A Thaumaturge campaign using Dragon Warriors rules

Habitués of these parts will already know that I’m an unabashed fan of The Thaumaturge CRPG, so it was only a matter of time before I started noodling around with ways to depict its lightly fantastical early 20^th century setting in a roleplaying campaign. Google tells me that Dragon Warriors in Polish is Smoczy Wojownicy – and this year being the 40^th anniversary of DW and the 120^th anniversary of the June Days, here’s an outline of how that adaptation could work.

Thaumaturges in Dragon Warriors

Thaumaturges, also known as temperomancers, are treated as mystics. To qualify as a thaumaturge, the character must have Psychic Talent of at least 13.

The character does not get spells automatically. They must first bind one or more salutors. Each salutor has a number of spells (usually one per level) aligned with its nature, and which unlock as the thaumaturge advances in rank. The GM will determine the spells available to a salutor when creating it.

When spells are cast, the thaumaturge rolls for Psychic Fatigue in the usual way for mystics except that it is the bond with that specific servitor that is fatigued; if the thaumaturge has other salutors then he or she can still invoke their powers. Each salutor has a different time of day when its bond to the thaumaturge will defatigue.

The thaumaturge can mentally confer with their first salutor. This calls for a few moments of quiet mediation, so it can’t be done in the middle of a conversation or fight. The salutor doesn’t have access to any special knowledge, but it has its own insights and may give some useful advice on the thaumaturge’s current course of action. (The main point of it is so that the GM can give players a subtle nudge when they are at a loss.)

Finding a salutor

Salutors usually attach themselves to individuals with a particular flaw, which the thaumaturge can discern with the skill of Aesthesics. To draw out the flaw, the thaumaturge must provoke the individual to excessively indulge the flaw to the point that they overreach and it causes them trouble. For example, urging a character with the scandal-mongering flaw to go too far and thereby attract the disapproval of the people they are gossiping with. That being achieved, the thaumaturge can acquire the flaw by rolling Psychic Talent or less on d20.

Subduing a salutor

Acquiring the correct flaw to attune with a wild salutor qualifies the thaumaturge to attempt to subdue it. This is a struggle analogous to physical combat except that Magical Attack and Magical Defence are used in place of Attack and Defence. Psychic Talent is used instead of Health Points, recovering at the end of the psychic battle regardless of outcome. Blows struck use d8 for Armour Bypass and do 4 damage. The character’s Armour Factor is equal to the number of bound salutors he or she has. Most wild salutors will have AF of 1 or 2.

If the thaumaturge wins the psychic battle, the salutor is subdued and can then be bound. If the thaumaturge loses, the salutor escapes into the wild and is gone for good; the thaumaturge retains the flaw and additionally suffers madness. (You can roll for madness as per standard DW rules, but better still if the insanity relates to the newly acquired flaw.)

Binding a salutor

Once subdued, a salutor is successfully bound if the thaumaturge rolls Psychic Talent or less on d20. If the attempt fails, the salutor escapes into the wild but can now be tracked using Aesthesics and the thaumaturge can again attempt to subdue it.

Flaws

Flaws are psychological traits such as pride, ambition, envy, recklessness, malice, scandal-mongering. If you have a flaw it may sometimes work as an asset, but think of it as a special ability with a downside, causing trouble for you as well as for others.

The best example of a flaw that springs to mind is the case of Richard the Lionheart, shipwrecked and travelling through hostile territory in the guise of a merchant, who was apprehended by Duke Leopold of Austria because he insisted on wearing a pair of exquisite gloves that no itinerant merchant could afford.

Thaumaturges must acquire a new flaw in order to bind a wild salutor into their service. Additionally, any time the player chooses to act in accordance with one of their flaws they can earn experience points proportional to the inconvenience or danger caused as a result:

Other abilities of a thaumaturge

In place of Dragon Warriors mystics' Premonition and ESP, the thaumaturge has four innate abilities.

Psychometry

This is the ability to read psychic impressions (“traces”) from objects imprinted with strong emotions. By handling the object, the thaumaturge detects the trace. Each person’s trace is as unique as a fingerprint, meaning that the thaumaturge will know if they have seen the same trace before, and if they know whose trace it is (immediately apparent if they have spoken to them) they will always recognize it again.

Psychometry allows the thaumaturge to retrace a person’s steps after speaking to them, following their trace the way a dog would follow a scent trail but with the important distinction that the thaumaturge is not discerning a physical trail but rather is winding back through the character’s thoughts and feelings. Therefore the trail is not only locational but also social; if the character had an important conversation with somebody else, the trace will lead to that person rather than simply the spot where they happened to talk.

The time that a trace can be followed back depends on the thaumaturge’s rank: 5 minutes times the thaumaturge’s rank squared. So a 4^th rank thaumaturge could follow a trace back eighty minutes. This is only a limit on following the path of a continuous trace. There is no time limit on detecting a trace on an object that has strong emotions attached; such traces last for decades.

