Call Allies

I was fiddling with spells for wizard for Dwarfhack and got to thinking - you know what would be a good spell?  Call Demihumans, where you get a group of friendly humans, elves, or dwarves from the nearest settlement to come help you.  That would be very on-theme for wizards; "a group of friendly rangers happens by and Gandalf happens to know their leader; they're hunting the same orcs that you are.  What a fortunate coincidence!"

When the wizard does his job right, people won't be sure he's done anything at all.

Under ACKS' spell-building guidelines, we get something like this:

Call Allies

Arcane or Eldritch 2

Duration: 1 day

This spell calls two 1HD humans or demihumans (elves, dwarves, hobbits, gnomes, ...) per caster level to aid the caster.  When called, they travel dismounted from their lair to the caster's location at their wilderness movement rate.  If this spell is cast in a wilderness hex which is native terrain for them, they arrive in 1d6 turns.  If this spell is cast in a hex to which they're not native, the time to arrive is increased for each hex that they have to traverse in order to reach the caster's location from the nearest hex of native terrain.

 

Speed -> Turns per hex:

60' -> 24

90' -> 18

120' -> 12

 

If called while the caster is unreachable (in a dungeon, for example), they will travel as close as possible and then wait in the vicinity.  For the duration of the spell, the demihumans will serve as the caster's loyal companions and friends.  The spell ends when they are slain, the spell is dispelled, or one day passes, at which time they depart.  If the spell is cast again when they are about to depart, they will remain for another day.

Spellcasting math: 2HD per caster level is 150 points (per HFH), 1HD limit is x0.15, general class of monsters is x1, 1 day duration is x1.25, calling delay is x0.66

It's really interesting that this works out as a 2nd level spell, because you could make it a special power comparable to a proficiency and make it usable once per 8 hours with a casting time of 1 round, which would let you maintain 6x your HD in 1HD followers, wage-free!  This seems like a promising angle for retinue-calling abilities like Call the Cousins; if you make it available at 5th level, then it's a perfect "welcome to the wilderness levels, laddie" ability giving you a platoon.  Give a second copy of it around 9th or 10th and then you have four platoons for a company.

ACKS: Countering Sleep

There's been some discussion lately about how low-level MUs are extraordinarily dangerous to low-level parties; just as sleep wipes a beastman gang, so too does sleep wipe a group of first or second level PCs.  Even adding a save doesn't help that much, because low level characters have terrible saves.  So the discussion has mostly turned to initiative and disrupting casters.

There was another discussion about how magic missile is really useful for this, to the point that there exists a spell designed primarily to counter it (shield), with accompanying magic items (brooches of shielding).

If sleep is dangerous enough that high-level wizards keep losing their best apprentices to other schools who cast sleep, maybe they'd solve this problem with magic, in the same way.

So kicking around the Player's Companion's rules for protection spells, here is a spell that might be useful for low-level characters expecting to go up against wizards:

Igmund's Insomniator

Arcane 1

Range: self

Duration: 12 turns

Creatures within a 7.5' radius of the caster are immune to the spell sleep for the duration.

(Points: immunity to sleep 5, range self x0.75, 7.5' radius x1.5, duration 12 turns x1.75 = 9.8)

There's a little room here to fiddle with the duration/radius tradeoff.  7.5' radius won't cover the whole party, but a good chunk will still be standing.  The other edge of the sword, though, is that enemies who are up in your face are also immune to sleep (which is very consistent with my feeling that arcane magic should over-solve problems).

Another fun avenue, of course, is potions.

Potion of Wakefulness

This dark brown, bitter potion prevents the drinker from falling asleep by any means, mundane or magical, for six hours.  For the first hour after drinking it, the imbiber gains a +1 bonus to surprise rolls due to hypervigilance, but takes a -2 penalty to attack throws due to jitters.  Characters who use Potions of Wakefulness more than once in any given week halve the duration for each potion after the first (second potion lasts 3 turns and 3 hours, third potion lasts 1.5 turns and 1.5 hours, etc).

A final option for dealing with sleep in NPC hands might be the friendly fireball approach.  OD&D's text for sleep is predictably ambiguous about targeting, but "The spell always affects up to the number of creatures determined by the dice" could certainly be read to mean that once it has put the monsters to sleep, if it has any HD left over, it tries to put the party to sleep.  Changing ACKS' sleep to operate in this way moves it from "a spell to solve almost any non-undead combat encounter on the first two dungeon levels" to something you have to be a little careful with, because if you use it on too small a group and you roll high you could put your entire party to sleep, and then you're probably toast.  And if you want to have multiple henchwizards all casting sleep in the same round, so that any one disruption doesn't stop it from going off, then you have to worry about what happens if none of them get disrupted.

On Balancing New Spells for Wilderness and Domain Play, Contra ACKS' Design Systems

Central questions: what does it mean for a spell to be balanced at a particular spell level, in the presence of shifts in play?  What would a spell list / system of casting that really took the notion of shifts in play to heart look like?  How would you have to change the resource model to balance it without breaking the world?

Contents: speculative proposals.

I've been kicking around a couple of projects lately.  Both would entail designing new spells and figuring out what it means for a spell to be level-appropriate.

First, Magic the ACKSening.  I would like to hit the old Arena-era feeling, with physical objects that a caster attunes to which let him cast a particular spell.  I think there's some room for interesting mechanics here (blue card draw?  Attune to a talisman in your possession temporarily.  Black discard?  Temporarily disrupt someone else's attunement).  Also makes copying spells between casters within the party harder, makes competition for spells between casters in party more prominent.  But, comes with a whole bunch of problems, like "how do you model the different colors?  What's your spell-slots / mana pool mechanic look like?  How does recharging work?  How do you not shaft multi-color casters (if they even exist)?"

