Within the Genesys rules, how would you sensibly capture the Flavour of Warhammer Magic?

While "Play it by RAW and don’t worry about it" is a fine and logical approach, Flavour is what makes a setting, and the Colleges of Magic are a huge piece of flavour for Warhammer.

I know Genesys' three 'Types' or Magic (Arcane, Divine and Primal) have some limitations (Such as Arcane not having access to Augment spell), however, this doesn’t quite work with Warhammer, as each College has a range of spells that cover all the Genesys types. While some Collages do not have a 'Direct Damage' spell, all Wizards get a Magic Missile from Lesser and Petty Magic… so all Colleges would likely need access to all spell types. Even if its just the most basic effect.

Realms of Terrinoth add two talents (Flames of Kellos and Winds of Nordros), which provide a good starting point, but this doesn’t prevent, say, a Beast Wizard adding the Burn effect.

I don't know if creating more Talents (Like the above), for the other Colleges is the way to go.. In which case, what effects would those Talents add for each Collage (Death for example?) Would that also require the creation of more 'Flavour Specific' Additional Effects to go with those Talents. (Lore of Heavens is covered with Lightning, Lore of Fire and Lore of Ice is covered with the above Terrinoth talents). But what would they be?

I want to avoid creating new 'rules' as such, in that I want to keep the core Genesys Mechanic, but I feel I do need to create new options WITHIN the Genesys system to capture that flavour.

As an aside, triggering Tzeentch Curse… I am considering 4 Threat or a Despair on casting… does that feel right?

Any advice or ideas would be hugely appreciated

EDIT! Please note, I am basing all this on Warhammer SECOND Edition. I have NONE of hte 3rd Ed, and am not familiar with it beyond it being 'similar' in principle to Genesys

RD

Warhammer colleges, with each part of the wind having unique magic colors and spells, sort of reminds me of the Star Wars Template Trees. Since we already know this works with Genesys previously, it might be the way to go?

Take Realms of Sorcery, perhaps along with spells from the miniatures battle Warhammer game, translate them, then stat them into a tree each magus type character would develop from there. You may want to use Force and Destiny books (if you have those) in combination with this idea to flesh it out.

Just one of many possibilities. I am excited you are working on Warhammer for Genesys, great idea! Profession careers would work with trees easily too...

I have the entire Star Wars line, but I wanted to avoid having to create trees for each spell and each collage (and each career for that matter).

It would be a massive volume of work, and I have no idea how to keep it balanced.

The first thing that came into my mind was fiddling with the difficulties on the tables for each of the types of magic actions in the core rulebook. And then take a pass at "auto-upgrades" to spells for opposing schools of magic. So effectively, you'll be adding a column to each of those tables for each school of magic, plus divine or primal. Not 100% familiar with the magic system of Warhammer, but I read it a couple years ago.

I would even increase a harshness of threat and despair results. Maybe there's a resilience check after each casting that results in threat or despair to resist a mutation or something.

You could create some talents to mitigate all of what I just mentioned as well. Signature Spell and Improved Signature Spell does this already for reducing the difficulty, maybe there's a talent that requires Signature Spell to not get the auto-upgrade or something.

I'd love to see what you come up with!

Just my 2 cp!

Z

One potentially easy solution is to just limit what upgrades each skill can use, rather than modifying the magical actions themselves. So magic skill could determine what upgrades you can apply, rather then what magic action you can take.

37 minutes ago, Noahjam325 said:

One potentially easy solution is to just limit what upgrades each skill can use, rather than modifying the magical actions themselves. So magic skill could determine what upgrades you can apply, rather then what magic action you can take.

This is vaguely what I am thinking of doing...

I don't want to change how the magic mechanic works, but I feel I need to ADD some Additional Effects to flavour the Colleges that have not got something appropriate already (Burn and Ice and Lightning), and then create Talents that allow those effects to be added for free (Like Flames of Kellos and Winds of Nordros), that will be specific to a particular College... and then potentially limiting wizards from adding an Effect that is not appropriate to that collage, while getting the 'approrpiate' effect for free...

