The Complete Works Of Zorin Greystar

Book 1

Part 2

Subsection III

I Think I Did This Bit Already

Look, You Know How Hard It Is To Keep Coming Up W/New ‘Header’ Gags?

Well, my physical copy finally arrived. It is in excellent condition for a 40 year old book, no pages falling out, and the paper has only the barest hints of discoloration. This is especially noteworthy in that it’s a square-bound, not center-stapled, book, and those typically have problems with the glue and binding. For obvious reasons, I’m going to continue relying on the PDF for actual use, and leave this one with my stack of Arduin, Dragon Tree, and other books, near at hand when I need some inspiration, yet in a place no cat has yet figured out how to puke on. (I just saved myself from having to explain to work why I needed a new laptop by performing a very hasty felinecotomy.) But I (as usual) digress.

Speaking of digressions, by way of introduction, you should probably read Part I of this walkthrough of The Complete Works of Zorin Greystar for some context.

Skimming briefly, I see we have some new spells near the end of the book, but I prefer to write these articles in strict linear order, turning pages and making comments on whatever thoughts spring to mind, like “I’m hungry”, “I wonder what the cats are up to?”, and “Was that my phone or my wife’s?”. Occasionally, there’s thoughts about the book, too. Not particularly deep, insightful, or amusing, but thoughts.

Enchanting The Mattock

Not(?) A Euphemism

Look, it was on the next page from where I left off. Seemed like a good section header for some reason. I write from my gut, not my head, which is good, as my gut is a lot bigger. Anyway, this next bit is about learning spells. Even a first level spell, we are told, is “of comparable complexity to ten minutes of classical music being performed by rote memory”. If you’re too low-level to learn a spell, it’s simply beyond your comprehension. However, you can cast spells of higher level, “but it is very I will discuss this later” (sic). I like that phrasing. “This is very I will discuss this later. This is extremely I will not discuss this now. This is absolutely discuss this later kind of thing!”

There’s a slight, but understandable, discrepancy between the text and the formula as regards learning time. The text says learning time is reduced by Intelligence, but the formula says: T = S – [(P – 12)/2], minimum 1 day, where T is Time, S is Spell Level, and P is Prime Requisite, which is not always Intelligence. If pushed, I could make an argument for either being correct — you can claim “Intelligence is about learning and memorization, so it counts even if your magic is based on another attribute”, or you can equally claim “MAD sucks, your ability to learn a spell is the same as your ability to cast it”.

The highest level spell you can learn is the lower of either (half your level)+1 or (half your prime requisite)+1. Running some numbers mentally, this mostly maps to a typical D&D power curve, except you can cast higher level spells slightly earlier if you have a decent PR. But once you’re learned a spell, you must then memorize it in order to cast it (which in turn requires spell points). Memorization time is defined as H = S – [(P-12)/2], for all values of P > 12, while the total spell levels you can memorize is given as ∑S = (L2/3) + L. (In the interests of fairness, these formulae are explained in the text, with examples – and honestly, the equations are more confusing than just reading the descriptive rules, but they had a ‘ ∑’ in their font and they were gonna use it, by Ghod!)

Worth noting is that you don’t “forget” memorized spells. Your memorized spells are basically your loadout, you keep using them until you decide to voluntarily “forget” a spell and “memorize” another. This is good, because the memorization times are pretty long. (They were also long in AD&D, but no one actually paid attention to that. A 10th level MU would take nine hours to memorize their daily spells! I do not know of any group that actually held to that.)

Now that you’ve learned a spell, and memorized a spell, you can cast a spell, right? Wrong, as John McLaughlin would say. You must remember it! This takes a time, in segments, of  Tr = 16 – (P/2) + S – M. (Tr being ‘Time to Remember’, and ‘M’ is Maximum Spell Level Learned). There’s a curiously persistent typo here, to the point where I suspect it’s not a typo, but an early example of a search/replace error! (Yes, kiddies, there were word processors in 1984. I used Scripsit (I spelled it with an ‘h’. Guess where.) on TSR-80s and later WordStar on the IBM PC in college, and there were even some for the mainframes and minis most colleges had, and I greatly suspect the people who wrote this were at least college-adjacent at the time.)

Specifically (and I know, even for me, this is a tangent, but it’s intrigued me and I can’t let it go), we have the following in close proximity (??? is where I believe there’s a missing word):

• “Spell casters can ??? their level in levels of spells at any one time”
• “since I am eleventh level, I can ??? 11 levels of spells”.
• “If more than one spell is to be they must be contiguously ???.
• “I waited quietly outside while clearing my mind and ??? (up to 11 levels of spells)”

(In my editor in WordPress, the bulleted list is the same size and font as the text. Rendered, it is not. Any WP gurus out there have a clue?)

