As anyone that plays with me will tell you, I love playing magic users. It's my favorite class. Now, it didn't bug me at all when I found out that there wasn't any in dead reign, because lets face it, Palladium games are built to be modified. So, since I had Kevin on the show two weeks ago I've been trying to figure out what kind of magic would actually fit Dead Reign in the right way.
(I should mention here that I do not have the book yet...)
The first thought is that, frankly, spell casters aren't going to work. They're too strong and too dynamic for a survival game. A class that can create energy and items out of mid air are not needed. For magic in dead reign to work, you'd need something that takes time, that is a gamble to use and is so limited that players should have to agonize if it's worth casting. If they don't have to worry about using it and can count on it in a pinch, it fails the survival game test.
Plus, there's another factor. How does one discover this new magic? In Rifts, the ley lines had to explode and people needed to start casting wildly before people realized that it worked, and frankly, a zombie apocalypse is not the kind of thing that would make people suddenly start believing in magic. However, it would make people start finding religion
That helps to some extent but the addition of gods and other powerful entities kind of skews the survival aspect as well. So priest type characters don't really work either. They're limited, sure, but it still doesn't fit the theme too well.
Besides, while they're not true spell casters and their spells aren't as dependable, they can cast in a heart beat so there goes that.
The other issue that comes in here is you need to avoid massive damage. No spell or magic should be able to do more than a land mine or grenade to the zombie hoards or else it really will be too overpowered.
Then it hit me. Palladium already has the PERFECT magical occ to fit dead reign, with a couple of thematic tweaks.
The Diabolist.
Now, wards and runes would need some tweaking. The wards and runes need not all be exactly the same as in PFRPG, but could be wards and runes drawn from the various relgions, or even made up by the character in a dream, or spoken by mad men or what have you. Basically, your magic users would either be people who studied religions, dabbled in the occult, or people that were crazy or snapped and tried something insane when all else failed. I actually don't like the crazy idea cause it fits the theme but not the play.
For example, to really have a good diabolist, you're going to need to have him constantly collecting compenents for the wards, and as we already know, getting what you need to survive is bad enough. On top of that, most would only have a handful of wards to start, which means they'd need to somehow convince their comerades to go on raids to liabraies, churches, book stores, and even insane asylums with no guarentee of success of finding anything even remotely magical in nature.
So, in my opinion, it's something that could easily be brought over to the system, and would fit very well in the game itself without overbalancing it, or even really changing the game in any major way.
What do you guys think?
Oh, and as a note, this would work best if you're using the cause being the magic and demons, and just make those that caused the plague be the Summoner OCC.
I was just showing My Bro old eps of Thundar today!... Awsome!
...."SMILE YOU S.O.B"....
