“A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.” – The Grey Wizard
Starting off
Welcome to the Arcyne Arts. While most servers provide a set spell for a mage to use, or give a list of spells, but only rare chances to select new ones, Ratwood is different. The Core gameplay loop of magery involves your spell book, and what you can do to expand your knowledge/ offer your talents to lesser gifted denizens of Rockhill.
What can you do?
Most Mage activities boil down to a few options. Offering your spell-related services to those who need it, creating enchantments, or using rune rituals to assist others.
Spells you acquire as a mage are gained through studying your spellbook. Almost every mage starts with a spellbook, of varying quality depending on their lot in lyfe, with the Court magos having the best book at week start in rockhill. A mage can read their spell book once a day, and each time will be granted spellpoints to spend on more spells. The Maximum amount of spellpoints is determined by the quality of spellbooks:
Poorly made tomes offer at most 1.
Beginner tomes offer 2.
Apprentice tomes 3.
Adept Tomes 4.
Expert tomes 6.
Master tomes 8.
Legendary tomes 12.
These given spellpoints are then multiplied by a learning modifier, that consists of your reading skill, your intelligence, and your arcana skill. As an example: The court mage will almost always have 100% of their spellpoints each night, where as a refugee mage may get as low as 25%.
This Learning modifier can be influenced by a few extra actions. Reading a spellbook atop of a knowledge rune, infusing your spellbook with a gem, and smoking pipeweed all increase your learning modifier and can allow you to have more spellpoints on reading your spellbook.
For what type of spells you can learn refer to the Guide to Spells.
Enchanting
Recommended items: Chalk, Summoners pouch, scrolls, mercury, Various summoning material.
What about enchanting, you ask? Mages are able to make a variety of enchantment scrolls along 4 tiers of enchantment. To do this, a mage must have a piece of chalk, a scroll, Mercury (to write with) and various components that are required for the desired enchantment.
Basic components are fairly easy to obtain, Many of which can be found in the wild. Obsidian is obtained from prestidigitating lava, Mana crystals from prestidigitating a mana-fountain, runed artifacts can be randomly found and look like rocks with sigils. However, for the majority of required components, You will need to summon things.
Refer to the Guide to Summoning: for what creatures can be summoned, and what components they leave behind upon death.
To start enchantment, you must draw an imbuement array with chalk. This imbuement array requires a clear 3x3 space. From there, you can select any Tier 1 or Tier 2 enchantment, and it will tell you what ingredients you are actively missing from the array. What about Tier 3 and Tier 4 enchantments you ask?
For higher level of enchantments, you require an arcyne silver dagger. By default, the court mage has one handy. Otherwise, you’ll need to find some silver and have a blacksmith forge you a silver dagger. After which, you imbue the silver dagger with a chunk of raw Cinnabar. Be warned however, that the Greater Imbuement Array requires a 5x5 tile space to create.
Enchantments are relatively finicky things, and some enchantments only work on some types of things, be it armor, weapons, rings, or shoes. Refer to the Guide To Enchanting for what each affects.
RuneRituals
Rune Rituals function with the same system as enchantments- That is, you draw the desired rune with chalk, and to perform a ritual it requires components to be atop of it. These can vary, from the wall accession matrix; which creates an arcyne barrier in front of the ritualmaker, To the convienant, but expensive Planar Convergence Matrix, which allows the user and anyone above to be teleported to another convergence matrix.
Notably however: Some of these rituals require more then one invoker- That is, someone with arcana knowledge within range of the rune to assist in invoking it. This is especially present for a Tier 4 summoning rune, The noc's eye warded sealate confinement matrix.
As mentioned in the enchantment section, There are different tiers of runes, and arcyne silver daggers are needed to perform tier 3 and tier 4 rune rituals.
All rituals will use up the components offered to them, so be sure not to activate them carelessly, unless you have a stockpile of the material used in it.
Mage Curios
Mages also have access to several arcane crafting recipes.
Many of these are curios of sorts, providing varying usefulness albeit likely situational ones.
From crafting new chalk, Amythortz gems, infernal feathers, sending stones, void lampterns, manabinding collars, manabinding gloves, shimmering lenses, mimic trinkets, summoning binding shackles, infernal forges, rings of null magic, temporal hourglasses and a variety of arcanic melds.