All Spells Must Be Cast

Chargen

Points to distribute
Stats: 12
Qualities: 5*
Skills: 15
Magic: 7
*You can gain at most another 5 from Drawbacks

Stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Perception, Willpower

Secondary Stats
Life Points: ((Con+Con+Str)x4)+10
Endurance Points: ((Con+Str+Will)x3)+5
Essence: (Will+Int+Perception)x2

Qualities

Acute/Impaired Senses(2 points): Either a quality or a drawback, a +3 or -3 to anything that relies on the damaged sense!

Addiction: A drawback! You're addicted to some wacky local substance and if you don't get it, you're not gonna feel well. The points gained obviously depend on how illegal or rare it is.

Artistic Talent(3 points): A quality! Gives you a +3 to anything related to a specific kind of art, and adds +12 to your Essence!

Charisma(1 to 5 points): How good you are at smooth-talking, intimidating and generally doing all that social stuff!

Contacts(1 to 5 points): People you can ask for help or advice! The more points you have, the more favours you can wring out of them.

Fast Reaction Time(2 points): Gives you a +3 on initiative rolls!

Hard to Kill(1 to 5 points): Every point you spend on this quality gives you +5 Life Points!

Increased Essence Pool(1 to 5 points): Every point you spend on this gives you +5 Essence!

Inspiration(5 points): Your character has some sort of natural grasp of magic, most likely you've either got a weird heritage or spent your childhood wondering why your toys kept catching fire. You pick a Target word. You get a +2 to any rolls involving said target word.

Nerves of Steel(3 points): Allows you to resist supernatural dread and sometimes to see through illusions trying to terrify you. You never freeze up even when your life is on the line.

Photographic Memory(2 points): You never forget anything. If you see it, you can always recall it, to its tiniest detail.

Physical Disability(3 points): Whatever limb's injured, anything you try to do with it will have a harder chance of succeeding. Keep in mind that this injury can, for some reason or another, not be fied with magic.

Situational Awareness(2 points): You've got a good idea of what's going around you at all times. If nothing's distracting you and you pay attention, you can sense if there's anything dangerous or out of place in the area.

The Gift(5 points): Your character can, simply by focusing, see into the spirit world. What he sees may not always be pleasant, but if there are spirits, or flows or strange power around, they'll stand out to him clear as day.

Magic

You can use any combination of Target and Effect words to create your spells, but obviously there are some which you're more experienced with than others. Each point in an Effect word costs three points, each point in a Target word costs one point.

Effects: Create, Change, Perceive, Control and Destroy
Targets: Air, Animal, Body, Earth, Fire, Images, Mind, Plants, Power and Water

Skills

Some skills, like Acting or Stealth, just are what they are. Once you invest points in that skill, you have that many points in literally every use of it, ever. Others are specialized, like Craft, where you might know how to make shoes but not how to make guitars, there you pick a specific specialty.

Acting, Athletics(Running, jumping, swimming and all those things), Brawling(unarmed combat), Craft(a specific kind of craft must be chosen), Disguise, Dodge, Fine Arts(painting, music, etc., pick one), First Aid(for patching up those small wounds), Gambling(including how to cheat at games), Haggling, Hand Weapon(Pick a type of weapon), Instruction(teaching others what you know), Intimidation, Lockpicking, Medicine(for really severe injuries and long-term care), Myth and Legend, Notice(how to spot stuff, you want this skill), Occult Knowledge(Specialized in an Effect word), Pick Pocket, Play Instrument(pick one), Interrogation, Ranged Weapon(Bows, crossbows, throwing stuff, slings), Riding, Sailing, Singing, Smooth Talking, Stealth, Survival, Tracking, Traps.

System

The core system will be basic Unisystem, i.e., stat+skill vs a TN of 9. Get a 9 or better and you succeed, assuming no opposed roll(for an opposed roll, they roll the same, and the higher roll wins). There may of course be modifiers for complicated stuff, like firing an arrow at a target in the middle of a storm.

Magic System

The magic system functions by stitching together one of the five Effect words with one of the Target words. The five effects are: Create, Change, Perceive, Control and Destroy.

Create: Creates something new, or improves something existing. Things created from raw magic will disappear after a while.
Change: Changes something that already exists, perhaps adding attributes from another thing.
Perceive: Allows you to either sense something you normally couldn't, or sense something better.
Control: Allows you to change either how a thing acts and moves, or something about the state it is in(for instance, corn can be turned into bread, thread can be turned into clothes).
Destroy: Doing damage to something or removing one of its traits. Paradoxically the source of much protection magic as you can for example remove a fire's heat, or a blade's sharpness.

