What are the most game-wrecking spells?

- I'm voting for these two: Ranald's Detect Object (or whatever it's called) and Hero's Call's "Light of Truth" (i.e. detect lies)

Are there any "endless heal" situations that need to be houseruled?

What else does a GM have to be wary of?

jh

Well you know I'm with you on "Light of Truth", it has already been "disappeared" from my game (well to be clear, it's in the tray of player cards with a sticky on it saying "no way" so players know what I'm doing).

That's an "I win" button for a conspiracy adventure. It's not just "detect lie" it's "know truth". Sure it's epic with lots of bad modifiers, but are there no epic mysteries? For a setting that involves potential conspiracies at the highest levels of society, that's a badly designed spell. Perhaps it seems fitting for College of Light but this is the College Egrimm van Horstmann hid his corruption from to become Patriarch.

I've hated all such "mystery killing" spells in all game systems, starting back with D&D and locate object etc. Balancing by creating countermeasures is just nerfing spell to make it "not useful when it should be most useful" which is also not a good approach.

There's the celestial "long range teleport" spell (name escapes me) that is also a bit troublesome since the difficulties of travel are supposed to be part of setting's feel and also explain slow news travel etc. You have wood elf ley line etc. walkers but that should have lots of risks and is limited in where it gets you.

Rob

That teleport spell might be a fun one to "modify so that the adventure of traveling still occurs, but it becomes extraplanar, and possibly incredibly dangerous. In a sense, it would become like "Planescape" along a ley line. Lord knows what you'd find in the chaos void traveling… You'd want it all set up so that the entire group would go however, and not just one person.

As for "detect" spells, and even Sense Magic/Magic Sight, I try to keep it vague. Our priest of Ranald who had the "find object you want" spell really helped solve one of the issues of one of the scenarios, but found himself dead just a short adventure later. I'm now going to reintroduce the "hounds" and other horrors of the void that appear when a person uses magic sight too much (detailed in 2e in the core book I believe).

Funny the combat spells don't really seem all that game breaking. I think it's because they are balanced with the mechanics of the use of magic.

Other spells come to mind?

jh

It is related to this post. I never found any combat spell broken as compared to other actions, although as compared to "norma"l actions we only tried a few of them. The petty I found in wfrpg 3 was the lack of non-combat spells.

Runestrike - a Runesmith "Spell" on Rank 2 on Recless side

Cast with one Hammer brings 1 Wound, if I read this card correct to every Enemy in short range.

2 Hammer make 5 Wounds to every Enemy in medium range

4 Hammer make 10 wounds to every Enemy in long range

Double Chaosstar destroys rune and all friends and foes are hit with maximum possibel effect.

The wording means Wounds, not Damage, so this Baby as far as I know goes straigt into the wounds without being reduced by Soak or Toughness. That means this Spell is a runic H-Bomb and could aswell wipe out the complete Player Group.

The conservative side is more reasonable as every Enemy will get 1 wound, 1 stress, 1 fatigue per rune used. So this could also kill a lot of NPCs or destroy their Dicepool, if everything goes wrong the players will suffer the same effect but stress and fatigue is not as deadly.

Oh, that's not broken. At rank 2 you should be able to annhilate all enemies with a single crack of your neck and a flick of your wrist Any thoughts on fixes?