The Rules of the Road

House Rules

The handful of places where this table parts company with the book. Everything else we play as written.

I have no patience for a rule that exists only to be looked up. These are the few we keep that the book does not, and I have set down the reasoning, because a rule you understand is a rule you stop arguing about halfway up a rig with a devil already on the deck.

On casting

In the book a spell is a fussy thing: the right words, the right gestures, a hand kept free, a pouch of oddments to paw through while something with claws decides what to do about you. We have thrown all of that out. At this table casting is loud and it is obvious. Every spell is movement and noise, and anyone with eyes or ears nearby will know you are doing it. There is no hand to keep empty and nothing to fish out of a pouch. The single exception is the spell that eats something costly in the casting, the diamond, the expensive dust. Those you still pay for, because the cost is the point of them.

What the casting looks and sounds like is yours to decide, and it says nothing about where the power comes from. Cael bellows his oath and brings his sword round. Eryador goes to one knee and prays it aloud. Kaelis brandishes the Aspect and drags the power down the blade. I level a hand and speak the formula like a woman who expects to be obeyed. Dress it however suits the character; the spell does not care.

Rituals are the exception that proves I am not wholly lazy. They want the paraphernalia and the ceremony, but that is common kit any caster is assumed to carry, and the fuss is simply part of the work. It only becomes interesting when someone has been stripped of their gear and is standing in the waste with nothing, at which point you improvise: a circle drawn in the ash, sigils scratched into bark, whatever the ground will give you.

Two things follow from casting being loud, and both matter in a fight. Anything that hides the casting, Subtle Spell and its cousins, now hides you entirely: no words, no gestures, nothing to see or hear until the spell has already happened. An unseen cast cannot be answered, so it walks straight past a Counterspell. You see the Lightning Bolt, but only once it has left the hand. And because ordinary casting is always noise, Silence is a far worse thing to be caught inside than the book lets on. A caster trapped in it who has not gone quiet is shut down completely, not merely robbed of a few words. I have started treating it as a weapon rather than a curiosity.

On the things that are ours

Each of the Five carries at least one thing that is properly theirs, a piece made for the bearer and meant to grow as we do. I keep the full account in the ledger, and the particulars live on each of our sheets. I will only say here that a company is told as much by what it has been given as by what it has taken, and this place has given us more than I expected of it.