Dungeon Fantasy: New Skill: Cast Magic

[b-dog]

Cast Magic (Mental/Very Hard) This skill is useful for characters that do not have magery or power investiture. On a specially written scroll or spellbook, a character with this skill can cast a spell from them. He needs to have Thaumatology to be able to read it and know what the spell means first.

Specially written spellbooks and scrolls. These are written by a mage, cleric, druid or other spell caster. They must expend fatigue when writing them and they must use magical ink. These are used in emergency situations, when the spellcaster is out of fatigue. Many spell casters keep these around their studies just in case.

Magical ink: Ink that is enchanted so that when spells are written on scrolls and spellbooks the magic is held in them. The cast must also expend fatigue as he writes the spells. Enchantment cost ?

[Lonewulf]

Hmmm... not a bad idea, honestly. Why not just call it "Spell Reading" or "Scroll Reading" or something?

Then again, it might not JUST have to do with scrolls. Maybe this skill is also able to activate wands and the like...

[Randover]

Doen't Magery 0 solve most of these problems?

[Harald387]

My $0.02 -

I wouldn't go with this, because Dungeon Fantasy is really big on niche protection. It might suit a small game (2-3 players) where nobody wanted to play an actual spellcaster, but as a GM for that kind of group I'd just be inclined to have very few magical scrolls or spellbooks lying around as treasure.

And as was pointed out, Magery 0 is probably cheaper and much more reliable.

Player enchanting - including scroll creation - is really not within the purview of Dungeon Fantasy. As has been pointed out many times, if delvers could *make* this stuff, they'd go make their money doing that safely in their lab rather than heading down into dungeons full of things that want to eat their brains to retrieve them.

[JAW]

Well - if the GM wants there to be scrolls usable by anyone the GM can just drop them in the dungeon as magic items that work for any literate character...

The scroll could come with an instruction - "point your right hands index finger towards the target you want to zap and read the folloving aloud holding this scroll on your left hand." - No skill recuired - expect maybe DX chek to aim with the finger right..

An scroll with just the text that is supposed to be read aloud would work but one would need to roll thaumatology to know what the scroll does. But it would be more fun to have the characters have to test out one of a fev similar onme use scrolls to find out what they do - just like in nethack.. ("the scroll disintegrates to dust and you notice your feet are no longer toughing the floor..")

REmember that a point in skill represent some 200 hours of training - whre would dungeon going characters that are not mages have spend that kind of time reading magical scrolls?? Of course in dungeon fantasy one can bypass these kind of things but still.. "I'm a thief who got's special training on reading magical scrolls..."

If a scroll requires some special rituals to use right - well if the characters know the rituals (becouse someone has told them that information for example) then they know - Or one could roll thautmatology to recognise the scroll type and know the rituals. If one has spent some hundreds of hours reading moldy books on magic or in classes on hogwarts or sumthing one could have picked up that kind of trivia..

Requiring a special skill would be a bad idea IMHO.. "OK you find this scroll - does anyone have the cast magic skill?" No - uhm then nothing..