Introduction

What’s a fantasy game without magic?

Sure, the AD&D® game can be played without spellcasters, enchanted monsters, or magical items. Everyone can still role-play brave heroes, confront deadly foes, and attempt great quests or deeds of mythical proportions. In fact, it can be fun and challenging to do so in a nonmagical setting. But the point remains that magic, more than any other characteristic, defines the AD&D game. As a fantasy role-playing game, AD&D is anchored in the traditions of fantasy literature, and fantasy literature by definition features some element of magic. Even if the heroes of a fantasy story distrust or dislike magic, it’s still there in the background as part of the world they live in.

Generally, most writers of fantasy literature create their own unique systems of magic to explain the supernatural powers their heroes and villains employ. With great care and deliberate effort, authors define what magic can and cannot do in their worlds. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien circumscribes the wizard Gandalf’s power by placing restrictions on Gandalf’s freedom of action. The great wizard is bound by a code of secrecy and noninterference that prevents him from directly challenging the power of Sauron, and he can only help and advise as the Free Peoples of Middle-earth fight their own battles. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories assume that wizards must study complicated patterns and formulae to memorize very specific spells that may only be used once before vanishing from the wizard’s memory. (Sound familiar?)

There are very good reasons for limiting magic’s power from a literary point of view. Modern readers need to see real challenges and obstacles for the characters in a story, and magic systems that are too open-ended can wreck a story’s credibility and sense of suspense. If Gandalf could have just wished the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom from Frodo’s living room, what would have been the point of the trek to Mordor? Since fantasy role-playing games are flexible models of the fantasy genre, the same considerations are true for them. A fantasy RPG has to set very precise rules for how magic works and what it can do, and the presentation and workings of the magic system inevitably become the game’s salient characteristics.

In fantasy literature, it’s common for a magic system to be defined for only one world-setting at a time by a single author (although shared-world concepts are fairly common, too). The AD&D game’s magic system represents a common framework built up by hundreds of designers, Dungeon Masters, and players over more than twenty years. There are thousands of spells and magical items defined—a volume of material that is an order of magnitude larger than any other magic system in games or fiction. The basic assumptions of what magic is and how it works in the AD&D game are shared by literally millions of gamers and fantasy fans. Despite the immense importance of magic to the game, it is one of the few areas that has remained nearly unchanged to date in the evolution of the game. Magic never changed in function; it simply grew amoeba-like, adding more and more spells and items while the basic, underlying assumptions remained the same.

Player’s Option™: Spells & Magic examines the AD&D magic system from every angle. First, the spellcasting classes—wizards, priests, and less dedicated magic wielders such as bards or rangers—will be examined in detail. The various schools and spheres of spells are reorganized and new class abilities are introduced, along with an optional point-based character class design system compatible with the Player’s Option: Skills & Powers rulebook. New proficiencies and detailed information about wizard and priest equipment adds depth and variety to any campaign. A new magic memorization and casting system is introduced in Chapter 6 , providing new ways to customize a character’s spell selection. Spells in combat and critical hits with spells are detailed in Chapter 8 . And last, but not least, there are more than 30 pages of new spells included in this book.

Like any of the Player’s Option books, the material in this supplement is optional. The DM is free to use as much or as little of Spells & Magic as he wishes to in his campaign. However, we have tried to present systems that do not contradict each other, so it is possible to use all the rules additions and expansions without any difficulty.

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