Hello everyone, first post here and I usually play in French so if any term is not correct, please excuse me.

First you should know some things:

1) We play with the rules but like to also mess around with them, meaning that if its not exactly written, we can poke around the rules a bit (but isnt that the goal for anima?)

2) My Brother is the Dm, buuut, he is an experienced RPG player and isnt the kind to give you in-game gifts just cause he can. That said, he believes that if the players have good enough ideas or rolls, they can do pretty much what they want (although some of my ideas required Zen rolls...so not always possible)

First, I wanted to know if any of you experienced with spell combos, either by casting two spells that have an cumulative effect (like summoning a pool of water over the head of a group of enemy and then zapping that with lightning ) or by casting two spells that dont necessarily add up, but with a great enough roll (and if the dm is nice enough) it makes it work (for instance casting mineral control and earth spike simulteanously to have the two spikes from Earth Spikes plus a dozen other smaller sources of damage from Mineral control(I rolled a 407 on that one) ) .

If you have any great combo ( or anything that works really), of any type, I'd like to hear about them! I'll share some of my successes(and failures (ho so many failures)) with you if people are interested ....

Next, I wanted to ask a question about mages and more specifically earth magic.
I have lurked around the site for a while, and I couldn't really find a thread related to earth magic ( or maybe I wasn't looking properly)
So the thing is, my character is a Creation/Earth mage that my Dm allowed me to play a bit as a druid, praying to the goddes of nature and being able to slightly control plant life through earth magic, but I wanted to know If it would be a good idea to also take the Essence book, or if I should use something with a bit more punch, since as of now, my only attack spells are with energy creation (with Creation) or the earth spells. My goal is not to be a powerhouse, but it is still nice to be able to pack a punch, you see.

Furthermore, would you consider it viable to introduce anothe r form of magic in anim a (with runes) That would not be used as a in-combat type of magic, but more as in a "increase the ip on this armor a bit" or "Can you add a bit of flame magic on this sword" at the cost of Zeon per round/day whenever tehse are activated? Or another possible use would be to set up magical traps without the caster having to be there and things like that.

THe dm seemed to like the idea, but I wanted to have your pros and cons on that, or just what you think of it?

Thanks for reading guys!

Lanathay

I've had a few nasty combos thrown together through magic, admittedly though that was generally through the metamagic that allows you to combine two spells and take the best of both. Probably one of the nastier ones was the Implosion and Black Blade of Doom void spells, created a sword that had about 900 or so damage, ignored armour, added to crit and was wielded with magic projection rather than attack and defense scores.

And as for the rune bit, if any of you can get your hands on a copy of the Prometheum exxet they cover use of runes in the creation of artifacts and such in there, so adding elements or making devices you can put down etc. I'm not sure how good the translation for French would be, i know the English translation of the book isn't the greatest, but it's proved to be a very good resource for artifacts regardless.

That indeed seems like a nasty spell! Although I never noticed that metamagic feat, now I know i have to go get it, because usually I have to roll 2-3 occultism or intelligence tests in order to combine spells ( without me or my dm knowing this feat existed, we made things homemade).

And yeah, I think my Dm's got it, so it's nice to know they already exist in game as it will help with the power system and etc.

For anyone that is interested, we used the nordic runes and their general signification from this website ( misraim3.free.fr/divers2/symbolismedesrunes.pdf ( it's in French ,so I'm sorry if you don't speak french )) Of course its a bit of reading for the Dm to get the idea of what each rune is supposed to do. We implemented it as a language that my character would have to learn in a many steps program.
1 ) I need to either find a rune which shape I can learn, or divine existing runes through an occultism, intelligence and concentration roll.

2 )I need to meditate on the rune that I found or learned over a very long period in order to learn the meaning of the rune. For instance, meditating on a fire rune, after a few successful rolls, I would get a feeling of warmth, light and etc( in game, it could take a few days to a few weeks to fully understand a rune, since it's not only a usual alphabet)

3a ) once I know a rune, I can draw it by itself and use its power. Again with the fire rune example, I could only draw this one, and then spend a X amount of Zeon threaded in the rune that, once released, would create a fiery explosion equivalent to the amount of zeon I put in (think in term of the spell Create Fire, but using it to set traps instead). For runes with protection meanings, it would create a one round burst of armour (unless I maintained) and etc with other runes.
3b )The second thing to do with runes is to create rune words, and thats where it gets interesting. (As I have not yet read the Prometheum exxet, I speak only of what we did with our own system) Rune words are a combination of runes with peculiar meanings used to create a word that can have multiple effects or a single focused, but powerful effect.

For example, in the latest session, we were trapped in an undead ridden city and were trying to rescue the citizens that were still alive. Since my character is a worshipper of the nature goddess, Rafael, we sheltered the people in an abandoned greenhouse that used to be part of a religious community, and thus surrounded by a 3m wall. The greenhouse being pretty large, 30m x 50m, and thus not easily defendable by physical means if things got through the wall, I used a Protection rune, a nature rune and an ennemy run to protect the greenhouse agaisnt the ennemies of nature by warding its whole circumference. And since spells in Anima appear the way you want it to, it acts as a light beacon that undead cant see due to the warding.

Other uses would include enchanting armor, weapons and various location depending on what the situation is, making it a pretty versatile system.

With the Prometheum exxet though, I dont know how much of that you could do or if it would actually work, although nothing stops anyone from using both system with a bit of good old home rules.