Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Help with NPC Spellcasters

In Kellri Classic Dungeon Designer Netbook #4 there is an very useful table for generating spellbooks. From it I can make a NPC Magic User with the spells he has memorized and have it differ from NPC to NPC.
While Clerics don’t have spell books it would be nice to have something similar for them. Also Kellri’s net book is oriented to AD&;D.
My question is that is there something that already been written for Clerics and other spell using classes? And as a bonus oriented to Swords &; Wizardry? Also I have old Dragon Magazines so a relevant article would be useful to me.

3 comments:

faoladh said...

I'm not aware of any articles of the sort you are asking about. There's a whole lot of stuff about clerics in Dragon 92, though, so that might be helpful.

Talysman said...

Clerics don't have spellbooks because clerics automatically know all cleric spells available to them. This started with Greyhawk (p. 8) and didn't end until (I believe) AD&D 2nd with its clerical spheres. Even there, I think clerics know all spells in their spheres. Hence, no tool to select what's in a cleric's spellbooks.

A tool to determine what a cleric has prayed for that day might be another matter. However, I can't think of one I've seen. I have a post on determining the contents of a captured (MU) spellbook, which could be adapted to prepped cleric spells, I suppose: assume they have prepped one of each spell of a given level, in the order they appear on the list, up to the number of spells they can prep for that level. Determine the first spell prepped by rolling on the standard list, then roll again to determine if there's a substitution. S&W Core doesn't number the spells, as opposed to OD&D/AD&D, but the lists are pretty short: use a d10 for level 7, d8 for levels 4 and 5, and d6 for the other levels.

Lord Kilgore said...

Some time back I cooked up a table with a number of clerics and their memorized spells ready at a moment's notice:
NPC Cleric Spells

It uses Labyrinth Lord core, so is roughly AD&D progression with B/X spells, which is probably close to S&W.