Incarnation of the Black Goat: Magic

These are the magic rules for Fate Condensed and Fate of Cthulhu

Spell casting

Spell casting

Performing a spell or ritual uses the Lore skill. Characters with high Lore will have an easier time casting spells. That is a double-edged sword, though.

The Difficulty of a spell determines the target Lore roll. Lore rolls can be enhanced above the caster's basic skill, but this usually requires very special aids or intense preparation. Create Advantage rolls to yield boosts for casting a spell are usually as specific and arcane as the spells themselves.

Backlash

Performing magic triggers backlash. When a character does something that triggers backlash, note the effort of the Lore roll (plain or enhanced). After resolving the action, the caster must defend with Will against a mental attack whose rating equals that effort; for instance, if their effort was Great (+4), the backlash will also be Great (+4), whether their action succeeded or failed. This includes any boosts to their original Lore skill. The mental attack can be absorbed with stress and consequences, as normal. If they’re taken out by backlash, they must corrupt (rewrite) an aspect.

Rituals

Rituals tend to be used for big magic. They take hours, days, sometimes weeks to perform.

Though rituals have impressive effects, they are safer than spells by far. During a ritual, one participant must be the leader, who rolls the dice, but each other participant with Lore of Average (+1) or better adds a +1 bonus to the leader’s roll. Use of multiple participants reduces the likelihood of catastrophic failure as each person checks the work, so to speak, and the backlash is spread among them, lessening it considerably.

If a living human sacrifice is used in the ritual, the risk drops even further as the backlash is shunted into the sacrifice. Murdering the sacrifice isn’t just some gore fetish on the part of cultists, it has a practical application. If the sacrifice becomes completely corrupted, there’s a very good chanceit will end up killing all the participants.

If a sacrifice is used, there is no backlash against those casting the spell. If there is no sacrifice, each participant in the ritual rolls to defend against backlash, but the difficulty is decreased by one step per participant. With enough people, the risk of backlash is effectively zero.

Spells

Spells—with their short casting time and ability to be roughly approximated through rote memorization—tend to be used for more personal magic. Instead of spreading the risk among multiple participants, everything is placed onto a single practitioner. Failures are more likely and can have far more disastrous effects.