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beccaelizabethSo, I was thinking about dragons, born human, having to learn how to change themselves into dragons.
GURPS Dragons does have a chapter on dragons and magic, but it basically assumes that their ability to shapeshift is the Shapeshift advantage, innate and not learnt. If you want to make it a magic spell there's just this really helpful paragraph that says "GMs can define a new version of the Shapeshifting spell" Yes, of course GMs can, they can make anything up they want. But actually that's the best they can say, unless they want to define Shapeshift spells for each and every dragon variant they've invented, because Shapeshifting is more of a class than a spell, since every single being you can shift into is actually a different spell.
So yeah, if a dragon manages to change themselves into a human, they wouldn't know how to change back... buuuuuut the spell only lasts one hour anyway. Permanent Shapeshifting has Shapeshifting as a prerequisite, so when you first learn to change yourself into a dragon, it'll wear off. That's less angsty than my plot bunny.
Any given spell can be an innate spell without its prerequisite chain, but again, no need to study it.
Shapeshifting is specific to a particular form, and becoming a really large, strong, flying supernatural creatures means so Shapeshift (Dragon) is one expensive spell to cast. "A reasonable guideline
is to calculate the point value of the physical characteristics of the beast form and charge 1/20 of the form’s cost to cast". So to figure out what the Shapeshift spell would cost you need to design the physical form you're shifting into, and work back from that. Fair enough, but there's so very many settings. There's a whole GURPS book of dragon variations. And it's 3e with conversions in the back rather than 4e like my character maker. ... wait, my character maker actually has the Dragons book as a loadable option, I'll try loading it and see what I can fiddle together. ... loading it takes half way to forever and usually more than one try, but, onwards...
You keep your own IQ with the shapeshifting spell, but the drawback is your IQ starts to drop to the beast form's IQ. But Dragons can easily have the same IQ as humans and dodge that whole thing. Magery etc remains the same in both forms. Fatigue for the purposes of magic does not change to match the new body, which requires listing it seperately anyway, so I think I'd rather use a mana pool mechanism, split their fatigue-for-magic off entirely, and tie it to their gold consumption so being magically powerful is financially expensive. That'd do new and different things to behaviour patterns. And give them new reasons to research earth magic and classic alchemy.
Shapeshifting (Human) would use the GURPS average physical stats and associated points cost ie 0. A physically average human would then be a free spell... except it does say 'minimum cost 3 to cast 1 to maintain', because they've thought of that sort of thing, obviously.
Hmmm, okay, so, even within a specific kind of dragon, there are age settings to choose between, so every dragon is a dozen dragons. That's... not massively helpful right now? Cool, but not helpful. Also, the Character Maker has the templates all bundled and I forget how to make them show up, and I do not need a burning breath attack. Phil in Flight Rising is a wind dragon, just because that was the sort of dragon I could find in iridescent shimmer shades of black. It's kind of funny because he seems like a bureaucrat and he's all wind spells. I'll keep that.
Right, tallying up only the physical stuff for a dragon 3 times human size (young and small, that is, SM+3), with Strength 20 (normal human is 10 at everything), Dexterity 12, HT15, sharp claws, sharp teeth, winged flight, nictating membranes, and damage resistance from their armoured skin, but also bad grip, horizontal posture and increased consumption: that form costs 182 points.
1/20 of the form’s cost to cast means Shapeshift (small dragon) is 9 magical fatigue to cast, 3 to maintain.
And that's a very small dragon. A Young Adult SM+5 dragon, using the suggested stats in the GURPS Dragons book... huh, is only 181 points, for the same 9 magic-fatigue cost spell. Increased Consumption goes up along with the stats, there's a modifier on basic move, and the size modifier makes it all cheaper than I'd expect.
Flight (Winged, -25%) [30]; Nictitating Membrane 2 [2]; Sharp Claws [5]; Sharp Teeth [1]; Bad Grip [-10]; and Horizontal [-10]. 18 points
Young Adult/Medium-Sized 163
Attribute Modifiers: ST+13 (Size, -50%) [65]; DX+3 [60]; HT+5 [50].
Secondary Characteristic Modifiers: SM+5; HP+1 (Size, -50%) [1]; Basic Move-1 [-5].
Advantages: DR 4 (Cannot Wear Armor, -40%) [12]
Disadvantages: Increased Consumption 2 [-20].
Notes: Size 8-12 hexes; weight 1,000-2,000 lbs.
One GURPS hex is one yard, because GURPS cannot join us in the metric era.
8 to 12 yards of dragon is a lot of dragon. That's a double decker bus of dragon, that is. Not in weight though, a dragon is much lighter; well it has to fly, so fair enough.
181 total... wait, why is the character builder giving me 186? Because it is level 2 of Bad Grip on the Dragons book, it's only -5 per level. Right, got the builder matching the book now. And retconned my math above.
Of course 9 fatigue is almost all most humans are going to have.
Health (HT) determines fatigue. In most games, it does even for magical purposes. GURPS Thaumatology has a lot of tweaked suggestions for that. But in the usual game, it logically leads to wizards who work out. They can buy extra fatigue, but only to 30% more than their HT, so they need to be healthy in the first place. Or buy powerstones, obviously. A dragon who has to keep one particular stone around in order to shapeshift... is more of a Flight Rising Pearlcatcher than the Guardian I had in mind. Not the thing, really.
Nonhumans are not subject to realistic limits, so of course dragons could have as much fatigue as they want. But boring, to take the limits off.
GURPS Thaumatology (*gets up and gets from shelf*) actually makes Energy Reserves for strictly magical purposes very simple. They cost the usual 3 per energy point, they aren't lost from missed sleep or physical effort, but they can't be spent on physical efforts either, only magic. A mage with an Energy Reserve can also choose to add in their regular Fatigue, as any mage can choose to spend actual Hit Points. They end up with three sources with different drawbacks. So I want my dragons to have to develop their Energy Reserves and keep them fed with gold, or their power starts starving the way bodies start starving of no foods. ... but gold lack can make them physically ill too, so no, that would just be Restricted Diet, where they need a weird food or they starve. Cool.
