He Did It Again (or, How Would You Deal With This New Madness?)

Burning Wheel Subsystem Advice and Guidance
1

Some of you may remember theridiculously powerful sorcerer in my Burning THAC0 game.

We’re into session…45?..now. Oh god how things have developed for the party. Long-term games are definitely the best way to play. BWG has done a nice job of curtailing his absolute insanity, especially since he can no longer stand “Out of Range” in a Fight! and just murder people with White Fire. He can be laid low by sword strokes!

But anyhow, the situation with his “Permanent magic-eating aura” has escalated. He decided to start pursuing a way to rid himself of the aura, and we came up with the idea of the aura actually being a planar entity that eats magic, and is following him around. Cool.

About 4 sessions ago, I introduced a complication as a consequence of failure: “The devourer problem has intensified. Now he’s not just binging on magic - he’s purging as well.” Mechanically, all failed Sorcery tests will result in a Garbled Transmission (or a 1/6 chance of Unwanted Summoning) as the thing vomits random arcane energies back onto you.

So now we’ve had a recent failure on a White Fire. The spell wound up changing to “Personal Origin, Presence AoE, Permanent Duration, White, Destroy.”

Now, I’m not a fan of the arbitrary “your spell kills you forever” thing. This sorcerer already has Aura of Fear and a magic-sucking astral daemon, so I figured why not make his life ever harder?

I decided to intensify his Aura of Fear to Aura of Death. Whenever someone enters this character’s presence, I roll a Die of Fate, and on a 1, they’re struck with White Fire. Also, Aura of Fear still applies.

Completely beyond the sorcerer’s control.

My goal is to make his life socially awkward.

“Nice to meet you, your Maje…KABOOM!”
“Well…shit.”

How would the rest of you have run with that one?

2

That seems like a perfectly reasonable effect to me. I can’t imagine the rest of the players are very eager to let their characters get close to him!

3

Time to give him a romantic interest!

4

That’s awesome.

5

Yes. Does he care about anyone or is he a murderhobo? Maybe someone you could put in danger? Aw with his powerful magics rescuing her would be a snap…oh, wait…maybe not so much.:slight_smile:

6

Also, if he accidentally kills someone who’s important to somebody else, there’s nothing to say that person will believe the excuse of “I didn’t mean to blast them to cinders…”

7

Well, I ruled a long time ago that Aura of Fear doesn’t work on the other players. For starters, that would get tiring, since this is an adventuring party and they’re always around each other. Also, it makes sense to me that the players would get used to it eventually.

If the party relationship falls apart, I’d probably have it start working on them.

He’s sort of a murderhobo, actually. The character is somewhat bland, honestly, but the player likes it that way. However, what I can do is use his new-found death-dealing to interfere with his goals. He’s got a Belief right now about needing to track down a temple of this specific religion in order to get rid of this curse - it’d be a shame if he accidentally blew up their high priest.

8

Actually, what he needs now is some way to even temporarily put a lid on his White Fire incontinence. That’s either fun material for quest, fun opportunities to make other characters who are protected (the party?) act as go-betweens, or a chance to make the mage turn to odd crutches. What if being soaking wet kept him from blasting? What if being roaring drunk did? What if it requires exotic, expensive, and illegal drugs to suppress his newfound curse, even temporarily?