Customer Reviews

GURPS Thaumatology

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When you want to create your own fantasy gaming world or adapt a setting from a favorite book or movie to a game one of the hardest things to do is make magic in the game work the way it does in the source materiel (or in your vision of magic for a home grown setting) without totally unbalancing the game mechanics. The reason for this is obvious a storyteller sets up his/her rules for magic in a way that makes a good story and can make it as arbitrary as necessary to keep things interesting, a game designer on the other hand has to keep it playable and fair to the player and still leave room for players who don't want magic using characters. Until now gamers creating or adapting a setting have faced two choices, use the rules for magic that come with the game you play and just ignore where they don't fit the source material or come up with a whole new set of rules for magic that may not work well with the rest of the game rules. Gurps Thaumatology offers another option, guidelines for how to adapt the existing magic rules to work in a way that fits your setting. The book shows how to take the standard magic system from GURPS Basic Set: Characters, Fourth Edition and expanded on in GURPS Magic and adjust it in ways that can radically change the feel of magic in game without having to completely rewrite the game mechanics including several updates of rules ideas from Pyramid magazine (threshold magic) and GURPS Cabal to the new edition of Gurps. There are even suggestions for how to mix multiple versions of magic within a given game setting.

If tweaks to the Gurps Magic rules aren't enough to get magic to work the way you want Thaumatology also includes alternate rules for magic like Path/Book magic that converts the concepts from GURPS Voodoo and GURPS Spirits to the new edition making magic work much more like it does in real world myth and folklore. There are also expansions of the concepts of syntactic magic and rune magic from Gurps Magic. Finally if no tweaking of any of these magic systems can get spells to work there's a discussion of treating magic as Powers (although I suggest having Gurps Powers, Fourth Edition if you want to go this route) and building it from scratch while keeping it balanced with the rest of the Gurps rules.

Now making magic work just right for your setting is still a daunting task but Gurps Thaumatology turns it from nearly impossible to merely challenging.

Thaumatology packs in virtually any type of magical system that a GM could want. I like it better than GURPS Magic, because several of the systems offer a way to bypass the huge spell lists that I did not want to deal with (virtually the entire use of Magic). Some people will like different magic systems than others, but this book offers so many, every will find something in it to use.

Note:You don't need GURPS Magic to use this book, which is a plus because, as of this writing, Magic is out of print and pricy, though the two books are compatible.

This book collects and updates all of the alternate magic systems from the previous edition as well as adding a few new things. It's not mind blowing or anything but it's an excellent reference for a campaign that uses magic other than spell based.

GURPS Thaumatology collects and revises the magic systems from Cabal, Religion, Voodoo, Spirits, Castle Falkenstein, Ice Age, and (I think) Celtic Myth. In the process it isolates the universal components, presents them as generic frameworks, and gives advice and guidance for specialization to a particular setting. This makes it much easier to understand and apply to new settings and current games.

Well written and a great source for ideas on magic systems for any roleplaying game, though especially well suited for GURPS.