Casting Chaotic Evil Spells.

this entry has its own OST

  

GOAL: I want to have both good and evil spells available to the PCs, but the evil ones must have a gamist reason to be tempting to the player as much as to the PJ, while their consequences must also be punishing to the character and the player alike, with enough leeway to not mean instant doom. I wanted to have a little more substance to this than to make a "corruption score" which makes their character an evil NPC when topped. 

My current system works on a Magic attribute and a spell list. The magic attribute grows as the spell list does, and that happens on level ups. (I have this idea to give them only spell slots, and then make the spells "things to be found", but hasn't happen yet)

Ok so now you have your Magic Attribute, your first spells and you start your adventure. They are probably very useful on the real world, but the Magic Attribute, which also defines the overall strenght of your spells, is not very high yet so you might not feel like a powerful wizard at level 1. 

You can artificially put your magic attribute into steroids by going evil. In the fiction, this may not be as easy as saying "I am evil give me power" but, at the table, it can be. 

In the fiction, it requires a dark patron to get in contact with you: This can be an evil spirit, a shady old man, an obvious vampire, a floating demon made of eyes or an aboleth that contacted you on a ship travel. At the table, just ask your GM and he will send one to meet you soon. You may even know them from before the game started. Their methods may vary: one might have to bite you. Others will give you a present. They all might have different agendas, but in the end they all want to use you. But in the inmmediate present, your spell list will grow and, subsequently, your Magic Attribute. 

In the practice, this will put you one or two levels above a similar wizard: This goes very well with the classic trope of dark magic being a shortcut to power. In addition, certain spells will gain additional effects, such as a little extra damage for psychic attacks, or make charm spells less restricted, or imprint a compelling fear into your suggestion spell.

Instead of corruption increasing per spell used, I will only count failed rolls or partial successes. Even though an increase of the Magic Attribute will make failures more sparse (representing "mastery" of the Dark Arts) having more power and relying on it will make you want to use it more in compensation.

Dark patrons may be overt, but most will present themselves as compassive figures that want to help you, give you a gift, because they see potential in you, so you can get that wish you said you have (vengeance, love, power, riches). They know they will eventually benefit of your downfall, if not also of the trail of chaos and sorrow that will precede it.

Depending on the nature of the patron, and the nature of the player, choose which 2 consequences are most befitting to a given botch. Let your player choose one.

1. Inevitable corruption score. You gain 1d3 "corruption". Once your HP go below that mark, dark powers will control your body like a puppet. The patron might want to use you for fun for a while and allow you to rest later, or maybe want to keep you forever on. Some NPCs may perceive corruption score in you, even if subconsciously, as a small buzzing fear. If you don't abuse corruption, you might level up and gain HP to keep up with it for a long time.

2. One of your attributes is permanently drained; probably charisma but again, whatever befits the patron better. You also suffer a hideous transformation to reflect this; not monster-like at first, but enough to know something is wrong about you. They will become more like jynxes later. Alternativelly, a cleric spell is permanently erased from your list (those that heal, bless or work against evil). 

3. The spell has unnecesarily horrific side effects, the GM will tell you which.

4. The veil between our dimension and the patron's wears out, and strange things start to permeate over your house/territory/kingdom, if your character is settled somewhere. Alternativelly, your patron will soon appear to cause chaos nearby, or strange entities will start following you for a time until they crash somewhere.

5. The patron convinces you to do something drastic that tangentially suits your goal, and you think its actually your idea. You can avoid doing it by choosing the other option your GM presented you, but your character still felt the suggestion. 

6. Right now, nothing happens. But the patron has decided that the free trial has expired, and reclaims you to be their full time servant, their new body, their food or similar. This is not automatic and you may still present battle. Alternativelly, they may impose a quest on you, which you cannot freely ignore.

to play naruto (spoilers!)

Following this, I am thinking on how good it sounds to play a low level Naruto campaign...

