We ran for over a year in GURPS Third Edition. It only broke down at the very high end of the power curve, and mostly because I'd stacked too many rules onto it without considering their consequences: the rules on Durability, Tuffness, and such only made the already-powerful Trolls even more indestructible. The new GURPS Fourth Edition not only provides better solutions to the causes that invited those house rules, but also provides a number of systems designed to handle Earthdawn-like worlds. Power Level Point costs have been rationalized. The old Eidetic Memory advantage is gone; attribute costs are flat at 10 pts/lvl for ST and HT and 20 pts/lvl for DX and IQ. Skills are also rationalized and are all now 1/2/4/4/... points per level. That is, there are no more half-points, and all skills max out at 4 points per level. Average skills cost 2 points for DX or IQ. Combat It's still possible to stay up for a while if you have high HT, but there's no longer a way to get effective HT as ridiculously high as before. Characters are likely to collapse at 20-40 points of damage, not 400. Blowthrough has been removed: a 7d6 rifle shot will kill most humans, instead of blowing through after 10 pts of damage. The penalty-negation maneuvers are mostly gone: just buy higher skill. The cinematic combat systems have also been revised, and no longer grant multiple attacks *and* damage boosts *and* access to supernatural combat skills. Instead, they reduce some of the penalties associated with doing fancy things: halving penalties for cool actions like multiple attacks. You simply can't get above 3 attacks per turn (1 normal, 2 wild swings at -3 to skill, with all out attack and TBAM) without buying an Extra Attack advantage. Professional Magic One new rule in GURPS 4th describes worlds where every professional has access to some magic. What makes Disciplines special is that they grant access to a Magic skill. Each Discipline has some small number of skills which are very important to it. For Archers, that might be Archery, Fletching, and Observation. Archers then default to the skills Archer Magic, Fletching Magic, and Observer Magic at -6. GURPS Magic spells appropriate to the discipline then default to these Magic skills at a penalty equal to the number of prerequisites they have. For example, if Gilad has Archery-22, he defaults to Archer Magic at 16. He then has Ignite Arrow, which has no prereqs, at 16. Know Direction, however, has 4 prereqs. Gilad only defaults to Direction Arrow-12. Spells can be improved as Hard Techniques (2 points for the first level, 1 per level thereafter) but can't exceed the Magic skill level. The Magic skill itself is M/VH. All of these spells cost the normal amount of time and Fatigue for GURPS spells. Spells in which points have been invested receive the normal discounts on time and FT (-1 cost at 15, -2 at 20, etc.). Spells known only at the default level don't receive any cost breaks. Raise Dead isn't in-schtick for Archers, so Gilad can't cast it at all. Each Magic skill should grant about as many spells as a single GURPS Magic college. Some spells require Magery at a certain level. This requirement doesn't go away: it mimics the Circle requirements of Earthdawn. It should be bought at a reduced cost to account for the smaller number of colleges available. Prerequisites are used only to calculate penalties; you don't actually have to buy all the prereqs before investing points in a spell. You may not even be able to buy them, if they're not in-schtick! These are the Professional Magic rules from GURPS Fantasy. Full-time Caster Magic Normal Adepts have useful skills from which to derive their magic: Archery, Performance, etc. Full-time Casters instead use useless skills like Wizardry or Elementalism, which are also M/VH. On the other hand, they have multiple equivalents to Magic: A Wizard who knows Wizardry-22 defaults to Knowledge Magic-16, Meta Magic-16, Making and Breaking Magic-16, etc. That is, he gets a bunch of GURPS colleges: essentially all of them, though a few spells may be restricted to particular Disciplines. This means that they need to spend more points to get good, and have lots of flexibility, but essentially always need to work magic---they don't have the incredible normal skills of a normal Adept. So they end up spending more fatigue at the same point level, or more points to get to similar effect levels. These are the Ritual Magic rules from GURPS Magic, used straight. The Alternate Prerequisites rule is not in effect. Note that the chart in the back of Magic listing prerequisite counts is badly wrong. Raw Magic Full-time magicians, and perhaps other Adepts, have access to Raw Magic. Rather than pay the FT cost of a spell, you can have the