So many spells, so little time
Jan. 12th, 2018 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI've been thinking about magic, again again. I get like that when I feel like I can't get things done in brickspace life, so, a lot. But I'm also attempting plot in a magic using 'verse, so, some understanding of system and reach required.
I've previously done endless spreadsheets to figure that, by the GURPS rules for study hours in character point equivalents, a mage can learn between 5 and 19 character points a year, depending how much is job, how much study by yourself, how much taught.
It can actually be as low as 2.5 if you only have a job and don't study, but, GURPS does reckon you get 2.5 CP every year from just doing a job, so that's nice, even if you do have to put them all into job related skills.
I didn't include Intensive because that's boot camp and the rule book is pretty clear there are very limited opportunities for that, but with sixteen hour days of twice as effective study and no weekends or holidays in the base assumptions you get about 58 CP a year *without* the Magery boost, which is enough to boost your basic stats, let alone your skills. However such courses are very much assumed to run for much less than a year, so, not so much likely.
Studying things that are not magic caps at a lower level, because Magery gives you a percentage boost to speed of learning magic. At Magery 0, or for things unmagical, between 5 and 13 CP a year is the best you get.
GURPS assumes college gives you 10CP a year, which isn't what I get from doing the math on actual courses, that comes out way lower with holidays and fewer teaching hours. But it's in that range of theoretically possible.
Magery gives the boost to learn spells up to 19 a year, and if you're learning that fast, you have enough Magery to learn any spell in existence.
I have previously got that far and noted that 19 spells gets you to Resurrection by the longest chain, so who would even need more than a year? That's spectacularly complex magic, and world changing, and you can do it as a freshman, if you can power it. Seems a little wonky.
But today I was thinking, there's 850 odd spells in my GURPS spreadsheet, and I haven't even added the gender spells from that one Pyramid. I invented a bunch of elemental spells last time I was poking those colleges, for things that should be logically possible cause they are in other elements. The Fire college looks kind of rubbish compared to a decent TL8 flamethrower, let alone grenades, and nobody has invented a magical nuke, even assuming the power requirements would be spectacular. You can't even say it would unbalance the game, because see real nukes. Plus every single Shapeshift spell is a separate spell, so if you want to be a wolf and an owl you learn it twice, and that's just for starters.
So if a magic user is zooming along a particular prerequisite chain to achieve a specific thing, they can do it in a year. But if they want to learn Magic, in general, they've got their 19 a year and like 900 options in front of them. Anyone spending a solid year thinking of nothing but magic kind of has to want one of the other very badly. So you'd get mages who really wanted That One Thing, like for example raising the dead, but you'd also get mages who just have to know how it works, and would feel like a smart kid with a university prospectus and only the one lifetime to go around.
I mean it's still a ridiculous lot. Great Wish requires one spell each from 15 colleges, Enchant, Lesser Wish, Wish, and Great Wish. And with Great Wish you can do literally anything, even if there's a character point maximum on how much of it you can do at once. That's a 19 chain. That's one year.
!
Of course you also need Dex + Int to add up to 30, so it's a rare mage can even aspire to it. And you need a teacher who can cast it. But since whoever casts it can in fact use it to raise IQ or Dex then they can use repeat castings to make an applicant capable. Wizards would prefer IQ of course but human abilities usually cap out at some point. And IQ is exactly what mages risk when they cast the thing, since any failure knocks a point off everyone involved. Which could lead to a cycle of mostly using it to apologise for the result of last time you use it. Except it's hugely energy expensive, so getting enough FP together to use it at all would get tricky. And the rules say a crit fail can bring down civilisations. Which actually seems a little overpowered for if you're using it as the permanent version of Relieve Madness or Grace or Wisdom, but what do I know about game balance?
The 'one spell each from 15 colleges' bit gets interesting though, because while you could do it in a year, it would involve only studying the starter spell in each college. And that means a lot of variations on Seek or Sense, where what you've studied has absolutely no external effect. You'd also get to make a light, a sound, and a simple illusion (though illusion as a college seems to make complex things pretty quickly compared to Light and Sound). You wouldn't get to do the kind of swish whizz bang magic people tend to think of as magic. And as soon as you've got ten colleges of basics you'll get pressured to learn Enchant so you can stand around for 8 hours a day supporting others as they cast it.
