernails: no effect (an everburning torch)
• 2 dice
• Eyes: you see the unseen; once you make eye contact only you can break it
• Tongue: your words cannot be ignored; you can rile up or terrify a crowd even if you don’t share a language
• Limb: replaced by one of ash, scorching to the touch and impervious to pain
• 3 dice
• Heart: your wounds burn closed; submerging you in water suspends the regeneration, but only extinguishing your heart can kill you
• Brain: burn out someone else’s mind and jump into their body; keep your Secrets

Marks of Fire

1. You radiate heat like a kettle of boiling water.
2. Flames burn behind your eyes. 
3. Your hair turns fire-orange and ignites harmlessly when your heartrate rises.
4. Dark-edged luminous cracks cover your skin, like a field of lava or smoldering embers.
5. You always smell of smoke.
6. Your shadow shows a mass of writhing flames in human form.

Dooms of Fire

1. Whenever you are more than an armslength from fire, you start to suffer from hypothermia.
2. Your touch is the touch of flame. Better get fireproof robes.
3. Your flesh is a delicacy among fuels. The fire wants you. It needs to consume you. It will seek you out. This doom can be avoided through marriage to a greater fire spirit, such as a true phoenix.

Monosophia

Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead

Economists divide goods into two categories: rival and non-rival. Rival goods are ordinary things, resources with a limited quantity; each one that you have means one that someone else doesn’t have. Non-rival goods don’t follow this rule. The archetypical example of a non-rival good is knowledge. If you learn a better basket-weaving method, teaching someone else doesn’t make you any worse off, not as if you’d had an apple and given it away. Information is more like fire, the common wisdom goes. You can share it freely without fear of reducing your own stock.

 Wizards know better.

Oh, that stuff is true for most knowledge, to be sure. Basket-weaving, writing, dancing, history. Common skills and ken. But there are exceptions. There are some subtleties to the world so deep that they do not abide by natural laws of cognition, not mere secrets of the universe but Secrets of the Universe. These forms of knowledge can be acquired, transferred, or stolen, but they cannot be shared. To tell such a Secret to another is to lose it yourself. The knowledge leaps from your mind to theirs like a living thing and curls up contentedly inside its new home.

Among the few who study such arcana, these Secrets are called monosophia. Most folk would call them magic.

Unraveling cosmic mysteries for fun and profit

One thing I’ve always wanted to change about GLoG-style magic is the way mishaps and dooms work. They’re a fun little concept: the more power you put into a spell, the more likely you are to suffer a backfire; or, eventually, to meet a messy end. More than you can chew, mankind was not meant to meddle, etc. All good.

But the thing is, the mishap and doom tables are divided up by class. Muscle Wizards have the Muscle Mishap Table; Bubble Wizards have the Bubble Mishap Table. When you pick a class, you’re also picking your set of upsets and disasters. And unless you pick up a template from a different wizard type, the options don’t change.

Can we do better? What if each flavor of magic had its own list of mishaps and dooms? Roll a double while casting Fire magic, and you roll on the fire mishap table. A triple on Beasts magic? Pick up a Doom of Beasts. If you only cast one kind of spell, it works just like GLoG class-bound tables. But if you dabble in several lores, you might get Marks of a few different kinds.

Oh yeah, Marks. That’s another thing I want to change: Marks instead of mishaps. This one’s not so much because I don’t like existing system. Mishaps are fine. They’re fun. But I think I’ve got something better.

In the Black Company series, all the most powerful mages are warped by the powers they wield. The act of twisting creation also twists you, body and soul, into something new and strange. Let’s gameify that. Instead of fire-themed mishaps, you gain Marks of Fire: your eyes burn, your skin is hot as a kettle, you always smell of smoke. These are the things that make passersby avoid you, whispering one to the other: “There goes a wizard.”

I’m going to write up several Lores, at least five. The finished ones are listed below:

• The Lore of Fire
• The Lore of Flesh
• The Lore of the Heavens
• The Lore of Beasts
• The Lore of Dream
• The Lore of the Sea

Magic Dice (MD) are standard d6s. You have a pool of them. Roll some or all of your pool each time you use a Secret. Each MD returns to your pool on a 1-3, or is expended on a 4-6. Your pool replenishes at dawn.

This is only a fragment of a game, of course. A fragment of a magic system, even. How do you get Magic Dice? How do you get Secrets, for that matter? Scoop knowledge out of the skull of a decapitated lich, snatch insight from a falling star, that kind of thing should do the trick. The classic method, of course, being to kill your mentor and steal from them.

