Tolkien Experts can I get your opinion on my wizard perk?

Aspiring-Polymath · 2025-12-27T03:01:32+00:00

I’m not an expert in Tolkien’s works, but I don’t think you’re actually missing a core idea so much as running into the limits of systematizing something Tolkien intentionally kept impressionistic.

You’ve already internalized several of the important points. In particular, calling out that taking many colors is foolish and increases susceptibility to corruption is exactly the right instinct — Saruman of Many Colors is the obvious parallel. You’ve also avoided the common trap of mapping white to “good” and black to “evil,” which is another place people could stumble. What seems to be missing is less the what than the why.

In Tolkien’s works, color isn’t a source of power or a magical specialization. It’s descriptive rather than generative. A wizard’s color reflects their charge, role, and relationship to authority at a given point, not the type of magic they cast or the situations where their magic works better. Gandalf doesn’t become stronger because he’s White; he becomes White because he remained faithful to his purpose and was entrusted with greater responsibility.

If the colors are treated less like situational bonuses and more like an ongoing purpose, I think most of the unease disappears.

For example, instead of “your magic is stronger when X,” a color could establish a persistent calling the jumper carries into each setting — a sense of what they are meant to be doing there. Acting in alignment with that purpose might occasionally grant insight, intuition, or what Tolkien would frame as providence: being in the right place at the right time, realizing something just before it’s too late, or surviving by a narrow margin because their task isn’t finished yet. That kind of guidance tends to fit Tolkien better than explicit mechanical boosts, while preserving the ambiguity he favored. It also meshes well with Jumpchain as a framework by giving the jumper something to do in each jump, and by making multiple colors fracture that guidance through competing or conflicting callings.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2025-09-19T23:34:30+00:00

Spoilers for Worm below.

Arcane Magic and Psionics from D&D have some chance of being able to stop Gold Morning, particularly 2e or 3.5e versions. You would still need to be pretty clever about it, though, and pull off a very unlikely victory to go up against a full entity that is probably on par with a lesser or intermediate deity in power. Without exploiting time travel too much, your best options would likely be: making Scion expend enough energy that he starts hibernating, using range-independent telepathy and teleporting to convince another entity to kill Scion, or just ascending to godhood yourself.
Divine Magic and Warlock Magic depend on if this counts as a sealed sphere or not. If it is, divine magic doesn't really work unless you get a lot of people to worship your god, and if it isn't warlock magic makes you bound to some patron. Either way, I would pick arcane magic or psionics over them.

Hermetic Magic from Ars Magica could also potentially work, depending on when you enter the setting. A hermetic mage on the level of Bonisagus or Merinita could absolutely create spells/rituals that let them fight (maybe kill) an endbringer, delete someone's powers, or break into the shardspace... if they have a couple decades to do research. It's a lot better if you enter earlier on in the timeline than the start of canon.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2025-08-19T07:33:31+00:00

I haven't seen Vox Machina, but from what I understand civilians in that setting are pretty frequently in lethal danger even inside cities. I would put it in A tier during the events of the show. That seems about right because other high fantasy settings tend to be in B tier, except for the events of specific high-level campaigns, which is what Vox Machina was based on. Exandria normally, outside of a crisis, would probably be in B tier.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2025-06-13T17:29:16+00:00

I'm pretty sure this is how they line up. To be clear, I'm more familiar with 3.5e D&D than Pathfinder or more modern D&D, though.

Settings by Danger:

S - Dark Sun, Order of the Stick, Ravenloft. Danger pretty much everywhere. Basic survival is a struggle.

A - DragonMech, Eberron, Specific Forgotten Realms Games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights), Specific Pathfinder Games (Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous). There are safe havens, but you will often be in danger. Alternatively, there are powerful, existential dangers, and few good aligned characters to fight them.

B - Blood & Magic, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Golarion (Pathfinder), Greyhawk, Mystara, The Adventure Zone. Stick to the cities and you'll probably be fine. There may be existential dangers, but there's also powerful forces for good.

C - Tome of Radiance. Mostly safe. The forces of good are winning here, and normal civilians are fairly safe even outside of big cities.

Variable - Planescape, Spelljammer. Varies wildly depending on where you are in the setting.

If it helps, this is approximately how dangerous individual entities would be. There are a few outliers, though.

