Uncommon Components
This month we asked our Quest Givers on Patreon which characters deserved a scene together. From the big menu o’ Handbook-World inhabitants, the most popular of our many side-characters were Drow Priestess and Jeremy the Dracolich. (Better luck next time to runners-up Snowflake, Kineticist, and Barbarian. We’ll have to see if we can’t get you gals some screen time in the near future.)
Any dang way, it looks like today’s adventure is something less than the “madcap buddy comedy” we promised. Our spider-worshiping murderess and our juvenile ex-dragon both have reasons to seek vengeance against The Heroes. And if you’re going up against an adversary as powerful as a party of main characters, it stands to reason that you’re going to need a big spell. Notably, these do not come cheap. And if you happen to be on the players’ side of the GM screen, you may not have access to them at all.
This is the territory of “plot magic.” No mere 9th level spell or second-circle sorcery can compare. When it comes to plot magic, you’ve got to bathe in the fabled font of a-wizard-did-it. That means artifact creation. It means map-changing uber-spells. It means the birth of a new deity, timeline altering Dr. Who nonsense, or literal apocalypse scenarios. These are the big-deal rituals that hide behind multiple quest chains, plot arcs, and high-difficulty relic hunts. They are oftentimes THE POINT of a campaign, and tend to be game-defining moments.
They also risk rubbing players the wrong way. If your BBEG happens to have access to “plot magic,” why don’t the PCs? Shouldn’t my guy, in all his awesomeness, have full access to phenomenal cosmic power? Why is it only the mages of yore that could create mechs or giant floating cities or whatever? I want in on that action too!
So here’s the question of the day. What “plot magic” have you run into during your travels across the multiverse? Was it strictly “NPC magic?” Did you have to brave a campaign’s worth of hardship to gather the necessary components? Or were you in one of those high-powered campaigns were the “wonders of the ancients” were a dime a dozen? Sound off with all your universe-altering, planar-collapsing, campaign-ending magical shenanigans down in the comments!
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I’ve always wanted a supplement that details lower level adventures to retrieve rare material components, and rules for hiring lower level adventurers to fetch said components for you when you’re higher level.
I think that first one is just a “simple” fetch quest, just make sure you are not being ripped off and agree to reward less than the market price for the item, and I mean the buying price. The latter, use your diplomatic skills(no intimidation, I mean it) to pay the queat takers less than buying price and hope GM is merciful and let’s those npcs take 20 on their fetch quest. Because I would “simulate” that quest as failing and the hired adventurer coming to beg you to save his captured partners. And no you don’t pay for failures, especially if you have to fetch the item you wanted yourself.
But hey each GM to their own.
I’ve heard people talk about this concept on a number of occasions. It makes me wonder if there is a supplemental system in “the handbook of epic level epicness” or some such.
Well, your old friends at Rusty & Co. have a whole sub-comic about Temper Feujette, a half-demon alchemist whose main job is finding those rare components: https://rustyandco.com/loot/inktober/
Holy shit do I ever love that a lot!
Less of magic and more science. Specifically in Paranoia. Needless to say my players will never make one of those things and will be used as quinea pigs in my attemp of either yricking them into killing themselves or eachothers. I am still proud of my rocket propelled ejection seats in a helicopter, minced Troubleshooter meat is a key ingridient in SoylentRed.
I like to think that “yricking” is combination of tricking, yeeting, and rick rolling.
Just Tricking, I wish I was that clever. Typing on a phone leads to typos alot and I tend to be a bit blind to making typos in english. Then again yours is the language that turns Colonel into Curnal and has silent R’s. I mean Finnish is hard but at least we pronounce like we write.
I guess it was only a matter of time until someone got serious about taking revenge on Fighter…
Oh. And the others, too.
Poor Jeremy. He just lost his chance to give his heart to that special someone…
Nope. Definitely a dangling plot thread. Zero plans to follow through on this one. It will never be mentioned again and I will disavow all knowledge.
Yeah, no way this will link up with the thread concerning the actual, physical Handbook of Heroes that was once restrained by Mr. Stabby…
Hopeful? Who’s sounding hopeful? You’re sounding hopeful!
you can either have Plot Armor or Plot Magic
or so I have heared.
“My guy is stronger!”
“My guy is tougher!”
And so the wheels of the multiverse grind on, powered by squabbling school boys.