As for the power to use them? Be creative. Here are some classic ideas; each one is worth a Magic Die:

• Cast off the name you were born with. Take a new one. Expunge all record of your True Name

• Die and be brought back. 

• Make a pact with a spirit of terrible power. What do they demand in exchange?

Mortal and Immortal MAGIC

“The ur-mage Klemto, it is said, traded his ties to the earth for an ageless body. Long did he rule in the craglands, until his apprentices removed his weighted boots while he slept, sending their once-master floating into the heavens…”

MORTAL MAGIC…

• …DISPLACES

o a weight on your shoulders

o a gap in your memory

o a knot in your soul

• …is DISCOVERED

o mighty bloodline

o ancient tome

o favor of the gods

o alchemical accident

• …is CIRCUMSCRIBED

o does only what mortal labor could

o sacrifice tools or materials (a pickaxe to magically dig a tunnel through stone, oil to start a fire)

o one task at a time

• …RETURNS

o dusk

o dawn

o moonrise

o death

IMMORTAL MAGIC…

• …COSTS

o your eye

o your name

o your birthright

o your empathy

• …is SOUGHT

o anyone can bargain with the eternal

o greater boons must be begged of higher powers—but are these spirits real, or just different faces of the infinite?

o those most desperate face the highest price

• …is BOUNDLESS

o unshackle the soul

o turn back time

o snuff the stars

o (The greater the boon, the higher the cost)

• …EVANESCES

o the gift remains

o the magic fades

The Lore of BEASTS

• Commonly asked of the eternal

• Mortal mage can harness the abilities of an animal instead of humans

• Lore of the crow allows magic flight

• COST is always the wizard’s humanity—never again will they be accepted by civilization

COMMENTARY

“Mortal magic” is almost entirely lifted from a great OSR blogpost that I have lost track of—if you know what I’m talking about, let me know! It reminds me of my favorite limit on “Wish,” too: “anything a person could do in a year.” Build a tower, yes. Kill a king, sure. Destroy the moon, no.

Immortal magic, on the other hand is deliberately open-ended. If you’re using it in a game, this is a roleplaying challenge, not something to solve with the numbers on your character sheet. What ancient power might be willing to help you? What do they demand in exchange?

RULES

Oh, you want an actual magic system out of this? Well, why not. We’ve been doing great stealing thus far, so let’s steal a little more. Take the Magic Dice terms from the GLoG ([DICE], [SUM], etc.); those are good. No spells, though, they don’t fit the paradigm. No Mishaps or Dooms, either. Keep it simple. Still terrifyingly powerful, though. Use these rules at your own risk.

MOSAIC-strict: MORTAL MAGIC

• Power represented by Magic Dice (MD, d6s)

• Get an MD when you consume a source of power

o Heart of a dragon

o Soul of a mage

o Fragment of an ancient artifact

• Roll to perform a single task with magic

o Performed as well as [SUM] people working at [DICE] x normal speed, with your level of skill

o Sacrifice tools to use them in the task (a pickaxe to have your magic dig through stone, a sword for your magic to defend you)

o On a 1-3, the MD return

o On a 4-6, the MD are lost until the next (pick one and stick with it)…

 …dusk

 …dawn

 …moonrise

 …death

• Magic CONTESTS

o Both sides roll, the winner can use the difference between their [DICE] and [SUM] and the loser’s

o Example: 

 Vlahal and Cohstr are having a Wizard’s Duel

 Vlahal rolls two MD and gets a 3 and a 4

 Cohstr rolls one MD and gets a 5 

 Vlahal rolled one more MD than Cohstr, so his final [DICE] is 1

 He also got a higher [SUM] (7 vs 5), so his final [SUM] is 2

 Vlahal’s magic strikes at Cohstr with the force of two people attacking at normal speed. En garde!

Is this too vague? Maybe. Game-able magic systems that don’t package their effects up into spells are hard. The more open-ended the abilities, the more narrative they become. In my experience you have to abstract something, either the economy of power, or its nature. Traditional Vancian spells do the former; this is a stab at the latter. It’s open to abuse by clever players, sure. Whatever. It’s magic!

The original post I got took these ideas from (would that I could remember where I saw it!) had a deliberate bronze-age flavor, and I agree. These rules conjure up an image of sorcerer-kings raising massive ziggurats, bargaining with djinn for immortality. Keep in mind, too, that a “task” doesn’t have to be physical! How many foes could a silver-tongued mage sway to his side, if there were five of him negotiating in double time?