Proton Square Gazette

2024-03-25

Thoughts on Magic Realm

Magic Realm is a 1979 board game which badly wants to be D&D. Players take the role of adventurers seeking gold and glory in the titular realm. I’ve been digging into it over the past few weeks using Tabletop Simulator and the fan-made Book of Learning tutorial¹. During that time it established a firm grip on my mind, to the dismay and mild concern of my friends. I think what I find so attractive about it is its sheer hubris. It sets out a fantasy world in miniature complete with monsters, adventure sites, magical items and loot, and even several factions of NPC you can hire and trade with. The game is designed to be incredibly replayable and provide a unique experience each time. Unfortunately it also kind of sucks to play and especially to learn. I’m probably going to come back to it at some point, but for now here’s some things I like and dislike about it.

Like

• Map generation. Tiles are large hexes with several clearings on them, and roads leading to the hex faces, generating a point crawl which meanders through several of the tiles.
• The chit system, despite its clunkiness. Other than special rules characters are defined by a “hand” of chits of various types. These mean each character plays completely differently. Action chits have both a strength and a speed, both of which come into play in combat. Wounds and fatigue are modeled as losing access to chits, giving interesting texture to attrition.
• The magic system. Casters need to know a spell, have a magic chit, and also have access to magic energy or “color” to cast a spell. Magic users can sink magic chits into providing color temporarily, or gain it from artifacts, map locations, or even certain calendar days. Spells have a magic school and color. This leads to neat characters like the Magician, who has one magic chit corresponding to each school allowing them to effectively cast any spell but forcing them to rely on outside sources of color.
• There’s a character called the Witch King which has no action or move chits, only magic chits. This leads to them being unable to carry items or manipulate the world except through their spells.
• Players write down actions for the day before they execute in a random order. Reminiscent of Diplomacy.
• The symbols for the characters and magic schools in the redesigned version I played. They just look sick as hell.
• I’m a big sucker for PvPvE and I wish there was more of it in games.
• I can call it “D&D at home”

Dislike

• Combat against monsters is mostly down to RNG rather than tactics, with more important decisions being about whether you should fight instead of the fighting itself. PvP seems like it could be more interesting and tense.
• The former combined with the fact that you’re going to need to fight at some point and that dying will basically end your run means combat is an exercise in frustration in my limited experience. Upon further play reframing the game as a roguelike experience helps but doesn’t make the game feel any more fair.
• Teaching the game to others. I was playing with players from my campaign and it quickly became a GM-like role, except instead of the game just working I had to dig into the rules I wasn’t sure about myself. I guess I should have understood the game better myself before teaching it.
• My impression based on the Book of Learning is that the game kind of relies on you already knowing exactly how it ticks from a strategy perspective.
• You only get two actions per day in caves and you’re going to have to pass through them in order to access other parts of the map.
• How close the name sounds to “Magical Realm”. If you know you know and I daren’t enter.

Although Magic Realm is a cited inspiration for Root (which borrows some of its terminology such as turn phase names and clearings) it most reminds me of Nemesis. Both are focused on replayability, genre emulation, and have a similar PvPvE element. Mechanically it’s even somewhat similar, as unique characters defined by their pool of card-like resources move between various rooms in a pointcrawl. A “refresh” of Magic Realm would lose the charm of the original and be wholly unnecessary, but cribbing mechanics from Nemesis wouldn’t be a bad idea.

It’s also an interesting artifact of its time, in a couple ways. There was a brief window where the Really Complex Game could exist, after people had the free time to play them but before video games were invented. You see the same thing with RPGs. Magic Realm exists in this space, but also in a unique space where RPGs had only just taken off themselves and began to carve off sections of the board game space which might otherwise have existed. It doesn’t seem particularly influenced by D&D to my eyes but I could be wrong. It’s also interesting in the sense that many of the various conventions and techniques in board game design hadn’t been established yet. I always enjoy digging up games like that, whether video games or tabletop to see “what might have been”. If D&D hadn’t existed maybe we’d all be big Magic Realm nerds who knows.

There’s a feeling of atomicity here, that the game cannot be tinkered with without losing something. It’s something I’ve only come across a couple of times, with other examples being Ars Magica and the little glimpses I’ve seen of Runequest and The Dark Eye. These are games you have to adjust yourself around rather than vice-versa. I wonder whether this feeling is a property of these games or a stage on a journey of understanding. Would mastering these systems allow me to open the hood and make alterations, or would they still be lessened by my meddling? The OSR hacks I’ve spent a lot of my gaming like tinkering with have the exact opposite feeling - they beg to be altered, modified, customized. Can you intentionally design a game (or other sort of system) to have either of these properties? I think that the modularity of the OSR is mostly accidental, and the atomicity of these other games a symptom of complexity and years of refinement through play that most RPGs don’t get. Intentionally tapping into either of those currents would be a difficult task.