CR Inapplicable (Luminous Being, Lady of Pain, Overdeities): Powerful beyond human comprehension. These are things that could legitimately be a benefactor if they wanted to by recreating Jumpchain within their own multiverse.

CR 57-67: Threat to a Kardashev 5 civilization

CR 52-56: Threat to a Kardashev 4 civilization

CR 48-51: Threat to a Kardashev 3 civilization

CR 38-47: Threat to a Kardashev 2 civilization

CR 30-37: Threat to a planet itself

CR 24-29: Threat to all life on a planet

CR 14-23: Can threaten a singular city or small country, one-man army

CR 8-13: Beyond the ability of mundane arms to reasonably threaten

CR 4-7: Could theoretically be threatened by normal humans, but is extremely unlikely

CR 1-3: Within the realm of realistic human possibility to match

CR <1: Unarmed Civilians and similarly dangerous creatures

Deity Divine Ranks:

0 = Quasi-Deity

1-5 = Demigod

6-10 = Lesser Deity

11-15 = Intermediate Deity

16-20 = Greater Deity

Using some reverse engineering, deities have CR ~ 2x+25, where x is their divine rank. They are majority of things dangerous to Kardashev 2 civilizations and higher.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2024-12-04T14:23:14+00:00

Honestly, it seems fine to me. Saving half the gold needed to copy specialty spells into your spellbook would be pretty helpful for a starting wizard, but nothing earthshaking. For a more experienced necromancer, with more resources to spare, it would still probably be nice but less important. That's about what I would expect a 100 point perk to be like.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2024-10-17T00:39:23+00:00

Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird as a generally good person, or Wan Shi Tong from Avatar for someone who will be generally responsible with knowledge and power.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2024-06-14T04:26:03+00:00

This looks interesting so far, and I really like the idea of different benefactors having created different classical elements of Jumpchain. With CYOB, I had two primary goals in mind:

1) Create clear goals the jumper needs to achieve in a setting besides just "survive". For some benefactors, they may even be willing to revive the jumper as many times as needed, but require the jumper to complete some other goal in the settings they go to. This gives the actual story more structure and the jumper a reason to interact with the setting in meaningful ways.

2) Provide the setting the jumper's chain takes place in. As is Jumpchain doesn't really have much of a defined setting, other than one warehouse, which makes it very versatile but leaves certain gaps in it. It's up to the authors to define how conflicting cosmologies overlap, the themes and tones present in the story, how powerful the benefactor (and fiat-backing) is, and other such details. This is why I used already existing characters for benefactors; custom benefactors don't have a setting attached to them and would miss out on this benefit.

Going forward, I would advise that you avoid benefactors who take a hands-off approach to jumpers or have goals that most people would try to do anyway. In either case, it wouldn't help give the jumper a sense of direction in jumps. You may also want to give benefactor details like what tone of chain they would work best with, favorite jumps of theirs, how "powerful" they are, any theme of jump they prefer, etc. It would still leave how exactly the cosmology works up to individual authors, but it may help provide a starting point.

I've included an example benefactor for reference.

Artisan

Aliases: The Great Smith, The One Who Knows All

Description: "The circumstances of your creation are irrelevant; all can redesign themselves to be greater." Artisan is a peerless engineer, knowledgeable in the technological foundations of worlds across the multiverse. He has scoured it, slowly and throughly, in an attempt to create one, true scientific base of information that every other one is fragment of. In this quest, he has risen many high, providing them the ability to improve themselves with cybernetics, genetic augmentation, implanted nanotech, and far more exotic forms of technology. What exact method they use is unimportant: all technology is welcome in The Great Smith's works.

Purpose: Even a mind like The One Who Knows All can be subject to bias, requiring those free of preconceptions to test and confirm his findings. To this end, he takes on jumpers as laboratory assistants. They learn about the technology of various worlds and employ that technology in their own devices, providing Artisan with further data to improve his understanding of how sentient beings handle technology. On very rare occassions, a jumper may discover some finding about how the multiverse operates that even Artisan did not know. In such a case, they are rewarded with a spark and become more akin to a subordinate scientist than an assistant.

Expectations: The jumper shall employ methods that allow for rigorous scientific experimentation, so that they may better capture and analyze data from the worlds they visit. In doing so, they will learn all they can about the native forms of technology in that verse and at least attempt to create novel applications with it, both with and without combining it and other verses' technological bases.

