Dungeoneering: A Kind of Magic

Surprisingly, spellcasting in D&D Pathfinder actually has it's origins in historical tabletop wargames. Players began to ask things like "If we can recreate Waterloo, why not the Battle of the Five Armies?" The next question was how to include spellcasters like Gandalf. The easiest way to slot them in was to base them on units that already existed, with some tweaks to the rules. Wizard units in these fantasy tabletop wargames were based on artillery - they had powerful long-range damage, but had limited ammunition and little protection if an enemy unit could get into melee with them.

The limited ammunition idea coincided neatly with the depiction of magic in the novels of Jack Vance, and thus was coined the term Vancian magic. In his novels, wizards had to study their spellbooks to prepare spells. They could only memorise a certain number of spells at once, and once they had been cast, the spells faded from memory until the wizard could take time to study thier spellbooks once again. When smaller-scale roleplaying games developed -  where each player had a single character unit instead of an entire army - the Vancian system was retained.

There are two main types of magic in D&D and Pathfinder: arcane and divine. Arcane magic is used by sorcerers, wizards and bards, stemming from the caster having a connection to the essence of magic itself. Divine magic is used by clerics, paladins, druids and rangers, and is magic granted by devotion to a deity or some sort of ideal or concept, like nature. Later versions of D&D have split off the nature classes like druid and ranger, and classed their magic as a third kind, 'primal'. Pathfinder still views them as divine casters, but has also added a third kind of magic - psychic. I have included more info on each of Pathfinder's magic categories below.

Arcane Magic
Wizard, Witch, Sorcerer, Magus, Bard

All arcane spells have two main components, called verbal and somatic. Think of the spells in the Harry Potter novels - each one has words that must be said (verbal), and a gesture that one must do with the wand (somatic). You don't need a wand in Pathfinder, however. These two components mean that it can be easy to shut down wizards - if they are gagged, put into a zone of silence, or have their hands tied up, they will be unable to cast spells. Arcane spellcasters are limited in what armour they can wear, as any armour besides the expensive mithral chain shirt will interfere with their somatic component. (And yes, that is very much a Hobbit reference.)

The wizards of Pathfinder, like the old tabletop wizards, still have to walk around carrying spellbooks filled with their spells. They must spend time consulting them at the beginning of each day, in order to prepare a number of spells up to the maximum number they can cast each day. These days, they are usually referred to as prepared spellcasters. The wizard class is extremely powerful, with access to a wide variety of spells for every occasion, but the preparation rules limit them significantly, as they can easily get stuck with prepared spells that are useless for the current situation.

Many people greatly dislike the preparation rules. The sorcerer class was made as an attempt to alleviate the problems with it. Sorcerers are based on a different sort of literary magic user - one born with inherent magical abilities, who does not need to learn magic. Sorcerers are called spontaneous spellcasters and don't have spell books. They don't need to prepare, but can choose to cast any spell they know, as long as they don't exceed the maximum number of spells they cast per day. They are, however, limited in spell knowledge - they only know a small number of spells compared to wizards.

Witches are prepared arcane casters, but have a significantly different spell list to wizards and sorcerers, a list that included a lot of spells previously only castable by clerics and druids. Witches cast these formerly divine-only spells as arcane spells, thus blurring the lines between arcane and divine magic.

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

Divine Magic
Cleric, Oracle, Inquisitor, Paladin; Druid, Shaman, Ranger
Compared to arcane spellcasters, divine casters have it easy. They don't need spellbooks, can use armour without worrying about spell failure, and prepared divine casters like clerics and druids know every divine spell that it is possible for them to cast. Need a niche spell to pull off a clever strategy? If you have enough time, they can just prepare it and you're good. They even have better health and attack bonuses than the arcane classes! (Prepared divine casters, like oracles, do have a limited amount of known spells, like sorcerers.)

