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Old 02-26-2013, 03:46 PM   #1
RaRaRasputin
 
Join Date: Feb 2013
Default Enchantment and Ceremonial Magic from a Magic-Powered Spaceship

In Spaceships 7 (Divergent and Paranormal Tech), it says that mages can draw power directly from any power plant which provides magical Power Points, without necessarily needing any of the Tech college spells designed for drawing power (p. 14).

Each ship-scale power point provides a maximum number of FP per second equal to [the ship's mass in tons]/4, (with [mass]/80 FP available per second if no power points are dedicated to being siphoned off). A mage can safely draw power each turn equal to (HT * 0.7 * Magery^2), so a fairly generic HT 10 Magery 2 mage can take 28 FP a turn. This would bump up against the limit of a SM+6, 100 ton ship (25 FP per power point), but it would not even scratch the "negligible power draw" limit of a much larger craft (A SM+10, 10,000 ton craft can provide 2000 FP/s per power point, or 125 FP/s for no power points).

I'm curious about how this would interact with Ceremonial Magic or Enchanting. If the mage is taking part in a Ceremonial Magic ritual that lasts one minute, can they funnel the whole 1680 FP (28*60) into it? If they're doing something that takes an hour (such as a Quick-and-Dirty enchantment), would they really have 100800 FP (28*60*60) available for it? The only other limit suggested by the text is to give them access only to the power they have available in the very last second of the ritual (ignoring the previous 3599), which in my opinion goes a bit too far in the other direction.

I like the idea of enchanters being able to seek large external power sources (because otherwise, larger enchantments will always take years or decades to create, which may or may not be an appropriate limitation to the setting one is trying to create), but this seems like an awful lot. Before I start imposing arbitrary caps, however, I thought I'd ask the forums if there are any other limiting factors I've overlooked.

Enchanting Facilities

A separate but related query involves enchanting in high quality workshops. Thaumatology (p 108) suggests that enchantment requires appropriate facilities, and should gain a bonus (somewhere between +1 and +TL/2) for particularly high-quality facilities. But if you require skill-15 in all relevant spells before you can even try enchanting something, and a roll of 16+ is always a failure, exactly what is this bonus good for?

Does it let you attempt enchantments based on spells you only know at 13 or 14? Does it mitigate penalties, allowing more assistants into an enchanting circle? Does it increase the final Power of the item (Magic p 17)? Does it allow assistants who know the necessary spells at 14 or less, so long as the primary caster knows them at 15+? As far as I know, this isn't explicitly defined anywhere- if it is, I'd appreciate a page reference.

Last edited by RaRaRasputin; 02-26-2013 at 03:54 PM. Reason: Grammar
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