A College of Enchantment would have to try recruiting like 'Ultimate power in one year! ... nothing very interesting before that. Some risk of permanent brain damage may apply...'
Which reminds me of Rivers of London, which I've been reading fic for since Yuletide. Using too much power in that 'verse does bad stuff to the brain. Other crit fails are in the more fun accidental explosion range, but the cauliflower brain bit is sort of defining. Makes it make sense why wizards are rare, even if masquerade broke, since most of what they can do at the less than ten years of study range is pretty much matched by modern weapons that don't fry your brain. The rest though gets... interesting.
The thing with magic is always why do they bother. I mean, it takes so long, it ha hazards nothing else does, it probably annoys the neighbours, what's worth that?
RoL has one character who decides Alter Visage is worth that, or possibly Steal Beauty, even if a one off, as long as it's permanent. And you can see why, even if it is a bad call. Alter Gender is another one people would happily put in the time for. But science is catching up with both.
It's the problem with a lot of these spells, compared to ultra tech they just don't seem very magical, and tech scales power supplies much more smoothly. Even using the Tech college spell to convert between tech power and magical power doesn't get you very impressive numbers compared to what ultra tech can do with the same power.
... actually the example for Draw Power is 28 fp per second, that's pretty swish... and Steal Power does make every battery a powerstone... okay, the tech college really ups a mage's game, if permitted. Is another spell that needs 10 colleges of prereq though, and this time two spells each.
... so that would be the second year then, broadening your base so you can draw on waterwheels and so forth...
But again, going only two spells in to each college? Not going to be impressive to look at. So setting out to be an Enchanter means being a dabbler at everything except Enchantment? Or getting really into other colleges and coming back to it postgrad when you start feeling the limitations.
The Power spells are vaguely bothering me. The text mentions a big enough circle of mages could Power a starship and it's weapons. And, okay, yeah, but why are they not more effective doing actual magic?
... Because Lend Power has precisely one prerequisite, the matching Seek spell. That's a two month training course even without Intensive, two weeks with it. That is not a world where mages would be encouraged to study. Dystopic much?
Wait, if waterwheels and low TL equivalents count, that's any Magery 2 mage at any TL, more useful to society as an engine or battery equivalent. Granted they'd need to take breaks, but they'd not need their fuel imported special, or to wait on weather conditions.
There's a pretty good reason for the college to be rare or restricted: elsewise all sorts of pressure would push mages into menial work.
It'd take ages for a lower IQ mage to get reliable at the spell, but they could support another caster doing it ceremonial, and get that 2.5 cp per year for a job. Ceremonial is slow though, I'd have to do some math to see if it's even useful for Power spells. And before that figure out what all the Energy rules mean already... Multiply casting time by 10 doesn't really help when there's no casting time and all the stuff about conversion between fatigue and power doesn't actually say if you have to cast the whole time to do it. Plus I don't understand the real world physics units. So. That... will work at the speed of the plot, if necessary.
Game balance as a concept, making sure all the character classes are going to be useful, kind of makes magic not special by design. I mean, the same number of points in any other skill would add up as useful, if designed properly. So that leaves you stuck wondering why risk it.
Plus the entire reason the real world shifted to boom sticks instead of archery was the same amount of time going in *didn't* get you the same amount of skill or ability to hurt people coming out. Archery takes a lifetime investment of regularly maintained work and minimum stats, like magery. Firearms have some chance of hurting the enemy if you know which end the boom goes out of. They can be used at default, and spells cannot. It would take some spectacular advantage to magic to make it worth the time.
And the kinds of things we can't so at all with science tend to dip into the Restricted section, like Mind Control or Necromancy.
Or any variety of shapeshifting. Got to admit, many people would put in the time to be able to be a cat. Or whatever else.
I gave mages an Intensive study course at Nethermost Abbey. Scholars recruit from people who owe years in public service in exchange for their post 16 education. ... though old school societies considered post 13 optional and split off into apprenticeships and so forth. I'd have an unusually educated society for one that doesn't have much of a tech level. But it's an alternate universe post apocalypse, so there's plenty to teach, and remembered incentives to do so.
Nethermost was inspired while watching a Shaolin movie which was mostly training sequence. The bits where they stab themselves seemed ridiculous, but the stuff where they increase their fatigue, strength, and dexterity actually has applications to making better wizards, especially fatigue. More puff is more power. So they'd set newbies to carrying buckets of water up stairs and suchlike. But they'd also be training them in Staff skill, because wizards use a staff and it's clearly going to be useful. And all this resembles military training enough that there's obviously Intensive versions.
