The Art

A player's guide to magic in the Age of Legends. Keep the Casting One-Sheet beside your dice; this page teaches you what the numbers mean.

The Field and the Gifted

Beneath the world you can touch lies a second world you cannot: the Lambda Field, the living substrate of reality. Magic is the art of reaching into that second world and persuading the first one to follow. The rare few born with the connection are the Gifted; in game terms the Gift is Magery, and this whole page is closed to characters without it.

Your capacity is measured by QN and its pool, QP. Understand this before anything else: your pool is not just fuel — it is armor. Hostile magic burns a Gifted target's QP before it ever touches flesh. Every casting decision is also a defensive decision.

Casting Levels: How Deep a Working Reaches

Every working is priced by one question: how many steps from the thing's own nature are you pushing it? That is its casting level, M0–M6, and your Magery is the ceiling.

Level	The question	Examples
M0	Could my hand do it this instant?	Cantrips: light the candle, slide the mug.
M1	Could patience get there?	Hasten the harvest, calm the anxious dog, close the scrape. All bolts are M1 Force work.
M2	Still itself, acting against its tendency?	Vines grip a man, fire burns cold, a stranger warms to you.
M3	Changed within its kind?	Earth to stone, a man flies, a will dominated, disease cured.
M4	Kind crossed or unmade?	Flesh to stone, a limb regrown, a memory rewritten.
M5–M6	Nature refuses / the world bends	Lead to gold; the dead speak with their own voice. Ceremony and legend.

Learning the Art

Ritual Magic (VH, KN) is the grammar — theory, ceremony, research. Domains are the vocabulary: each fundamental force you study (Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Life, Death, Soul, Oaths, Fate, Light & Shadow, Passage, the Art itself) is its own VH/KN skill. Force — raw push and guard — is the commons: any Gifted may learn it, and it is why any two mages can duel.

The double cap: no Domain may exceed your Ritual Magic, and neither may exceed QN + Magery. Practice cannot outrun understanding.

Your Vocation — your Way, Order, or tradition — is not defined by which Domains you hold but by its curated list of trained spells. A Storm Caller and a war-mage both hold Fire; one trains lightning and one a wall of flame, and nobody confuses them.

The Fast Casting, Step by Step

1. Speak. Name the working: Domain, casting level (≤ Magery), and any parameter dice. Total dice this round ≤ your Magery; each sustained working occupies one die the whole time it runs.
2. Modify. Extra time +1 per doubling; trappings at the GM's pleasure; Deceptive Casting (−2 skill per −1 to the target's resistance or defense); Subtle Casting at −3.
3. Roll 3d6 vs. skill — the technique if trained, the bare Domain if improvising. Crit (3–4): full effect, pay the tithe alone. Success: your margin becomes a budget. Failure: the Failure Ladder — and the dice still roll.
4. Roll the Magic Dice — one per level plus parameters. On a bolt the faces are damage; on anything else they are cost and loudness (the highest die: 1–2 whisper, 3–4 plain, 5–6 blazing to every Sight in the neighborhood). Every 6 is an offer: decline it, or accept and roll a bonus die above your capacity — more damage on a bolt, an overshoot of scope on anything else. Never depth. And every cost a 6 creates is irreducible.
5. Pay. COST = 1 QP tithe + 1 per die showing 4–6 + the sum of any matched faces − margin (trained spells only; never below the tithe; six-costs never reduce) Matched faces are the disaster case: a pair of 5s adds 10 QP. Respect for doubles is why mages cast lean.
6. Resolve, note sustained workings, play on.

Reach, Targets, Time

Range grows with total dice: 1 = touch · 2 = a room (~10 yd) · 3 = a courtyard (~25) · 4 = a field (~100). Targets: +1 die = a second target, +2 = a group, +3 = a roomful. Duration reads off total dice: a minute / ten minutes / an hour / until sunrise — nothing fast-cast outlives the next turning of the light. Sustained workings run while you hold them, one die occupied. Set-and-forget durations land on objects and places, never on living people — buffs are sustained or ceremonial, and there are no enduring self-buffs at all.

Bolts and the Duel

Every bolt is Force, M1 — one technique, learned once, dialed from 1 die to your Magery at each cast. Your tradition's trapping sets what it's made of (a Forger's burns, a Storm Caller's is lightning) and nothing else. Bolt range = dice released. A bolt is cast one round and thrown the next (two rolls: control, then aim) unless you bought Heroic Spellslinger. Charging gathers up to Magery dice per round for up to three rounds — damage only — and an interrupted charge releases every die into you.

Defense: DR stops arcane energy; what passes burns QP first (Gifted), then the double-drain (1 QP and 1 HP per point). Resisted workings ignore DR entirely. The Power Block is the Art's parry: 3 + half your Force skill, +1 retreating; success costs a flat 1 QP; extra blocks −4 (−2 with Block Mastery); −1 per incoming die past the first. (Adapted from the Power Block defense in GURPS Powers p. 167 — quick reference on the Casting One-Sheet.)

The Exposure Ladder: below 1/3 QP, Attenuated (−1 casting, Sight −2). At 0, Exposed (−2; magic hits your body; costs come from HP; real workings need a Will roll). Below 0, the double-drain. At −QN, Collapse. Duels end, overwhelmingly, not in death but in collapse — and killing a downed mage is a choice with witnesses in the Field.

Tools of the Trade: Staves & Powerstones

The mage's staff is the Art's war-chest. A staff (or wand, or held focus) carries a powerstone: a reservoir of stored QP spent exactly like your own — casting costs, block tolls, any of it — at its face value (a 4-point stone is a 4-QP battery, staff-mounted or not). Recharge is slow: one point per day, and only on days the stone goes wholly unused — a great staff drained in one hard night is a week convalescing. You may hold one focus at a time. The duel statistics are unambiguous about leaving it at home: every legend about stealing the wizard's staff is simply true.

When It Goes Wrong

Result	Outcome
Missed by 1–2	Flawed success — the working holds; a roll on your tradition's warp table is its flaw.
Missed by 3+	True failure — nothing, full cost, the warp is the residue.
18 (17 at eff. skill ≤15)	Critical — worst warp row, plus backlash to HP.
17 at eff. skill 16+	Counts as missed-by-1: a capped master cannot truly fail, only complicate.

Every warp bears the caster's unmistakable mark — her face in the soured milk, her voice in the dogs' baying. Magic has witnesses, and the ledger is how villages remember. At least two rows of every table can splash on your companions. Traveling with a mage is not free.