Alternate Magic Colleges

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Bookman

I've reorganized:

1) Most Colleges are self-sufficient and have no pre-requisites outside their own spells.
2) Colleges are organized into larger structures called realms.
3) Some spells and colleges have been removed.

I like #1 a lot. GURPS Magic is far too heavily biased aginst specialist casters.

#2 is also very needed, so that it becomes easier to get bonuses for themed groups of Colleges, e.g. those that have to do with the Elements, or with Nature. AFAIK it's not possible to build a Magery that gives bonuses to all the Element Colleges, if one follows the RAW, that costs less than unlimited Magery.

I've got those supergroups in Sagatafl too. 24 sets of spells (many rather similar to the Colleges in GURPS), all gathered in 4 categories: Green, Black, Grey and Element, with Green sometimes being called Nature. I also deliberately don't have some spells or "Colleges" because they are inherently damaging to the medieval fantasy ambience of the setting.

[Refplace]

I have colleges organized because of different guilds though mostly there very similar to the ones in Magic.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I have colleges organized because of different guilds though mostly there very similar to the ones in Magic.

That sounds very odd, because as presented in GURPS Magic, the Colleges aren't something invented by humans; rather they are an intrinsic part of the reality of the world in which the game takes place.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That sounds very odd, because as presented in GURPS Magic, the Colleges aren't something invented by humans; rather they are an intrinsic part of the reality of the world in which the game takes place.

And in some worlds the realities of the world bend to the will of the masses.
Also even in our world there are different philosophies and ideas on how things work and in a world where it really does who is to say that different approaches could affect things.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That sounds very odd, because as presented in GURPS Magic, the Colleges aren't something invented by humans; rather they are an intrinsic part of the reality of the world in which the game takes place.

I don't agree. At least not entirely. It seems self evident that the plethora of spells about creating, suppressing, controlling and transforming combustion processes, for example, have a fundamental commonality and for that reason they are grouped into a college. But if you pick some different commonalities to focus on, you could get different colleges. For example there's no fundamental reason why they couldn't instead have a set of colleges based on Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Psychology...

And just like with this schema, there would be overlap and cross-college prerequisites, which indicate that just as in reality, the college system of divvying up things that are actually part of a whole is artificial, and Communication/Empathy really isn't something so very fundamentally different from Mind Control.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That sounds very odd, because as presented in GURPS Magic, the Colleges aren't something invented by humans; rather they are an intrinsic part of the reality of the world in which the game takes place.

Actually, it seems like the colleges are simply how mages studied and learned related uses of magic. In the pursuit of studying fire magic, a mage might have studied and worked until he could produce simple effects, like igniting flamable materials or sensing the presence of fire, then moving on to creating flame from nothing, then finally discovering how to create more advanced methods of using flame, such as projecting a narrow jet of flame from his fingers or sheathing his body in flames that would not harm him. There's certainly nothing intrinsic about the way you have to learn the spells, however. There's many suggestions on re-organizing the colleges, and some magical schools teach completely different chains of spells to learn more advanced ones (Perhaps some school starts with the simple manipulation of existing flame, moving up to more precise manipulations and effects, and finally conjuring flame out of nothing). And if you've done the proper studying (Enough to get Shortcut to Power), you can even learn an advanced spell without having to learn any of the spells that are typically its prerequisite.