Knowledge Is Power; or: Magic Without Spells

From the vantage point of my throne on high it seems that some trendy things right now in game design are classless stuff and diegetic advancement (that is to say advancement that comes from in-world means, like finding a magic training manual, rather than collecting experience points). Likewise there's been good stuff done with levelless spells, word-based spells, freeform spells, ritual spells, and so on.

All that's made me wonder how far we can push this trend while still retaining fun and ease of use in play. Can we do away with spells altogether? What might we use to replace them? If this interests you, read on:

Inspirational Sources

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-secret-names-of-god-and-wizard-trap.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/06/fixing-religion-augury-blasphemy-and.html

Goblin Punch has made clerical magic something everyone can do based on in-game rites and observations and such. Can we do the same for all magic?

http://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.com/2016/12/you-are-on-fire-but-like-gravity-fire.html

"The trick however would be making an underlying system that either is too buried in the background for the players to notice OR is something that might break things if the players get their hands on it.

Like "spontaneous creation" and having snakes formed from the trailing part of a women's dress left in a rain barrel; and this being weaponized by the players to make a shit tonne of snakes.

This might not be a problem and it would give a certain fairy tale aspect to play, however if it starts raising questions on why no-one has done it before, then it could be a problem

For example if you establish you can eat snakes, and snakes form in the above manner, then why are these people starving when they can make snakes from cloth and old clothing?

Which can lead to either adding on additional caveats (the amount of snakes made from water is limited by the amount of stillborn children that year) or further consequences (if you eat a diet of snakes you become a Yuan-Ti ) .

So depending on how good you are at making up additionally layers of weirdness and bullshit might become a boon or burden"

This is it in a nutshell. What if all magic was essentially 'womens' dresses in rain barrels => snakes'?

https://sexuallytransmittedcentipedes.blogspot.com/2019/11/so-zedeck-siew-did-some-writing-for.html

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2020/07/rituals.html

What if all rituals were based on the same set of principles, and with enough experimentation you could figure those principles out and build your own rituals?

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2019/03/osr-spell-research-and-magical-industry.html

What if all spells (maybe even magical effects in general) were built up from the magical paradigm of a setting, and instead of scrolls and grimoires and wands you got bits and pieces of that paradigm as treasure?

Thoughts

Why would you want to do this?

Fucking around with stuff in a freeform manner is one of the big strengths of rpgs over videogames. Spell-less magic would give more opportunities for this.

It ties magical power more into player knowledge than character abilities

Why would you not want to do this?

Coming up with a paradigm that isn't shit or immediately drives things to shit would be difficult. Making it and remembering all the pieces is a lot more work on the DM's and players' plates. Depending on the paradigm it might be easy to come up with exploits that ruin the resource management dungeon crawling or whatever.

Is there a middle ground that gets us most of what's good about both with the least bad?

No, you are either with us or against us. You can sit on the fence until a picket slides up your ass or you can pick a side, soldier.

Protection Against Evil/Chaos/etc. isn't the greatest spell, so maybe you could replace it with the knowledge that bodiless spirits can't cross a line of salt. Ghosts on your tail? Hope you brought a bag of salt (and that there aren't any convenient hosts around the ghosts could possess to cross your line). Maybe higher HD spirits could power their way over the line with a successful save, HP cost, or being temporarily materialized and made vulnerable to physical weapons. Having little things like that mixed in with regular spells and spellcasting could help make this approach less frontloaded while making magic and magical things more interactable for non-wizards. You could even decide against making a paradigm at the start, and let one emerge through rulings from player actions later on (e.g. could stuffing a cursed object in a bag of salt insulate the poor hireling carrying it from the curse?).

Example Paradigm

Here's a quick paradigm to serve as an example for where you might go with this. Maybe it sells you on the idea, maybe it sells you off it, either way we've learned something from this:

1. Magic Is Powered By Blood Freely Given

Every use of magic requires a sacrifice of HD to get it going. Each HD sacrificed for a ritual adds one 'magic die' to the ritual's pool (like a GLOG MD, if you're familiar with that).

