Dark Spell has, at the moment, no setting. But! It's getting a revision. The new version is pretty much like the old one--except for a few minor points.
• It's diceless. Mostly. Instead of rolling Nd6 and comparing to a TN, you compare N to a difficulty. N pretty much stays the same between the two versions. There's an optional rule where you can roll a d6 to adjust your total by up to +/- 2 points.
• Battle and Forte are dropped, to be replaced by skills with individual ratings. The skills are rated on the same 1 to 5 scale that Battle and Forte used to be. Skills rated at 3+ get a specialty, and extra specialties can be bought with Special Abilities (another new thingummy).
• The Vitality, Willpower, and Sorcery pools are basically unchanged. However, the number of character points that you get to build your persona is now a function of Vitality, which ranges from 8 to 12 for starting characters. A character's totals for task resolution are no longer capped by current Vitality, but they can be penalized for low Vitality pools.
• Combat is pretty much the same (you've still got the Active/Reactive divide), but a bit more streamlined. After each 5 to 10 second round of Active Combat, the character with the lower total loses Vitality equal to their total minus their opponent's. If the victor wishes, they may forgo a few points of Vitality damage to their opponent in order to gain tactical advantages that get them +1 bonuses on the next round's total.
• Combat Styles are replaced with Special Abilities. Most of the old Styles are still there, but there are a bunch of new Abilities. Some let you get mundane talents, but others allow you to boost your skills by spending points from your Sorcery pool, invoke the names of spirits or demons to create spell-like effects, resist magic more effectively, talk to plants and animals, see spirits, have a familiar, and other standard Fantasy coolness.
• Magic is pretty much unchanged, but there are more spells, and their Costs are more uniform (1-2 Sorcery for Novice level, 3-5 Sorcery and up to 1 Willpower for Adept level, 6-8 Sorcery, up to 2 Willpower, and up to 1 Vitality for Master level). The classifications of spells won't be dropped, but they might be changed or blurred somewhat. Also, there are now a few specific materials that are common to almost all spells, these being salt, sulpher, quartz sand, dust of the earth and gems, pure water, and quicksilver, and sometimes mirrors, glass beads, and fetishes or sympathetic ties.
• There's a setting, inspired by reading Tales of Wyre again over at the ENWorld message boards. A whole bunch of pages on cosmology, religion, culture, NPCs and stats, and so on and so forth. However, the rules are more bound to genre than setting--the only things that would need to be changed for use with other settings are a few dimensional travel spells and the Invocation special ablities.
The entire thing, finished, will be somewhere between one and two hundred pages, about equally split between setting and rules. If I get my shit together, it'll be somewhat more snazzy than my usual par, with a nice border, art, maps, good spelling and grammar, and so on and so forth. I've got the basic rules and about 90 spells done, as well as a dozen pages or so of setting. I hope to have at least 150 spells by the time this is through, as well as much more setting material and a score or more sample foes.
I plan to start a DS Revised campaign when the current Exemplar plot arc ends (should be a month or two), so everything will (theoretically) be nice and playtested.
This project has been immense fun, so far. I hope it continues to be.
--Jeff
Posted: Wed Aug 18, 2004 3:57 am