But better so, inspired by naruto, but my own thing. The main reason is because the actual anime canon is too good to manipulate in a meaningful way, and I don't want to doublecheck information on the wiki about clans, dates and facts. 

I have actually some sketch of the rules. You start doing low level ranked missions at the start, as members of a ridiculously small clan, village or reassembled group. The main catch is that I want your character to be expendable, and to have the "ninja village" grow during the game, in the style of Blades in the Dark. Better ninja villages mean better starting characters, and the possibility to play during an overarching plot. I want parties to eventually include ninjas of different tiers: masters, students, legends alongside rookies, focusing more on deceit and tactics than in shonen powerups. I am rewatching the series and I really enjoy watching the Akatsuki (like the baddest ninjas you can find) being still cautious about an ambush in the woods, or being mindful about the money (both personally like Kakuzu or as a group like Pain). I loved when Jiraiya turned a giant frog into a bar called Frog Club in order to set a trap for two minions. And I love the overlapping bijuus, cursed seals, elemental techniques, mantles, special eyes and all. All those concepts are great and I want to use them, but, in relationship with the appropiate canvas (a tabletop RPG), there are some points that are so broken:

1 The Sharingan. A "just opened" eye with the sharingan can see chakra and genjutsus, physical movements at any speed and allows the user to copy them instantly. Also has the power to cast illusions and compel targets who look at it. And this is all the first level of many broken shit (mangekyu, rinnegan, etc). Like what the fuck, its really hard to manage this shit for a  GM. 

2. Genjustu battles. D&D fixes this as "you are stunned for 1d4 rounds" or similar. But in naruto, genjutsus are special, each one of them and ask to be played in. Sometimes, at least. They allow the user to draw information from the victim, or to speak to them apart. There are whole battles in mindscapes. But finding out you are in a genjutsu is also part of the concept, and that becomes harder to do, mostly when they target one member of the party and you are narrating to all of them. 

3. Shadow clones. They are easy on the surface: create X clones, say what they do. You wait until an enemy strikes you to reveal that he attacked a clone and that the real you is attacking him... just to see that he was a clone too, and the real one is behind you. Repeat. Something inside me thinks that it would be better to play that in reverse: Do not care about cloning yourself before the battle: just spend something to reveal it was a clone all the time. Same for the NPCs. The whole anime seems to work on retroactive logic, actually. 

4. Battles sometimes become kaiju fights alongside person fights. More rarely, a person fights a kaiju. Maybe is not as hard to portray as it seems, and its just giving those crazy abilities and tons of HP, but still. Summons, however, are broken on another sense: they allow instant communication by autodispelling from a danger zone, and being summoned by a receiver. This is easily fixed by allowing summons, but not unsummons: every animal must find the way to their home by physically travelling or any other.

5. The most broken shit, hands down, is those scrolls. Fuinjutsu: the ability to seal any kind of shit, of any size or nature, inside a piece of paper (technically, sealing spirits or monsters is also possible if sealed into persons or other living matter). Stealing a 50x50x50 meters statue from a musemum is easy if you take some time to draw some seals, unfold a parchment and cast some jutsu (it will make an audible "poof"). This makes characters able to carry virtually anything they can come up with: a canoe, endless shuriken, 10 tons of water, a house; make a legendary object dissapear by sealing it into a roll and tossing it down the toilet... In the series, there is no limits on how much they can hold. The chakra is spent sealing the objects, but not releasing them, so you can use them all in the same battle, providing you spent downtime preparing them. And if downtime is in practice infinite on the inside, so are the potential scrolls.

6. All of those are probably usable somehow, but the ability of making real operating clones is not available to PJs on any case. That is like mtg's Memory Jar of the moves, broken as fuck for a thousand reasons once you move it away from a controlled medium like an anime, to a chaotic like a game. 

 Am I being too much a pussy? Am I too scared of it? Maybe. What do you think?