Psychometry also gives the thaumaturge the power to imprint a message on an object. The message can be read by any other thaumaturge just as easily as if it was written.

A thaumaturge can conceal their trace on an object. In that case, another thaumaturge attempting to read the trace must match their Magical Attack against the first thaumaturge’s Magical Defence in order to do so.

Aesthesics

This skill allows the thaumaturge to read someone’s emotions while talking to them. The thaumaturge can detect whether the person is telling the truth, when they are hiding something, and if they have a flaw.

The same skill can be used to mask emotions, flaws and lies from another thaumaturge, who must match their Magical Attack against the dissembling thaumaturge’s Magical Defence to see through the veil.

Aesthesics can also be used to find a person whose trace the thaumaturge is familiar with. The thaumaturge knows the direction to go, but not necessarily how far off they are. The chance of knowing the distance is 10% times the thaumaturge’s rank.

Manipulation

When a thaumaturge knows what is most important to a person, they may be able to manipulate the person’s emotions to convince them to do something. A character who is eager to impress a superior might be convinced that the thaumaturge is somebody the superior will listen to, for example.

Different salutors play on different emotions and aspirations. When using the manipulation ability, the thaumaturge enlists the salutor’s power and this could cause psychic fatigue on their bond. Treat it as a level 4 spell (analogous to the mystic spell Enthrall, in fact) matching the thaumaturge’s Magical Attack against the target character’s Magical Defence.

Sequester

Thaumaturges who meet can move their conversation onto the psychic plane. Their astral selves appear as they do normally but their surroundings vanish. On the psychic plane it is impossible to speak an untruth, which can be revealing even to the person speaking. Any of the thaumaturges in a sequestered conversation can leave it at any time – usually, that is; you could freak out a player by having them unable to return to the real world. No matter how long the conversation on the psychic plane, when it ends no time will have passed in the real world.

The grimoire

The grimoire is a book of psychic formulae. To use the abilities of their salutors, a thaumaturge must have a grimoire to hand. Without it, they cannot cast spells or manipulate emotions. Their psychometry and aesthesics abilities are unaffected, however.

Running the game

When a campaign is set in a historical setting, there is a temptation to fanfic it by pulling in ideas and characters from any and all contemporary genre fiction. Don’t, that’s my advice. Honour the originality of The Thaumaturge by seeing that it stands on its own merit as an original fantasy setting. It does not need and will in no way be enhanced by treating it as a turn-of-the-century bucket in which you need to throw Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Raffles, Cthulhu, Allan Quatermain, John Silence, Professor Challenger, or any other intruder from a different fictional universe. Less is more, and once you start down that road you are inevitably lining up to jump the shark.

On the other hand, it’s well worth plundering any and all the real historical details. Characters, events, history – they’re all there on Wikipedia, and provide rich seams from which to mine the storylines of your campaign. There is no better way to absorb the feel of a place than by visiting it, of course, and in the absence of time machines the ideal way to soak up the vibe is simply by playing the CRPG, which does a first-class job of conveying the style and culture of the times along with the combustible atmosphere of a society riven by tensions between past and future, rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed.

Other game systems

If you’re using a skill-based system like GURPS or Call of Cthulhu, you can incorporate the dimensions of the Thaumaturge system: Deed, Heart, Mind, Word. In Jewelspider those first three translate closely to three of the four qualities that define a character: Strong, Inspired, Clever – except that Jewelspider uses Inspired for both persuasion and emotional insights, and splits The Thaumaturge’s Deed stat into Strong and Graceful. 

The snag with using Jewelspider is that it’s explicitly tied into the Legend setting and has no instant-cast spells, so you’d have to junk the entire magic system and rebuild that to be based on salutors and psychic powers.

If you don’t mind working out a bunch of playbooks you could use a Powered by the Apocalypse framework with Deed, Heart, Mind and Word as the base stats. It risks becoming tediously mechanical, as you’d have to force all the character roles through the usual PbtA cookie cutter of, say: thief, reporter, army veteran, bon viveur, artist, entrepreneur, gangster, etc –- and as any of those could potentially be a thaumaturge, the whole playbook structure shatters at the first tap.

GURPS has a lot of detail (here) about weaponry of the period. If you do decide to stick with Dragon Warriors, there are some early 20^th century rules for that here. And if you want to delve deeper into the rich folklore of Poland, take a look at Beyond Corny Groń by Kuba Skurzyński.

This is a repost of an article from my Jewelspider page on Patreon. About half the posts, like this one, are open to all who subscribe to the page whether they are backers or whether they are what Patreon calls "free members". Of course, the choicest pieces are reserved for the paying members, but I hope this one will entice you over to browse among the non-paywalled content and to consider subscribing for the top-drawer stuff.