Feedback

I got a couple pieces of feedback recently which is great because it means people actually read this.

Firstly one about the HP cost of making potions and scrolls.  My thoughts on this were that I didn't want first level characters making healing potions every spare minute so I figured a 10x multiplier would mean that they would need 30HP to do it so they would wait till 4-5th level - as Daniel pointed out it also meant that you would need to be absurdly high level to make even 3-4 level potions and scrolls.   I did go ahead and change this to a 5x multiplier in the rules but I had to think about it a bit.  You could leave it at 10x and spread the cost over the number of days - however that would pretty much make it meaningless and therefore a waste of bookkeeping.  You could also make it possible to pool the HP of a number of casters for the HP - which I really liked initially.  I think that the 10x modifier came from something I was reading on ritual spell casting in the first place where the HP was shared.  I can see a cleric meeting with his sect for the purpose of whipping up a batch of healing potions and you could even make adventures out of this idea where the party needs to convince the local church to help them by doing them a solid.  I can also see it becoming a situation where you get a party of 4 mages opening up a scroll shop which I am not so sure about.  In the end I figured simpler was better and went with the 5x mod and hope that the monetary and time overhead can prevent too many potions and scrolls getting made. 

The other feedback I got was somewhat related, it was a question about guidelines for treasure amounts.
I don't have specific info on treasure in the rules but there is some implied information.  The equipment cost charts, the cost of magic item creation and the ratio of gp/xp would determine how much treasure you hand out and let you balance it with how fast you want the party to advance.  I am pretty cheap when it comes to handing out treasure so the values are probably skewed towards that, however I tried to keep things mostly SRD compatible.  Running a game -  I probably use the equivalent of the SRD encounter treasure values for a whole session instead, and I know that I routinely cut back on written module treasure amounts by 50 - 80%.  It's probably because I did start out playing AD&D and using modules and always always got into a situation where the players had wagons full of treasure and nothing left to spend it on.  Now I try to keep the party LEAN.   I like it to take at least a couple sessions to gain a level and I find it is way more fun when they are scraping by than when they are full of cash.  It's really a balancing act to keep the amount of treasure coming in and the amount going out in sync.  In Beacon I really tried to put in a couple big release valves on the player economy besides good and services - the first being spending gold for xp and the second being costs for making disposable magic items like potions and scrolls.  It doesn't really matter what the values are or whether you give out 5sp or 500gp for a goblin band as long as you balance it on the output side as well.

Really though the answer to both these is to do what you want and what will fit in your campaign.  It can be awesome fun to have a party with a wagon of treasure and their own scroll shop.  Those guys are living large!  It can be just as fun to have a group of half-equipped characters picking through the ogre horde for unbroken arrows and a bit of silver to carry on the fight.

Beacon Update

The second version of the Beacon PDF is posted.  It includes stuff like a second attack for Hunters, more combat rules, rules for scroll and potion creation, reworked spell lists (to level 5) and a bunch of other stuff.  It should be fully usable now and I plan of using it to play test a bit before making any more major changes.  And don't think it's not tempting to make more major changes.

I left up the first draft for a bit for those of you who like to compare things.

And if you notice any (unintentional) weird crap in there feel free to let me know.

Potions and Scrolls

I want to allow the characters to manufacture magical items but not spend all their time in the shop building dungeon busters or wagon loads of healing potions instead of adventuring.  I think that the first guy to cast continual light on a bag of stones and then cover them in clay was a real clever player who deserved a reward, however I think that allowing other players to do this and destroy the livelihood of  torch makers everywhere is stupid.  I think it's good to put a heavy price on crafting scrolls and potions, and also make a HP expenditure large enough to ensure that characters have to be a decent level to make them. 

Potions
Divine Magic can be made into potions.  The potion must be created in a well stocked alchemist laboratory and it takes a day per spell level to prepare the ingredients. It requires an HP expenditure of 10x the spell cost to infuse the potion with the magic.  Potions are applied topically or ingested as appropriate.  Suggested ingredients for potions are rare and expensive monster parts, precious stones or herbs.  Costs should average 1000gp/spell level.

Scrolls
Arcane magic can be made into scrolls.  Scrolls are written copies of spells that can be cast through use of a Read Magic spell.  Generally the type of spell (and other errata) is indicated on the scroll allowing it to be determined prior to casting- but this does not always have to be the case. Reading a scroll from a different school of magic adds a DC modifier of +5 to properly cast the spell.  

