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For our final poll on what character archetypes people want to see in the limited space of the core book, we have the perfect Science as Halloween approaches: witchcraft! Cast your vote for your favorite Witchcraft archetypes today through next Sunday, Oct. 26. (You’ll have to register at the Shewstone Forum to vote; this is to keep away the spammers, not to track you.)
The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse, 1886
With Halloween approaching, we have a spooky new actual play video of Magnomonia! This is a complete play session of our sporadic weekend game, which grew out of our internal playtests. Four of our wizards venture into a graveyard in search of a missing person. We realize the audio isn’t perfect and we have ideas for how to get it better next time. Notice how the GM makes a simple plot and we, the players, embellish it with our crackpot ideas! Enjoy!
This week’s poll at the Shewstone Publishing forum is on theurgy archetypes. Theurgy is the magic of holy names, by which the magician borrows the authority of powerful spirits and commands reality to bend to the magician’s will. Although it comes with strong religious symbolism, Theurgy is a magical Science. In Magonomia, it works regardless of whether the magician has any religious convictions.
Come visit the Shewstone Publishing forum and cast your votes for your favorite Theurgy PC archetypes! You will have to register with our forum site in order to vote.
Here’s a page from the Magonomia® design journal: a diagram showing the relationships among the magical Sciences and certain types of spells we’ve encountered in the historical sources. A professionally drawn version of this, with an appropriate parchment-and-ink look, will appear in the core book.
All fans of Renaissance magic are invited to join us on the Shewstone Publishing forum to help us decide what spells will make it into the core book. This week, we’ll be selecting Astrology spells by choosing what character concepts will be supported in the core book.
The Astrologer by Ferdinand Bol (1616-1684), courtesy of the Rosenwald Collection, US National Gallery of Art
The author team has developed slightly over 200 spells for Magonomia®. This presents a bit of a challenge because, as you can see from the Starter Rules, each spell takes up the better part of a page. From a production standpoint, we can’t fit that many pages in a book. A 400-page book would only be cost effective at a large scale and it’s not realistic to expect our crowdfunding campaign to bring in over 1,000 backers who want hard copies. It might happen, but we certainly can’t count on it.
The way forward for the Magonomia® Core Rules project is a more typically sized, 250-300 page rule book. This means not all of our spells will fit — some have to be saved for future supplements.
To help us decide which spells to prioritize in the near term, we’re using the concept of archetypes. Archetypes are an optional tool for character creation that describe a broad concept for a type of Renaissance wizard, such as “Alchemist mystic” or “Astrologer detective.” The archetype comes with a list of suggested spells that will best equip the wizard to do their job. Come help us figure out which archetypes are your favorites, and we’ll make sure they have a collection of interesting, useful, and historically-themed spells to match their concept.