Strange Magic 2 - Cartomancy, Onmyodo, and Herbalism

If Vancian magic bores you, it's time to go Strange!

Herbalism - Chaos magic done right!

Strange Magic 2's herbalism is chaos magic built from the ground up and not just a table that takes a magic missile and makes it kill the party on a roll of "1".

The Process

1: Each morning, pick random herbs from your current biome's table.

2: Each evening, store leftover herbs overnight in preservation vessels.

3: When you stockpile enough, plant your favorites in potted plants and take them with you.

4: Finally, learn recipes and collect the ingredients to create them and cash in on their awesome effects.

Modular Customization

Generous Kickstarter backers have piled on the bonus content in Strange Magic 2 to make sure the herbalism experience any player wants is there with a little twiddling.

• Give up either the ability to store or the ability to plant in exchange for the ability to collect rocks. Rocks act like detonating AoE herbs, but don't spoil. (Geologist archetype - has its own spellbook)
• Give up recipes in exchange for the ability to collect bugs. Feed bugs to activate them again and again multiple times per day, giving you a spammable ability if the core system is too random. (Entomologist archetype - has its own spellbook)
• Force your first herb collection roll of the day to be made in a special high-chaos biome, increasing the chaos for a taste of variety nobody else can have! (Mycologist archetype - has its own spellbook)
• All of the above - Special care has been made to allow archetypes to stack, utterly transforming the base class with their cumulative effects. Who's up for an entomologist/geologist/mycologist?

Cartomancy - Spellcasting with deckbuilding!

Fate has a will that guides its power, and it takes a smooth talker to trick fate into playing into one's hand. Among the best at this, cartomancers tell fortunes and manipulate fate itself using tarot cards as a focus.

The Process

1. When making a new cartomancer, choose the classic deck or the deathdealer deck. These cards are your collection.
2. Using your collection, build an active deck made of least, lesser, and greater portents.
3. Your hand is drawn from your active deck, but if you don't like your hand, you can discard cards to power seals, a limited resource that reduces the random nature of cards by giving you a number of deterministic "outs" per day.

Modular Customization

1. Using the Three Card Monty feat, build one or more three-card minidecks that can be unleashed whenever you need their effects.
2. Take the Multitudes of Fate feat to add one least portent and one lesser portent from the Multitudes of Fate deck to your collection. These cards aren't found anywhere else!

Onmyodo - Oriental druidism with respect for its mythological source

Onmyodo, traditional Japanese occult druidism, influenced imperial policy for centuries before its eventual ban. To the onmyoji, its practitioners, the world was awash in spirits, and many of them were all too happy to share their secrets with those who knew how to speak with them. This led to the onmyoji becoming superlative diviners and advisers despite the fact that they themselves couldn't cast a single portentous spell of their own to save their lives.

Using this as a springboard, Strange Magic 2 introduces a series of five lightweight magic systems steeped in eastern mythology to produce new gameplay options that are both delightfully chewy in crunch and authentic in the fluff.

Haiku - Used by the warrior poet base class, haiku are effectively custom bardic performances with plenty of Interjection Games' signature modularity. Build two subjects up using a spellbook of various topics, then add a kireji, or cutting word, from a complete list of cutting words used in traditional haiku. When the poet begins to perform, he chooses one of the haiku's two subjects, and when he executes his kireji as an attack action, his performance changes to that haiku's other subject.

Origami - Used by the shikigami ascendant base class, origami represents the ascendant folding its own body to grant itself various powers each day. The number of folds allowed is based on the ascendant's origami pool.

Petitions - Used by the onmyoji and shikigami ascendant base classes, petitions represent calling on the help of the spirit world directly, whether that be the direct intervention of Amaterasu herself, a thunderstorm Tenjin, Raijin, Susano-o, and Fujin built by committee, or just the assistance of a few dozen dead functionaries. Mechanically, the system is a wide selection of talents that are activated through the use of a spirit point pool.

Shikigami - Used by the onmyoji base class, the shikigami is a kami-familiar bound in a shell of origami paper. Far more central to the onmyoji than a familiar is to a wizard, shikigami not only deliver talismans, but also cast their own petitions if it takes the feats for it.

Archetypes that get rid of the shikigami? not everyone likes pets? tend to feel like whole new classes because of the amount of power that needs to be replaced.

Talismans - Used by the onmyoji and warrior poet base classes, talismans are placed objects that allow no saving throws and function until destroyed or their duration expires. Most talismans have two variants: a single-target omamori version and an area-of-effect o-fuda version.

Product Features

• 8 base classes: the herb-cooking gourmend, the herb-collecting herbalist, the warrior with a venus fly trap naturalist, the spirit-speaking onmy?ji, the haiku-performing warrior poet, the pet-made-master shikigami ascendant, the card-slinging cartomancer, and the martial card-slinging wildcard.
• 23 archetypes, including at least five which could stand on their own as a brand new class
• 10 new magic systems and subsystems, ranging in weight from the simple self improvement of origami folds to the controlled chaos of herbalism and its geology/entomology analogues.
• Upwards of 100 feats
• The optional microcosms system, which allows special features to influence biomes. A wizard's tower in a desert will behave differently from a wizard's tower in the forest, after all.
• So. Many. Tables.
• Print-and-play cartomancy decks
• Tables that allow for functional, albeit slow, cartomancy play with a standard deck of poker cards. (Use the print-and-plays. Please.) Watercolor interior art by Vera Crouch