Time spent learning magic: I had forgotten this, but levels of Magery take 10% off the time to learn a spell. So Magery 0 has the full 200 hours teaching per point, Magery 1 only needs 180, Magery 2 takes 160, and Magery 3 only requires 140 hours per point of spell. Which is incredibly handy. Especially since studying it yourself out of grimoires or practicing without a teacher after an initial lesson doubles the number of hours you need. That would usually mean 400 hours before you could cast a single spell, but Magery 3 drops that to 280. And given that prerequisite chains require whole sets of spells before you can do the really cool one you always wanted, that would seriously add up. (The limit on that is 60% of base time at Magery 4, but most campaigns don't hand out 4 or above anyway. You only need 3 for the most powerful magics.)
Plus even average IQ plus Magery 3 can learn 1 point of a spell and be casting it at 11 straight away. Spell casting in theory requires both hands, both feet, and some clearly spoken words, but the better you know a spell the more of that you can skip. At 11 you only need hands and words. So you'd study the little dance, but after your first success you would realise how to do without it.
A skill of 15 needs only one of gestures or words. Useful if tied up or stealthy. A human with an IQ of 14 and Magery 3 could get that straight away, but a human with an IQ of 14 is also Exceptional to a degree immediately apparent to any observers. They're going to find any academic or IQ based pursuit at least as easy as magic, and probably much easier. They could be outstanding in their field in any of the sorts of things you could study at university, which are all much more varied and less repetitive than the study of magic. Studying spells means spending at lesat 140 hours practicing a thing that costs usually a few seconds to cast. That's a heck of a lot of the exact same gesture.
So you'd want to divide it up. A little each day, and probably a few spells in a session. It would have the air of ritual about it, since you'd need to do very precise things over and over again, plus all the chanting. Easiest to pass off as religious observance if asked. It would be like tai chi, but only if each pose was a seperate spell. You could make a song and dance of it, but it'd be a very quick one. ... I have done the Macarena how many times by now? Same exact gestures over and over for the length of the song. So it can be done, you can stay motivated to do it, but have I in fact done 140 hours of the Macarena in my entire life? And if I did, what would happen?
140 hours is 8400 minutes. If you do five minutes a day that's 1680 days. A bit more than four and a half years will get you one spell, if you remain so diligent you never skip a day.
And to cast Shapeshift you need to learn 6 other spells, so you're actually studying 7.
I don't know how young you could start teaching someone spells. Where's the rules on maturation and sentience... Right, to study language or tech skills you need at least IQ 6. And humans gain their IQ gradually, like their DX and ST.
"A human infant has 30% of his adult ST score, 40% of his adult DX, 50% of his adult IQ, and Size Modifier
-3.
A 5-year-old has 60% of his adult ST, 70% of his adult DX and IQ, and SM -2.
A 10-year-old has 80% of his adult ST, 90% of his adult DX and IQ, and SM -1.
A 15-year-old has adult scores.
Interpolate between these values for children in other age groups."
... this is why I only started counting A levels as specific skills, and everything before that as general education meant to feed the IQ. I don't know if the rules imply that or if that was just my interpretation. But if you only finish growing your IQ just before sixth form, it seemed to me to have consequences, like Clint spending that time doing DX and ST stuff not IQ education might mean he's got a lower than average IQ. Or not.
ANYways, how to train your dragon (child): they need to have IQ at least 6.
The average human has IQ 10 age 15, IQ 9 age 10, IQ 7 age 5, and IQ 5 at birth. Interesting interpretation.
Somewhere between birth and age 5 they'll cross the line that lets them learn language based skills. Like in the real world. Hello, kindergarten.
So they can start studying magic at around the same age they can start studying anything.
That means baby's first spell would be learned by maybe age 10? If they start studying in that few minutes a day way outlined above, age 5, and have time off every now and then.
... actually, make it age 11 and you're Mythic again. Some very popular fiction and education based on the specialness of 11 year olds. ;-)
The problem then becomes that your first spell isn't going to be terribly useful. It'll probably be from the 'seek' set. If we stick with Phil the Wind dragon, there is a 'Seek Air', though it's of obvious limited use. The usual starting point then is 'Purify Air'. If an 11 year old can make air be good to breathe again, well, that's handy and all, but why would they stay interested?
On the flip side, once you have something with actual visible results, once you have proof the magic works, it's probably easier to get them to do more than five minutes practice.
I actually might be underestimating with that five minutes. I know I used to do musical scales for ages and ages and aaaaages, to the appreciation of all, I'm sure. I just get stuck on the thing where it's literally the same ... not even the same song, the same phrase, over and over. Purify Air takes one second to cast. Even if you slow down individual moves to teach it, that's... that is a lot of repetitions, in five minutes. Magic is far less adaptable than music, in the standard GURPS version, and keeping people interested enough to actually learn a thing seems to require... very peculiar people.
Wind Dragons need six spells before they can shapeshift.
Purify Air -> Create Air -> Shape Air are the first three, unless you want to start with Seek Air, which... for an air breathing species seems surplus to requirements most of the time.
Purify Air has a one yard radius and extends 12 feet up. It can take smoke out of the air, or more usefully poison gas. Probably people don't teach their five year old kids the actual poison gas version though. You'd need like a smoke filled tube to demonstrate it in, but you'd have a very visible and noticeable demonstration once you learned. Not one that comes up very often though.
Create Air makes about 45 cubic feet of clean air in 5 seconds. It does this as a gentle outward breeze. If it is cast under water, it makes bubbles.
I can actually see a kid wanting to learn the bubbles spell, I just can't see them wanting to spend 140 hours perfecting it. Or even watching their dad cast it over and over and over.
I don't know, how repetitive are small children? Could they be sped along the early learning by watching the spell hours a day? Seems unlikely.
Shape Air is where it starts doing things, if you can put enough energy in it. This one is tuneable from gentle breeze up through heavy wind to violent blast, and can actually knockback a human. A small child could then push an adult around with air. ... once, if they even have the requisite 10 fatigue available at all. They could certainly use breezes at the adults and daydream about getting strong.
Destroy Air doesn't lead to further spells, but does make a good whomp noise or a mini thunderclap as 45 cubic feet of air disappear in an instant. You can't exactly injure people with it, unless they're in an airtight room or relying on an airtight container, but you could surprise the heck out of them.
