Page Body
Standard Spells
The core teaching syllabuses of the Colleges of Magic may be found on the following pages.
Spell Lists:
- Light Spell List - White Magic.
- Dark Spell List - Black Magic.
- Air Spell List - Blue Magic.
- Earth Spell List - Brown Magic.
- Fire Spell List - Red Magic.
- Water Spell List - Green Magic.
- Grey Spell List - Grey Magic.
Spell Research
To learn a spell, you need four things.
- A book or other record of the spell - or a mortal or elemental teacher. Specifically not a scroll, as scrolls are a paper-and-ink cage around an already cast spell.
- A lab prepared for the especial purpose of teaching that spell. Not that colour of spell, not spells like that spell, that particular spell. This involves rare materials and unguents.
- Mana. You'll need to expend twice the spell's mana cost while learning it, and then cast it once at the end to fix it in your mind.
- Elemental Skill. You must have Elemental Skill N to learn an Nth level spell.
When learning spells on the College syllabi, the first two of these are provided by the College's infrastructure. There are many texts detailing the basic spells, and supervisors willing to help out in difficult cases. There is also a lab prepared for each of the spells in the first four levels - above that, you have the authority to book one of the high-level labs in advance and the lab technician will prepare it for you. Thus all that you need to spend is your mana; the time taken to memorise the form of the spell is in general minimal compared to the time taken to recover your mana.
When a mage teaches a spell to another, traditionally it is the teacher who sets up the laboratory and bears the cost of doing so. They may extract whatever payment and / or profit they see fit. Setting a lab up takes a day (cantrips are treated as level 1 for these purposes), and labs are in general trivially available for this purpose in the various Colleges.
When a mage learns a spell from a book, they must set up the lab themselves and bear both the cost of borrowing the book, if there is one, and the cost of setting up the lab. It takes no more time to do this for oneself than for another - a lab assistant is not very useful in this matter, since the required procedures were optimised for one person long ago by academic and introverted elves.
Spell research is not that hard to fit into this pattern. First you design the spell - i.e. you hire a lab, play around with magic, occasionally nearly blow yourself up, and eventually come up with a working spell matrix which you write down. This procedure probably takes no more than a week or two. Then you spend the mana as above and you have learned the spell. If you wish to teach anyone else, you must hire the lab to teach the spell as before - and providing a copy of the spell for the college's grimoires is encouraged.
For an exhaustive out-of-character list of the effects available at different levels and colours, see here.
Who has these spells?
Each College has grimoires of spells available for loan - for a price, naturally. There are also private libraries which may contain such grimoires, and indeed the Great Library probably contains many rare and interesting spells if you can convince the librarians to let you (a) see such a priceless book and (b) actually take it out on loan. Each player guide will contain a short list of the titles of spells in the easily available grimoires - it wouldn't be hard to learn these, but it would cost you.
It may also be possible to acquire spellbooks in play, through trade or the defeat of other wizards.
Note: Spell research costs were removed over summer 2008