Dungeon Scrawler

I'm pleased with my previous take on Spellbook magic. ...yet, at the same time, something inside me says it's too  detailed. Or perhaps, too "hard"; Brandon Sanderson is famous for (if not inventing the idea) popularizing the idea of "hard" vs "soft" magic systems. The explanations I proposed before definitely constitute a hard magic system. There's nothing strictly wrong with that, of course, it's just that everything else  about Cairn is so pro-abstraction. Other things in Cairn feel  "soft".  Mind you, this isn't a criticism; Cairn is quite practical--the focus is on good gameplay. But my motivation was to come up with a sort of coherent understanding of magic. I think I definitely did that (or at least about 80% of it), I just, y'know, wanted to do it again . In part to hew closer to the "spirit" of Cairn, but also, in part, to demonstrate that these things are malleable, and one person's explanation nee...

This is a bit of an idle musing I wanted to put out into the world. In Cairn, magic is generally carried out in three ways. (More like two and a half really.) You've got spellbooks, scrolls (that's the half), and relics. Today's thoughts are all about those spellbooks and scrolls. Mechanical justification vs. diagetic justification For good, very OSR flavored, gamey reasons, spells in Cairn are contained within a single spellbook that occupies a slot. Casting a spell requires some level of safety, holding the spellbook open in both hands, and filling another  slot with Fatigue. That's more than enough for a good time, and we don't have to think about it any harder.  But , my brain is the sort that looks at this and says.... why though? I don't mean "why would you design it this way", the only reason needed for that is "it makes the game fun in the particular way we want it to be", but I do imagine some people with a stronger variant of my par...