But Shape Air leads to all sorts of things. Including some very ambitious looking ones that can, briefly and precariously, let them Walk on Air.
I don't know if I want dragons to learn that one though. I mean, a winged species could get precious about it, and reckon people should learn their wings before they mess around up in the air. Also it's no good as a safety harness because falling breaks the spell.
If a dragon family is teaching kids air spells then they've got to have learnt them themselves. So if you have like dragon uncles who all learnt a slightly different set of six, or a dragon grandfather who has had time to learn all the things, you could learn everything in the book. But if dragons are, on the whole, mostly interested in learning to shapeshift, then they might have a single set of six that they pass down, and then get busy with the wings part of life.
Purify Air -> Create Air -> Shape Air -> ...
Fire dragons would be working their way up to Breathe Fire.
Their six would be
Ignite Fire -> Create Fire -> Shape Fire -> Flame Jet -> Breathe Fire ... and it would be really handy to learn Extinguish Fire riiiiiight after Ignite Fire, wouldn't it?
Ignite -> Extinguish -> Create -> Shape -> Jet -> Breathe
And then they'd get access to Shapeshifting. Which doesn't seem to make entire sense, but does make entirely fun dragons.
Air spells though,
Purify -> Create -> Shape -> Air Jet works
Air Jet shoots a thin jet of air from a finger. It does 2d knockback damage per point of energy put into it, can be blocked or dodged but not parried, and can damage vaporous beings or swarms. "It is also good for sweeping the floor." :-) Apprentices doing their chores there.
I had to look up Knockback, and it's in the campaigns book. It says it doesn't do damage unless they collide with something? So they get knocked back 2d yards per point of energy, and if they hit a "something solid, the result – including damage to him and whatever he hit – is as if he had collided with it at a speed equal to the yards of knockback".
So Shape Air can knock people into things at 1d per 2 full points of energy put into the spell. Knocking someone into a wall at speed 6, what would that do? See Collisions and Falls page 430... you know, I do understand people who don't get into GURPS, it's all math, it's mostly good for me when I'm stuck being insomniac with nowt else to do... ANYway, Collisions and Falls... that wants to use velocity, measured in yards per second. So does knockback at speed 6 mean velocity six? Basic Speed 6 is the same as Basic Move 6 is the same as speed in yards per second. Lovely, why have so many words? So! Knockback at velocity 6 into a wall, damage determined by HP... hang on, you need to know the Hit Points of the wall...
An object in a collision inflicts dice of crushing damage equal to (HP x velocity)/100.
so if an average human is knocked into another average human, they'd have 10HP and 6 velocity, so 60/100 is less than 1 dice of crushing damage.
"If this is less than 1d, treat fractions up to 0.25 as 1d-3, fractions up to 0.5 as 1d-2, and any larger fraction as 1d-1."
So that's 1 to 6 crushing damage, available through Shape Air, knocking people into each other?
there's some maxed numbers in there, but still
I think teaching this to five year olds would have some serious drawbacks. Even 11 year olds would crunch each other a lot.
The interaction of the magical and the social is where things get interesting, and given the battle focus of the average RPG rule book, interesting tends to mean crunching.
It do start being fun for SHIELD agents to do, having an air jet at their fingertips, that would be a nifty trick. Noticeable, but nifty.
Purify -> Create -> Shape -> Air Jet ... and then 'Breathe Air' means something entirely different from Breathe Fire. Instead of having a directed attack that comes out of your mouth, therefore working even when you're tied up, there's just a specialised spell for water breathers to let them use our atmosphere. Which irritates me, because the Breathe set of attacks are sneaky handy, and obviously the most appropriate for dragons. Who ever heard of a dragon sending attacks that *weren't* breath?
Spells to invent: The Breathe version of the Air attacks, all knockback?
Or go further down the spell list for a different angle?
Air Jet isn't the prerequisite for anything. (If it were, it would still be all knockback.)
Windstorm however...
Purify Air -> Create Air -> Shape Air -> Windstorm -> Wind ... or other interesting things.
Windstorm is an area spell, meaning at the lowest energy it's 1 yard radius and 12 feet tall. There can be an eye in the middle of the story. For double cost you have your own pet mini tornado. "This powerful windstorm physically lifts and hurls objects up to 30 pounds per yard of radius." It's going to sweep people off their feet and make fighting kinda difficult. But it's still very local.
Wind modifies actual weather. It can nudge the wind up the beaufort scale, and can be cast on an object like a ship, or possibly an airship, airplane, opponent in a flying suit? As an area spell it goes 300ft up. It is, basically, big. You could whip up your own localised hurricane with this one.
That seems to escalate quickly.
But then after Shape Air you could also learn Body of Air. It's apparently just as easy to transmute yourself into gas in a temporary yet coherent way as it is to move wind around outside yourself.
I'd be vaguely tempted, on the basis that they're going to learn Shapeshifting next, but it offends my science even though it's all magic. Pushing air around doesn't involve changing elements into other elements or still thinking while lacking a brain. Plus I feel like someone that can Walk on Air and Body of Air is not someone concentrating on trying to acquire wings.
Six Air spells are also the prerequisite that unlocks Lightning attacks. I don't know about you, but if I could learn to throw Lightning, I might get seriously distracted from the whole scaly and wings side of studying. Also, it's a thread they can follow after they've got the hang of shapeshifting. Probably that way round is better, they unlock dragon form, get the hang of it, then look around for more magic and ooooh, lightning bolts!
If everyone's first spell is from the Seek set they have a mostly useless extra sense. Teach a child that and they're unlikely to find a way to turn that into trouble. Seems like a place to start.
Seek -> Purify -> Create -> Shape -> Jet -> Breathe
The basic six spells a dragon learns before they unlock the particular understanding necessary to shapeshift themselves.
Each element would be a different set of six, so there's fire dragons and air dragons and... do Earth and Water have breathe attacks, or is it really just fire that has that one already?
Earth goes
Seek Earth -> Shape Earth -> Earth to Stone -> Create Earth -> Sand Jet / Stone Missile / Rain of Stones
Or after 4 Earth spells, Walk Through Earth, after 5, Entombment, or Earthquake if already Earth Vision.
yeah, there's no obvious breathe attack there.
