Development

Other Magics has been in development since November 2025. Development is driven, above all, by frequent playtesting with our wonderful pool of playtesters. Let us know here if you'd like to be a part of that process!

The Basics

Other Magics is a role playing game about creativity, problem solving, and whimsical wizardly antics. One player – the Adjudicator, similar to the Game Master or Referee in other systems – controls the game world and facilitates play while the other players explore that world as individual characters called Wizards.

The primary power wielded by Wizards is the casting of Spells, which are created by channeling a stored Essence - itself a fundamental and specific property, like Fire, Anger, or Orangutan, which varies little between its instances.

Wizards collect Essences via Attunement, achieved merely by finding and focusing on an instance of an Essence in the surrounding environment. This permits ‘storing’ a copy of the Essence within an Attunement Slot, where it will stay until Burned to boost a spell, lost in Mishap, or otherwise discarded.

There are four Classes of Wizard each player may choose from, each with their own unique method of casting Spells.

• Artificers can bring about new shapes of a channeled Essence, such as creating a boulder with Essence of Stone.
• Kineticists can apply force to objects containing a channeled Essence, such as lifting a rock with Essence of Stone.
• Transmuters can infuse a target with a channeled Essence, like by turning a rock wooden with Essence of Wood.
• Enchanters can manipulate channeled Essences within a target, like by increasing the velocity of a falling rock with Essence of Speed.

The flow of gameplay in Other Magics is similar to that found in most TTRPGs: the players describe the Action of their characters in constant conversation with the Adjudicator, who describes the Situation at large and determines the consequences of those actions. However, should any action require a Check, or is otherwise of significance, the game proceeds in structured, successive Rounds.

Each Round, the Adjudicator establishes the scene and any relevant Threats before each player commits to an intended Action, negotiating Checks if needed with the Adjudicator. All Checks are then rolled simultaneously, and the Adjudicator interprets the results (called Effects) with respect to the ongoing fiction, representing certain individual Effects numerically (as d10s), before play proceeds to the next Round.

All Checks are made by rolling a d100, indicating success if the result is equal to or below a Target Number. The Target Number is one of three Ability Scores – Body, Mind, or Spirit – modified up or down in increments of 20 given the demands of the Situation.

Rolling above the Target Number indicates failure, though that failure may indicate a ‘partial’ success with complications with respect to the Situation at hand.

A 01-05 on the die is always a Critical Success, granting success and more, and a 96-100 is always a Critical Failure, unambiguous and with additional consequences.

After a (non-critically) failed Check, players may choose to Burn to succeed anyway, subtracting a number of points from their combined Ability Scores as Damage equal to the difference between the die roll and the Target Number. If casting a Spell, sacrificing (Burning) the channeled Essence counts as 20 such points.

Whether a Spell achieves its intended Effect is determined by a Mind Check, the difficulty of which is modified by the scope of the spell, called its Tier.

All Spells last only one Round unless Sustained, achieved by a Spirit Check to Attune to the Spell itself once cast and stored within an Attunement Slot on success until discarded or lost.

Wizards can Ritual Cast to aid in casting (or Sustaining) another’s Spell if also attuned to its channeled Essence, adding an additional d100 roll and taking the best result.

If Attunement to an Essence is failed, or an Attuned Essense is lost, it becomes Drained for the rest of the day. Drained Essences cannot be re-Attuned to.

Core Philosophy

At the core of Other Magics is an emphasis on the ‘fictional reality of the situation.’ This is sometimes called Diegesis, Simulationism, or being ‘Fiction First;’ for Other Magics, it really just means that the focus of play should be on what’s happening in the game world from the perspective of the game world (sometimes called the Situation, or the Fiction).

While this may seem like a preference for ‘realism’, diegesis is about gameplay. Problem solving is gameplay! And problem solving from the perspective of the game world is really cool, because instead of relying on knowledge of a game system¹ to solve a set of narrow problems (like maximizing statistical capacity for violence), players rely on their own intuition about people, cause-and-effect, and a (hopefully) richly described and internally-consistent game world to solve any number of problems in any number of ways.

This style of play does rely on a shared ability to consistently ‘intuit’ the unstated, ‘common-sense’ rules of the game world, which lack the stability and authority more concrete rules typically provide. But when it works, it’s more intuitive, more immersive, brings the ‘secondary details’ of the game world into focus, and permits meaningful gameplay (strategy, interaction, and decision making) the rules never explicitly model.