Ah, that’s just an Unstoppable Power Paradox, it always ends up in sexy times because if you can’t fight it out, you have to bang it out…
As the latest (definitely NSFW) Oglaf illustrates.
https://www.oglaf.com/archive/
(look for “Teumessian Fox”, tell them I sent you)
Generally I prefer even my plot-magic slightly smaller scale than universe shattering since the latter tends to ironically lower the stakes since it can’t really be allowed to come to pass. If the villain is trying to cast a spell that’ll raise an entire army of undead warriors allowing them to wage war on the kingdom, then the next adventure could be about forming an alliance to oppose it and so on should the villain succeed. If the villain on the other hand blows up the world that’s the end of not only that story but all further stories in the same setting.
Still you won’t find “create 10,000 – 25,000 skeleton warriors” on the Wizard/sorcerer spell-list, so I think the concept still applies.
I do feel a bit of tension around “NPC magic”, and have tried to make it more available for player use in games I run, to various degrees of success. Usually I try to make it more “ritual magic” with a lot of effort required but which the players can dip their toes into if they want.
I do really like the sorcerous working system from exalted 3rd edition for that reason. It’s really good about both being flexible and grand enough while still putting the thing into the hands of the players. I have been playing around with hacking it for other systems.
Me too. It was late when I wrote the examples, and my brain couldn’t process anything smaller than “explode the universe.”
Raising an undead army is a great example.
Agreed. World ending perils are only on offer in my games when I’m planning to end that world anyway. So “win or lose”, the game will be ending.
One of our game night crew had a hideous tchotchke from a trip to the Caribbean–a “knife” with a face that included real goat teeth–that he wanted to see incorporated into the campaign somehow. I think he hoped for maybe a one-off fetch quest, but I worked it into an overarching mystery involving rare coins with no nation of origin, ancient mile markers with impossible distances, snippets of nonsense poetry, and a literal “uncanny valley”–a flat field where walking toward the center feels like going downhill. The final discovery was the existence of an ancient city-state (“Lost Carcossa”) that was so vile and corrupt that it was excised from reality in a messy fashion that still left these traces behind centuries later. Of course, the descendants of its inhabitants would now like to come back…
Nice buildup to Carcossa. The “downhill” thing is always a nice touch.
I hope the knife cut open the portal to your hideous other world in the end.
Technically, dragon hearts have very specific pre-established properties and uses, being (by some lore) to make a long story short, essentially a biological link to the magic of the Weave and the very heart (literally and figuratively) of what makes a dragon’s magic tic. Depending on how the details of dracolichdom works and if there’s a fancy workaround there or such, Jeremy might very well still need his in order to do dragon stuff like breathe elemental energy, cast spells, and be an innately magical creature.
Which, of course, means that it is perfect for a magical ritual component, but the result of any such ritual certainly won’t just be “anything the DM decrees” but rather have a very tight relationship to the nature of dragon magic and that type of dragon.
If Jeremy is a silver, his heart could probably be used alongside a series of other nonsense to bullshit up, like, a literal cloud castle, or an eternal fog generator, or any amount of things that deal cold damage or freeze things solid.
I’m not sure you understand how “bullshitting up” works. 😛
I believe there to be a bit of a difference between “anything the plot requires” and “a thing thematically relevant to the magic ingredient being used”. Some degree of bullshit is still required, of course.
You know what? Let’s do this. It sounds like fun.
Give me a big dumb magical effect. I’ll tell you how Jeremy’s heart makes it happen.
opens a permanent portal to the hells.
You need a powerful source of negative energy to kickstart an opening to the lower planes. Dracolich hearts run on the stuff. Once that portal is torn open it becomes self-sustaining.
I think the keyword here is “by some lore”. Stuff that’s true in the Forgotten Realms is not necessarily true in Greyhawk, stuff that’s true in the Scarred Lands is not necessarily true in Dragonlance, stuff that’s true in Golarion is not necessarily true in Mystara, and so on and so forth. There are dozens of published D&Dish settings, and thousands of homebrews.
Plot Magic always takes; A) Time, more time than the players will ever sit still for, B) Cooperation, more people working in concert than the players will ever want to organize, C) Sacrifice, more dead bodies than the player- ah, who am I kidding on this one, and D) Reputation, again, kind of tenuous, but unless the party is going full evil, they usually want the world their characters exist in to at least not hate them on sight, and the tasks needed to do magic this big generally makes you an enemy of the world.
Fair cop. Even refurbishing a giant magic mech or whatever would take an archaeologist wizard years of construct-assisted excavation.
