ZEITGEIST Combining Zeitgeist with Spheres of Power

[Fortuitous]

So with less time to prepare games these days (weekly sessions are draining after a while) I've decided to give myself a break and go with a premade adventure. Zeitgeist looks absolutely amazing, but with the end of the last all-custom game, the group found the supplement Spheres of Power by Drop Dead Studios. For those who don't know, Spheres of Power is a massive rework to the standard Pathfinder/D&D Vancian magic system, and is widely viewed as a lot more balanced. My players are super excited for Spheres of Power. My concern is this: Can we run Spheres of Power with Zeitgeist (and a little bit of conversion, tweaking, etc) and not get too screwed up?

I know, it's a bit of a hail mary to hope to find somebody familiar with both, but hey, Hail Mary.

 

[efreund]

I don't know Spheres of Power. A player of mine brought it up to me in a prior campaign and I declined to learn the system. However, being familiar with the ZG campaign and its associated rules, here's my (very unofficial opinion):

ZG has a few house rules with regard to how magic works. You can find these in the Player's guide with regard to flying, teleportation, and planar magic. These broad concepts should be easy enough to port into any magic system. ZG gets a whole raft of additional house rules at the beginning of adventure 10 (and these are previewed in a restricted capacity in adventure 7), and these have a bit more of a driilldown into how specific spells work and might require more of a conversion into an alternate magic system. If you plan on playing that far.

ZG uses quite a few non-standard monsters and rules for its NPCs. On one hand, this will make "converting" to an alternate magic system easier, simply because there are so few NPCs who were using the core magic system to begin with. They will just remain as the unique rules-hack snowflakes that they are, and need not concern themselves with what rules govern the PCs. On the other hand, depending on how Spheres of Power is implemented, this could be a real headache. For example, I know that 3.0 Psionics kindof requires the PCs to go up against psionic NPCs pretty frequently, or else the whole system breaks down. If Spheres of Power is like that, you're in a lot of trouble. But if Spheres of Power is just a way for PCs to cast stuff, and doesn't make any assumptions of the spellcasting ability of their opponents, then things will be quite easy for you.

If you're worried that there's any rules-specific minutia that ends up being super-plot relevant, then no, you're in the clear. This isn't like Rise of the Runelords, where the specific specialist and opposition schools ends up having a massive impact on the plotline in the second half, and if you try to convert the rules away, you break down core setting assumptions. Just the broad strokes around gold and planes (which *are* plot-critical houserules).

Anyway, dunno if that was helpful, but I hope it was. And ZG is the best pre-written campaign I've ever come across. (It was difficult for me to dethrone GPC in that regard.) But this campaign hard to run, and requires a ton of prepwork. If you put in the energy, the thing really sings. Enjoy!

 

[Fortuitous]

Thank you for the response. It sounds like it should be a reasonable conversion. So I would want to look into module 10 and the players guide specifically to check for compatibility then. Sounds good.

Just in case someone else wants to chime in, spheres of power is a replacement for the existing vancian magic system in which magical classes gain talent points which can be put into picking up specific spheres (conjuration, destruction, life, creation, etc) which grants access to a handful of specific powers, which are then modified with further talent investment. Magic is cast with a spell point system, and automatically scales with caster level.

So say instead of learning fireball, would learn the destruction sphere which gives you the ability to do short range blasts of Blunt damage. Then you would use a talent to gain the ability to make your blasts do fire damage, and another one to make them into explosive AoEs. Or into walls. Or make them do slashing/piercing/blunt depending on resistance. Or make. Them do acid damage and linger. Or channel through a melee attack.

The result is that casters tend to be more specialized. You can't as easily just pick up fly, teleport, wish, and the occasional conjuration spell, though dipping unto spheres is possible. So players would have less access to those staple utility spells unless they invest in them.

 

[Morrus]

If you used our own Elements of Magic (also by Ryan Nock) he might have some more insight. From the sounds of it, Spheres of Power is a point-based spellbinding system like EoM?

 

[Fortuitous]

If I had to take a guess, the company who made Spheres of Power had certainly read Elements of Magic - however I'm not familiar with EoM so I'm working off the more detailed reviews. Spheres of Power is a bit more limiting in terms of what you can do. Since it takes talents (basically feats for magic) to pick up new spheres and expand on those spheres. This means that without feat or resource investment (Scrolls and the like) you can't just pick up something like Teleportation or Flight, unless you've invested your talents already into the tree. This specifically attempts to rein in the ability of a mage to have a spell for every occasion, be that picking locks, dealing with traps, mobility, whatever. It also means that it can leave a caster with their pants down if a module assumes that all parties at level 12 will, say, have teleportation, or flight, or the ability to shift planes, or some type of conjuration, or anything of that nature. This is my biggest concern - I can leave most of the baddies as is, the players need to know it's 10D6 fire damage with a DC17 reflex save for half, not that it's fireball vs a destruction sphere mage.

However, if there are a lot of casters that rely heavily on a lot of different schools of magic (I remember in Cult of The Ebon Destroyers there was an abjuration mage / monk who used something from everywhere, and it was integral to his build that just couldn't work in this system) it could cause problems as well. One or two of these I can work around.

 

[RangerWickett]

I think you should have few problems. I try to make very few assumptions of what the PCs have access to. When long-distance travel is needed, the party either can requisition a ship or call in a favor to get someone to teleport them. Theoretically the whole campaign could be done by a group of fighters with no magic (well, some potions and such would help), though it'd be useful if they had a diversity of skills, because investigation is key. I mean, there are a few places where we assume the party will use magic in an investigation (like following a magical aura), but the PCs can fairly easily requisition a mage to cast any necessary spells for them.

Now, as for the bad guys, of course if you plan to use a variant magic system it would require a lot of tweaking to change all the spellcasting enemies to use the same system. I mean, there aren't a ton of spellcaster enemies, but there are monsters that use spell-like abilities, elementals, ghosts, and such. Most of it could just run under the hood without the PCs being any the wiser.

 

[Fortuitous]

Now, as for the bad guys, of course if you plan to use a variant magic system it would require a lot of tweaking to change all the spellcasting enemies to use the same system. I mean, there aren't a ton of spellcaster enemies, but there are monsters that use spell-like abilities, elementals, ghosts, and such. Most of it could just run under the hood without the PCs being any the wiser.

About the only thing I would take the time to change would be the boss type humanoid enemies. Monsters get to cheat. Nobody asks how many levels of wizard a golem has when he starts firing disintegration eye beams.

 

[RangerWickett]

Well, there's a sort of witch with custom curses, a mage who conjures cannons, Magneto as played by Willem Dafoe, a gnome in a mech suit, a ghost wizard, a guy who I just have the abilities I wanted because I had a cool boss fight in mind, and a man who splits into 4 each with a different class.

 

[Fortuitous]

I approve of all of those things. There goes my money...

 

[mdusty]

Well, there's a sort of witch with custom curses, a mage who conjures cannons, Magneto as played by Willem Dafoe, a gnome in a mech suit, a ghost wizard, a guy who I just have the abilities I wanted because I had a cool boss fight in mind, and a man who splits into 4 each with a different class.

Willem Dafoe! I knew that portrait of 'Magneto' looked like someone, I just couldn't think of who! In fact, I've noticed that a lot of the portraits kinda resemble famous people. Am I the only one who thinks that Duchess Ethyln looks like Weezy Jefferson and Thames Grimsely is kinda Mel Gibson'ish'?