I'm not sure Intensive meditation can logically exist. Probably that's just regular teaching.
If spells can go Intensive then there's a real chance of coming out the Abbey knowing every spell a Scholar can know. 58 a year for ten years, restricted colleges available because of the spit up system that keeps Healers separate.
Every schoolkid would be taught Lend Energy though, to help with the big socially necessary spells, and Recover Energy at least in theory, though it would only work for those with Magery 1, it's probably just meditating quietly, and who doesn't want to get kids to do that?
... this is a society built around the needs of Healers and Scholars, so the priorities look weird from other angles. But things taught an hour a week add up, so one or two spells each through school is viable.
Intensive study for spells doesn't really logically add up. Scheduling someone 16 hours a day for years isn't going to work. So split the physical and mental disciplines, give them study days, and pour the extra points from Intensive primarily into fatigue. Scholars come out very physically fit and with a habitual training schedule like an athlete, but still mostly focused on the academic.
There would be careful observation in the early spells to determine who was learning faster. They can use Mage Light to determine magery, since only mages can see it, and they can have standardised testing in schools to approximate IQ, but the precise level of Magery is unmeasurable except through practical observation. ... or the Aura spell, actually, but that relies on one person casting it right and observing the complexities correctly, so there'd be backup layers.
The fastest students would have higher levels of Magery. Ones that were fast and smart enough might be able to learn spells well enough the simplest ones are free to cast, as soon as they learn them. That would be possible with IQ alone but easier with IQ plus Magery. And it would be students who could invest the least time for the most reliable results that they'd most want. So there would be tests of magical endurance, to measure how much fatigue you have and use per spell. Ignite Fire would be a pretty and obvious one. You'd get a row of candles and see how many they could light, and the few students who cold light them all without keeling over would be whisked away to higher study.
You'd want to test as fast as possible if someone had Magery 3 and therefore could do the greatest magics. Easy for Healers, they would have them attempt Great Healing with it's 4 prereq chain every student already started. Animal and Body Control spells hve short chains too, and those are Healer side vitality magics. But a lot of other M3 spells are Necromancy (still vitality), Gate (unknown to Scholars, or at least survivors who'll admit to it), or on really long chains. The 18 chain Great Wish is actually one of the short ones, and you wouldn't even try teaching that to anyone you weren't already confident in. Some meta spells are shorter. Shortest are Illusions. You'd get people casting Create Servant in their first year just to show that they can.
... actually shortest is Permanent Possession, but no one in their right mind is teaching that to freshmen, however promising. That's on the restricted list for sure.
Simulacrum and Doppelganger are also M3 spells, enchantments, elaborations on Golems. They require Illusions and mimic real people. Anywhere teaching those would get to be a weird place.
Those would all provide several alternate means to carry the buckets though.
... students teaching themselves an M3 spell so they wouldn't have to turn up for, basically, PE...
Create Servant only lasts for a minute, but only costs one to maintain, so learned at high enough skill could be maintained free. Simulacra are permanent.
Making the Abbey primarily an Enchanter's college makes a lot of practical sense.
But it's also possible magic is too fragmented in this 'verse. Elementalists make deals with elemental spirits and do magic with and through them. If the Elemental colleges were only accessed this way then a lot of other spells would be stuffed for prerequisites.
But the point of deals with spirits is they make spells Easy to learn, loan power, and distort the caster to fit the powers. That's already different enough. Scholars and Healers can learn elemental magics, but they do it the slow and difficult way, and Healers traditionally avoid Fire and destructive spells.
... or else Purify Earth is only available as Divine magic, because the prereqs will be drawing on different powers.
... any way of splitting magic is illogical and limits what is possible. That's probably the point... social control on what spells get discovered...
Nethermost is close enough to the Storm in the Pikes that it was probably on the border when the war was raging. Now it's mainly concerned with calming the Storm and dealing with the demons it produced. But Gate magic isn't known, and that includes Banish. So the demons are stuck here unless destroyed. So the duties of the Scholars mean they aren't primarily academics, and the students are basically drafted.
