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TTRPG Tuesday: Channelers, I Call It

Hello and welcome back! Another post? So soon? How? Why? Don’t question it.  It’s a TTRPG Tuesday.

Today we’re revisiting the concept a few posts back where I proposed a magic system based on hosting spirits that consume you.  Since then I’ve attended my first Session Zero hangout, as well as a local TTRPG designer meetup here in Chicago, and have been very energized by the conversations I had in those spaces.  Session Zero in particular was great for iterating on the >1 minute’s worth of explanation I had for the magic system (which I’ve dubbed Channelers for the time being), which yielded many realizations, one being that this is inherently more horror-sympathetic of a system in feel and inspo than any of my usual stuff.  But the main exciting thing to come out of that convo, is Philosophies.  These stand in as classes/backgrounds, but have less to do with the combat role of a character (as the Spirits can shape that) and more to do with how the character views Spirits.

Crucially, no one is wrong about Spirits.  So in a typical story about malevolent beings that consume your sense of self, any cultists who worship those entities would eventually be proven to be suckers, manipulated by the Spirits.  In Channelers, what you believe about Spirits shapes how you interact with them and how they can affect you.  So our cultist equivalent, a Spirit-Worshipper, believes that there are some malevolent Spirits, but their Ancestral/Patron Spirit is inherently good - and so it is.  Hosting that particular Spirit will not harm the Channeler; but because the Spirit has nothing to feed on, the benefits are much smaller.

You also have of course the types of characters I initially envisioned, who are like warlocks, balancing a series of potentially deleterious relationships.  But there are also non-believers, who can accept magic but not that it comes from Spirits, and so they channel indiscriminately, paying the normal cost (perhaps even higher) for power that they have greater control over, and without the side effects/benefits.

This needs fleshing out of course, but synapses are firing and we are having a good time.  We’ll see if there’s anything more tangible I can build out of this.  The three Philosophies I’ve laid out so far, and perhaps one or two more? And say five basic Spirits and how the different Philosophies interact with them?

I like this, it feels more asymmetrical.  Off to noodle on this some more, til next time!

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