Rune Magic 2: Electric Beamaroo

Welcome to part 2, you made it.

PART THE FIRST - Making Runes
PART THE SECOND - Rune Mechanics
PART THE THIRD - Tutorial Rune Dungeon

Time to learn some mechanical bullshit I made up on the spot at the table.
It meanders a fair bit, so the tl;dr version is to read the stuff in big letters.


I have since updated my mechanics for rune magic, you can find them at the end of my house rules doc.
This article should be current now too... I hope.


What is even the deal here with these runes.

Alright the main thing is that runes can be used by anyone, especially if they're not a wizard.
This is why the all the wizards got together and sealed away the rune magic in a dungeon. There was probably a war or something.

You power runes by touching them and kind of pushing. You'll know it when you feel it.
You do need to concentrate though. The first rune isn't so bad, but casting several runes at once or powering them from a distance increases the strain on your brain.

How to cast a rune

• The player (not character) draws a glyph and shows you and you work out what it does.
• The player (not character) slaps the glyph he drew.
• Rune magic!

How long does it take to draw a glyph?


- It takes one round to draw 1 rune with, say, chalk on stone. This is the quickest possible. Harder materials might take longer.
- It takes 1 round to draw all the connective lines.
- It takes one round to power the finished glyph (like a spell, you declare you're casting at the start of the round and the glyph goes off at the end)

This means that to draw and cast a Beam Lightning glyph in the midst of combat it will take 5 rounds.
Beam Lightning glyph is made up of a Beam rune connected to two Light runes. Hence it takes one round to draw each rune, one round to draw the connecting lines, and powering the glyph takes an extra round beyond that.
Basically, draw them in advance. Unless you're a very specific kind of Dwarf.
Once powered, a glyph stays powered until you turn it off.


Limitationz 


Runes are cool but it takes effort to power them based on the number of minor runes in the glyph.

1 minor rune: No penalty!
2 minor runes: -1 AC, +1 encumbrance point.
3 minor runes: -3 AC, +2 encumbrance points.
4 minor runes: -6 AC, unable to move at all.
5 minor runes: Impossible to power.

By "encumbrance point" I mean "next slowest step on the movement speed table", ie. in LotFP each encumbrance point counts as carrying an Oversized item.

You can switch off a rune whenever you want. You just close off the connection in your head.

The strain also increases with distance.

1 ft or less: No penalty!
5 ft or less: -1 AC, +1 encumbrance point.
15 ft or less: -3 AC, +2 encumbrance points.
30 ft or less: -6 AC, unable to move at all.
Over 30 ft: Connection breaks

Putting somebody in a palinquin and having them power three runes and carrying them around is encouraged and working as intended.


Concentration

You can't cast spells while you're powering a rune, but you can shut off the rune instantly so it's usually no big deal.
If you're damaged while you've got a rune powered it immediately shuts off.

This is partially to give an advantage to regular torches over rune-lights - it's all well and good to have an infinite light source, until you get hit and it gets shut off and you're alone in the dark.

Damage!

Using effect runes used for direct damage (fire beams, lightning sprays, etc) is pretty common once those rune combinations are discovered.
In general, damage from a glyph does 1dX damage. The base die is 1d6.
If the target is particularly vulnerable to that element the die size might increase to d8 or d10.
If the target is particularly resistant or wearing armour it might decrease to a d4 or d2.

Each tier of armour (Leather/Chain/Plate) reduces the die size (to 0 for Plate) unless you do something like using lightning on metal armour.

Augmenting weapons: Adds +1dX on top of normal weapon damage.

Beam: Deals 1dX damage. Range as bow. Roll to hit once against unarmoured AC, adding your ranged attack bonus. Damage rolls over to the guy behind if you kill someone with it. Unless you spend a round aiming first, a miss means the beam scatters in a random direction.

Repel: Deals 1dX damage, save vs breath for half. Automatically hits all targets in a 30' cone.

Laser beams!

This is all stuff I made up at the table on the spot, change things around if you want.
Beams of fire or lightning sprays or anything that seems like it'll hurt someone badly does 1dX damage.

