Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
Eh, as long as it follows the same rules as powerstones you can just cast it for 4x cost without using a gem; an extra $20 per point of energy fits nicely...
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I had thought of using Manastone with a Scroll before but forgot about it when replying here.
I'm pretty sure it's canon that Manastone follows the same rule as powerstone, so you could spend 5x4=20 energy to make one from anything.
There doesn't however seem to be a canon "One College Manastone" like there is for Powerstone. But it seems reasonable enough to extrapolate it as 60% of the cost (like Powerstone does) so that it's 3 or 12 energy.
Using my idea of a "one spell manastone" (since One College Powerstone basically matches up with applying the -40% One College magery limitation to energy cost...) of -80% would make it 1 energy to create a 1-spell manastone from an expensive object, or 4 energy to create a 1-spell manastone from any object.
It's pretty cheap, but you're still limited to the 60-minute manufacturing time minimum for enchantments unless GM also allows you to fiddle with that using various "Time Spent" or "Long Tasks" rules.
Long Tasks is intended for 8+ hours (more the Slow and Sure method) but it might be interesting to do something along those lines on a "per minute" basis.
if Time Spent discounts were also allowed then 60 minutes could be reduced to 6 minutes for -9 to skill...
Or just extrapolate "max 100 energy enchantment per 60 minutes" to "max 5 energy per 180 seconds" or "take 36 consecutive concentrate maneuvers per 1 energy your enchantment costs".
Being able to put 1 energy into a "one-spell pebble manastone" per 4x36=144 seconds (2 minutes 24 seconds) might seem pretty powerful (you'd probably have mages stockpiling these) but I kinda like the idea... is it really THAT powerful?
Maybe as a balancing factor we could invert the usual rules for "more energy to cast magic on big SM things" where instead, it's actually EASIER to store magic in big objects, and HARDER to store magic in small ones?
The simplest would probably be just to apply SM as a skill penalty or skill bonus to manastone/powerstone.
This would help deal with issues like "my manastone is a grain of sand, I carry thousands of manastones in my hourglass". It'd be POSSIBLE, but really hard to set up due to the skill penalty.
Whereas something like "my manastone is this big SM+10 boulder" would be more common since it'd be easier, but also less convenient to port around.
An additional limiting factor would be to actually force mages to roll to observe/hit/find their manastones. It would be harder to notice / touch smaller manastones/powerstones, which would be an additional incentive to use larger ones.