The World of Balance campaign will take place semi-regularly at Games Night in Pembroke College. This page holds some house rules and setting-specific rules.

Communal characters

All PCs created for the campaign are communal. They're not attached to one particular player; anybody who turns up can grab them. In fact, players are encouraged not to play the same character twice in a row. (This is to dissuade people from getting attached to a PC and then getting upset when somebody else plays it and messes it up.)

The Colours of Magic

There are no restrictions on what Might or Mind skills you can take (well, you can't take "kill people with my bare hands" as a Mind skill...) but limits do exist on which Magic skills you can take. There are six. Five of these represent actual magic -- the sixth is an all-purpose "defence against magic" skill.

The skills are:

Black Magic

Black Magic is evil, necromantic stuff and involves sucking the life out of people, raising the dead, creating monstrous structures of bone and living flesh, and controlling peoples' minds. It's not good for anything... nice, really: using it is illegal in most places, and immoral in all the others.

White Magic

White Magic is pure and holy and good. It can be used for healing people, protecting people, and dazzling enemies. It's not good for physical, visceral effects (you can't shoot balls of white fire out of your hands or anything)

Green Magic

Green Magic is summoning magic. At least one of your Focuses should be a creature you know how to summon. You can only use your Green Magic skill when that Focus is at stake in a fight; when you use it, rather than narrating the action you take, you narrate what your summoned creature does. When creating new Focuses, you can specify that these are summoned creatures as well.

Red Magic

Red Magic is the raw, untamed magic of the elements (which really comes down to fire, and the weather.) It's powerful, explosive, and very unsubtle. You do not get fine control with Red Magic. Nor do you generally get by without collateral damage.

Blue Magic

Blue Magic is mimic magic. You can use any spell that was cast at you in the past week. You still use your Blue Magic skill to roll on it.

Example: Mary has the skill Blue Magic 3. A few days ago, she found herself fighting a sorceror who had the skill Red Magic 5; one of the attacks he described was "I hold up my hand / and a great ball of flame forms up inside it / which I hurl towards you / with deadly precision." She now decides to use this spell against the undead knight she is fighting, and so narrates "I hold up my hand, / think back to the battle with the sorceror, / and form a ball of flame in the air / which I hurl with deadly precision at the Knight." However, even though she added four details, and even though the sorceror's Red Magic skill was 5, Mary's Blue Magic skill is only 3, so she only gets to roll 3 dice.

Furthermore, she wouldn't be able to do any of the other things that the sorceror used Red Magic for. Even if she'd seen him blasting her friends with lightning bolts, unless said bolts were actually targeted at her she can't replicate them.

Soul

Finally, you can take the skill Soul, which has Magic as a base skill. This represents your natural untapped arcane talent. You can use this to resist magic, even if you wouldn't know one end of a staff from the other. You can also use it for a sort of general "figure out magic stuff using only mundane knowledge and intuition" or "have some sort of weird wibbly psychic vision" thing.