It’s clear from context the missing word is probably ‘remember’/’remembered’, but was it once some other word, a term later changed for reasons unknown? Perhaps confusion over ‘memorized’ (to have a spell in your ‘load-out’) and ‘remember’ (to have a spell ready to cast) nagged at the writers, and they wanted another term, but never actually replaced it? Odds are, we’ll never know, but if anyone involved in the book wants to step up (and, hopefully, they have a good sense of humor… I kid because I love, people!), I’d be happy to share their insights.

While not well-explained, there’s definitely the germ of an interesting system here for spellcasting. You’ve got all the spells you’ve learned (a large list, unchanging), the spells you’ve memorized (a shorter list, changed occasionally), and spells you’ve remembered (the ones you’re about to cast)

There’s a further wrinkle: You can remember a set of spells to cast contiguously, one after the other. Though surprisingly they didn’t use this analogy, in light of their other music-based ones, it’s like having a ‘playlist’ of songs you plan to perform.  If you’re interrupted in this process, you only have the ones you’ve already ‘remembered’ in your head, and you can’t remember a new spell without ‘forgetting’ those. Lastly, your ‘remembered’ spells only last for a number of turns equal to your prime requisite.

I’m gonna skip ahead a bit, cause I’ve only covered about 5 pages! I’ll just note the next bit deals with trying to cast spells you haven’t learned, via reading them from books, and there’s a typically-nasty magical fumble chart for when you inevitably fail. This overlaps with rules for casting spells when you’re OOM (that’s “Out of Mana” for those who never played Everquest), which can both result in spell failure and screw up mana recovery.

This book is dense, I must say. There’s a lot crammed in here, and despite the ‘written in character’ conceit, there is surprisingly little useless fluff.

Are You Experienced?

Herein follows an in-character rant about how those other games don’t award experience correctly, and I’m getting mid-90s USENET flashbacks. I wonder if we’ll see some version of “Armor stops damage, not makes you harder to hit!” and “Hit points aren’t realistic, no one can survive being hit by a sword a dozen times!” in here somewhere?

I will reproduce only a part of the text here:

I have heard lore of strange worlds where adventurers gain experience in finding gold and magic. Also in these strange places, the larger the party of adventurers, the less each gets, for experience is divided like booty at the end of each quest. Why, if I were in a world like that, I would strike down all my comrades just before the quest finished and take all the gold and experience for myself!

But fear not! For there is a New System (surprisingly, not a NEW SYSTEM) for awarding experience!

I’ll bet there’s formulas. Do you wanna bet there’s formulas?

First, experience is gained by Doing Stuff, not by gaining treasure. Nor is it divided amongst participants. Rather, anyone who either actively participated in a fight, or was threatened by the enemy, gains XP. (Even if the monster doesn’t hit you, if it could have hit you, that counts. But you have to at least be in the general area, no AFK campers back at the spawn point!)

Second, instead of adding up numbers in the thousands, every opponent gives you 1 point per their level/HD, 1.5 if they had ‘special’ abilities and 2 if they had ‘exceptional’ abilities.

While this results in far less XP earned, you also need far less, as expressed by this formula:E = [K(L² + L)]/2, where K is the Character Class Constant… so why is it not C? Especially given the, ah, problematic interpretation if you start all three of those words with a ‘K’. This ‘simple’ formula expresses the more ‘complex’ concept of “Add all your prior levels and then your current one, so if you’re 4th level, you multiply 1+2+3+4 times your ‘K’. The ‘C’onstants range from 90 to 150. There’s also a chart which does all the math for you, but it’s very badly formatted. 

 (Side Note: An awful lot of the verbiage and formulas in Zorin’s book could be replaced by just using the charts and tables they provide anyway. I think the writers intended to show what’s “under the hood”, instead of presenting some set of seemingly arbitrary numbers. I have to commend their intent, at least.)

Well, almost lunchtime, so I think this is a good stopping point. It’s interesting that not only is there an alternate magic system (there were lots of those published at the time, practically from the get-go) but there’s both an alternate XP system (Arduin had some steps in this direction, but not as extreme), and an alternate combat system. This book is, in essence, the core of a new game entirely, and I think it’s a pity they didn’t just bite the bullette (sic) and do exactly that.