Focused Practitioner: Geomancer Ideas

[Lord Finnion]

I have a player wanting to use the Focused Practitioner with a background as a geologist and focus on earth magic.  I have a few ideas but was hoping to pick some creative minds...

We're starting with Feet in the Water and the other players are a wizard, wanting to use cold and ice rather than fire, and a changeling who's mother is a Nymph. 

The others are pretty easy but coming up with magical abilities from the FP are a bit of a challenge.  It doesn't help that this cast is not a very experienced RP group.  I have plenty but we're learning the system together.

[Sanctaphrax]

At Feet In The Water, you don't really have to do anything fancy with the Powers. Channeling, Ritual, both, or a custom Sponsored Magic is plenty. Maybe toss on a Refinement.

But if you really want to try something new, you could go with a Supernatural Sense for earth-related things. Or you could go a physical route, taking Strength and Toughness to represent power drawn from the earth. Human Form could fit, if the character is creating stone armour for themself when they fight.

Strength and Channeling are redundant together, though, so I don't recommend taking both.

[narphoenix]

You also want to remember that magic tends to be a reflection of the person casting when choosing aspects. I mean, the premier manipulator of Earth in the novels was Morgan, to give you an idea. Suggesting that the player take some kind of aspect related to why his magic turned out the way he is could help refine him more.

*is semi back from the dead*

[Quantus]

Off the top of my head, with earth magic you can go in several directions.

Magnetism is earth magic, and taken to an extreme with Magic Senses you could start being able to perceive electromagnetic fields including radio signals, which would be an interesting slide toward technological Ferromancy (as mab called it).  Eventually you could even develop this into electrical manipulation as well, in a sort of Earth & Sky union of opposites type thing.  It's supposed to be a particularly impressive thing to master, like Harry being good at both Fire and Ice. 

If you want to go more Mineral than Metal, straight up stone manipulation and mineral senses could have a wide range of applications, especially if the character has a strong Chemistry education.  The Setting of your game will play a factor here, for example if you are in the Kentucky/Pennsylvanian region, in Alaska, or in the southwest near Texas or Oklahoma, there could be a lot of fossil fuels relatively close to the surface.

Offensively there are the direct sort of things where you create spikes of stone and make pits open up underneath people.  Turing stone to sand or mud and back can be good too.  Or you can take a more "seismic" flavor and go with shaking objects and using more Resonance effects to make things happen. 

Earth Magic can be used to ground out other magic if you are extremely good at it, so there might be some low-level anti-magic protections you could use, though full immunity might be out of the reach of ordinary mortals. 

Any strong Earth-sense could lend itself to riches through prospecting, even without active magic involved in creating or moving valuables to within reach.

Then there could be the spin of /being/ more earth-like, as opposed to more traditional wizardly stuff, bumping strength and defensive resistances, like what Sanctaphrax described.


A lot of it depends on what sort of role you'd like to have in your group.  Are you the tank/bruiser?  The Sensory information vector?  The Jack-of-all-trades type bag of tricks that uses their surroundings against their enemies?