GURPSよろず

　 Myth, fiction, and game rules offer many ways for objects to gain magical powers – although these sometimes involve chance, unpredictable coincidences, or the action of powerful gods or unreliable spirits.

　In the standard magic system, wizards create magic items using spells from the Enchantment college alongside applications of other spells that generate the specific effects desired.
Chapters 2 and 8 of GURPS Magic cover this process in great detail, and include an analysis of the economics of enchanting. In addition, most spells in Magic have an “Item” description, while those that don’t can’t normally be enchanted into items.

　It’s worth noting that the GM doesn’t have to use the exact item forms suggested in Magic. Spells described as being enchanted into wands or staves might instead be placed on gauntlets, fly swatters, blunted daggers, rattles, etc.
Magical jewelry may become magic belts of rare leather – or fine silk headbands bearing intricate hieroglyphs.
The Scroll spell can use just about any written medium, especially if paper, papyrus, and vellum are unknown in the culture; for example, in a Sumerian-style setting, wizards could work spells into writing on small clay tablets.
A postmodern mage might “write” a spell as a file stored on a PDA (PCs who try to copy these digital “scrolls” will find that this just doesn’t work, that the original has a magical charge while any copies are useless gibberish, or that copies are as good as the original but that triggering any one of them uses up the magic and deactivates or wipes every copy, everywhere – GM’s decision).

　Ruling that specific spells can’t be enchanted into items – whatever Magic says – can help preserve trained wizards’ monopolies.
Allowing enchantment with spells that have no “Item” description is trickier, as they’re often set up that way for practical or game-balance reasons. Still, there’s no obvious reason why, for instance, Colors, Rejoin, or Increase Burden shouldn’t be worked into wands or rings.
Of course, the GM would have to set energy costs for these enchantments, based on other spells of similar power and complexity.

　The Basic Set (pp. B481-482) and GURPS Magic (pp. 17-18) describe two standard enchantment methods.
Quick and Dirty enchantment involves high energy requirements, usually met with the aid of multiple assistants.
Slow and Sure work feeds in energy over time, allowing wizards to achieve almost any enchantment using a minimum of external energy sources – eventually – while suffering fewer skill penalties.
These two techniques offer options for both emergency enchantments and cottage industry work, and should logically lead to a fair variety of magic items in a campaign.
The GM can adjust the parameters of either or both to create specific game styles.

　For example, to preserve magic items as the rare handiwork of dignified stay-at-home wizards, while permitting emergency castings by highly skilled or desperate individuals, Quick and Dirty enchantment might take a blanket penalty of -4. It could further suffer conditional penalties; e.g., the -1 for other people within 10 yards could become -2 per person within 25 yards, forcing enchanters to find plenty of space. Conversely, given that the proximity penalty would be a problem for any enchanter working in a garret or an apartment block, the GM could reduce the critical distance.

　To make magic items cheaper and more common, reduce the time requirements of either or both methods, and recalculate cash costs accordingly. To slow down enchantments, in a world where wizards don’t trust each other much, say that mages can never collaborate on such castings; each must be a solo project. To speed them up within a system of collegiate collaboration, permit lessskilled and unskilled spectators to contribute limited quantities of energy as explained in Ceremonial Magic(p.B238) – either for all enchantments or only for Slow and Sure work.

　The GM can even make just one of the two standard approaches available. If only Slow and Sure enchantment is possible, then adventuring wizards who lose magical equipment must wait until they return to civilization to replace it. Minor items will often be too expensive to be interesting – a situation akin to that in many high-fantasy tales and legends.

　If Quick and Dirty is the only way, then the creation of high-powered items will be extremely difficult, requiring large-scale collaborations, high skill levels, and lots of organization. Tinkering with the setting’s assumptions about energy supplies (see Energy Sources, pp. 50-58) can make the process more interesting and atmospheric; e.g., if Powerstones are unavailable but sacrifices provide plentiful energy, then enchantment might be a bloody business. Combining Quick and Dirty enchantment – with its high energy costs – with Threshold-Limited Magic (pp. 76-82) or Assisting Spirits (pp. 90-94) could produce strange and twisted enchanters.

　Lastly, the GM might restrict Quick and Dirty enchantment to the (NPC) gods. He could even limit it to one or two gods of craftsmanship – and perhaps their superhuman servants. This would lead to a situation such as is seen in Homer’s Iliad, in which a deity who wants a gift for a warrior goes to the blacksmith-god, who, asked politely, produces some superior armor in short order.

　Enchanters are assumed to need properly equipped laboratories or workshops.
The GM may use the rules for alchemy labs (see Laboratory Procedures, p. 102), applying the bonuses for better facilities to enchantment skills.
Whether an alchemy lab also counts as an enchantment workshop of the same quality is up to the GM.
The two could probably share the same space, unless perhaps the workshop is used for enchanting items such as swords or armor – a blacksmith’s shop doesn’t much resemble a chemistry lab!
Then again, weapon enchantment might be closer to alchemical refinement than to metalworking.

