No More Magic-Users: Magical Foci
You know, these guys. In an ongoing basic DND game I play in the referee or a player opined that they would like to play a game where there was one class, and that class was fighting man. I can't remember what stuck in my head about that but it triggered a set of considerations for me. The first was that my experience in that game is that a great deal of the fun of the game comes from finding strange objects (magical or mundane) and leveraging them to overcome strange mechanisms, entities and obstacles. Magic spells feel like another part of this. To me then, the next stage was not a magic-less approach to B/X D&D, but one where magic is peeled away from class (and race as class). This was my first attempt to preserve the fun and flexibility of magic, while turning it into a magic item for the party to use. I am currently testing this system in my ongoing OSE game in the Hot Springs Island setting. So far the players have not recovered any of the magical focuses (more o...