Illusion doesn't seem like the most useful college against beings made of magic. Anything that can be dispelled by disbelief seems primarily aimed at minds. And the standard demon template has Immunity to Mind Affecting Magic, meaning the whole mind control college can't pretend to be about the current conflict. It would have worked in the earlier war, and that was forty years ago, so practitioners would still be around. And they'd teach because why not?
... and they'd have a steady supply of younger bodies turning up, if that would tempt them...
But if Illusion isn't going to work on their enemies, they won't be so eager to teach it.
Sense Mana is going to be more use than it sounds, since some mana dependent beings stay in the Very High or High zones, so knowing the precise boundaries becomes a survival skill.
It does end up that what magic is for is simply dealing with the fallout of earlier magic. Which, typical, but depressing. Possibly why they mostly have to draft? Or just the draft applies to everyone, and Scholars get second pick.
Healers are first. Everyone appreciates a Healer.
I know one main Scholar turns up with a great deal of skill at Earth spells, and at one point turns someone into a statue as a reflexive defensive move.
Flesh to Stone is *ridiculously* powerful, not possible by technology, and available in only four spells. Seek Earth, Shape Earth, Earth to Stone, Flesh to Stone. ... Stone to Flesh is right after that, but needs M2, so many more could get into what they can't get out of. Any demon with a flesh vessel, anything not purely made of magic, is going to be just as vulnerable to it as anyone. And with prereqs that short you could teach it in four months even to the slowpokes. No, wait, requires M1, it'll be 10% faster than that.
If Flesh to Stone is a standard combat spell it makes sense to go there fast under stress, especially since, unlike most weapons, it can be reversed.
It would also make it a common training accident, to be petrified. And while it would look shocking and serious to a civilian with no experience up the mountains, Scholars would understand it as a pretty ordinary oops.
But if Healers and Elementalists all have varying levels of access to this spell too... ooh, magical combat looks like a statue garden...
Healers would be fine with using it offensively because of the reversability.
Oh, and! Body Of Stone would look a lot like an incapacitated enemy! You'd turn yourself to stone for camouflage! And then start moving :-)
This is fun.
It's easier to think of consequences for small handfuls of spells at once. A world with every spell available gets deeply weird fast.
Elemental spells are tempting for warriors, they mess people up fast. But they'd do nothing to thaumic elementals without a body, those would be stopped by things like Pentagram, and that requires a much wider understanding of the nature of magic.
So we're back to the balance between wide and deep. To Enchant they'd want M3s to go wide, but to do mass damage fast, they'd get elemental spells out there in early training.
I still wonder about the social effects of Elementalists and their spirit deals. Maybe purely elemental magic looks cheap and tacky? You can't prove the power is your own if there's a ton of Earth spirits quite willing to do the work for you.
But if Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and therefore Weather, are only for Elementalists
Animal, Body Control, Food, Healing, Necromantic, and Plant are only for vitality practitioners
Gate doesn't exist, and probably Tech neither
then that leaves
Communication & Empathy, Enchantment, Illusion & Creation, Knowledge, Light, Making & Breaking, Meta, Mind Control, Movement, Protection, and Sound
to be proper thaumaturgic magic, as Scholars practice.
Which is just barely enough colleges to learn Enchantment, and *not* enough to learn Great Wish.
If Scholars can do elemental magic Great Wish is just barely in reach again.
It's an interesting list to consider their core though. Mind Control is very seriously illegal, but only other practitioners are likely to be able to catch you at it. Many Comm & Emp spells are pretty seriously manipulative anyway. I mean the ability to Compel Truth would be a world changer.
If the mind and illusion spells are no use for the current war then I imagine they'll focus on movement and protection. Given the vaguely martial focus there'd be some who only focused on enhancing themselves. Magical super soldiers, sort of thing. Body Control is most obvious for that, but Movement will get you the Flash, at the high end. Basic Apportation and Dancing Object can have all kinds of fun too.
And once you get up to Flight you have an air force, of sorts.
so yeah, scholars focusing on elemental magic is easy to imagine, because I've done elementalists before, but Movement and Protection as the core seems better for giving Scholars a distinctive flavor.
And then first meeting a Scholar who specialises in Earth magic would make him impressive to us, but not to his society. Hmm.
I am going to go and read spell lists for those colleges until I come up with some nifty plots for them.
... and if I put this many hours into actual useful study imagine how smart I'd be...