Much of their magic still uses verbal and somatic components, making them susceptible to the same things that shut down arcane spellcasters. In addition, their magic requires a divine focus - a holy symbol for the more religious classes, or a sprig of mistletoe for those of a natural persuasion. Deprive them of their focus, and they can't cast spells. They are easy and cheap to replace, unless you want them to be really fancy.

I personally think it is silly that the three nature-focused spellcasters are lumped in with the divine casters, and in my games I usually make it hard for each group to recognise spells cast by the other - like how arcane and divine spellcasters struggle to recognise each other's spells.

Mechanically, there's not a lot of difference between arcane, divine and nature-divine magic, it's more of a story thing that needs to be played up by the GM and players for it to actually be relevant. Psychic magic, on the other hand...

Illustration by Tomasz Chistowski

Psychic Magic
Psychic, Occultist, Spiritualist
Psychic magic is both elegant and problematic. D&D's psychic classes had spell-like powers that worked completely differently to other spellcasters. Pathfinder decided that they didn't want people to have to learn a whole new system of 'spellcasting'. So they decided that psychic magic would work just like arcane magic, with a two key differences.

Instead of the normal components, psychic magic uses emotion and thought components. This means that most of the usual ways to stop spellcasters, like silence and binding their hands, doesn't work on them. But, anything that messes with their emotions - like a fear spell - will shut off their ability to cast. The intense thought required also means they have difficulty casting defensively, making melee combat even less desirable for them than it is for wizards.

Secondly, all psychic classes use spontaneous casting. Prepared casting for psychic magic does not exist.

The problem with psychic magic being slotted into the game this way is that, despite the fact that you can always tell when a spellcaster is casting a spell, the game doesn't explain how this works for psychic magic. Wizards, clerics and druids visibly move their hands and mutter incantations, but psychics do not. You can't see the psychic components. So we have to come up with our own explanation. Perhaps their eyes glow blue, or mystical sigils appear in the air around them, or you just get this nagging feeling that the guy in the corner is trying to read your mind. It's not hard to come up with something fun for it, but it makes for a lot of initial confusion when you are trying to work out how to play one, as it isn't brought up at all, and you have to go searching through forums to find an official answer, that yes, you can always tell.

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

Alchemy
Alchemist, Investigator

Alchemy is actually just arcane magic. However, the mechanics used by alchemists and investigators (a class inspired by Arkham Horror) circumvent many of the limitations of arcane magic. They actually 'cast' all their spells at the beginning of the day, by creating extracts, which basically act as potions that they can later drink. While preparing extracts requires components, drinking an extract does not, and has no risk of spell failure. Alchemists and investigators can basically cheat their way around the restrictions by only putting on their armour after preparing extracts, and don't care about Silence. They are not without drawback - that their spell list is a lot more limited than wizards or sorcerers, mostly defensive spells that affect only them, and lack the three highest spell levels.

In all other ways, alchemists and investigators mirror wizards - they have a formula book with all their extracts written down, and they prepare them in advance.

The Loremaster: The Strange Tale of Ravi Sengir

You have probably heard of Barin Sengir, or his progeny, the Sengir Vampires. What you probably didn't know, was that his grandmother, Ravi Sengir, was a powerful planeswalker from Dominaria.

Ok, so, she wasn't actually his grandmother. She did, however, have a significant role in the baron's origins. When Ravi was a young girl, a plague swept through her village, killing her mother. At her funeral, Ravi met the future baron as young man, who told her that his father was responsible for the plague, having unleashed infected rats on the village in order to study the effects of black magic. The only way to save the village was to kill his father, said the boy, and he taught her how to control rats with a song. The reason Ravi had to kill him was that the law prevented a son who killed his father from inheriting his lands and title (which was, of course, Baron).

Ravi was hesitant at first, but after her father died from plague too, she attacked the elder baron's castle with controlled rats. The two youngsters, however, had neglected to remember that the elder baron could control the rats with his music too, and thus an epic rap battle was fought for control of the rats. Confised, that rats attacked and killed the only person who wasn't singing, the young future baron. Horrified, the elder baron stopped singing to cast a spell - allowing Ravi to use the rats to kill him. The younger baron had been restored to (un)life by his father's spell - now and forever he was Baron Sengir, vampire lord.

