Magic

What Magic Is

Though this system is intended to allow the player to magically do anything the GM and the Dice Gods will permit, magic always has a cost, and there are some feats of magic that are intrinsic or impossible for certain characters. For example, while a Demon teleport, an Unbound can only perform an approximation through more in-depth means. This section explains how magic works: the difference between ritualized and spontaneous magic, the purpose of Shape, and Shape's connection to keystones and foci.

Facing the Nature and Unraveling

There are two ways a person becomes a magic user: Facing the Nature and becoming Unbound, or being Taken by a Daemon and Unraveling into a Demon. Neither can be forced, either on yourself or on another. The hunting patterns of Daemons are known to none but themselves, and Facing the Nature can happen at any point in a person's life, for any reason or for no reason at all.

When a person Faces the Nature, it is always a deeply personal and individual experience. Every person describes it differently, but one thing is always the same: a sudden out-of-body feeling, and the realization that the whole of the universe was a tiny speck in an endlessly vast, cosmic medium that was malleable. Upon returning to their body, the person feels a 'Shape', the outline of their own power.

Little is known about Daemons apart from the fact that they seem to feed by Taking people. In the process, the person is torn out of reality and unraveled, stretched across the endless cosmic medium until they break free, and then snapped back into reality as a near-mindless, starving husk of themselves. The only thing sating their hunger is the unraveling of bits of reality, with other humans being the most nourishing of all. Because of this, most Demons become monsters lurking at the edge of society, some more literally than others.

Shape

Before we get into what a character's powers are, you must first know how a character's powers come to them. Shape is the form a character's power takes. It can be anything the player can imagine, from an unending supply of fighting sprites, to a magic wand that allows all manner of hocus pocus, to the ability to manipulate water, or even a specific memory the Unbound concentrates on to perform magic.

An Unbound and a Demon's Shape determines how difficult or easy performing any act of magic will be. For example, an Unbound whose Shape takes the form of a pair of wings would be able to fly with ease (a difficulty of 1, or no roll at all), whereas a character whose Shape takes the form of a sword would have to put in a great deal of effort to fly (a difficulty of 6-7, or even impossible). The difficulty of a magic task is ultimately up to the GM, with the player trying to explain to and convince the GM that their character would be able to do the magic task with the Shape they have.

To give an example of this, here is a brief hypothetical situation focused on A player runs a pyromaniac whose Shape is a flip lighter that can create and manipulate vast amounts of fire. The party needs to get into a mansion, and there is a cave that connects to it, but the cave is sealed by a metal door with a sturdy lock. The player wants to pick the lock with magic, leaving no evidence. The GM looks at the character’s sheet: "With your Shape that's impossible, but you could try just melting the lock." "What if I melt it, then remake it so nobody knows it was touched?" The GM considers: "You could try. It'll be Nearly Impossible, so you’ll need to take a Warp or Fail and the lock is destroyed. Just melting it would be Standard so you may not even need to take a Warp." The player does it their way anyway, succeeding, and marks down the Warp. Deeper in, the cave is pitch black and nobody brought a light. So the player says, "I make a small flame. What do I need to roll?" "Effortless Magic," says the GM, "no roll and no warp." At the far end two guards stand by the door the party's after, and the player wants to send the flame at them, grown large. "That should be pretty easy for your character: make a Magic attack roll and tell me what you got or take another Warp." But dice gods are unwilling, so the flame engulfs the guards, but not before they radio a massive fire in the caves. That's the end of this hypothetical situation, which should give you some idea of how the Shape of a character determines what they can and can't do, and how it can change how difficult doing it will be.

Keystones

Keystones are items that synergize with a character's Shape in order to give additional dice or lower the difficulty on magic rolls, but they are not required to perform magic. A pair of nice gloves to deal from deck of everything with, a Wizardly hat to go with your magic cloak, the superhero suit to match your superpowers. Think of keystones as items that help your character get into character.

Foci

When a character's Shape takes the form of a physical object, that object is called their Foci. The pyromaniac's flip lighter, an Unbound wizard's wand, the sword a Demon's power is bound into: all of these are Foci. The term exists because a Shape that is an object is still a Shape, not a piece of gear. It is the character's power wearing a physical form.

Not every Foci is a full, real object, though. On character creation you should decide, if you have a Foci, which of the two kinds it is:

• Summonable. Your Foci is bound to you and can be called back to your hand whenever you need it. It exists in reality while you are using it, but it does not stay in the world on its own terms; it returns to you rather than being left behind, taken, or lost.
• A real object. Your Foci genuinely exists in the universe. It can be dropped, stolen, hidden, or lost like anything else, which makes it a vulnerability, but it also means it can be handled, examined, handed to another person, or mistaken for something mundane. The one thing a Foci can't be is destroyed however.