Fire
Ignite Fire -> Extinguish Fire / Create Fire -> Shape Fire -> Flame Jet -> Breathe Fire
Wait, I misread the chart, it's not Flame Jet or Resist Fire it's Flame Jet and Resist Fire, which requires Fireproof too, so that's
Ignite Fire -> Extinguish Fire -> Fireproof -> Resist Fire + Create Fire -> Shape Fire -> Flame Jet -> Breathe Fire
That's a 9 spell chain, that's not what I wanted. *sulks*
Water
Seek -> Purify -> Create -> Destroy / Shape -> Jet
but again 'breathe' means underwater. After Water Jet you do have some interesting options, but they mostly combine colleges. There are Ice options all over the tree though.
If you want an Ice mage you have to give them water spells first. I don't know, that's vaguely unsatisfying somehow. Like, it's not cryokinesis, if they have to make H2O first. A whole branch of Ice magic would require a lot of rearranging of prerequisites. Thaumatology has suggested rules for that, of course.
I'm sitting here grumbling about how unsystematic the magic system is. Same words used to mean different things! Elemental colleges progressing different ways! Why it's almost as if magic is not a science and, being made up out of whole cloth, doesn't need to obey any rules.
:eyeroll:
I can make up my own chains of spells, and standardise them if I want. Loses some flavour that way.
If I use the GURPS rule that says you need 6 spells before you can learn to shapeshift, I get diversified dragons, with interesting social norms and traditions.
Even if all they do is learn six variations of Seek... and who would do that? Someone trying to learn the Seeker spell, iirc. I sidetrack myself.
Whichever six spells a particular family line pass down, they'll start teaching them as soon as their children are teachable. If they're going to grow up particularly bright, that might mean before they're 5 even. If they start a child as soon as their IQ hits 6 and teach very quickly somehow, the kid might know their first spell to level 8 or even lower depending on Magery, but that spell would only work infrequently. As their IQ grows their magic would get more reliable. They could learn spells with visible results pretty quickly, which might be a problem if the result is things catch fire. It would be a social problem discussed among dragon parents at what age you should teach them certain spells, and if they could really learn them responsibly. But if the ability to shapeshift to dragon form is considered true dragon adulthood, well, you want to get your kids all grown and flown pretty swiftly, right?
Also, dragons are secret, and rare, and had been hunted not so many dragon generations ago. They're going to both want to make sure their kids don't accidentally give themselves away before they're old enough to understand the consequences, and make sure everything necessary is passed on as soon as possible, in case the worst happens to them.
Kids started early might not even understand the purpose of the little rituals they've been taught, but they might practice them in memory anyway. Can they self teach purely by rote? Magic in ignorance? That has fun side effects, like accidental spell casting, so lets do that.
If a spell has to be completed before the next can be started (prerequisites) then each spell could take 5 years of five minute practices with a teacher, and 6 spells are a 30 year project, started around age 5, before you can even start on the shapeshifting spell. A guy would be 40, transforming for the first time, and only just an adult. And that's if they were reasonably diligent and never lost touch with their elder dragon. Missing six months out of five years seems like a lot, but missing one practice out of ten doesn't seem that many to me, that's still practicing most weekends.
Without a teacher, if that's even possible, even with Magery 3, they'd need 280 hours per spell. Five minutes a day, that's ((280*60)/5)/365= 9.2 ish years per spell. They're going to be 70 before they can shapeshift.
So if I want my guy to first shapeshift age 50? He learnt a couple of spells completely from a teacher, meaning they took much less time. By the time he joined SHIELD thirty years ago he had 4 spells and the necessities for learning the last 3. After that, he had a lot of work to do, but mostly kept up his five minutes per day. He probably made sure to keep it private and unobserved, too, especially since these spells would be the actual damaging ones. There would be times on missions that would be difficult, slowing him down a little more.
And then he'd learn a new trick after ten or twenty years, Air Jet and it's Breath equivalent, before the big one at his half century. Or he might learn those two, then really slow down and dally towards the end, since he knows once he can fly he'll have a bunch of expectations from the dragon community land on him.
Or of course people could sit down and study study study, concentrating on just this one thing that will eventually take 1 second to cast, and get through their required chains in ... that's actually not simple because hours per day and do they have a teacher and is there a dragon equivalent of boot camp?
I've done this math before, but I forgot the rule where Magery reduced study time.
http://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/2683842.html
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 6.25 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 25 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 10 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 33 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
With spells, those numbers would be for Magery 0.
Magery 1 - 10% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 5.625 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 22.5 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 9 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 30 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 2 - 20% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 5 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 20 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 8 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 26 2/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 3 - 30% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 4.375 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 17.5 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 7 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 23 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 4 - 40% off (the maximum)
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 3.75 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 15 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 6 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 20 days per point, with no need for weekends.
I usually max Magery at 3. So if there's such a thing as wizard boot camp, with intensive military style training, then 4 16 hour days plus 6 hours will give them 1 spell. And that sounds great, you could learn a spectacular grimoire at that rate, but the entire 70 hours is spent chanting 'Wingardium Leviosa' while doing the wand flick. There are monk disciplines that do mantra and moving meditation quite intensively, but even so, that's... I just have a lot of difficulty believing in real people who can study at these rates.
If magic is simple repetition, I can only believe in the daily dance version. If it involves a much wider sort of study, like magical principles, then okay, maybe people can do 12 hour days and get one spell down in a week. But thaumatology is a seperate study, so in the ordinary Magic system, that just doesn't seem to be the case.
It's the best argument for the path/book version of magic I can think of. That is based on a central systemising principle, not simple rote learning of individual spells. I can actually believe people studying that just like college.
... just to be clear, I am aware it's all made up rules meant to mostly support people pushing small figures around a hex map while they roll dice.
But as a writer it's far more interesting to try and imagine a world where the implications play through.
You'd get very old mages simply because they had better things to do than study magic.
Or you might get very young children that learn the song that lights the candles, but haven't learnt the one to put them out again yet...
