I wrote up my ad hoc rules for using dhar in another thread when it occurred to me, some of you might be interested in the concept and want to expand, tweak, embellish.

The idea is to make using dhar (dark magic) attractive to a caster, and slowly send them into a spiral of corruption.

• You're in an area with high magical influence: add +1 fortune
• You're in an area corrupted by dhar: add +2 fortune; any chaos star result opens up the "Dark Magic" skill for a player to take, plus all miscast results are doubled (double damage, double duration, increase liklihood of drawing an insanity, etc)
• Once you have the Dark Magic Skill you can draw upon dhar to fuel any spell to add +1 fortune to your casting roll. Every time you use Dhar & you roll a chaos star, add a checkmark to your Dark Magic skill. The next time you must resist an insanity, you receive a number of misfortune dice equal to the number of tickmarks. Once you gain a permanent insanity, the tick marks reset.

So it has a subtle increase in power without too negative effect initially, but it grows worse the more you rely on dhar. I am debating on the following changes:

1. Allowing a player to "charge" their spell with Dhar, for each tick mark you add (up to half your WP) to the Dark Magic skill, you can add +1 fortune dice to the casting.
2. Adding a damage or effect increase (+1 damage), or maybe reduce the recharge on the spell by 1, or something.

thoughts?

I like it.

But I note, you will only roll a Chaos Star when using a Challenge die. As such, there will be some spells that never have a chance of activating anything. I dunno if this is intentional. A player could manipulate that by taking the dhar Fortune dice only on things without a challenge dice.

You could alter it slightly to include: Two Bane symbols: Chaos Risk (roll a challenge dice. Ignore any result but a Chaos Star. Chaos Star does everything you said it does).

Sarim Rune said:

Great point; I'll have to mull this over for consideration. That's a decent idea to force a Chaos Risk... Cheers!

Or, simply add a challenge die to see if there's a chance for corruption. All other sides would be treated as blank.