[Thaumatology] Specialist Magic-Users

[Plane]

Hey Charon how much FP would your Enchantress have to get the ball rolling on making powerstones? You'd need 12 energy to start off making a One-College Powerstone (Enchantment Only) which you could then use to mitigate the cost of the broader 20-energy all-college powerstones.

Even 12 (60% or 3/5 cost) can be more than you start with at HT 10 though (do you want to lose 2HP?) unless you bought extra FP (or an Energy Reserve).

An alternative to that (since that's 3 points per level) is also learning Manastone, since that only costs 5 energy (easily affordable) and even though it's one-use, building up a manastone to help pay the cost of One-College Powerstone could help your enchantress get off the ground without needing to lose HP in the process.

Energy is an even more serious consideration if you don't have expensive stuff to enchant to avoid the x4 cost penalty, since then you're looking at 80 (all-college powestone) or 48 (one college powerstone) or 20 (manastone). That puts even manastone outside of most people's energy capabilities!

House-ruling a one-college manastone as being makeable at 3 energy (or 12 energy if made from something low-value) might be one way to do it (perhaps it should be a perk to do this since it's not technically legal?) but you're still looking at a cost of 12 energy which is beyond most people's safe FP limits, and you might not want to design an enchantress with an ER or extra FP, or who has helpers/familiars to lend them energy...

Unless you wan to go the route of Black Magic to pay those costs (dangerous!) one other route might be to use Threshold-based magic. This could help you avoid using HP to enchant stuff, although it comes with other risks...

T77's suggested Threshold of 30 would let you spend 30 energy on a spell without any problems if you began at tally 0. Unless you have T79's "Variable Energy Access" (super costly!) you can't use Threshold to power normal magic directly... but there are some lower-cost workarounds to avoid spending 50 points, if you're willing to indulge some risk....

T79 mentions how "Lend Energy" can allow you to accrue Tally to recover FP. So you could use Tally to indirectly fuel FP-based magic by using Lend Energy on yourself after. It's not exactly the best deal though since Tally takes a long time to recover. It also doesn't help with casting big spells since you'd have to deplete your FP before Tally could restore it.

T79 also mentions how "Share Energy" can allow you to take up a mage's energy cost for their spells as Tally instead... You do need to learn separate versions of spells for using Threshold instead of energy if you lack VEA, but this is feasible, and if you are only interested in fueling 2 spells, you can take 2-spell magery (also T25) for a cheaper discount than one-college magery.

Threshold Magery 1 (2 spells only -75% Slower Magical Recovery -10%) would only cost 3 points, so you pay 2 more points to get Lend+Share with a point each, so it only costs 5 points to be able to tap into thresholds to assist your Energy Magery buddies.

But... if you ALSO have the usual run-of-the-mill Energy Magery, is there any reason why you couldn't cast "Share Energy" and designate yourself as the recipient, allowing you to create energy for use with a future spell by accruing Tally?

This only allows up to 5 energy to be shared, so it wouldn't help a huge deal with high-cost spells. I guess that's where Variable Energy Access would truly shine...

The requirement to use the energy in the next second also creates a complication with spells that have casting times longer than 1 second though. In that case, I think you'd usually have a buddy cast Share Energy right before you were about to complete your spell.

That would cause a problem with trying to use Lend Energy to power your own spells though, since you can't be casting 2 spells at once unless you have Compartmentalized Mind. A caster who had that could probably be using 1st mind doing Energy Magery-based Enchantment while the 2nd mind could jump in at the 2nd-last second accruing 10 Tally to cast Share Energy and make 5 extra energy available for the enchantment.

Without CM, this trick would only work if you cast a 1-second spell in the next second :( Assuming it was okay to self-designate using Share Energy (doesn't seem broken)

Tally/Threshold gets interesting if you're making enchantments that way primarily though. Aside from having the base 30 to work with (you can totally make that cheap manastone without Calamity) T80 replaces Powerstone with "Buffer Objects" which have twice the capacity, although they take twice as long to heal Tally meaning in total they take 4x longer to recharge from 0 to full.

This system allows bigger creations (even without risking Calamity) but the longer recovery times mean you can't really pump out stuff using "Quick and Dirty" at the same speeds.

Tally/Threshold also has no "Breath Control" or "Recover Energy" equivalent to speed things up further.

I don't think there's any way for Energy Magic to actually mitigate accrued Tally, so you can't reverse the above trick where you dabble in the other to beef up your primary. T80's "Trading Fatigue Points for Power" only helps with cutting down the initial tally costs of spells, but not healing tally once you've accrued it.