GURPS Dragons does have a chapter on dragons and magic, but it basically assumes that their ability to shapeshift is the Shapeshift advantage, innate and not learnt. If you want to make it a magic spell there's just this really helpful paragraph that says "GMs can define a new version of the Shapeshifting spell" Yes, of course GMs can, they can make anything up they want. But actually that's the best they can say, unless they want to define Shapeshift spells for each and every dragon variant they've invented, because Shapeshifting is more of a class than a spell, since every single being you can shift into is actually a different spell.
So yeah, if a dragon manages to change themselves into a human, they wouldn't know how to change back... buuuuuut the spell only lasts one hour anyway. Permanent Shapeshifting has Shapeshifting as a prerequisite, so when you first learn to change yourself into a dragon, it'll wear off. That's less angsty than my plot bunny.
Any given spell can be an innate spell without its prerequisite chain, but again, no need to study it.
Shapeshifting is specific to a particular form, and becoming a really large, strong, flying supernatural creatures means so Shapeshift (Dragon) is one expensive spell to cast. "A reasonable guideline
is to calculate the point value of the physical characteristics of the beast form and charge 1/20 of the form’s cost to cast". So to figure out what the Shapeshift spell would cost you need to design the physical form you're shifting into, and work back from that. Fair enough, but there's so very many settings. There's a whole GURPS book of dragon variations. And it's 3e with conversions in the back rather than 4e like my character maker. ... wait, my character maker actually has the Dragons book as a loadable option, I'll try loading it and see what I can fiddle together. ... loading it takes half way to forever and usually more than one try, but, onwards...
You keep your own IQ with the shapeshifting spell, but the drawback is your IQ starts to drop to the beast form's IQ. But Dragons can easily have the same IQ as humans and dodge that whole thing. Magery etc remains the same in both forms. Fatigue for the purposes of magic does not change to match the new body, which requires listing it seperately anyway, so I think I'd rather use a mana pool mechanism, split their fatigue-for-magic off entirely, and tie it to their gold consumption so being magically powerful is financially expensive. That'd do new and different things to behaviour patterns. And give them new reasons to research earth magic and classic alchemy.
Shapeshifting (Human) would use the GURPS average physical stats and associated points cost ie 0. A physically average human would then be a free spell... except it does say 'minimum cost 3 to cast 1 to maintain', because they've thought of that sort of thing, obviously.
Hmmm, okay, so, even within a specific kind of dragon, there are age settings to choose between, so every dragon is a dozen dragons. That's... not massively helpful right now? Cool, but not helpful. Also, the Character Maker has the templates all bundled and I forget how to make them show up, and I do not need a burning breath attack. Phil in Flight Rising is a wind dragon, just because that was the sort of dragon I could find in iridescent shimmer shades of black. It's kind of funny because he seems like a bureaucrat and he's all wind spells. I'll keep that.
Right, tallying up only the physical stuff for a dragon 3 times human size (young and small, that is, SM+3), with Strength 20 (normal human is 10 at everything), Dexterity 12, HT15, sharp claws, sharp teeth, winged flight, nictating membranes, and damage resistance from their armoured skin, but also bad grip, horizontal posture and increased consumption: that form costs 182 points.
1/20 of the form’s cost to cast means Shapeshift (small dragon) is 9 magical fatigue to cast, 3 to maintain.
And that's a very small dragon. A Young Adult SM+5 dragon, using the suggested stats in the GURPS Dragons book... huh, is only 181 points, for the same 9 magic-fatigue cost spell. Increased Consumption goes up along with the stats, there's a modifier on basic move, and the size modifier makes it all cheaper than I'd expect.
Flight (Winged, -25%) [30]; Nictitating Membrane 2 [2]; Sharp Claws [5]; Sharp Teeth [1]; Bad Grip [-10]; and Horizontal [-10]. 18 points
Young Adult/Medium-Sized 163
Attribute Modifiers: ST+13 (Size, -50%) [65]; DX+3 [60]; HT+5 [50].
Secondary Characteristic Modifiers: SM+5; HP+1 (Size, -50%) [1]; Basic Move-1 [-5].
Advantages: DR 4 (Cannot Wear Armor, -40%) [12]
Disadvantages: Increased Consumption 2 [-20].
Notes: Size 8-12 hexes; weight 1,000-2,000 lbs.
One GURPS hex is one yard, because GURPS cannot join us in the metric era.
8 to 12 yards of dragon is a lot of dragon. That's a double decker bus of dragon, that is. Not in weight though, a dragon is much lighter; well it has to fly, so fair enough.
181 total... wait, why is the character builder giving me 186? Because it is level 2 of Bad Grip on the Dragons book, it's only -5 per level. Right, got the builder matching the book now. And retconned my math above.
Of course 9 fatigue is almost all most humans are going to have.
Health (HT) determines fatigue. In most games, it does even for magical purposes. GURPS Thaumatology has a lot of tweaked suggestions for that. But in the usual game, it logically leads to wizards who work out. They can buy extra fatigue, but only to 30% more than their HT, so they need to be healthy in the first place. Or buy powerstones, obviously. A dragon who has to keep one particular stone around in order to shapeshift... is more of a Flight Rising Pearlcatcher than the Guardian I had in mind. Not the thing, really.
Nonhumans are not subject to realistic limits, so of course dragons could have as much fatigue as they want. But boring, to take the limits off.
GURPS Thaumatology (*gets up and gets from shelf*) actually makes Energy Reserves for strictly magical purposes very simple. They cost the usual 3 per energy point, they aren't lost from missed sleep or physical effort, but they can't be spent on physical efforts either, only magic. A mage with an Energy Reserve can also choose to add in their regular Fatigue, as any mage can choose to spend actual Hit Points. They end up with three sources with different drawbacks. So I want my dragons to have to develop their Energy Reserves and keep them fed with gold, or their power starts starving the way bodies start starving of no foods. ... but gold lack can make them physically ill too, so no, that would just be Restricted Diet, where they need a weird food or they starve. Cool.
