GURPS spell chains
Apr. 29th, 2019 02:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI am bored at two in the morning so obviously the important thing to be doing right now is thinking what GURPS spells I most want.
With minimum IQ 13 and Magery 4 you can do pretty much everything in the books I got.
I bought the Artillery Spells supplement so I now want to build up to the really epic cleaning spell that can take care of any pesky out of place organisms, up to and including people if you pour enough power in. It's a Healing spell but 'No safer for living beings than being bleached, autoclaved, fumigated, and irradiated'. So you could have a one college healer mage with a spell chain up to Remove Contagion and then oh hey, oops, didn't see that whole army there, guess they're autoclaved now. ... okay, that would take either serious fatigue or a powerstone big enough you probably want to save it for ressurections, but still, area effect cleaning spell from the least expected person does a whole lot of damage. Has style.
Spells Clean and Cleansing have requirements from other colleges, so would have to add some earth, plant, and making and breaking spells, which whole college needs a bit of each element.
But if you can Clean you can Restore and Find Weakness, and if you can do Cleansing you can Purify Earth, which basically makes topsoil *and* shakes all the stones, treasure, and bones out of it. For an adventurer the topsoil bit might not seem impressive, but it would be a real world changer. Specifically it says the soil is fit to support growing plants, and Plant Growth is a prereq, as is Create Earth, which makes earth designated good and solid, but if Purify builds on to that it seems to need Purify to remedy deficiencies in soil composition. But then Essential Earth is defined as being three times as fertile as plain old Earth. And it don't need any Plant prereqs.
Prereqs for Purify Earth include Seek Plant, Identify Plant, Heal Plant, and Plant Growth. So if you're seeking Cleansing you get good at plants first.
Cleansing gets rid of bullets, arrows, barbs, quills, and any other foreign matter. Including, unless specifically excluded, fillings and cybernetics.
... I don't think there are dentistry spells, specifically. I don't think there are any rules about teeth except combat rules. Lots of healing, not that specific. And most of the Healing spells say they don't restore missing body parts, which would include missing teeth, but then the only spell that restores missing bits is Regeneration, which can also do entire limbs and seems like overkill. So now I'm wondering. Like, obviously dentistry doesn't need a game mechanic, but, which healing spells would a dentist know?
Pathfinder healing seems less fiddly and like it can happen more than once a day per spell no problem. GURPS just wants to kill more I guess.
Cure Radiation has its own seperate spell, which requires tech college Radiation spells. But seems handy if mages have radiation spells.
To get everything in the Healing college you'd need spells from Body Control, Communication and Empathy, Mind Control, and of course Necromancy for Ressurection, in addition to rhe above mentioned. Bit of Sound might be handy. So a well rounded Healer is a well roundwd mage.
But the short spell chain up to Great Healing will get a lot of the job done.
There's also spells in GURPS Biotech relevant to doing interesting stuff with healing.
Including several about pregnancy.
And one Analyze Heredity, which can divine the answer to one question about ancestry or inheritance, though the question can be a full dna sequence by the time the tech lebel knows what dna is so I don't see why that would only answer one ancestor at a time. Or at least it says it can answer anything you could by genetic profiling, but I guess that only includes ancestry if you've got both sets around to compare, so even the tech way has its limits. Still. Slooooow.
GURPS knowledge spells are more specific than Pathfinder equivslents anyway. I saw a Pathfinder spell the other day that in a single lvl 2 casting told you ancestors back to ten generations. Now that's a whole lot of knowledge. Asking the blood one generation at a time would take a teensy bit longer. And I'm not sure GURPS intends to give you names, the example question is like 'is he a son of x' not 'who is he a son of'.
Okay, that was nearly an hour not entirely well spent.
But it's a very different scale of story if even quite low level casters can tell you ten generations vs if it takes years of study and long prereq chains to answer if you're a son or grandson or great grandson of someone who you have handy for comparison.
