The Time Structure of the New Campaign.

I've decided to go a different route with the time structure of the new campaign, and this is going to be important to the players because I will be *starting* the campaign on August 9th with the players having had a complete month worth of  in-game "Off-Table Time" to get them accustomed to using the concept. While it might sound complicated, I'm just going to codify stuff we're already doing...to be as fair as possible. 

When a gaming session is occurring, the players are said to be on "table time," which is pretty obvious-we're playing, etc.

When the session ends, the characters are either paused or in "off-table time" which may be used for traveling (with limitations) or accomplishing things at home (or in another safe place.)

Things that may be done in off-table time include research, conversations and plans between characters, shopping (with limitations), restocking, creating items/spells/special attacks (again, with limitations), leveling up, fixing the fence at your dad's farm, healing from normal damage, recovering from exhaustion effects, etc.  Things done in off-table time accumulate very little experience points per hour, or none at all. (People creating things and spells will get more experience, but have less opportunity to do so.)

Off-table time will be given in the form of "maximums" between "events" (ie: 'There is a maximum of seven days of off-table time between now and next session') and if you intend to do anything off-table, you have to contact the DM at least 24 hours before the next session. There will be no piling on of 'oh, I already did this' at the start of sessions. It makes the DM go crazy.  There is no guarantee that the off-table time will be as long as the maximum, so if you want to do many things, you will have to tell me the order they happen in.

If you need to contact the DM in a hurry, you know my phone number, my twitter and where I live. If you just want to put something on paper, and you want me to get to it eventually, you can send it to thane@fenlock.org or contact your liege-lord on twitter at @ThaneFour 

I will be using these as catch-alls for campaign related questions and stuff. In addition, the office of the thane will provide a "the current time is" tweet on  a semi-regular basis.

Remember, unless something changes, character selection is 6pm this Friday. If you aren't here, you might not get who you want (although there are more characters than players.) Sometime between now and Friday, if the fates allow it, I will post a bit about how the batch character creator worked, and why I chose to go that route.

Worldbuilders' Guide, Part Three

Historian’s Guide to Aret and Ara

According to one source, the world of Aret was originally settled by neoluddite space travelers from Earth, including a number of people who we’d call gamers. These people found themselves on a world where magic was ‘easy,’ and it quickly replaced technology (which they used only grudgingly.) The elves, dwarves, halflings and other ‘native’ races are the result of intentional genetic manipulation of human stock to better survive the erratic climate of Aret before The Equilibrium, where the Font (the place where all magic intersects with the Prime Material Plane) spawned storms of wild magic, dead magic, and even anti-magic. This technology-based starting point is said to explain both why the occasional high-tech ruin is found, and why the language has words which should be meaningless to people not from Earth. (Spartan, for example, is a word which would require a Sparta in the history to be meaningful.)

Likewise, many of the deities of Aret are similar to Earth deities in name or appearance (some, such as Fortuna, have the same name, but are much more important in the Aretor Pantheon) and the explanation that the planet was settled by earthlings is a good explanation for this. Other explanations involve the idea that both Earth and Aret were settled by the same beings, or that both are reflections of the one true world.

The elves and dragons, who have been here since the beginning, tell a different story, that the humans, dwarves, gnomes and other older races, as well as technology that seems out of place, slipped into the world because of the world’s loose connection to the Border Ethereal, which regularly takes various peoples from other places (especially ships at sea and flying vessels) who’ve become lost on the Ethereal Plane, and dumps them onto the planet. This theory is made credible by the fact that those lost at sea or in airships on Aret regularly find themselves slipping into the Ethereal Plane, and many large ships have crews which include clerics or mages skilled in steering away from such rips in the fabric of space-time. The sea between Misty Cross and Northern Conteria is especially notorious for these such rips, and about one in four ships will encounter them if they attempt to go the ‘short’ way across the sea.

