Five New Practical Magic Spells

[Anomylous]

I don't have a great intuitive sense of what it would cost to have it cast.

That's ok... old TFT gives us enough numbers to calculate it out! (New revisions may change these calculations.)

A 30-ST spell obviously requires either a large ST battery or a pack of apprentices. For the sake of simplicity, I'll assume there's no ST battery and it all comes from the wizard and his apprentices.

Let's assume that each caster can give 6 points towards the spell, which leaves a ST 10 figure a couple points for missed rolls, and a couple to stay conscious. 30/6 = 5, so you need one wizard and 4 apprentices.

This would realistically represent a half-day's work for everyone involved (6 points fatigue = 1.5 hours resting time), but for simplicity I'll assume they're charging for the full day. That's $8 a head (rounding up) for apprentices - who are listed in both ITL and AdvWizard as being paid $25 a week, but that's not including $20 for room and board - and $24 for an IQ 15 "town wizard". (I'm assuming 6-day workweeks - which I believe were standard in pre-modern times.)

...Which brings us to a total of $56. Round to $60 and buy lunch for the wizards' crew. However, it's the nature of contractors to charge whatever they can get, not knowing when the next job will pop up, so any given customer might be quoted a much higher price...

Edit: arithmetic error.

Also - what exactly will Regeneration fix, and how does it decide? Like, say I were a TFT character and lost my left leg, but was lucky enough for someone to cast Regeneration on me. Would it grow back with the same mutant toes I've got on that foot now, or would I just get "full health" including regular boring toes? What about tattoos and piercings, does it count those as "damage" and repair them?

Obviously, this kind of detail isn't likely to come up much in gameplay. But maybe someone took a handicap as in the TSG article recently re-published on the website, something like Lame, Hard of Hearing, Nearsighted, Blind, Hemophiliac, etc., and now wants to "buy it off" GURPS-style - would this spell provide a mechanism for doing so?

[Steve Jackson]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Too much "crippling injuries don't exist for the middle class in this world" for my tastes.

I don't know if the average at death is much older in Cidri than the current Terran average, but just the lifestyle improvements allowed by magic are probably going to keep infant mortality WAY down from corresponding tech levels on Earth. This is assuming that the advantages of sanitation are understood, and in most places they are.

And I have no problem with the idea that crippling injuries might not exist for the middle and even the lower class. Nothing at all romantic about losing a hand, or a limb, or a kidney. (I know, you did NOT say that it was romantic, but some people would go there mentally as long as the crippled characters are just part of their background flavor.)