[ericthered]

I'd prefer a recent conquest environment. It gives us narrative permission to be shaking up the status quo.

Mages require 200 hours of training to learn a new spell. This means that not only does the Mage require training time to perfect his grasp of the spell, but that a teacher must ALSO dedicate that time to teaching said student the spell. This in turn also requires that the "masters" who are teaching the apprentices, will also have to have the skill of teaching at 12.

I'd prefer a lighter version of the teaching requirement. Apprenticeships are how much of the information in the middle ages was transferred, and requiring everyone with an apprentice to have the teaching skill feels off. That said, I have no problem requiring 400 hours or more if the teacher doesn't have the teaching skill at high enough level.



I'd also like to take this time to protest against a requirement to know a prereq at 10 or some other number. I think knowing the theory of a spell but not being any good with it makes a good deal of sense.

So - 2 character points per age over 12 devoted to spell casting and life skills? Do you want to track them as almost player characters with character sheets and such?

I do want to track full skill lists, but actually making sheets sounds like a pain. 12 points per age over 12? that sounds very 3e, but its not a bad starting point. I would like an additional pool for "leisure skills", that just sort of happen, like area knowledge and dancing.

First thing up for debate: If we're dealing with 10 villages in theory, and each of you are going to want to know how many mageborn you have in your village - do you want to set it up as a general "pool" of mageborn, where each one is assigned to a random manor (ie if we have three of you in this, then manors 1-3 are going to be assigned to you for your control, while those with manors 4 - 10 will be known to exist, but not directly impact on your manor unless you hire their services directly.

Alternatively, we simply roll at 2% chance per person on your manor (thus, if you have an 1800 acre holding, with 90 families, plus the 1 family that is your own Noble family - that works out to about 455 people on YOUR manor. That is roughly 9 mageborn that you get a shot at.

I prefer the 2%. Let the dice do their work. If I end up with no mages, we'll see what I can do to steal someone else's.

Do you want to specify low mana or normal mana?

Normal Mana. Oh Please Normal Mana.

Do you wish to use Pre-Magery 0 invention and require that lowest magery possible is magery 1 and highest is magery 3?

I'm mostly neutral about that.

Do you wish to go the route of permitting an alchemist in the game as a "Tradesman"? If so, I can easily add that "trade" to the trade's list and generate manors.

I'd lean against that, but that's just a minor preference.

If unfettered access to all spells within GURPS MAGIC for 4e is what you want to experiment with, be my guests. If you want to see what the differences are with one manor using 4e, while others use GURPS MAGIC 2e, or even simply GURPS FANTASY 1st edition, that works for me as well.

unfettered 4e would be the most useful to me.