I just dont know what would be a sensible and appropriate effect for the other colleges.

58 minutes ago, RebelDave said:

This is vaguely what I am thinking of doing...

I don't want to change how the magic mechanic works, but I feel I need to ADD some Additional Effects to flavour the Colleges that have not got something appropriate already (Burn and Ice and Lightning), and then create Talents that allow those effects to be added for free (Like Flames of Kellos and Winds of Nordros), that will be specific to a particular College... and then potentially limiting wizards from adding an Effect that is not appropriate to that collage, while getting the 'approrpiate' effect for free...

I just dont know what would be a sensible and appropriate effect for the other colleges.

I'm not at all familiar spellcasting in Warhammer so i can't personally attest to even what these colleges are.

I think the easiest solution would be making each college its own magic skill, and every magic skill has access the base effect of every magic action. This would fulfill what you described as "petty" spells that everyone knows. Then go down the list of colleges and assign specific upgrades to each college. You can make this step even easier by only fleshing out the colleges your players are going to use.

I think creating the custom talents that are limited is a great idea.

As i said, I'm not familiar with the magical lore of Warhammer, but if you want to list out the ones you're having trouble with, and what their niche is i would be more than willing to try and brain storm how to translate them.

10 minutes ago, Noahjam325 said:

I'm not at all familiar spellcasting in Warhammer so i can't personally attest to even what these colleges are.

I think the easiest solution would be making each college its own magic skill, and every magic skill has access the base effect of every magic action. This would fulfill what you described as "petty" spells that everyone knows. Then go down the list of colleges and assign specific upgrades to each college. You can make this step even easier by only fleshing out the colleges your players are going to use.

I think creating the custom talents that are limited is a great idea.

As i said, I'm not familiar with the magical lore of Warhammer, but if you want to list out the ones you're having trouble with, and what their niche is i would be more than willing to try and brain storm how to translate them.

OK.. thats kinda the direction im thinking..

And for the Lore of Fire, or the Lore of the Heavens, effects exist (Burn and Lightning).

But for the more... out there Collages, such as the Lore of Shadows, or the Lore of Death (Which is not about raising Undead in Warhammer, thats a Chaos list), there isnt much that would really 'Flavour' those schools.

Would it help If I tried to put together a general list of the Collages (And Divinities) and what the overarching 'taste' is for each? (This might take me a while, there is alot to recap on... its been a while for me too)

27 minutes ago, RebelDave said:

OK.. thats kinda the direction im thinking..

And for the Lore of Fire, or the Lore of the Heavens, effects exist (Burn and Lightning).

But for the more... out there Collages, such as the Lore of Shadows, or the Lore of Death (Which is not about raising Undead in Warhammer, thats a Chaos list), there isnt much that would really 'Flavour' those schools.

Would it help If I tried to put together a general list of the Collages (And Divinities) and what the overarching 'taste' is for each? (This might take me a while, there is alot to recap on... its been a while for me too)

I think that would be a good idea, and then the thread could discuss the flavors of those colleges, college by college. The alternative is to just flesh out the ones your players are going to use. For instance; when i was working on the first version of my Gentlemen of Fortune setting i started with races, careers, magic, & skills that i knew my players wanted. Then i just kept going because i was having so much fun. So it felt really overwhelming at first but got easier the more i did it, and knew i could stop if i wanted to because i already finished what i knew my players wanted.

Just based on what you listed above and a little Googling i came up with this...

Lore of Shadow: New augment effect called Shadow. +1 difficulty die to grant the target 1 concealment and additional 1 concealment for every 2 advantage. An invisibility or cloaking effect.

Lore of Death: New attack effect called Drain. +2 difficulty die and the caster recovers wounds equal to half the damage dealt by the attack rounded up. A life drain spell.

Lore of Death: New curse effect called Decay. +1 difficulty and the target lowers their wound threshold by 1, and an additional 1 for every 2 advantage. Weakening the target's life force.