Costs for making scrolls should be comparable with the costs of potions (HP 10 x spell cost and 1000gp and 1day per spell level).  Like spells found in spell books, spells on scrolls can be transcribed into spell books given materials and 1 day per spell level.  The transcriber must have a high enough level to cast the spell in order to copy it to their book.

Given these rules a 4th level Restoration potion or Dimension Door scroll would cost the caster 4000gp in materials, take 4 days to work up and require the caster had 91 HP to create.  So they aren't going to be just lying around on the ground.

Divine Magic

The Cleric class is one of the most problematic because it has the potential to be very interesting or very uninteresting depending on how it's executed in the setting.  In a detailed in campaign world there is usually a detailed and balanced pantheon of Gods (or whatnot) for clerics to play off of. In a minimalist campaign there usually isn't a lot of thought put into it and generic gods are pulled out.  In both cases there can a be a problem because in the detailed world all these divine entities would require custom versions of the cleric to carry their various philosophies/powers into the world -  something not much supported in the general rules.  In the minimalist campaign the Cleric is simply is the holy magic guy - an armour wearing magic user who heals and touts the laws of a generic god - something which is supported in the rules but can be a drag. The SRD is least helpful in this, as a lot of cleric spells are duplicates of magic user spells anyway - so the perception of  is reinforced. Sure all this can be overcome by good players and GMs in either instance, but I think that the deck is stacked against it.  Ideally a cleric spell list would be a list of spells rituals that derived from their religion and the more religions in the setting the more spells and rituals you would have to deal with.  That's hard on the GM and hard on the players however and I tip my hat to those that can pull it off well.  I can't offer many solutions to this here.  I did have the idea of making the cleric spells over entirely but I am trying to make Beacon as compatible with d20 references as I can so I settled with working over the SRD spells, trying to find ways to highlight the class.  I did put back in a lot of dualism in the spells which I think follows from the older game - I can't recall if there was an actual cause light woulds in old d&d spell lists but it was implied (or imagined) a bad cleric could reverse the cure spells.

In Beacon, Arcane magic is the magic of Words, Divine magic is the magic of Souls.  The spells come from outside the caster and can be channeled by will alone.  Divine magic spells can be made into potions, they can be imbued into objects - but they cannot be written down.   Following from this a cleric can't add spells to their spell book - they either simply know all the spells as a product of their faith or have had religious training to access them.  I am willing to go either way on this - perhaps a mixture of the two if I was running the campaign.

As for the holy avenger role - in D&D the paladin fills that role, something that always bugged me.  I mean isn't the cleric really supposed to be the paladin?  If he wasn't he wouldn't be allowed to wear plate armour and beat the hell out of things- he'd be in the back with the wizards.  They needed a whole other class just because they won't let the poor bastard use sharp objects?

So a Beacon Cleric can use sharp objects (unless his faith prohibits), and can use armour (unless his faith prohibits) and can cast spells (the ones his faith gives him).  He can be the terrible dude in black mail on the black horse with the fiery sword - or he can be the nearsighted monk with surprising strength of will.  Or the swamp witch who prays to the fen spirits to take away your blindness.  Or something else entirely.

What spells can say about the setting.

I hate to harp on these obvious things but going over the spell lists really brings home how the rules, and especially how spells rely on features of the game setting.  For example here's a pretty simple 4th level Cleric spell from Beacon:

Ethereal Ward:
Range:  Radius 25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels.
Duration: 10 min/level.
Area is impassable to Ethereal creatures and effects (including spells such as invisibility and Mage Sight, but not greater invisibility).  When the spell is cast, ethereal creatures already in the area are ejected and Ethereal based spells stop working.

So what does this say about the setting?  Well it says that the Ethereal plane is pretty damn important for magic users since it appears that the invisibility spell utilizes it in some way (It wraps the target in Etherealness to be specific).  So Arcane mages (or at least the high level ones or the sages) are probably pretty somewhat versed in Ethereal lore or mechanics to have come up with something like this.   You may not want to do anything with planes in you game (inner or outer) but there it is in the rules and your players are going to be exposed to it.  They are going to want to know what other Ethereal based spells and creatures are out there.

I put this spell in Beacon to replace the SRD spell Dimensional Anchor because that spell made a whole different assumption about the setting - namely that there are a butt-tonne of creatures called outsiders zipping around all these exotic planes and you might want to nab one of them before they flit off to the Lawful Indifferent Plane of Left-handed Smoke Elementals.  Having a 409 alternate planes might be great for your Pathfinder campaign but I DO NOT WANT.

