Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

[ericthered]

Ceremonial Magic.

Oh Boy. Time to see what we can break. The take-away is that this lets lots of people be mages.

I've outlined the basic things that a mage can do with their own FP. What happens when ceremonial magic gets involved?

The classic version of ceremonial magic is getting the entire village together and having each villager donate 1 FP to a massive communal spell. Using this method, you can cast 100 energy spells, which means you can do things like cast bless plants over the entirety of an awkwardly shaped three-square mile manor with five castings. The actual hardest part is getting everyone to agree to do it. Counting on a mage to provide leadership and the prestige for this is a loosing bet. And spectators could oppose the ritual. I don't think there is a huge motive for people to oppose the ritual, but I can certainly see a few grumpy folks opposing, even when the casting is a great deal, like counting as a full day of labor, being essential to not making them starve, and being associated with a local festival. (bah humbug!) This is useful for spells that get better with larger castings, like most area spells, or spells that can't be cast from one mage at all... which tend to have magery prereqs beyond magery 1. I haven't seen one I like yet.

More reliable is the "mage squad", a group of several assistants who assist with casting. These can be hand-picked and well-paid, and expected to work together as a team. While the "whole village" plan allows for massive spells to be cast, this method relies on consistent casting... which means that the x10 casting time makes some spells unavailable, like bless plants, which has a 5 minute base casting time, and thus a 50 minute casting time when done ceremonially. This method is also very sensative to numbers: each assistant can contribute 1 FP per casting, so when casting a 6 FP spell a bunch of times (like earth to stone) having five assitants lets you maximize FP. treating the mage as "Extra" provides a bit more robustness if someone is sick or something, and the mage can dump any excess FP into extra castings. The "Mage squad" is doing a dangerous job, and an exhausting one, so paying them extra is a good idea. The assistants regenerate FP as fast as the mages we've been talking about, so generally actually function as though we had an extra mage.

The last ceremonial magic worth mentioning is apprentices. They can generally add 3 points of energy, as long as the additional casting time is worth it. Apprentices are more often work it for spells with longer casting times, because they can dump 30 minutes of FP into the single expanded casting time.


Bless Plants doesn't make sense for mage squads or apprentices to help with, because the casting time goes up to fifty minutes. It makes a fantastic amount of sense for a village ceremony. The cost of a village ceremony is huge: the entire village takes it off. even paying an effective 250d for the spell, with serfs being paid for a full day of labor (its really a half), and gifts and generosity making the farmers excited to do it, The spell is well worth it: The output of the entire manor goes up by about 75% (the spell's failure rate). Crops take an additional two days of labor per acre to thresh and harvest so much grain, but the other base costs remain constant. Its an incredible investment. It also runs out of land quickly unless you're doing something like using bless plants.
EDIT: the ease of doing the entire manor was due to a math error: its a LOT harder than I thought.

Essential Earth doesn't scale with size, making it a good target for mage squads. the ceremonial casting time of five minutes slows it down a little ( a team of 8 workers cast 4 times in an hour, 8 mages cast 6 times), but it remains viable, especially in combination with bless earth. It also makes converting an entire manor to essential earth in timeframes under a millenium possible. An apprentice is similarly effective: they cast every 55 minutes, with the mage providing 5 energy and the apprentice providing 3.

Hair growth takes 50 seconds to cast ceremonially, making it a good target for mage squads. Hair growth is interestingly already fairly labor intensive to get the best bang for your buck, and a place I think the economy will bend fairly quickly.

Earth to Stone and Shape Earth don't scale with size, and have really quick casting times, so they're ideal for mage squads, who act as a strait multiplier on the mage's FP. village castings of this don't make much sense unless you're trying to build a fortress in a day or have some other huge need for power. 100 assistants supporting an earth mage with shape-earth 12 and architecture-12 building the 12 by 8 foot wall can build 1400 feet of wall (50 energy per mage-day, 100 participants, 3.5 energy per foot) if they provide energy all day. It will be a grueling day, so you better have them good and convinced they want that wall, but if they do, watch out for walls! The hard part is probably properly defending the walls!

Plant growth isn't worth it for the individual mage, so it isn't worth it for mage squads, at least not small ones. Full sized communal castings are worth their own discussion. Right now it looks like plant growth is viable, but complex, when run on the village plan... if you can get your village plan tight, which I have misgivings about.