I've previously done endless spreadsheets to figure that, by the GURPS rules for study hours in character point equivalents, a mage can learn between 5 and 19 character points a year, depending how much is job, how much study by yourself, how much taught.
It can actually be as low as 2.5 if you only have a job and don't study, but, GURPS does reckon you get 2.5 CP every year from just doing a job, so that's nice, even if you do have to put them all into job related skills.
I didn't include Intensive because that's boot camp and the rule book is pretty clear there are very limited opportunities for that, but with sixteen hour days of twice as effective study and no weekends or holidays in the base assumptions you get about 58 CP a year *without* the Magery boost, which is enough to boost your basic stats, let alone your skills. However such courses are very much assumed to run for much less than a year, so, not so much likely.
Studying things that are not magic caps at a lower level, because Magery gives you a percentage boost to speed of learning magic. At Magery 0, or for things unmagical, between 5 and 13 CP a year is the best you get.
GURPS assumes college gives you 10CP a year, which isn't what I get from doing the math on actual courses, that comes out way lower with holidays and fewer teaching hours. But it's in that range of theoretically possible.
Magery gives the boost to learn spells up to 19 a year, and if you're learning that fast, you have enough Magery to learn any spell in existence.
I have previously got that far and noted that 19 spells gets you to Resurrection by the longest chain, so who would even need more than a year? That's spectacularly complex magic, and world changing, and you can do it as a freshman, if you can power it. Seems a little wonky.
But today I was thinking, there's 850 odd spells in my GURPS spreadsheet, and I haven't even added the gender spells from that one Pyramid. I invented a bunch of elemental spells last time I was poking those colleges, for things that should be logically possible cause they are in other elements. The Fire college looks kind of rubbish compared to a decent TL8 flamethrower, let alone grenades, and nobody has invented a magical nuke, even assuming the power requirements would be spectacular. You can't even say it would unbalance the game, because see real nukes. Plus every single Shapeshift spell is a separate spell, so if you want to be a wolf and an owl you learn it twice, and that's just for starters.
So if a magic user is zooming along a particular prerequisite chain to achieve a specific thing, they can do it in a year. But if they want to learn Magic, in general, they've got their 19 a year and like 900 options in front of them. Anyone spending a solid year thinking of nothing but magic kind of has to want one of the other very badly. So you'd get mages who really wanted That One Thing, like for example raising the dead, but you'd also get mages who just have to know how it works, and would feel like a smart kid with a university prospectus and only the one lifetime to go around.
I mean it's still a ridiculous lot. Great Wish requires one spell each from 15 colleges, Enchant, Lesser Wish, Wish, and Great Wish. And with Great Wish you can do literally anything, even if there's a character point maximum on how much of it you can do at once. That's a 19 chain. That's one year.
!
Of course you also need Dex + Int to add up to 30, so it's a rare mage can even aspire to it. And you need a teacher who can cast it. But since whoever casts it can in fact use it to raise IQ or Dex then they can use repeat castings to make an applicant capable. Wizards would prefer IQ of course but human abilities usually cap out at some point. And IQ is exactly what mages risk when they cast the thing, since any failure knocks a point off everyone involved. Which could lead to a cycle of mostly using it to apologise for the result of last time you use it. Except it's hugely energy expensive, so getting enough FP together to use it at all would get tricky. And the rules say a crit fail can bring down civilisations. Which actually seems a little overpowered for if you're using it as the permanent version of Relieve Madness or Grace or Wisdom, but what do I know about game balance?
The 'one spell each from 15 colleges' bit gets interesting though, because while you could do it in a year, it would involve only studying the starter spell in each college. And that means a lot of variations on Seek or Sense, where what you've studied has absolutely no external effect. You'd also get to make a light, a sound, and a simple illusion (though illusion as a college seems to make complex things pretty quickly compared to Light and Sound). You wouldn't get to do the kind of swish whizz bang magic people tend to think of as magic. And as soon as you've got ten colleges of basics you'll get pressured to learn Enchant so you can stand around for 8 hours a day supporting others as they cast it.
A College of Enchantment would have to try recruiting like 'Ultimate power in one year! ... nothing very interesting before that. Some risk of permanent brain damage may apply...'
