RuneQuest 2.5 Spirits
Spirit Rules:
There are seven basic kinds of spirits. Disease spirits and Passion spirits are ones that Merryn could capture and throw at someone else: they'd engage in spirit combat with that person and do their damage if they win. Merryn can capture one these with his fetch, but will lose control of it if the fetch's MP ever goes beneath the spirit's POW. Once thrown, they will either possess the other person or leave once defeated. Healing spirits work similarly but are only used to chase off possessing spirits.
Intellect Spirits: these have 1d6 INT and can be used to hold spells for someone. They're what you need to keep free intelligence. Each is either a sorcery intellect spirit or a spirit intellect spirit. Merryn won't be able to create bindings for intellect ones. Suharo or Marius can learn those, or can ask Arlaten to do it for them. Also, Suharo will need to maintain separate spirits for his spirit magic and sorcery.
Magic Spirits: These have 3d6 INT and 3d6+3 POW. They know their own spells and cast their own spells with their own MP. They know 1d6 spells typically. Again, they'll only be spirit, divine, or sorcery.
Power Spirits: These have 2d6+3 POW and act as a MP pool. They need to match the binding, so sorcery-to-sorcery, spirit-to-spirit, and in theory castings would work similar, but that's way to fiddly to mess with for me!
Spell Spirits: These know a spell and will teach it to someone who defeats them in spirit combat. Technically, this is how all spirit magic is learned. We generally just skip over this. Their POW varies on the points in the spirit spell (this is a houserule), so a Bladesharp 6 spell will typically be significantly harder to learn than a Bladesharp 4 due to the spirits power. However, I tend to hand-wave anything at 4 points down, and up to 6 points for certain cult affiliations: Humakt has a regiment of low POW spell spirits with Bladesharp 6 to send out so that effectively all of his initiatives will learn that. Anyone not a Humakti (or similar), will tend to find that power of Bladesharp very difficult to learn: spirits that know the spell are rare and those that do are powerful enough it's hard to defeat them to learn their magic.