Time spent learning magic: I had forgotten this, but levels of Magery take 10% off the time to learn a spell. So Magery 0 has the full 200 hours teaching per point, Magery 1 only needs 180, Magery 2 takes 160, and Magery 3 only requires 140 hours per point of spell. Which is incredibly handy. Especially since studying it yourself out of grimoires or practicing without a teacher after an initial lesson doubles the number of hours you need. That would usually mean 400 hours before you could cast a single spell, but Magery 3 drops that to 280. And given that prerequisite chains require whole sets of spells before you can do the really cool one you always wanted, that would seriously add up. (The limit on that is 60% of base time at Magery 4, but most campaigns don't hand out 4 or above anyway. You only need 3 for the most powerful magics.)
Plus even average IQ plus Magery 3 can learn 1 point of a spell and be casting it at 11 straight away. Spell casting in theory requires both hands, both feet, and some clearly spoken words, but the better you know a spell the more of that you can skip. At 11 you only need hands and words. So you'd study the little dance, but after your first success you would realise how to do without it.
A skill of 15 needs only one of gestures or words. Useful if tied up or stealthy. A human with an IQ of 14 and Magery 3 could get that straight away, but a human with an IQ of 14 is also Exceptional to a degree immediately apparent to any observers. They're going to find any academic or IQ based pursuit at least as easy as magic, and probably much easier. They could be outstanding in their field in any of the sorts of things you could study at university, which are all much more varied and less repetitive than the study of magic. Studying spells means spending at lesat 140 hours practicing a thing that costs usually a few seconds to cast. That's a heck of a lot of the exact same gesture.
So you'd want to divide it up. A little each day, and probably a few spells in a session. It would have the air of ritual about it, since you'd need to do very precise things over and over again, plus all the chanting. Easiest to pass off as religious observance if asked. It would be like tai chi, but only if each pose was a seperate spell. You could make a song and dance of it, but it'd be a very quick one. ... I have done the Macarena how many times by now? Same exact gestures over and over for the length of the song. So it can be done, you can stay motivated to do it, but have I in fact done 140 hours of the Macarena in my entire life? And if I did, what would happen?
140 hours is 8400 minutes. If you do five minutes a day that's 1680 days. A bit more than four and a half years will get you one spell, if you remain so diligent you never skip a day.
And to cast Shapeshift you need to learn 6 other spells, so you're actually studying 7.
I don't know how young you could start teaching someone spells. Where's the rules on maturation and sentience... Right, to study language or tech skills you need at least IQ 6. And humans gain their IQ gradually, like their DX and ST.
"A human infant has 30% of his adult ST score, 40% of his adult DX, 50% of his adult IQ, and Size Modifier
-3.
A 5-year-old has 60% of his adult ST, 70% of his adult DX and IQ, and SM -2.
A 10-year-old has 80% of his adult ST, 90% of his adult DX and IQ, and SM -1.
A 15-year-old has adult scores.
Interpolate between these values for children in other age groups."
... this is why I only started counting A levels as specific skills, and everything before that as general education meant to feed the IQ. I don't know if the rules imply that or if that was just my interpretation. But if you only finish growing your IQ just before sixth form, it seemed to me to have consequences, like Clint spending that time doing DX and ST stuff not IQ education might mean he's got a lower than average IQ. Or not.
ANYways, how to train your dragon (child): they need to have IQ at least 6.
The average human has IQ 10 age 15, IQ 9 age 10, IQ 7 age 5, and IQ 5 at birth. Interesting interpretation.
Somewhere between birth and age 5 they'll cross the line that lets them learn language based skills. Like in the real world. Hello, kindergarten.
So they can start studying magic at around the same age they can start studying anything.
That means baby's first spell would be learned by maybe age 10? If they start studying in that few minutes a day way outlined above, age 5, and have time off every now and then.
... actually, make it age 11 and you're Mythic again. Some very popular fiction and education based on the specialness of 11 year olds. ;-)
The problem then becomes that your first spell isn't going to be terribly useful. It'll probably be from the 'seek' set. If we stick with Phil the Wind dragon, there is a 'Seek Air', though it's of obvious limited use. The usual starting point then is 'Purify Air'. If an 11 year old can make air be good to breathe again, well, that's handy and all, but why would they stay interested?
On the flip side, once you have something with actual visible results, once you have proof the magic works, it's probably easier to get them to do more than five minutes practice.
I actually might be underestimating with that five minutes. I know I used to do musical scales for ages and ages and aaaaages, to the appreciation of all, I'm sure. I just get stuck on the thing where it's literally the same ... not even the same song, the same phrase, over and over. Purify Air takes one second to cast. Even if you slow down individual moves to teach it, that's... that is a lot of repetitions, in five minutes. Magic is far less adaptable than music, in the standard GURPS version, and keeping people interested enough to actually learn a thing seems to require... very peculiar people.
Wind Dragons need six spells before they can shapeshift.
Purify Air -> Create Air -> Shape Air are the first three, unless you want to start with Seek Air, which... for an air breathing species seems surplus to requirements most of the time.
Purify Air has a one yard radius and extends 12 feet up. It can take smoke out of the air, or more usefully poison gas. Probably people don't teach their five year old kids the actual poison gas version though. You'd need like a smoke filled tube to demonstrate it in, but you'd have a very visible and noticeable demonstration once you learned. Not one that comes up very often though.
Create Air makes about 45 cubic feet of clean air in 5 seconds. It does this as a gentle outward breeze. If it is cast under water, it makes bubbles.
I can actually see a kid wanting to learn the bubbles spell, I just can't see them wanting to spend 140 hours perfecting it. Or even watching their dad cast it over and over and over.
I don't know, how repetitive are small children? Could they be sped along the early learning by watching the spell hours a day? Seems unlikely.
Shape Air is where it starts doing things, if you can put enough energy in it. This one is tuneable from gentle breeze up through heavy wind to violent blast, and can actually knockback a human. A small child could then push an adult around with air. ... once, if they even have the requisite 10 fatigue available at all. They could certainly use breezes at the adults and daydream about getting strong.
Destroy Air doesn't lead to further spells, but does make a good whomp noise or a mini thunderclap as 45 cubic feet of air disappear in an instant. You can't exactly injure people with it, unless they're in an airtight room or relying on an airtight container, but you could surprise the heck out of them.
