It’s Not Every Day You see a Golem Horse (or is it?) - Part One

So the question has been asked in this blog before:  How Much Magic Is There?  For a GM and world builder, I think that is probably the most vital question.  Seriously, that is THE question that must be asked when you are setting up your world.  Once you decide, you can tweak your answer, but you cannot change it too much, maybe with a huge global event, but not “just because”.

So what do you do?  For me, it has always been easy.  I play High Fantasy.  In fact, I even played a game called “High Fantasy”, which always confused me because they allowed for guns.  Anyway, in a high fantasy setting, there is a lot of magic.  Lots of magic comes with huge concerns for maintaining game balance.  Let the party acquire too many magical long swords and you could make them unstoppable.  Nowhere is this risk bigger than when you let your PCs purchase magical items.

In Fletnern, you can bring in nearly any item and have it enchanted.  This makes the game balance risk huge, because as the GM you get the party enchanting weapons, armor, rings, shoes, horseshoes (you want a flying horse, don’t you?), and so on beyond your ability to predict.  So how do you counter this?  OK, how you counter magic unbalancing your game is a topic for a 300 page book, but we’ll hit a few of the highlights here.

First, enchanters and alchemists need to be expensive!  By keeping magic costly and watching how much treasure you hand out, you can restrict what they are able to buy.

But second, and I think more importantly, actually make up the enchanters in the party’s home town.  If you say, “There is an enchanter in town and he will enchant anything you can afford to buy” you have already lost the campaign.  Maybe it’s easier in Legend Quest because enchanting is a defined form of magic, but if I recall correctly that other huge game required the enchanters to know a whole bunch of spells if they were going to try and craft anything.  The point is - don’t let them know every one of those other spells.

Let’s use LQ as an example:  The enchanter in this smaller city knows the following spells:  animated parry, hardened-steel, and flight.  He has three power levels (journeyman enchanter).  So what does that mean?  Well first off, it means that he cannot make your sword hit more often, in fact he’s pretty much focused on defensive magics.  Why would someone do that?  Well, mainly so his customers don’t kill him.  If some barbarian who hates mages orders a battle axe with vorpal sharpness, what are the chances that he cleaves the enchanter in order to avoid paying him or to recover his payment?  Too high for the enchanter.  This guy avoided that possibility by not knowing and therefore not offering vorpal sharpness as a service.

But what can he do?  Actually quite a lot.  By putting animated parry on both sword and shield, he can make the PC a lot harder to hit in battle.  With hardened-steel, he can allow mages to carry glass swords that will function just as well as steel ones but not interfere with their magic. (Steel and magic don’t mix in LQ.)  With flight, he can allow people to move faster and gain other advantage normally not allowed.  Or he could cast it on a spear and allow the spear to have ranges more like a bow.  These are not small things.

But he is also limited by the power level 3.  He’s not crafting the most powerful magical items in the world.  This allows the GM to put in a couple of juicy magical items (anything Power level 4 or better) into the adventures and still have the players get excited.

One of my better uses for this specific “details as restrictions” is the Ivory and the Amber Enchanters.  These two guys are active in the city of Rhum.  They are friends and rivals.  One always etches his protection amulets on ivory while the other always uses amber.  (Being formerly living things they both make enchanting easier.)  If you want fire wards, frost wards, or “shield spells” (defense-magical), you go to the Ivory Enchanter.  If you want defense-physical, defense-magical or charm wards, you go to the Amber Enchanter.  Other than protecting people from spells (defense-magical) they don’t even compete, and are happy enough to send clients to each other.  Because they are so limited in what they sell, they actually have protection amulets on hand and can sell them to a party ready to head out on an adventure right now.  No need to wait while he crafts the thing.

There is an underlying thought here that may not yet be obvious:  I allow magical items to be sold in every major city in Fletnern, BUT only the lesser items.  This gives adventurers something to save up for, but the truly game unbalancing things come only from me as the GM or seen another way, from looting the corpses of the big nasty evil guys at the end of the dungeons.