Places of Power

Magic is not the same everywhere you go. It is not a fixed, internal thing within a spellcaster, that they can call on whenever they want. It is instead something the magic-user always must channel and mediate through the circumstances of their environment.

Magic does not work in civilization. Buildings and infrastructure disrupt ley lines or interplanar convergences. This presumption supports one of the key concepts of the West Marches, where the town is intended to be inherently uninteresting and not a location for adventure. PCs also have a stronger incentive to fly straight while in town and not mess with the locals, because magic, their biggest edge against ordinary folk, doesn’t work there.

Magic does work for clerics in civilization… within the confines of their temple. A single temple in a small settlement dedicated to a particular god is extremely powerful within that region. Anyone who wants clerical aid is going to need to be on good terms with that faith. In this framing, a PC building a temple goes from a nice bit of flair to an essential extension of the cleric’s power.

Magic works in the wilderness. Generally. It may depend on the time of day, the season, or the weather. Perhaps healing magic won’t work until the break of dawn; or will only work in a diminished form. Necromantic magic is the opposite. Players will be all over those meaningful and strict time records if we attach rules like this to spellcasting.

Some magic works better or worse or not at all in the wrong environment. Druidic magic could work well in the wilderness but not at all in a castle. Necromantic magic could depend on the amount of deceased matter and ambient death present. At the extremes, the schools of magic could hold sway over particular regions, jealously preventing rival schools of magic from functioning on those grounds.

Magic is stronger or different in the dungeon. Some spells work better or worse or not at all on certain floors. “Unlocking” magic on a given floor might involve any number of extrinsic goals that characters could pursue. Take it to an extreme and say that magic spells can only be cast on a dungeon level equal to the spell level or greater. 

Sometimes no one knows why magic works or doesn’t work in a place. Spells like Hallow, Protection from Evil, Mordenkain’s Private Sanctum, and Forbiddance may have been cast with permanent durations in ancient times. The origin and purposes of those castings may be unclear to modern people. Indeed, in many cases, even the underlying physical structures that those spells once protected have been worn away by the passage of time, leaving white noise zones where magic doesn’t seem to work the way it should. 

Some of these ideas can be dropped into a game quite easily. Others need to be baked into the cosmology from the first session. But the underlying idea is to make magic less like a handy, ordinary, convenient tool, and more like something strange and difficult and dangerous and unpredictable. You know, something magical.