But Shape Air leads to all sorts of things. Including some very ambitious looking ones that can, briefly and precariously, let them Walk on Air.
I don't know if I want dragons to learn that one though. I mean, a winged species could get precious about it, and reckon people should learn their wings before they mess around up in the air. Also it's no good as a safety harness because falling breaks the spell.
If a dragon family is teaching kids air spells then they've got to have learnt them themselves. So if you have like dragon uncles who all learnt a slightly different set of six, or a dragon grandfather who has had time to learn all the things, you could learn everything in the book. But if dragons are, on the whole, mostly interested in learning to shapeshift, then they might have a single set of six that they pass down, and then get busy with the wings part of life.
Purify Air -> Create Air -> Shape Air -> ...
Fire dragons would be working their way up to Breathe Fire.
Their six would be
Ignite Fire -> Create Fire -> Shape Fire -> Flame Jet -> Breathe Fire ... and it would be really handy to learn Extinguish Fire riiiiiight after Ignite Fire, wouldn't it?
Ignite -> Extinguish -> Create -> Shape -> Jet -> Breathe
And then they'd get access to Shapeshifting. Which doesn't seem to make entire sense, but does make entirely fun dragons.
Air spells though,
Purify -> Create -> Shape -> Air Jet works
Air Jet shoots a thin jet of air from a finger. It does 2d knockback damage per point of energy put into it, can be blocked or dodged but not parried, and can damage vaporous beings or swarms. "It is also good for sweeping the floor." :-) Apprentices doing their chores there.
I had to look up Knockback, and it's in the campaigns book. It says it doesn't do damage unless they collide with something? So they get knocked back 2d yards per point of energy, and if they hit a "something solid, the result – including damage to him and whatever he hit – is as if he had collided with it at a speed equal to the yards of knockback".
So Shape Air can knock people into things at 1d per 2 full points of energy put into the spell. Knocking someone into a wall at speed 6, what would that do? See Collisions and Falls page 430... you know, I do understand people who don't get into GURPS, it's all math, it's mostly good for me when I'm stuck being insomniac with nowt else to do... ANYway, Collisions and Falls... that wants to use velocity, measured in yards per second. So does knockback at speed 6 mean velocity six? Basic Speed 6 is the same as Basic Move 6 is the same as speed in yards per second. Lovely, why have so many words? So! Knockback at velocity 6 into a wall, damage determined by HP... hang on, you need to know the Hit Points of the wall...
An object in a collision inflicts dice of crushing damage equal to (HP x velocity)/100.
so if an average human is knocked into another average human, they'd have 10HP and 6 velocity, so 60/100 is less than 1 dice of crushing damage.
"If this is less than 1d, treat fractions up to 0.25 as 1d-3, fractions up to 0.5 as 1d-2, and any larger fraction as 1d-1."
So that's 1 to 6 crushing damage, available through Shape Air, knocking people into each other?
there's some maxed numbers in there, but still
I think teaching this to five year olds would have some serious drawbacks. Even 11 year olds would crunch each other a lot.
The interaction of the magical and the social is where things get interesting, and given the battle focus of the average RPG rule book, interesting tends to mean crunching.
It do start being fun for SHIELD agents to do, having an air jet at their fingertips, that would be a nifty trick. Noticeable, but nifty.
Purify -> Create -> Shape -> Air Jet ... and then 'Breathe Air' means something entirely different from Breathe Fire. Instead of having a directed attack that comes out of your mouth, therefore working even when you're tied up, there's just a specialised spell for water breathers to let them use our atmosphere. Which irritates me, because the Breathe set of attacks are sneaky handy, and obviously the most appropriate for dragons. Who ever heard of a dragon sending attacks that *weren't* breath?
Spells to invent: The Breathe version of the Air attacks, all knockback?
Or go further down the spell list for a different angle?
Air Jet isn't the prerequisite for anything. (If it were, it would still be all knockback.)
Windstorm however...
Purify Air -> Create Air -> Shape Air -> Windstorm -> Wind ... or other interesting things.
Windstorm is an area spell, meaning at the lowest energy it's 1 yard radius and 12 feet tall. There can be an eye in the middle of the story. For double cost you have your own pet mini tornado. "This powerful windstorm physically lifts and hurls objects up to 30 pounds per yard of radius." It's going to sweep people off their feet and make fighting kinda difficult. But it's still very local.
Wind modifies actual weather. It can nudge the wind up the beaufort scale, and can be cast on an object like a ship, or possibly an airship, airplane, opponent in a flying suit? As an area spell it goes 300ft up. It is, basically, big. You could whip up your own localised hurricane with this one.
That seems to escalate quickly.
But then after Shape Air you could also learn Body of Air. It's apparently just as easy to transmute yourself into gas in a temporary yet coherent way as it is to move wind around outside yourself.
I'd be vaguely tempted, on the basis that they're going to learn Shapeshifting next, but it offends my science even though it's all magic. Pushing air around doesn't involve changing elements into other elements or still thinking while lacking a brain. Plus I feel like someone that can Walk on Air and Body of Air is not someone concentrating on trying to acquire wings.
Six Air spells are also the prerequisite that unlocks Lightning attacks. I don't know about you, but if I could learn to throw Lightning, I might get seriously distracted from the whole scaly and wings side of studying. Also, it's a thread they can follow after they've got the hang of shapeshifting. Probably that way round is better, they unlock dragon form, get the hang of it, then look around for more magic and ooooh, lightning bolts!
If everyone's first spell is from the Seek set they have a mostly useless extra sense. Teach a child that and they're unlikely to find a way to turn that into trouble. Seems like a place to start.
Seek -> Purify -> Create -> Shape -> Jet -> Breathe
The basic six spells a dragon learns before they unlock the particular understanding necessary to shapeshift themselves.
Each element would be a different set of six, so there's fire dragons and air dragons and... do Earth and Water have breathe attacks, or is it really just fire that has that one already?
Earth goes
Seek Earth -> Shape Earth -> Earth to Stone -> Create Earth -> Sand Jet / Stone Missile / Rain of Stones
Or after 4 Earth spells, Walk Through Earth, after 5, Entombment, or Earthquake if already Earth Vision.
yeah, there's no obvious breathe attack there.
