Subsystems and You 14
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Spellblights
While it may vary a lot in terms of power level and how integral it is to the setting, magic is a pretty wonderful thing. It might be the words of creation harnessed, the will of the gifted manifested, or even a form of energy that some can tap into (sometimes with deleterious effects as a side effect) and so on.
In a lot of settings, however, magic is a wild force. Sure, it can be somewhat tamed with spells and rituals, but like ink splashing out of a dropped container, sometimes not only does magic go wild, it but it stains the things it touches.
These are spellblights, magical curses that latch onto mages when their spells encounter problems, like a computer program encountering a fatal exception, leading to a persistent bug that affects them and their spellcasting in various ways, some minor but annoying, others stronger and more pressing.
Many of these spellblights affect behavior, such compelling the victim to prepare their spells in a certain way or cast certain spells repeatedly. Others afflict them with psychosomatic reactions to casting spells, anything from causing the caster to ignore targets they’ve already cast spells upon even though they remain threatening, to hallucinating that otherworldly predators have taken notice of their magic and are hunting them.
Others cause actual physical changes to the caster’s body, such as altering their eyes to invert their reaction to light and shadow, or causing them to temporarily flicker in and out of phase with reality after casting.
However, while they are all by definition curses, the fact that there is no malice behind them somewhat easier to cure. Spells like restoration, heal and the like are all good options, while eldritch auge can be cured with a remove disease spell, and caster croak can amusingly be broken by the caster using the shout spell to force their airways to open up.
But with all of these blights, one has to ask how one can come to be afflicted, and it varies. This is an optional rule set, so there’s no one set way. The most common choices are having areas that straight up are cursed with unstable magic, making casting risky therein, or by outright afflicting them deliberately with curse spells. Both bestow curse and it’s variants, as well as specific spells that inflict specific blights are available.
However, there are other potential options that are definitely up to GM fiat, such as flavoring antimagic fields not as null magic, but magical pollution that prevents concise spell creation. Another option is making spellblight a consequence of making mistakes in casting, such as rolling arcane spell failure, fumbling the crafting of an item or the activation of the same. Heck, getting hit by spell turning might cause the magic to unravel a bit on return. This is where things get out into the weeds, so your GM will have final say as to what can cause a spellblight and when the risk manifests.
Some spellblights have slight positive side effects that can be used to the caster’s advantage in the right circumstances, but there’s even another optional sub-subsystem here where a caster may choose to turn other conditions they possess into ammo for certain spells, usually at the risk of failure. Turn your bleeding into greater inflict wound spells, for example. However, I would personally not use this or limit it to conditions brought on by the spellblights if at all, because a sufficiently diverse spellcaster can potentially eliminate the need for spells that heal conditions by removing them themselves and getting a buff to a spell out of it.
And that’s spellblights! It’s a neat way to provide some risk to spellcasting in settings with the possibility of wild magic or damaged magic. But that’s only the beginning of what subsystems await us this week, so keep an eye out!