　The standard enchantment rules make the creation of truly significant items – those that require enough energy that only the Slow and Sure option remains viable – a lengthy process, often taking months or years.
They also make the whole business terrifyingly unreliable: at the end of all that time, even a highly skilled enchanter can destroy his work by rolling a single failure.
This serves to limit magic-item manufacture, leaving it mostly in the hands of professional NPCs, and deterring wizards from ever trying really interesting projects.
If the GM wants to encourage adventurers to make the occasional item for themselves without them having to work in large teams, then he might wish to relax things a little.

　In some settings, enchanters can or must“put something of themselves” into their works.
This might be a way to speed up enchantment – or even the only way to create magic items.
The price is loss of a crucial personal ability for an extended period, and possibly permanently.

　In game terms, the enchanter converts the point value of a specific advantage – or possibly an attribute or a skill, or even a disadvantage voluntarily assumed – into energy points applicable to the enchantment.
The GM determines what traits the wizard can “burn” for this purpose. These should always be related to the enchantment work in some way.

　The enchanter might eventually be able to “re-buy” sacrificed abilities, and buy off any added disadvantages, with bonus character points and/or points gained from study (GM’s option).
In other backgrounds, restoration is impossible. The wizard puts himself into the work permanently – and it likely remains forever linked to him in some magical sense, allowing those who possess it to use location spells or other sympathetic magic to find him, perhaps even giving a bonus for the purpose.

　Every character point expended in this way grants the equivalent of 25 energy points. If wizards can use this option with Slow and Sure enchantment, then every five character points (or fraction thereof) used this way requires one day’s work. This is instead of the usual day per energy point.

　Lend Skill (GURPS Magic, p. 47) and similar spells don’t have standard associated magic items. This is because such items have the potential to disturb game balance. In particular, they can enable wealthy PCs to dominate in every situation by trading cash for competence. Still, some campaigns do fine despite including “skill items” (e.g., “skill chips” in cyberpunk games), and such artifacts do sometimes appear in fiction or myth. They aren’t necessarily an overwhelming problem. A game might, at minimum, feature a few hardto-reproduce items that grant a single skill apiece – perhaps to enable the PCs to accomplish some essential heroic task for which they’re otherwise unqualified. If the GM is concerned about balance and explanations, these can have built-in limitations on how well or how often they work. They might even be products of divine craftsmanship, remnants of a Lost Age of High Magic, etc.

　Traditionally, many magic items look the part, with shapes and embellishments that match their abilities. This makes sense in light of the Law of Sympathy (p.14). It also provides an excuse to reduce energy costs for some enchantments.

　Optionally, the GM can reduce enchantment costs by 2% per stylistic feature that makes the item blatantly appropriate for its enchantment, so that anyone who looks at it and knows that it’s magical can guess some of what it does. The viewer should at most require Cultural Familiarity with the maker’s culture, and perhaps have to make an IQ+4 roll. If the symbolism and clues require close inspection, or a roll against a skill such as Occultism or Thaumatology, then the reduction is only 1%. Such details also tend to be stylish, flashy, or rich – thieves should certainly be strongly tempted on sight!

　The maximum energy reduction should be about 10-15%, or perhaps twice that if the detail work is very expensive, inconvenient, and attractive to thieves – although fitting that much symbolism onto an item ought to take some ingenuity! That said, permitting even larger energy discounts would offer a way to make enchantment significantly faster, if enchanters are sufficiently clever and willing to produce some bizarre items.

　Example: An enchanter is making an Illusion Disguise item. A mask is an obvious symbol here (-2%). Spells of illusion are “lunar magic” in his world – and everybody knows that silver, moonstones, and seed pearls correspond to the moon – so he has the mask cast in silver (-2%), decorated with those gems (-2%), and shaped like the well-known lunar moth (-2%). It’s also engraved around the edge with subtle occult moon symbols (-1%). That’s -9% to energy cost. Given the expense of this thing, its slightly cumbersome form, and the temptation it represents to thieves, the GM would have permitted twice that, had the player thought of further appropriate details.

　Conversely, if symbolism works, then incorrect symbols should be disruptive. In that case, deliberately obscuring an item’s function with inappropriate form or symbols raises energy costs. Each misleading detail adds 5% to the energy requirements – and the strict GM can also apply a cumulative -1 per such feature to the enchanter’s skill rolls. Some misleading symbolism might simply be impossible; e.g., “No demonic item will work if marked with symbols of divine benevolence.”

　Mandatory and Significant Modifiers (pp. 82-90) produces comparable effects, but those rules modify skill instead of energy cost. It’s up to the GM to decide whether this is a good mix or a bad one. If an enchanter can find lots of appropriate materials and symbols, then he might be able to use some to gain skill bonuses and others to reduce energy costs.