Ships, particularly airships, which find their way into Aretspace are often stuck because the laws of physics work ever so slightly differently here. The powders, oils and compressed gasses which fuel them are often non-explosive or even inert once they’ve transcended space and landed here. Even those substances which still burn often burn less effectively, and some ‘inert’ substances that should not burn explosively explode with impunity. With magic so effective and predictable, many of the technologies that rely on gunpowder or petroleum products in the mundane world are simply passed up or replaced with magic in Aretspace. Alchemists from other worlds coming into Aret find that this combustion suppression has something to do with the magic or the atmosphere, because in tightly controlled labs or small amounts the mixtures might work, but when scaled up, they often fail. Alchemists from other places have a -50% to their alchemy scores when trying to use them on Aret.

Calendars

The most frequently used non-academic calendar on Aret is the civic calendar of Misty Cross, which dates the first year as the first year of peace after the Racial wars that tore the city apart. It is dated from the completion of the castle in the city center, and is frequently called PW, or Post War, with year before then going backwards (as with our BCE) and ending at year one PW. Before then, the city used the founding of the city (CF) itself as a start date,  having been founded (according to both the city mythology and Grey Elven historians) in the year 2056 PM (pre-Modern.) The castle, then, was completed in 2057 CF, or 1PW.

As if this wasn’t confusing enough, there exists a Grey Elven Calendar, a Shom-Rainian Calendar, a calendar that dates from the creation of the Equilibrium and several dozen others, each with a different set of abbreviations, but most commonly found without any such thing. Each of these gives the year in a different number, and only the Grey Elven and Misty Cross Calendars share a starting date.

In general, conversion between calendars works thuswise (pretending they all start on same day.) As if this wasn’t confusing enough, some of the more obscure calendars don’t even agree on what date it is now. :

Converting from→ Converting to↓	GE	Eq	CF	SH	MW	PW
Grey Elven Calendar (GE)	N/A	+32376	+33724	+35464	+35649	+35784
Creation of the Equilibrium (Eq)	-32376	N/A	+1352	+3088	+3273	+3408
Founding of Misty Cross (CF)	-33724	-1352	N/A	+1736	+1921	+2056
Shom-Ra/Haran (SH)	-34626	-3088	-1736	N/A	+185	+320
After Mage War (MW)	-35649	-3273	-1921	-185	N/A	+135
Misty Cross Calendar (PW)	-35784	-3408	-2056	-320	-135	N/A

 

The Equilibrium

1352 years before the city of Misty Cross was founded, the Equilibrium was created. The Equilibrium is an incredibly important aspect of magical culture (and, indeed, all culture) in Aretspace. Before it was created, frequent wild magic storms blew forth from the intersection of the two poles of magic (near what is now the Crystal Desert on the Continent of Tia.) Magic would sometimes surge in power, wiping out large areas of land, mages would find themselves overflowing with power one day (sometimes destroying themselves in the process) and completely without magic the next.

It was a hardscrabble and chaotic existence. Magical surges would generate monsters and areas of dead magic, flying castles would fall out of the sky, cities would sink into the ground, people would teleport into blocks of stone…not an easy way to live. Sometimes magic would disappear altogether, and using it would draw the innate magic out of the land around it, turning it to dust, other times, magic would surge so powerfully that it would leave a coating of a somewhat explosive residue on everything. This residue could be used to make something rather like a drug that boosts magic power and is incredibly illegal in Aretspace. This substance, Rhizen, absolutely does not exist, according to all official sources, and if you ever encounter it, you should tell someone in The Inquest.

Aaron Blackheart[1] (or so the legends say), who would come to be known as “the mad mage,” traveled across space and time learning about how magic worked in other places and eventually ended up on the elemental plane of magic. How he survived there is anyone’s guess, but one legend is that he was a descendant of some sort of metahuman family. Certainly the Blackhearts and their descendants have had a habit of living two, even three hundred years, but whether this is magic or something else is up for debate. However he survived, when the Mad Mage came back to Aret, he would sculpt the magic of the land into The Divine Balance, a rigid balance whereby magic pours into the world in the form of a font of power, tended to by a Mage-King, initially Trinian the first. Within one hundred years of the creation of The Divine Balance, a group of mages known as “the Hand of Divinity” managed to wrest the entirety of  the font over to the power of what they considered Good, and for forty years the magic of the world, and indeed, the world itself, was ruled over by the Sorcerer-King Belian the Bold (known as Bel).

