From: Jeff Okamoto (okamoto@hpccc.hp.com)
Date: Wed 06 Jun 1990 - 09:56:33 EEST
>Subject: I Woulda Made a Great Rune Lord, Volume 4, Number 12
>
>From: paul@bondi.phyast.pitt.edu (Paul Reilly)
>
>The first spell to be discussed is the grossest (sorcery) spell:
> Damage Boosting
>We changed it to: Damage Boosting "stores" an amount of Death Rune
>Magic in something which already contains an aspect of the Death Rune.
>This Death magic goes into the target along with the "regular" Death
>carried by the weapon and the spell is used up. Any number of Damage
>Boosts may be stored in a single weapon, but they "come out" one at a
>time, starting with the Boost of greatest Intensity.
[Only one? Given a decent POW spirit or two, or a familiar, you could be putting up multiple damage boosts a day. It seems like with this method, you get bigger damage per boosted blow, but fewer strikes. If your combats are reasonably small, and your party usually has time to rest for a few days between fights, it seems like this method would be *more* powerful. Need to kill a dream dragon? Wait until you've got damage boost 12 or so on every arrow and weapon, and off you go... -- ACB]
>New Spells:
>
>Set Phase to A (Ranged; Temporal, Passive)
>Sympathetic Targeting (Ritual Ceremony; Ranged, Instant)
>
>It allows a sorcerer to cast a spell on a target he has never seen if
>he has appropriate materials or symbols relating to the target.
>In addition to the requisite Intensity, both the Sympathetic Targeting
>spell and any spells "carried" with it in a Multispell must have
>sufficient Range to reach the target.
Does the sorcerer casting this spell know ahead of time what the range is?
>Procedure for Use:
>
>The Intensity of the Targeting spell must overcome a special
>Resistance to Targeting. If the spell's Intensity fails to overcome
>the Targeting Resistance three things can happen:
>
>Thus Dufus must overcome a difficulty of -5 to Target his spells.
>To make sure, he casts an Intensity 5 Range 10 Sympathetic Targeting
>multispelled with a Venom 8, Venom 7, Palsy 6, Neutralize Magic 4
>(on spell defenses), and Smother 3, each with Range 10, for a total
>of 93 magic points*.
>Note: The most common spell to Multispell with Sympathetic Targeting
>is (Sense) Projection. Once you get the Projection up, you can cast
>another spell "through" it, or another Projection now that you've seen
>the place.
Why waste points? Why not just cast the spell you wanted to in the first place?
While I am familiar with the concept of Sympathetic magic, I'd want to seriously test this before even playtesting it. It has the potential of SERIOUSLY unbalancing a campaign. I think it makes an already seriously powerful mage even more so, while doing little for the less-skilled apprentices. This may be desirable, but then, after looking at the sorcerer in Griffin Island (can't remember his name), I'm not so sure.
Jeff
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