Which reminds me of Rivers of London, which I've been reading fic for since Yuletide. Using too much power in that 'verse does bad stuff to the brain. Other crit fails are in the more fun accidental explosion range, but the cauliflower brain bit is sort of defining. Makes it make sense why wizards are rare, even if masquerade broke, since most of what they can do at the less than ten years of study range is pretty much matched by modern weapons that don't fry your brain. The rest though gets... interesting.
The thing with magic is always why do they bother. I mean, it takes so long, it ha hazards nothing else does, it probably annoys the neighbours, what's worth that?
RoL has one character who decides Alter Visage is worth that, or possibly Steal Beauty, even if a one off, as long as it's permanent. And you can see why, even if it is a bad call. Alter Gender is another one people would happily put in the time for. But science is catching up with both.
It's the problem with a lot of these spells, compared to ultra tech they just don't seem very magical, and tech scales power supplies much more smoothly. Even using the Tech college spell to convert between tech power and magical power doesn't get you very impressive numbers compared to what ultra tech can do with the same power.
... actually the example for Draw Power is 28 fp per second, that's pretty swish... and Steal Power does make every battery a powerstone... okay, the tech college really ups a mage's game, if permitted. Is another spell that needs 10 colleges of prereq though, and this time two spells each.
... so that would be the second year then, broadening your base so you can draw on waterwheels and so forth...
But again, going only two spells in to each college? Not going to be impressive to look at. So setting out to be an Enchanter means being a dabbler at everything except Enchantment? Or getting really into other colleges and coming back to it postgrad when you start feeling the limitations.
The Power spells are vaguely bothering me. The text mentions a big enough circle of mages could Power a starship and it's weapons. And, okay, yeah, but why are they not more effective doing actual magic?
... Because Lend Power has precisely one prerequisite, the matching Seek spell. That's a two month training course even without Intensive, two weeks with it. That is not a world where mages would be encouraged to study. Dystopic much?
Wait, if waterwheels and low TL equivalents count, that's any Magery 2 mage at any TL, more useful to society as an engine or battery equivalent. Granted they'd need to take breaks, but they'd not need their fuel imported special, or to wait on weather conditions.
There's a pretty good reason for the college to be rare or restricted: elsewise all sorts of pressure would push mages into menial work.
It'd take ages for a lower IQ mage to get reliable at the spell, but they could support another caster doing it ceremonial, and get that 2.5 cp per year for a job. Ceremonial is slow though, I'd have to do some math to see if it's even useful for Power spells. And before that figure out what all the Energy rules mean already... Multiply casting time by 10 doesn't really help when there's no casting time and all the stuff about conversion between fatigue and power doesn't actually say if you have to cast the whole time to do it. Plus I don't understand the real world physics units. So. That... will work at the speed of the plot, if necessary.
Game balance as a concept, making sure all the character classes are going to be useful, kind of makes magic not special by design. I mean, the same number of points in any other skill would add up as useful, if designed properly. So that leaves you stuck wondering why risk it.
Plus the entire reason the real world shifted to boom sticks instead of archery was the same amount of time going in *didn't* get you the same amount of skill or ability to hurt people coming out. Archery takes a lifetime investment of regularly maintained work and minimum stats, like magery. Firearms have some chance of hurting the enemy if you know which end the boom goes out of. They can be used at default, and spells cannot. It would take some spectacular advantage to magic to make it worth the time.
And the kinds of things we can't so at all with science tend to dip into the Restricted section, like Mind Control or Necromancy.
Or any variety of shapeshifting. Got to admit, many people would put in the time to be able to be a cat. Or whatever else.
I gave mages an Intensive study course at Nethermost Abbey. Scholars recruit from people who owe years in public service in exchange for their post 16 education. ... though old school societies considered post 13 optional and split off into apprenticeships and so forth. I'd have an unusually educated society for one that doesn't have much of a tech level. But it's an alternate universe post apocalypse, so there's plenty to teach, and remembered incentives to do so.
Nethermost was inspired while watching a Shaolin movie which was mostly training sequence. The bits where they stab themselves seemed ridiculous, but the stuff where they increase their fatigue, strength, and dexterity actually has applications to making better wizards, especially fatigue. More puff is more power. So they'd set newbies to carrying buckets of water up stairs and suchlike. But they'd also be training them in Staff skill, because wizards use a staff and it's clearly going to be useful. And all this resembles military training enough that there's obviously Intensive versions.
I'm not sure Intensive meditation can logically exist. Probably that's just regular teaching.