The ACKSiest way to do this would be to use the custom magic system creation rules from Axioms, but that makes life very difficult for multi-color casters.  If red casting and white casting are two different magic systems, they track two different repertoires and sets of spell slots, and if you want to combine them in one class, that class is not going to be very good at either of them.  In effect, its spellcasting will not actually be "level-appropriate" (I hate to use that word, but it serves), in the same way that a nightblade who casts as a wizard of half his level isn't actually going to be a useful spellcaster outside of the first couple of levels, or a high-level venturer isn't going to be a useful spellcaster.  Neither has access to spells which are relevant in their current tier of play; they don't keep up with the subtle shifts.  That's a damn shame, particularly in ACKS where those subtle shifts are not so subtle and a big selling point.

(This is probably a little too harsh on nightblade - if you pitch it as "at low levels when thief is weak, you're most of a mage with d6 HD and leather armor, and at high levels when thief is strong, you're most of a thief but with d6 HD, free Acrobatics, and the ability to cast Invisibility on yourself", it's probably a reasonable class.  But my players sure don't use it)

I think this is fundamentally a problem with ACKS' design systems.  They are too quantitative and insufficiently qualitative.  For another example of this, consider fireball, which by ACKS' design rules should be a 5th-level spell.  As I argue in the linked post, fireball is fine at 3rd - provided that the "expands to volume" clause is relentlessly enforced, in which case it becomes an outdoor spell, providing a big hit against either a humanoid warband (where the area of effect is the important point) or a single tough monster (where the d6 per level is the important bit, to force a morale roll through half-HP damage).  It's much like sleep, which in the low levels provided the ability to either neutralize an encounter's worth of weak humanoids or to take out a single big monster like an ogre.  The parallel is striking.  I'm a little surprised that death spell doesn't have a single-target mode (which was split out into disintegrate), following that same pattern.

The second project I have been considering is a result of my travel to Taiwan for work last summer.  While there, I visited the shrine of the Xia-Hai City God of Taipei.  I was rather tickled by the notion of a City God.  I subsequently read Journey to the West, and enjoyed its portrayal of the Celestial Bureaucracy, with deities ranked.  So I'm considering attempting to model that sort of messily syncretic polytheism, with ancestor worship, immortal heroes, animal spirits, boddhisatvas, dragon kings, hearth gods, stable gods, all manner of gods being worshiped, preferably with a minimum of systematic complexity.  I'm considering keeping just one divine caster class.  Your first and maybe second level spells are from ancestors and commoner deities like the Kitchen God, your third and fourth from regional deities, and then your fifth level spells are from higher powers, picking (say) two of three patrons per spell level, which then determine your spells available at that level.  But in any case, would need (many) new spells for this as well, hence the interest in "balance" with existing divine options.

So there's the question - if I'm dubious of ACKS' numbers for producing really balanced, tier-appropriate spells, I need to get a better qualitative idea of what's appropriate for a spell of each type (arcane | divine) at each level.  I think I was on the right track here - generally arcane does just straight-up solve (or oversolve) a level-appropriate problem at low levels, while divine does tend to only half-solve problems, give a bonus, or something like that.  But there's more to it than that.  I'm interested in the relationship between eg Wizard Lock and Hold Portal, 2nd and 1st level arcane spells that do roughly the same thing at different degrees of thoroughness.  That might seem like a silly thing to care about, but I'm kicking around spells that fog whole hexes to solve fundamentally the same problem ("we are being pursued") at wilderness levels, because the wilderness is just a big megadungeon - so if your wizard can have a spell to solve the problem of pursuit in the dungeon, and now we're doing wilderness stuff, well sure, you should have spells to solve similar problems at this new level of play.  Flood Ford and Hold Mountain Pass as 3rd-level analogs of Hold Portal, maybe...  Light solves the problem of tracking consumable torches temporarily, Continual Light solves it more permanently - Create Food and Water solves consumable wilderness resources temporarily, Cornucopia solves it more permanently by imbuing an object and requires maintenance (the divine version, meanwhile, is more like Call Game Animals and gives you a bonus to hunting throws to find food.  Purify Food and Water / Preserve Food and Water are also more along the divine "partial-solve" lines, but rely on enforcing ration spoilage).

If wizards could straight-solve wilderness-level problems like they straight-solve dungeoneering problems, maybe wilderness play would be more fun.  Perhaps my players would be willing to take more risks if they felt they had some aces in the hole besides fireball.

Unfortunately, this [high-powered wilderness- and domain-grade spells] is in tension with ACKS' ethos of "let's tone wizards down a little so that we can still have conventional armies and historical-looking economics."  This is why ACKS' fireball only has a 10' radius instead of 20', for example.  A partial resolution to this is really enforcing the "spell slots only recovered by rest in safe, sanitary conditions" rule - this means that yeah, that wizard is gonna wreck one unit, but then he has to get back to town to recharge.  This breaks down under siege conditions, providing a huge advantage to casters defending a town over those laying siege to it, and might have other unforeseen edge problems.  Maybe the right thing is really to vary the recharge time for spell slots by phase of play.  Dungeoneering-tier spells recharge every day, while a turn in the dungeon is ten minutes - a similar scheme would have wilderness-tier spells recharging maybe every month, against a "wilderness turn" of one day (...  or maybe every 3 months; 144 10-minute turns per day, and 144 days is 4.8 months, but that seems excessive), and domain spells...  I don't even know.  The upshot of boosting the recharge times is that you can go nuts with high-power spells that solve level-relevant problems but aren't really useful at lower tiers (does raise some questions like "how do they interact with Dispel Magic?").

Maybe it makes sense to move the bar for ritual spells down.  The nice thing about spell slots, though, is that they don't build up over time like ritual spell items do - lord help him who goes to war with the elven or lich wizard-lord who has had a couple of centuries to stockpile ritual items.  Maybe a limit on "sustainable" ritual spell items, just like on Continual Light?  Or you have a spell slot, but you have to do something like ritual research to recharge it?  The logical endpoint of this train of thought probably looks rather vancian...  I think I like longer recharge times better.

