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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 9487823" data-attributes="member: 9254">I always liked Earthdawn's way of recreating Vancian magic (which is unsurprisingly similar to Shadowrun)1) Magic is damaging - a caster can kill themselves by casting spells.2) magic involves spells - mostly true....3) the faster you cast, the more likey you are to die and/or be possessed  -yes, you could both die and become a demon's undead play thing.  Yay cadaver men!This last one was the control factor.  Spell matrices can only channel a certain amount of power and a caster can only have so many at one time. Powerful spells require multiple rounds to collect enough power and it involves die rolls that can fail. So you could totally kill yourself without ever successfully casting a spell.Net result is a caster that only has a small number of spells available, the spells are either fast/weak or slow/powerful and in both cases tend to cause Strain (injury), which limits total castings.</blockquote>