If spells can go Intensive then there's a real chance of coming out the Abbey knowing every spell a Scholar can know. 58 a year for ten years, restricted colleges available because of the spit up system that keeps Healers separate.
Every schoolkid would be taught Lend Energy though, to help with the big socially necessary spells, and Recover Energy at least in theory, though it would only work for those with Magery 1, it's probably just meditating quietly, and who doesn't want to get kids to do that?
... this is a society built around the needs of Healers and Scholars, so the priorities look weird from other angles. But things taught an hour a week add up, so one or two spells each through school is viable.
Intensive study for spells doesn't really logically add up. Scheduling someone 16 hours a day for years isn't going to work. So split the physical and mental disciplines, give them study days, and pour the extra points from Intensive primarily into fatigue. Scholars come out very physically fit and with a habitual training schedule like an athlete, but still mostly focused on the academic.
There would be careful observation in the early spells to determine who was learning faster. They can use Mage Light to determine magery, since only mages can see it, and they can have standardised testing in schools to approximate IQ, but the precise level of Magery is unmeasurable except through practical observation. ... or the Aura spell, actually, but that relies on one person casting it right and observing the complexities correctly, so there'd be backup layers.
The fastest students would have higher levels of Magery. Ones that were fast and smart enough might be able to learn spells well enough the simplest ones are free to cast, as soon as they learn them. That would be possible with IQ alone but easier with IQ plus Magery. And it would be students who could invest the least time for the most reliable results that they'd most want. So there would be tests of magical endurance, to measure how much fatigue you have and use per spell. Ignite Fire would be a pretty and obvious one. You'd get a row of candles and see how many they could light, and the few students who cold light them all without keeling over would be whisked away to higher study.
You'd want to test as fast as possible if someone had Magery 3 and therefore could do the greatest magics. Easy for Healers, they would have them attempt Great Healing with it's 4 prereq chain every student already started. Animal and Body Control spells hve short chains too, and those are Healer side vitality magics. But a lot of other M3 spells are Necromancy (still vitality), Gate (unknown to Scholars, or at least survivors who'll admit to it), or on really long chains. The 18 chain Great Wish is actually one of the short ones, and you wouldn't even try teaching that to anyone you weren't already confident in. Some meta spells are shorter. Shortest are Illusions. You'd get people casting Create Servant in their first year just to show that they can.
... actually shortest is Permanent Possession, but no one in their right mind is teaching that to freshmen, however promising. That's on the restricted list for sure.
Simulacrum and Doppelganger are also M3 spells, enchantments, elaborations on Golems. They require Illusions and mimic real people. Anywhere teaching those would get to be a weird place.
Those would all provide several alternate means to carry the buckets though.
... students teaching themselves an M3 spell so they wouldn't have to turn up for, basically, PE...
Create Servant only lasts for a minute, but only costs one to maintain, so learned at high enough skill could be maintained free. Simulacra are permanent.
Making the Abbey primarily an Enchanter's college makes a lot of practical sense.
But it's also possible magic is too fragmented in this 'verse. Elementalists make deals with elemental spirits and do magic with and through them. If the Elemental colleges were only accessed this way then a lot of other spells would be stuffed for prerequisites.
But the point of deals with spirits is they make spells Easy to learn, loan power, and distort the caster to fit the powers. That's already different enough. Scholars and Healers can learn elemental magics, but they do it the slow and difficult way, and Healers traditionally avoid Fire and destructive spells.
... or else Purify Earth is only available as Divine magic, because the prereqs will be drawing on different powers.
... any way of splitting magic is illogical and limits what is possible. That's probably the point... social control on what spells get discovered...
Nethermost is close enough to the Storm in the Pikes that it was probably on the border when the war was raging. Now it's mainly concerned with calming the Storm and dealing with the demons it produced. But Gate magic isn't known, and that includes Banish. So the demons are stuck here unless destroyed. So the duties of the Scholars mean they aren't primarily academics, and the students are basically drafted.
Illusion doesn't seem like the most useful college against beings made of magic. Anything that can be dispelled by disbelief seems primarily aimed at minds. And the standard demon template has Immunity to Mind Affecting Magic, meaning the whole mind control college can't pretend to be about the current conflict. It would have worked in the earlier war, and that was forty years ago, so practitioners would still be around. And they'd teach because why not?
... and they'd have a steady supply of younger bodies turning up, if that would tempt them...