Horrors pay it. They will pay up to three times your Magic skill level in FT points. At the end of any day in which you used Raw Magic, you need to make a roll to see if you acquire Taint: your Will, minus the number of points of energy the Horrors paid for that day. You pick up one point of Taint per ten points by which you fail. Taint is a penalty to any magic used which is *not* Raw. It can be slowly cleaned away with time. If you ever get 10 points of Taint, worse things start to happen to you---but you'll never go that far, right? Below that point, the only danger is the penalty to non-Raw spells. These are the Demonic Black Magic rules from GURPS Magic, used straight. Enchantment by Naming Quick and Dirty enchanting is available, enabling Powerstones and similar tools. The economics of powerstones as shown in GURPS Magic are not appropriate to the Earthdawn setting, and need heavy revision. Slow and Sure enchanting is available, but rarely used: few Adepts are willing to waste their lives in a closet when they could be adventuring. Instead, time spent doing nothing but the Karma Ritual accumulates energy for future enchantment, counting as time in study towards skills. Time spent living as a pure member of your Discipline counts as on-the-job training. Every legendary action, cool enough to get stories told about it by the players, earns a character point towards future enchantment. Characters can then use the special Naming skill to apply these points to enchanting an object. Each character point worth of skill is worth 25 energy points. This explains all the objects named after people and places and associated with legendary events. These are the Contemplation Enchanting rules from GURPS Fantasy, modified a bit. Born Mages Born Mages can buy advantages such as Spirit Sight or innate magic with the 10% limitation "Blood Magic", and an Unusual Background describing their parentage. Blood Magic advantages are susceptible to counter magic, and count as Raw Magic when used in any place that is Tainted. Most areas outside Kaers in the Camrish setting are Tainted, but most areas in the Boston setting are not Tainted. Cyberware There isn't a GURPS 4th Cyberpunk out yet, but implants should also be available as advantages with a 10% flavor limitation. Extra ST, DX, or Perception are common. If you have Blood Magic, implantation of Cyberware subtracts 1 CP of magic advantages for every 1 CP of Cyberware advantages gained. Those with Cyberware may *never* buy more Blood Magic advantages. Decking This could be handled with a simple Computer Hacking skill. For campaigns with more intricate cyberspaces, advantages and disadvantages may be bought with the -80% limitation "Only in Cyberspace". Normal physical advantages do not function in cyberspace, but mental advantages work just fine. Normal magic does not function in cyberspace; magic that does function there is a 50% enhancement. Do look at the "Chipped Skills" variant of the Modular Abilities advantage, though. An alternate mechanism for Decker-heavy games: Cyberspace uses a universal fantasy motif. Normal people using computers act like normal people. Deckers know spells. Decks grant Magery. Chips plugged into the deck commonly grant more spells, or sometimes skills or advantages such as Combat Reflexes. Otaku are very strange people who have Magery (cyberspace only) *built in*. The limitation for these cyberspace-only advantages should be set based on the frequency with which the game visits cyberspace. Economics If you assume that even a journeyman enchanter is Comfortable ($1400/month), and a master enchanter is Wealthy ($2100/month) or better, then you've got to pay a lot more for even Q&D enchantments. On the other hand, there'll be a lot more tools around---powerstones, for example---to make the job easier. This means the cost per point goes up, but the threshold where you can't use Q&D and have to use S&S also goes up. Basic Enchanters work 176 hours per month, and each hour can sustainably use 12 points of energy, which they recover in the next hour at a rate of 1 FT per 5 minutes. That means 6 pts/hr overall, or 1040 points of energy enchanted into Q&D items in a month. Some of that's wasted into failures in casting: 17s and 18s blow things up a lot, and many casters will take an extra assistant so as to be at effective Enchant-15. At that point, only 992 FT/month make it into useful objects---and that's assuming single castings per object. Powerstones break or quirk much more frequently, due to repeated castings. So a mage is typically paid $1400 for 992 FT, or $1.41 per FT. A master Enchanter, with skill 20, is paid $2.12 for the same work. A master enchanter plus five assistants can churn out 5951 points of energy at a cost