There is also the difficulty that most of the existing 5th-6th level spells are really more like high-level-dungeoneering spells than wilderness or domain spells.  Passwall, disintegrate, anti-magic shell, feeblemind, dimension door...  this stuff has domain applications (siege, fighting high-level NPCs and big monsters), but it's not for domains.  Passwall is for punching temporary shortcuts in dungeons; disintegrate's secondary function clearing a 10' cube is the same but more permanent, and probably wasn't designed or balanced with reducing fortresses in mind.  They're not designed around the shifts, and if your game doesn't include dungeons as a salient feature of high-level play, they're a bit out of place (especially if competing for repertoire space with eg a spell you can only cast every five years that summons 500 demons for a single mass combat).

Maybe tacking these high-level dungeoneering effects onto low-level spells when cast by high-level casters is a reasonable solution?  So say, knock can produce passwall if the caster is 9th+ level, much like bless can make holy water or magic missile scales up.  And then 1st-2nd level spells are your dungoneering and personal combat bread and butter, 3rd-4th are mostly wilderness or small mass-combat (haste, prayer, and other mass- spells fit here) with longer recharge times, and 5th-6th are for domains and big mass combats and have looong recharge times.

What a mess.

This is starting to sound suspiciously like Trailblazer's reforms to spells, grouping them into different recharge times even within the same level...  And I also adopted their solution to half-casters being bad.  Trailblazer was right about everything.  Well OK, maybe not action points, but a lot of things. Although even ACKS is headed in that direction with the Heroic Fantasy book...

Cleric Spells of Sea and Wind

Curiously, rejecting the spell design system leaves me feeling free and desirous of creation!  So here are some cleric spells, in the idiom of "half-solving level-appropriate problems".  As a secondary objective, I want to write some cleric spells that serve as wilderness-level bookends, like Fireball and Fighter's +1 morale.

Buoyancy
Sea-Cleric 1
Range: Touch
Duration: 1 turn per level
The subject gains a +4 bonus to rolls to avoid drowning for the duration of the spell.

Spell to compare: Resist Cold.  Both situational, don't really address hazards that come up much at low levels, require casting before you fall off the boat.  Because they're low-level, though, you can provide protection to multiple party members in the mid-levels when blizzards and capsizing ships become serious hazards.

Red Sky
Sea-Cleric 3
Cast only in the evening, while in a location where you can see the sky.  An omen of good weather appears; when tomorrow's weather is rolled, you may request a reroll of either wind direction or wind strength at sea, or the weather die if on land.  The rerolled result stands.  Casting this spell multiple times allows rerolling both wind strength and direction at sea, or rerolling a rerolled result.

Spell to compare: Fellowship.  Fellowship addresses a common problem at the level of play where it becomes available ("Monster, please don't eat us" vs "we need to sail a long way to hit this wilderness lair") but it does so unreliably (still subject to reaction roll, weather roll) and with a chance to make things worse (can penalize reaction roll, random result stands even if it's worse than the original).  Both also require casting in advance of the situation where they're useful, though they're slightly different here - Fellowship gambles resources you might need later, Red Sky expends resources you didn't use today (and thereby rewards cautious play).

Fair Winds
Sea-Cleric 4
Area: 100' radius, centered on caster, moves with caster
Duration: 16 hours
This spell is a great boon to travel by ship.  The cleric can alter the direction and strength of the wind within the affected area.  They can shift the direction of the wind and its strength by two degrees; altering its direction by a minor compass direction (ie, N to NW) is one degree, and altering the wind's strength by one category (ie, Becalmed to Light Breeze) is another degree.  (So if you had a light breeze from the north, you could turn it into a light breeze from east or west, or a moderate breeze from northeast or northwest, or average winds from the north).  Once the spell is cast, altering a single degree requires a declared full round of concentration, like casting a spell.  Continuing the previous example, if you'd altered the wind from a north light breeze to an east light breeze, and you then came under attack by a sea-dragon and decided that thrust was more important than vector, you'd need to take a round to shift the wind to northeast, then another to north, and then two more to boost it to average winds.  Should the caster perish while the spell is active, the winds remain "stuck" at whatever they were set to when he died, until the duration expires or Dispel Magic is cast.

Spell to compare: Create Water.  Both make a particular element of a whole day of wilderness travel much easier; while Create Water is limited in the number of people it can support, Fair Winds is limited in how much it can alter a random result.  The ability to alter wind direction slowly in combat has a nice "jump drive charging" feel, to draw a Traveller comparison.

Following Seas
Sea-Cleric 5
Targets: Up to one ship per caster level, all of which must be in the same six-mile hex as the caster.  Really big ships might count as multiple.
Duration: 16 hours
The caster can influence winds in a 100' radius area around each target ship, as Fair Winds.  When casting, the caster must be able to see all of the target ships (doable from the deck on a clear day, nautical horizon distance being pretty far, but not good in foggy weather).  Altering wind direction and strength takes one round per degree of control per ship after the spells is cast.  The wind can also whisper messages from the cleric to the crew of each ship - the cleric must name the recipient, and then state the message.  There is no provision for replying, however.  Should a cleric target a vessel already under the effects of some other cleric's Fair Winds or Following Seas, each cleric rolls a d20 and adds their caster level, with the higher result taking control of winds around that ship, and ties going to the defender.

Spell to compare: Control Weather.  Following Seas has a larger area, doesn't require concentration, but is much less versatile, and you still have to work with what the weather-dice gave you.  Control Weather gets you perfect control over maybe five large ships (and combat capabilities, via tornado), but at the cost of your wizard having to concentrate and not be disturbed, while Following Seas can give you limited control over many ships.

Are these balanced?  I dunno.  But it seems to me that if you give the players tools to fight, they will fight.  If you give them tools to sail at 6th level, they might decide it's worth a shot.