Bel managed to set himself up as a minor deity, enforcing his ideas of justice and good upon the world. While this worked out well for the friends of Bel, it drove massive wedges between the humans and other races of the planet, resulting in a massive decrease in numbers among elves in particular, and setting up a number of race-based wars, with humans and approximately half of the planet’s Dwarves (and nearly all that would survive) fighting for The Sorcerer-King.

Bel’s magical abilities allowed him to see inside the hearts of men, and he ‘destroyed’ evil by simply wiping out evil beings where he found them, without trial, without jury, without even law. He would go into a household, find an infant who would grow to be evil, and dash that child’s head upon the rocks. Progressively he grew madder and madder, and because of his powers, the world went mad around him. This time period, called “The Black Forty” or even “the age of darkness,” reduced the population of the planet to around 5% of its population beforehand.

One area, in what is now Kelara and the Unclaimed Lands, enraged Bel so much that he caused the entire land to be cast under a cloud of darkness that would not end for nearly 2500 years. He threatened to extend this darkness (called The Mists, or sometimes The Murk) over all the lands that did not comply with his demands. This cloud killed everything that breathed it, and shore off buildings at their foundations. It was elves in particular that were Bel’s target, although sources disagree as to why the elves provoked his wrath (one source claims there was an advanced and thoroughly evil elven subrace, similar to drow but more prone to work together, at the heart of Kelara.) Certainly there are many ruins of temples to evil powers within Kelara which support this belief, but there are also many ruins of temples to deities of good found there, and the remains of large human cities, and places where the races clearly lived together in peace.

As Bel went madder and madder with power, he became focused inward, and this allowed a small group of very powerful figures, including Uvala and Astra, then two fairly limited deities, to attack him, with the help of Aaron Blackheart and the Elven King Vanithil Tyllnion, and at least one elemental of pure magic. At least ten others were involved, but their names are lost to history, or hidden. Bel ended up divided into two separate beings and removed from the Prime Material Plane (he would later end up as the deity Bel the Two Sided) and the font itself was divided into three sections, two parts representing the directional magics, and a third part which would empower the cautious balance between all three, which would come to be known as The Equilibrium. (The planet Ara would be pulled into its current position during this, but that is another story.)

In order to keep the balance, Blackheart selected the two most powerful and least alike mages he could find and bound them to the respective fonts, before binding himself to the third. All three mages would slowly be consumed by the fonts, but not before bestowing their students with the maximum amount of power possible without causing their destruction. The fonts, to this day, retain a great deal of the personalities of those three mages, and these personalities (and alignments, to a degree) greatly flavor the Mage-Protectorates. This is why, although it is technically not accurate, the Mage-Protectorates are said to control the demesnes of good, evil and neutrality. (Some of the most potent mages in history have actually been ‘cross wired,’ having a good alignment, for example, but the “sinister” handedness.) Throughout history the names of the demesnes have gone from ‘good, evil, and neutral’ to ‘white, black and gray,’ and even ‘dexter, sinister and balanced.’   Depending on the historian, and the fashions of the day, you may hear all three.

A Mage Protectorate is largely like a transformer on an electric grid. Power flows from the Elemental Plane of Magic, through the font, to the Mage Protectorate, and is distributed through him (or her) to all the mages in the world who use that flavor of magic (match the Mage Protectorate’s handedness). S/he is bestowed with enough knowledge and prescience to be able to control the flow, stopping The Equilibrium from failing.

The Equilibrium has failed three times, and wavered a few hundred times in its existence. In all three failures, a Mage-Protectorate found a way to tap into the energy of one of the other fonts. Each time The Equilibrium has failed, at least two Mage-Protectorates had to sacrifice themselves to get it back ‘up and running.’ When the Equilibrium is down, there is no magic in the world, save that stored in items or people. Items cannot be charged, spells cannot be memorized, and very bad things begin to happen. Every mage on the plane, including other creatures which use magic, feels when the Equilibrium wavers or fails. And they know that it is bad.

