System Ufera
First Post
Hello! As some of you are aware, I'm designing my own Pen n' Paper RPG system from the ground up, and I occasionally ask the ENWorld community for help with certain types of content for my system. This time, I'm having trouble adding variety to one college of magic in particular: Thermancy.
Thermancy is a combination of the more traditional Pyromancy and Cryomancy colleges you'll find in other systems; the reason I've combined them, in case you're curious, is due to the nature of magic in my game. You see, magic is basically another type of technology, in that to use it effectively, you need to be well-learned in science. In other words, rather than treating magic as an exception to physical law like other settings do, my game treats magic as part of physical law. Without going on too much more of a tangent explaining magic overall, the reason Thermancy is one college of magic is because "hot" and "cold" are just differing amounts of the same thing.
That said, I'm at a loss as to how to actually flesh out this college with spell effects; all I have so far is a spell effect called "Ignite," which creates heat and possibly burns things if enough heat is generated, and "Freeze," a spell effect that makes things cold, potentially freezing them. Because the effects of spells and their shapes are treated separately in my system (at the time of casting, a spellcaster chooses a spell effect and a spell shape, such as "bolt," burst," "wall," etc., and combines them into a spell), the "Ignite" spell effect on its own can be used to cause a small fire or a raging inferno, and to spread the flames all over the place or concentrate them in a line or barrier, and anything in between, as long as the spellcaster has mastered the shape in question; as you've probably guessed, it's the similar with the "Freeze" spell effect.
The magnitude of the spell is also changeable within the one spell effect. Despite the names, "Ignite" doesn't actually have to create enough heat to burn anything, and "Freeze" can be used to make one comfortable on a hot day just as easily as cause your blood vessels to burst open. The only limit to the magnitudes of Ignite and Freeze is how smart you are, and that's the upper limit; the lower limit, of course, is doing next to nothing. All of this is up to the will and capability of the wizard... and, from the perspective of game design, this is a problem.
Those two spell effects, as far as I can tell, make up just about everything that can be done with Thermancy. I don't know of any extra things intrinsic to fire and/or cold damage that isn't already accounted for (the damage type itself has the extra stuff built in; deal enough fire damage from any source, and the target will take ongoing fire damage from being on fire, whereas sufficient cold damage makes it harder to move as your nerves go numb). I'd rather not split the spell effects into different magnitudes, because that would make pursuing Thermancy less worthwhile due to the greater amount of investment required to obtain a standard damage-type spell effect (because, just like the "crawl before walk" proverb, one has to learn to magically heat a cup of coffee before one can learn to burn the whole town to ashes, and there would also be the many stages in between). The only thing I can think of for another spell effect is making flaming snowballs, which would just be a combination of weakened versions of Ignite and Freeze.
So... any ideas?
Thermancy is a combination of the more traditional Pyromancy and Cryomancy colleges you'll find in other systems; the reason I've combined them, in case you're curious, is due to the nature of magic in my game. You see, magic is basically another type of technology, in that to use it effectively, you need to be well-learned in science. In other words, rather than treating magic as an exception to physical law like other settings do, my game treats magic as part of physical law. Without going on too much more of a tangent explaining magic overall, the reason Thermancy is one college of magic is because "hot" and "cold" are just differing amounts of the same thing.
That said, I'm at a loss as to how to actually flesh out this college with spell effects; all I have so far is a spell effect called "Ignite," which creates heat and possibly burns things if enough heat is generated, and "Freeze," a spell effect that makes things cold, potentially freezing them. Because the effects of spells and their shapes are treated separately in my system (at the time of casting, a spellcaster chooses a spell effect and a spell shape, such as "bolt," burst," "wall," etc., and combines them into a spell), the "Ignite" spell effect on its own can be used to cause a small fire or a raging inferno, and to spread the flames all over the place or concentrate them in a line or barrier, and anything in between, as long as the spellcaster has mastered the shape in question; as you've probably guessed, it's the similar with the "Freeze" spell effect.
The magnitude of the spell is also changeable within the one spell effect. Despite the names, "Ignite" doesn't actually have to create enough heat to burn anything, and "Freeze" can be used to make one comfortable on a hot day just as easily as cause your blood vessels to burst open. The only limit to the magnitudes of Ignite and Freeze is how smart you are, and that's the upper limit; the lower limit, of course, is doing next to nothing. All of this is up to the will and capability of the wizard... and, from the perspective of game design, this is a problem.
Those two spell effects, as far as I can tell, make up just about everything that can be done with Thermancy. I don't know of any extra things intrinsic to fire and/or cold damage that isn't already accounted for (the damage type itself has the extra stuff built in; deal enough fire damage from any source, and the target will take ongoing fire damage from being on fire, whereas sufficient cold damage makes it harder to move as your nerves go numb). I'd rather not split the spell effects into different magnitudes, because that would make pursuing Thermancy less worthwhile due to the greater amount of investment required to obtain a standard damage-type spell effect (because, just like the "crawl before walk" proverb, one has to learn to magically heat a cup of coffee before one can learn to burn the whole town to ashes, and there would also be the many stages in between). The only thing I can think of for another spell effect is making flaming snowballs, which would just be a combination of weakened versions of Ignite and Freeze.
So... any ideas?
