Ritual Magic and Secret Spells

[Plane]

Pg 30 of Magical Styles has a perk-level UB you need to buy before actually putting points into certain spells.

How would this work in a system where you don't need to put points in spells to cast them and instead cast them as techniques defaulting to a "Path of X" skill (at a penalty equal to prereqs) named after the appropriate college?

Requiring specific investment in spells to cast them seems to waver from the Ritual Magic idea (everything is on the table) but if you did allow casting secret spells defaulting to the college then it seems like there should be a bigger requirement for it.

Since the technique penalty is based on the number of defaults, perhaps at least an extra -1 penalty where you treat the missing Secret Spell perk as a prereq too?

I figure M200's "can ignore the spell’s prerequisites under the standard system" is only written with spells in mind, and not non-spell prereqs for learning such as Magery (or Empathy) or IQ or a specific skill.

M299 lists Lend Energy as having a prereq count of 0 (ie it defaults to Path of Healing at a -0 penalty) so there isn't any -1 coming from lacking either Magery 1 or Empathy ... so I guess you still need those things?

Interestingly if using the Ritual Magic system I guess that means that anybody with any special capacity in using Recover Energy would also have special capacity in all healing spells.

Maybe the Recover Energy spell/technique could be floated to other colleges/paths if given some kind of special drawback like "the energy recovered is aspected and can only be used to fuel spells from this college" as opposed to the healing college which allows the FP to be used for ANY purpose.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Plane

the Ritual Magic idea (everything is on the table)

That seems to depend on the assumptions you make as worldbuilder.

Ritual Magic doesn't presuppose that mages automatically have all possible magical knowledge. It allows you to attempt all the "standard" spells that are well-known or obvious from the application of general magical principles -- whatever "standard" means in the setting. But that doesn't necessarily include secret spells. You still need to discover those, or re-invent them if the magic system allows spell invention, as they're the non-obvious spells that require an unusual insight, special trick or new approach.

If the word leaked out enough to become part of the standard body of knowledge, then you might well decide the secret had become part of the "standard" spell list. Future generations of students might learn all about it, just as real-world students of science learn a few hundred years worth of special tricks today. But right now in the setting, few or perhaps only one mage ever saw how achieve that particular effect with the standard methods.

Or, if you prefer, you're certainly within your rights as worldbuilder to decide there are no such things as secret spells, since the correct application of magical principles would be fairly obvious to any mage. At best, you've just though of an application that no one's used before -- but they wouldn't have much (if any) trouble achieving that same effect after having seen it cast, or even just read about it.