As I hinted near the start of this thread, the Wizardry Talent I wrote up for Interplay at William Gustafson's request was only the tip of an iceberg. The full house rules for magical talents my original group composed and used from 1981 forward were so radical, they would surely have been too much for Metagaming to swallow. Uh, they are still too much to swallow :) I would
not use this system today in a new group. Anyone reading this would call it crazy, and that's quite alright because it was.
We had two tracks of wizardly arts, and two tiers to each track. We required any wizard to take at least one of these talents to cast spells, but in return they no longer had to pay double for other talents; and each mage got a memory pool equal to IQ for memorizing spells. Verbatim, it began with:
IQ 8 TALENT, WIZARDRY (5). Ability to gather and focus ambient mana to cast spells. Spell costs reflect physical exhaustion for the mana gathering, and are tallied as fatigue type hits against the user's ST. This talent only costs 3 IQ if you already have SORCERY.
IQ 11 TALENT, SORCERY (5), Ability to tap personal Mana Valence [your mana charge, which started as equal to IQ] for the mana to cast spells. Spell costs reflect psychic exhaustion for mana expenditure, and are tallied as hits against the user's MV. This talent only costs 3 IQ if you already have WIZARDRY.
IQ 12 TALENT, ADVANCED WIZARDRY (3). Prerequisite: WIZARDRY. Ability to focus ambient mana to cast spells with great alacrity and efficiency. [Which went on to explain the ST cost for each spell was halved!]
IQ 15 TALENT, ADVANCED SORCERY (3). Prerequisite: SORCERY. Ability to concentrate more mana than usual in MV -- 2 mana points for every 1 IQ point.
There's a bit more to my old group's old text, explaining mana recouped at the same rate as fatigue, and a wizard couldn't mix both power sources for the same spell at the same time. Wish I had it all on computer, but alas no.
I know what someone will say. We must have blown up our planet with too many spells - hahaha. In point of fact, we reserved those two Sorcery Talents for a tiny number of rarely seen NPCs that, by copious ingestion of youth potions, had survived in hiding for a couple hundred years since a religious order had nearly exterminated all the wizards in the World. Those two talents, all enchantment spells, and most of the new spells that appeared for the first time in Advanced Wizard were considered "lost knowledge" from a "golden age of magic". We always intended to eventually restore that lost knowledge though a great in-game quest, but we never got to that campaign. In fact I can only recall one PC taking that Advanced Wizardry talent. He was mine and he only had ST 8 to begin with, so no, we never blew up our World! :)
In any event, taking all four of those talents would have cost 16 talent points. Imagine the starting wizard with 32 points to pay spell costs, plus twice his ST added in. But then that superhero would have to have started with ST 8, DX 8, and would probably have been skewered by a crossbow bolt and killed before getting off one spell in combat - LOL.
But the basic IQ 8 Wizardry Talent worked out perfectly well. Wizards having their full IQ compliment of spells even after Talents came along didn't rock the boat -- that was the ship we'd sailed since 1978.