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Magic. The raw, fundamental power that distinguishes a fantasy campaign from a realistic one. The inner workings of the universe. The secrets of infinity. And the ability to turn people into toads if they annoy you.
GURPS Magic 4th Edition is the latest version of Steve Jackson's big, generic book of spells. It's a 240-page hardcover with full color interior illustrations. Quite a change from the old, black-and-white softcovers.
For folks who aren't familiar with the standard GURPS magic system, let me summarize.
Magic in GURPS is skill-based, with every single spell being a separate skill you have to learn. Many of them have prerequisites, lesser spells that you have to know before you can learn the more potent ones. There's also a Magery advantage that you may (or may not) be required to take in order to cast spells. It depends on the exact setting as to whether or not taking levels of Magery is mandatory to work all magic, or just makes it easier.
For example, Rain of Fire, which causes fiery droplets to pour out of the sky, can only be learned by a mage who has Magery II or better and who already knows Create Fire. Now you can't learn Create Fire unless you already know Ignite Fire or Seek Fire, so it takes a minimum of 2 other spells and Magery II to learn Rain of Fire.
So the spells are organized into trees of prerequisites. Most of the higher end spells simply can't be taken until you've already invested points in learning a number of prerequisite spells.
Spells are also grouped in Colleges like Fire Spells, Water Spells or Movement Spells. The colleges don't mean much except for making it easy to group spells together. In fact, there are 24 colleges; each one gets its own chapter that lists off its spells. Kind of annoyingly, the spells aren't listed in alphabetical order, but rather by order of prerequisites, so spells that require Create Fire will always be listed after Create Fire. This probably makes things easier during character creation (the spells you'll need to take first are listed first) but it's annoying when you're trying to find a specific spell and only know its name.
Luckily, there's a fifteen page appendix that's nothing but a giant table telling you where to find each spell, its basic stats, what college it's in, what prerequisites it has and the total number of requirements that you have to match in order to learn it. So, while Rain of Fire lists Magery II and Create Fire as its prereqs, it also notes that it has a total of 4 prerequisites... 2 levels of Magery, Create Fire, and either Ignite Fire or Seek Fire, which are required to take Create Fire. This appendix is a very nice thing to have.
Spells in GURPS generally have several limiting factors. First, each one costs a certain amount of energy. Second, each one takes a certain amount of time to cast.
So, the fairly unimpressive Tell Time spell, which tells the caster the immediate time and date, costs 1 energy and takes 1 second to cast.
On the other hand, Suspend Time, which allows the caster to stop time over an area, requires Magery III and 27 other requirements (including knowing 20 other spells from 10 different colleges), costs 5 energy per day maintained and takes 5 minutes to cast.
GURPS Magic also has extensive rules for creating enchanted items by investing spells in them permanently. There are even clever refinements like the Bane enchantment. This spell has no effect on its own, but makes adding future enchantments much cheaper (as much as 1/10th normal cost). The downside, of course, is that those enchantments now only affect the kind of creature that the Bane is aimed at. So if you enchant a sword to be a Wyvern Bane, any additional enchantments will be 1/3 cost but will only affect wyverns.
There are a lot of different spells in GURPS Magic. Most descriptions only take a paragraph or two (although there are exceptions) so each page tends to have 5-6 spells on it. And there are 176 pages of spells in this book.
That's a lotta spells.
They range from the stereotypical Explosive Fireball (does 1d6 damage for every 2 energy invested in it)... to the offbeat Lightning Stare (caster can shoot lightning from their eyes)... to the really bizarre Decapitation, which causes the target's head to fall off but otherwise remain just fine. In fact, while under a Decapitation spell, there's nothing stopping you from picking up your severed head, putting it under an arm, and doing a quick "headless horseman" impersonation.
Some colleges have a lot of combat spells, but others are almost entirely utilitarian in nature. For example, in the college of Food Spells, you could learn Season (which lets you season a piece of food to your taste) or Far-Tasting, which lets you taste any object you can see. Not the sort of thing that you'd expect a lot of adventurers to invest in, but food mages make very good cooks.
Now, while the vast majority of GURPS Magic is taken up by spell lists for their standard magic system, there are some alternative systems offered.
There's a short writeup of clerical magic, which basically just replaces mana levels with "sanctity"... the rating of how much influence your deity has in the area. In a stronghold of your god, even clerics who normally can't work magic may be able to cast spells. In the stronghold of an enemy deity, only the best priests will be able to work magic at all.
There are a number of suggestions for possible changes to the system, including support for Ritial Magic, changing the way prerequisites are handled, and otherwise tweaking the basic magic system. I did like the box text discussing alternate names for spells, to replace the very straightforward and functional spell names that GURPS Magic uses with more flowery or evocative ones. As they say, "The Seventeenth Chant of Air" sounds much more impressive than "Odor".
Probably the most interesting of the variant forms of magic is Syntactic Magic, a nice, fancy way of saying "magic words". In Syntactic Magic, you buy magic words as separate skills.