C) I resent that remark.
we let a demon go who powered a mighty Plot Magic Device by temporary level drain (and who said he was down to 1 effective level) and we probably would have done so without a paladin in the group.
Isn’t supposed that a dracolich’s heart is their phylactery? 🙂
Shit man, I don’t know how magic works. What am I, some kind of vaudevillian?
To me you have more bohemian airs, but yeah, i suppose you are 😀
Me IRL: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Zan_Zig_performing_with_rabbit_and_roses%2C_magician_poster%2C_1899-2.jpg
Nice moustache 😛
i invented an “npc class” called the ritualist. They give up the ability to use flashy fireballs and the like, instead being able to enact “rituals” that do whatever the plot requires.
GMs love ’em!
I often though it would be amusing to invent that kind of 4th-wall breaking character in a Superhero game. Lots of luck manipulation and retcon powers.
A buddy of mine played a character in a GURPS Supers campaign who had no costume, code name, or secret identity–just an average schlub with overpowering luck powers that were balanced and purchased with a host of disadvantages like Total Klutz, Cursed, Unlucky, and Weirdness Magnet. The super-team kept him close not because he was useful in their adventures, but because he was a walking SCP-level threat to reality itself and too dangerous to be left out in society.
This is a great use for the Ritual system in PF2e. You want to cast that big world-altering (or world-destroying) spell? Well, we have rules for rituals of that tier, probably a Level 10 Ritual. As befits such a ritual, it’s gonna take months to cast (these things always take forever, gives the heroes plenty of time to interject), a Cost befitting such a task (most likely in Rare or even Unique reagents, possibly including Artifacts capable of generating or channeling such extreme magical force), numerous Secondary Casters (villains have a Cult for a reason), and a check that… is probably going to actually be deceptively low for your level, but with devastating effects (for the Primary and Secondary Casters) for failure, let alone crit failure.
Neat!
https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=777
Seems like a pretty starightforward template as far as creating your own. Still, it makes me wonder how generous a GM ought to be when a player says, “I want to invent my own ritual.”
I can’t tell if this heart-to-heart exchange is a result of tenuous cooperation, or Drow Priestess, an NPC cohort stats-wise, somehow kicking the ass of a Dracolich on her own.
“Hey kid? You wanna get back at all those who’ve wronged you?”
“You bet!”
“Ok then. Close your eyes and hold still.”
“Neither I nor my sense motive check can see anything wrong with that request.”
I’m bad about this, all of my BBEG’s tend to wind up either casting big threatening magic rituals or otherwise using/accessing items/resources unavailable to the players, like breaking the concentration mechanic where necessary or having magic items from older editions as a couple of examples.
I blame myself and my grandiose need to make THIS bad guy more threatening, more powerful, more unique then the six who went before him.
That being said one of my players did wrap his grubby mitts around some of the more world altering magics in one of my older campaigns, he was playing a brain damaged, amnesic and very old elven wizard who’d basically gone into hermitage in the ruins of an old and very magic city.
After the other players found and dug him out (a wizard, a wizard, my kingdom for a wizard) he eventually remembered who he used to be, found the sacred temple of his dead goddess and sucked up all her lingering divinity.
In terms of strict mechanics, this was near enough to the end of the campaign that it didn’t derail everything but mundane obstacles like wardings or mountain ranges stopped being problems for our freshly demi-godlike elven wizard as he thrashed the laws of magic into obeying him.
I eventually called it a wrap after the party teleported into the BBEGs throne room (past his entire magical fortress), chucked a couple hundred DMG down his throat and buried him in the elemental plane of earth for good measure.
Still, I had fun, our Wizard had fun and the party learnt a valuable lesson about giving the DM a backstory he can work with.
BBEGs are allowed to break the rules. The trick is to telegraph that “this is something unique to this creature.” Iean, why would a previous edition magic item even be a problem? Players can loot it and use it themselves, right?
Usually yeah, I’ll let my players use the BBEG’s things but I do sometimes run into problems with transferring the rules and some things coming out stronger than they were perhaps intended to.
For example, porting the Keen property over to 5e is inadvisable, especially paired with a Champion fighter.
Is she cold in that getup in that environment?
