Yesterday, I went down a slippery slope. I started messing with gematria as a spell building system.

So, a ran the gematria for all the spells in The Black Hack, The Rules Cyclopedia, and the Rules Cyclopedia spell names translated into Latin. (Thanks Encounter zine issue #3).

I will post the results shortly. After that, I am back to the Blue spells for my homebrew.

    Working on magic for The Red Concordant, I have to fight off the new shiny idea so that I can finish this project.

The New Shiny is:

A gematria based spell research/building system. First, name the spell. Letters have a value from 1 to 9. Spaces count as 1. Total the letter values. Take the total and take the sum of the digits until you get a single digit number.

That final single digit number determines the level and relative power of the spell.

For example: Magic Missile
M(5)+A(2)+G(8)+I(1)+C(4)+space+M(5)+I(1)+S(2)+S(2)+I(1)+L(4)+E(6) is equal to 42. Four plus two is six.

This would make Magic Missile a 6th level spell. If the description of the spell is that the spell caster creates bolts that damages targets, the effect would change to something like two bolts are created per caster level, each bolt does 1d6 damage.

If you change the name to Magic Bolt and keep the same effect, you get down to a second level spell. That could give you one bolt per two levels, each doing 1d4+1 damage.

FWIW, if you want a 1st Level spell, I found the name Flaming Missile works.

This wouldn't be fun for every player, but I am discovering that I am getting less work done playing with names. 🙂

    More Red Concordant

In generating spells for The Red Concordant, I defined a set of criteria for a category of spells and then looked at SRD spells for inspiration. Each category is assigned a color for reasons I'll detail in a bit. After creating, re-purposing, modifying a list spells, I change the color name to something more evocative.

For example, the spells posted yesterday were labeled Black

The criteria were:
*Divine spells that are not healing.
*Arcane or Divine spells that deal with the undead.
*Arcane spells that a Necromancer might use if he/she was Neutral in alignment.

After going through some SRD spells, I started modifying the descriptions to fit The Black Hack style and mechanics. Some of the results were really inspiring.

For example, Ray of Enfeeblement ends up quite differently. Instead of providing Advantage for character rolls, the Monster Rating (monster HD in the original Black Hack.) is lowered. This seemed easier for me to deal with as a DM, but it also made it different than the Protection from Evil spell.

When the rating goes down by one, the monster has a harder time damaging you, resisting attacks, and the damage goes down.

For the other spells, the above process got me in the right frame of mind to think of spell effects in term of TBH.

Skeletal Shield was one of my favorites. It essentially grants the one time use of the Shield Bash ability that Warriors have. (It also sounds cool.)

After generating 21 spells, I looked at the whole set of spells and called in Shadow.

Currently, I am working on Blue spells. I wonder where this will lead. 🙂