Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2
Pray allow me to mess up your calculation by pointing out that while Banestorm does explicitly say that have to have inborn potential to be a mage, it doesn't explicity say that people who are mageborn can't train up their level of magery. (Although it does indicate that 90% of mageborn are left at 0) I would say levels of one college magery are probably the product of personality and training and not purely genetic.
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I like the idea that you can train up a level in Magery, personally. It also simulates what I read in L.E. Modesitt's Recluce series--those mages can increase their power and range by practicing. His Order and Chaos mages get better skill-wise as well, but I like the mechanism of being able to train both skill and power.
Since the Recluce series was originally written to demonstrate that magic has economic effects (and can't just be simply "grafted on" to an otherwise mundane world), it might be useful to keep that in mind. (As, I think, we are.)
As for increasing the amount of magic items in the world (using the basic magic system) we can make the average mana level High instead of Normal; we can lower the difficulty of spells from "Astrophysics" to "Algebra" (that is, VH-->H, H-->A, or even knock them down 2 levels); change how spells are bought from separate skills to techniques based on your skill in a College; we can change the prerequisites to have shorter chains. I suppose we could also just knock a zero off of the amount of mana it takes to enchant. There are likely other ways in Thaumatology, but I haven't had the chance to read through that yet.
But I don't think we need to do that. I don't think Yrth was ever supposed to be a D&D equivalent, which I sort of equate with a world with magic items lying around all over the place. I always saw Yrth as a more realistic attempt to come up with a world that had a slew of different sentient species, magic, supernatural creatures, and all the rest. It's debatable how well they succeeded, but it was at least a good attempt.
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Warmest regards,
StevenH
My current
worldbuilding project. You can find the Adventure Logs of the campaign
here. I try to write them up as narrative prose, with illustrations. As such, they are "embellished" accounts of the play sessions.
Link of the moment:
Bestiary of Plants. In a world of mana, plants evolved to use it as an energy source.
It is also the new home of the
Alaconius Lectures, a series of essays about the various Colleges of Spells.