Final Fantasy Mages, revisited.

[Cleverest of Things]

So,I'm pretty sure I've done a post about this before, a decent enough time ago that I don't want to use post necromancy to find it again, and I'd love new input.. but despite my setting being mostly DC oriented, I wanted to bring the various flavors of mage from Final Fantasy to life, even if I may not use them in the current setting, and I wanted to brainstorm. And since I don't want to reveal too much to my players, I'd love for your input!

So, the basic concept is that they are Legacies, potentially dating back to Atlantis or even before. I've got good ideas for each of the five legacies, I've merged a few final fantasy classes into one Legacy, and I'm really looking to help design them based on what should be an Attainment, what should be a Rote, what Artifacts or Imbued Items they use, and even just how to name the spells.

The two easiest and most obvious were Black Mage and White Mage. I kinda went in a sort of Jedi/Warcraft route with both, but the naming conventions of spells and the actual mechanics of the relatively nerfed Attainments have me hung up.

White Mages come from the Obrimos, with their third primary arcanum being Life. They have moved beyond the specifics of a given divinity or law of order in the cosmos, and instead believe in the Light, a cosmic unity of all beings that is perpetuated when someone does something for someone else or helps someone. They are priests and healers broken down to the very basic, but can also çall upon the strength of the Light in other ways. The attainments I am looking at are Cure (Healing wounds), Esuna (healing diseases and poisons, and maybe other tilts), Protect (helping defend against damage or add health levels), Shell (protect against magic and possibly other supernatural attacks) and Holy (a raw attack using Prime).

Black Mages are Moros, focused on Forces, Matter, and Death. They believe instead in the Shadow, the idea that because the universe is nihilistically balanced, they cast a shadow over all things with their own ideas if they have the power to enforce them. Their attainments would be Fire, Blizzard, Thunder, Storm (a heavy environmental tilt), and Doom (yeah, out right killing avada Kadavra style).

The other three mage types are far less clear in my head, and I'd love some interpretations from people.

Red Mages are Mastigoi. They don't believe in Light or Shadow, only themselves and their own destiny. They focus on Fate, Mind, and Space. I imagine their attainments to include self buffs and enemy debuffs, but as per final fantasy they are known for Rotes and Praxii and Improvised Magic mimicking other spells. I'd love it if there were ways to give them stuff like double cast or triggered as or delayed magic etc.

Green mages are the geomancers and beastmasters,with control over the environment and wilderness, focused on Matter, Life, and Spirit. Almost all of them end up with a familiar,and they are well known to turn their current environment against people. Philosophically, they believe that light, Shadow etc are complications that shouldn't really matter, and instead of focusing inward, they focus groundward, and hope to build things up from scratch. No idea on their attainments beyond the ability to get a familiar and the ability to get the environmental spirits to help them and maybe manifest.

The Gray Mages are the time space mages, with control over the cosmic forces. They are Acanthi, specializing in Space, Time, and Fate. They believe in destiny and karma as separate from Light and Shadow and other ideas, and manipulate causality and the spacetime continuum for their own benefits. They curse and bless people, and their attainments would be Haste, Slow, Stop, Teleport, and Meteor/Comet.

I'm still working on final fantasy naming schemes for spells.. right now, the -ara spells are improvised or praxis spells that are flexible, the original spell names are attainments, and the -aga spells are Rotes,but I'm not sure. Im so considering using Artifacts or Imbued Items to represent each job class's traditional outfit, but have no idea on how to do that and have it a benefit considering that most Mages of a given legacy will be able to at least improvise all the spells they need. Maybe the White Mage Robes give them access to Death magic so they can ressurect people using Raise? Maybe Black Mages get Space spells to use X-zone/Black hole? Not sure.

I'd love to hear ideas and stuff, regarding naming,balancing the attainments, ideas to give the legacies some flavor, etc. I'm trying to flesh them out, and I hate to say it but 2e legacies are a bit lack luster, hence why I may relegate the most "basic" spells as their innate attainments and use Rotes to represent the peak of their power. But any input is welcome.

And yeah,I skipped Summoners, because that's a whole other ballgame, and I've used both the Summoners book and Wyrdhamster's ideas to try to translate them into 2e but that's a much bigger fish to fry than this post alone.

Thank you for your ideas and input, if you give them!

[Errol216]

I don't know much about Final Fantasy archetypes, so no help there, but I can give you some basic pointers.

Red Mages are Mastigoi. They don't believe in Light or Shadow, only themselves and their own destiny. They focus on Fate, Mind, and Space. I imagine their attainments to include self buffs and enemy debuffs, but as per final fantasy they are known for Rotes and Praxii and Improvised Magic mimicking other spells. I'd love it if there were ways to give them stuff like double cast or triggered as or delayed magic etc.

