Wizard was the first scheduled game at the Happening, intended as a kind of flexer and also to establish direct contact for others with something that influenced me immensely and which I reference often. I brought several scans of the booklet, including several detached spell lists, and I confess I hoped to see many people playing it across several tables, which didn’t happen. But we managed a few duels and at least people were able to see and touch it, perhaps making it less historically abstract.
I talked about it in Laser focus, summarizing these mechanics, although presented here outside of other rules context like incomplete information.
- Your spells are powered by bodily energy (Strength), basically, taking damage.
- You know spells based on Intelligence, for both number known and for their general effectiveness. E.g., if you have Intelligence 12, you know twelve spells chosen from the Intelligence 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 lists. The higher-rated the list, typically the more effective the spell and the more Strength it costs.
- You cast spells by rolling 3d6, seeking equal to or under Dexterity. A failed roll costs 1 Strength.
These points create a quite tight, elegant, playable, and build-able package in a tactical sense, but it is also a bit much of every possible constraint and contingency all at once. Unsurprisingly, a lot of historical magical design in role-playing is best understood as amplifying and refining one or more parts of this picture + removing or dialing down one or more other parts.
I found myself at loose ends for a bit on the last day, so I said, “let’s try Melanda,” and was then confronted with a packed table including Daniel, Denica, Bea, Ross, Greg, and Laura [correction: not Greg and Laura, but there were a lot of people, at least two more, now I remember that Mika was there]. Which is a lot of characters to make and a lot of rules to apply suddenly and simultaneously, so, I picked a monster and into the deep end we went.
Melanda: Land of Mystery, to give it its full title, is squarely located in the late-1970s grassroots phase of role-playing culture and design which includes High Fantasy, What Price Glory?!, Ysgarth, Adventures in Fantasy, Mage (Achaeron Press), and The Arduin Grimoire, which I distinguish from the contemporary RuneQuest, Advanced D&D, and The Fantasy Trip: In the Labyrinth, because all of the latter were developed from earlier publications.
As with all of these games excepting the rather agnostic Wizard itself, the magic is underpinned by dense-packed blithering woo very much of its era … which, if you get past that, affords context for many judgment calls built into the procedures. The core rules promise many different magical schools or versions, but the only one provided is Rune Science. Briefly, if you build this training into your character, you begin play with a handful of runes, which you choose from a bunch of lists like this one.
Remember what I said about amplifying vs. decreasing/eliminating different components of Wizard? In this case, there is no bodily cost or deficit in resource points of any kind, and although the more runes the better, having more doesn’t directly provide more effectiveness for a given spell, nor does it require specific levels for an attribute. The procedural concern is strictly about resolution, based on a percentage roll, extensively modified both formally and informally according to the GM.
- Quantitative: your training (sets the base roll), years spent as a mage, and the time you put into casting
- Qualitative: precision/correspondence of the runic sentence, your magical affinity (which you probably don’t know), the precise means of casting, the location and any relevant details of the moment, and one’s past history using this combination of runes
There are no further quantitative indicators, e.g., no default durations or degree of effect, and no embedded directives, e.g., “this many runes means this much duration,” et cetera.
Given a successful roll, what the spell actually does is based on the combined runes, which must include a subject and verb. Therefore knowing more runes allows you a wider range of general effects. But crucially: the better the match of the runic statement to the immediate situation and your stated goal, the more effect the GM is supposed to apply, in all those things we usually quantify: range, duration, extent, et cetera, as well, as pinpointing more goal-appropriate results. These are enhanced by your affinity and implicitly most of the other modifiers too, again, relying on the GM’s aesthetic commitment to the underlying ideas.
As for play itself, well, I’d been reading the rules as carefully as one might, but at the table, we managed to mess up just about everything in the face of a bunch of people announcing rapid-fire actions. Revisiting the text led me to say “Oh! So that’s how it works” many times, so I’m ready for the next phase of learning, through more committed and timely play.
6 responses to “Magical 70s”
Melandra looks really interesting. I’m interested in seeing how those qualitative factors affecting range, duration, etc. work out in play.
Also, I’m now reminded of the ‘runic magic’ in the Ultima Underworld videogames, and wondering what secret chains of influence might stretch from mostly forgotten games like Melandra into other parts of pop culture.
One consideration is that the players are equally or even more committed to the integrity of the qualitative factors than the GM; to put it most clearly, there is no GM/player distinction in terms of wanting to play this game and to accept whatever qualitative decision-making is assigned. From a hobby standpoint, this is idealistic raving, but if we consider play among people who want to be there, and who know and embrace the rules (subject to whatever we do with them to make actual table-rules), then the fear of “oh no, we can’t have qualitative standards, they will fail!” turns out to be unfounded.
After all, the only reason that long and detailed lists of constraints and pre-written results work is for the same reason: that all of us know and embrace them. It’s the same choice. For some reason doing that with textual lists seems to be sacred whereas doing it without them seems to be profane. Therefore, the issue is not “textual and quantitative results or not,” but rather, “are the rules we are genuinely using any good.”
That makes perfect sense. Part of me still feels like it would require some kind of leap of faith, but I guess that ties in with the question of whether the rules are any good!
We’ll have to see in play, of course, and probably extended play … but if the question comes down to accepting that Person A has the job of deciding how three or four concepts intersect, then it’s simply yes or no. One might object or be concerned with whether a particular Bob is himself capable of being Person A, but I think it’s foolish to think that no one can, and especially that whoever wrote a table a book is “obviously” good at being Person A just because there’s a book.
Another way to look at it is that Bob will decide upon the modifiers to the magical resolution roll using exactly the same logic or aesthetics as you or I do when we decide upon the next actions of our characters. Some of that logic is qualitative and some is strictly aesthetic, in addition to whatever quantitative elements are included.
Being good at this is a very important topic, especially since it’s not about compliance and it’s not about entertaining everyone else.
I went back through the post and thought more about the session, and here’s the phrase which matters to your point … and I hope will get us past the bromide that “well, if we are nice and all agree about everything, then everything works!”
It makes sense (I think) if I unpack “if you get past that” to mean, embracing something good about it and accepting its textually-offered language for that. So …
For me, regarding Melanda, these are easy to identify and, fortunately, in descending order of quantity.
For example, for point #3, I’d assign much of the blither about “magic underpins everything, it’s all around, it’s in everything, it is truth and perfect communication and harmony in all,” which is thick enough to make The Force look halfway coherent. Sure, characters might say it, we can treat the world-as-such as at least consistent with it, we can invoke it as aspects of descriptions especially for magic … but it doesn’t do anything, or very little, which would not otherwise be in place without it.
But that’s after assigning a goodly portion of it to #2, i.e., embracing the idealism to whatever extent it does inspire me, and playing up the sense of connection and direction, in using magic, which I find worthwhile. (Here, the influence of the Earthsea trilogy on Melanda’s magic is helpful; also, some of the extravagance one finds in Night’s Master, also evident in the example.) It’s also exciting to consider that Rune Science is supposed to be merely one of many types, so there’s room to make up new types, meaning, venues for this exact profile of acceptable, inspirational nonsense our group is creating or discovering among ourselves. So a certain amount of the woo is in fact “in action” before I start talking about the parts which I simply can’t take seriously.
Sorry for taking so long to reply. I don’t have much to add, but it seems like (1) trusting in everyone’s competent exercise of their authority, and (2) treating the backdrop as a menu (and not an exhaustive one) rather than a prescription, are key. I suppose both of those are good (or essential) things in general.
I’m finding this valuable, and look forward to any new posts you make about Melanda.