GURPS Magical Styles: Modern Magic

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Magic For Our Times

Games often take it as read that magic is for fantasy campaigns. To enter our world, it must either be intertwined with historical beliefs, thus painting the past as a subtle fantasy setting, or be a sinister force that empowers occult-horror villains. But what about less horrific magic in the present – the sort that suits villains motivated by greed and politics rather than the supernatural, and that even heroes might wield?

GURPS Magical Styles: Modern Magic explores possibilities loosely inspired by present-day practices, real and fictional, without automatically assuming that magic is fantastic, old-fashioned, or evil. It offers five styles built on the GURPS Thaumatology: Magical Styles framework:

• The Librarian’s Art is the most traditional, based on accumulated magical knowledge in present-day libraries. There, magically gifted scholars and bibliophiles learn it . . . mostly to help them curate even better collections of writings.
• Magical Demagoguery is the most villainous. It assumes that power-hungry politicians and other rabble-rousers sometimes harness the magic of the mob to gain not immortality or other extraordinary power, but plain old money and influence.
• Punk Magic is the most unpredictable – a riff on "Chaos Magic" in which those who reject order and authority might gain a view of dirty, everyday reality that includes magic, a force as anarchic as its wielders.
• Rock and Roll Magic is the most blatant, being an answer to the question, "What if musicians whose lyrics, album art, stage shows, and public image evoke the occult aren't making it all up?" The flash, smoke, and noise might conceal or even be magic!
• Trenchcoat Magic is the most heroic. While some practitioners are selfish, most use their powers to solve occult mysteries and thwart supernatural villains before the whole world learns about magic the hard way.

These styles not only have alternative spell lists, but also come with new spells, strange secret materials, and more Magic Perks. There's no shortage of advice, either – especially on how to fit these approaches into the campaign, what their likely origins are, and how they interact with each other and the schools of magic in GURPS Magical Styles: Horror Magic and GURPS Magical Styles: Traditional Styles.

The world is more magical than you know!