Reign is the TTRPG I have run the most of in recent years, and likely will be for the forseeable future. I intend to discuss it more in the future, but today I am only discussing one specific aspect. The Reign system is perfectly designed to fit my needs on many levels, one of those being a lot of room to hack and develop my own game content. Indeed, the rulebook I have used until now, Reign: Enchiridion, provides primarily guidelines for homebrew/hacking. For instance, it only has a handful of Esoterice Disciplines and Martial Paths (The games Feat-like rules), but a very robust structure for developing your own.
Another aspect that is strongly supported is developement of magic. Briefly, the core game groups spells into categories (schools) and characters generally focus on learning one. Unlilke something like D&D, where these schools are broad and have numerous spells, a Reign school usually has 6-12, and the more powerful ones require "attunement" - with each character being limited to one attunement (usually). Again, there are few examples in the Enchiridion, but a detailed method for creation of more.
However, this post is dicussing something where I have gone one step further in developing my own magic system. I will discuss the magic system for my game/setting which I call "Sorcery". This is, to those familiar with the game, confusing - as the core game calls its own magic system "Sorcery". However, this is actually coincidental, the core setting in which I run games has three forms of magic: Wizardry, Prayer, and Sorcery, which were conceptualized before I had the rules for Reign (And largely developed from D&D 3.5e Wizard/Sorcerer, Cleric, and Binder [from Tome of Magic] respectively). Thus, my version of Sorcery began with a few concepts: summoning of powerful entities, these entities can inhabit/possess you, this possession grants you powers, this possession can alter your personality. Additionally, I wanted a vibe of traditional occult ritual summoning - candles, circles, pentagrams, chants, etc. Certainly, some strong influence from the Bartimeus novels I read in my youth - which means I wanted to also add the ability for these summoned entities to perform tasks for the summoner independantly.
Reigns written system supports only single shot spells, you roll to cast and the effect either happens or doesn't. Thus, I felt the need to develop something entirely new to support the requirements.
Using sorcery to summon a Deiemon (setting name for some sort of powerful spiritual entity) is a task that varies from quite easy to nearly impossible.
At the simplest level, every old grandmother knows a handful of rituals. She can summon Deiemons of nature to help her garden, animate brooms to hasten sweeping, and the such.
At the upper end, ancient sorcerers with decades of learning spends days performing rituals to summon Deiemons of immense power, Deiemons which are no longer just vague abstract concept - but entities with name, history, and personality.
Once a Deiemon is summoned, there are two options. The first is to have it possess the body of the summoner. The second is to have it possess some predetermined (inanimate) object, and perform a task to its best ability in that form.
From Deiemon levels 1-4, when posessing the Deiemon raises the characters level of a specified skill to its level. Eg a "fight Deiemon level 4" makes the posessed characters level of fight equal to 4, regardless of what it was previously. Beyond level 4, things get somewhat more complicated. Deiemons of level 5+ are "named entities" and are thus more involved. They should have a handful of different skills at different levels, which all work the same as the earlier described ones. But also, they should have Esoteric Disciplines and Martial Paths - or maybe they are spellcasters themselves and have spell casting skills of one of the other two varieties. Point being, they are more complex - they are a form of NPC - mechanically and flavourfully.
When a Deiemon posesses a person, there is risk of its Passions (Mission, Duty, Craving) taking over the characters. Whenever a Deiemon posesses a character, as well as at the start of every day after that, they fight over control of those passions. The character gets to roll Command+Sorcery, while each Deiemon rolls equal to (level)+MD. The characters roll is used as Gobble dice against all the Deiemons rolls.
When a character fails to Gobble a Deiemons dice:The rules for a Deiemon being commanded to complete a task are much less developed. Most simply, a Deiemon needs to roll (level) dice in order to determine sucess of task. However, I also want T1 - T3 Deiemons to not be completely worthless, therefor they need some reasonable chance of task completion. This amounts to "rolls only need to be made for non-trivial tasks" - a very useful guideline. I think that if there is any opposition there needs to be a roll - L1 Deiemons really cannot to suceed tasks with opposition, and I think this is fair. Beyond that, theres also the issue that at some point we want Deiemons that can complete tasks that require multiple skills. I think when named entites are involved, this can likely be resolved by treating them as a character in their own right. However, I think with T3/4 we can implement a system where they can be summoned with a number of skills, and each one needs to be rolled for (at their level). I'm not sure how well this works, or how balanced it is - as I have yet to run a game where this exactly has been attempted.