8 minutes ago, Noahjam325 said:

I think that would be a good idea, and then the thread could discuss the flavors of those colleges, college by college. The alternative is to just flesh out the ones your players are going to use. For instance; when i was working on the first version of my Gentlemen of Fortune setting i started with races, careers, magic, & skills that i knew my players wanted. Then i just kept going because i was having so much fun. So it felt really overwhelming at first but got easier the more i did it, and knew i could stop if i wanted to because i already finished what i knew my players wanted.

Just based on what you listed above and a little Googling i came up with this...

Lore of Shadow: New augment effect called Shadow. +1 difficulty die to grant the target 1 concealment and additional 1 concealment for every 2 advantage. An invisibility or cloaking effect.

Lore of Death: New attack effect called Drain. +2 difficulty die and the caster recovers wounds equal to half the damage dealt by the attack rounded up. A life drain spell.

Lore of Death: New curse effect called Decay. +1 difficulty and the target lowers their wound threshold by 1, and an additional 1 for every 2 advantage. Weakening the target's life force.

I like those very much!

So obvious, yet so elusive to me....

I will try and get back with a generalised idea of each Lore and Divine school as soon as my brain allows me to read properly.

you might want to take a look at this

https://faustusnotes.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/simplifying-wfrp3-magic/

6 minutes ago, Terefang said:

you might want to take a look at this

https://faustusnotes.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/simplifying-wfrp3-magic/

Im sure that would be useful if I had an understanding of how WFRP3 worked, but I don't.

I never bought into 3rd Ed.

I was firmly in the camp of 1st and 2nd Ed'ers who said "SCREW YOU FFG! YOU BETRAYED US!" when they scrapped 2nd Ed.

(I have since forgiven them, as it resulted in the Genesys system, and Star Wars... but there we go).

So, I dont know how to reconcile that article with what I want to do

9 minutes ago, RebelDave said:

So, I dont know how to reconcile that article  with what I want to do

ohh ... yes i forgot that you have none of the WHFRP3 material.

the WHFRP3 The Players Guide p.239-271 (Appendix 8: Spell Actions) contains all the spells and statistics you would need for a conversion.

perhaps you can someone convince to sell you a used pdf, as it isnt legally available on the internet anymore ...

I went through the effort of creating Genesys friendly versions of a lot of the Blessings from 3E before I modified the approach into individual spell charts for each caster. This means depending on the career you use you’ll have your own set of effects and modifiers just like the standard Genesys system, divided by your deity or college.

So far I’ve only applied it to Sigmar, Shallya, Ranald and the Gray college, as those were the ones that interested my players. I’ll get back to the others after playtesting.

Until we do that, I’m working on Disease rules and a couple of adventure conversions from the 3E material. I’m missing a couple of the PODs, but I have everything else.

I allways try to make mye rules as easy as possible. I am working on a set of rules for implementing the Insanity, Corruption, Disease and Critical cards from WFRP3e into Genesy, since they are a lot easier to use than a bunch of tables and hand-written notes. I have been pondering how to implement the magic system because I honestly hate all the convoluted magic rules most systems implement for magic (and hacking in modern/scifi settings).

What I am thinking is simply creating a Talent for each magic wind which gives you access to casting spells from that lore. If I want somethin slightly more complex I will make it a Talent with several ranks so you can buy it several times to get access to higher level spells. Or, the talents downgrade the difficutly. So you can allways cast a high level spell, but it will be 5 Difficulty Dice unless you have talents to downgrade it to something more managable.

For the actual spells, if I want to do that dedicated work I'll use the WFRP2 spell lists. Probably splitting them into levels and give access to them as he buys talents or through learning them by studying. Alternatively, make the spells into Talents, allthough I think that might limit the amount of spells a bit much.
If I feel like more free-form RPG (which I usually do) I'll just let the player make up what he attempts to do with his magic and I'll set the casting difficulty accordingly.

9 hours ago, Darrett said:

I went through the effort of creating Genesys friendly versions of a lot of the Blessings from 3E before I modified the approach into individual spell charts for each caster. This means depending on the career you use you’ll have your own set of effects and modifiers just like the standard Genesys system, divided by your deity or college.

