Purchasing entire spell colleges?

[Drakyrias]

I'm trying to find a rule I saw once and now can't find again. It allowed mages (wizards etc) to learn/purchase access to entire colleges of spells rather then learning them individually.

Anybody know where I found this so I can find it again?

[wmervine4]

Originally Posted by SinsofDivinity

I'm trying to find a rule I saw once and now can't find again. It allowed mages (wizards etc) to learn/purchase access to entire colleges of spells rather then learning them individually.

Anybody know where I found this so I can find it again?

Are you thinking of Ritual Magery perhaps? I believe it is mentioned in a sidebar in the Basic Set section on magic. It's also in a sidebar in the beginning part of Magic.

[philosophyguy]

In Thaumatology, page 75, there's a sidebar on Wildcard Colleges. The character can purchase a wildcard skill for a magic college, and each spell defaults to the college skill with a penalty based on how many prerequisites it has.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by wmervine4

Are you thinking of Ritual Magery perhaps? I believe it is mentioned in a sidebar in the Basic Set section on magic. It's also in a sidebar in the beginning part of Magic.

Page 242 in the basic set, at the bottom of the sidebar.
Page 200 in magic, in the chapter "Variations" towards the end.

These two rule sets are very similar, and I don't think there are any rule differences between the two. Very short rule sets.

Page 72 and 73 of Thaumatology are dedicated to exploring this idea further, mostly disucussing ways to further modify it. I would not purchase thaumatology just for that section. Though I would happily purchase thaumatology for what's in the rest of it.

the wildcard college blurb has been mentioned already.

One further way to do it deserves mention: realm magic, found in chapter 6 of thaumatology. That chapter can be hard to follow because its building several possible systems at the same time, but one suggestion is to just use the FP cost of existing spells when possible (page 180). Then you use realm magic (page 188) and choose 24 realms. That gives you 30 points per college, with level costs in the section letting you break it up more. There is an argument to be made that the cost should be less than 30/college, but its not bad. This is not what you were referring to, but I never miss a chance to plug realm magic!

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by ericthered

One further way to do it deserves mention: realm magic, found in chapter 6 of thaumatology. That chapter can be hard to follow because its building several possible systems at the same time, but one suggestion is to just use the FP cost of existing spells when possible (page 180). Then you use realm magic (page 188) and choose 24 realms. That gives you 30 points per college, with level costs in the section letting you break it up more. There is an argument to be made that the cost should be less than 30/college, but its not bad. This is not what you were referring to, but I never miss a chance to plug realm magic!

I did something similar with my Affinity Magic system, essentially a College is a Realm. Though I also created different types of 'colleges' as possible options.
See Lantern Guilds for a worked example. (The actual rules are not included here since I submitted it to Pyramid).

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by ericthered

One further way to do it deserves mention: realm magic, found in chapter 6 of thaumatology. That chapter can be hard to follow because its building several possible systems at the same time, but one suggestion is to just use the FP cost of existing spells when possible (page 180). Then you use realm magic (page 188) and choose 24 realms. That gives you 30 points per college, with level costs in the section letting you break it up more. There is an argument to be made that the cost should be less than 30/college, but its not bad. This is not what you were referring to, but I never miss a chance to plug realm magic!

30 points per realm/college on a 6-level layout gives spell college realms at 5 points per level. On a 4-level layout per realm/college, that increases to 7.5 points per level, which is probably rounded to 8/level. While they may seem expensive taken as a whole, the lower levels are very affordable on smaller point budgets.

And let's face it, most folks tend to specialize in one or two colleges, with most of the other spells being the simpler "cantrips" in the other colleges, which are covered by the lower levels of the realms (level 1 in the four-level layout, first and second level in the 6-level layout).