Haha, thanks for the reply... two days to catch a six year old thread necro is pretty prompt!

Your swashbuckling sounds pretty great... but no stop in Avignon? There's gotta be some ancient mystery there somewhere!

It's not in the right time period, but sometime you might check out "The Cheese and the Worms" by Carlo Ginzburg. It's a really interesting account of a heretic peasant, his theology, and his trial. He also wrote "The Night Battles" about the Roman inquisition and its cases but I never read that one. Happy haunting!

Hi, I had a very similar idea for my BoL/D&D mashup that I haven't run yet. The "vancian"/D&D mages are the scholarly type, and those from other cultures are of the sorcerer/warlock type. At one point I intended to have the sorcerer/warlocks go with the freeform BoL style, and I never saw any reason that wouldn't work (assuming I got the Vancian stuff right). I had two very different campaign areas and really liked the idea of "foreign" magic being powered and used totally differently. Go for it!

Hi all, this may be a stupid question but... what is intended where the regular D&D magic system is suggested? In particular, is the idea that the spells become automatic to cast but with targets making saving throws? Or is the idea that the caster still makes a spellcasting roll? Adding saving throws to that then seems to weaken magic even more.

I like the idea of switching to caster success to determine spell effect; I've always wanted to switch to that in D&D by inverting the saving throws so the caster tries to get a high roll on a d20 to affect a target (rather than the target needing to roll low on a d20 to avoid effects of an automatic spell).

I'm curious if anyone's tried this, or if anyone (hi Simon!) knows what the original idea was, that would be helpful too. Thanks!