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Introduction

Very recently, Steve Jackson Games began offering their GURPS Fourth Edition books as PDF downloads via e23, SJ Games' virtual warehouse. I will be reviewing the electronic version of GURPS Magic here. I have borrowed the hardcopy (physical book) from a friend as well, to compare any differences between the two.

For those unfamiliar with the "standard" GURPS magic system, in a nutshell, Magery is an advantage that allows you to buy spells. Each spell is bought as a skill and has a casting cost in Fatigue Points, which are recovered normally by resting. The terms "mage", "wizard", "spellcaster", etc., are all interchangeable; they do not denote different types of mages.

Specs

The GURPS Magic PDF (hereafter referred to as just Magic) is $10 cheaper than the hardcopy. It was very easy to download and featured no watermarks or DRM code, which was a huge relief; I have given up on many sites that use DRM simply because it makes even personal, legal use of the file incredibly difficult. Magic is a little over 8 MB and has been fully compatible with various PDF readers under both Windows and Linux. Searches work fine, the text is clear, and the images are stable. Printing went smoothly and without loss of detail or proportion.

The PDF is fully bookmarked. Every chapter has a heading; every section within that chapter has a sub-heading; and there are sub-sub-headings beneath that (a total of three levels of organization) for key points within each section. Essentially, the complete Table of Contents is available as a bookmark. I found it very useful and well done.

There are no hyperlinks between sections. I can understand why; the amount of effort involved in hyperlinking internal references is far greater than that needed to bookmark a file. Still, if SJ Games decides to hyperlink any book, this would be the most appropriate one, as several spells are cross-references across the various "colleges" (i.e., if you're reading the Movement Spells chapter, the rules for Teleport are there, but if you're reading the Gate Spells chapter, there's an entry for Teleport that refers you to the Movement Spells chapter), so I hold out hope for the future.

What's Inside

Chapter One, "Principles of Magic", expands on the magic rules presented in Chapter Five of the Basic Set. Details are presented for what magic and mana are, how one learns spells, how one casts spells, and so on. The details, such as what a "subject" is (and can be), how casting time and energy cost works, and what rituals and magical ingredients are involves, are all covered in detail, answering most general questions that anyone using the system will have. Ceremonial magic is presented, allowing circles of mages and willing spectators to share energy for powerful spells. A sizeable amount of text is given to spell interaction: maintaining spells, cancelling your own spells, recasting spells, etc.

The chapter then goes into the different "classes" of spells in GURPS (e.g., Regular, Area, Information, Missile, Melee, Blocking, Enchantment, Special, and Resisted, which overlaps with the others), giving very specific information about how each one is cast, what happens if it fails, what happens if the caster is injured or loses concentration in the middle of it, etc. If someone shoots you with an arrow in mid-casting, the situation is rather different if you were casting Seek Water than if you were building up an Explosive Fireball in your hand!

Guidance is also given for inventing new spells, with recommendations on what a fair casting cost, casting time, etc., are for GMs who feel the need to add more spells to their campaign. There is also ample advice for player-created spells, with rules for PC mages to use the existing New Inventions rules (from the Basic Set) to come up with new magicks. Some quick advice, on useful traits to keep in mind when building a wizard character, rounds out the chapter.

Chapter Two is the "Magic Items" section. It is not a catalog of available items; it contains the rules for mages to craft enchanted items. (The "catalog" is the book itself - each spell has a description of what sort of magic items it can be enchanted into. If you want a wand of fireballs, you can look under the Fireball spell for the details on making one.) Magic offers two types of enchanting, unchanged from Third Edition rules: "Quick and Dirty" or "Slow and Sure". The former is only useful for low-powered items but is fast and easy, while the latter takes weeks, months, or possibly years, but can craft items of amazing potency and is slightly more reliable. Specific sections cover confusing situations (such as casting permanent enchantments on an area, instead of an item). There are also details on how magic items are used, along with advice for the GM on controlling magical items and PC enchantment to prevent it from getting out of hand.

For those familiar with Third Edition, yes, Powerstones are still a key part of the magic system. For the rest of you, Powerstones are simply gems enchanted to hold magical energy, so you can use the points of energy within instead of tapping into your own Fatigue Points. A good-sized Powerstone is incredibly expensive (the text explains why, sensibly - the spell must be cast incrementally and has the potential to destroy the gem each time) but will give a mage a huge edge.

The last part of the chapter goes into a surprising amount of detail on the economy of magical items. It looks at the amount that enchanters need to make each month to live comfortably, how much enchantement they can do in that time, and extrapolates that into a reasonable cost for magic items (essentially, $33 per energy point for a newly commissioned items). The information on "magic shops" and the hoops involved in buying and selling enchanted items is solid, though it does assume that such things are very common - that may apply to some fantasy worlds, but certainly not all, and there isn't a lot of advice for how enchantement should work and how much to charge for magic items in, say, a Lord of the Rings inspired setting, in which such things are incredibly rare.

