anb's logs

His Magicsty, The Gathering

One of my first ttrpg white whales was been Magic: The Gathering - and it lingers around my shores to these days.

Before I even knew more than one ttrpg system, I was already drafting character sheets and terrible rules for playing an MTG inspired campaign. I later found out that D&D had its own Magic-inspired sourcebooks and was, well, immensely dissapointed. From what I knew about MTG lore, those lists of spells with verbal components and class restrictions had nothing to do with the awesome idea of colorful mana permeating the world, affecting mages and non-mages alike. That lovely moment of Tamiyo curing Jace's madness with a spell made by telling the stories of the Myr could never be recreated by D&D's rigid spell requirements. And I couldn't even use my cool trading cards while playing!

And so, rather weirdly, my flame of creating questionable MTG homebrews got slowly stifled. Maybe it was because I started playing more distinct rpgs or maybe it was because real life got in the way of playing MTG all the time with my friends. Hell, maybe it was because Wizards of the Coast transformed one of my favorite fantasy worlds into a soulless collab machine, but the important part is that the idea went away. I often thought I could just one day run a full FKR Magic game with some peeps that were really familiar with the source material, but I would very much like to have some fun mechanics involving cards and I wasn't going to rule that on the spot.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about, well, D&D, and the conversation went into Magic: The Gathering and ttrpgs, and it occurred to me that I now know of a very cool ttrpg that uses cards in interesting ways! Cards that could be replaced with MTG cards to create an adorable aesthetic cohesion to the subject matter, actually. It is, of course, His Majesty The Worm, by Josh McCrowell.

So let's brainstorm some ideas of how I could infuse some Magic: The Gathering sauce into HMTW. Like my WoDu Avatar hack, this may never see a table or a pretty pdf, but it got me excited about an MTG ttrpg again so I decided it was worth writing down. Also, I'm gonna assume familiarity with Josh's rules and, in case you're lacking that, go grab the game because it's awesome.

The Minor Arcana

So everything instantly fell apart on a direct conversion because of several reasons.

The first one is the suits. Five colors of mana (six if we try to get colorless cards into the mix) versus the four suits of the minor arcana, which means increasing the deck size quite a bit and reducing the chance of a Great Success. That's actually fine by me, I like when special results are quite unlikely.

The second problem is the Mana Value. I naturally thought of representing the number of the card with the Mana Value (Converted Mana Cost, back in my day), but Mana Values don't really go up as high as 14 in every color. Actually, there is only one card with MV 14, Blinkmoth Infusion, and only one card with MV 13, which is our favorite spaghetti lady, Emrakul, The Promised End. So even if we were using all Magic cards available, we couldn't replicate the Minor Arcana and that means changing the fixed Success number of 14+. An unmedicated psychopath would suggest using the power and toughness value of creature, but let's not do that since it would be a pain to tell at a glance - and even still, there would not be enough cards with P/T 13 and 14 anyway.

Problem three is that I don't want to use every Magic card available, I want to use creatures only. Why? Because I can't use lands since they don't have a number on them and I want to use spells as cards that are in posession of the players, not the table. This also lowers our MV threshold to 9, because white cards take the "white weenie" thing very serioulsy and there are no white creatures with MV 10.

And now for the last (as if) problem, we have to make our version of the Fool card. It should obviously be Fblthp, the Lost, even though I'd rather it be a colorless card.

With that out of the way, let's assume the math is going to magically work out and draft something slightly presentable.

The Fate Deck and Tests of Fate (work-in-progress name) (and procedure)

Build a 46-card deck with the following cards:

When a character's action may lead to an uncertain fate and etc, Test Your Fate:

The GM decides the action's Color, tha player Channels Mana (more on that later) then draws from the Fate Deck and adds both the cards' MVs.

Success: Total value 9 or more

Failure: Total value 8 or less

Great success: Total value 9 or more and the Fate card matches the action's color.

Great failure: Total value 8 or less and no cards match the action's color.

Fblthp, the Lost counts as a colorless card with MV 0. If you draw Fblthp: after resolving the Test of Fate, reshuffle the Fate Deck.

