Tomes 2 - Chaos Tomes, Scrolls and Tome Creation
This post is an addition to my earlier post on Tomes, an alternative to Knave / Cairn / Mausritter style spellbooks.
I'm pretty happy with Tomes in play! It's about what I expected because I'm really just using the normal random spell generation but just doing it ahead of time. My players seem to like it as well (though I'm not sure if thats just because they get "more" spells at character creation :P). Follows are a few additions that I've found myself needing to add to Tomes to make them fit a bit easier in play.
Chaos Tomes
A Chaos Tome is a Tome that maintains the old totally-random style of spell generation. Every Chaos Tome has 2 slots that are randomly generated every day that act otherwise like Maze Rats / Knave style random spells (effects determined at runtime). Chaos Tomes can't be copied and spells within can't be used to make Scrolls.
In my setting, the reason Chaos Tomes can't be duplicated is that the magic that powers the random spells is drawn directly from the life force of the caster, so making more than one would kill the creator. This also means that its still possible to acquire more Chaos Tomes, you just have to take one off another Magic-User and keep them alive while you use it.
Scrolls and Tome Duplication
Any character with a Tome can create a Scroll, which is just a single-use casting of one of the spells in the Tome. To do so, they need magic ink and prepared vellum costing 100 coins (100gp), access to the Tome, and 3 days of time to work.
Similarly, a character can also duplicate the Tome itself if they have even more supplies and time. A Tome can be duplicated with 500 coins (500gp), access to the original Tome, and 2 weeks of time to work. A duplicated Tome can't be duplicated again.
Allowing Scrolls vastly increases the number of spells that crop up in sessions, especially in an open table, take note.
I added in the clause to require the original Tome to duplicate because I'd rather encourage lots of unique Tomes acquired through play. It's still possible for players to construct a "loadout" of Tomes for new characters using these rules, but they need to have the original Tomes to do it. If players team up to hunt down the original copies of Tomes and do the work to duplicate them to power up new characters, they're basically creating their own wizard order and that's what I want (interacting heavily with the setting).
Tome Creation (Spell Research)
The creation of a new Tome requires the creation of 3 new spells tied together via a central theme. Assuming access to 3 such spells, a new Tome can be created by following the above rules for duplicating a Tome, subbing in the spells for "access to the original Tome."
New spells can be created similarly to the Scroll rules above except that they require research material in lieu of access to a Tome. "Research Material" is any object corresponding to a singular word (example: a book on operating sailboats corresponding to "Sea"). You need 1 slot / unique item for each letter in the corresponding word (example: book on sailboats, a deepsea octopus, a pile of kelp for "Sea"). Munchkinry in word choice is an intended inclusion to allow for clever play ("Sea" vs "Ocean"), but is ultimately up to GM discretion (does "Sea" work instead of "Lake"?). The end result is a spell Scroll that can be used normally to cast the spell as well as Tome creation.
The above is based loosely on Telecanter's rules on Crossword Spell Research. I've ran crossword spell research in the past and enjoyed it, though in practice Magic-Users had to acquire a gigantic pile of research items before they were able to do anything interesting within the system. I made the above alterations to allow for easier spell creation while still maintaining the research-hunt gameplay that my table loves.