Ok this is a bit of a straw-man argument because Dimensional Anchor is a pretty nice spell and does not necessitate having a lot of planes of existence - you could just use it for a Demon bashing campaign (I will probably do this actually, just with a different set of spells).  But the basic idea is I'm trying to remove some of the baggage.  That's the other reason I am reworking the spells instead of just using the SRD.  The main reason is just a rebalance because you have more spells per day in Beacon and a lot of SRD spells get pretty powerful if they are usable on demand and aren't taking up a precious spell slot.  Also there is a hell of a lot of overlap in the SRD and that's just lazy.

SO, you might not agree on my idea of a fantasy setting but if you use the Beacon spell lists there will be no adventures to the Lawful Indifferent Plane of Left-handed Smoke Elementals like you get when you use those nasty SRD spells.

Druids

I'm through working over the Arcane spells and onto the Divine spells now, and so almost ready to post the new draft.   Since Druids aren't a variant of Clerics in Beacon, most of their overlapped healing ability is out the window (for the better I think) but I did leave in some aspects of it - namely dealing with poisons and dealing with fatigue. There's a nice first level spell that ties in with the rules about HP and resting* and would be helpful for a traveling party.

Restful Glade:
Range: 25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels.
Duration: 8 hours.
Description:  Enchants an area, providing a comfortable rest in the wilderness.

For some reason 4th level Druid spells needed a lot of work so here are three of them I had to work up.  This is the replacement for the Druid animal shape change special ability which I think is pretty fair.

Animal Form:
Range: Personal.
Duration: 10min./level.
Description:  Caster is able to assume any natural animal form.  They assume the statistics of the form and can use any natural abilities of the animal (e.g. dig, fly, smell) however they retain their original HP and the ability to speak and cast spells.

This one should add some damage when cast on a floor or someones sword.

Static Charge:
Range:  Touch.
Duration: Instant.
Description:  Adds 1d6/level of lightning damage to an object which is discharged when next touched.

This one replaces Summon Nature's Ally 1-6 in the SRD with one spell.  I'll probably make a more robust summoning spell to replace the top level versions but call it something else.

Summon Nature’s Ally:
Range: 25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels.
Duration: 1 min./level.
Description:  Summons non-intelligent, non-magical animal(s) totaling 6 HD who fight or otherwise act on behalf of the caster for example a 6 HD lion, or three 2 HD wolves or a dozen rats or ravens with ½ HD each.  The creatures immediately vanish when killed or when the spell ends.

So that about sums it up for Arcane magic and Druids, Mages and IlluEnchanters.  Next week: Clerics and Divine Magic and hopefully a new draft of the Beacon PDF.


*Hit Points are restored fully after a solid rest, usually 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep or meditation in comfortable surroundings. Partial recovery can be determined by the Game Master. For example a character trying to rest in a cold dank cave or while hiding in a forest with no fire or shelter may gain back only some HP, while a character lodging in an expensive inn with a soft bed and a hot meal and bath would perhaps only require 6 hours rest.

some call him... Tim

Beacon has an Illusionist class because the Microlite advanced rules have an Illusionist class (probably because AD&D had (has?) an Illusionist class).  It's also because I have a metal mini of an illusionist just like this one:

Ral Partha's Female Illusionist

It's certainly not because I ever played an Illusionist or had an Illusionist in any of the games I ran.  I believe it's because the name Illusionist sounds pretty wonky.  I mean who wants to be Latona the Illusionist?   No one will take your gold, everyone cracks wise about what you have to do to get a man, all the jokes about if they are real or not.  Also of all the spells in the Illusionist list there are a lot of mind altering spells but not a real majority of actual illusions.  Now I'm not saying that the Illusionist class isn't good - in fact I've spent more work on it than any of the other ones and I want it to work.  But maybe I should rename it.

I tried to make the class names more generic so that instead of the Ranger (retconned these days to mean 'ranged damage dealer' from the original 'elf hugger who likes to walk a lot') you have the Hunter.  A Hunter you can fit into more roles such as Barbarian wanderer, Bowman or City Rat-catcher as I mentioned a while back.  Also the class Rogue is more generic and covers more ground than simply Thief - including players who want to be an Assassin, or a Con-man, or a Horse Courier who likes to swindle people in real-estate.

Mages get a bonus to Knowledge - they are the scholarly types. Druids get a bonus to Survival/Knowledge - they are the natural philosopher types. Illusionists get a bonus to Communication/Subterfuge - they are the tricky mind messing type.  They deal in illusions yes, but that's only part of their repertoire.  They are just as happy to use charms and compulsions to get the job done, maybe even more happy.

If you hadn't already guessed, I had a sudden strong compulsion desire to re-brand the whole Illusionist class to Enchanter.