| Arkania is a world, where not
only thiefs and warriors roam the streets born to be heroes, it is also
a world of the magicians and sorcerers, witches and druids, faeries and
elves, who were not only once responsible for the run of history or the
fall of kingdoms or only the survival of one of the greatest heroes of
the world. In fact, it got its name from the arcane secrets of those spellbinding
characters.
Magic is a power that may be used to turn things good or evil and so teachers of this noble art demand a high degree of discipline from their students to allow them to create a world according to their beliefs and not a world that will destroy them one step after another. There is a variety of different kinds of magic in Arkania, which are bound together in the gigantic arcane web: The mightiest beyond them is the arcane art of the human magicians who teach their knowledge that comprises a lot of the other varieties, too, to students in their academies. Other varieties are the nature magic by the elves, witches or the rituals of druids. The oldest knowledge on magic is inherent in the elfish culture, which developed to the momentaneous state in which every elf is capable of effecting small wonders only by pure thought. Whatsoever you may think about magic by now, this only a very short description of what magicians may or may not evoke or invoke. If you want to know more about it, wait some time for such mysterious things as faerie magic, hobgoblin magic or shamanistic rituals of the primitive tribes of the north and the south of the continent. In these rules you will only learn how to play a magician
or an elf, no word will lead you to witches and druids, but it is still
a very nice job to get to know to the basic magic rules of Arkania.
Astral energy (AE)All magically talented creatures are filled with another power source beside the life energy. This reservoir is called the power of magic of simply astral energy (AE). Whenever a spell is cast or a ritual is invoked, the magician looses some of her astral energy. This is called losing astral points (ASP).The power is needed to transform the omnipotent forces of the spheres into something more ordered patterns, the spell. A big order needs a huge amount of this astral energy. The very number of astral points (ASP) a spell employs is written down in their description. If the magic test does not work out well, only half of this energy is transformed into some pattern that might vanish immediately or fall back onto the magician. If a magician does not have enough astral points left to cast the spell nothing happens, the spheres do not react to her despair. The astral points, however, are not lost forever. Magicians and elves may regain their amount of astral energy as they regain astral energy during a quiet night. Whereas other heroes may only roll 1D6 during the nocturnal recovery to add them to their life energy, magically talented heroes may roll 2D6. The lower number they roll is added to their astral energy reservoir, the higher to their life energy. |
Magic talents (MTaP)More than 200 spell are known throughout the whole of the continent. We only present the 26 most commonly known spells. But even from this restricted point of view you will realize that every magically talented character has other preferences than the other and may only be talented to learn specific ones. Therefore every spell is connected to a magical talent value (MTaP), who will tell you how well a single character knows the specific spell.Additionally, the hero will have to show his special
virtues that belong to every spell, so an elf will more easily recognize
the feelings of another one if he has already developed the virtues WISDOM,
INTUITION and CHARISMA. The spell is only an interweaving of all these
virtues and combining it with a magical power source. All of these virtues
and values must be regarded to perform a spell correctly.
A magic testIf a hero starts to cast a spell, it will not automatically succeed. The result is determined by a magic test. As you might have noticed by the overview in the previous passage, magical talents are in essence the same as talents and so the test is also similar.You will roll the dice for the 3 different virtues and may correct them with the magical talent points (MTaP). You might as well look it up more detailed in the talent test description.
|