Where I am fairly confident in the core of the posession system, I have much uncertainty in the task completion system. It has had very little testing, and is much looser and more poorly defined to begin with. Should there be any Reign players out there who find this interesting, please update me with any insights you might have on this system.
A significant assumption of this system is that people are strongly limited in their knowledge of and ability to summon Deiemons. The goal is to produce a situation where characters spend significant time digging through ancient tomes in libraries and spend vast sums of money on teachers to learn the rituals of higher level Deiemons. My current method is that any character with levels in Sorcery can summon a T1 of basically anything imaginable, a T2 of any common skill (that being one on the character sheet, or deemed appropriately common for the setting), and (skill level) T3 Deiemons.
Uknown T2's require some token amount of research - so they can't be summoned without preperation in the wilderness, but in a city with people and centers of research and learning they are fine. T3's require some research, even a common one needs some rolls when in a situation where the info can be found - but it shouldn't be particularly difficult, mostly a time commitment. T4's need to require time and skill. These should be hard to find, but not impossible. A dedicated individual in a large city will find the necessary information given enough time and money. Make players roll for loss of resources rather than chance of sucess.
T5+ is when things get interesting. These are the "named entities" and thus need to be rare and difficult to find. Knowledge of these rituals is often a closely guarded secret, and not often written down for public consumption. For both setting and GM, these need to be hard to find. A setting inundated with these will be broken and disfunctional, and a GM will be overwhelmed with the additional layer of NPC creation. For me, learning the ritual of a T5+ needs to be a side-quest in its own right, this doesn't happen in downtime - it needs to be an active goal with significant opposition and difficulty. This is no longer just a roll or two, at this point it is an adventure.
I have enjoyed this system so far, however it has only been tested in a setting with other forms of magic. I am very interested in testing it out in more isolation - I have a place in the setting where this can occur, but it is not optimal. Of the various forms of magic and spellcasting I have played with in the Reign system, I think this one is the most innovative when it comes to tying the mechanics in to the narrative at a conceptual level. I am happy with how I've worked the limitation of Reign and the conceptual limitation of this type of magic together, and how the system interacts well with the generally exponential power curve. As metioned previously, the posession system has been tested to a satisfactory level, but the "task completion" one has not - I would like to gather more data on this.
I think this system suceeds at the primary goal of providing a method of long ritual based summoning of powerful entities. This provides many gameplay, lore, and narrative opportunities. Although for my setting low level Deiemons are relatively common, this need not be the case - there is much space where any level of this is as uncommon as the next, and thus the play is mostly focussed on the "named entities". This is a great way to create Lovecraftian vibe game (for instance) - a lvl 10 named entity (the most powerful thing that is comprehensible) represents the great beings of the mythos, the Cthulus and such. The ritual to summon this, by my rules, takes 100 hours, over 4 normal earth days - one could easily have an entire adventure within that timeframe, and it would be a great way to track the time and add pressure. Even a lvl 9 is still 81 hours. Cutting the 1-4 but creating a class of people with a greater awareness of 5-7 creates a world which is much more like the Bartimeus trilogy from which some of the inspiration came, however the "task" sytem will have to be more thoroughly developed for a game such as that. Cutting the named entities and just sticking to abstract power level tied directly to skills creates its own setting, here there are people who can be extremely good at any task they so choose - given the time.
Exquisite Whine (1 Point):
Any time
you succeed with a Plead roll, the result is
marginally better than would ordinarily be the
case. For instance, if a normal roll would keep
your captor from killing you, an Exquisite
Whine might keep you alive and win your
freedom (after he beats you and steals anything
of value, of course). If a normal success
would get a coin fl ung in the dust at your feet,
an Exquisite Whine produces two coins.
Dogged Persistence (2 Points):
If you fail
in your first attempt to gain someone’s mercy,
you can immediately roll again with no
penalty. If that second roll fails, you’re stuck.
Infinite Sorrow (3 Points):
You can use
Plead without penalty even when you are
demonstrably better off than the person with
whom you’re pleading. For instance, you
could have a captive tied up and starving in
your dungeon and elicit feelings of sympathy
from him while you strut before him eating
peeled dates from a silver tray. (It won’t make
him like you, but he’ll feel some pity.) You
still must, in character, come up with some
explanation for why he should feel sorry for
you, but even an outlandish rationale can be
made to work with this technique.