Beams shoot straight ahead, holding a Beam rune and aiming it means you've got to roll to hit unarmoured AC.
Unless you spent your previous round on an Aim action, Missing means it scatters. If you did Aim first, the beam merely misses everyone and sizzles harmlessly up a wall.

We use a Warhammer Scatter Dice to see which way the beam goes. Of course, it hits the first thing in the way.
The in-universe explanation for this is that you have a moment of unconsciousness when you turn on the glyph as your soul begins powering it, and if you're not prepared you'll just spray it everywhere.


Laser sprays!

Repel glyphs make things like fire and lightning spray out of them in a short range wide area cone shape.
1d6 damage, save vs breath for half.
Yep your players have breath weapons now. Congratulations to them. Make sure you get those enemies all up in their grill so they can't just fireblast everything to rubble!

Other rune issues! 

Make Rune

• You can't create something where something already exists, so no drawing this on your warhammer and summoning rocks inside people you hit! It's been tried.

Take Rune

• Weaponise a Take rune by absorbing a whole lot of something into a throwable object then deactivating the rune in mid air. Everything it absorbed will come out at once!
• Some uses include flashbangs, fire extinguishers, and getting weeds out of cracks in the pavement.
• If you absorb a bunch of elementals they come out as one GIANT elemental.

 Beam Rune

• If you cross the streams it's like Magicka. If in doubt, roll a d6: 1-2 They combine 3-4 they pass through each other 5-6 they detonate at the point of contact.
• If you kill someone with a beam it pierces through them at hits the guy behind him! It keeps going until it hits something without killing it. Barbeque mooks for fun and profit!

Repel Rune

•  Use Repel Earth on a slab of wood to make an overland hovercar! Put a Repel Mass rune on the back to make it go!
• Doing the same thing with Repel Stone makes a serviceable replacement for Tenser's Floating Disk in your average dungeon.

Change Rune

• Things turn back when the rune loses power.
• The lines of the rune stay the same as the original material. (So wood turned to stone would be a stone surface with the rune inlaid in wood)
• It transforms an area around the size of your average window, but circular.

 

That's all I can think of for now! If in doubt, make something up.
Next stop - Rune dungeon!

Part 3 coming soon!

Rune Magic

Rune magic is kind of my baby. I hope you like it.

Schedule!
PART THE FIRST - Making Runes
PART THE SECOND - Rune Mechanics
PART THE THIRD - Rune Dungeon

Some initial points:
- It's powerful and flexible. If they're clever and into it you might have given them an extra levelsworth of power.
- This is all player skill not character skill, and generally an extra thing any class can use.
- Expect your PCs to start tattooing runes on their foreheads and tongues and carving stuff into armour and thinking up all sorts of badass abuses and exploits like guns and ironman suits.
- Be prepared to make up rulings and mechanics on the fly.
- Don't give them all of this all at once because they'll get overwhelmed. Hell, you might be overwhelmed too after seeing all this. By my genius.
-I introduced it via a dungeon as a kind of tutorial. Half the fun is seeing them try to work out how runes work, which runes mean what, and how to exploit them for fun and profit.




Now, basic rune crafting.
There are two types of rune, which I call Master and Minor.
Combine a Master Rune and one or more Minor Runes to create a Glyph.

Minor runes define the element being cast.
Master runes define how it's cast.

 So this is a Make Light glyph:

And this is a Beam Heat glyph:

So that's your basic two-symbol glyph. Orientation doesn't matter so long as they're connected by a line.

Before I go into the next bit, I tend to think of the elements as either Materials and Effects. 

Materials are anything that's affected by gravity. 
So Earth would be a material and Heat would be an effect.
This is important because a Beam Earth glyph will shoot out a ball of soil, while a Beam Heat glyph will create a sustained beam of heat for as long as you power the rune.

 These are the five Master Runes.

• Make creates a fist sized ball a handspan in front of the glyph.
• Take draws stuff into it, but releases it all at once when you break concentration.
• Beam shoots a beam of Effect or a high speed blob of Material.
• Repel throws material away from the glyph or pushes effects out in a cone shape.
• Change transforms the surface that the rune is drawn on into a material, or applies the effect to it.

And these are the five Minor runes.

