Fertilize the wetlands with the bodies of the rich.

Read (manga): Dra-Q vol 3 (Chiyo): You’d think a little light murder among supernatural creatures would be no big, but no, this means war. (As much of a war as it can be when each side fields half a dozen combatants, anyway.) The war is resolved by heroic sacrifice, the end. It was kind of weird all the way through, but it didn’t really live up to the promise of the first volume.

Read (novel): The Library at Hellebore (Cassandra Khaw): You thought that other dark magic academia was dark? It doesn’t even begin to compare. Every student is capable of destroying most or all of the world, many of them would be perfectly happy to, they’re at Hellebore to be made useful, named characters are getting eaten alive by the second chapter and it’s only downhill from there. Do not read if you are at all squeamish!

Spent much of the evening reading OSR blogs, which makes me want to weird stuff that’s probably not actually functional with the gamers I have or useful for my game design, but sounds really cool.

Written (game design): 276:

If we roll HP every round, maybe we should roll MP every round too?
Roll the dice and that’s how much magic you can do this turn,
sustaining ongoing effects and casting immediate ones. “Magic harm”
including curses, overcasting, etc, knock off dice. Think of it as
clogging up the channel through which the energy of the universe
flows. Probably costs would be fixed rather than rolled; one only needs
so many dice in a turn.

No, probably not. If nothing else, it lends itself to confusion
with initiative/HP, which is bad. Unless we combine them, but that
way lies madness. Right? Right.

Maybe rolling MP every day, though? Or something like, MP dice are
all d6s, and every day the GM rolls a single d6 and everybody
multiplies it by the number of dice they have, so it’s universally
a good or bad day for magic.

Initiative/HP is called Readiness, I think.

Not sure what MP is called. As a white guy, I probably should not
look through Asian religious terms for something that means oneness
with the universe. We established there’s no distinction between
secular and divine magic, though, so something religious or
philosophical seems appropriate.

On a vaguely related note (if you scroll up far enough), instead of
having attack dice, we could have an action-like roll where you start
out doing full (fixed) attack and inflicting any special effect of your
weapon, with each bad die knocking off the special effect or half the
attack. This leaves the question of determining Difficulty open, but
maybe it’s cleaner than having a different mechanic for attacks?