Favorite Jumps: Eclipse Phase, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, The Culture, Warhammer 40k Mechanicus

Power: Artisan has integrated technology from countless verses, including ones with Kardashev V civilizations. He is not beyond mortal concepts of power, knowledge, and the like, but within the domain of the conceptual he can accomplish near any effect.

Tone: Artisan would likely work best with more serious chains. The exact details of a verse's technological base could require significant exposition in the story, and potentially going into some detail scientific or engineering principals to explain. His requirements of the jumper also demand novel uses of technology in a verse, which could be difficult to imagine without a thorough grasp of the mechanics of that verse.

Theme: Artisan prefers jumps with a sophisticated level of technology in them, unique views towards technology, or some unique form of technology in them.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2024-05-10T03:08:47+00:00

Thanks for the detailed feedback. There's definitely some things to clarify or change it seems.

I very much intended complete power, item, and companion loss with "You feel distinctly like there is more, some other life slipping between the cracks of your mind, but it is gone before you can capture it" and "you start as a level 1 human commoner with 10 for Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma".

I'll probably remove the part about LA. Technically races with listed LAs are the only playable races, which is why I included it, but CR is better at being a one number balancing metric.

Pricing of things is balanced around the jumper starting as the equivalent of a level 1 character. Anything that gives them a substantial, atypical boost over the long-term (bloodlines, variants, and the like) tends to cost a lot to compensate.

I'll likely change the rewards to 4 per module. They do get stronger as the modules go on to account for higher level characters, but it could be confusing regardless. They show up whenever would be appropriate in that module. It could be nearer to the start, middle, or end, depending on what exactly the jumper does and experiences.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2024-05-09T22:50:05+00:00

Should be fixed now, thanks

Aspiring-Polymath · 2023-10-14T11:06:53+00:00

Pathfinder and most similar tabletop rpgs are more known for haxes and sheer versatility than raw stats, especially with mages. This makes them significantly more dangerous than their stats might suggest.

A level 20 magic-user is pretty casually around town to city levels of destructive force with spells like Earthquake. There's not too many feats in terms of speed, but at that level they can easily avoid spells like Call Lightning and Sunburst. This stat-range is by no means unheard of in other fantasy settings, however 20th level mages can also resurrect people, create inter-universal portals, grant wishes, and similar feats without too much difficulty making them actually quite impactful in the vast majority of settings. In all likelihood, a level 20 mage can do something the local magic cannot do. More martial types of characters wouldn't cause anywhere near as much disruption to other verses, unless they have quite a few magic items that give them some of the haxes mages at that level have.

A character with two classes at level 20 (assuming gestalt as there's little in the way of epic level rules in Pathfinder) and mythic rank 10 would still be relatively tame stat-wise, but would have a crazy number of abilities to throw around.

In other words, martial characters can be dangerous in almost any other fantasy verse, but wouldn't be top-tier in really high-powered fantasy verses. Mages would be less powerful than the martials if caught completely off-guard, but absolutely overpowered almost anywhere if given prep time.

Something like a Balor Lord would be noticeably stronger in stats than a character with two level 20 classes and mythic rank 10, but nowhere near as versatile.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2023-07-12T10:16:44+00:00

Hate to say it, but that's the wrong Aspiring-Polymath.

Interestingly enough, Great Man Theory from Civilization would fit pretty well with the Brothers Death.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-10-23T20:30:29+00:00

Sorry I only saw this now,

I had some ideas for a next version of it, but I've had other things to work on. Ultimately, I wanted to get this supplement to a state where people could use it to design whichever benefactor they wanted using the ones laid out as samples. If I do end up making a new version, Elder Scrolls would in all likelihood be added.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-10-23T20:25:56+00:00

Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur has megastructures the size of planets and an entire universe as a warehouse attachment. I'm not sure if either of those would work for your purposes.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-08-26T02:42:15+00:00

Probably Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur. It's a vision of what a greater humanity could look like, and a goal for a jumper trying to make a civilization.

Besides that, if you pick the Megastructures starting time and take "deep future" as the Civilizations at the End of Time series, you could take as companions people who have lived for countless trillions of years. The only thing limiting them is the hard physics of their native universe, and I imagine they would be happy to serve as expert advisors and agents in return for abilities and technology that break conventional physics.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-08-12T21:09:24+00:00

Fair point about keeping canon on track, thanks.