So far I’ve only applied it to Sigmar, Shallya, Ranald and the Gray college, as those were the ones that interested my players. I’ll get back to the others after playtesting.

Until we do that, I’m working on Disease rules and a couple of adventure conversions from the 3E material. I’m missing a couple of the PODs, but I have everything else.

I would be very interested in your work, it sounds like the direction I'm heading myself.

1 hour ago, Ralzar said:

I allways try to make mye rules as easy as possible. I am working on a set of rules for implementing the Insanity, Corruption, Disease and Critical cards from WFRP3e into Genesy, since they are a lot easier to use than a bunch of tables and hand-written notes. I have been pondering how to implement the magic system because I honestly hate all the convoluted magic rules most systems implement for magic (and hacking in modern/scifi settings).

What I am thinking is simply creating a Talent for each magic wind which gives you access to casting spells from that lore. If I want somethin slightly more complex I will make it a Talent with several ranks so you can buy it several times to get access to higher level spells. Or, the talents downgrade the difficutly. So you can allways cast a high level spell, but it will be 5 Difficulty Dice unless you have talents to downgrade it to something more managable.

For the actual spells, if I want to do that dedicated work I'll use the WFRP2 spell lists. Probably splitting them into levels and give access to them as he buys talents or through learning them by studying. Alternatively, make the spells into Talents, allthough I think that might limit the amount of spells a bit much.
If I feel like more free-form RPG (which I usually do) I'll just let the player make up what he attempts to do with his magic and I'll set the casting difficulty accordingly.

I did something similar when I tried converting the Star Wars rules (Pre Genesys), and it got complicated... either way, I would be interested in seeing what you've done

I would keep the three magic skills from the core book, and probably add Verse as well, to make sure magic users are all different without having to have 18+ different skills. After all every priest is a divine magic user, it’s just the flavour of their magic that changes.

Arcane would be the skill for Colleges and self taught witches/warlocks. Divine is the skill for priests. Primal is the wood elf, Orc, and skaven magic skill. Verse is a possible way to include a less powerful version of High Magic.

Then for the actual spell limitations I see two possibilities that keep things as simple as possible:

1. A more ham fisted approach, but simpler. Everyone gets all the basic spells, but they can only add additional effects to 2 of the Spells. Which 2 spells they can improve with additional effects depends upon their college/religion. As an example a Priest of Sigmar probably has access to the additional effects of Heal and Augment. A Pyromancer perhaps has the Attack and Barrier additional effects.

2. A more complex solution, but it could provide a solution with better representation of the themes. In this scenario you go through every single college and religion and pick the spells and additional effects that they each get. So a Brown wizard could perhaps have:

Attack + Ensnare, Impact, Range & Poison

Augment + Swift, Haste & Primal

Barrier

Conjure + Summon Ally

Curse + Range, Misfortune & Enervate

Utility

In this second scenario there’s also the possibility of modifying the difficulty of different spells or their additional effects depending on the school/deity. For example a Shallian priest could have an easier difficulty for Heal than a Sigmarite, but this could also be represented by the Signature Spell Talent

None of tgese really address the Narrative use of spells, perhaps for that you could set the maximum difficulty for each available spell for each college/religion

On 7/19/2018 at 4:41 PM, Ralzar said:

I allways try to make mye rules as easy as possible. I am working on a set of rules for implementing the Insanity, Corruption, Disease and Critical cards from WFRP3e into Genesy, since they are a lot easier to use than a bunch of tables and hand-written notes. I have been pondering how to implement the magic system because I honestly hate all the convoluted magic rules most systems implement for magic (and hacking in modern/scifi settings).

What I am thinking is simply creating a Talent for each magic wind which gives you access to casting spells from that lore. If I want somethin slightly more complex I will make it a Talent with several ranks so you can buy it several times to get access to higher level spells. Or, the talents downgrade the difficutly. So you can allways cast a high level spell, but it will be 5 Difficulty Dice unless you have talents to downgrade it to something more managable.