After the last failure, the Mage Protectorate of Neutrality developed “The office for the protection and defense of the Equilibrium, and for the destruction and prevention of any and all threats to the Equili-brium, by means of Scrying and Inquest,” generally known as The Inquest. Although politics have driven them out of the public eye on more than one occasion, they do exist, and no one wants to be on their bad side…All they do is protect The Equilibrium.

---

[1] It’s well established that the name derives from the black hart on the family’s coat of arms, and was changed some generations before. A common claim is that they are descended from the Lockeharts, notorious pirates with similarly long lifespans.

Aret and Ara: The Cartography Problem-Amount of Information

One of the main problems I am having adapting all this information to a free, internet available campaign world is the size of the world, and the level of detail in the world. For some scope, I recently combined several different maps of the main world into one scale map. Since they are not all identical maps, I averaged the images, made them all black and white lines, removed most of the noise, and tried to clean them up where available. Unfortunately, a lot of the 'averaging' makes straight lines, and removes some of the subtlety of the coastlines from my various map makers. So, consider this map of 'playable land and sea area' as very, very, very rough...good for knowing the rough distances between the continents and island groups. I'll show how the LaCroix map (the nautical map used in my campaign) fits into this map, as well.
But, to give an idea of scope, here is the rough map (note that if an island only appeared on one map, it got averaged out of existence) made up of all the other maps. The heavier lines (I tried to clean them up) are usually places where the same bit of coastline was the same map to map.

The map, again, is not very accurate for terrain shape, save in the most general of ways, and I moved continents up and down to 'match' the equator line on all maps. This map is a variation on the square map we've used for tabletop sea battles.

To show the scope of the information problem, I whipped up a quick overlay on this estimating the amount of information I have for each area on the map, ranging from 0 to 10% or so (nothing more than a few names of cities and places) to greater than 90%, where I have the land mapped out over large time periods, huge active campaigns, etc. On this map, black represents information, and green represents a lack of information. I tried to make it out in rough blocks:

And, for my campaign, for the players who've asked how off the official nautical map of the city of Misty Cross (the places that 'officially exist') IS, here is the unlabled background of the LaCroix map.

I think you can see I weighed this map heavily creating the other, at least in terms of continent shape, if not placement.

So, suffice it to say, there is a LOT of room for expansion by other creators on the map.

The Worldbuilder's Guide to Aret and Ara, Part Two

The Planar Location of Aret and Ara

So what makes Aretspace so Chaotic, Dangerous and Unnatural? Aretspace is an alternate Prime Material Plane, and like most Prime Material Planes, it ‘borders’ the elemental planes of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. As a result, these things work ‘normally’ on the plane, as they do on ours (in gaming terms, the real world we live in is an alternate Prime Material Plane, an alternate Crystal Sphere or both.) Unlike our world, Aretspace also connects with the elemental plane of magic.

In the theories of planar space used in Dungeons and Dragons and now other forms of role playing, a prime material plane has earth, air, fire, water, light, lightning, ooze etc., because they are in contact with these material planes (and subplanes). An alternate prime material which lacks connection with one of these things would, in theory, lack that thing. These are neat to think about, even if the concept of a prime material plane without, say, air, is probably impossible to play in.

Energy is generally portrayed in these concepts of inner planes as being divided into “positive” and “negative” energy, but if you sincerely look at the concept, each of these planes is essentially a plane of energy, with their various associated matter (if any.) This is vital to understanding how magic is believed to work in Aretspace. Indeed, the elemental plane of magic can be used to describe why magic works differently in different worlds, which should become apparent as it is described.

One of the first laws of magic in Aretspace is that magic is energy, and therefore cannot be created or destroyed, only change form, move from place to place, etc. A mage, doing a spell, taps a source of energy, and either converts it into something (heat, light, fire, etc.) or uses it to open up to another place (such as the elemental plane of fire.) In the cosmology of Aretspace, in order for a mage to have such a power, the Prime Material plane must be ‘pierced’ by one or both of the two ‘poles’ of the elemental plane of magic. Where these poles appear in the plane affects the ‘flavor’ of magic for that alternate prime material plane.