Attributes Colors

This is the worst part. My heart says to rip out attributes and just use the colors from MTG and the vibes associated with them, but my brain assures me that that's not going to work. Well, little does my brain know that it has no evidence for this unless I playtest, and we all know how that turns out.

Since we have no playtest evidence, I'm going to replace the Attributes from His Majesty The Worm with MTG's colors. Decision making! The idea is that these colors represent both the mana that the character concept is aligned with and the overall vibe of the actions the character is taking in the fiction. The colors are going to be used to build your character's personal deck of cards and, as mentioned previously, determine when you're adding bonuses to your Tests of Fate.

Colors (work-in-progress uhhh rule?)

Choose up to three colors that represent your character, which will be their Color Identity. Colors are also attributed to individual actions on Tests of Fate.

White: diplomacy, order, law, selflessness

Blue: subtlety, knowledge, caution, detail

Black: self-interest, ambition, pride, power

Red: haste, destruction, impulse, emotion

Green: connection, harmony, resilience, spirituality

I just skimmed the MTG Wiki and Rosewater's articles1 regarding colors, but there are likely better words for each one. I am assuming at least the GM (me, it's me) will be familiar enough with the source material to know what each color tends to be about.

You may have noticed that I completely scrapped the Attribute numerical values from HMTW. That's because I want players to use cards from their Library on every roll. I think playtesting might reveal that this entails a reduction on the success threshold, but let's skip the boring numbers and talk about using your personal deck!

Combat and Pushing Fate Library and Channeling Mana

As I've previously mentioned, I am very much against the combat minigame, but that doesn't mean I can't look at a nicely designed combat system such as Worm's and say "hey, let's steal some of that". What I want is to expand it to more situations and make sure players always have cards in their hands that they can use to influence their Tests of Fate and remove the turn-based gameplay. I also would like to replace the Pushing Fate mechanic with the idea of using your own cards to influence Tests of Fate. Given that I'm removing the system mastery aspect of "having a combat minigame"2, I might as well sprinkle some tactical buttons and resource management elsewhere.

So, players should be able to make a nice little deck of MTG cards to represent their character's spellbook and abilities, but given that we know that high MVs are good, we should have some deckbuilding restrictions. Honestly, I think the easiest way to do this would be to just have the player build their deck thematically to their character and add a fixed value (such as HMTW's Favor and Disfavor)3 if they can Push Fate with a card that thematically fits their action, but I want to try writing something a bit more numeric down, for the crunch enjoyers.

Library (this is the only name that might stick)

Your library is a 40 card deck that represents your character's spells and abilities. It must contain cards within the following restrictions:

When starting play, draw 7 cards from your library.

That seems like a normal-ish curve, surely it requires no more thinking beyond that. In a very distant future, there could be a progression system that let's you exchange some cards with better ones, if we're feeling like fulfilling some power fantasies. Now, for using the cards...

Channeling Mana

Whenever you test your fate, choose to use a card in your hand in one of two ways:

After resolving the test of fate, put the used card in your discard pile and draw a card.

Is this fun? You can make a lot of different decisions, like trying to build a better hand for the future, using your weaker cards to nullify critical failures, cycling cards that aren't related to the situation at hand... Maybe items or a game currency such as HMTW's Resolve can let a player Channel Mana more than once per Test of Fate? And maybe with a good enough description, a player can add the MV of a card with a color different from the action's? What happens when you run out of cards, just reshuffle? Much to think about.

Everything else

HMTW still has a lot of other interesting things to play around with, but this post is getting a bit too long, so maybe I'll wait until playtesting this4 to write some more. I wonder how broken this'll all be! Let's just rapid-fire some stuff...

And that's it for now! While drafting this, I was thinking how cool it would be to adapt Rowan, Rook and Decard's Resistance System to MTG, using the colors as Domains, but let's leave that for another day, shall we?

anb

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  1. I'm going to link to the article discussing green because it also links to all the others.↩

  2. Yeah, I know it's called the "Challenge Phase", not combat.↩

  3. This would likely require putting the attribute numbers back in and having a pushing mechanic more like the original.↩

  4. If I say it enough times, maybe it'll happen, ok?!↩

#hmtw #magic-the-gathering #ttrpg