What the fuck, humans? How do you still need this? Just repurpose all the men as reactor shielding, already.
No gaming, Ken has to parent.
Read (manga): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 13 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Having escaped that side quest, Frieren resumes her main quest of heading northward and finding obscure spells and meeting people who knew Himmel. Also, ninjas!
Written (game design): 420:
More horrible things a monster can do to PCs:
– engulf them
– be immune to certain attacks
– generate strong magnetic fields
– cause a ruckus that attracts other monsters
– make their equipment decay
– turn into a cloud of vapor
– covered in spikes
– electrically charged
– perpetually on fire
– everything’s on fire
– conjure minions
– forcefields
– aura of unnatural fear
– paralyze them
There is so much here, trying to consolidate it would be basically
reinventing Hero System. Which doesn’t have separate rules for every
single forced-movement effect, so could be worse. But also, a lot of
these don’t seem like a wizard could steal them. A vampire’s hypnotic
gaze? Sure. Porcupine quills? That would be weird. Dragon breath? In
between, depending on how exactly dragons get that fire to breathe.
Also, we still don’t want to be saying that some things are natural and
some are magic, because “magic” is natural.
(I think this may tie into the OSR thing of “player skill vs character
powers” because “player skill” tends to mean real-world logic, with
limited specific exceptions unambiguously defined in real-world terms, game
mechanics, or both, so they can be logicked. Not sure where I’m going
with this, since the game world has to be at least somewhat consistent
or players can’t make choices.)
Maybe instead of stealing powers, wizards copy them. Breathing fire
isn’t a magic power dragons have from an astral mechanism, but a clever
wizard can watch the dragon breath fire and figure out how to conjure
something similar. That’s a lot more sensible, but also a lot less
interesting.
Maybe the whole idea of stealing powers from monsters is a non-starter.
It was never going to be the only way to get spells, since not all
wizards are adventuring weirdos. If nothing else, they have to have
something to start out with (unless it’s like clerics in the old days,
where you couldn’t cast spells until level 2).
I guess monsters are in some sense never “natural” since they’re
entities from the higher realms, or humans that have changed, or the
result of one of those two doing something unnatural, so we’re back to
wizards having been altered by the gods to give them powers. Although I
also want ritual magic because glowing circles and ancient languages are
cool. We’re back around to one or more of the previous times where I
couldn’t figure out how magic should be.