Burials of Teganshire post 11 of 30

Where did the spell permanency go, I wondered when I read the 5E PHB and DMG for the first time. How and the heck do I explain this permanent magical effect? Do I just handwave it? What if the PC wants to do the same thing? Wrut-wro, I found a significant flaw for my own campaign world—or did I?

After a while, I begin to love 5E’s permanent magic philosophy, even if its design was a simplification rather than a campaign enhancement feature.

The (conjectured) Intent Behind 5E Permanent Magic System Changes

We can speculate the changes in 5E came about for these reasons:

• Desire to further streamline the rules leaving the DM with more creativity
• Change the way magical items are made
• Create an environment to encourage PCs to make magical items.

I don’t believe the designers sat back and went, “what’s a cool thing we can do to make the DM’s game world better?” My belief stems from a lack of communication in the DMG concerning permanent magical states and world-building (along with ignoring world-building in general).

Regardless of how we got here, I can appreciate the lack of discussion about the mechanics behind permanent magic in world-building due to page count. On the other hand, D&D might as well be named “Magic and Monsters,” and everything to do with those two words is the backbone of any campaign setting.

So, let’s stick with 5E (Pathfinder is a separate discussion) and talk about how to use its magical rules (or lack thereof) to spice up the campaign world. Griffon Lore Games is all about hard fantasy—the magical systems we use must maintain internal consistency.

Before We Begin

Remember, the rule here is to add verisimilitude to the campaign setting. The “truth” of the setting that makes it believable by using plausibility and credibility. This is a game. A game has rules. Like in Hard Science Fiction, the usage of physics and mathematics adds belief. The world becomes alive when a DM sticks to standards. The DM is the arbiter of the actions, not a narrator, and action generated in a believable system makes for believable conflict. That’s the game.

Don’t Forget Some Spells Have Permanent Effects

Some spells like hallow, exist until dispelled. Others, like guards and wards, and forbiddance, can be made permanent or semi-permanent with repeated casting.

Create Magical Effects in 5E via Magic Items

This is highly plausible and a good rule-of-thumb. If the PCs want their door to have permanent protection from evil and good on it, then the PCs can create a magic item to make that work.

Two books describe how to create magical items: The Dungeon Master’s Guide and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. Both are excellent books for 5E, and XGtE is a gold standard of sorts. Both come highly recommended.

We suggest using XGtE’s additions and changes to crafting magical items. We believe those rules were the rules that were extensively playtested for item creation. This excellent article on Flutes Loot describes the difference between the two.

Door Example

Back to our door example, the closest thing in the DMG is a ring of protection (rare) and a scroll of protection (rare). However, the effect of those does not approach the impact of the protection from evil and good spell. Thus, the magical door is a very rare magic item, and in XGtE, that takes some serious components, 20,000 GP, and 25 workweeks.

Ouch!

But do the players want this door or not?

If you saw this on a door, you might want to leave the door alone.

Create Magical Effects via One-Shot Custom Spells

Another way to add some exciting effects is unique custom spells. For example–the dungeon that was picked clean doesn’t have any magical problems for the PCs, but the rooms and corridors behind that secret door contain a multitude of nasty surprises. The traps have sat there, all this time, undiscovered.

The DMG contains rules for creating spells, but the DM needs to keep in mind that under a system of hard fantasy that puts magical effects in an explainable box, custom spells should:

• Be balanced
• Have clear effects
• Cost a bunch of coin
• Be something the players could duplicate if they so desired

These custom effects need not be powerful. For example, there are traps in our unexplored corridor, traps that reset themselves. They reset themselves via a clockwork mechanism. Steam is what powers this clockwork. And it’s the custom magic spell “generate steam,” that exists until dispelled (and it sits behind tons of rock) that powers it all.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You think, why bother, just say “steam-powered trap.”

But where does the water come from?

How is it heated?

How did that mechanism last for so long?

It matters because those are the rules, and that’s the environment the PCs are in. It’s those details, and the ability for the PCs to do the same thing, that makes the game world seem real. In this example, we went from a “corridor is trapped” to “this corridor was constructed by an advanced people who had a fundamental understanding of clockwork, stonework, and thermal dynamics.”

We’ve gone from a trapped corridor to steampunk dwarves.

Dudes. Steampunk dwarves. HOW AWESOME IS THAT.

Ahem.

The bottom line for custom spells: anything the DM can do the players can do.

Creating Magical Effects By Compounding Methods

And now we come to some DM tomfoolery—the gift of time.

Thus far, we haven’t talked about “the ancients created this effect, so here it is” because that’s a copout. But people of yore did have one thing going for them—they had plenty of time to think about things. If not, they would be barbarians, and then this would be all moot.

The DM can borrow from that concept—the DM knows this magical effect will take a while to design.

But most of that “figuring it out” doesn’t need to occur right when the idea goes from DM brain to PC discovery.

Let’s give an example:

The Knight’s Graveyard

The Knights of the Wailmoor bury their dead in the Knight’s Graveyard. There is a stone fence surrounding the park-like grounds, 800-ft. in diameter.

Evil creatures cannot enter the graveyard. Nor elementals, fey, undead, demons, devils, aberrations, lousy weather, and anyone who isn’t a Knight of Wailmoor or a direct relative. Flying, teleporting, tunneling, or any other means does not work, nor can they damage the wall that provides this effect. This effect exists 800-ft. above and below the graveyard.

When I came up with this description, I conjectured:

• The knights created several magical items—to accomplish this—for example, the iron gate that does not rust is magical.
• The knights used several custom spells
• The knights used the hallow and forbiddance spells
• The knights used a ritual to link the spells with a nearby artifact, a hydro dam

Dartmoor dam photo from Wikipedia Commons

Yup, instead of using the spell permanency (which no longer exists), they realized they could use the permanent flowing water of the dam several miles away as magical energy. This dam empowers their spells and makes them nigh dispellable. You can’t dispel any of the wards in the graveyard, you have to destroy the damn—the graveyard’s singular flaw.

As a DM, I don’t know how the dam works in a fantasy game, other than it uses water-based elemental energy (of course). But it sounds cool, and if the players really get into it, I can design the dam, using standard 5E rules and the methods above, to make it a Legendary Artifact. I just don’t have to do that right now.

Permanency Doesn’t Mean Forever

I’ve been waiting all day to type that, ha, ha, ha.

D&D 5E has a lot going for it. Even if, as a DM, you decide magic varies too much with squishy rules to bother sticking to a framework, there’s still an out that makes sense and adds to your world-building lore. Perhaps there was a permanency spell used by those ancient civilizations so long ago.

The current civilization just hasn’t discovered it yet, because it was a closely guarded secret, and when the old one’s empire fell, the knowledge was lost. So the PCs either need to reinvent the wheel (and people have been trying to do so in the campaign world for hundreds of years)—or they need to go dungeon diving to get it.

Magic is all over D&D. Make it work in the game world—by making it work.

Back Burials of Teganshire on Indiegogo today to find out just what those magical runes on the bridge do!

Crossbow Man doesn’t have much need for magic but sure would like a magic crossbow.
And some armor. And perhaps a magical tankard that always has beer in it.
And are those magical runes on the bridge simple warding glyphs—or do they have some other construction?

Previous 30 Days of BoT  | Next 30 Days of BoT