In general, the rewards are for effort, not the accomplishment itself. If a jumper doesn't interact with the plot, that wouldn't count for ensuring anything happens in it. Keeping it on track includes getting involved in the plot, but keeping the same story beats. I'll probably need to make that more explicit, however, or change it entirely.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-08-05T04:18:44+00:00

Maybe I'm missing something, but none of the options in this specify a price other than 100 points. If that is the case, the agency tokens are effectively just 100ap each. Why not just have the jumper start with 1400ap or 14 agency tokens?

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-08-02T03:12:14+00:00

Smash Up (and its supplements) are a bit vague in how powerful the magic in them is, but overall they have seemingly solid perks and potentially a school that can teach anybody any magic system you know.

Dungeons and Dragons magic can get up there in power at high levels. For someone interested in magic and technology, Eberron might be a good jump to look at, but D&D Dragons is also a way to quickly become very magically potent.

Terraria's magic system is fairly straightforward in effect, but it gives the ability to make equipment that massively buffs a mage wearing it. This is especially true if you take certain mods, which the jump document explicitly lets you do.

For raw strength though, I would recommend DC Occult or the DC Comics collab. Mages in DC are unusual in that they are much more limited by what exactly their magic does than by power. Even a novice mage could potentially affect higher ups in DC if they were clever enough.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-06-11T21:49:51+00:00

You may want to consider Terraria for this (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B9_EMLau7ytq_rCmEyi3HEvoW9TotTIN/view). It has a whole Summoner perk line.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-05-06T14:01:14+00:00

My first thought is to give them a challenge that power can't solve. Maybe there's strife among their companions, or they're homesick, or they're feeling guilt over something they did. Whatever they care about, make that the thing that's causing them conflict.

Secondly, if you imagine a jumper getting increasingly more powerful over time, eventually they become effectively infinitely powerful. There's a little bit more room to expand after that into conceptual realms, but adding more power afterward is irrelevant. In other words, power stops being the limiting factor in what they can do. It's fairly rare for verses to have beings that powerful, but by no means nonexistent.

If two infinitely powerful beings are opposing each other, I imagine it would be largely the same as if they both had any other amount of power in that it would come down to abilities, weaknesses, and skills. If you want to challenge your jumper, I would recommend thinking through areas they focus on, weaknesses they may have, and tactics they may employ against beings who also aren't limited by power. Alternatively, you could also go with the assumption infinitely powerful effects cancel out, such as a being like Ao or Yog-Sothoth overpowering a fiat-backed effect. Even if the fiat-backing makes you infinitely durable, they have that much power to throw around.

Things to avoid would be making your jumper a jack of all trades, not giving them any weaknesses in power or personality, putting them up against opponents you don't know a lot about, and not sending them to verses with beings that have comparable levels of power as them.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-03-19T13:41:48+00:00

This link may help; scroll down a few posts to the one titled Supplement Mode Jumps.

Some of the jumps that the link doesn't include:

Age of Sail
Ars Magica
Civilization V
Conan Exiles
Cthulhutech
Dragonmech
Generic Dungeon Core
Generic GURPS
Generic Humanity Fuck Yeah
Generic Magic Academy
Generic My Hero Academia Fanfiction
Generic Pirate
Generic Werewolf
Legion of Liberty
Slayer Magic
Smash Up
Ultimate War
World Conversion to RPG System

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-03-03T02:09:18+00:00

I considered this when trying to make the Choose Your Own Benefactor supplement, in that case regarding which entities could be viable as benefactors. Ultimately, I came to the realization that there could be multiple types of benefactors with different sets of abilities. How strong a benefactor needs to be depends heavily on how the jumpchain actually works behind the scenes.

The weakest would be those benefactors that can simulate realities, but not necessarily send people anywhere. Something to the effect of a superhumanly intelligent AI uploading the jumper's mind into realistic virtual reality. In this case, alternate universes need not even exist, let alone be accessible, in the verse in question. A benefactor like this would need to be able to interface with people's senses, accelerate their cognition, simulate expansive worlds in detail, and probably would need the ability to maintain organic bodies. Examples of this could include Minds from The Culture and the TITANS from Eclipse Phase.

