One College Magery tips

[William]

Knowledge will make you a diviner. Very useful outside of combat, very little utility in combat.

Movement is an interesting utility College for dungeon diving. Knowing Apportation, Manipulate and the like at high enough levels to reduce the Fatigue cost means you'll be able to regularly handle suspicious objects at a safe distance or affect isolated/protected areas; Levitation, Flight and eventually Teleport are handy for getting around; Wallwalker and Lockmaster can make you an effective second-story man; there are a few directly offensive and defensive spells such as Distant Blow, Winged Knife, Deflect Missile, and of course Haste and Great Haste.

[edk926]

I'd say for a pure Wandering Mage, go with Movement.

[Kromm]

I agree with those saying that versatility and utility are (1) different things, and (2) dependent on the campaign focus.

Will you spend most of your time in town, dealing with merchants, digging through musty libraries, encountering mysterious foreigners, and involving yourself in intrigues? Then the answer is Communication and Empathy, as it overcomes the barriers of deception, language, and unfriendliness – which are likely to be the campaign's main obstacles – while sparing you the social and legal complications of outright mind control. Your friends might actually get pretty tired of you being a know-it-all with Borrow Skill, Gift of Letters, and Gift of Tongues; short-circuiting their information-gathering with Mind-Search; and even showing them up in the rare combat by using Possession on powerful warriors.

Will you spend most of your time down a hole in the ground, seeking loot? It's hard to go wrong with Earth. You can dig your way out of or into just about anything with its spells, or just sneak in with Walk Through Earth. You can seek out treasures with Seek Earth and Earth Vision. In the inevitable battles, you have a high-caliber Missile spell (Stone Missile), one of the system's very best area-damage spells (Rain of Stones), and a couple of really nasty save-or-die spells (Entombment and Flesh to Stone). And unless the GM stops the gap with a house rule, you can abuse Essential Earth to great profit.

And if the emphasis is on wandering around outdoors, don't underrate Plant spells. This college gives you free food. It provides concealment and stealth unmatched by anything less than Invisibility. It isn't great in combat, but it still gives you crowd-control spells (Pollen Cloud, Rain of Nuts, Tangle Growth) and a save-or-die spell (Arboreal Immurement), and lets you animate scary pets. Plus it's almost as good as the Knowledge college for gathering information in the wilderness. Oh, and it's fun to cast Plant Form Other on your friends and then restore them to full health with a single, large Heal Plant spell.

So if I were you, I'd ask the GM what the campaign is going to look like.