For the actual spells, if I want to do that dedicated work I'll use the WFRP2 spell lists. Probably splitting them into levels and give access to them as he buys talents or through learning them by studying. Alternatively, make the spells into Talents, allthough I think that might limit the amount of spells a bit much.
If I feel like more free-form RPG (which I usually do) I'll just let the player make up what he attempts to do with his magic and I'll set the casting difficulty accordingly.

I’d also like to see this work. I’m messing with Warhammr in Genesys, but need to develop the magic system further.

thanks..

Sorry, late to noticing this thread, went on a tangent, my suggestion is in the last paragraph.

I had a similar issue when converting a homebrew magic system to Genesys which included various "Sorces" which would be similar to the colleges of Warhammer. The skills translated easily, since I actually had three magical skills (Word, Thought, and Rune) depending on how you invoke the spells. But, for each magical type (eight of them, 4 elemental and 4 essences) I had to do more work which is not what you preferred.

I started by creating a new derived "skill" I called an Affinity. Affinities couldn't be granted with XP, but by various methods including racial affinity, talents that unlock higher levels, etc. There are 8 Affinities, one for each magical type. These have a direct affect on limiting how powerful (in difficulty dice) a spell the caster can safely control. A person with Fire Affinity 2 can safely cast 2 difficulty or less spells, but if he goes higher there are upgrades with possibly devastating affects. Next, I made a table of the 8 Affinities with suggested spells for each Genesys type (augment, attack, etc) for them.

Again, not exactly what you wanted to do. It's extra work. But, it worked for me.

Having played FFG's Warhammer, their system simply handled it the old D&D way. Lists of (or cards) of spells of varying difficulty which could only be cast by specific colleges.

My suggestion? If you don't want 18 different casting skills, then keep it to Arcane, Divine, etc. Then, use Knowledge (insert college) skills for each college. Knowledge would not be the casting skill, but would have a direct impact on many spells from that college as in the Genesys RAW system. Make it a requirement to have Knowledge in the specific college to even attempt one of their spells. If you want to go further, compare the appropriate Knowledge skill to the final difficulty of the spell you build. For each Difficulty > Knowledge, upgrade once for fun results with despairs! I can't wait to tempt my Fire mages to go beyond their capability and accidentally release an explosion of fire about them.

to add to @Sturn 's suggestion

assign a corruption threshold like in 3rd edition https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/wfrp/news/gm-guide/gm-guide-corruption-rules.pdf

you gain corruption points from # Despairs, failed spell-casting (# Fails ), or leftover threats.

you purge yourself of corruption by spending Advantages and Triumphs subject to GMs approval.

if corruption is over threshold you gain random mutations until under threshold again.

if the total # of mutations is higher than 2xBRN you become a "Chaos Spawn"

if the total # of mutations is higher than 2xWPR you develop a # of permanent insanities equal to the difference.

It is an old topic, but I was also fighting with the WFRP conversion and looking a lot on the web for some ideas. In the end I have asked myself a question - how many players will play a mage or a priest? Dont bother with the rules like WFRP, use basic Genesys magic and simple the mage character has to limit himself to casting spells basing on his college spells from the WFRP 1, 2 or 3. It is not so hard and this is a narrative game, and the Genesys magic system is really cool and so open. You have to know the lore and forward, only your imagination stops you. The rest can be taken from WH40 conversion which is so well done. Instead of wasting hours of creating some conversion I prefer to waste that time creating a good campaign or playing the game itself. Just my 5 cents.

19 hours ago, NicoDavout said:

It is an old topic, but I was also fighting with the WFRP conversion and looking a lot on the web for some ideas. In the end I have asked myself a question - how many players will play a mage or a priest? Dont bother with the rules like WFRP ... The rest can be taken from WH40 conversion which is so well done. ...

hmm ... most consider Warhammer a Grim-and-Dark Setting so to give it flavor you need some kind of adaptation.

your milage may vary and adapting from the 40k Conversion may be enough for your needs.

me myself and i -- since owning most of the WH3 -- chose the path to adapt from what was already present from FFG.

PS: sorry FFG, but i have to say that the new "Wrath & Glory" RPG adaptation for 8th Edition 40k should also be looked at (first rpg to include playable xenos).