Friendly Fireball

I've been growing increasingly skeptical of ACKS' design systems recently.  At the end of the day, I think the project of creating rigorously balanced content consistent with B/X is deeply misguided, because what is balanced varies strongly between groups based on their culture / context, past experiences, and styles of play, and because the B/X corpus, while good, is also not perfectly balanced (case in point: thieves).  You can't zoom in on an image past its native resolution, you can't add significant figures to a measurement beyond what the instrument reports, and you can't build balanced content by making it consistent with unbalanced content.  While somewhat harsher than I really mean, the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" comes to mind.

One place where I think an error was made is in the spell point prices for Blast spells.  Fireball and Lightning Bolt both do d6/level in pretty good-sized areas at 3rd level, while Cone of Cold does d6/level in an honestly-lousy area (cones are awful - you have to open a hole in the front line and expose your caster, and you're going to waste a lot of area most of the time) at 5th level.  What gives?

The secret is that Fireball and Lightning Bolt both have "unpredictable area when used indoors, high probability of friendly fire" clauses - fireball expansion to volume, and lightning bolt random reflection off of hard surfaces.  This hazard is borne out by that finest of accounts of old-school play: Tucker's Kobolds.

I recall we had a 12th-level magic user with us, and we asked him to throw a spell or something. "Blast 'em!" we yelled as we ran. "Fireball 'em! Get those little @#+$%*&!!"
"What, in these narrow corridors? " he yelled back. "You want I should burn us all up instead of them?"

The hazards of using these spells indoors mark them as clearly "outdoor toys", to use my mother's phrase.  Their availability heralds the wizard's entry into wilderness-adventuring levels, for use in blowing up large groups of humanoids in open areas, just as +1 hireling morale marks the beginning of the fighter's wilderness game (I wonder if there's an equivalent for cleric?  They do get create water, growth of animals, and speak with plants all at 24kXP, 4kXP after wizards get fireball and 8kXP after fighters get hireling morale...).  Further, because Fireball and Lightning Bolt are so dangerous to use, they should not trivialize dungeoncrawling, as we often see them do in later editions.

This friendly fire problem also explains the existence of Delayed Blast Fireball.  I'm not totally clear on the history of this spell, but it does appear in Swords and Wizardry (an OD&D clone), indicating that it has some TSR lineage.  The ability to delay a fireball, so as not to fry your whole party in the dungeon, raised the spell's level from 3rd to 7th.  Swords and Wizardry also helpfully notes that the volume of a (20' radius, in contrast with ACKS' 10' radius) fireball is about 33 10'x10'x10' dungeon hallway cubes, which seems more than adequate to thoroughly self-immolate if used indoors, and makes it very clear the the fireball expands to volume.  This is crazy; it suggests that the multiplier for "non-TPK-inducing" on Fireball should be about x2.33, and even that leaves you with another drawback (the delay)!  If you just want some nice clean area effect damage that is blocked by walls, doesn't try to kill you, and does 1d6 per caster level right this round...  too bad.  There is no such spell in S&W (not even Cone of Cold with its crappy area).  d6/level is serious business, and doesn't come without correspondingly serious drawbacks.  Big areas of effect are a necessary consequence of dealing with that level of barely-controlled elemental energy.

Another illustrative example from Swords and Wizardry is Ice Storm.  Ice Storm is 4th level, covers a 30'x30'x30' cube (but doesn't say anything about expanding), and does 3d10 damage, flat, fixed, no save.  During my 3.x days, everyone hated on Ice Storm, but it makes a lot more sense now, because it is good for not committing suicide by sorcery.

In all of Swords and Wizardry, the only spells that deal uncapped one-die-per-level damage are Fireball, Lightning Bolt, and Delayed Blast Fireball, and they are all nontrivial to use safely and effectively indoors.  The only other damage spell that scales with level at all (ie, isn't just fixed number of dice), that I saw, is Magic Missile, which scales comparably to how it does in ACKS.

Thus, while ACKS' spell creation rules explain Fireball and Lightning Bolt's relative advantage over Cone of Cold by research breakthroughs, I think an "if you use this indoors you risk a party wipe" modifier is probably much more correct.  Honestly I'm probably in favor of just banning non-fixed-dice damage unless it's got some horrible rider attached to it.  I also sort of want to bring back 20' radius Fireballs, too, because they are, from a certain point of view, more balanced than 10' Fireballs.  And when a 20' fireball expands to volume in a wilderness hex because you ground-bursted it, you get a 25' radius, which lets you cover about 70% of a 60' hex.  I'm not totally clear on how the maximum damage fraction for Fireball was set in Domains at War, but I suspect you could do a lot more than 1/8th of a Company's maximum HP if you covered most of its hex.  Likewise, at Platoon scale, you could totally cover a single hex for excellent damage with a little splash out into adjacent hexes.

Divine Elves - Proposed Spell List

Well, this was going to be a post on this thread, but autarch's forums are 504'ing me again, so it's going here instead.  As context, there's been some discussion of cherry-picking spells for custom divine classes, and how it may cause the Divine value, particularly from a +divine race like divine elves, to be too small for what the class is getting.  Hence, for the development of my own divine elf classes, I wanted to build a list which captured 'elfy' divine spellcasting and would constrain me from going out and stealing arcane spells.

Thematically, this list captures the following capabilities:

• Elves are good at fixing people.  Stabbed with a morgul-iron blade?  They have a spell for that.
• Elves know things beyond human kenning.  The list has a lot of divination as a result.  Also read languages, glyph of warding, ESP, speak with plants and animals, eye of the eagle, and tongues.
• Elves are enchanting in their natural beauty, and as a result can charm, enthrall, and inspire others.  However, they prize free will, and as a result lack access to 'direct' enchantments like Command and Hold spells (some academics hold that it is not moral opposition but their essentially fey and fickle nature; a prank is no good if the target lacks the agency to bring about their own downfall)
• Elves are attuned to nature and natural forces, and are at home in the wilderness.  They can speak with, summon, enbiggen, and command animals and plants, as well as controlling the winds and creating fog.  They're also sneaky in the wilderness.  They avoid fire and lightning, however, as these threaten their natural habitats, and they find indiscriminate destruction distasteful and lacking in finesse or grace.
• Elves are the favored firstborn children of celestial powers, and as a result have power over light and can repel creatures of darkness and provide protection to others.

