The impact of Youth [Magic/Thaumatology]

[AlexanderHowl]

A mage with Youth spell who spends their time keeping the nobility alive with the assistance of 100 highly paid ceremonial assistants would need someone to do their dirty work. They could offer their assistants wealth and youth, especially if they are the only person in a nation with the Youth spell at a high enough level to be cast ceremonially. In the case of PCs, they would probably just pay them very well to work as their contractors.

In such a society, the local elites would depend on castings of the Youth spell to live forever. Supply and demand might drive the cost for each casting to $20,000, meaning that only people with Status 3+ could afford it for themselves. At Status 4+, they might offer it to their close relatives. At Status 5+, they might offer it to their close friends. At Status 6+, they might offer it to favored servants, slaves, or pets.

Adventures relating to PCs working for the mage might relate to collection of debts owed to the mage by the local elites, the acquisition of magical knowledge and magical items for the mage, the collection and transportation of unusual animals as pets for the mage, the purchasing and transportation of unusual slaves as concubines for the mage, etc. The mage might even hire other mages to work for them as contractors, as their magical labor would be much less valuable than his.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

I'd forgotten that the GURPS version of the scroll is a waste of page space

There's advances to using scrolls even for those who know the spell if you ponder on it...

1) no need for hand movements
2) no need for feet movements
3) no skill roll required for non-resisted spells (very useful if there's range penalties which might reduce it to skill 3 and likely to fail)
4) no crit fail explosions or demon summonings (as above for non-resisted:since you can't roll them) which I guess is balanced by no crit successes (will always cost energy)
5) no false info from non-resisted information spells
6) uses skill at time mage wrote spell, which could be higher than when he casts it (ie if you wrote "scroll of fireball" when you had your "+3 fire magery" staff, but don't have the staff on hand when you want to cast a fireball)

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

it is a common house rule that a scroll may contain the energy

I think there's a legal way:
M57: costs 500 energy to give "Power 1" to an enchanted item (why not a scroll?)

That's normally for recurring uses, but you only need ONE use of Power, so per M56 if you know "Temporary Enchantment" you can use 15% cost for single-use: 60 energy for -1 energy cost.

That's still going to double each tier (120 for -2, 240 for -3, 480 for -4, etc) so it's still pretty prohibitive to make energized scrolls in this fashion.

Probably easier to just use "Manastone" on the scroll itself: 5/20 energy per 1 energy.

I've always thought it'd be cool to allow making a "Dedicated Manastone" (energy can only be used for attached object) for x2 or x3 outputs like Powerstones get on 70.

In that case you could allow a "half energy powerstone" at half-cost (3/10 instead of 5/20) and spending the 0.5 outputs 1 energy, instead of 1 outputting 2.

Another idea is floating the -40% one college limitation (makes powerstones drop from 20/80 to 12/48) over to manastones (3/12 instead of 5/20 ... or 2/6 if allowing "half energy" stones)

Or even incorporating the -80% "one spell" limitation for stones (makes powerstones cost as much as manastones to create, and manastones cost 1 or 4)

Multi-energy manastones are generally reusable if you don't use the entire energy, so "Temporary: 1 use" dropping cost to 15% could be another approach to cheapen them too, if it applies to the entire energy pool (spend 1, spend all) though it's a non-limitation for the 1st-tier 1-energy stone...

You'd never want to do that for a Powerstone (would defeat the purpose: the whole point is that they recharge for multiple uses)