The poles of the elemental plane of magic are chiral. That is to say that energy in one spins clockwise and energy in the other spins counterclockwise. People also have a magical handedness which affects how they learn magic (this will be described later.) Philosophers of magic say that there is, in fact, only one pole of magic, and those planes with two “poles” of magic actually have the same pole, from two different directions, but the fact remains that plane traveling mages have discovered that some alternate material planes have clockwise magic, some planes have counterclockwise magic and some planes have both. Likewise, in some planes, clockwise magic is very strong and counterclockwise magic is less so, or vice versa. These poles are understood as working similarly to how the regular elemental planes work, if you imagine that Fire and Water (and Earth and Air) are opposite poles of the same ‘stuff,’ which can never touch.

In Aretspace, magic flows in equal amounts from both poles, the magic “pierces” the prime material and the two poles are perpendicular to each other, crossing each other in the prime material. This is essentially meaningless to player characters who never leave Aretspace, but becomes quickly important to players who travel to alternate prime material planes. (How much of this is explained to the players is always up the world builder.)

Each campaign world, then, has four pieces of information about the elemental plane of magic that are important to how magic works:

1.       Do one, both, or neither of the “poles” of the elemental plane of magic intersect the world?

2.       Do these intersections happen on the Prime Material Plane or elsewhere?

3.       If there are two poles, are the poles near each other or far away?

4.       If the poles are near each other, do they touch, how, and where?

The answer to the first question tells you whether a world has magic or not, and if the magic of that world comes in different flavors or not. A world with no contact with the elemental plane of magic has no magic in it (it may have clerical/divine magic, which works with different rules.) A mage could bring stored magic into the world from another place, but he could not replace the stored magic once used.

If the world is intersected by only one pole, only the magic which ‘goes the same way’ as the pole works, and the world counts as a null magic area for mages who are oppositely ‘handed’ to that pole. A mage who comes from a place with only clockwise magic who goes into a place with only counterclockwise magic finds his magic ‘canceled out’ when he tries to do anything. A balanced mage (described later) finds his magic only works at a third of the strength.

If the world is intersected by both poles, both counterclockwise and clockwise magic works, although how effectively will depend on the answer to the remaining questions. Most worlds are either crossed by two poles or no poles. Worlds with only one pole tend to have very few mages (they must naturally lean towards that type of magic in order to do it) as a population of the people because those who would want to become mages must have the INT to be a mage, the proper handedness for that world and access to a teacher.

The answer to the second question tells you how magic is accessed on that plane. If, for example, magic crosses the world at the elemental plane of fire, only a character able to access that plane would have magic. Magic would always be fire ‘flavored.’ If, for example, magic only accessed a world on the elemental plane of earth, a mage might be required to use special crystals attuned to that plane to have access to magic. Remember that other planes touch upon the Prime Material, so even if the magic doesn’t touch the Prime Material, it may bleed through nonetheless.

A commonly found arrangement is that the clockwise pole comes into the world through the Positive Material (also called positive energy) plane and the counterclockwise pole comes into the world through the Negative Material Plane. In this instance, clockwise (or right handed) magic is creative, deathless and often seen as aligned with good, and counterclockwise (or left handed) magic is destructive, necromantic and often seen as aligned with evil. This common arrangement would influence The Mad Mage when he designed the Equilibrium (described elsewhere) and is part of the reason why Left-handed magic is often considered ‘evil.’ A world in which the poles touch the prime material in this manner might have “white robed mages” and “black robed mages” who have equal and opposite powers locked into their alignments, or maybe even a third, neutral set of mages who can access both (often with a limit to their total power.)

The answer to the third question determines how stable magical energy is in a world. If the magical poles are distant from each other (including being on separate planes) the magical energy is very stable. In such places wild magic, magic storms, and the like might never happen, or happen very rarely. If the magical poles are close to each other, they draw energy from each other, much like a binary star, and cause there to be storms, areas of chaos and worse. If the poles are close to each other throughout the entire world, especially if they are perfectly parallel, magic may be terribly unstable throughout the entire world as it tries to find a medium and fails.