And so it comes out as a sort of bard/ranger/healer list.  No pillars of fire in the sky, but a lot of party support capabilities.  And it doesn't need to be a hugely flashy list, since it's something that can be added on to another full class's worth of abilities.

1s (need to prune a few of these to get down to 15):
  Cure Light Wounds
  Delay Disease
  Detect Danger
  Detect Evil
  Detect Magic
  Faerie Fire
  Fellowship
  Light
  Locate Animal or Plant
  Pass Without Trace
  Predict Weather
  Protection from Evil
  Purify Food and Water
  Read Languages
  Remove Fear
  Resist Cold
  Sanctuary ('Elbereth')
  Salving Rest (the canonical 'hang out in Rivendell for a week and you feel much better' spell)

2s:
  Augury
  Bless
  Charm Animal
  Chameleon (gotta have some way to make those cloaks and boots...)
  Cure Moderate Wounds
  Delay Poison
  Detect Charm
  Divine Grace
  Enthrall
  Holy Chant
  Obscuring Mist
  Resist Fire
  Silent Step
  Speak with Animals
  Warp Wood

3s:
  Charm Person
  Continual Light
  Cure Blindness
  Cure Disease
  Cure Major Wounds
  Detect Curse
  ESP
  Eyes of the Eagle
  Glitterdust
  Glyph of Warding
  Growth of Animals
  Locate Object
  Prayer
  Remove Curse
  Sphere of Visibility

4s:
  Command Animals
  Create Water
  Cure Serious Wounds
  Death Ward
  Dispel Magic
  Divination
  Fate
  Neutralize Poison
  Prot Evil Sustained
  Speak with Plants
  Spirit of Healing
  Sticks to Snakes
  Summon Animals
  Tongues
  Vigor

5s:
  Atonement
  Commune
  Control Animals
  Control Winds
  Cure Critical Wounds
  Create Food (sprinkles seeds on the ground and asks them politely to grow)
  Fear
  Growth of Plants
  Quest
  Reincarnate
  Restore Life and Limb
  Scry
  Strength of Mind
  Summon Weather
  True Seeing

New ACKS Spells 3 - Summons

Three summons - one silly, one risky, and one I should've written some six or so months ago.

Summon Minions
Arcane 3
Range: 10'
Duration: Permanent until dispelled
This spell summons several weak humanoids, who appear within 10' of the caster and subsequently begin cowering and swearing loyalty.  One chaotic humanoid per caster level may be summoned, and no summoned humanoid may have greater than 1 HD or more than one special ability.  A favorite of evil casters with a high rate of minion attrition or in need of crossbreeding subjects, the minions so summoned serve loyally and permanently.  Casters with beastman domains and sufficient spell slots may even use this spell to expand their populace rapidly (but woe betide them when someone brings a ritual-grade Disjunction against their realm...).
(Maths: Summon, HD = caster level (75), up to 1 HD per creature (x0.15), general type (humanoids) (x1), range 10' (x1), duration indefinite (x2.5) = 28.2)

Call the Worm
Arcane 3
Range: 60'
Duration: 1 turn
This spell calls a purple worm from deep in the bowels of the earth to serve the caster.  The worm erupts from the ground beneath the caster's enemies at a range of up to 60', and obeys the caster's mental commands for one turn.  However, during this period, the caster must concentrate to keep control of the worm; should he take damage or otherwise have his concentration broken, the worm will escape his control and proceed to go on an indiscriminate rampage for the rest of the spell's duration.  Should the caster's enemies all be slain before the spell's duration ends, he is advised to continue controlling the worm, for it cannot be dismissed and does not disappear until either it is slain or the spell ends.  Known variants of this spell include Call the Remorhaz in frozen regions, Call Giant Crocodile in jungles and swamps, and Release the Kraken at sea.
(Maths: Summon, one creature (65), up to 18 HD (x1.33), two special abilities (x1.66), specific type of creature (x0.7), concentrate to control (x0.5), range 60 (x1.15), duration one turn (x0.5) = 28.8)

Summon Legendary Ancestor
Valkyrie 4
Range: 10'
Duration: 12 turns
This spell calls a powerful viking spirit down from Valhalla to fight alongside the valkyrie.   The legendary ancestor fights as a 10th-level Jutland barbarian warchief with a 16 Str, 10 Int, 10 Wis, 13 Dex, 16 Con, 10 Cha and the Alertness proficiency.  He is armed with a battle-axe +1, shield, and chainmail, for the following statistics:  AC 6, MV 90', HP 65, 1+ to hit, damage 1d6+7, SV F10, ML 12, AL N, +2 init, +2 surprise.  Once called, he fights alongside the valkyrie for twelve turns, or until dispelled or slain.  Reverence for the ancestor and tradition forbid summoning him more than once per day.  If called a second time in one day without regard for this tradition, the summoned ancestor will arrive very drunk and belligerent, sans any weapons, armor, or pants.  If the summoner is lucky, the ancestor will pass out on the floor or maunder on about the lack of respect today's youth exhibit for their elders before disappearing back to Valhalla.  If not, he may  stick around and cause trouble as only a drunk viking chieftain can until the summoning expires.  In either case, he is unlikely to be useful in combat.
(Maths: Summon, one creature (65), up to 10 HD (x0.8), specific type of creature (x0.7), once per day (x0.9), divine (x1.2) = 39.3)

I should do Plague of Cats and Summon Trusty Steed (summons horse with 8-hour duration for wilderness travel), but bleh.