I'd swap the Path with your Gray Mages. Acanthii + Mind works better, especially as "choose your own destiny" is an Acanthus thing more than a Mastigos thing IMO. (Mastigos are more about "define yourself", which is similar but different.) For buff/debuff, look at Fate: the Boon/Hex stuff (p134) is a good guide. For triggered magic, look at the Fate Attainment "Conditional Duration" (p192) and also the Time Attainment "Time in a Bottle" (p196). If the boon stuff is confusing, I know this forum has discussed it previously, so you can probably find it with a search.

For "mimicking" other spells, you might be able to figure something out where they see it, cast Shifting Sands to drop backwards through time, and then copy it using a combination of Mage Sight and intuition and whatnot, but that might not be capturing the effect you want. For simply anticipating someone, reading their Mind would be a useful start.

The Gray Mages are the time space mages, with control over the cosmic forces. They are Acanthi, specializing in Space, Time, and Fate. They believe in destiny and karma as separate from Light and Shadow and other ideas, and manipulate causality and the spacetime continuum for their own benefits. They curse and bless people, and their attainments would be Haste, Slow, Stop, Teleport, and Meteor/Comet.

Mastigoi + Time would work fine for most of this; you'd just be missing Meteor and I'm not sure how you'd have done that in the first place. Curse/Bless could be done using Mind hijinks to make someone doubt/believe in themselves.

Part of me thinks that you'd be better served by not trying to copy Final Fantasy-style spells at all, given that they're part of a magic system with fundamentally different assumptions than M:tAw's, and to focus on the philosophy of each Legacy and trying to express that Legacy to its fullest... but that might result in the lackluster that you speak of, so... eh?

[proindrakenzol]

Red Mages combine Black and White magic, with their signature ability usually being Dual Cast, I don't really see how you could have them have an entirely different set of Arcana from the two types of magic they're known for combining.

Summoners would have Spirit, maybe Mind. Heck, the Bene Ashmedai and Clavicularius already fill that mechanical niche; both are Spirit/Mind Mastigos Legacies.

I honestly don't think you can really pull Final Fantasy mages into Awakening: their spell lists are super limited, and in most of the FFs the different mages don't actually have defined philosophies, just power sets; for lore you're really just looking at XI and XIV, the MMOs.

[Cleverest of Things]

The Gray Mages are mostly based on the Time Mage and the "oracle's" of final fantàsy tacticswho focus on the cosmos and greater flows of destiny and karma. While they definitely need both Space and Time, I figured the Gray mages are more about hexes and controlling probability, with Meteor being some variation of that Fortean lvl 5 space spell that drops frogs or rain of fire or other incredibly improbable events onto an enemy's head. Hence why I went with Acanthus. They aren't exactly an antinomain foil to the Acañthi's self determination, but they do focus on the ramifications of causality and the flow of spacetime.

With the Red Mage, perhaps using "choose their own destiny" was a too loaded phrase. What I meant to say is they choose their own path and don't care what others think about it, or whether they are moral to the standards of others. Similarly, saying they mimic other's spells is a huge misnomer (due to Mimics being an actual final fantasy class that I'm trying to work out). Rather, Red Mages are known to have stolen Rotes and memorize Praxi of Black, White, and Gray (and occasionally green) mages. They don't get the discounts of them being innate arcana of the legacy, and they may have to resort to nerfarious ways of getting them (or just spending the extra Mana to improvise them), but yeah, they use White and Black Mage spells, just not às easily or efficiently. I'm hoping to figure out a way to get Dualcast for them, but that is already built kinda into mage systems in general. I'm also hoping for a way to imbue their weapons with spells, so I'm considering either adding an Order aspect to each job class to give them Adamant Way, or just saying they managed to steal it, too. It really is tough to decide between paths for the Gray and Red Mages because I can see arguments for both, while Black, White, and Green were pretty self explanatory (and Blue Mages being Beasts with Kinship Nightmares wasn't a hard stretch but I digress)

As for Summoners, the current working model is that they are a left handed Legacy that can be used by each individual Path. Each Path grants you a different Familiar, and eventually gives you access to a single Supernal Entity based on your Path, with further Trials giving you access to others. They're based mostly on that legacy in Summoners (I think the Choir of the Hashmallim?) That ties a supernal being to let you summon it's avatar into the world through Attainments temporarily and protect it from some of the things supernal entities suffer from. For example, a Mastigos can summon the demon Ifrit, an Acanthus can summon the faerie Shiva, an Obrimos can summon the angel Ramuh, etc. Higher tier attainments strengthen the Avatar, further pacts and trials give access to more avatars, archsummoners can summon any lesser Avatar and even greater ones like Bahamut.

[KaiserAfini]

I would also like to suggest adding he Illusionist job from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance to the list, which I see as Death and Mind based. At low levels they shape ectoplasm or shadows, but afterwards they make ideas and hallucinations solid. They are scary because they don't always make them visible, so they could literally make a shooting hand gesture and you would be shot, make "glasses" with their closed hands and you would see better, etc.

In time they can call forth idea beings from the Astral into the Material. Naturally, they are the Anchor for all of them, for both their safety and keeping their summons well supplied.

True masters are the ones who bring their Astrally terraformed dwellings into the Material, summoning their ideal reality into being.