Years later, Ravi ascended and became embroiled in a war between two factions of planeswalkers on the plane of Ulgrotha. In an attempt to end the war, she used a powerful artifact: the Apocalypse Chime. After ringing it, she sealed herself inside a magical coffin to escape its effects. The Chime was, however, even more powerful than Ravi realised. Not only did it kill all planeswalkers on both sides of the war, it killed almost everything on the plane, and disrupted the plane's leylines, ripping away all of Ravi's mana bonds to the land - now unable to planeswalk away, she was trapped inside the coffin for centuries. The destruction spread further than Ulgorotha, affecting the nearby planes of Dominaria and Kamigawa, and forming rifts that linked the three planes together.

The rifts created by the Chime allowed the Myojin of Night's Reach and Toshi Umezawa to travel from Kamigawa to Dominaria. Toshi's desendant, Tetsuo Umezawa, later defeated the Emperor of Madara, Nicol Bolas, coming perilously close to killing the dragon with a meteor hammer. Thus, Ravi is indirectly responsible for the downfall of Nicol Bolas and his 400 year exile. Lets hope Bolas never finds that out.

As for Ravi, she was imprisoned for over 300 years, long enough to drive her completely insane. She didn't even remember who she was - or recognise the man who eventually opened her coffin - Baron Sengir. Due to retcons, there is corrently no offical explanation for how the Baron ended up on Ulgrotha - but we can probably go with the easiest: 'He traveled there via one of the apocalypse rifts'.

The Baron gave a place at his castle on Ulgrotha, the aptly named Castle Sengir, and told everyone she was his grandmother. But all of these stories serve as mere backdrop for the Homelands set - though we are told they are evil, in the actual Homeland comics, the Sengirs don't do anything important at all. Instead, the story is focused on Feroz and Serra falling in love, and on Sandruu and Taysir fighting over Kristina (for such a backwater plane, Ulgrotha certainly attracts a lot of high-power planeswalkers). The Baron is actually quite pleasant towards Feroz and Serra, and after their deaths he seems genuinely sad, leaving a rose on Serra's gravestone.

While Serra's story is about the effect of loss and grief, and Kristina's is about the dire consequences of jealousy, I am left wondering what exactly the point of Ravi's story is. Her descruction of Ulgrotha in the distant past has no emotional impact on us, as we didn't see Ulgrotha before the Chime, and we are not given any information on any of the planeswalkers who Ravi killed. The story also makes it clear that the Baron wasn't looking for her, and his freeing her was nothing but coincidence, which is an odd angle to go for. Perhaps the story was written merely to set up the rifts, to allow laters stories to feature travel between Dominara, Ulgrotha and Kamigawa.

Dungeoneering: The Cleric Conundrum

“So who is going to play the cleric this time?” A phrase that was common in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons. It was hard to heal damage without access to magical healing, and clerics were the only class that could do it well. So someone always had to play the cleric. Which is kind of boring.

A typical dwarven cleric by Chris Seaman

Technically, you can play Pathfinder without a dedicated healer. I know, because I've played in a group that pulled it off. You just have to play the right combination of classes. In my game we had a paladin, witch (me), alchemist and wizard. You may notice that everyone except the wizard has self-healing. My witch had the healing hex and quite a few cure spells, which was normally enough to keep the wizard alive, but in a pinch the paladin could channel. I'd say you need to know what you're doing to pull it off, but...none of us had actually played Pathfinder before. Which was why I was under the mistaken impression that witches were actually good at healing. So it is possible – but not very advisable, as I suspect our DM went easy on us. I just can't get him to admit it.

