Balancing the Books; Spirit Magic and Sorcery

Sandy Petersens sorcery system is superb, certainly the best addition I've ever had to the RuneQuest system. However it has created an upset balance of power between spirit magic users and sorcery users. Whilst RuneQuest and Glorantha in general has never set out to be a perfectly balanced system, something I applaud it for, it is a bit disheartening for your players to chop up the spirit magic users before they knock off a Bladesharp.

At lower levels it is quite balanced. The average sorceror should being with the Basic Arts and, say, 55% in one or two spells, and maybve a ceremony of 35%. This means they can knock off an intensity 8-10 spell. So it is possible that you'll find a character with Boost Damage 10 or Boost Damage 6 multispelled on all his mates; now whilst your average low level spirit magic user only has a 3 point Bladesharp, they'll quickly gather more. Meanwhile the sorceror has access to fewer spells, rather than nipping down to his local priest and coming out at the end of the day being able to cast the a 4 or 5 point spell, they take ages to get the power level up. So I think it balances as most sorcery users will need to be dedicated (so a Malkioni Knight will know only a tiny amount of sorcery to only a very low skill level, you should really only get one decent sorceror per group at low levels) whereas every character from a spirit magic society can use magic, more of it, more accessible and so on. This works especially well if you employ the rule that cult spell spirits have 1d3 POW per point of spell rather than 1d6 (you can offset the ease of learning the spell by boosting the prices back to resemble RQII prices, I'll do a piece on that later).

At higher levels, this is not true. By the time you have rune lord spirit magic users, the sorceror will be happily knocking off quite powerful Boost spells on him and all his mates, whilst at the same time all his mates will have become more proficient themselves, and may well be knocking off high intensity spells of their own. Now, whilst the Rune Lord may have Bladesharp 10, Protection 10, Countermagic 10 and gawd knows what else, the problem is in the time to cast the damn things! A spirit magic user may well be chopped to slivers by the time they knock off even half the magic they need to get them to a decent level, whereas the sorceror and his buddies will be toting around at full power at all times. I recommend that one addition is that the new Rune Magic spell of Battle Magic be added as a Common Rune Spell (somewhat similar to RQII Multispell), as well as Range (was that a spell in RQII? I think it may have been).

One problem that this doesn't solve is the 'run away and fight again another day' tactic (which fortunately my players have chosen never to use, on the grounds that if they did I'd have to change the system to stop it). Basically, since you don't have to recast your sorcery spells, you can charge in to attack the enemy, watch as they knock off all their rune magic and spirit magic, run off, wait a bit, and return to slaughter them as they have used up all their rune magic, and will have lost nothing in the process. I'm not entirely certain how to solve this problem.

Battle Magic
1 point
instant, self, stackable, resuable
When you cast Battle Magic the caster must select one cult spirit magic spell (and cult spells only!) that the caster knows. They can then cast that spell there and then at no additional time or action cost. So if a Humakti casts Battle Magic they could choose to cast their Bladesharp 6 there and then. A roll must still be made, magic points must still be expended, and just as with Rune Magic any magic points spent on boosting the spell takes 1 strike rank per point. Since Battle Magic can be stacked, a character can cast much of their spirit magic quite quickly by means of this spell.

Range
1 point
No range, instant, stackable, reusable
When cast it must be stacked alongside another rune spell. For every point in the spell the range is doubled. This spell only works on normal ranged rune spells (so the spell must (a) have a range and (b) must be described merely as 'ranged' not with any specific range such as '10 metres' or '10 miles', or any special range).