Barony Magic

Gustave Doré, Les Saltimbanques

PLAYING YOUR ACADEMIC/ARTIST

Academics have contact with as many entities as they can speak pattern languages. Artists have a single entity, which comes into the world when they do. 

Part of the fun of playing with entity magic is designing your own entities, with bespoke powers, desires, needs, and goals. The guidelines given below are approximate, and might be used as a baseline. Discuss with your DM. 

When designing an entity, choose a name and an image for them, then choose two traits from the list below. An Artist's entity will always have one specialism derived from the Artist's practice - painting, sculpture, tailoring, literature, jewellery making, etc. 

An image is how the entity perceives itself, what it looks/sounds/smells/thinks like. Traits are what an entity can do. Favours, described beneath, are how often an entity will work with you, and under what conditions. 

TRAITS

1. Psychic Attacks

Choose one of the following: 

• d3 psychic damage each turn to one enemy you can see. 
• +d6 psychic damage each turn to a weapon attack that you make. 
• 2d12 psychic damage once during the combat, to one enemy you can see. 
• 1 psychic damage each turn to every enemy within 10ft. 
• Blindness, deafness, dumbness. Inflict one of these each turn on an enemy you can see.

You may spend multiple traits to buy different types of psychic attack, but an entity may only use one type of attack per turn. Psychic damage manifests as extremely painful and frightening mental destabilisation. Some rare entities may instead conjure flashing arcs of fire or slashing poltergeist energies - change the damage type to fire, slashing, cold, etc. as necessary.

2. Specialisms

Choose a specialism for your entity. This can be something mundane, like medicine, sailing, or engineering; something more abstract like poetry, companionship, generalship, or seduction; or something overtly magical, like smelling lies, reading ancient languages, or dispelling illusions. You may spend multiple traits to select multiple specialisms. These will significantly determine the look and personality of your entity. Entities without any specialisms tend to be impersonal, inhuman, and difficult to understand. 

3. Spells

Choose a spell from your favourite GLOG spell list, in agreement with your DM (it is recommended to disallow healing and direct damage spells, but I don't run your game). You may spend multiple traits to select multiple spells. 

ENTITY MODIFIERS

You may take an additional trait for each of the following descriptors:

• Cruel: wants you to suffer. Will use imaginative logic to subvert the letter of your requests, to the detriment of you and those you love. 
• Sociopathic: does not understand empathy. Alarmingly literal, with no sense of context or implicit intent.
• Fixated: will only perform favours in return for specific tribute, and does not care how you get it. 
• Old: will refuse its first summons of the day 1 time in 6. You waste your daily favour. 
• Ancient (+2 traits): will refuse its first summons of the day 2 times in 6. You waste your daily favour. Ancient entities cast spells with 2MD. 
• Royal (+3 traits): summoning is accompanied by the beating of giant wings. Will only answer summoning if a gift of worth is sacrificed first, and will never give favours for free. Royal entities cast spells with 2MD. Will punish any show of disrespect by taking 1 max hp from the summoner, and may have odd ideas about what constitutes disrespect. 

FAVOURS

You may ask an entity to grant you a favour once per day. If you are in good standing, they will happily do this for you - a single favour is no big deal for a good friend. For each additional favour per day after the first, sacrifices must be made. Entities will make specific requests dependant on their nature; sacrifices of something personally valuable to the summoner (or simply expensive) are common, but some entities have agendas in the physical world that they will want help with. 

An Artist may always sacrifice d3 fatigue, d6 hp, or 1 max hp, to be granted another favour by their companion entity - the two work together to shape the world around them with raw force of will. 

A favour can be one of the following:

• Make a psychic attack. The attack is directed by the summoner, and the details are described in the TRAITS list - unless otherwise noted, the favour allows a psychic attack to be made each round for duration of one combat. A clawed thing inside the brain, a thief of breath, your internal organs cooking. Most entities love to get their hands dirty like this, even normally compassionate and kindly ones. 
• Use one of the entities specialisms to overcome an obstacle. This always works, unless there is a good reason why supernatural aid would fail. A shimmer in the air, a hardening or blurring in the eyes. Two voices, sounding in tandem. A smile stretching across the face, utterly unlike the one that you know.
• Act as a mage hand for one minute. All entities can do this, Academics call it 'poltergeisting'.
• Injecting a spell into your brain. For the next hour you can cast it with a single MD. You may add 1 MD for each of the following: empower it with your blood/viscera and take d6 damage, or prepare a ritual (usually with chalk, but specific spells may require other regents) lasting one hour. Academics may also (if they know it) speak the true name of the entity that taught them the spell as they cast it, which grants a free +3 MD, but this is a hostile act will sever any friendship that they have, and may provoke aggression. 
• True Magic. A flash of the true power that all entities hold within them, which rewrites the world in accordance with sacred abstraction. Invoking True Magic as a favour always costs the summoner d3 max hp, in addition to any other cost, and an entity cannot provide this favour more than once, ever. It swells like a song, or like a whisper, or like a high voltage wire, or like a scream. The effects are detailed below.

TRUE MAGIC

True Magic is a wish spell. It is not cast with MD, you simply describe how the world changes, and it does so, with the following restrictions:

• You must make your request with three words or less. You may choose to add additional words, but each word over the first three costs you an additional max HP. 
• The effects are limited to what a healthy adult human could reasonably accomplish in a week (or a month for Ancient or Royal entities).
• If your entity has any specialisms, then the hypothetical human labouring for a week also has those specialisms - entities with (for example) mason, smith, assassin, or playwright specialisms can expect quite different results from the use of True Magic.
• An Artist may invoke True Magic more than once, but only in pursuit of true obsession. Each use after the first incurs a cumulative +1 to the d3 max HP lost, a -1 to WIS and INT, a +1 to CHAR, and a creeping sense of unreality.

Design Notes: True Magic is designed to allow a greater than usual freedom to magic users. Magic is less powerful and flexible in Barony than in most systems, and these rules aim to balance that. The intent is that magic users enter into a limited, almost story-game style collaboration with the DM at key points in their character's life. True Magic should always feel impactful, strange, and dangerous. Magic is the imposition of the Will onto the world. The Will has a character that is Divine. Language and Abstraction are the proper vehicles of this Divinity. If it feels too freeform for your campaign you should just ignore it. 

POSSESSION 

Academics sometimes open their body up to possession by entities, and some entities work to possess unwilling humans as well.

While a body is possessed by an entity, it is under the control of the DM and will act in accordance with the desires and personality of the possessing spirit. The entity has 10hp, and takes a maximum of 1 hp damage from physical attacks (the body it is controlling takes the full damage of any physical attack on the entity). Magical and psychic damage affects the entity as normal, and psychic can target it independently of the body it is piloting. 

A possessed body has permanent access to all psychic attacks and specialisms of the entity, and can cast spells freely at the cost of d4 hp per MD invested.

If the host body dies, the entity may continue to puppet the corpse if it wishes. It can no longer cast spells (nothing left to power them), but still has access to its attacks and specialisms. 

If an entity ‘dies’ it loses its coherence, and is no longer summonable. 

Artist possession works identically, except that the artist has full control over the possession. While possessed, the Artist has full access to its psychic attacks, specialisms, and spell casting, using hp to cast as normal. The artist’s entity is exposed to damage during possession, and if the entity dies, so does the Artist.