She’s cold as ice
She’s willing to sacrifice his heart…
She never takes advice
Someday she’ll pay the price, in blood…
preferably in someone else’s blood
I’ve seen it before, it happens all the time
She’ll open the door, so kiss the plane goodbye…
Tangentially related to the prompt but cool, I saw a suitably impressive “plot magic” pulled off by RAW, regular old PC magic in one of the GitPG competitions. Let me see if I can track it down…
Ah, here we go. https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=23999723&postcount=100
Cassandra, a villain(?) who has become convinced that something went badly wrong with the world thousands of years ago, and has indirectly caused all of the problems that will come. Her solution? Eliminate that entire stretch of history so she can start with a blank slate. Teleport through time isn’t enough, because it can’t cause major changes to the timeline. But she can place a clone of her self with forced dream cast on her in anti-time-gel (“quintessence”) so that the duration of the spell is extended until the present day. Then letting her simulacrum out of the quintessence allows forced dream to end, rendering that entire stretch of history into a dream by the simulacrum and resetting the universe.
The author notes that it’s not really clear if it would work by RAW, but it’s threatening enough that the PCs have to treat it as though it could.
Most of the best shenanigans come with that caveat. The key is to find players responsible enough to let it happen. See also this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/wish-bound
Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame, you give Drow, a bad nameeee…
I play my role, and you run your game,
Let’s give Drow a bad name….
Only 10 more comics before things get Succubus-fied. But before that, a Xmas eve comic!
Ah crap. I really ought to put up an X-mas comic poll over on the Patreon. Any good ideas?
As a Player, if it’s done well Plot Magic can be fine and won’t even be questioned, but if it’s not done well… well…
As a GM I don’t tend to go the Plot Magic† route because I don’t like to throw in bullshit the PCs won’t be able to replicate or have no way to ever path to‡. But on the ‘Clarke’s Third Law’ hand, I will frequently throw in Sufficiently Advanced Technology, destroy it, and then deny the PCs access to the ‘one-of-kind’ super-advanced tech… so I kinda do it anyway. But since it was “tech” not “magic” it feels like it’s got enough sugar on it to go down well.
.† Now Divine Plot Magic bs is different. Them “Gods be Crazy” is a perfectly acceptable answer.
.‡ Now I have thrown in Plot Magic BS and given them a “path” and simply made the path out of broken glass coated in citric acid and extraordinarily terrible exs just to keep the PCs from wanting to go down it… that’s okay too. But that takes work and I’m a really lazy GM.
I have also just given them the Plot Magic when it’s very, very, very narrowly useful, like “If you inscribed this specific symbol on these specific gate with paint made from these very specific ingredients you can stop Chu’d’na’jirq from coming through and wiping out this realm”… but that feels less like Plot Magic and more like a badly contrived campaign ending, so I don’t do that anymore.
What’s the difference? Why are the “lost secrets of the ancients” acceptable when they’re presented as tech, but not as magic?
Unfortunate cultural inertia, I’m afraid. The same that underlies… well, a lot of bad tropes.
And that should be endeavored to be overcome at every opportunity.
Incidentally, while it wouldn’t necessarily be bad for the characters to initially struggle with [x], as someone who hates the old and exhausted tropes surrounding medieval stasis and the like, I simply cannot recommend the concept of “plot magic” be used in any form.
I’ve encountered a few different types of plot magic, all reasonably done.
Rise of the Runelords: The first plot magic was a giant ritual across a few books, which we were disrupting. The second plot magic was that the enemy was an ancient wizard who’d had time to research a few custom spells (which we claimed after beating him). In the hands of players, one of them is an absolute game-breaker, but his boss-only abilities were all in line with the power curve, and were what introduced those items/spells to the game world (didn’t stay boss-only)
Council of Thieves: A chapter boss had a powerful artifact of magical destructive darkness. Used correctly, a potential game-breaker, and the source of a minor apocalypse in the city’s recent history. But we acquired its equal and opposite as a player-only power, so… that worked out. There’s also some other plot magic hanging over someone’s head, but that’s a Deal with a Devil Demigod-type thing, and doesn’t directly affect the players.
In World of Darkness crossovers (which I hosted a little of), there’s a certain amount of “these other supernatural beings get a different set of goodies than you do, but you get your own goodies.” Since player and NPC are either both alien in power to each other (Werewolf vs Mage), or else using slightly different powersets they both know about (two Vampires of different bloodlines), I regard that as fair.
In Mutants and Masterminds 3e, as a GM I do use some Plot Magic. Mostly Ritualist and Artificer on mage characters to give them a one-shot Escape Button from the players, teleporting them to a set location far away. I just hand-wave the rolls because they can easily make the checks. It’d probably be less irritating to my players when their opponents try to scram if the artificer player were to bother building a teleport inhibitor device. Or spend a single point on an alternate effect to do that (you use Arrays liberally to get lots of effects, you can afford it!).
