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Herr D
A mage was faced with about 12 archers. He dove into some tall grass. He knew the cover wouldn’t last, tossed his shield up onto his back and curled under it. He plucked a mageroot bloom, broke it into 3 pieces, pulled off his right sandal, fished a feather out of a pocket, and opened his lantern. He touched one bloom piece to each ingredient. Player rolls with the following chart and stats.
i1-i3: lantern
feather
sandal
A1-3: burns
small
crushes what it touches
A4-6: portable
quick
hard
A7-9: oil-powered—-breath-directed–smells of feet
B1-3: tips over
white
flammable
B4-6: black
soft
runs from enemy
B7-9: metal
fragile
leather
Casting Weight Tier: 1 pound<3.5 lbs total ingredients; Memory (mm): 17; Magery: 15; Player rolled a 9.
So, the mage made his magery roll–but wait–18 traits to keep track of with a 17 mm and an insufficient casting weight.
The roll made means the spell worked. The GM chooses ‘portable’ as a trait that the result lost. As a random effect, the result is invisible (Reasonable, because the only colors chosen were colors NOT to be.)
Yikes. The result is an invisible thing that can’t be held. It is made of hardened fire which burns and crushes. The mage, not yet realizing the problem, blows on it. It doesn’t run from the enemy, so it ‘kicks’ and sets fire to the nearest archer and flutters randomly downwind like a feather, ‘kicking’ and setting fire to the next archer. They would roll for fire damage. In this example they die quickly.
The third archer makes an intelligence roll and starts huffing and puffing. The others do also and so catch on. The field catches fire and kills the mage. The forest catches fire and burns the village the mage was protecting. The smell of feet becomes overpowering. 3 hours later the 7 surviving archers escape, having taken turns huffing and puffing over each other and fanning vigorously. The lantern had only had 3 hours of oil in it. A field hand found it a month later and turned it in — an invisible lantern? They caged it for study. The point of this system is that creativity, thoughtfulness, and good choices make the difference.
