I've always thought the story teller system has big potential for fantasy and sword and sorcery and was writing something like this myself (using a lot of the old WoD Dark Ages sourcebooks).
I didn't get quite as far as you have, and handled magic differently.
Old WoD had a lot of material that could be adapted relatively simply, Vampire became quite extensive (bloated in my opinion) with clans and along with that disciplines, many of which had little to do with traditional vampire mythology and were more arcane in scope (such as most of the Tremere stuff, the Voodoo clan, the clan that has fire control).
My approach to wizards was that it was a template based entirely on the vampire but with some name changes and alterations.
Blood potency is a mechanic that enables advancement and limitation of what abilities you can use and how often, change it to Arcane Potency and you have your D20 equivalent of caster level.
Blood pool becomes Mana pool or something, instead of being refilled by drinking blood, the wizard must use a meditation skill, perfoming power rituals, brew and drink potions, or even have it recover over time like injury.
Humanity functions in a similar way with wizards as it does to vampires, but I renamed it Grounding. The idea behind grounding is that the more powerful a wizard becomes, the more detached from mundane reality they become, they lose their grounding to ordinary life. As a wizard increases their knowledge about how the secret forces of the cosmos really work it radically changes the scope of the human experience, they cease to percieve the world as the uninitiated do, it changes their focus and explains why even initially benevolent wizards can "go bad". As Arcane potency increases Grounding decreases (like with blood potency and humanity). However, there are ways to prevent or even reverse the loss of grounding, and that is to artificially ground themselves in the mundane world through what are essentially hobbies, self imposed obligations, and pet projects. A wizard might decide to collect magical animals in a sort of menagerie, they might become experts on frogs, they may dedicate themselves to protecting a mountain peak or insignificant village, the main criteria is that it requires effort and has no real practical benefit to the wizard. Grounding explains why really powerful wizards are either evil, insane or highly eccentric.
Disciplines are renamed Arcane Lores, and function identically, there are even guidelines on how to create new disciplines in the book..
I considered the idea of Clan being School/Tradition but it isn't really necessary, just allow Disciplines/Arcane Lores to be learned as normal.
To learn a Discipline/Arcane Lore the wizard needs a teacher (who can teach up to their own ranks in it) or book (which has a rating) to learn from.
In regard to more sci-fi elements, I noticed mechanical similarities between the ST system and 4th ed ShadowRun, which needs further investigating.
Last edited February 5, 2020 3:52 pm
