SKM Development: Magical Research Revisions

Life, and specifically work, have gotten in the way of me providing for the requested modifications to the magical research system in SKM. I’ve neglected SKM a lot actually, and its particularly sad since my players have been floating in a holding action for over a year while I embarked on this goofball crusade to make house rules, and ended up inventing a sort of weird new system.

Previously, magical research required funding and gave no particular benefit. As magic, unlike the other techs, doesn’t have a list of Research topics (RTs) it also had no place for funding overages to go, and funding it became either a luxury line of a successful kingdom, or a foolish and dangerous exercise. The costs didn’t outweigh the penalty.

You had to spend reams of cash to maybe get nothing, and maybe end up with frogs raining from the heavens. That needed work. My main issues were trying to balance use with risk. Magic should not be a simple and safe procedure, but in that desire I went too far to the extreme. Let’s try this again..

For our new magic research, let’s stick with our three categories: Land, Artifact and Creature. That part is simple enough.

We’re going to modify land magic though. Instead of it being a one time shot of whatever, we’re going to make it like technology, and make it sustainable. Resource, Gold or Food, will power discoveries for ‘Land’. This is representative of sacrifices to enchantments, sacrifices, or rituals that empower it. So you’d have a situation where maybe you need to toss 50 Resource on a flame pile to get the Fertility enchantment you unlocked to work for a few months. Kind of like in King of Dragon Pass.  This also gives us an easier resolution for a majority of land mishaps, you could just toss some resources at them to make them go away.

Artifact still provides items like magic swords, and the like.

Creature provides creatures. Either wonderous, useful, useless, or dangerous (to your foes).  

The required sage for Magic Research rule, we’re going to keep. But he’s not going to go crazy if he fears his tenure anymore and increase a chance for disaster.

The biggest issue is the Mishap. And the solution to the Mishap is obvious. Previously, you fed money into Magic and it had a chance of going to one of the three categories. Now you choose the category, and a mishap, instead of having a base percentage chance occurs when you decide to try to push.

Pushing Magic is something you can do to vastly increase the likelihood of a magical breakthrough, at an increasing chance of a Mishap occurring. In this system, every sage has a stat called ‘Risk Acceptance’ or RA, representing how cautious or risky they are.  When a sage is pushed, twice his Risk Acceptance chance is added to the success percentage of unlocking a discovery, however it also means that the pushing triggers a potential for mishap equivalent to his RA.

Our First Example Sage is Lactose the Buttermage, he has a 1% RA since he’s pretty cautious (boring some might say). His king wants to push magical research on land magic. He throws gold at the problem to the tune of 500gp. Let’s say that’s sufficient for a tier 1 magical land effect RT and would normally grant a 50% chance of unlocking. By pushing Lactose, the chance is now 52% (not much of an increase). The DM rolls the percentage, gets a 38, they unlock a magical land effect. He then rolls a percentage to see if the 1% mishap triggers, it doesn’t. The pushing was successful. Lactose is pretty low risk.

Alternatively our Sage is Antmatt the Fire Ant Speaker, he has a 30% RA because he takes enormous risks for the good of learning. He gets pushed. His chance for success launches to a stratospheric 110% (50%+60%), assuring that something is going to be learned or unlocked. His king rolls for the mishap, gets a 22 on a d100, triggering a mishap. What they learned is that the fertility of spiders has vastly improved as they rain from the sky.     

This way the risk is placed on the player’s choices. He can choose to increase his risk to increase success, and he can also choose to gamble by looking for sages either more or less willing to take risks. Mishaps don’t occur randomly anymore, they occur as a consequence of the player taking a measured risk. This I hope will decrease the ‘magic just screws me’ factor.  

Also, instead of the money disappearing into the ether, 30% of ‘wasted’ monthly magic funding will end up going into random available RTs of non-magical fields, representing that while the mage wasn’t able to make a potion that made a man as strong as steel by mixing some pebbles and chemicals around, it helped out the kingdom in figuring out how to make concrete.

SKM Development: Magical Research

Magical research is hinky, because magic itself is hinky.

The ACKs system included different rules for being a mage ruling a kingdom. Involving towers, and literally building dungeons and stocking them with monsters to send adventures into to get components.

Magic research, in our SKM system though, works a bit differently than the normal SKM Research. It works differently insofar as well..

There is no base 5% chance for discovery. Your people aren’t doing research into these fields.

It requires a sage, who is our Magical Research Sage, he has the same upkeep as a normal sage, but he is always some variety of spellcaster.

Wizard rulers may ask why they can’t do the research themselves, and the answer is that they can’t because they’re busy ruling. That’s an old excuse, but I think a fair one.

The way magic research works is that funding for magic research is not funneled into RTs, they have no RTs, it is instead funneled into one of three categories.

Wonders: This represents kingdom wide magical effects, that may be temporary or not. Stronghold walls become protected by ghosts. Higher crop yields. All of the cows milk production being increased. Etc.

Artifacts: This represents magical things. Generally this stuff is limited, quasi-consumable and/or limited in scope.

Creatures: This represents the creation of strange magical beasts, constructs, or undead. Or alternatively, represents the capture of similar beasties.    

There is a side area though. Disasters. Magical research is intrinsically unpredictable and dangerous. And therefore, there is a base 5% chance that a disaster occurs during the magical research. The creatures created are monstrous vampires. The wonder is a perpetual rain of blood. The artifact is a cursed weapon that makes whoever bears it mad, and so forth.

Magical funding has a 25% chance of producing something when funded. Its benefit, or severity, is determined by how much cash you throw at the sage. Unlike normal research, excess cash expended on this is wasted as there are no RTs to fill.

There is an idle hands rule though. A magical research sage who is not funded, will still produce something (choosing a category at random), but his chance of causing a disaster increases to 50%. He’s taking increased risks to try to get his funding back and to impress his leader. The severity of a potential disaster is based on the funding he received two months prior, and assuming the kingdom has gone cold turkey, by the third month he will still continue hunting for discoveries or disasters, but they will be minor.