Codex Alera Conversion for DFRPG

[celticdm]

External furycrafting

External furycrafting [-3]
Description: You can manifest furycrafting outside of your body, manipulating an element that fits with the element of one of your furies.
Effect: This power works like both evocation and thaumaturgy as defined in the DFRPG, except you are limited to one chosen element that can be manipulated, which must align with one of your furies chosen at character creation. Immediate effects (such as creating fire or manipulating solid wood) use evocation, whereas long-term effects (such as contributing to a engineered structure, crafting a fire-sphere or cold-stone, or making a raft out of earth to carry you across ground) would use the thaumaturgy rules. You do not need a magic circle, but group efforts require you to be in close proximity with each other.
You also gain one specialization, in either power or control for fast casting, or complexity/control for long-term casting.

Refinement [-1]
Description: Experience or training has improved your strength or broadened the scope of your abilities.
Refined Furycraft. Refinement is a tool for improving your furycrafting over time. Each time Refinement is taken, choose one option from the following:
      Add a new element to to your external furycrafting. This must be GM approved, most likely fitting with furies decided upon at character creation.
      Or, gain two additional specialization bonuses for external furycrafting. This must follow the same “column” limits as skills.

Sponsored Furycraft [varies]
Description: you either inherited a powerful fury, or you bound a wild fury to your will.
Effect: You don’t just have a water fury, you have a river fury. That’s not just a fire fury, but one borne out of a lava vent from an active volcano. This fury’s power augments your own, but also affects your personality.

[celticdm]

Random thoughts:

Many of these look like Stunts. Basic Archery, Woodtracking, Calm Beasts, and Earthsense could all be mortal stunts.

True. I can see non earth-crafters being able to do some of these. That doesn't mean these can't also be powers, though.

Earthsense boosts Survival, but I don't think that Survival is actually used to locate nearby beings.

Woops, that was always supposed to be Alertness.

Not sure that Recovery is appropriate for waterbenders. I don't ever recall any of them shrugging off massive wounds quickly.

I don't like the way that people who have better Endurance are harder to heal.

Agreed! Recovery removed, and the base check has been standardized.

Healing seems kind of easy.

Weeeel, yes and no. It's still based on a Scholarship check to reflect the healer's medical background, and the higher level versions will be about useless without aspects and stunts to up that skill. Yes, you can take more time, but if there's three people with life-threatening injuries, taking that much time for one means the other two die.

What happens if you over-succeed at healing?

You're done quicker.

I don't really like the way that Read Emotion scales with Refresh invested in watercrafting.

Stronger watercrafters are more sensitive. I'll explain below why I'm not too worried about this and other water-based powers.

Can watercrafters use Mimic Form on other people?

Absolutely not, or else all that stuff with Max in Cursor's Fury wouldn't have been as important, and all major political figures would have one or two doubles around for this purpose.

The "must touch earth" and "disrupted by salt" things are probably best handled with compels.

I completely disagree. Must touch earth is a must, plan and simple. You can't buy off a compel to gain strength from the earth when you're say, on a wind-coach five-hundred feet off the ground. And a flying windcrafter hit with salt falls, period.

Upper-level Archery worries me. Stacking stress boosters that high isn't normally supposed to be easy.

Agreed somewhat. I've adjusted this a bit, but they're still a little broken, which to me fits with the setting. Enhanced archers are not that uncommon in Alera; just about any Aleran can (and probably should) be broken when compared to a "vanilla" mortal in Dresden. This offsets the fact that Alerans don't have computers, automatic rifles, or Youtube.

Some sort of area-effect upgrade for Incite Emotion for fire might be good.

Ignored, explanation below.

Inner Comfort doesn't look worth Refresh to me.

Adjusted somewhat.

Might be safer to put a limit on the supplemental movement from Speed.

There is a limit, its only so many times per scene.

Why does Iron Spine refer to social conflicts?

I've adjusted that in the endurance power set to be mental or social, this covers wehn someone would draw upon steel to remain calm or to counter emotional sensitivity from advanced watercrafting.

A bound fury could just be Sponsor Debt.

Agreed.

[celticdm]

Moar Notez!

In general, this may not be balanced very well, or at all, with the Codex Alera world. I'm not losing much sleep over this because A) the campaign I'm getting ready to run might not last more than a few weeks, B) none of this has been playtested, and C) I'm not publishing this. If this game is still going strong if/when Evil Hat releases the official version, I will buy that in a heartbeat! And encourage my players to convert to the official rules. Until then, this is just a ground-work for having fun and telling some interesting stories.

More specifically, I'm not too worried about anything water or fire based because my players didn't choose those furies for their characters. I've got an earth/wood crafter, and a metal/wind crafter. Anything fire or water based will be NPCs, and if I find a glaring hole, I will follow that oldest of game-mastering rules: make crap up and roll for effect.

For example, veils. In my opinion, veils should always be external furycrafting. Rote crafts, if you will. I would encourage anyone that is the equivalent of a caster to try new things. It keeps me on my GM'ing toes.


Our game is going to be set in/around Phrygia about 5 years after the conclusion of FLF. This lets us play with Icemen, Marat, the occasional wild vord, and the myriad of wild furies that will have cut loose from the war and fury-Alera's dissolution. I'm going to be looking at the Wild West for a bit of inspiration, both in the untamed frontier that used to be the main continent, and post-war swords for hire not satisfied at farming, but not wanting the stricture of serving in a legion. We can also go into Phrygia proper for some politicking. Also, I'm going to have at least one Face that's a mad scientist sort, because A) I want to explore some "furypunk" ideas, and B) because I love mad scientists.

[Becq]

Instead of representing Furycrafting as refresh powers, have you considered making them skills, instead?  Try this basic framework out for size:

First, add in a Furycrafting skill for each element (Watercrafting, Firecrafting, etc).  Subtract off all of those skills that were made 'obsolete' by Furycrafting (like Craftsmanship).  If you want to do something with Furycrafting, the GM determines a difficulty based on the complexity of the task, you roll your appropriate Furycrafting skill, and shifts determines success.  Example: You have Metalcrafting, and are in a fight.  Roll your Metalcrafting against your own Weapon skill.  Success increases your Weapon skill by +1 (temporarily), with spin increasing it further.

Second, add in the following power:
[-?] Furycrafting Potential.  The refresh you pay for this determines the skill cap on your Furycrafting skills.  Your primary Furycrafting skill can't go above this number, with your next best one less than your potential, and so on.

Next replace most of the powers you wrote up with difficulties for the above powers (and/or with minimum required skill levels).  Keep a few of them, such as refinement (specializations increase your skills, even past your potential).

I haven't fully thought this out, but the idea of paying refresh seperately for each bonus didn't feel right to me.

[Sanctaphrax]

Changes and new powers mostly look good to me.

Expert Defence has a typo in its cost.

You may have gone a touch too far in reducing the power of the archery powers.

Not sure what Sponsored Furycraft does.