Nightly Rain #001 - On Magick
Hey guys, Rain here.
Thanks for reading the first issue of Nightly Rain, where I leave my late-hour thoughts on game development: what I’m building, why I’m building it, and how a world gets assembled piece-by-piece.
Tonight’s Rain: Magic in tabletop roleplaying games, the niche Magic fills in REDCASTLE, the sins most systems commit, and the design ethos that led us to a system that feels like real magic without table slowdown.
The Problems with Magic
After hundreds of sessions behind the screen, I’ve learned that most tabletop systems fall into one of two sins.
Sin One: the rabbit in the hat.
In many games, magic is more like ordering from a menu than manipulating the world. You get to pick your spell archetypes - your fireballs, your mage hands - prepare them, then pull the correct rabbit out of the hat when the moment arrives. It works, but it hardly feels like sorcery. It’s simply calling out “waiter, five more fireballs!”
And of course, the spell list itself is always bounded by the most mortal limitation imaginable: how many spells the under-slept designers can crunch prior to shipping the game.
Sin Two: the beautiful but inefficient machine.
Other systems try to restore that “mage” feeling through deeper construction, like with Ritual Path Magic in GURPS 4e. You can do breathtaking things… at the cost of poring over rules and calculating minutae endlessly.
This leads to the first sin of tabletop play: table slowdown. Nothing kills dread, momentum, or immersion quicker than twenty minutes of page-flipping.
And hovering above both sins is a third truth: magic will never be “balanced” is the way designers often mean it. It will either be limited until it feels mundane, or it will bloom into absurdity. Older editions of D&D are infamous for the gulf between martials and casters, and too many design solutions simply sand down the magic system until it becomes safer and flatter.
Rain’s Guide to Magickal Things
Here’s the creed that underpins REDCASTLE:
Magic cannot be balanced on raw capability, only on cost.
If we’re being honest, of course a sword is beaten by a fireball. That is only logical. In my ethos, mages should feel wickedly powerful, because power is the point. The question should not be “can a mage do it?” but rather “what does it cost them?”
A knight’s power is consistent, reliable, and sustainable. Steel, horse, training, comrades. A magus however burns like the brightest candle, unstable and hungry, easy to snuff if pushed too far. Drink too deeply from the well. Stare too long into the abyss. There is always a price for borrowed power.
But this power should not manifest in its 3.X interpretation. 300 splatbooks filled with endless spell permutations do not solve the “ordering from a menu” problem. In my view, magic should be open-ended and versatile, with the system designed to robustly allow for any possibility while avoiding the pitfalls of table slowdown.
Runic & Combinatory Magic
I’ll keep the explanation of REDCASTLE’s magic short and sweet.
In REDCASTLE, mages craft spells ahead of time and then bring them to the table ready to use. The heavy lifting happens between sessions as part of character advancement; I use a spellbuilding assistant I wrote to offload the arithmetic and let players experiment freely.
A spell is assembled from thirteen slots, grouped into these categories:
Base Runes: the substance of the spell (what it is)
Vector Rune: how it travels (the mode of conveyance)
Catalyst Rune: the tint that supercharges the working (what it’s charged with)
Function Runes: what it actually does (create, shape, bind, destroy, etc.)
Modifier Runes: refinements (stabilize, invigorate, extend duration, increase range, and so on)
Patron Rune: a permanent influence for mages that have sworn themselves to a pact with a greater being (a second, non-optional catalyst)
REDCASTLE recognizes eight fundamental domains, each represented by an Origin Rune:
The four elemental domains: Gaias (Earth), Firos (Fire), Aeron (Wind), and Aquina (Water).
The four heretical domains: Solar (Order), Lunos (Chaos), Vim (Life), and Terminus (Death).
When invoked during spellcrafting, an Origin Rune manifests its aspect and provides the spell’s raw domain.
Two origin runes can be combined in the Base slots to form a Product Rune - a more specialized domain. For example, Aquina + Vim = Sanguinus, the domain of blood and the fluids that carry life on their currents.
A mage can craft with a single Origin Rune for a pure effect, or invoke a Product Rune for something sharper and stranger.
From there:
The Vector Rune defines the mode of transmission (range, conveyance, & delivery) using either an Origin Rune or a Product Rune
The Catalyst Rune adds a supercharged tint and increases the potence of your spell, drawn from any Origin Rune.
Function Runes define the action of the spell and can be combined; for example, Genesis creates the Base element, and Bolt manipulates it as a projectile.
Modifier Runes add smaller refinements. Stabilizing the working, invigorating the potence, extending the duration, broadening the range, and many other tweaks.
Finally, the Patron Rune is granted only to mages that have sworn themselves in pact to a greater being. In exchange for this pact, the Patron’s domain becomes a non-optional influence on every spell you cast, effectively serving as a second Catalyst Rune.
This system is combinatory at its core. With thirteen slots, almost any spell is craftable, and with ease. The spellbuilder lets players test combinations and arrive at workable results in minutes, and spellcrafting happens outside of play - allowing for the best of both worlds.
If a mage finds themselves unprepared and needs to conjure an effect on the spot, we call this Freecasting. Freecasting is very limited and has steep cost, but allows the mage to manipulate one Origin Rune, one Function Rune, and one Modifier Rune on the fly. It is designed to allow for impromptu magic while reserving the truly powerful spell effects for advanced preparation.
Final Notes
I was inspired by things like Ars Magicka, Noita, and Mage: the Ascension in writing this system. I wanted to design something that was fun, flexible, and most importantly: playable. If it sounds complex - it is much simpler than meets the eye here in my Nightly Rain. The Spellbuilder will be released alongside the REDCASTLE Setting Module, and you may then be the judge.
We’ll talk more about magic another night. For now - this has been your Nightly Rain.
Next Nightly Rain: Vampirism in REDCASTLE, the pitfalls of immortal antagonists, and how to avoid VTM-isms in your writing.