New ACKS Spells 2 - Utility

Today I've got an upgrade of an old standby, as well as two (slightly silly) mount-related utility spells:

Deep Slumber (Ench)
Arcane 3
Range 120'
Duration: 4d4 turns
A more powerful version of the common Sleep spell, Deep Slumber causes up to 24 HD worth of living creatures within range to save or fall asleep for the duration (the save may be vs Death or Spells, as the judge's discretion).  There is no HD cap per creature, and the caster may select the order in which he desires to effect targets, subtracting them from his HD budget.  Affected creatures may be awakened as per the Sleep spell.
(Maths: Enchantment, target asleep (15), 24 HD of creatures (x3), only living targets (x0.75), range 120' (x1.1), duration 4d4 turns (x1.2), save avoids (x0.5) = 29.7)

Estenmar's Equine Enhancer
Arcane 2
Range: Touch
Duration: 8 hours
This spell doubles the movement rate of one willing creature touched for eight hours.  Typically used by the originator on his horse for long overland journeys, the spell is equally effective on one's travelling companions or oneself while fleeing a dungeon in a pinch.  Whether unintelligent animals are 'willing' is an open question; they might be willing recipients of benign magics, or they may need special training.  Ask your DM if Estenmar's Equine Enhancer is right for you.
(Maths: Movement, double speed (5), one willing creature with normal carrying capacity (x0.8), range touch (x1), duration 8 hours (x4), beneficial effect (x1) = 16)

Pegastasize (Transmog)
Arcane 4
Range: Touch
Duration: Permanent until dispelled
Pegastasize is a specialized spell developed by a wizard who was trying to turn horses into pegasi with Polymorph Other, but who then had to deal with the complete training wipe that ensued from inheriting their mental characteristics.  Pegastasize avoids this problem, transforming a horse into a pegasus without altering its mental characteristics.  If used on a pegasus, pegastize causes its wings to retract, yielding a normal horse.  In both cases, the subject receives a saving throw vs spells, and if the target is unwilling, the caster may have to roll to hit in order to successfully touch them with the spell.
(Maths: Transmog, Total transform of living creature with physical characteristics and attacks (55), limited type to transform to (x0.75), limited type of subject (x0.75), HD limited to caster level and 2x target level (x0.75), range touch (x0.6), attack throw required vs unwilling target (x0.75), indefinite duration (x3.5) = 36.54)

New ACKS Spells 1 - Direct-Fire Combat

I broke out the spell construction rules when I was looking at Dismember earlier, and it turns out they're a lot of fun to fiddle with, much like Traveller starship design.  So, some new spells, part one of several - blasts and death:

Missile Storm (Elemental)
Arcane 2
Range: 240'
Duration: Instantaneous
This spell creates a hail of magic missiles which rain down from on high with unerring accuracy, dealing 1d6+1 damage to up to one creature per caster level within a 30' diameter area.
(Maths: Blast spell, 1d6+1 / caster level (33), cap of 1 die of damage (x0.1), one target per level in a 30' diameter (x5), 240' radius (x1.2) = 19.8)

Conflagration (Elemental)
Arcane 3
Range: 120'
Duration: 1 round per caster level
This spell, developed as an early version of fireball, causes the air in a 20' diameter sphere to ignite and burn for 1 round per level of the caster.  Each round on the caster's initiative, each creature in the affected area takes 1d8 points of damage from the fire, no save.  A cold version of this spell is also known to exist, called Dead of Winter.
(Maths: Blast, 1d8 / caster level (35), cap of 1 die of damage (x0.1), 20' diameter sphere (x2), 1 round per level (x4) = 28 points)

Wrack (Necro)
Arcane 3
Range 90'
Duration: Instantaneous
This spell induces terrible phantom pain in up to 4d8 HD of creatures, all of whom must be within a 30' diameter area.  As the evil spirits summoned for this purpose prey on the weak, those with the lowest HD in the area are affected first, and no creature of greater than 8 HD may be affected.  Affected creatures suffer only 1d4 damage from the ordeal but, on a failed save versus death, they become convinced that they have suffered a terrible injury and the spirits make it so, causing a roll on the mortal wounds table modified only by their Con score and not subject to shock or blood loss (as Dismember).
(Maths: Death, 1d4 / level (27) * cap of 1 die (x0.1) = 2.7 plus mortal wound (60) * save negates (x0.5), subtotal 32.7.  32.7 * 4d8 HD within 30' diameter (x3) * fewest HD first (x0.5) * no targets over 8 HD (x0.75) * range 90 (x0.8) = 29.42)

PC Spells vs DM Spells

While responding to Alex's comments on my review of the ACKS Player's Companion, I was reminded of a position I've held on spell selection for a while now.  Alex argued that Dismember and Choking Grip are both awesome spells, and was surprised that my players, despite having access to them, had fallen back to the old standbys of Fireball and Sleep.  I discussed this with the rest of the group, and I think we reached something of an agreement on why Dismember in particular didn't see much use.

The primary concerns which motivated our players during combat spell selection were reliability (How often will this spell actually work?), versatility (How often will this spell be useful?), and raw power (When I get to use it and it works, how awesome will this spell's effects be?).  A spell which allows a save, requires an attack roll, or has a variable duration is unreliable, while a spell which can only target one opponent, or which has its effectiveness reduced against certain classes of opponents (eg, undead immune to sleep) lacks versatility in terms of the sort of combats where it can be used to its fullest potential.  Unreliability and inflexibility can be outweighed if the payoff on success is very high, which is where raw power comes in, but that's a hard sell.