• Light is bright like a light bulb.
• Heat is warm but quickly heats up like a stove top.
• Mass is for crazy physics effects and has been used to create zones of heaviness and beams of force and stuff like that.
• Cold starts off chilly but quickly cools like a freezer.
• Earth is regular soil.

"Dude you got me all worked up and I find out you've only got like 25 possible rune combinations of limited utility? Shit sucks."
Woah woah chill out imaginary uncouth man because there's more.


Advanced Rune Crafting  (ARC102)

In this unit you will learn how to:

• Use rune magic to impress the ladies.
• Compare and contrast Kennard F Wombus' Lesser Rune Theory and the Integrated United Theorum of Universal Lesser Special Runativity using exactly one introduction, one conclusion, and three body paragraphs.
• Tell the difference between a rune and a potato.
• Shoot laser beams out of your face.

So the other thing you can do is combine the minor runes to make different elements.
This is done with a triangle shape, but there's a major distinction, as shown below.

In the second example, drawing a master rune and two minor runes in a triangle shape simply casts them both at once. This means you get the benefits of two runes while you're only powering one which is good for saving energy or whatever.
Essentially Heat and Light are both cast separately into the same place, the result being a ball of light and warmth.

But if you add an extra line between the runes like in the third example, they combine to make something different. In this case Heat and Light combine to create a ball of Fire floating in front of the glyph.

You only ever have one Master rune, trying to cast a rune with two Master runes means it just doesn't work.


Rune combos follow in a visually pleasing format.
Also a word of warning some of them don't reeeaaally make sense, but in the real world you can combine two volatile deadly chemicals and get table salt so whatever.
And they're intentionally fucky so that they make you groove in your DM shoes. 
What the fuck happens if they draw a Take Water rune on the seabed? 
How does a Size Beam work? 
Is it really a good idea to tattoo Make Water in your mouth for desert journeys?




You decide!

Cold combos!

Earth combos!

Mass combos!

Heat combos!

Light combos!

Expert Rune Crafting

One last thing!
You always have a single master rune, but you can add as many minor runes as you like!

etc etc etc

They've got to have the master rune in the middle of a geometric shape, but other than that go for your life.
Remember that your players have to actually physically draw the glyph!

Because they're big, you can have multiple combinations of elements depending on where you place the in-between sticks.
So say you want to make an explosion, but you're in space! Do explosions happen in space where there's no air? You don't know for sure, but you do know this is Frank's favourite topic of conversation and he brings it up whenever he's drunk.
Your eye is drawn to the half-empty bottle of beer next his hand. It's his sixth, and he got here late.
Frank's eyes are greedily lighting up, preparing his amateur physicist notes in his head.

You better do something.
You better 
RUNE UP.

You quickly draw a glyph, taking care not to combine Mass and Cold because it might make the explosion less rad. You PUNCH THE RUNES.

An explosion explodes the thing you're pointing at! Straight balla!

The DM makes boomy whooshy noises and makes explodey motions with his hands! 

Fuck yea the day, and Frank's suspension of disbelief, is saved!

Awesome work! Just don't mention the ending of BSG because he'll be off all night.

Alright! That's all for rune crafting folks.
See you next time as I tell you how they actually work mechanically!
OooOOOooOOOoooOOOOO

Part 2

Easy Familiars That Are Actually Good

So familiars.
Hard to make them good without doing retarded downsides and making them a gorramn liability.

•  A magic user can get a familiar for free if they want.
• You can make it run around and stuff and I guess it can tell you things that it sees. 
• It can hold an extra spell for you and cast it like normal.
• It can't die but you can interrupt its spell casting. 
• When you die, it erupts as a Summon spell with HD equal to your level.

 

bamf

Last night one of my players died.
Her cute chicken who only ever used its held spell to cast Unseen Servant so it could pretend to fly around erupted into a 3 HD lightning demon which proceeded to drag one of the other party members back into hell.

Of course it could potentially go well and the surviving players would have a new pet demon for a while, but honestly this is LotFP so it's going to go amusingly bad nine times out of ten.

Also don't tell your players the downside at first. Just let the wizards think they get a free spell slot and be done with it until they find out the reality is far worse.