A Foci should not be confused with a Keystone: a Keystone is an external item that makes your magic easier, while a Foci is simply the physical form of your Shape itself.

Acts of Magic or Making a Magic Roll

Like every uncertain outcome in the Grayleaf System, magic is resolved with dice. You roll 2d6, plus one d6 per level of your Presence, plus one d6 per level of your Magic skill, and count the successes (4s, 5s, and 6s). The GM sets the target from the fiction, but magic uses a slightly higher scored Magic Standard Difficulty Model (MSDM):

1. Easy: 4 successes
2. Standard: 6 successes
3. Moderate: 8 successes
4. Hard: 12 successes
5. Very Hard: 16 successes
6. Improbable: 20 successes
7. Nearly Impossible: 30 successes

If an effect is so minor, or so well suited to your Shape, that success is a foregone conclusion, the GM may rule it an Effortless Action: no roll is needed and no Warp is gained.

However, unless it's impossible for the character to attempt it at all, rather than gamble on beating the target, a Magic user can have the magic work exactly as they want and take 1 Warp.

On an Act of Magic where Damnation is rolled, the magic out right fails, the character instantly go to full Warp and even if the character was already at full Warp a full Warp breakpoint event occurs.

Just like for rolls with the SDM, rolls with the MSDM falling short doesn't mean an outright, 'no'. Instead when an Act of Magic 'fails' The GM should prompt something along the lines of, "You feel reality pushing against you, you have a moment to take on the Warp or something unforeseen is coming." if the warp is taken no ill effect occurs, unless a Warp breakpoint is reached. If they refuse, the spell does as the player instructed but either a mundane side effect, like someone noticing the magic, or a supernatural side effect, like those that occur at Warp break points; the full rules for Warp are below.

Warp

Warp measures how close you are to the universe, deciding you've bent the rules too far and deleting you, or maybe you'll just go boom. Whenever you make a magic roll of any kind, you can either try to beat the high MSDM target to escape consequence, or take one Warp and have the magic work exactly as you want. Your Maximum Warp increases by 2 for each level of Presence and 2 points each level of Magic. Your current Warp decreases by one point each day, or a special object can absorb one or more points of Warp, destroying itself in the process. At half your Maximum Warp, and again at full Warp, you suffer immediate, dramatic physical consequences, and only at these two breakpoints, never at any other amount. At half Warp it's something like a bloody nose and -5 HP, or a headache that leaves you blind for half an hour; at full Warp, your skin catches fire or your arm unravels like string cheese. Instant death isn't guaranteed, but it's on the table at full Warp.

Magic in Combat

Using magic is an Action on your turn. Magic Attacks use Presence and the Magic skill: roll 2d6, plus one d6 per Presence level, plus one d6 per Magic skill level, against the MSDM plus any cover or concealment modifiers. If the number of successes equals or exceeds the MSDM target, the attack hits and deals its damage, first to Armor and then to HP. If it misses, except in the case of a Salvation and Damnation, it still happens, but the target of the attack is given an Opportunity. Unlike Acts of Magic outside of Combat when a Magic Attack falls short of the MSDM you are not given a second chance to take on the Warp.

Magic users who reach Master (level 4) or Superhuman (level 5) can perform Acts of Magic without gaining Warp: one per day at Master, up to five per day at Superhuman.

Ritualized and Spontaneous Magic

There are two ways to work magic, and every magic user uses both.

Ritualized Magic is magic with the risk taken out of it, paid for in time. A ritual can run for hours or stretch across days, and it often takes more than one person to see through: each participant holds a piece of the working, and the effect only comes together when every piece is in place. That slow, shared shaping is what makes it safe. A properly performed ritual has little to no risk of failure, because the power is never asked to move fast; it is coaxed, step by step, until the effect simply clicks into place. A ritual is not a spell written down for later, and nothing about it is stored. The ritual is the end result: when it finishes, the magic has already happened, and there is nothing left over to keep.

Spontaneous Magic is everything that is not a ritual, which is to say it is most magic: the flame conjured in a dark cave, the lock transmuted mid-heist, the desperate effect thrown together while the guards reach for the door. Every act of magic is a burst of primordial energy shaped by human thought to alter the laws of existence, and spontaneous magic is exactly that, no more and no less. It is magic made up on the spot because all magic is made up on the spot; the only difference is that a ritual has hours and a chorus of hands to do the shaping, while spontaneous magic has one mind and one moment. Fast and flexible, it is where most Unbound live, because the world rarely offers a ritual's worth of time, and a magic user's life is rarely dull enough to not need magic.