Lost in Translation

[Samloyal23]

So I have an idea of an ancient tome of magic spells that has been repeatedly re-translated, censored, edited and miscopied over and over. So the spells and instructions for creating magical items held with any particular copy may be faulty. I want there to be chance that using spell or magic item described in the tome will have a nasty side effect. Not often, just occasionally. I am also thinking getting multiple versions of the book should decrease the risk if they are studied and compared, but that should require multiple skill checks to translate and compare the texts. Has anyone developed rules for this kind of thing?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Nifty idea, and I don't know of any published game supplements doing that before you.

 

[Samloyal23]

Call of Cthulhu has rules for tomes that state that different versions of a book will have slightly different stats. I am thinking if a spell is learned "wrong" it may have a side effect when you cast it or an item that is made wrong my come out cursed. So the user of the tome has to be very precise in doing the necessary research to make sure each spell or other piece of lore is correct before trying to use it.

 

[Celebrim]

I've thought about it but have been generally worried about the consequences in terms of play of making magic more random, bizarre, and difficult to run. I think there is a mental burden on the GM that is just too heavy if you have to worry about the effects of spells a player is using, rather than the player having that burden. It's great in theory, but in practice I think it would slow play to a crawl and lead to lots of errors in play. I don't want to be asking the player, "Which version of the spellbook did you use when memorizing the spell?"

 

[jhingelshod]

Dungeon Crawl Classics has rules for spell mis-casting that you could probably re-tool to suit the system you have in mind.

 

[Samloyal23]

So, just jotting down ideas. I am think I need a table of casting side effects. If you do not learn the spell "correctly" you in effect learn to miscast it. If this happens you have to deal with the side effects until you do enough spell research to re-learn the spell without errors.

Perilous Spell Learning Table
Roll d10
1-2 You have not learned the spell or invocation correctly. Each time you cast it you suffer a 10% casting failure penalty.
3-4 You have not learned the spell or invocation correctly. Each time you cast it your target receives a +2 saving throw bonus.
5-6 You have not learned the spell or invocation correctly. Each time you cast it you must save versus Fortitude or lose 1 Con. Lost Con can be recovered only through rest.
7-8 You have not learned the spell or invocation correctly. Each time you cast it you must pass a skill check or accidentally summon a random creature as though you also cast a Summon Monster spell of the same level. You have no control over the summoned creature and cannot dismiss it.
9 You learned the spell in an eccentric way but it works normally. Any other caster who sees you use the spell knows you were not trained in its use.
10 A breakthrough! You have learned a "trick" to cast the spell more efficiently. Targets suffer a -2 penalty on saves when you cast this spell.

This is just off the top of my head, but what do you all think?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You could use one of the old wild magic/wand of wonder tables, at least for minor mishaps.

For the most major of mishaps, maybe look at the Deck of Many Things for inspiration. That would be stuff like what happened when Ash mangled the incantation in Army of Darkness, or what happens to Boris Balkan in The Ninth Gate.

 

[Samloyal23]

I've thought about it but have been generally worried about the consequences in terms of play of making magic more random, bizarre, and difficult to run. I think there is a mental burden on the GM that is just too heavy if you have to worry about the effects of spells a player is using, rather than the player having that burden. It's great in theory, but in practice I think it would slow play to a crawl and lead to lots of errors in play. I don't want to be asking the player, "Which version of the spellbook did you use when memorizing the spell?"

Noted. But this is not something I see coming up often and would be temporary, the caster just has to spend some time researching a fix to any spells learned wrong. So, say you learn six spells from your copy of the book. You make a translation check for each one, failing to learn one spell correctly. You get five normal spells added to your spellbook and most make a note next the faulty on your character sheet "Spell faulty, enemies receive +2 on save". When you spend enough time and money to find a fix you just delete the notation.

 

[Bera]

I did something like this with rituals in a 4e Dark Sun game. I made characters roll an arcana/intelligence check to learn the ritual. If they got a standard success they had partially mastered the ritual. If they passed a difficult check, they had fully mastered the ritual. They could re-check each level for each ritual they had failed to learn or only partially learned.

The partial rituals were just the normal ritual with a bit of the text redacted by google-translating it into another language. That way they could cast a divination-type ritual to get advice, but they didn't realize who the advice was coming from without mastering the ritual (i.e. from one of the Sorcerer-Kings, thus each time they cast the ritual they were giving an enemy some information). So basically the PCs who had partially mastered a ritual knew what the obvious and basic effects were (or had a pretty good idea), but they might not fully understand the consequences of the ritual.

It was super easy because the text of the rituals was available in the online character builder and the Dark Sun campaign guide had some suggestions for which types of rituals I should consider changing. Then I just printed them out and each player had their own ritual book. I stuck to only the partial/full mastery to keep things easy, but you could obviously have more levels of mastery depending on how many meaningful details you could learn about each spell.

I have definitely considered adding this, or something like it, into other games. It's especially appropriate if the PCs have access to the core books as a set of standardized or well-known magic effects a wizard's guild or culture of wizards knows about, but you can add in spells from other books or 3rd party suplements easily which are totally new and not well understood by anyone. Could be awesome in a 2nd Edition Jakandor-type game where part of the characters' missions might include recovering lost spells.

 

[Samloyal23]

So I was looking at the rules from Ravenloft for fear, horror, and dark power checks as well as wild magic surges. I am thinking of having a chance for each of these effects as well as a chance of some positive effects such as free slots for metamagic.