Fire
Ignite Fire -> Extinguish Fire / Create Fire -> Shape Fire -> Flame Jet -> Breathe Fire
Wait, I misread the chart, it's not Flame Jet or Resist Fire it's Flame Jet and Resist Fire, which requires Fireproof too, so that's
Ignite Fire -> Extinguish Fire -> Fireproof -> Resist Fire + Create Fire -> Shape Fire -> Flame Jet -> Breathe Fire
That's a 9 spell chain, that's not what I wanted. *sulks*
Water
Seek -> Purify -> Create -> Destroy / Shape -> Jet
but again 'breathe' means underwater. After Water Jet you do have some interesting options, but they mostly combine colleges. There are Ice options all over the tree though.
If you want an Ice mage you have to give them water spells first. I don't know, that's vaguely unsatisfying somehow. Like, it's not cryokinesis, if they have to make H2O first. A whole branch of Ice magic would require a lot of rearranging of prerequisites. Thaumatology has suggested rules for that, of course.
I'm sitting here grumbling about how unsystematic the magic system is. Same words used to mean different things! Elemental colleges progressing different ways! Why it's almost as if magic is not a science and, being made up out of whole cloth, doesn't need to obey any rules.
:eyeroll:
I can make up my own chains of spells, and standardise them if I want. Loses some flavour that way.
If I use the GURPS rule that says you need 6 spells before you can learn to shapeshift, I get diversified dragons, with interesting social norms and traditions.
Even if all they do is learn six variations of Seek... and who would do that? Someone trying to learn the Seeker spell, iirc. I sidetrack myself.
Whichever six spells a particular family line pass down, they'll start teaching them as soon as their children are teachable. If they're going to grow up particularly bright, that might mean before they're 5 even. If they start a child as soon as their IQ hits 6 and teach very quickly somehow, the kid might know their first spell to level 8 or even lower depending on Magery, but that spell would only work infrequently. As their IQ grows their magic would get more reliable. They could learn spells with visible results pretty quickly, which might be a problem if the result is things catch fire. It would be a social problem discussed among dragon parents at what age you should teach them certain spells, and if they could really learn them responsibly. But if the ability to shapeshift to dragon form is considered true dragon adulthood, well, you want to get your kids all grown and flown pretty swiftly, right?
Also, dragons are secret, and rare, and had been hunted not so many dragon generations ago. They're going to both want to make sure their kids don't accidentally give themselves away before they're old enough to understand the consequences, and make sure everything necessary is passed on as soon as possible, in case the worst happens to them.
Kids started early might not even understand the purpose of the little rituals they've been taught, but they might practice them in memory anyway. Can they self teach purely by rote? Magic in ignorance? That has fun side effects, like accidental spell casting, so lets do that.
If a spell has to be completed before the next can be started (prerequisites) then each spell could take 5 years of five minute practices with a teacher, and 6 spells are a 30 year project, started around age 5, before you can even start on the shapeshifting spell. A guy would be 40, transforming for the first time, and only just an adult. And that's if they were reasonably diligent and never lost touch with their elder dragon. Missing six months out of five years seems like a lot, but missing one practice out of ten doesn't seem that many to me, that's still practicing most weekends.
Without a teacher, if that's even possible, even with Magery 3, they'd need 280 hours per spell. Five minutes a day, that's ((280*60)/5)/365= 9.2 ish years per spell. They're going to be 70 before they can shapeshift.
So if I want my guy to first shapeshift age 50? He learnt a couple of spells completely from a teacher, meaning they took much less time. By the time he joined SHIELD thirty years ago he had 4 spells and the necessities for learning the last 3. After that, he had a lot of work to do, but mostly kept up his five minutes per day. He probably made sure to keep it private and unobserved, too, especially since these spells would be the actual damaging ones. There would be times on missions that would be difficult, slowing him down a little more.
And then he'd learn a new trick after ten or twenty years, Air Jet and it's Breath equivalent, before the big one at his half century. Or he might learn those two, then really slow down and dally towards the end, since he knows once he can fly he'll have a bunch of expectations from the dragon community land on him.
Or of course people could sit down and study study study, concentrating on just this one thing that will eventually take 1 second to cast, and get through their required chains in ... that's actually not simple because hours per day and do they have a teacher and is there a dragon equivalent of boot camp?
I've done this math before, but I forgot the rule where Magery reduced study time.
http://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/2683842.html
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 6.25 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 25 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 10 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 33 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
With spells, those numbers would be for Magery 0.
Magery 1 - 10% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 5.625 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 22.5 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 9 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 30 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 2 - 20% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 5 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 20 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 8 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 26 2/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 3 - 30% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 4.375 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 17.5 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 7 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 23 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 4 - 40% off (the maximum)
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 3.75 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 15 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 6 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 20 days per point, with no need for weekends.
I usually max Magery at 3. So if there's such a thing as wizard boot camp, with intensive military style training, then 4 16 hour days plus 6 hours will give them 1 spell. And that sounds great, you could learn a spectacular grimoire at that rate, but the entire 70 hours is spent chanting 'Wingardium Leviosa' while doing the wand flick. There are monk disciplines that do mantra and moving meditation quite intensively, but even so, that's... I just have a lot of difficulty believing in real people who can study at these rates.
If magic is simple repetition, I can only believe in the daily dance version. If it involves a much wider sort of study, like magical principles, then okay, maybe people can do 12 hour days and get one spell down in a week. But thaumatology is a seperate study, so in the ordinary Magic system, that just doesn't seem to be the case.
It's the best argument for the path/book version of magic I can think of. That is based on a central systemising principle, not simple rote learning of individual spells. I can actually believe people studying that just like college.
... just to be clear, I am aware it's all made up rules meant to mostly support people pushing small figures around a hex map while they roll dice.
But as a writer it's far more interesting to try and imagine a world where the implications play through.
You'd get very old mages simply because they had better things to do than study magic.
Or you might get very young children that learn the song that lights the candles, but haven't learnt the one to put them out again yet...
no subject
Date: 2015-04-04 07:44 am (UTC)I made error in spell systems, magic is more tricksy and Shapeshifting isn't even the spell that applies here.