Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Review of Magic World

So I picked up Magic World by Chaosium, the latest iteration of fantasy role-playing for the d100 system. Though broadly similar to the other contenders, RuneQuest 6 by The Design Mechanism and Legend by Mongoose, Magic World, not surprisingly, more closely adheres to the Basic RolePlaying game system. Interestingly, it doesn't use the expanded magic system presented in The Magic Book, released in 2011, which updated the magic rules from older editions of Chaosium's RuneQuest for use with BRP. Rather, Magic World expands the sorcery rules from the basic BRP game. In other words, all magic in Magic World is sorcery. If The Magic Book is derived from RuneQuestMagic World seems more influenced by another old Chaosium game, Stormbringer. Though the darker aspects of Stormbringer and its later edition Elric! have been toned down in Magic World, the rules for summoning demons and elementals are there. If you can get your hands on the excellent Elric! supplement, The Bronze Grimoire, to incorporate its more detailed summoning and necromancy rules, Magic World would make an excellent ruleset to run a dark fantasy campaign.

-Rognar-

4 comments:

Sean said...

The Bronze Grimoire is still available, in PDF, from Mongoose:

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/635/The-Bronze-Grimoire?term=bronze+gr&it=1

$7.74 at the moment on DriveThruRPG.

Ben Monroe said...

All the sorcery spells in Bronze Grimoire were included in Magic World. Also, all the rest if BG (and more!) will be included in the forthcoming "Advanced Sorcery" supplement for MW.

Rognar said...

Awesome! Thanks for the info.

Pulp Herb said...

It sounds like the magic system is an expansion of the system in the original Magic World that was in the Worlds of Wonder boxed set circa 1982 or so.

Which is great given I wish that boxed set would come back into print. I'm more interested in Future World than the other two.