Five Colors
One of the major things we’ve decided to do with our Five Color Game is to remove the ability score for Wisdom from the game. This wasn’t a light decision, and I’ve always been a bit of a fan of WIS for a number of things. But with the removal of clerics and druids and the simplification of many other things, we’ve decided it had to go. The characteristics that WIS encompasses have mostly been included in INT.
We considered using both INT and WIS as key components of our wizard classes, such as using one to determine success rates and chances of learning spells and the other to determine bonus spells. But that made the wizard class too dependent on two ability scores, and we’re trying to do a bit to untie the playability of a character from the scores rolled up during creation. So we rolled it all into INT. Wizards must have an intelligence score of 11 or more. Others must be warriors, which have no minimum requirements.
This leaves us with 3d6 in order for five ability scores, each of which can be modified based upon the color the player chooses for the PC.
This will likely be heresy for a great many.
Tags: Five Colors
I’ve not had much time to blog this week but I have actually made a fair amount of headway on a homebrew game based on old school D&D and utilizing the Five Color Magic concept. I’m hoping to have an “alpha” version of the game ready and printed up at Staples this weekend, though that might be pushing it a bit.
Here is what it looks like it’s going to be:
- 48-page letter-size book
- Character levels 1 through 8
- Human PCs only
- 5 wizard classes
- 5 warrior classes
- Roll to advance
- Simplified monster write-ups
We’re thinking of the highly original name “Wizards & Warriors” because those are the two classes to choose from, with each having 5 colorized sub-classes. The mechanics of the game are going to be pretty much B/X D&D. The monster selection is going to be most of the AD&D list redone with combined single attacks and written in the OD&D matrix style. Other various tweaks and houserules that we’ve been using and like.
It is NOT going to be a Magic: The Roleplaying Game at all, rather more like D&D with magic and alignment loosely based on the five color scheme used in Magic: The Gathering.
Tags: Five Colors
It occurred to me that nearly everyone who wants to give Five Color Magic a try in their own game will want to tweak it a bit. So I uploaded a .doc version of the lists for you to mess with:
Click here to download Five Color Magic in .doc format
Tags: Five Colors, Kreations, Labyrinth Lord
Last week I wondered aloud about the possibility of reorganizing the spell lists and spellcaster classes into five schools or spheres based loosely on that one card game. As I’ve thought about it some more and got my son involved, we’ve come to like the idea more and more. So, without further ado, here is the list of spell levels 1 through 5 in PDF form:
Five Color Magic - Free PDF
There are, I think, a lot of benefits to doing something along these lines. Most of all, it gives five fairly equally-playable classes instead of four where one (the druid) is often seen as out of place and another (the illusionist) is often not viable. Plus it solves the issue of “just what is the cleric class doing in the game, anyway?” which has always bugged me a bit. Rather than one powerful spellcaster and one supporting cast member, there are five flavors of adventuring wizard, each with strengths and weaknesses.
I should say that this list is not exaclty what we’ve come up with for our own game. We’ve added a few spells (such as a full complement of cure wounds spells) and some other minor tweaking along the way. I wanted a fairly standard list for others, though, so I’ve removed our own spells and used the standard names from Labyrinth Lord’s Advanced Edition Companion.
One thing we’ve done on our own list is to slightly adjust the spell’s flavor to better suit the color it ended up in. For instance, in our list the illusionist spell obscuring mist is in the red list so we changed it to obscuring smoke to better match red’s theme of fire. And some of the overtly-religious spells have also been re-named while keeping the same mechanical effect. Bless, for instance, became rally.
Some of the slotting decisions were arbitrary, and no doubt others will want to adjust things to their liking before giving it a try. Our own list is still in a state of flux and will probably continue to be so for some time as we keep tinkering. One thing that I did leave in from our take are the separate elemental conjuration spells (as the druid handles it) rather than the all-in-one conjure elemental magic-user spell. Splitting up the conjuration and banishment of elementals from the various elemental planes really plays to the strength of the color-based system, so I included it here.