The one time I tried to implement “the bad guys teleport in and out” shenanigans was the same campaign I’d asked my players to make “setting-appropriate martial characters.” That went over about as well as you’d expect. With no reasonable way to counter, the sense of unfairness was pervasive.
Well, my players include:
1) Someone who can do laps around the map each turn before positioning; he’s that fast.
2) A teleporter who abuses Arrays and has Quickness 10 on magical artificing which is something of a game-breaker.
3) A guy who sees through walls and has arms that reach almost as far as the first guy can run. He can melee attack people from the far side of the map, so who cares about his low defenses.
4) My inadequate-feeling GMPC who mostly does scouting and sniping.
So them teleporting out is about the only option they have that works.
But blocking teleports is something they absolutely have the ability to try and do (with a tiny bit of prep), so the issue you mentioned isn’t the issue they’re having. Especially since only a few enemies thus far have tried it.
Continuing the theme of Druids abusing polymorph from my comment on the previous comic, I recently had an idea of a weird cult in the woods that worship a nature god and only occasionally interact with the settlers in the nearby village. When they do, the villagers always find the cultists super-weird (sometimes acting nearly feral), and there always seem to be new ones, even though no one from the villages ever join them. Eventually, PCs investigate and discover that the cult’s leader gains new recruits by using Baleful Polymorph to turn animals into humanoids, complete with (easily pliable) humanoid intelligence! All through a permanent 5th level spell with no material cost!
Then I read Baleful Polymorph again and realized that while you can cast it on animals, you can only use it to turn things into animals. Theoretically, you could do a roundabout thing with regular Polymorph and Permanency (perhaps with Awaken thrown in), but that’s many thousands of gp and a high-level Wizard. Clearly this is a situation for NPC magic! Let the PC interrogation of a former donkey begin!
Our group is pretty new (we started at level 1, and we just reached level 2), but I’m more than ok with the plot magic my GM used so far, since it helps drive the adventure. The uber-smart wizard’s tower is cursed and no one can leave once they learned too much, so he can’t tell us where we’re going? That means he has to use a portal to send us into someone else’s personal plane/mansion, and we had to puzzle together the map we needed by finding pieces throughout the different rooms. It was a fun module, and we wouldn’t have done it if our GM couldn’t make such a contrived scenario.
I’m really hoping my GM keeps up with the plot magic thing for my character’s sake. My character is a druid of spores, and their whole thing is that they have a complicated relationship with the fungus on their arm that nearly got amputated by a bear trap*. I gave the GM free reign to determine what that all meant in-universe, and she revealed during a level-up dream sequence that a powerful fairy did it to save my character’s life because they are destined for greater things. If the GM lets one of the healers on the team (there are two clerics and a paladin because we all chose our classes individually) get rid of the fungus and fix my character’s arm, I would feel cheated. Why would my character even bother to continue with the quest if their goal can be obtained with a simple healing spell? I want the fungus to be there from unbreakable plot magic because I want a whole character arc with drama, struggling with the team to find the macguffin the King wants to get rewarded and yadda yadda yadda. I’m a bit like Wizard.
*Actually, my character’s thing is that they are from a nomadic pastoralist family littered with druids and rangers and other anti-social folk, but trying to find a fix for their arm that died and got fungus-ed during their failed vision quest is my character’s plot hook.
In general, I don’t like to wave the idea of “Plot Magic lol” around since too many times it is just an excuse. Pathfinder even makes it so that most of what seems to be “Plot Magic” is actually reproducible.
Thus, my system accounts for characters using awesome abilities.
There’s some crossover here with “The Big Guns”-type situations, but the most recent example of this for me would be usage of teleportation, tactical time manipulation, and other abilities and items to fight a war in multiple dimensions (think Planeswalkers and Godbound, among others, combined with science-fantasy) over a massive galaxy enclosing weaponizable reality changing holoscreen controlled by the remnants of an ancient race (who were also the ones fighting to take it back).
To clarify on this example, the opponents were the campaign’s main antagonist, a splinter division of our own faction that joined with the ancients. The aforementioned holoscreen was actually a combination of factors that also involved (occasionally) alternate universes (“experimental” and otherwise) that doubled as ways to work in other settings into the campaign.
The campaign ended with our faction going to explore and reclaim the omniverse.
In terms of components, I also don’t use them, the rationale being that magic has advanced to not require them anymore, among many other aspects.
However, antiquated forms of magic (ie 5e, PF1) still might require them.