The target words are:

Animal, Air, Water, Fire, Plant, Body, Images*, Mind, Earth and Power**.

*Images covers everything related to the senses, not just the visual.
**Related to the Power of magic. For instance, Perceive Power would allow you to sense magical effects. Destroy Power would take spells apart.

Casting a spell of some sort requires a skill check(barring really simple cantrips) and figuring out what two words you knock together to make it happen. The check itself is Average of Effect + Target + 1d10, as usual a 9 or better succeeds. Casting a spell also drains some Essence, at a minimum 1 point. Usually there's no opposed roll for spellcasting, except in the case of spells cast on creatures/people, where they'll either get a Willpower or Constitution check to resist(if it's cast directly on them) or a Dodge roll to avoid(if it's some sort of projectile or beam or whatever).

Spellcasting modifiers
Known-and-practiced spell: +2
New spell: -2
Hurried casting: -2
Ritual magic: +Intelligence
Modifier for simple spells: +1 to +10
Every 2 points of Essence spent(beyond the first): +1
Generic difficulty modifiers for complicated/powerful effects: -1 to -10

Practiced Spells

Everyone gets to start with two practiced spells, presumably either learned while experimenting with their magic potential or while being tested to see if they had the very basic brains needed to attend the school. More spells can be trained as the school year progresses, attending classes related to the relevant targets and effects you want will get you there.

Magic Items

There are three kinds of magic items.

#1: Magic equipment. Like a magic sword, would give its user a bonus to just about anything done with it(at least if it's what the item was intended for, using a magic sword will not give you a bonus to sailing unless the creator was senile).

#2: Magic focuses. Like magic wands or crystal balls, which give the user a bonus to a specific Effect or Target word.

#3: Magic potions and scrolls. These contain a single, pre-determined effect. For instance, an Invisibility Potion might have a Destroy Images effect on whoever drinks it(or whatever it's poured on…).

Setting

The world is familiar to you if you've ever played a fantasy RPG or read a fantasy book. There are monsters, dangerous ruins, deep forests, tall mountains and goddamn elves everywhere. The elves are insufferable, everything else it's possible to deal with.

At some point, decades ago, a bunch of adventurers beat up an evil overlord and stole his crumbling bastion. Then, after a few years of trying to make a profit off of it, they realized that all they were good at was killing monsters and taking their stuff, so they sold it to a bunch of wizards. The wizards had plans for the place, however: They were going to make a school for new mages. After all, it could be made into a craft just as like carpentry, cobbling or plumbing. It took some years for the idea to catch on, but now, every year hundreds of fresh-faced young students arrive to learn the arcane arts. Some want to be there, some got sent there by their parents, and others ended up there after their latent magical abilities set their uncle on fire.

The place is ancient and falling apart, however, and the experienced wizards in charge have no intention of actually paying for a horde of servants and laborers to keep the place running, so instead they came up with a cunning plan. Under the guise of creating houses for "student unity," they used their students to do all the hard work. The Leaves take care of the overgrown gardens and fields(as well as the kitchens), the Bears help manage the animals and monsters that run rampant in the disused parts of the school(and herd them into cages for use in the exams), the Hammers are stuck keeping the place from falling apart(but since house assignment is essentially random, many of them are all thumbs and seemingly-competent Hammer repair can be more dangerous than an obvious hole in the floor), the Swords are campus security both against unruly students and outside forces, and the Feathers are the healers who patch up the other houses when their members inevitably screw up or get into fights.

The School Year

Rather than attempt to manage classes, the wizards in charge simply let the students know when and where they are. If the students manage to soak up enough through discipline and study to pass the exams that occur at the end of every term, it's assumed they're competent enough to handle another year. If they don't, it's assumed that they weren't really trying and they're either penalized or unceremoniously booted from the grounds.

Every year also contains a bunch of highly distracting holidays, festivals and traditions that no one ever bothers to explain to the new students until they're sprung on them.

The School Grounds

The school grounds are an utter mess, you could find just about anything here.

School Environs

The school itself is located in the middle of a dense forest. A winding road leads to a nearby town(where the sensible students who manage to scrape together some money spend most of their time rather than at the deathtrap that is their school), and the woods themselves contain all sorts of fascinating things like old ruins, mysterious caves, raging rivers and other stuff.

Characters

Ansar Costache
Varinka Satyev
Frances Agnesti
Celes Koibe Schastlivtsev
Mira Highland

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