The sort where it can unfold whole family trees seems more worrying.
... I should go to sleep...
With minimum IQ 13 and Magery 4 you can do pretty much everything in the books I got.
I bought the Artillery Spells supplement so I now want to build up to the really epic cleaning spell that can take care of any pesky out of place organisms, up to and including people if you pour enough power in. It's a Healing spell but 'No safer for living beings than being bleached, autoclaved, fumigated, and irradiated'. So you could have a one college healer mage with a spell chain up to Remove Contagion and then oh hey, oops, didn't see that whole army there, guess they're autoclaved now. ... okay, that would take either serious fatigue or a powerstone big enough you probably want to save it for ressurections, but still, area effect cleaning spell from the least expected person does a whole lot of damage. Has style.
Spells Clean and Cleansing have requirements from other colleges, so would have to add some earth, plant, and making and breaking spells, which whole college needs a bit of each element.
But if you can Clean you can Restore and Find Weakness, and if you can do Cleansing you can Purify Earth, which basically makes topsoil *and* shakes all the stones, treasure, and bones out of it. For an adventurer the topsoil bit might not seem impressive, but it would be a real world changer. Specifically it says the soil is fit to support growing plants, and Plant Growth is a prereq, as is Create Earth, which makes earth designated good and solid, but if Purify builds on to that it seems to need Purify to remedy deficiencies in soil composition. But then Essential Earth is defined as being three times as fertile as plain old Earth. And it don't need any Plant prereqs.
Prereqs for Purify Earth include Seek Plant, Identify Plant, Heal Plant, and Plant Growth. So if you're seeking Cleansing you get good at plants first.
Cleansing gets rid of bullets, arrows, barbs, quills, and any other foreign matter. Including, unless specifically excluded, fillings and cybernetics.
... I don't think there are dentistry spells, specifically. I don't think there are any rules about teeth except combat rules. Lots of healing, not that specific. And most of the Healing spells say they don't restore missing body parts, which would include missing teeth, but then the only spell that restores missing bits is Regeneration, which can also do entire limbs and seems like overkill. So now I'm wondering. Like, obviously dentistry doesn't need a game mechanic, but, which healing spells would a dentist know?
Pathfinder healing seems less fiddly and like it can happen more than once a day per spell no problem. GURPS just wants to kill more I guess.
Cure Radiation has its own seperate spell, which requires tech college Radiation spells. But seems handy if mages have radiation spells.
To get everything in the Healing college you'd need spells from Body Control, Communication and Empathy, Mind Control, and of course Necromancy for Ressurection, in addition to rhe above mentioned. Bit of Sound might be handy. So a well rounded Healer is a well roundwd mage.
But the short spell chain up to Great Healing will get a lot of the job done.
There's also spells in GURPS Biotech relevant to doing interesting stuff with healing.
Including several about pregnancy.
And one Analyze Heredity, which can divine the answer to one question about ancestry or inheritance, though the question can be a full dna sequence by the time the tech lebel knows what dna is so I don't see why that would only answer one ancestor at a time. Or at least it says it can answer anything you could by genetic profiling, but I guess that only includes ancestry if you've got both sets around to compare, so even the tech way has its limits. Still. Slooooow.
GURPS knowledge spells are more specific than Pathfinder equivslents anyway. I saw a Pathfinder spell the other day that in a single lvl 2 casting told you ancestors back to ten generations. Now that's a whole lot of knowledge. Asking the blood one generation at a time would take a teensy bit longer. And I'm not sure GURPS intends to give you names, the example question is like 'is he a son of x' not 'who is he a son of'.
Okay, that was nearly an hour not entirely well spent.
But it's a very different scale of story if even quite low level casters can tell you ten generations vs if it takes years of study and long prereq chains to answer if you're a son or grandson or great grandson of someone who you have handy for comparison.
The sort where it can unfold whole family trees seems more worrying.
... I should go to sleep...