Welcome back, Adventurers!

Day two of posting a highlight of one section of the book every day a week, to give you guys something to chew on while the campaign chugs along!

This week is...

In Crowns 2e, spells cast through the use of grimoires, which are found by exploring out in the world. No one starts with spells and, unless you take a special Title, you cannot cast them without carrying around a grimoire which takes up valuable inventory space. So, they better be worth it!

To cast a spell, the caster chooses how many power dice they want to use (up to four) and rolls that many d20s. For every one that rolls over the caster's LOR, the grimoire is depleted once. If this depletes the grimoire more than it has charges left, it instead drain the caster's life force and deals X unblockable damage. In this case, X equals the number of over-depletions squared (1^2 = 1, 2^2 = 4, 3^2 = 9, 4^2 = 16).

The sum of the power dice is the power of the spell. If an individual power die rolls a crit, the caster also adds their LOR to the spell's power. This can be done multiple times if you get multiple crits at once.

Then the spell's power is effected by Anima (things in the environment that boost a spell's power) and Obscura (things in the environment that lower a spell's power). These are unique to every spell, and are listed on the spells description, but all spells suffer penalties if the caster is wearing armor (due to the microscopic geometric patterns of the metals that obscure the caster's spirit).

Here's an example spell:

Let's say we only roll one power die and get an 12, which is under our LOR. The grimoire doesn't deplete, but we get a weaker version of the spell: The darkness breaks its orb-form and falls to the ground like a fog, covering a LOR foot area in ~5ft tall darkness.

If there was Obscura close to us while we cast it (such as an ally's lantern), we would have -5 to this roll. You only add -5 for each Obscura, even if the same one appears multiple times, but a torch is a bright light, so it can stack the debuff of the lantern, bringing us down to a spellpower of 2, and giving us the weakest version of the spell: The darkness is not impermeable, and mundane lights provide a 1ft by 1ft sphere of vision inside the orb. That sucks, let's try to boost it instead.

Well, first we should step away from our allies with all the light sources; the spell's Anima is listed as a Bottle of Ink and Deep Dark Pits. So let's say we prepared, because we are good little spellcasters, and brought a bottle of ink with us into the dungeon, and there happens to be a deep dark pit nearby us when we cast the spell. Each Anima gives +5 to the casting, so that brings our 12 up to a 22. We get the regular version of the spell. Great!

Now let's say 12 IS our LOR score, that means we critically succeeded and may add our LOR to the spell's power, bringing it up to 34! Now we get a slightly stronger version of the spell: The darkness grows to be double its normal size. Fantastic!

What if we had chosen to roll more power dice? If we roll another and get a 7, that brings us up to 41, now we get an even stronger version of the spell: As above [meaning it has all the same effects as the above entry as well as the following effects], the darkness confuses those who enter, requiring a successful LOR check to leave it.

We need more power!!! At the beginning, let's say we chose to roll all four power die, getting a 19 and 20. Now we have a spell power of 80, and we get the spell's strongest effect: As above, the darkness saps the body heat of those inside, dealing one cold damage each round. However, those high rolls are over our LOR, so the grimoire is drained!

There are three kinds of grimoires:

Spells are contained within arcane runes, diagrams, and writings, so lesser grimoires are completely covered in the stuff. But even if every inch is covered, a sword or ring simply cannot compare to the amount of symbols that a 500-page tome can contain, thus the distinction.

Every spell has an inverted version listed just below it's title. The inverted version of darkness is light, and vice versa, take a look:

Casting an inverted version of a spell is just like casting the normal version. There are no special rules for it other than that it is an ability reserved only for greater grimoires.

To recharge a grimoire you need to perform that spell's ritual (unique to every spell). This takes d4 hours (rolled for each time it's performed) and the ritual components listed on the spell's description (these are consumed during the casting). Only the ritual for the primary spell of the grimoire can be performed (so if it's a Greater Grimoire of Darkness fireflies will be of no help to you).

There is of course, no rule saying a Grimoire requires a charge for you to cast from it. However, you are risking some serious damage if you roll power dice without the safety of charges.

The only way to find grimoires is by finding them in dungeons! Likewise, a lot of their components require the caster to stock up ahead of time or otherwise plan travel around their needs as a caster.

Which is fun! I haven't had a player complain, they say it really makes them feel like a wizard, and it leads to them thinking entirely differently from their companions, which is also fun. Helps with roleplay.

I always thought a cool idea for an expansion book would be to make a d100 table of spells in the Crowns 2e style, converting as many over from classic RPGs as possible. I'd reprint the original 20 in the book as a part of that d100 so you can use it as a replacement for the spell table in the core book. That'd be fun to have, but it sounds like a big project.

To be continued...

You can playtest the game on our Discord with me and our awesome community! We don't bite!

Let's get to $10,000!
Reese Surles, Ward Against Evil