I’m trying to put together a new type of magic for my group, as in our game one of the characters is striving to obtain magical powers.
We wanted something different from Sorcery, since in the first sessions we established that in our world that kind of power was something you are born with, not something you could develop on your own.
Also, since the character is dealing with dark entities in his quest for power, we wanted to underline the vileness of the magic he’ll be going to learn from them. So we came up with a new emotional attribute, Malice (a sort of unholy mix of Corruption, Hatred and Greed) and a new sorcerous skill called The Evil Eye.
I would get rid of the relationships as modifiers to starting malice. The concept is already strongly pointed in the hateful direction and I think a romantic relationship would actually be a really nice counterpoint to such an evil character. You don’t want to penalise players for that.
More generally, I don’t think I’d like to play in a party with a character with this EA (except maybe if we’re all playing Orcs and Great Spiders and such). The fun thing about corruption is that it’s a trade off, a little bit of power for long term consequences. The malice thing? Yeah, its only point is playing a douchebag that no character in their right mind would associate with.
I like the feel of the new sorcery. Here is my criticism:
Malicious help (eg for Falsehood) seems a bit much. It has no great cost (generates routines, no fate price) for great benefit. I’d suggest charging a Fate point and making advancement user normal help rules (Corruption works like this)
I don’t like the Malice requirements for evil eye use. Let malice help evil eye, or mitigate tax. Otherwise you have a bit of a feel of only having access to powers at your level of expertise. Let the unwary plunge ahead of their understanding.
mtsr: the romantic relationship modifiers were actually intended to help the character!
I mean, as you said, Malice is even worse than Corruption: it gives you some power, but forces you to pay a terrible price. Like Spite or Hatred, Malice is basically a path of self-destruction. A character following it will gradually alienate himself from anyone around him; will never be satisfied by what he has; and, in the end, will lose everything he strived for.
So, I thought that giving an option to mitigate starting Malice could give the character a chance to postpone his fate or redeem himself.
BTW, all the PCs in the game we’re playing are of the villainous sort. They’re a bunch of ruffians, cultists, blackmailers and the such. That’s to say that we’re on the same page here, and no one will get hurt if someone backstab another character in game.
Why: yes, it’s probably better to charge a Fate point for malicious help.
As for Malice helping resist tax/casting instead of limiting the rituals you have access to, I like it. What if I let Malice help resisting tax and performing rituals for free, in place of the malicious help rule?
Or, I could simply let characters substitute Malice to Forte when resisting tax, like Corruption.