There are 10 verbs and 14 nouns available... stuff like Communicate, Heal, Sense, Weaken, Strengthen... and Air, Animal, Body, Death, Earth, Fire, et cetera. Folks familiar with Ars Magica or World Tree will have seen this basic idea before.
Spells are cast as a combination of words. So to levitate someone, you'd probably cast Move Body. If you tie in 3 or more words, you're at a -1 penalty for each additional word, but you can pick which two words determine the energy cost and casting time. So rather than just casting Move Body (total energy 3, time to cast 2 seconds), there might be times when you'd rather cast Move Body with Air and use Air instead of Body for the noun. That would reduce your chance of success slightly, but the casting time would be reduced to 1 second instead of 2 because Move Air is faster than Move Body.
There's a simple chart that gives the base energy cost and time to cast for each of the 24 magic words. This offers you a lot of trade-offs. For example, Fire costs 4 energy and takes 1 second to invoke, while Earth costs only 2 but takes 3 seconds. So, in a non-combat situation, assuming you had equal skill in both, you'd be better off using Earth-magic. If time really mattered, though, Fire would be a much better choice.
Syntactic Magic is a short section (only 3 pages total), but it's a very interesting and nifty take on the traditional noun/verb spell system. Personally, I like flexible systems like this better than the normal GURPS magic system, so it's a pity that it didn't get a more thorough treatment.
Symbol-based magic gets its own section as well. It works a lot like Syntactic Magic, where you learn individual symbols and combine them to make spells. However, since they require drawing magical runes on things, casting them is slower... but they often last until the runes are erased.
We get two example sets of runes... Futhark Runes and the Ogham Alphabet. While these both use the same system, the fact that their runes are defined differently makes them work a bit differently in practice.
For example, the Futhark Rune of Gebo normally means Food, but could also be used to mean Offering or Gift.
An amusing limitation of symbol magic is that each symbol must normally be carved on a separate item. So, to light a campfire with Futhark runes would require you to rummage around in your rune pouch and find both the runestone for Kenaz (fire) and Berkano (creation/growth). If you happen to be carrying a lot of runes, getting the right ones in a hurry could be a pain.
One of the examples describes a bard using Ogham runes carved on sticks. He's grabbing them one at a time in a hurry, so which ones he gets are determined randomly. He ends up with Move and Fire and has to improvise a combat spell with them on the spot, because he doesn't have time to keep searching for the right ones.
There's even a 13-page section devoted to Alchemy. About 7 pages are dedicated to listing off various potions and elixirs that can be brewed, so there's a fair number of options available to the dedicated alchemist.
This is another interesting section; GURPS alchemists aren't limited to the traditional magic potions. The rules cover making powders, ointments and even pastilles. A pastille is a thumbnail-sized tablet which, when lit on fire, emits a smoky haze that produces magical effects in anyone who breathes it.
Alchemists generally learn their formulas as individual skills. A cute touch: unless you have a formula at a skill rating equal to your overall Alchemy skill, you'll be at -6 to prepare it without a reference to consult. If you do have the skill at your Alchemy rating or higher, you can make it from memory without a penalty.
The potions are an interesting assortment. While there doesn't appear to be a sterility potion, there is a fertility one... and even the Hybridization potion, which can be used to allow members of two different species to mate and produce a crossbreed child. No rules are given for determining what the kid would be like (other than its size will match that of the mother), but that's what experimentation is all about, right?
This section also has three "exotic" preparations from real-world beliefs about alchemy... Alkahest (the universal solvent), Homonculi (a miniature duplicate of the caster) and even the Philosopher's Stone. Finally, it closes off with a list of various possible ingredients and what sort of effects they would probably be good for.
After that, we get the aforementioned spell summary tables, an example spell prerequisite chart (with a note that more are available at http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/magic. And an index. The index doesn't list individual spells, of course (see the spell tables for that) but it's good to have, anyway.
So, overall, what's GURPS Magic like? Well, the art is decent but not fabulous. The illustrations are full color and are almost always directly relevant to the section of the book they're in. The style is a little wooden in places, but it's still good and clearly evokes the atmosphere that they're looking for.
The borders are a nice, practical touch... the color of the edging is different for each college, so you can flip through to the bright red edged pages if you want to look at Fire magic. Makes the book more like a traditional reference manual than an RPG supplement.
Overall, this is a very impressive book. Even though I'm not a regular GURPS player, I got a lot of ideas from reading through this volume. I'd definitely recommend it for folks who play GURPS Fantasy. Apparently, some of the material is taken from the old GURPS Grimoire, which S. John Ross and Daniel Thibault wrote. Unfortunately, I don't have any previous versions of Magic or Grimoire, so I can't really say what's been updated and what hasn't.
If you dislike the normal spell system, well, the book will be less useful to you. But it does have a few alternate spell systems inside (although none of them are described in anywhere as much detail) that you might want to look at. I'll probably be stealing some ideas from this book for my non-GURPS campaigns. It's a great idea mine for settings with traditional individual-spell systems.
I give it a 5 for substance and a 4 for style. Overall, a really impressive book.
