The modern Diabolist

[barna10]

If any of you watch Supernatural, wards and circles are tossed about in just about every episode. I have no doubt the Demon Hunter from Armageddon Unlimited was inspired by the Winchesters.

One interesting thing about the Winchesters and others on the show is that they use Wards (which they often refer to as spells).

(NOTE: I know the show doesn't follow any rules and does not directly map to anything in-game, but it is cool for ideas. Also, ALL RPGs are derivatives of fiction so the fact it appears on-screen is fodder for in-game inclusion. Also, this is NOT a "conversion" of Supernatural into Palladium. This is purely a twisting of Palladium material inspired by an outside source.)

So given the resurgence of the skills of the Diabolist, how would you include wards and circles in your modern game?

Here are my ideas:

• Do away with the Diabolist. It makes sense in a Fantasy setting, but in a modern one, with better ways to gain knowledge, learning wards seems like more of an add-on than a theme for an entire class. I think anyone with the proper amount of instruction, and the P.P.E. to activate the wards, should be able to create them. Again, the precedence for this is the show Supernatural where people are easily taught wards.
• Wards should be learned like spells. Each one takes hours or days to master. The Diabolist is front-loaded knowing ALL wards, but in a modern setting each ward should be something sought after and it might take a lifetime to learn them all (at least all the known ones)
• The advancement of tattoos. While not exactly tattoo magic, you should be able to tattoo wards on to beings. For a permanent effect (like the Winchesters "anti-possession" tattoos) you would still need divine / demonic ingredients (like Angel grace), but other wards should be reusable, like magical tattoos. These wouldn't grant extra S.D.C. or P.P.E. like true magical tattoos, but they would be reusable and able to be activated by the bearer similar to magic tattoos. I could easily see a protection from fire tattoo or the like.
• I would not do away with the Summoner class, but I would open-up circle magic. I see no reason why others couldn't learn to create / activate / and use magic circles. The Summoner class still has the ability to control beings, but the knowledge to create circles should be learnable given time.

I'll probably create several skills to support this new initiative (inscribe ward, draw circle, etc) something like what the Diabolist currently has. Creating ward tattoos would require a skilled tattoo artist, but the artist would not have to be the one that understands wards. The warder would have to be present during the tattooing process and would've had to drawn the ward for the artist though. Then the success of the process would depend on the skill of the warder AND the tattooer. If either failed, the tattooed would have a funky looking tattoo that looked somewhat like a ward, but did nothing.

Then there is the ability of certain beings (mainly Angels) to wave their hand an inscribe wounds on things and beings...

[eliakon]

I wont touch the conversion aspects of this with a 10' pole....
...but I will address the idea of diabolists as superfluios.

The main advantages of a Diabolist ward over a spell, is that they can be complex, narrowly targeted, and set up in advance.
If you don't mind adding that ability to the abilities of other mages, then go for it. You will first need to figure out how many phrases per day a non-diabolist can energize though.
A compromise might be to make a 'symbol mage'....give them the Nazca Line Drawings, Circles, and Wards as their magic...this can make them vastly more flexible than any one of the three classes is on its own....while still leaving 'spell casters' separate and allowing the two magic styles to be not crossed over to much.

[barna10]

I'm going to allow this to non -casters

[drewkitty ~..~]

Easy conversion to a modern setting.
Take the magic abilities of the rune mage and the education of a mystic study and mash them together.

Note, I said easy....not 'well thought out'.

[Nightmask]

This is a pretty good idea really, in fiction we often see characters that clearly aren't mages scribing things like protective wards and even summoning circles (heck a lot of horror fiction and movies have idiots who're clearly not mages doing a ritual often a summoning one and have it go horribly right). The ability to make warding items and charms and the like by the non-mages is common enough that it's actually contrary to a lot of fiction when you run across various RPG explicitly making it so that only mages can craft them. Probably the only protective ward I can think of that anyone can make in Palladium is a cross and that's horribly limited and weak in regards to protective ability. Meanwhile I can remember a modern fantasy novel where a female museum curator (or perhaps historian) when she and the main protagonist (a dark elf) had to deal with the threat of a Babylonian demoness was able to craft functional wards against her simply by reading up on them and carefully following the rituals involved in making them.

[Fermat]

I've actually been working on this recently, primarily for handling it in HU. Mostly creating a few new wards and circles, mostly for defensively minded characters. They are feasible, especially as a strange form of magical object (prepared armor, amulets, and so forth).

[barna10]

I'm going to start playtesting it soon, I'll update you with the results.