I've been working on fleshing out a city for
Dungeon Fantasy purposes and among other things thinking about what spells would be especially likely choices for wizards living in town
not going on adventures. I'm assuming all the modifications in "Wizardry Refined", and I'm especially interested in spells clerics
can't cast. Here's the list I came up with on an initial skim of
Magic, cross-checking against
Clerics:
- Earth to Air: Useful for excavation. The deeper the excavation, the more useful it is, because it safes you having to move what you're removing through the entire length of the tunnel (whether you're using Shape Earth or mundane means).
- Hair Growth: Frivolous? Sure. But seems likely to be popular among rich people.
- Alter Voice: can effectively grant the Voice advantage, and notably has a big advantage in terms of duration over Silver Tongue.
- Transform Body, Transform Other, and Transmogrification: I'm not quite sure of the use-case for these but their relatively long duration means hiring a wizard for a one-off casting isn't entirely crazy.
- Borrow Language and Lend Language: their low cost (especially the fact that they cost only 1 FP to maintain) is a big advantage over Gift of Letters and Gift of Tongues.
- Mind-Search: somewhat redundant with Compel Truth, Truthsayer, etc. (especially if you can browbeat the subject into saying something), but potentially useful in some situations.
- Telepathy and Communication: absolutely setting-altering. You only really need one of them.
- Season, Mature, and Fool's Banquet: more "frivolous" spells that nevertheless seem likely to be quite common—especially when you consider how much the rich were historically willing to pay for spices.
- Distill: not a big deal if mundane distillation is commonplace but might explain fancy alchemical concoctions showing up where they'd otherwise be difficult to explain.
- Much of the Illusion and Creation college: most obviously useful for entertainment, disguises might have practical applications.
- Mage Sight and Analyze Magic: these aren't a bad choice for adventuring mages, but if no one in the party can cast them, they're high on the list of spells adventurers will want to hire townie mages to cast (namely, to identify magic items among their loot).
- Dye: this is sort of like Season, in that it's not super practical but when you consider how expensive some dyes were historically...
- Copy: incredibly useful before the printing press, though it's more practical for longer works.
- Other Making and Breaking spells: Reshape and Mystic Mark stand out for their permanent or semi-permanent effects. There are a few others where the use-case is not entirely clear but which have potential given their 1 hour duration.
- Meta spells: Scryguard, Conceal Magic, Scryfool, Spellguard, and Remove Aura all have the sort of long durations that make them practical to hire a stay-at-home wizard to cast. Some of the uses are illicit but they might find legitimate users among rich people worried about espionage, or thieves who use magic to locate high-value targets.
- Encrypt: with a 1-week duration, this basically speaks for itself.
- Hallucination and Great Hallucination: legitimate uses are mostly recreational, but the very wealthy might go for it.
- Magelock and Nightingale (in cities that lack a patron deity who empowers city priests): These bend my rule about avoiding spells clerics can also cast, but in some settings not all cities will have a patron deity that grants these spells to clerics. Again, the long duration is quite nice.
- Atmosphere Dome: A clever caster may be able to pull some tricks that go well beyond what you can do with Weather Dome.
- Delayed Message: Occasionally useful for confidential messages when you can't pull off Telepathy or Communication, though it would probably work better if you could cast it on items.
- Essential Acid: Even with "Wizardry Refined" nerfing the duration, it seems likely to be quite useful for alchemists.
Okay everybody, what did I miss?