How to use Channeling in a game set somewhere other than the Wheel of Time.
This is a set of modifications to the channeling system to allow its use in other game worlds, in order to use these modifications you will need to buy the book. Individual GM’s might want to use some of the flavor if so retain the rules you like.
After the basic modifications are done many will want to use spells found in other source material such as the PH, T&B, or R&R.
1) No bonus for gender.
2) All channelers can sense active weaves, but the Feat: Sense Residue is still needed to detect channeling after it has occurred.
3) Combat Casting, Extra Affinity, Extra Talent, Multiweave, Power-Heightened Senses, and Tie Off remain the same.
A) Each game world will need to decide if they have Traditions such as the Aes Sedai or Asha’man or if they will have a mentor-pupil style development for channeling. Most will fall somewhere between the two. Nearly every published setting falls into this middle ground.
B) The five powers existed long before RJ used them in WoT and are fairly integral to use of the channeling system, but you could use others. If a GM wanted a classical D&D style to his game you could have Affinities be evocation, conjuring, summoning, divination, and etcetera. That said you would be creating a lot of problems with balance issues and with the amount of work needed to make the system playable.
C) The Talents give a GM much more latitude to adjust. There is already some strangeness in the published Talents – Earth Delving & Cloud Dancing are each their own talent but Elementalism is a combination of Fire, Air, and Water? It would probably be better to have an Elementalism Talent that included basic weaves from all five Affinities and then have specialized weaves for those who “specialized” by taking the Talent Earth Delving.
Every game is going to have some different stuff in the Talent department; the trick will be to create enough Talents without creating to many Talents.
D) Strange issues.
1) Angreal and Sa’angreal – these work just fine in any game. In standard treasure for D&D they will quickly become somewhat common items. GMs should use their heads and make these somewhat rare items. Remember they effectively increase a channelers level by their power rating, it isn’t really fair to have the Channeler functioning 3-4 levels above the rest of the party. If you would like to see them have more use but be more limited consider giving them charges. A good example of how this could work would be Rod of Metamagic in T&B.
2) Linking – again no real problems with linking. If you have a concise view of your world I would limit the knowledge of linking to a small group. In FR the Red Wizards would be one such group, in GH you might limit it to the Boneheart and the Circle of Eight. You can remove the male/female ratios but I would suggest that you come up with some other limiting factor. The Tattoo focus from the Red Wizards works very well for this.
3) Rare and Lost weaves – is really dependant on campaign setting. If you play in a dark ages campaign it makes good sense that many of the great weaves of lore are no longer available. If the game is set at the time of the battle of Diesmar in BR
I do not think they really mesh well together - the Channeler gets killed in a normal magic game. No buffing spells, no defensive spells, no summoning spells, & weak offensive spells. In WoT this is balanced by everyone but the channelers having crappy saves.
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