Spells, Spells, and More Spells

Chapters Three through Twenty-Six are the various "colleges" of spells, from Air Spells through Weather Spells. (The "key" to understanding the format of the spells, though, is surprisingly found back in a box in Chapter Two.) Each chapter lists the spells by approximate difficulty. As GURPS uses a prerequisite system to keep its spells more-or-less balanced (i.e., you'll need to know a lot of simple Air spells before you can learn the big, dangerous ones), this is a reasonable way to organize things. It's useful for mages when buying spells, but is actually a bit of a pain when you have to look up a spell in game, as you have to consult the Spell List (at the back of the book) to get the page number, since they're not in alphabetical order in each chapter.

Boxes of information present templates and other bits of information which are crucial to each spell. For example, the template for a Small (40-point) Air Elemental is in a box next to the Summon Air Elemental spell, and the same goes for the other three elementals (Earth, Fire and Water). Similarly, the various spells to raise the undead are buttressed by a box with Mummy, Skeleton, and Zombie templates (Demon, Lich, Wraith, and Skull-Spirit templates also appear in that chapter, beside their respective spells). New meta-traits also appear for the various "Body Of..." spells, such as Body of Wood, Body of Algea, Body of Lightning, and Body of Plastic. I was disappointed that only the template for Clay Golems was included with the Golem spell; previous GURPS books have had details on Iron Golems, Flesh Golems, and so on, and I feel that their lack of inclusion here is a definite oversight.

The Spells Themselves

Since the first printing of the hardcopy, there have been several errata brought to light, and I'm pleased to say that they've all been corrected in Magic. Most of the errata stemmed from the fact that the bulk of this book was primarily a "cut and paste" job from the Third Edition GURPS Magic and GURPS Grimoire, and thus a few (now depricated) Third Edition concepts had leaked in. As the errata are somewhat extensive, I prefer this corrected, up-to-date PDF version. SJ Games also guarantees that when new errata are found and corrected in the PDF, customers can come back and download the updated version for free, every time, which makes the electronic version fairly attractive in my eyes as well. (Obviously this doesn't apply if you download anonymously and don't give them any way to verify who you are.)

If you own the Third Edition books from which Magic is derived, you're probably wondering about changes. Many "munchkin loopholes" have been closed. Draw Power now requires an actual mechanical device to convert the energy (you can't just stand by a waterfall and use the kinetic energy therein to destroy the nearest town), you explicitly can't mind control people into participating in your ceremonial magic, and so on. A few things are still twink bait: Death Vision lets you stun anyone with no resistance roll, Concussion at high levels will dominate any battlefield, etc. And a few spells that used to be more balanced are now a little bit scary; e.g., now that Enlarge increases your SM, it's logarithmic instead of linear, making it possible for casters with a decent Powerstone to grow to hundreds of feet high, with a corresponding ST gain. That fits mythic games just fine, but seems out of line with the power levels of most of the spells in Magic.

And More...

Chapter Twenty-Seven, "Variations", is full of tweaks and changes to the magic system to fit different concepts. Note that all of the variations revolve around the standard GURPS magic system presented here - the spirit ritual paths from Third Edition and such are slated for a possible upcoming book (the unofficial title GURPS Thaumatology has been mentioned a few times).

Clerical Magic and Ritual Magic expand slightly on the information in the Basic Set. For the former, a discussion of Sanctity level and a list of "Holy" spells is useful, while for the latter, there's a box of alternate core skills that could replace Ritual Magic or Thaumatology (Computer Hacking, for example, for a magical Matrix game). Some suggestions for changing prerequisites and renaming spells then offer extra "flavor" for some games.

The section on improvisational magic is a bit uneven. It first notes that one can use Wild Talent for an improvisational mage, which sort of goes without saying. Rules for treating magic as a Wildcard! skill are more interesting, if not particularly balanced (of the two options given, one is seriously overpowered and one is seriously underpowered), but the suggestion for "spell defaults" (e.g., if you know a lot of fire spells but don't know Extinguish Fire, you could try a "default roll" for it) is well thought out and seems rather balanced, though I haven't playtested it yet.

Syntactic magic makes up the meat of the chapter, departing from the spells of the former chapters in favor of Noun and Verb skills. The idea is that you learn each noun (e.g., Air, Animal, Body, Death) and verb (e.g., Move, Protect, Create, Control) as seperate skills, and then roll against those skills to work magic. For example, if the bridge is out and you want to walk on air across it, that could be done as Move Body to levitate or Strengthen Air to make an air bridge. (This concept will be familiar to Third Edition gamers, but note the difference - these are now actual IQ/VH skills, not pseudo-skills derived from formulas - a change for the better, in my opinion.) Magic presents fairly detailed rules to determine casting time, cost, effects, etc., of the spells, though it's noted that many applications will require GM rulings, of course.

