New Magic System

The idea behind the changes of the magic system, is to reward mages who specialize in few colleges and make it more expensive for mages has a few spells in all colleges.

The way this system is implemented is that all Magic Colleges is now a skill that the caster must possess before he can buy spells in that school. The skill is IQ/H with no bonuses from Magery, furthermore no skill level of a spell can exceed that of the schools level. So in order for a caster to get 16 in Minor Healing, he must first have 16 in the Healing College. Now since both (most) spells and the colleges are IQ/H they will follow in the same pace, with the exception of Magery, since spells get bonus from Magery and colleges does not. This means that the higher Magery the higher the difference between the spell level and the college level will be, and thus making colleges more expensive if the user want the full Magery bonus to his spells.

Since the advantage of Magery has been made less worth compared to IQ, the Magery advantage has been reduced in price to only 5 points pr. level, but do notice that Magery 3 is still required for some spells. The new system will be more expensive for most mages, with the exception of mages specializing in only one college. Otherwise the more colleges the player want spells from at a high level means that he has to use a lot more character points go get thus, forcing mages to select a few schools at a high level and the remaining support schools at a more moderate level.

Link to a GURPS Character Assistance file that changes the current spell casting system to match the above rule changes. Note that the Magery discount is implemented as a modifier to Magery 1-3, Magery 0 still costs the normal 5 points. All the colleges are prefixed with “Magic College – “, for easier identification. (file is comming as soons as I find a place to upload it).

As a final note, the weather college has been removed since all spells in that group also is a Air or Water spells so those spells require ether the Air or Water college.

GM Notes: With the new system, advancement in IQ becomes much more attractive, since it increases both all colleges and all spells. So the GM may be required to set restrictions on allowing the PC’s to increase their IQ or set a limit to how high they can increase it so they will be forced to increase specific spells and schools instead of the entire range of IQ related skills.