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Originally Posted by JethroKirby
Been following the thread and I have to say that its an interesting idea. Wanted to toss in a few ideas I've come up with for my campaign based off of it. Let me know what ya think.
Magic is not inborn and does not rely of magical talent, thus the magery disadvantage is history. Magic is based off of spirits instead of mana eliminating the effects of mana level on spell casting. Each "style" or tradition requires a Style Familiarty perk with at least one point in all of the required skills to learn it, and has several spells associated with the tradition. A practitioner of a tradition may only use the spells associated with his tradition and must follow the rules established for his tradition. All spells require at least 10 seconds to cast. Spells with a lower casting time increase to 10 while spells that already took longer are ignored - spirits cannot be invoked with a seconds thought. To compensate, all of the prerequisite penalties are reduced by half (round down). The spells do not default to the path skills either, but to one of the required skills for the tradition. Here is an example tradition:
Stonesong – 5 points
Stonesong is the magical tradition of the dwarves. Its practitioners (often called Stonesingers) use the spirits of earth in many different ways. A stonesinger sing deeply in the dwarven language to use his magic and uses the lowest of his skill with the spell or his singing skill for the roll (whichever is lower). Stonesingers are also taught the basics of runesmithing as well, allowing them to craft magical items. They must seek training for the different runes separately.
Skills: Masonry; Ritual Magic (Stonesong); Singing; Symbol Drawing (Runesmithing).
Spells (all default to Ritual Magic (Stonesong): Armor; Awaken Craft Spirit; Counterspell; Divination (Geomancy); Earth to Stone; Earth Vision; Entombment; Explode (earth, stone, or metal only); Find Weakness (earth, stone, or metal only); Flesh to Stone; Identify Metal; Inspired Creation; Metal Vision; Predict Earth Movement; Repair (earth, stone, or metal only); Seek Earth; Seek Pass; Shape Earth; Shape Metal; Sharpen (earth, stone, or metal only); Shatter (earth, stone, or metal only); Stone to Earth; Stone to Flesh; Toughen (earth, stone, or metal only); Weaken (earth, stone, or metal only).
If you see any holes in this, feel free to point em out. Note that I'm probably going to be using this system of magic alongside of the rules for symbol magic.
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Sweet! Technically, Ritual Magic requires at least two Very Hard skills - either Ritual Magic (Tradition) plus Path skill, or a VH craft or professional skill plus the Mysteries of the Trade skill associated with it, that's the equivalent of a path skill. This is so spellcasters that concentrate on one Path have to either cast from a steep double default (-6 plus prereq-count-based), or effectively pay double to raise it (2/4/8 points instead or 1/2/4). Path skills and Profession (Magic) skills default to the base skill at -6. So, if your dwarves are only using the one skill, they're technically getting the benefits of +6 to all spells. Plus, if I'm reading that correctly, no default penalties.
To make it book-legal, maybe make Dwarven Masonry a VH skill instead of Easy (and/or defaults from regular Masonry at -3), and limit Stonesong to no higher than Dwarven Masonry. Individual spells take the prerequisite count based penalty when defaulting from Stonesong, and are bought up as Hard techniques. Or see my last post, upthread, for Power Investiture-equivalent narrow styles if you really want all spells to default to Stonesong at no penalty. Or, just ignore the rules for prerequisite count based default penalties - Kromm has said elsewhere that prereq chains are a minor limiting factor on spells, and can be ignored without breaking the game (although that was in the context of regular spell-by-spell GURPS Magic; not sure if he'd say the same for Ritual Magic).