Stolen Ideas from the Krynn Series of Gold Box Games

In the Dragonlance lore, there are 3 moons named Solinari, Lunitari, and Nuitari. They were aligned with Good, Neutral, and Evil, and they share their names with gods. As each moon waxed and waned, a spellcaster aligned with that god gained or lost magical spells.  

The Krynn-based SSI games did an excellent job tracking this. When you have the brain of a machine, such things are trivial. It can become a basic design element for your interface. 

The white, red, and blue orbs note the moons and their phases. The game even allowed bonus magical spells when this happened. I never bothered to figure out when more spells were available, availing myself of the advantage whenever they became available. 

I thought it was a neat system, but unfortunately, bringing it to the tabletop proved intractable. How would one track the changing of phases and rising of moons in a game world? It was too hard. 

For me and my players, there was a strong belief that magic users were squishy, and I always dreamed up new and utterly intractable ways of empowering spell casters. Invariably, most of these ideas were panned by my players and shit-canned by me. But this idea of bonus spells stuck with me. It was already hardcoded for Clerics in AD&D and appeared on our character sheet.  

Having a formal character sheet is very handy, and I was super cool for being able to print a character sheet at will instead of using notebook paper, graph paper, or purchasing a handful of bright orange character sheets. 

The magic system in Krynn is not a great mechanic for an RPG. But it does make an incredibly realistic world. Welcome to Black Monday when you are at 75% while your nemesis is at 150%. And it ain't getting better any time soon enough to matter. That is a very real-world mechanic. 

As neat as it was, presenting this lunar influence in a tabletop game is both impractical and not very fun for a variety of reasons, such as making squishy spell-casters even more squishy. However, what we did do was simplistic and fun. Magic Users and Illusions got bonus spells like Clerics and Druids, except the deciding factor was Intelligence. 

I recall one of my players pointing to the character sheet and mentioning how close the lines for Bonus Spells were to Intelligence. "Wisdom is only one box down. We don't even need to redesign our character sheet!" 

We had no mechanic for losing spells, nor did I track the phases of the moon(s). That made everyone happy. We did discuss it at length, but could come up with no practical way of using it without being a rolling disaster. 

This one change was so ingrained into my mind that I forgot this was even a house rule or where I got it from. It was from the Krynn series of Gold Box games. 

You can check out my character sheet on DrivethruRPG or from my store on Ko-Fi. Or you could pick up all of the e1 modules on DTRPG.