So how do you actually fix this cleric issue? Dungeons & Dragons tried to remove it in 4e (shorthand for 4^th edition) by changing how the healing system worked – they made it much easier to naturally regain hitpoints out of combat. They created the five minute short rest, which allowed them to regain health based on their hit dice (the dice you use to determine your health when making a character). They also reduced the amount of healing clerics could deal out, and gave some nifty healing powers to other classes. This worked well on the surface. But 4e Edition suffered from too much homogenisation – people complained all the classes felt too similar too each other. Which is still boring.

Druid & Bard by Tim Kings-Lynne

So in 5e they revamped healing again, and this time I think they got it right. It's not as easy to heal as it was in 4e, as short rests are now an hour (so you can't stop to rest between every battle), you have less hit dice to use on healing during short rests, and you don't always get them all back after a long rest. Life domain clerics are still the best healers, having access to mass healing via channel divinity - but they are not essential. Bards and druids are now as good at healing as most other clerics, especially with the flexibility of Cure Wounds and the existence of the new spell Healing Word that can be cast as a bonus action. Even non-spellcasters can get in on the action by taking a healing feat.

Pathfinder, on the other hand, took a different tack and created the oracle class. Technically the life oracle uses the main healing mechanic of the cleric – channel positive energy. Which means it's basically the same class, right? Well, no. Because somehow, playing an oracle feels totally different to cleric. Maybe it's because their casting is spontaneous like a sorcerer (and based on charisma, which is nice, because channel is charisma-based too). Maybe it's because they are dedicated to an ideal (called a mystery) rather than a specific god. Maybe it's because they all suffer from a curse, which gives a really nice hook to build a character around – as opposed to clerics, whose hook is usually the god they follow. Whereas clerics feel strictly religious, oracles are more like that friend you have who talks about being in tune with the universe.

Oracle by Wayne Reynolds

More recently, the Advanced Class Guide gave us a third class that can play healer – the shaman. The shaman is an strange hybrid of the witch and druid classes. She gains magic and hexes from a familiar, like a witch, casts nature-based divine spells like a druid, and has a feature called spirits, based, for some reason, on the oracle's mystery feature. Shaman dedicated to the life spirit get (of course) channel positive energy. But the hexes she gains are an odd twist – giving her the ability to reduce the amount of healing an enemy can receive, completely prevent healing for a short time, or drain her own health to heal an ally. Shamans bring a very nature-based feeling to the healing game, one that might leave you suspicious that they are not very nice. Shaman is notable for being the only class that allows an evil character to channel positive energy. Nature, it seems, doesn't really care about good or evil.

So the next time you find yourself needing to play a healer, remember, cleric is not your only option! D&D players can go with bard or druid, whilst Pathfinder players can pick oracle or shaman.

Dungeoneering: Solving Problems Creatively

People often ask writers where their ideas come from. Its a difficult question to answer, as when you are creating stories, you don't often stop to think where your ideas come from. But I have noticed something important: the best ideas happen when you are trying to solve a problem.

In the past, D&D has suffered from the 'cleric problem'. Healing was vital, and the only class that could be a decent healer was the cleric, meaning that every party of adventueres had to have a cleric. Which tends to get a bit boring, especially if you have become the person who usually plays the healer. D&D solved this problem by making healing less important and also nerfing cleric healing to bining it in line with other classes. Pathfinder, on the other hand, solved this by giving us fun, viable alternatives to the cleric: the oracle and shaman. But this means there still has to be a healer in every party.

Unfortunately, the cleric in my first campaign was often absent due to work commitments, leaving the group without healing. I solved this by giving the cavalier a powerful artifact that mimicked the channeled healing of clerics and oracles. As this was a Plane Shift campaign based on Zendikar (a world from Magic: the Gathering) I called the artifact an Angelheart Vial (based on a card from MtG).

But where exactly does an Angelheart Vial come from, I wondered? This is the first important point: after you solve the problem mechanically, you need to find a storyline reason for the solution to exist. An Angelheart Vial, I decided, was the crystallised heart of a slain angel. But not just any angel, this was one on the level of the legendary angels of Zendikar – Iona and Linvala. The angel was named Numa, and was slain in battle against the mighty Eldrazi Titan known as Emrakul. There you go, a cool little tidbit, but not terribly important in the grand scheme of things.

