Syllable/Rune-based magic system?

[Laukku]

While I've never played it, Dungeon Master has a spellcasting system which sounds interesting. Basically, you form spells by sequencing various syllables: for example, by combining the syllables for "air" and "poison", you get a "poison cloud" spell. The syllables are categorised by elemental type, form, power etc.

I find this system neat because it makes spellcasting more like actually conjuring magical effects, and allows some experimentation to find out new spells, and experimentation is always fun.

The various elemental attack spells in ADOM would be easy to translate to a system like this, because they have so many overlapping elements. There'd be elemental type ("acid", "fire", "ice" and "lightning") and form ("bolt" and "ball/explosion"). The various utility spells, such as invisibility, identify and strength of Atlas would be tougher to do, because they're all very specific and have little overlap. But for starters, there are spells that deal with revealing information (identify, magic map, know alignment...) and curing (the various cure X wounds spells, neutralise poison, cure disease...) Some spells are basically opposites of each other, so including an "opposite effect" syllable sounds reasonable.

One downside is that the more syllables you have, the more combinations there are, making things difficult to design. And maybe spellcasting through sequencing syllables would be too tedious anyway.

[Archie]

Have anyone here played Ultima Underworld? It's magic system was similar (and really good!)

[CotySaxman]

Treasure of the rudras (EDIT: This is a Japanese SNES game. The Japanese title is Rudra no Hihou) has a spelling based magic system.
Every word you can think of is a spell, even random alphabetic strings.
Community research determined that there were reserved key prefixes, spells, and suffixes - and multiple prefixes and suffixes can append one spell word. Different combinations were more or less effective, and more or less efficient.

Something like that would be awesome.
(Press Z) "Enter the spell you would like to cast:"
("IgGodNa" (fire, Godly damage/high cost, affect all)
"Do you want to exhaust yourself casting this spell?" etc.

In that case, anyone could invoke any spell, but then 'learning' spells could also be used to train proficiency in known syllables.