In today’s blog, we talk about the Rune Magic system! First featured in Path of Iron, rune magic had spells with a lower baseline power than your average spell, but with the ability to build “charges” with each one you cast, letting you “overload” your important spells with extra power.
Scribe, by Le Rastislav
When designing rune magic initially, it was pretty different from the existing system. Runes were passive abilities or effects you’d give by inscribing the rune. The user could then “shatter” the rune for a one-time effect, but doing so would remove the passive ability. While I liked this design, in the scope of Pathfinder it didn’t feel very good in play. There was no good way to balance between players that stacked (and never spent) a large number of passive effects vs. players that shattered their runes frequently. I’d like to toy around with this idea more in a future product, if possible, but it wasn’t a good fit here.
The current implementation of rune magic was the next idea in line, and I was surprised it was the one I went with, given my track record of usually going through five or six major revisions before being satisfied with the result. The runic charge system gave a cool means to still have synergy between their chosen runes (though instead of passive synergies, it was synergy through overload effects).
Next came the themes of the runic spells, or “scripts” as they came to be known. I didn’t want to just use the typical schools of magic; while they are decent at grouping spells by the effect, I wanted rune magic to be grouped more by theme (like creation vs. destruction). This led to the creation of the six runic designs (alteration, creation, destruction, invocation, manipulation, and revelation) which informed much of the design for…everything else in the system. The effects of the scripts, feats and magic items, and the new archivist class all relied heavily on these themes, so it was important to suss those out first.
This is a pretty brief summary of rune magic on the whole; there’s a LOT of content in it, given it involves a new class, feats, magic items, and so on, and if I were to cover all of those things here this blog post would go on for WAY too long. So instead, how about we jump straight into the important bits:
What’s changing for rune magic in Paths of Magic?
The changes to rune magic are substantial enough that it’s getting its own dedicated section in Paths of Magic, with separate chapters for archetypes and options, feats, and magic items. It’s no longer interspersed in those same chapters for the other options in the book, which should make it easier for players and GMs that want to use those rules to find the relevant info.
Rune magic is seeing a pretty fundamental change to its design. Rather than simply speaking the magic words and having the runes appear on you (somewhere), you actually have to make the runes first. This is a significant departure from the initial design, since now it means you have to “prepare” your scripts. However, it also means that scribes that want to get additional castings of scripts, they no longer need to learn the same script more than once, which ends up improving the flexibility of runic scribes compared to their original rules.
The most important change beyond this, for sure, is:
EVERY spellcaster can now be a runic scribe!
In the original run of Path of Iron, only the archivist class, along with the rune knight magus and rune binder inquisitor, had access to rune magic. In Paths of Magic, not only are there more unique archetypes for bard, bloodrager, cleric, and paladin, but there now exists “generic” rules to replace any class’s spellcasting ability with rune magic. Wizards, psychics, rangers, you name it. Every spellcaster in Pathfinder can now be a runic scribe, complete with their own script list. This should make it a MUCH more attractive option for players and especially GMs, who now can more readily incorporate it into their campaign worlds at large.
Rune magic is also getting a straight 50% increase to its script list, going from 120 runic spells to 180. Many scripts have been fleshed out and tweaked, both for balance and to give some distinct effects compared to their typical spell counterparts. The diamond skin script, for example, used to function mostly like stoneskin, but now is a combination of AC and DR/- instead of DR/adamantine.
This isn’t to mention new feats (which have nearly tripled in count) and magic items, which have far more thorough support for both archivists and other runic scribes. New item properties like glyphic and templated give additional functions to rune magic (reminscent of the original design of using “passive” effects), while specific items like the archivist’s vestment and esoteric wrappings grants bonuses to scribes of various types.
Obviously there’s still a lot more that I could talk about here, but I don’t want this blog post to run on forever. Instead, I’ll be breaking up the rune magic posts over the new few weeks to go in more detail for each section. Keep an eye out for more updates in the near future!