The syntactic rules are then worked into a "symbol magic" ruleset, in which each verb/noun has its own rune, the inscription of which holds the magical power of the word. (In other words, the caster has to draw or trace the rune to cast the spell.) This has the advantage of making it far easier to enchant items, and the disadvantage of making spells take longer to cast unless you have prepared "rune stones" ready to use. The runes of the Futhark and Ogham languages are both used as samples, with guidelines for adapting others.

Interestingly, one of the neatest variations, Black Magic, isn't in this chapter, hiding instead in the Necromantic Spells chapter. I suppose it makes sense, putting it near the Summon Demon spell, but I didn't find that intuitive. This variant of casting spells involves forming a contract with a demon and allowing it to partially "power" your spells, giving a merely human caster access to a great reservoir of power. Of course, the more you use it, the harder it gets to cast spells without the demon's help, and eventually you're beholden to them for everything magical. I like the fact that a careful caster can avoid the bad stuff for a very long time - it gives them an incentive to take advantage of it, which is always a bad idea in the long run.

Alchemy

Chapter Twenty-Eight, "Alchemy", abandons the magic system and provides rules for the Alchemy skill from the Basic Set. Fully detailed rules for crafting potions, powders, pastilles (smoke grenades), and ointments are given, along with a sizeable list of possible preparations, from the simple to the bizarre. There are also optional rules for allowing alchemists to make "charms" (essentially, magical items) out of their alchemal knowledge; these charms tend to be somewhat weaker than normal enchantments, but are also faster to make and don't require the maker to be a mage. This final chapter ends with a discussion of other uses for alchemy (e.g., creating a universal solvent or homonculus) and a list of magically potent materials to help the GM determine what material ingredients, if any, should be required for any given spell.

Magic ends with the Spell Table, a quick-reference list (in alphabetical order, thankfully) of every spell in the book. Those of us who use the Ritual Magic rules depend on the prerequisite count found on this table, and I'm pleased to say that, like the other errata, they've been corrected in this PDF as well. There is also a Grimoire Sheet that can hold the information from the Spell Table, to minimize having to look up spells in game.

Final Analysis

I take the following into account for Style grades:

Layout: The editing and grouping within Magic is very good, though I've mentioned a few things that I feel could have been done better. The graphical and text layout are easy to read and attractive. The lack of hyperlinks is unfortunate but understandable (I see them as a bonus, not as something to insist upon) and the bookmarks are perfect. 4.5

Text: The vignettes at the beginning of each chapter are mostly well written, though a few fall short. The writing style is clear and easy to follow; there were few questions that came up in game that we couldn't quickly find the answers for. (There were a few, though, such as how Divert Teleport would handle someone with the Warp (Magical) advantage, that I had to just make a ruling on.) I enjoyed reading this book. 4.0

Art: The new Fourth Edition books have suffered some criticism for their artwork. The prevelance of the obvious "make a person in Poser and then paint 'em in Photoshop" shots has served to detract from most of the latest GURPS books. Unfortunately, Magic is the poster child of this problem. Virtually all of the artwork is not only obvious Poser models, but done in a lifeless and dull fashion and painted over poorly afterwards. I found myself actually averting my eyes from some of the pictures. 1.5

Overall Style: 3.3

I take content alone into account for Substance grades:

I was very pleased with the amount of content in Magic; I never felt that any space was wasted or that anything was tossed in as "filler". I was surprised that the Unlimited Mana variant was not included, since it's a direct derivative of the standard system (unlike Syntactic/Symbolic Magic and Alchemy, both of which would have been more appropriate for the theoretical GURPS Thaumatology). This is not a complaint, however, just an observation. "Meaty" is a very appropriate term; there is a lot of content in this book. 4.0

Overall Substance: 4.0

I'd recommend this book to anyone running a GURPS game involving magic. Its only real flaws are its artwork; the text is strongly written and well put together. If you'd prefer a hardcopy version, I understand that a second printing is in the works, so the errata will be updated in that as well.

(If you already own the Third Edition books from which this is derived, I would recommend picking this one up anyways, if it fits comfortably into your budget. While most of the spells were ported over without any changes, there have been some significant updates to several of them, some new spells added, and some spells that were intentionally taken out, all to address game balance issues and take advantage of new concepts in Fourth Edition.)

Anyone who wants more information to help make up their mind can download a nine-page preview PDF here, from the e23 product page. It features the table of contents, introduction, and a taste of Chapter One. It's worth checking out.