2026-06-04 Magic house rules, again =================================== I'm using a strict reading of the magic system. Magic users and elves start with just one spell in their spell book. Learn more spells: You need a teacher to learn new spells. Learning a new spell takes a week. Repertoire: The list of spells in your spell book make up your repertoire. Its size is determined by your level. The table below shows the maximum number of spells in your repertoire and the number of spells you can cast per day. You regain your spell casting powers at the dawn of day after a good night's sleep in a comfortable bed. +-------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+ | LEVEL | 1ST CIRCLE | 2ND CIRCLE | 3RD CIRCLE | 4TH CIRCLE | 5TH CIRCLE | +-------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+ | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – | | 2 | 2 | – | – | – | – | | 3 | 2 | 1 | – | – | – | | 4 | 2 | 2 | – | – | – | | 5 | 2 | 2 | 1 | – | – | | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | – | – | | 7 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | – | | 8 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | – | | 9 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | | 10 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | +-------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+ Thus, a 5th level caster's spell book can hold a single 3rd circle spell like fireball. If they are taught lightning bolt from a teacher before reaching 6th level, they can no longer cast fireball. The connection is gone even though the pages in the spell book are still there. Unintelligible gibberish. Strange. And if they want to switch back to the spell they once knew, they need to find a teacher, again. My hope is that this results in specialized spellcasters. My Spellcasters document is full of such spellcasters. Each one of them is 10th level and they all have a thematic list of spells. I feel that the idea of finding them or their students to learn their spells is galvanizing. Instant adventure. When you find somebody's spell book, you can add it to a library and you can cast read magic to know what it contains, but you can't learn those spells unless you can convince somebody who knows the spells to teach them to you. Killing spell casters and taking their spell books is of no benefit. Then again, I count intelligent creatures that have innate magical abilities as casters. They might not need a spell book but they know how the magic works and they can teach you. You can learn fireball from a red dragon, you can learn disguise and shape change from a doppelgänger, and so on. I've tried to add this information to all the monsters I described in my Halberds & Helmets Referee Guide. My hope is that this offers a different kind of adventure, where killing creatures in a dungeon is not the point. Capture a magical creature. Capture a rogue spellcaster. Go and find a famous spellcaster. Perform a service for a spellcaster in order to be taught a new spell, help them out, befriend people. We can also have moral conundrums: how far are you willing to go in order to appease a dreadful necromancer? Will you right the wrongs after you have learned what you came to learn? I love how this is possible because there's a need that some player characters have that cannot be satisfied through loot and kill adventures. To me, that is a lot like faction politics in a megadungeon. That is to say, it's great! Not automatically gaining new spells on gaining a level adds pressure to do this. One way to remove this pressure as a referee is to make sure that the adventurers have a positive connection to a big school of magic with a bunch of level 9 and 10 magic users and elves. Then there is no pressure and the table can opt out of this aspect of engaging with the setting. If a referee does want to explore it, however, rumours must be available to tell players where to find new spellcasters. Those spellcasters must have made a name for themselves, they are famous throughout the region. The same is true for powerful magical creatures. If players ask, this information should be available. If players want to have a wider selection of spells than allowed by the rules, they need to invest some more time and gold and take on more spell casting retainers. Have them learn different spells. That turns your main character and their retainers into a little magic school. If you want to retrain some of your weaker spells, have your retainers teach you. Of course that requires you to care and share with your retainers. Other player characters can join in. I love the fact that the setting changes through player actions: A magic school is established. I've been wondering about spell research, though. @phf@tabletop.social suggested the rule from Expert D&D that allows players to research new spells using time and gold and he also suggested a use for found scrolls and spell books. Later, he also said that he once knew a player who hoarded scrolls for later scribing instead of using them. @randomwizard@vivaldi.net said that in his latest homebrew, spellcasters can not learn spells from scrolls. They can only use the scroll. So perhaps scrolls should not be useful for research. @d6@tabletop.social has another idea to handle scroll hoarding: Casting a spell from a scroll grants you a chance to learn the spell and put it into the spell book. The idea is that this encourages the use of a scroll. Implicit research and no hoarding. Research: New spells can also be researched. Every spell circle costs 1000 gold and takes 2 weeks. Scrolls with the spell in question cut the time in half; a spell book with the spell in question cuts time and cost in half. What I fear, however, is that this makes the adventuring for new spells extremely optional. Why have it in the first place when research is always available? Specially since we play using gold spent is experience points gained, so paying gold for research just means less infrastructure is built and fewer statues are erected. And since this rule relies on the passage of in-game time, it's unclear whether the time sink is significant or not. I would have to try it for our table. We play with real time synchronisation. And what about scribing scrolls and brewing potions? D&D 3.5 had something like the following: Scrolls: Creating a scroll of a known spell costs caster level × spell circle × 25 gold and requires a quiet study. Potions: Creating a potion for a known spell costs caster level × spell circle × 50 gold and requires a nice lab. But again, does that result in plenty of scrolls and potions being created between games, based on how often we play? Is it a problem? Is this too cheap or too expensive? Do other players expect to be able to buy scrolls and potions from the other player characters "that are not coming along"? From non-player characters they encounter in the setting? Does that turn every spellcaster into a potential magic shop? I mean, they'd ask for double the price but still, a magic shop is a magic shop. #RPG #Spellcasters #Halberds_and_Helmets 2026-06-05. @d6@tabletop.social also pointed out that Knave uses encumbrance for a lot of things. If every spell in a spell book is in fact a heavy tablet, then encumbrance rules limit the size of the repertoire. When you move your library, I guess it takes a lot of porters. I like it. At the same time however, that simply grants the player wish of having a big spell collection for a single character and therefore there being no point in specialized spellcasters. And that's a feature I'd miss. 2026-06-07. On fedi, somebody said that they sided with “my players” – but in this case, I like these rules as a player, too. I play a magic user using these rules in @phf@tabletop.social‘s Barrowmaze. I suspect that the things people enjoy in games are different. I happen to like “unfair” games where the goal is to make do with what you get. Like the inherent unfairness of rolling 3d6 down the line for character creation. Thus, if people in my game don’t like magic-users as written, they should play some other class that suits them better. Personally, I like fighters. Some people hate fighters be cause they don’t “scale up”. I like them precisely because of that. I mean, if nobody (or very few people) liked playing magic-users, then that would be an argument. But as it stands, nobody is ditching them, either. I know that this position is fundamentally different from games where it seems that you can play “whatever you want”. In that sense, I think the system is “interesting” and I’d like to avoid changes that make it “boring” – boring as in: there is no decision to make and there are fewer consequences to bear. Anyway, that would be the philosophical argument, here.