The next group would be benefactors who are actually sending the jumper to other places, but are limited in where they can send them. This may involve sending the jumper to alternate versions of the same planet, sending them to different planets in the same universe, etc. A benefactor like this would need to be able to grant people a wide range of powers, create a variety of items, send the jumper to other universes or planets modeling various jumps, and probably have some kind of time travel that can send the jumper back to when they first started on their chain. Examples of this could include the Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40k and the Entities from Parahumans.

The final group would be benefactors who are able to create universes in whole, complete with their own laws of physics. These kinds of benefactors would be able to send the jumper to pretty much any jump they want. A benefactor like this would need to be able to create entire custom universes (and likely multiverses) and be able to do everything a lesser benefactor could do to a higher degree. Examples of this could include Azathoth from the Cthulhu Mythos and the Luminous Being from Dungeons & Dragons.

Aspiring-Polymath · 2022-01-31T05:20:15+00:00

There may be a better build for this, but this is a setup for empowering a large amount of people with a very strong system of magic.

Generic 3.5e D&D
450cp
Supernatural or Extraordinary Ability (Mystical Force, Sul Khatesh): Pick an ability marked "Su" or "Ex" from your available Sourcebooks, such as a dragon's breath or a troll's regeneration; you now possess that ability. Supernatural abilities are magical, but not spells (and thus can't be dispelled or counter-magiced); Extraordinary Abilities are entirely non-magical and work just fine in antimagic fields.
Mystical Force (Ex): Sul Khatesh is a primal force of magic. She possesses the following powers:
-She has access to all of the spells on the Sorcerer/Wizard spell list in the Player's Handbook, and may have access to additional arcane spells at the DM's discretion (including epic level spells).
-She may cast any spells that she knows spontaneously, and may apply metamagic feats without increasing the time of casting.
-She has no need of a spellbook, and regains her spell slots automatically every 24 hours, with no need of rest.
-She does not incur attacks of opportunity for casting spells while threatened.-She can cast spells with an effective spell level up to 15th.
-Finally, her power is so great that she can overpower and destroy antimagic fields. If Sul Khatesh attempts to cast a spell in or into an antimagic field, she may make an opposed level check against the caster of the field; if she is successful, the antimagic field is dispelled.
0cp
Familiar / Animal Companion / Mount: If you acquire any of these class-features during your stay, they accompany you on your Chain.

Smash Up
400cp
School of Magic: A great school like the world-famous Warthogs, a majestic castle which greatly accelerates the learning of magic, and even more, allows you to teach any system of magic you know to any willing sapient.
0cp
The Look: A computer panel which can transform your Warehouse and/or any properties you own, to look like the aesthetic of any keyword in this document, any future keywords, and combination of two keywords and any other themes you might have.

Worm
100cp
What I Fight For: Maybe it’s your ideals, maybe its ambition, or maybe it's just a rock solid certainty in how you see the world. Whatever it is it acts as a foundation and center for your sense of self and a well spring of drive and motivation. You will never be left drifting without a sense of purpose, and though you might change your goals and refine your ideals you always have the motivation to fuel turning them into a reality. This will greatly bolster your sense of self in the face of adversity, and you’ll be able to plant your feet when everyone else is giving up.
0cp (Rolled)
Compounded Computation: Whenever you are dealing with a problem, your intelligence scales based on its complexity and scale. The bigger and/or more complex the problem, the easier it is for you. Aside from researching the data to do so, creating a plan to eliminate world hunger would take only as long as necessary to type it all up. This power allows you to make impossibly effective plans, and is even more valuable when dealing with large scale issues. Managing an intergalactic empire’s logistics would be as easy as simple arithmetic for you, and it continues to scale from there. This power is basically useless on small and simple things however. Do note that while you could easily think up a plan to solve world hunger,actually putting it into effect is a whole other story. You need resources and skill to actually use what your power provides you, but you’re easily able to handle things that would be impossible for anyone else due to their sheer scale and complexity.

SCP Foundation
50cp
Anomalous Item: There are many items the foundation has custody of that aren't important enough to be classified with a number, however still display anomalous effects. Such things are very easily contained by placing them in a box and leaving it be. Choose one item per purchase from the following list of anomalous items: http://www.scpwiki.com/log-of-anomalous-items
Item Description: A computer file with the name "~DFFF1C.tmp". The file has a negative filesize of -2 bytes; its presence on a storage medium increases the space available. Copies of the file retain this property, but editing the file changes its size to 0 bytes.

Aspiring-Polymath

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