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Old April 27th, 2008
deleriad deleriad is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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I've played and used RQ sorcery a lot.

RQ3 (after the errata) is book-keeping heavy. Most spell casting is actually done during down time with sorcerors pre-casting long duration spells on themselves. It's not a "plug and play" system as even the weakest spells tend to need multiple Power Points(*) to cast. Once you have a powerful Magus though (e.g. about 50 years of game time) then they're humongously powerful. Summary: High book-keeping, extremely weak at low level, probably over-powered at high levels.

RQ4. This attempted to downgrade the top end of sorcery and adopted some ideas from Sandy Peterson's system. Still requires extremely complex book-keeping.

Sandy's system. A very different beast. Much of the system requires Gloranthan cosmology because sorcerors gain power by taking restrictive vows. You could re-engineer it into other game worlds. Tends to require a lot of book-keeping and downtime.

MRQ. The simplest system. At first glance looks like RQ3 as sorcerors have skills for each spell and each art. However spells cost far fewer PPs to cast. Cast at the base level they cost nothing. Because MRQ makes POW gaining a lot harder than other versions of RQ, MRQ sorcerors can generally make a decent fist at magic using just personal power. MRQ is the strongest sorcery system at the bottom end but progresses in a linear gradient rather than exponentially as does the rest of RQ.

MRQ is my favourite but has one HUGE problem; Mongoose's right hand never knows what their left hand is up to. Thus, the spells have been basically copied from RQ3 without noticing the differences in the system, especially the ability to free cast base level spells. This means that some spells are ludicrously overpowered, some the reverse and some simply don't work. You can't seriously run MRQ sorcery as written because of this.
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