Sorcerer

Requires: Intellect ✦✦
Start with: 4 Life, +1 Awareness, ✪ Focus
Choose discipline: Light Magic or Dark Magic

Sorcerers practice the “high magic” of physical forces. With precise gestures and careful thoughts, Sorcerers can manipulate gravity, bend light, and unlock the deepest secrets of matter and energy.

The Focus Die

You gain a special action die, the Focus Die. Its size is based on your Intellect and a secondary attribute of your choice. Choose the secondary attribute and calculate how many sides your Focus Die has:

Intellect + Secondary Attribute + 4 (rounded down)

Based on your choice of secondary attribute, you might control light and gravity through subtle hand gestures and intricate finger movements (Agility), by channeling your raw strength into physical forces over a distance (Strength), or through the sheer force of your mind and soul (Will). You can’t choose Intellect as your secondary attribute.

Sorcerer Disciplines

You start with one ability: ✪ Focus Dark Magic or ✪ Focus Light Magic. These two abilities are the entry points for the two main disciplines of high magic: Dark and Light. These disciplines and their abilities are described fully on the following pages:

⧨ Dark Magic
◮ Light Magic

Choose which discipline you start with when you begin the game. You can learn the other discipline later by spending XP on its starting ability. You aren't locked in to your initial discipline.

Using and Losing Focus

When you Focus light or dark magic, you gain an amount of magical energy—also called focus—which you can then expend to cast spells. However, the focus you generate from one discipline of magic can only be used to cast spells from that same discipline. If you Focus dark magic, you lose any light focus you have, and vica-versa.

Also, focus is precarious and can be lost. If you take lethal damage, make a free challenge roll with your Focus die.

✦ 5+: You maintain focus.⬖ 3–4: You can take -1 awareness to maintain focus, or else:ⓧ 1–2: You lose all focus you've accumulated.

Hands Required

Usually, Sorcerers need both hands to Focus light or dark magic. Wielding armaments thus prevents you from casting spells, with only a few exceptions:

The Kotharian staff, a Mazrian implement, is designed to work with Focusing light magic, but only to cast certain spells.
The Solar Circle lore grants a way to focus and cast light magic spells while wielding a heavy shield, club, or mace.
The black gauntlets, another Mazrian implement, work well with dark magic, and The Hand lore amplifies their power further. However, this implement dampens light magic focus.

Ask the Guide:

Can I sense the presence of dark or light magic here?
What type of magic powers this Mazrian device?
Why is this island floating in a strange way?

The Third DisciplineLegend has it that Kothar the Kotharian founded a third, secret discipline of high magic known as Small Magic. This inscrutable philosophy supposedly described the behavior of matter and energy at the most infinitesimal scale. Some say that studying Small Magic is what drove the Kotharian insane.

← Way of Names ✧ Dark Magic →