This is an absolutely wonderful gimmick system! Highly recommended to anyone reading this, and many thanks to the author for creating it!
Just ran a one-shot in it (which actually will end up being the first half of a two-shot, as is normal). Players included someone with mild autism and someone with dyslexia who was also doing it in a (fluent) second language. Everyone had an absolute blast!
The system has a bunch of really nice properties.
- My entire prep took maybe 90 mins, using some random generators to create a handful of locations and characters (curated/modified to taste), and work out some very vague plotlines to introduce. I spent about 30 mins of that writing some spells for NPCs to use on the players, which is a lot more fun than wrangling statblocks.
- The spell system prevents too much munchkinning; you have to write it and you have to cast it, and both are non-numerical activities. One of my players was way better at writing than casting, and that fostered some fun teamwork and specialisation.
- The incredibly limited skill points encourages specialisation, which encourages players to solve problems in unusual ways with what they have.
- Because writing new spells is hard, players try to solve problems with the spells they already have, leading to hilarious consequences.
- It forces players to commit to the bit, which is great and keeps everyone engaged.
- By the end of the session, my players were exploring the limits of the system, with group casting (I made them cast it in a round, one word at a time, instant crit failure on fuckup) and multi-discipline (they wrote an Evocation spell where each word began with 'ma', then pig-latined it to make it also Transmutation, but it still fit Evocation, it was sick).
- The probabilities are super swingy, and that works for the tone. Players are (rightfully) as scared of a critical success as a critical failure, and would sometimes intentionally flub elements to try to avoid big dice pools which might produce 5+ successes. Lots of random nonsense happening, it's great fun.
Overall, really good; immediately led to one of my favourite sessions ever, which is particularly impressive given it was Discord + Tabletop Sim.
Other notes:
- The quest generator did exactly what it needed to, gave me a great starting place which has been a tonne of fun.
- I don't think the pig latin in the examples is correct. Shouldn't it be 'igpay atinlay'? Also, 'ivegay' not 'ivengay', I think?
- Example in Divination is wrong, example in Evocation is questionable ('to the').
- I gave a +1 bonus to any spell cast without being written down first. Seemed only fair.
- I added a timer to time-sensitive castings (20-40s as appropriate). Only used it once (a player found themselves falling from 200m up and turned into a duck), but it ratcheted up the tension and rewarded quick thinking and good prep. Would recommend.
- For combat, I on-the-fly made a very simple system where the party got 3 actions (max 1 per player) per round and the boss 2, and they had to ration whether to keep actions for Abjuration casts. Worked fine.
- I got players to add a 'Ludicrous gimmick' to their character, and had them roll on a table for connections to each other player (e.g. "I don't respect them very much in some aspect, decide why" and "They borrowed something from me and haven't given it back"). Didn't make a huge impact, but helped players get into character faster in that crucial first 20 mins. Would recommend.
With all that said, running it was remarkably smooth, and the core concept did all the heavy lifting I needed it to.
Our 4.5h session included:
- The players immediately descending into mild PvP in a way I've never seen them do, because it was genuinely funny.
- One player immediately triggered the quest curse by saying an erased word, at which point every other player utterly failed to help them but succeeded in making it worse, for literally six spells in a row.
- When confronted with a person who'd been transformed into a cat, the players removed the curse by accidentally transferring it to everyone else in the village, themselves included.
- When confronted with thick underbrush, one player extended everyone's legs by ten meters (???) and then another player crit-succeeded on a retaliation and moved all leg extension plus all the wild magic in a 100m radius onto the first player, who zoomed to 200m tall and frantically shapeshifting. The other players abjured this, and the first player had to transform into a duck in mid air to avoid falling to their death as their legs popped back to normal, which I made them do on a time limit.
- The session concluded with a genuinely good boss fight, where they did some investigation to find its weakness, and some preparation to fortify their position, and then made good tactical decisions and were really pleased when they vanquished it. Excellent stuff.
- Nobody cast fireball, not even once, because it was never the best solution to the problem.
That's a pretty high content-to-time ratio for a TTRPG, so, big ups to this system. I don't think it could easily support a longer campaign - players would build up spell libraries that were too good - but it's brilliant for one-shots.