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mercoledì 9 marzo 2016

Holy Magic an ACKS Wednesday post

This post is the first of what should become a series of articles dedicated to one of the most interesting simulacrum game of the OSR scene.

The game is Adventurer Conqueror King System (or ACKS in brief), we already have done a short review of the system in the article Adventurer Conqueror King or Diocletian D&D.

One of the most interesting aspects of the system is the attention to details and the great quantity of tools to create balanced content for the game and the total backward compatibility with the original games (as presented in the B/X version).

While some of this tools are present in the ACKS book (specially for the handling of dominions, spell research, magical object costruction and monsters creation) a lot more are presented in the ACKS Player's Companion book where we find complete rules for creating classes, races and spells.

An ulterior step forward in this direction was presented by the Autarch Patreon and is a fantastic tool to create an original magic system balanced with the ones presented in past and future ACKS book. This new tool is the Creating a Custom Magic Type (accessible only to supporter, but you can be a supporter only for 1$ so what are you waiting for? In this months we supporter got also shaded magic, mage class, overcasting, arcanogenesis and other ACKS goodness).

And by using this Magic Type creation tool you can do a lot of things, like creating an Holy Magic Type.

Among the many things I like of the ACKS rules is the magic system, specially the one of wizards who works like sorcerer in the d20 system, with the difference that prepared spell can be changed (albeit at an high cost), what I don't really like is the difference with the clerical magical system which is similar but with an expanded list of "prepared" spell (all spell in the cleric list, which are 10 and are all considered prepared for the cleric, this list can be changed only with magical research), other divine caster have a longer list (but they have stricter codes of conduct). So I got the idea of changing the clerical magic system with one that keeps the same spells (and spells cost for calculating the level of new spells) but has the same "repertoire" of the wizard class (the number of spell slots + the characteristic bonus).


Holy Magic for ACKS

This system of magic use only one of the many possibilities offered by the Custom Magic creation article, and with just a little change we have a completely different flavor for the magic present in the list of divine classes.

The differences

The Holy Magic type is the same of Divine magic but instead of being a Prayerful magic type it's a Studious magic type. This means that the Holy caster will have Int and Wis prime requisite and the repertoire will be limited to the number of spells/day plus the bonus of Int or Wis (the lowest one), but the Holy caster can change the spells into its repertoire as all Studious caster. The spell that are in the Holy caster list are all the divine spells (Cleric, Shaman, Witch, Bladedancer and so on), plus the one built with the Holy multiplier (same of the Divine one). Obviously the Holy caster will need an Holy Spell book to keep tracks of the holy spirit of his spell just as an arcane caster has a spell book.

Holy Magic can be used in two principal ways:

  • to create new classes that use Holy Magic,
  • to modify existing divine classes in holy classes

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