In fact, the answer to the fourth question makes a major difference in how magic works. While a perfectly parallel set of poles next to each other creates incredibly chaotic but powerful magic throughout an entire world, perpendicular poles will create incredibly powerful magic with localized zones of chaos or null magic throughout an entire world…unless it destroys the world outright the moment the lines cross. In addition, perpendicular poles make ‘neutral’ magic, or the existence of magic which is an even mixture of clockwise and counterclockwise, possible. Usually, some method of containment (The Equilibrium, The Pattern, Magical Fonts, etc.) must exist in these situations to maintain magic in this stasis, because every time the lines uncross and re-cross, there is a chance that the stress will rip the world apart.

These situations combine with magical handedness-a person’s tendency to be more easily able to access clockwise, counter clockwise or balanced magic-to limit who can and cannot become a mage. If a world has all three “types” of magic available, there will usually be very many mages. In summation:

# of poles	Perpendicular or parallel	Location of poles	Effect:	Example Worlds (see note):
None	N/A	N/A	No magic	Magic-free“tech” worlds.
2	Parallel or close without touching.	Prime material	Extremely chaotic environment, a lot of magic, magic works differently at different times. Magic is in flux, what works once might not work another time. Magic affects even mundane things. Magic may come and go. If truly parallel, the amount of chaotic magic is dependent upon how close the lines are.	Courts of Chaos, Rifts, alternate earth of the Kate Daniels Books
2	Perpendicular or crossing.	Prime material	Extremely stable environment with regular ‘bursts’ of energy, in form of storms or zones of wild magic the closer one gets to the point where lines cross. Magic follows rules. Magic affects even mundane things. May have containment on magic to limit damage from storms, has areas of strong magic and areas that are magic-poor. If truly perpendicular, storms and other areas of strong, deadly magic come from point of crossing, with rest of areas fairly mild.	Amber, Aret and Ara, Forgotten Realms, Valdemar, Most magical roleplaying worlds.
1	N/A	Prime material	Magic requires being born to it (having the correct handedness) and is extremely rare, it may exist in a parallel world to the ‘real’ world, not being noticed by people who lack the ability to do it.	Lankhmar, Star Wars, the alternate earths of Harry Potter and The Dresden Files.
2	N/A	Positive and Negative Material Planes	Mage magic is rare and is possessed by things that ‘connect’ to these planes, magic may be alignment-linked. Magecraft possessed by all examples of some types of monsters, but not all humans/demihumans. Magic might be only accessible by using “life” or “death” magics (made by drawing energies of life from other beings or the planet.)	Early forms of the Dragonlance setting, Ravenloft.
2	N/A	On elemental planes	Only creatures with access to those elemental planes can do magic, magic is all elemental-based.	The Codex Alera, Magestone, any world where magic requires an elemental ‘focus’ such as water, fire, stones.
1	N/A	‘Elemental plane’ of time	Only forms of magic are based on time travel and/or prescience, contact with present or past.	Doctor Who, Dune.
Notes: Each of these worlds was suggested by people familiar with these worlds, and these should not be taken as an endorsement of this system by the authors/creators of these worlds.

Again, for the vast majority of characters, this information is not important. In general, however, the rules work so that the strongest possible natural resident magic user of a plane is always stronger than the strongest possible “visitor” to that plane, merely because magic works differently on that plane, and having learned in one area is no guarantee of being able to work in one area. The general rule in Aretspace is that Aret-natives take a level and/or ability hit when they travel to other planes and non-native mages visiting Aret do not get a level boost, but find that their spells work as if they were 1-9 levels higher, with a 10% chance of a wild-magic surge resulting from their spell (Roll 1d10). This effect will continue until the mage has spent a few years working on Aret, or has submitted him/herself to testing and training at The School.

On Aret, access to magic is determined by both handedness and access to The Equilibrium. Mages under 9^th level usually don’t have to worry about access to The Equilibrium, because it is always in the Mage Protectorates’ best interest to have as large a crop of low-level mages as possible, so low level magics are generally unrestricted. Mages who are trained at The School (or its corollaries in Zent, the Elven Isles, the Bardic University in Harmony, etc.) or whose teachers are affiliated with The School, can generally assume free access to The Equilibrium up to level 8 spells, but mages casting 9^th level spells or working at 9^th or higher level without a relationship with their Mage-Protectorate can run the risk of getting involved in the sticky politics of Aret.

