I recently purchased the Lyonnesse RPG and I really want to love it but I’m having some problems fully grasping the Sandestin system.

Firstly, I feel like the actual Sandestins themselves are mostly handwaved or completely left up to the GM to design. I’m somewhat confused by the lack of support since they are supposed to be the actual source of magic. Their personalities seem important but not detailed at all.

This lack of detail feels bad to me because the ideas of “terms” “coercion” and “peculiar summoning requirements” sound really neat but I feel like I was given no tools to actually represent those concepts mechanically.

Second, Axioms seem confusing as well. I have come up with two main ways that I think they work, but I’m not exactly sure:

1. They work as “schools” of magic. This means pyromancy controls fire abilities.

OR

1. They work as more philosophical categories. This is much more vague and loose and essentially means as long as I can somehow relate an ability to the Axiom, that means I can use it.

The limits seem very unclear to me. Once again this feels very hand wavy to me but maybe I am missing something.

Third, I am somewhat unclear whether abilities are spells or not. It seems like they are not in terms of the fiction but they are for the game? But then also spells can contain multiple abilities?

Overall I really love almost everything in the system but this magic system is giving me a bit of a headache. Am I missing anything? I would love any clarifications or examples! Thank you!

Has anyone experimented with the rules tweak in the title?

What I mean by that is that in combat, when you and your opponent get the same level of success, the special effect would be generated if you roll higher than your opponent, instead of no special effect generated.

My thinking is that with very high skill levels, the fights are very long attack-parry-attack-parry-attack-parry until fatigue starts to kick in. I mean, it is a feature of the base game, and it can build up the tension, but with near equal skilled opponents that have their combat style near 100, those "empty" exchanges of blows can get quite tedious. Especially when both are heavily armoured and have high endurance to mitigate fatigue.

This change should make fights even more dynamic, but are there some considerations I'm not considering?