Inventing New Spells and the first Mage

[momothefiddler]

Originally Posted by Nemi3e

Technomancer mentions Kindermagic. Mage children usually make one or two spells, due to the effort and time required, though it is done intuitively, this "assembling strings of nonsense words and nursery rhymes," into spells. Which indicates some sort of natural feedback? Things "feeling" right.

The First Mage could easily continue doing this into adulthood, and come up with a dozens basic spells in his entire lifetime, pass them on, and the later generations build upon it. Enchant Item would probably be the result of "I want to put magic in this thing," and then using it as a sort of dowsing rod for their own magic/harmonics. Maybe make an array of them and then go "What happens if I make them all point in the same direction?" Or what ever.

Intriguing. I don't have Technomancer (and I don't think I'd heard of it until now, which is a pity - just the name makes me like it) but I like the concept. It makes me wonder, though - what were the rules for spell invention in 3e? Is kindermagic somehow bypassing those? How and why?

Originally Posted by starslayer

I always more viewed it as 'the spells in the book are the optimized application of magic'.

In a world where magic exists it does more then power spells (it powers a lot of the races in that realm), manna exists and DOES STUFF, stuff that is largely beyond the ken of even wizards to figure out without a lot of research into things, but they can direct the manna, sloppily and haphazardly, with only trivial understanding of the fundamentals of magic.

So ANY individual with a background in thaumatology can enact an apportation. First you need to physically walk to the object and bind strings of magic to it, then you need to focus a lot, in a circle. Then you need to lift an equivalent amount of weight elsewhere to set up the sympathy between the two, and then what you were trying to lift up via apportation lifts up, at ten times the regular fatigue cost.

Basically it would have been easier to just lift the object up in the first place, but that it CAN be done by magic means that a proper wizard in there tower, with there tools, can bash away at the concept until they economize the process down to the apportation spell.

As such the first mage just noticed that by doing something weird they could get an effect that was not part of what they were doing, they then refined the process until they created there first spell, once they had one they taught it to others (and some of those others were better at it, and some of those others could just outright not do it).

I like this concept. So you're saying something like Anaraxes - there are certain unterspells (unterspellen?), the invention of which is possible with minimal equipment, but the spells given in Magic are the diecast high-precision spells that can't be made without specialized tools.