Our basic idea is to use five wizard classes, one for each color. A wizard will only be able to cast spells of his own color or from the “colorless” list which consists of general magical function spells. An optional idea is to allow wizards of higher levels to begin getting access to lower-level spells from the two sympathetic colors (white and red for green, for instance). We haven’t quite worked out how we’ll manage that.
Another thing we’ve been thinking about is making spells of seventh-level and above require cooperative casting by wizards from two or more colors.
One thing I should say is that this does not at all, I think, turn D&D into some sort of Magic: The Roleplaying Game. The spells themselves remain the same as in the original game and the number cast per day is unchanged. This is simply an attempt to look at an alternative class system for spellcasting adventurers.
Take a look if interested and, by all means, give me some feedback on this. It has gone from something done out of curiosity to something that is looking more and more worthwhile to use in our game. In fact, my son’s enthusiasm for the idea has us working on taking some of these ideas beyond just the magic system and re-tooling our homebrew game in a more significant manner. I’ll have more on that in the near future if we keep at it.
Tags: Five Colors, kilgore edition game, Kreations
Something that I’ve thought about off and on for several years concerns re-working the spellcasting classes in D&D. I’ve never been 100% convinced that the cleric belongs in the game, at least not in the “adventuring religious fighting priest” concept, and though I think the illusionist is interesting, he doesn’t seem viable except in certain circumstances. I’ve re-envisioned clerics as mystic warriors, removed the religious themes to the class, and explained their spells as being more like powers. I’ve described how magic works in our game. I’ve tweaked spells slightly and dropped the pre-memorization requirements. But still I’m not overly thrilled with any of the spellcaster classes.
So I dusted off an idea I had for Swords & Wizardry White Box last year and redid the spell lists. I took all the spells and sorted them into five “colors” or “schools” loosely based on (and this is sure to ruffle some feathers) the Magic: The Gathering card game.
(Yes, I realize I just lost a lot of folks right there. That’s okay. If someone is likely to arbitrarily dismiss ideas just because they sound like something from WotC games, I’m not really interested in their opinion anyway.)
So I have red magic, white magic, green magic, blue magic, and black magic. With red wizards, white wizards, green wizards, blue wizards, and black wizards to use it. Roughly one-sixth of the spells at each level are “colorless,” meaning they’re available to wizards of any color. Spells like read magic, hold portal, light, dancing lights, and dispel magic can be used by any wizards.
Reversed versions of spells are separate in this system, meaning that detect evil and detect good are separate spells on separate lists. The same goes for cure light wounds and cause light wounds.
White wizards are not necessarily good, but they cast a lot of the healing and protection spells. However, even though many of their spells are from the standard cleric’s list, they aren’t exactly clerics. Magic missile, for instance, is a white spell.
Black wizards, of course, deal with darkness and death. They get the cause wounds spells, sleep, and lots of the other nasty magics. They end up being a sort of anti-cleric/necromancer mix that isn’t afraid to mix it up.
Blue wizards are the masters of illusion, trickery, and water and sky. Much (though not all) of the standard illusionist spell list is available to blue wizards, and they also get some spells that deal with unseen forces such as feather fall, invisibility, and teleport.
Red wizards are masters of fire, chaos, and warfare. Many of the fire-based spells (like fireball and pyrotechnics) are theirs, as well as a good selection of direct combat-related magic and monster summoning.
Finally, green wizards are not only in tune with nature and life with spells like sticks to snakes and entangle, they get some pure magic like fly, knock, and charm person. Though many standard druid spells were spread out among the other four colors, a lot of them stayed with the green wizard.
The spell lists still need a little tweaking, but I’m pretty happy with them after the first stage of sorting. I’ve done spell levels one through six, which is as high as our game is currently designed to go.
I’m toying with the idea of giving each type of wizard a special power, such as turning undead for white wizards and maybe even some weapon/armor allowances (or even thief skills?) for others, but I haven’t got that far yet. I’m also considering wizards of one color to have access to the spells of another complementary color once at higher levels.
I’m not at all sure where this is going to go. Maybe it won’t ever be used at all. One major downside is the fact that it would pretty much wreck compatibility, something that we’ve been trying hard to maintain. I’ll keep messing with it for a while and see how it turns out.
UPDATE: Check out the first draft of the list here.
Tags: Five Colors
