Scratchpad:AmberGM

Sorcery

Okay. I had some ideas about sorcery a while back, and I'm juggling them again as to how they work.

If I were to run a game... Sorcery alone should not be as powerful as Pattern. Ever. Sorcery and Pattern working together could do some really awesome things that they can't do alone, but Pattern is the dominant partner.

One of the other things I'd worked on was an actual //theory// of sorcery. It was based on the three Patterns of Amber - in part because people having Fire Patterns was making me twitch. So the three components were Sky (Tir, represented by a triangle), Sea (Rebma, of course, represented by a pair of squigglies like you sometimes see as a symbol for Aquarius), and Stone (Amber, represented by a circle). Fire falls under Sky and is represented by a v.

So each world could be represented in magical notation as a set of characters representing the balance of the world. Let's use ^, o, and ~ as temporary symbols. Tattooine would be ^^oo. Waterworld would be ^^~~. The world of the Primal Pattern would be ^o~, which looks amazingly like a smiley now that I look at it this way. *laughs* I think I'd decided Amber would be much the same, with Rebma being ~o and Tir being ^o. I think Chaos had a special symbol all its own, but in the end, it's also ^o~.

So the idea would be that depending on where you were, the effects of your magic could be skewed. Water magic would be very weak on Tattooine. Earth magic would be very weak on Waterworld. Fire spells would fizzle in the Underdark.

The only way to bypass that would be to take either the Pattern or the Logrus and then take Advanced Sorcery and/or Advanced in the Power to be able to integrate the Power and the sorcery. Then your spells would always be based in ^o~, not the local balances. Broken Pattern would be similar but unreliable in that regard, sometimes working as Pattern, sometimes working as the local balances, and sometimes skewing the local balances unrecognisably. (Waterworld could react to Broken Pattern magic as ^^~~ one spell and oo the next...)

I'm kind of thinking of the process of sorting out spell effects as a sort of... I dunno... long division? Multiplication?

Say you're casting a fireball on Tattooine.

The spell is ^, Sky. The world is ^^oo, Sky and Stone. Well, technically, it has to be something more like ~oooo^^^^^ - a tiny bit of water, lots of dirt, lots of sky. Slightly more Sky than Stone, so the effect would be just slightly amplified.

I figure each world has a long representation and a short one. So Earth, for example, would be ~o^ for short - but the long would be more like ~~~oo^^^^^, if we assume that each element is ranked 1-5. Actually, I think 1-10 would be easier; nicer ratio, at least. So Earth would be ~~~~~~~ooo^^^^^^^^^^.

Ooo! Ooo! Gas planet! ^^^^^^^^^^. Or ^ for short. In fact, any place with a wide-open sky would most likely end in ^^^^^^^^^^...

And Tattooine would be ~ooooooooo^^^^^^^^^^.

Underdark might be 19:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)ooooo^.

So the place of the Primal Pattern is technically 19:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)19:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)oooooooooo^^^^^^^^^^. Or ~o^.  :)

Expanding on the thought process...

The player's responsibility would be: 1. Be aware that Shadows have different balances that may effect the spells.

A suggested thing for the player to know would be: 1. Roughly what elements each spell draws from 2. A way to determine the balances of a Shadow before casting spells

The rest of it is GM stuff.  :)

GM Philosophy

Also, have I mentioned that my Amber philosophy does NOT include auctions? Or secret GM-spends-your-points agendas?

Those were two of my least favorite parts of the ADRPG books. Although Grand Prize for Suckiness goes to the introduction on Shadow Knight, where I //still// want to slap Wujick around for basically saying, "I didn't want to write this book, and I think it's wrong, and I don't know why I spent time on it, but here you go."

It was about group scenes. Everybody posts once. And when everyone's gone, everyone posts again. I like that system. It's tidy. It will also have to hold true for group threads. No burying the GM without permission!