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?