Baby Got Backlash

Cutest engine of destruction EVAR!

The premiere of the sixth season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic introduces baby Flurry Heart, the daughter of Princess Cadence and Shining Armor. It also reintroduces a particular quirk that infant unicorns – or, in this case, infant alicorns – have in the show: that they’ll manifest powerful magic at random.

This idea was first brought up with the introduction of the Cake twins, way back in the show’s second season. While it makes for some amusing antics, and creates the conflict in the current season’s premiere, this particular quirk of unicorn physiology is somewhat awkward to model in d20 terms. As Thoth put it:

Even counting Twilight Sparkle as an exception, Pumpkin Cake can break chains, dimension door or teleport, phase through matter, move and animate objects, and fly around – at one month old. In the comics, Sweetie Belle, who certainly doesn’t seem to be a magical genius or exceptionally powerful, accidentally transforms half the ponies of Ponyville into animate fruit, apparently irresistibly. Yes, that seems to be mostly cosmetic (and so could be considered an illusion or a rather minor transformation rather than a major one) – but it’s still pretty impressive for someone who can barely levitate a broom.

Characters that get weaker as they grow up don’t fit into d20 as easily as most. Sure, you can just handwave it in a lot of games – but even if child PC’s are uncommon, kids are very common indeed. It makes it kind of hard to raise tension with a monster attacking a village if the smaller local kids panic-response can be expected to include blasting it with horrific spells. Given that that doesn’t seem to happen, it seems likely that very young unicorns only have mighty magical powers when it’s cute and funny for the audience.

Now, at least part of this problem is solved in the latest episodes, since there’s a line that Sunburst rather off-handedly (off-hoofedly?) tosses out when discussing what spells to use to solve the problems that Flurry Heart’s random magic has created:

“…and a little Fledgling’s Forbearance for the parents… Heh. That should curb the little one’s power fluctuations.”

Those two sentences help to provide a great deal of needed context with regards to how pony society deals with this problem. A spell designed to safely curtail the random discharges of magic that baby unicorns experience is one of those things that not only makes sense in-and-of itself, but helps to explain why, for example, Pumpkin Cake doesn’t seem to be running amok anymore.

But while that provides for an in-universe explanation for how this particular problem is dealt with, it doesn’t answer the question of how we’d model it in the first place. The underlying issues that make this difficult to manage in a d20 game (what with baby unicorns being, at least temporarily, stronger than the adults, and their magic being more disastrous than dangerous) are still present.

To answer the first problem, I’m of the opinion that the best way to model this is via a template. Since templates are a discrete aspect of a stat block, and can be added on top of a character, they can also be removed from said character (even if that is much more rare). Hence, we can simply create a template that includes whatever mechanics we’ll use, with the condition that it’s removed as the baby unicorn grows older (or has the appropriate spell cast on them).

Insofar as the second issue – that these magic surges tend to be troublesome more than truly hazardous (though they can be that too) – we’ll just make that into an aspect of the magic itself. That’s not particularly hard because only NPCs are going to have this template anyway, and so if we introduce a random element into how their magic works, that just creates more latitude for the GM.

In d20 terms – using Eclipse: The Codex Persona, of course – the result would probably look something like this:

Wild Child template (9 CP/+0 ECL)

• 4d6 mana with Unskilled Magic (24 CP), specialized and corrupted for increased effect/caster level is equal to the user’s highest mental ability score (Int, Wis, or Cha) and maximum spell level is equal to the user’s lowest mental ability score, spells cast do not need to meet caster level minimums; subject to involuntary random spellcasting, when a spell is cast roll 1d6 – on a 1-2 the spell functions as intended, on a 3-4 the spell’s parameters (e.g. effects, targets, duration, etc.) are randomized, and on a 5-6 a different spell is cast instead.
• Rite of Chi with +4 Bonus Uses, specialized and corrupted for one-third cost/does not allow for additional uses of Rite of Chi at the cost of negative levels, requires at least a short nap to use (4 CP).

In addition to what’s above, the entire template is specialized and corrupted for one-third cost/this template can only be applied to a character at the “infant” life stage (level -2), and is automatically removed when they advance to “child” (level -1), or if a casting of fledgling’s forbearance spell is used on them.

Given that it’s a spell with no applications beyond removing this template, there’s not really any need to write up fledgling’s forbearance. At most, we’d only need to know its spell level, which I’d presume is 1st.

With a total cost of 9 CP, this template is one that’s fairly cheap to apply for what it offers. Of course, the cost is somewhat academic anyway, as there’s really no way to apply this to any character that’s remotely likely to be a PC. But if you want to make sure that your plot hook has stats, this should do the trick.

Tags: Eclipse, Friendship is Magic, My Little Pony, unicorn