of (5*1400+2100)=$9100, or close enough to $1.50 per point of energy to be acceptable. If enchanters aren't HT 12, and haven't bought extra fatigue so as to be able to alternate shifts precisely, then it's probably closer to $2 per point of energy. Slow and Sure casting, however, now generates only ~22 points of energy/caster/month. That means those same $9100 buy only 130 FT, or $70/pt. On the other hand, those Comfortable and Wealthy enchanters can afford a lot more tools for their work. Big powerstones don't help them very much: they need to recharge for so long as to not be very useful. Even without powerstones, the circle described above can put out 12*6=72 energy per object. If each of the 6 casters has a 5-point powerstone, then they can just barely eke out a 100 FT casting using the quick and dirty rules. It's even easier if the master has skill 21; then he can pack in another assistant. But they can't use just one N-point powerstone: to be sustainable, they need 4N each to use while the others recharge. It's not entirely unreasonable to have 4 1-point powerstones, or even 8 2-pointers. After all, a 2-point block of wood costs only $80 to enchant. But 20 5-pointers gets pretty expensive: $400 per stone, so each caster has $8000 in equipment and the circle as a whole has $48000 in powerstones alone. That can't be right. As mentioned previously, the default economics for powerstones and enchantment don't work. Powerstones cost double energy if they don't use materials worth at least 10p^2+40p. But if you can reliably throw around 40-energy spells, that's not really a problem. Certainly, it's cheaper to pay double cost for the mages (because of doubled recovery time) than it is to pay for that p^2 term! There's probably a breakpoint where doubling the time cost makes it more reasonable to use cheap materials. 
  Energy  material  casting     total      quadrupled
  1       50        40          90         160
  2       120       80          200        320
  3       210       120         330        480
  4       320       160         480        640
  5       450       200         650        800
  8       980       320         1300       1280
  n       40n+10n^2 40n         80n+10n^2  160n
In fact, at $2/FT, as shown above, that point is passed at size eight. So while adventurers or poor casters will use small gems, enchanters willuse fixed powerbricks: the focus will be on durable goods---not gems. On the other hand, to use a powerstone providing n fatigue for four casting operations per day costs $160n*4n=$640n^2. A comfortable mage has $2000 to spend on starting equipment; a wealthy mage has $5000. That means that the master mage can use 2-point powerstones and the assistants only 1-point powerstones. Assuming HT 11, then we actually have 5 apprentices with 10+2 energy and one master with 10+3 energy, for a Q&DE limit of 73 points. If the master reaches skill 21, he can work at a Q&DE limit of 85. At skill 22, he can use Q&DE for 97, and at skill 23+ he can hit the holy grail of 100-energy quick and dirty enchantments. It's reasonable to consider that on-the-job training could also be used for Extra Fatigue (spellcasting only) and for Recover Energy. It's also worth thinking about what happens if powerstones can be rented at a historically accurate rate of 0.1% of their value per day. Of course, you have to pay for the charging time as well. So a ten-point stone, which costs $1600, would rent for $1.6 per day, or $17.6 (you have to pay for the day you use it). A hundred point stone, which costs $16000, would rent for $161.6, or $1.6 per point of energy---even cheaper than hiring assistant mages! This is horrible news, because while mages learn, powerstones don't. Well, it's horrible for the mages, but it's wonderful for constructing a plot of a Mage's Guild, anxious to protect its monopoly and its members money. From unknown Sun Apr 3 13:30:13 -0400 2005 From: Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 13:30:13 -0400 Subject: Investment and banking. Message-ID: <20050403133013-0400@shadowdawn.evenmere.org> Well, realistic starting enchanter gear really depends on its return on investment once you start hitting renaisance level society. If additional gear will pay for itself within about 5 years or less, it would reasonably be financed. That would not decrease the cost/ft, but it would push the common limits and throughput of enchanting up. From bts Sun Apr 3 23:31:51 -0400 2005 From: bts Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 23:31:51 -0400 Subject: Message-ID: <20050403233151-0400@shadowdawn.evenmere.org> Yup. That's what I'd meant about a Guild: playing at the end of the dark ages and the beginning of Renaissance, sort of a Sorcerer's Crusade setting.