Dismember is pretty unreliable; a save negates all of its effects.  It's also single-target, which reduces its versatility somewhat.  Worse still is that the single targets you're going to want to burn a 3rd-level spell slot against are probably enemy chieftains and spellcasters, who have relatively good saves.  While mortal wounds are scary, the death and dismemberment table introduces another level of unreliability into the spell; while you could sever both of their arms or break their spine, scoring an immediate knock-out, you've got a similar probability of knocking out a few of their teeth or inflicting minor scarring, which is probably not a relevant contribution to most combats.  3d6 damage is nice, but that's on par with fireball successful-save damage to a single target, and only occurs on a failed save.  Fireball, by comparison, deals damage (more reliable than negative effects across types of opponent) to a potentially-large number of targets (versatile), and while it gives a save, it's a save for half (more reliable).

Choking Grip is a slightly different case from Dismember.  It has the advantage of preventing an enemy from casting while under its effects, in addition to dealing damage which under good conditions outstrips that inflicted by magic missile or other 1st-level damage dealers (though those conditions are unreliable, and the targets you really want to deal that much damage to have many HD, hence probably higher saves and more likely to end the effect sooner).  It can also be cast by a 1st-level wizard henchman, and doesn't scale with caster level.  This means that if you're (say) clearing hexes and have reason to believe the weaselmen might have a witch-doctor, it absolutely pays to have your low-level wizard henches learn Choking Grip to lock down superior enemy firepower.  Also useful for winning wizard-duels if you're short on spell slots, or for killing your master to take his tower and spellbooks.  Arguably useful for preventing dragonbreath, since a choke closes the windpipe (as opposed to a strangle, which just closes blood vessels), but good luck getting a dragon to fail those saves for any length of time.  Less than useful for killing massed humanoids than sleep, though, and that was what we tended to be doing.  Also no use at all against undead, which were another mainstay of our adventuring diet, and where magic missile saw a fair bit of use instead of sleep.

This is not to say, of course, that Dismember is a bad spell.  It is, however, what I classify as a "DM spell", and it is the division of spells into PC and DM spells which is my main thrust here.  This category of spells is generally characterized by long-duration negative side effects (which aren't typically useful against monsters due to their generally short life expectancy), single-target nature, and saving throws.  Other examples include Blindness, Bestow Curse, and Phantasmal Killer in 3.x (notable for the fact that the target gets two saves to avoid; normally DM Spells aren't save-or-die, but this one is sufficiently unreliable that I've never met a PC who used it, even dedicated illusionists with Spell Focus to boost the DCs).  I claim that spells like these are not all that useful against monsters compared to other spells of their level (Web, Wall of Fire, Charm Monster), but they are very scary when you're a PC and they're aimed at you, because you will have to deal with the nasty side effects for quite a while.  Thus, while they don't see wide use by PCs, they make excellent spells for NPCs to use against players.  Hence, DM spells.  Players are often underwhelmed when they select a DM spell for its cool factor, use it a few times, and see their opponents make the saves and suffer no effect, but the DM can go through as many casters and slots as he needs to, and isn't out to murder the PCs to the maximum extent of his abilities anyways.  By contrast, players tend to respond well to spells which are reliable and versatile, because they pay a fairly heavy premium for switching out spells and will be confronted with a wide variety of situations with a single set of spells known, and when an unreliable spell fails they've burned an important resource which they may not get a chance to recharge for some time.  Hence my criteria for a PC spell, above; it all boils down to risk management and resource management, and DM spells are a risky way to spend the limited resource of repertoire slots.

On the other hand, this spell selection philosophy grew out of playing 3.5, where monsters never lived more than 10 rounds, the bodak that almost TPK'd us was retconned to being an illusion, and even high-mobility dragons refused to flee from combats they were clearly losing.  In old-school play, it's very possible to engage a monster or group of monsters several times when one group or the other retreats, in which case a long-to-permanent-duration crippling spell against an enemy powerhouse could be very useful.  Maybe there is a strong PC use-case for such spells in ACKS revolving around hit-and-run tactics.  But my players are very...  direct and true to their 3.5 roots in their tactics, and their spell selection preferences reflect this, with a strong preponderance of short-duration negative effects and direct damage instead.  If I wanted to design a spell to fill the '3rd-level single-target offense' niche that Dismember is in, and I wanted to build something my players would love and use regularly, I would go for something like a single-target 1d8 damage per level blast, uncapped, no save, no attack roll, 90' range, which works out to 28 points under the spell construction rules, and hence a 3rd-level spell.  Is this something which I would actually put in my game?  Probably not, except maybe as treasure for killing a wizard who had it and was able to use it against the PCs first.  And if some clever PC wizard decided to research it, I would likely have a rival steal his notes and use it against the party, because that there is a deadly weapon for the killing of dragons, kings, PCs, and other hard targets.  There's a reason most damaging spells offer either an attack roll or a save for half; perfect reliability is both boring and powerful (especially when combined with uncapped scaling).  Perhaps unfortunately, we seem to tend to gravitate towards it anyways...

(A more reasonable construction along similar lines might be a 3rd-level blast or death spell dealing 2d4 / caster level capped at 10d4, range 90', no save, no attack.  25ish damage is enough to put a really good dent in most targets, but it doesn't scale up indefinitely)

ACKS - Mark of Justice

I ran a few sessions of ACKS solo with my brother earlier in the break, and after I informed him of our (probably incorrect) interpretation of the Hijinks rules, he began looking into hiring a few goons around town to carouse, spy, and smuggle.  Upon examination of the criminal punishment rules, his response was largely "eh, I can get these fixed with a Restore Life and Limb.  Might not be profitable, but losing a hand isn't as much of a deterrent as it might seem when you have backers."  And so, I present the Mark of Justice, a new application of Bestow Curse for ACKS.