In order to maintain The Equilibrium, an equal amount of magic must flow from both ‘directions,’ so every high-level magic (such as Wish) cast with the powers of The Equilibrium must simultaneously set off a clockwise and counterclockwise (or as they are called on Aret, Black and White) burst of energy. A Mage-Protectorate could, in theory, stop a high-level use of magic that would screw up The Equilibrium, cause his/her enemies to gain too much power or worked against their own ambitions. For the most part, however, the Mage-Protectorates aren’t going to care, unless the character is using stored magic, or Synergy and its equivalents, to exceed the power of 9^th level spells. Players using these magics at such a high level will either want to engage in political discourse with their Mage-Protectorate (or one of the six Mage Regents each Mage Protectorate ‘farms out,’ such decisions to,) or to try to remain ‘under the radar.’

Neutrally-handed, gray or ‘balanced,’ mages have less such troubles, as their Mage-Protectorate is only focused on controlling whether magic works to strengthen The Equilibrium or to weaken it, and doesn’t really care what those under him do, as long as it doesn’t affect the Equilibrium. Since most magic isn’t fully balanced, it doesn’t really matter. Players can always choose a handedness of “Exceptional Balancer” and largely avoid the politics altogether, but most will want to leave it to chance, with the possibility of having as many as two extra spell slots per spell level, depending on roll. These extra spells reflect the fact that magic on Aret saturates everything, and is much easier than magic elsewhere.

The tables used in the Grand Grimoire (the collection of all spells available on Aret) for determining magical handedness are as follows:

Handedness Modifiers:

Status:                                                     Effect on Roll:                                                         Note:

Alignment: Chaotic                                 Subtract 2 from your roll                                        CE,CG,CN, Anarchist

Alignment: Lawful                                  Add 2 to your roll                                                    LG,LE,LN, Unprincipled

Alignment: Good                                    Add 1 to your roll                                                    CG,LG,NG

Alignment: Evil                                       Subtract 1 from your roll                                        CE,LE,NE

Specialist: Conj/Summon                       Subtract 2 from your roll

Specialist:  Divination                             Add 2 to your roll

Specialist: Illusion/Phantasm                 Add 1 to your roll

Specialist: Necromancy                          Subtract 1 from your roll

Specialist: Elementalist                          Add 3 to your roll

Specialist: Wild Magic                            Subtract 3 from your roll

Specialist: Meta Mage                           Roll is 5+1d10                                                         Must be partially balanced

Character is Psionic                                                Add 1 to your roll

Character is Elven                                   Add 1 to your roll

Character is Human                                                Subtract 1 from your roll

WIS stat 18 or higher                             Add 1 to your roll

CHR stat 18 or higher                             Subtract 1 from your roll

Handedness Rolls:

Modified Roll: (d20)                               “Handedness”                                                         Default MP:             Modifiers:               

1 or lower                                               Strong Left (Black or Sinister)                                                Evil                          +2B, -1G, -2W

2-5                                                           Left (Black or Sinister)                                            Evil                          +2B, -2W

6                                                              Balanced Left and Pure Magic                               N or E                      +2B, +1G, -2W

7-9                                                           Normal Pure Magic                                                                Neutral                    -1B, -1W, +2G

10-11                                                       Exceptional Balancer                                              Neutral                    +1G

12-14                                                       Normal Pure Magic                                                                Neutral                    -1B, -1W, +2G

15                                                            Balanced Right and Pure Magic                             N or G                     +2W, +1G, -2B

16-19                                                       Right (White or Dexter)                                          Good                       +2W, -2B

20 or Higher                                            Strong Right (White or Dexter)                              Good                       +2W, -1G, -2B

Affects of Modifiers:

+2: An additional 20% chance to learn spell of same handedness; an additional 2 spell memorization slots of same handedness per magical level (2 extra level one spells, 2 extra level 2 spells, etc.)

+1: An additional 10% chance to learn spell of same handedness; an additional 1 spell memorization slot of same handedness per magical level (1 extra level one spells, 1 extra level 2 spells, etc.)

-1: A 10% penalty to learn spell of opposite handedness

-2: A 20% penalty to learn spell of opposite handedness