Sunday 21 August 2011

Three Spell Monte: Two Pages of Spell Cards

No, not those cards.
Cards have been recognized as a great way to keep track of spells in a fire-and forget system since at least 2nd edition D&D. My insistence in the current campaign that each spell be castable only once a day makes this even easier, with no need for duplicates. Maybe, in fact, I'll work up some spell cards for those rules and my players.

I'm keeping text to 18pt, unlike 3rd ed ...
In the meantime, here are spell cards for the 12 magic spells that are all you need to play the one page starter rules (see here and here). The way these spells are going to work is almost tailor made for cards - or so I realized. You know as many spells as you have written down in your book, which varies with your intelligence and with how many spells you have found during adventuring. You can take a certain number of spells with you each day, ready to cast, depending on your level and intelligence.

When you cast them, you turn them face down; the extra moons and hourglasses are to paste on the back of the card so you can see when they'll be recovered. Spells require either 10 min (hourglass) or a full night (moon) to recover; I've ditched the at-will casting for now, finding it hard to balance. The number at top right is the minimum caster level at which the spell is available. That's it; no such thing as "spell levels", or rather, those equal caster levels.

Here they are shrunken; click for full size:



In the next couple of posts I'll fill in the wizard class with the actual spell rules and with ... Lab Abilities.

5 comments:

  1. Lab abilities? This sounds suspiciously like what I'm doing with the alchemist this week. I've got a 4 part post on item creation and history coming up.

    I am looking forward to steal- er I mean reading about your lab abilities.

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  2. Thanks ... I'm realizing I should have described them as "lab and library abilities." Coming up next!

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  3. I really, really like what you're doing with spells, they walk hand in hand with stuff i put on the blog recently. I might or might not nab a few of your ideas for a thing i'm working on: how do you feel about it getting published?
    You'll be obviously credited and stuff like that.

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  4. I'm following closely, keep it up!

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  5. Tsojcanth: Let me know which ideas in particular, rogersebastian #at# gmail #dot# com. Your One Page Monster Manual is a random generator correct? See, I would try for, well, a one page monster manual ;) I think I could scun down at least 16 of the usual suspects onto a page and then give suggestions for varying & tweaking.

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