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2024-03-25

Misc Campaign Ideas

A few undeveloped campaign ideas from previous years, updated with commentary. I like the “In [world] the players are [X] who do [Y]” format for campaign descriptions. I think I stole it from somewhere but I’ve lost the post.

Imperial Patrol

On the frontier of a vast empire, the players are rangers whose responsibilities are split between the local communities and the empire they serve.

Dogs in the Vineyard but fantasy and without the Mormonism. Inspirations include the Malazan and Black Company books.

I’m thinking the rangers themselves would be a Night’s Watch sort of organization. An underfunded mix of criminals and unwanted second sons and antisocial types. There would be a ruined castle the players would inherit to serve as an improvable home base. The initial patrol across their territory would be overseen by the previous generation of rangers, who would not be good people, and their legacy would be passed onto the players.

Structurally the frontier would be a pathcrawl looping through several communities and then back to the main castle. I want the frontier to be a complex place in terms of ecology, politics and culture. The players would effectively be the face of the empire in these communities, responsible for the safety of these settlements but also for the maintenance of their exploitation. I want to tie the ecology to a calendar and the passing of time. This is the time this particular flower blooms, this is the time this animal migrates, this is the time that these stars align and this magic is easier. Ideally the players would be able to watch the game world grow and change on these axes due to their decisions.

I was considering running this a year ago when planning my current campaign, but pulled back as I was feeling iffy about making the player characters cops. On further reflection it’s not a problem as long as the game world responds appropriately to their actions, especially the shitty ones. I like that even in a similar setting to other games, giving the players obligations and an identity changes their relationship to the world so dramatically.

Alchemical Princelings

In a colorful patchwork fantasy world, the players are princelings setting out from a hidden mountain castle where they were raised in their father’s court. Their goal is to win his favor by seizing power in the outside world and restoring their family’s fortunes.

Inspirations include the Umbrella Academy, the Castlevania anime and the boardgame Oath

The starting characters would be the only humans in a setting with lots of different types of non-human folk. The game world would mostly be trucking happily along doing its own thing until the players show up. I’m thinking that each player would have multiple characters, Ars Magica style. Players would have one princeling and several lower status characters. Each session would jump to a different princeling and their party of retainers. The princelings would be competing against each other to become heirs to the throne, while also destabilizing the world around them as they try to grasp for power. The princelings would have access to special training in skills such as dueling and alchemy. Character creation would speedrun through their childhoods, allowing them to pick the skills they are experts in and establish relationships with the other characters. I believe Amber Diceless had a system where each skill can be truly mastered by only one character, which might be something to try here. I think combat should be focused on duels, and I like the idea of stealing the fighting-game style combat from Exalted (and the old En Garde game by TSI before they made Traveller).

Spoiler territory for my players in case I ever want to run this, but my plan was to make the father immortal and tied to a steampunk throne like the God Emperor in 40k. His butler would likewise have some method of immortality, probably vampirism. The scions were born in vats designed by their “mother”, an alchemist involved with their father but who is now long dead. The father has sent several generations of scions out into the world in extremely long cycles which usually end up in tragedy. He might even be the reason there are no more typical humans outside his domain.

Looking back on this I like that this takes the typical OSR quest for power and reframes it. The characters are explicitly privileged, see themselves as more human than those around them, and their quest is self-destructive. At one point I had considered making this as a video game, but how I would accomplish that is a thought for another time.

Mobile Manors

This one is much more half-baked than the other two, more of a vibe than anything else. The big idea is manor houses which move around on giant walker legs. That’s it, that’s the whole idea. Gormenghast meets Mortal Engines. At one stage this was part of the Alchemical Princelings idea, but it was dropped and separated out into its own thing. Considering it again I think the way to go would be a barely-magic human-only world with the nobles in the manor houses coded as English aristocracy. I’m not familiar enough with English history to point to a particular era, but I’m thinking more of Jane Austen and Dr Strange and Mr Norrel than steampunk “Victorian”. Some kind of upstairs/downstairs divide ought to be explored, either via multiple characters again or by having two parties which are divided by class. I’m not sure what the downstairs characters would be getting up to (short of formenting revolt), but the upstairs characters would be involved in some heavy status-intrigue bullshit. Perhaps if the Gormenghast inspiration was leaned on more, the downstairs folk would be focused on their own rituals, hierarchies, and problems. To them the upper class would be like the weather. Something to be endured. There would be multiple such manors, but all the characters ought to be from a single house. I’m less inclined to explore colonialism with this one in favor of class relations but if one wanted to go that way something based on the East India company could be interesting. Perhaps it could be something the nobles are involved in, but from their vantage point it is distant and bureaucratic, more a vehicle for wealth and prestige than a day to day concern. Maybe there would be continental wars for the army of the nation to get up to, once again distant and far-away to the nobility (against a nation pseudo-French revolutionaries?). To say nothing of the potential for the nobles to get involved in Parliament.

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