A Mark of Justice may be cast only on a creature who has just rolled on the Mortal Wounds table, or who has been otherwise maimed, and applies to a single wound.  The casting cauterizes the wound, preventing blood loss and restoring 1d6 HP to the subject, but also marks the injured character permanently with a prominent, clearly-distinguishable symbol (as appropriate for the caster and circumstances, usually the seal of a particular court) over the cauterized area. The purpose of the Mark is to prevent the wound from being healed, and so it inflicts a penalty equal to half the caster's level to the d20 roll on the Tampering with Mortality table for any Restore Life and Limb attempted while it remains in effect.  In addition, the bearer of the Mark suffers a -2 penalty to reaction rolls with law-abiding citizens, though he may gain a bonus to reaction rolls among criminals.  The Mark is a difficult curse to break, as it is intended to foil high-powered magical healing, and so its removal requires a casting of Remove Curse by a caster of no lower than 9th level.  A subject may receive multiple Marks of Justice; their penalties stack.  Should the subject receive a Restore Life and Limb while subject to the Mark, the Mark persists and covers the restored area visually.  It retains its efficacy even if the subject is slain and returns from the dead.  The Mark is usually reserved for repeat offenders who have had legal punishments healed with RL&L, though certain chaotic sects are also known to use it for nefarious purposes.

Praise be to Armok! - New Dwarven Craftpriest Spells

I am sad to say that I had a Dwarf Fortress relapse during the parts of Thanksgiving when I did not have guests.  In between eating leftovers, experimenting with surface farming, and pondering what to do with the two owlmen caught in my cage traps, I was struck by the fact that ACKS' dwarf craftpriest uses the same spell list as their standard cleric.  This is somewhat ridiculous, given that Bladedancer use a different spell list, and it hardly seems reasonable for the folk-under-the-mountain to worship some surfacer sun god.  So I got to thinking about what some suitably dwarfsome spells would be, and while I don't have full descriptions or levels, the rest should be fairly doable.

• Detect Treasure - Dwarves love gold, and their priests have perfected means for locating it.
• Detect Ore - Like Detect Treasure, but lower level and somewhat less utile.
• Plague of Cats - Summons 3d4 cats which harass, distract, trip up, and reduce the frame-rate of the target.  A long-term Curse version is also available, whereby the subject suffers a +4 to reaction rolls with cats, cat-like monsters, and cat owners, and is forever plagued by their unhelpful presence and 'gifts' of dead animals.
• Fell Mood - A uniquely dwarven Curse with Geas-like attributes, the target of a Fell Mood must save vs spells or be driven mad by an obsessive need to construct an utterly implausible work of art.  Should he fail to do so within six months of the casting of the spell, he goes irrevocably insane.  Should be succeed, however, he becomes a master of his craft.  Sometimes used as a means of trial among the dwarves along old Medieval "trial by superstition" lines; if he succeeds, he must be innocent.
• Deforestation - Kind of an inverse of plant growth; sends a wave through the earth which uproots trees and other plants in the affected area.  Originally designed for fueling the furnaces of industry, later discovered to be good for depriving those accursed goblins of their cover too.
• Speak with Stones, Stoneshaping, Burrow, and similar earthy spells
• Water to Ale - seriously, why do you think they keep these guys around?  Arguably just a reflavoring of Purify Food and Water.
• Create Ale - A similar reflavoring of Create Water.
• Bless Tools - A possible replacement for the ability of high-level clerics to create holy water with the Bless spell.  What blessed tools do, I don't rightly know.  Maybe +2 on the next proficiency roll using them in the next unit time?
• Beard of Iron - Grants the subject's beard the strength of steel wool, providing a bonus to AC and to mortal wounds rolls against the chest and head for the duration.  When applied to a subject without a beard, causes severe facial itching instead.  Might work as a replacement for Shimmer on the Bladedancer list.
• Stranglebeard - Causes the subjects' beards to attempt to strangle them, much like multi-target Choking Grasp that only works on targets with beards.  Applications in the dwarven justice system are again clear.  An improved version instead strangles the target using the caster's beard.
• Vulcanism - Flame Strike, but from below rather than on high.

The bladedancer spells Vigor and Flame Blade (er, Hammer) also seem plausible, as well as the Player's Companion spells Call Dragon and Summon (Dwarven) Berserkers.

ACKS Player's Companion - Summoning Spells

The Kickstarter for the ACKSPC released what is basically a final draft of the text pre-formatting and artwork today.  Some of the new spells are pretty neat; Burning Hands is a reasonably competitive 1st-level offering for elementalist mages, there's a nice 4th-level multi-target healing-over-time spell for the priestess class, and bladedancers got Swift Sword (two attacks per round for a short duration, which is really really nice), but the summoning spells take the cake.  The standouts here are Summon Berserkers (calls four berserkers from the afterlife to fight and die for you), Summon Fantastical Creature (summons any one of a wide variety of wyverns, gryphons, unicorns, and so forth), and Summon Hero (which summons a 4nd-level fighter with good stats for a short duration).

I think what I like about these is that, in addition to seeming 'powerful but reasonable', they're very Magic the Gathering-esque.  You're summoning things you might plausibly meet in the game world, rather than celestial dire badgers or other extraplanar weirdness.  Technically, the things these spells summon are extraplanar in origin as well, but...  they're normal.  Which implies that other planes are reasonably normal (beyond the usual hell and heaven-type planes).  This is a refreshing break from the hidebound, alignment-enforced planar weirdness that 3.x inherited from Planescape.  It encourages GMs to create their own cosmologies, and also to cross-pollinate between settings; if I want to steal Tim's chromata, for example, the excuse of 'they fell into this world from another in ancient days' is very, very compatible with this cosmology (not so much with the Great Wheel).  Finally, it helps explain why the endgame in ACKS is setting yourself up as a world emperor rather than extraplanar adventuring; if other planes are pretty similar to this one, then (in general), why bother going there?  This is not to say that other planes shouldn't be exotic, but setting up a power base on one's home plane rather than gallivanting through the multiverse is much more reasonable if there are high level foes locally and not a whole lot to gain 'out there'.

One final touch that pleases me is their use of the term 'spheres' instead of planes.  I might have to steal that, for a little distance and breathing room from Planescape's cosmology and concepts.