Essence
From Sagataflwiki
Revision as of 16:14, 29 July 2010 by Peter Knutsen (Talk | contribs)
Essence is, crudely put, an amount of inflict-permanent-magic-on-the-setting coupons that each character has, and which he may be able to use.
- Essence is calculated from some a character's attributes
- Essence is not renewable. The character is born with an amount and never gets more.
- It should therefore be spent wisely
- Essence is meant to be spent. There's no reason for a character to choose to retain his Essence, once he has found something attractive - in his eyes - to spend it on.
- Not all characters can spend Essence.
- In theory, all characters can learn the Endowing skill, which is one way to Enchant permanent magical items; in practice, for many charaters the time and Skill Points (SPs) required to learn Endowing to a safely usable skill level is prohibitive.
- Some characters are born with one out of several kinds of Powers that can be used to create permanent magical items.
- Some permanent magics that are not item-related cost Essence, such as Enhancing animals, turning Enhanced animals into Familiars, or giving spells a Duration of Permanent.
- In some cases, Essence can be spent to drastically boost the power of magic, without this magic being permanent.
- Essence is an in-world phenomenon that characters can and should talk about; it's not a metagame phenomenon.
- Essence can be lost due to spellcasting or Endowing Fumbles, or other disasters, and also to the Death Touch of a Wraith or Wraith Lord.
Contents |
Deriving Essence
The formula for calculating how much Essence a character is born with is
- Psyche attribute squared
- Faith attribute squared
- Will attribute squared
- Constituition attribute squared
- The four above values added together
- Divide the total by 12
- Round down to the nearest 0.1
- This means that an average person, with 3 in Psyche, Faith, Will and Constitution, will have 3.0 Essence.