But if Illusion isn't going to work on their enemies, they won't be so eager to teach it.
Sense Mana is going to be more use than it sounds, since some mana dependent beings stay in the Very High or High zones, so knowing the precise boundaries becomes a survival skill.
It does end up that what magic is for is simply dealing with the fallout of earlier magic. Which, typical, but depressing. Possibly why they mostly have to draft? Or just the draft applies to everyone, and Scholars get second pick.
Healers are first. Everyone appreciates a Healer.
I know one main Scholar turns up with a great deal of skill at Earth spells, and at one point turns someone into a statue as a reflexive defensive move.
Flesh to Stone is *ridiculously* powerful, not possible by technology, and available in only four spells. Seek Earth, Shape Earth, Earth to Stone, Flesh to Stone. ... Stone to Flesh is right after that, but needs M2, so many more could get into what they can't get out of. Any demon with a flesh vessel, anything not purely made of magic, is going to be just as vulnerable to it as anyone. And with prereqs that short you could teach it in four months even to the slowpokes. No, wait, requires M1, it'll be 10% faster than that.
If Flesh to Stone is a standard combat spell it makes sense to go there fast under stress, especially since, unlike most weapons, it can be reversed.
It would also make it a common training accident, to be petrified. And while it would look shocking and serious to a civilian with no experience up the mountains, Scholars would understand it as a pretty ordinary oops.
But if Healers and Elementalists all have varying levels of access to this spell too... ooh, magical combat looks like a statue garden...
Healers would be fine with using it offensively because of the reversability.
Oh, and! Body Of Stone would look a lot like an incapacitated enemy! You'd turn yourself to stone for camouflage! And then start moving :-)
This is fun.
It's easier to think of consequences for small handfuls of spells at once. A world with every spell available gets deeply weird fast.
Elemental spells are tempting for warriors, they mess people up fast. But they'd do nothing to thaumic elementals without a body, those would be stopped by things like Pentagram, and that requires a much wider understanding of the nature of magic.
So we're back to the balance between wide and deep. To Enchant they'd want M3s to go wide, but to do mass damage fast, they'd get elemental spells out there in early training.
I still wonder about the social effects of Elementalists and their spirit deals. Maybe purely elemental magic looks cheap and tacky? You can't prove the power is your own if there's a ton of Earth spirits quite willing to do the work for you.
But if Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and therefore Weather, are only for Elementalists
Animal, Body Control, Food, Healing, Necromantic, and Plant are only for vitality practitioners
Gate doesn't exist, and probably Tech neither
then that leaves
Communication & Empathy, Enchantment, Illusion & Creation, Knowledge, Light, Making & Breaking, Meta, Mind Control, Movement, Protection, and Sound
to be proper thaumaturgic magic, as Scholars practice.
Which is just barely enough colleges to learn Enchantment, and *not* enough to learn Great Wish.
If Scholars can do elemental magic Great Wish is just barely in reach again.
It's an interesting list to consider their core though. Mind Control is very seriously illegal, but only other practitioners are likely to be able to catch you at it. Many Comm & Emp spells are pretty seriously manipulative anyway. I mean the ability to Compel Truth would be a world changer.
If the mind and illusion spells are no use for the current war then I imagine they'll focus on movement and protection. Given the vaguely martial focus there'd be some who only focused on enhancing themselves. Magical super soldiers, sort of thing. Body Control is most obvious for that, but Movement will get you the Flash, at the high end. Basic Apportation and Dancing Object can have all kinds of fun too.
And once you get up to Flight you have an air force, of sorts.
so yeah, scholars focusing on elemental magic is easy to imagine, because I've done elementalists before, but Movement and Protection as the core seems better for giving Scholars a distinctive flavor.
And then first meeting a Scholar who specialises in Earth magic would make him impressive to us, but not to his society. Hmm.
I am going to go and read spell lists for those colleges until I come up with some nifty plots for them.
... and if I put this many hours into actual useful study imagine how smart I'd be...
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Date: 2018-01-12 05:47 pm (UTC)4 prerequisite spells + Magery 2. Start building your necromantic horde in your freshman year. Energy cost is based on mass of the target, so, mostly skip humans and make zombie dogs, cats, squirrels, and bats. (Can zombie hawks fly?)
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Date: 2018-01-13 07:59 am (UTC)