HD must be given without coercion to count. You can get some from an animal, but they'd have to be a loyal dog or something (you heartless bastard).

2. Magic Requires Containment

Rituals in this paradigm must take place within a space defined by a boundary of certain materials. Some materials are better at containing magic than others. Each material can safely contain up to a certain number of magic dice for a ritual cast with it. Each die used for the ritual above this limit adds an additional 'disaster die' to the pool which adds nothing to the ritual but increases the risk of mishaps or dooms (again, as the GLOG), mishaps occurring on doubles and dooms on triples. These materials include:

Ashes: Safe for 1 MD

Salt: Safe for 2 MD

Gold: Safe for 3 MD

Powdered Diamond: Safe for 4 MD

Safe for 5+ MD: Some really wild shit, like an ancient dragon that's been tricked into biting its own tail

Mishaps might be something like (1D6):
1: Ritual is harmful where it should be helpful, or vice-versa
2: Minor inconvenience related to intended effect (e.g. ritual to cause fire ignites your clothing)
3: Become ritually impure! Add 1 disaster die to all rituals you participate in for 1d6 days
4: The boundary blows away and you can't reuse it
5: Ritual's effect is inverted (e.g. a fireball becomes a spout of water, a banishment turns into a summoning)
6: Ritual affects random target instead of the intended one

Dooms are escalating, lingering consequences that come in three stages, the first being relatively minor and the third being more or less fatal, and tend to ironically reflect the ritual that caused them.

3. Magic Requires Focus

If you just put magic dice into an empty boundary, the ritual will fizzle out (that's kind of boring actually, maybe it explodes?). Rituals need objects placed within their boundary to shape them.

Any object can be used as a ritual focus. What ritual focuses (foci?) do is add a 'Word' each that determines what the ritual actually does. This Word can be drawn from the object itself, e.g. Shield for a shield, a part of that object, e.g. Fire for a torch, or something that object can be used to do, e.g. Binding for rope. The person adding the ritual focus decides exactly which Word it brings to the ritual.

After the ritual focuses have been added, the participants then issue a command of with a maximum number of words (lower-case w) equal to the magic dice in the ritual +1. Based on the command and the ritual's Words the DM then adjudicates what the ritual actually does.

You can use as many ritual focuses as there are magic dice in the ritual +1. Ritual focuses are consumed by their ritual. Using exceptionally rare, difficult to obtain, etc., focuses (such as a rope woven from a prince's beard or the emperor's crown) means that any miscasts rolled don't count. Dooms still take effect as normal.

For how powerful a ritual should be given the amount of magic dice put into it (or how long it lasts, or how many targets it can affect, or whatever) look at some GLOG spells for a basis to work off of.

4. Magic Requires Direction

At base, a ritual can't affect anything outside its boundary. If you know the name of something you can direct a ritual at it if it's within your line-of-sight. If you've got a part or personal belonging of your target (hair, favourite pair of gloves, etc.) you can target them from even further, but they become aware someone's trying to use magic on them.

If you've got a part/belonging from someone you can also draw HD from them. This patron flavours the ritual (e.g. an ogre patron would make a ritual more brutal, a dryad patron might cause vines to grow around a ritual's target) and can decide one of the words of the ritual's command if they so choose.

This one might be too freeform. I'd recommend giving your players the first two rules of the paradigm to start off with, and a couple recipes as "spells", let them figure out the freer parts on their own or something.

Other Thoughts

Bits that could be fit into a paradigm:

• The sound of church bells compels unintelligent undead to return to their graves, and affects intelligent undead like a Sleep spell
• Saying a creature's true name three times in a row lets it know that someone's calling it from your general location, and if it's a demon/bogeyman/similar creature slip into the world near you (possibly into a prepared binding circle)
• If you swear an oath on something of yours and break the oath, the furies will come to take it away
• If you toss a stillborn calf down a well under the full moon it becomes a portal to the Land of Dreams until dawn