My third BIND campaign ended in glorious disaster and nonsense which forced me to reforge magic.

Lax Theory

I had a magic system with a bit of metamagic ‘bend’, where people could do basic spells (fwoosh, fire!) then add a little metamagic to boost literally any spell (fwshhHHH FIREBALL!). No more ‘control person’, ‘control people’, ‘control crowd’, and ‘control city’ spells - the system would present some choice spells, and let players put the pieces together themselves.

Normal, impatient casters would simply spend their Mana Points, but more savvy alchemists could grow their Mana inside the right kind of items, and watch it multiply. This made for some nice decisions, as players could give up 2 of their 8 Mana Points, and receive an item which stores 4 Mana Points. The downside was not having access to that power until they spent some time siphoning it back from the item.

Flowcharts and spreadsheets let me map the complete possibility-space within BIND’s basic magic system, ensuring the early days of magical ability would never explode in unexpected directions, and more charts and graphs for the medium-levels, and then I got bored. “The higher levels will be powerful, clearly - but shouldn’t be a problem”, I thought. “I do not need any more spreadsheets”, and all the goblins laughed.

Five or so years ago, hosted a complete campaign, and the calculations proved perfect! Everything had exactly the results planned, all the numbers remained within the ranges expected of them. The second campaign went just as smoothly, this magic system had stood the test of time, and successfully implied a world of possible spells, while only asking players to note a few levels in a few spheres, and look up what each level of each sphere does once or twice.

But of course…

On the third campaign, someone rolled up a random character: the circus goth-clown alchemist. Fast-forward a year and the player had spent every drop of XP on advancing the character’s magical abilities. With more access to magic than any other PC in any campaign, something finally broke.

• The clown multiplied his Mana Points by storing them in items (as usual), using a dozen Mana-Storing trinkets made of eye-of-this, and toe-of-that.
• He sacrificed a Mana Point in each item to allow the trinket to cast a single spell: an illusion of a dancing blade.
• A second Mana Point was sacrificed to let the trinkets cast multiple illusions of flying blades.
• The player produce a horde of small slips of paper, and on every slip he had hand-drawn an Action Point tracker.

The system’s Action Point tracker was meant to give people a nice way to do a couple of actions - run, stab, cast, shout. The system expected everyone to take two or three actions in a round, maybe six actions with a great character and special circumstances. This maelstrom of illusory blades contained something close to a hundred actions.

However, since the blades all took actions at the same time, we could group them, and combat continued…not quite as smoothly, but Action Points ticked down as a few cutthroats lost their focus (i.e. Action Points) to the illusory, dancing, blades.

• As a cutthroat attacked, he gestured for me to remove a slip of paper (representing an illusory blade) as it vanished instantly once someone struck it with a real sword. The paper said ‘ILLUSION’ on the back.
• After a few more attacks, I flipped another, and found a doodle of a blade.

“This one is real”, he informed me.

Some of the blades were real, and some were not. If the cutthroats noticed the blades were nothing but fun-house magic, they would ignore the whirlwind of shiny swooshing noises. However, with some blades being really-actually-levitating-blades, anyone who ignored them could receive an instant stab in the back, or a slice across the throat. BIND’s system does not grant little bonuses for slicing open the tender flesh of immobile targets - it grants the kinds of auto-damage which usually means instant death from a dagger.

And so on…

The player in question did not beat on the dead horse of the magic system. Every single session, he found a new way to twist those multipliers together.

One game had the souls of a dozen angry mages, summoned back from the their afterlife of torment, and stuffed into dead rats. With a rat-cage full of undead alchemist-rats, who could not escape, but had enough necromantic abilities to kill a football-field of people, he simply opened the box, and let the almighty undead rat-casters kill everything they saw, then shut the box to block their line of sight (and therefore, their spell-casting abilities).

Luckily, the campaign was already near its natural end-point, because every session brought in one or more ridiculous use for power-multipliers.

Spheres Reforged

The new magic system has two core principles:

• Each sphere of magic let you affect that sphere in nearly any way which makes vague sense.
  • Wind magic lets you make a magic bubble to travel underwater, or summon a storm.
  • Fire magic lets you smother any fire you see, or make a hearth-fire take the form of a demon and jump down someone’s throat.
• The mechanical effect equals the spell’s level + 2.
  • If that wind blast lowers someone’s Action Points, then a first-level spell spell removes 3 Action Points.
  • If that fiery-demon is cast as a second-level spell, it deals 4 Damage.

The plan was to let anyone think up arbitrary, bizarre, highly bespoke spells; and they would make sense, as long as the sphere matched the target (Fire to fire, Water to water). However, the results would never get out of hand in the same way as the last one did. It would never allow Mana-Bombs to stack multipliers to inflict 10,000 Damage onto any target in sight.

• If a fourth-level spell dealt Damage, it would deal (4 + 2) 6 Damage.
• If a fourth-level spell helped a character to climb, then it would provide a +6 Bonus to climbing.
• If an alchemist invented a slime potion, lathered it all over their body, and asked the Judge ‘does this help me squeeze out of being wrestled by the giant octopus?’, the Judge could instantly say ‘yes, you receive a +6 Bonus to wriggling out of the giant tentacles’.

And if that slimy character tries to flee up a flat rock-face? ‘Take a -6 Penalty to the climbing roll!’.

End of Part I

Multiplication can’t be left to run amuck, but the notion of a sad, lonely alchemist, stalking the forests for his escaped silent illusion-women, is just too good to pass up. Metamagic was reintroduced eventually, but this time it was set up as a trap for careless casters; it returned like the Yellowstone wolves , to provide ecological balance.