Fast forward to a few months later, and one of my players is wanting to play a fetchling character. The problem is, fetchlings are not a thing that exists on Zendikar. These days I'd just refuse – you don't need to play a fetchling when you have access to unique Zendikar races like kor, merfolk and sphinxborn – but back then I was in my 'you must give the players what they want' phase. The main problem was that fetchlings are an outsider race linked to the Plane of Shadows. D&D and Pathfinder use a planar structure consisting of the material realm with other planes overlaying it (like ethereal and shadow) and higher planes stacked around it (like the elemental planes, heaven, hell, and so on). MtG, on the other hand, uses a multiverse model, where each plane is it's own distinct world, basically a series of unconnected material planes. In this model, the concept of a shadow plane doesn't make sense.

I had already discarded the idea of removing the traditional planes from Pathfinder. There are a number of spells that rely on the shadow plane (like Shadow Walk) or ethereal plane (like Blink) to function, and there is the concept of creatures called Outsiders, named because the come from other planes. Outsiders include everything from angels and demons to elementals of all flavours, and even include some playable races like fetchlings and tieflings. These creatures interact with spells like Summon Monster and Dismissal, with entire classes being built around the mechanics involving them. Altering all these creatures was a substantially larger undertaking than I was willing to undertake.

Which meant I had to come up with a way to include planes, but not make them actual planes. There was a possible solution for the Outsider problem, as angels and demons in MtG are currently described as 'mana constructs', beings made out of pure mana. When they 'die', their essence or mana is said to return to the lands that they were created from in the first place. Could lands and mana stand in for the idea of an overlapping Shadow Plane?

This is the second important point: When you have a bunch of semi-connected problems, what you do is smoosh them all together and make a story out of it. I didn't have the answer to everything yet, but I could come up with a solution that included black mana, demons, fetchlings and the Shadow Plane.

I know all sorts of obscure Magic lore, so I knew that the concept of a shadow plane did actually exist, back when Magic was more like D&D. Hidden away in really old stories about Leshrac are ideas hinting at the existence of a shadow realm, and that people have become trapped inside it. Though never officially explained, it is theorised that this has something to do with creatures called the soltari, a race encountered on the plane of Rath that had been abducted to populate the realm, but had somehow ended up stuck out-o-phase with the rest of the world. This is represented on the cards as a mechanic called 'shadow'. Aha! Rath is indirectly linked to Zendikar due to the fact that another race called the kor was also kidnapped to poulate Rath – and the kor were originally from Zendikar. What if, I thought, the soltari were also from Zendikar?

And so, pulling disparate threads together, I ended up with the following:

When the Archangel Numa died in battle against Emrakul, her spirit end up in the Shadowlands, a black mana realm populated by undead, demons and madmen. Being a protective deity, she took up the cause of the soltari, a group of humanoids also trapped in the shadow realm of Zendikar, who were slowly going crazy from the madness-inducing realm. Crafting a blade from her remaining light, and the shadows of her new home, she fought back the undead and darkness long enough for the soltari to build a fortified city called Solitaire. Leaving her Sword of Light & Shadow in the temple the soltari built to honour her, she vanished from mortal sight, but the people of Solitare have been under what is obviously divine protection ever since, leading many to believe she still protects the city in unseen ways.

And just like that, I have a god, a plane, a fleshed out idea of what black magic involves on Zendikar, a new city to populate with people, a powerful relic, and a great conflict between the soltari and the undead for the players to get drawn into.

You may recognise that I've taken ideas from all over the place. This is part of the third important point – you don't have to come up with it all yourself. You don't even have to come up with it all beforehand. A lot of the time I found myself making things up on the spot as players asked me questions. I intended to avoid anything to do with planar travel, but my players ended up spending a siginificant amount of time in the Shadowlands, and even gave me ideas for putting this all together (though they didn't realise it).