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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9572733" data-attributes="member: 7737">We next choose between Detect Magic and Read Magic and we get to turn to (55) to discuss it with Thayne. He regrets there won't be time to teach us both, because both are useful, but ultimately we have to choose between being able to find our father's "magical treasure" at all (Detect Magic, 83) vs. being able understand what we find (Read Magic, 134).[This is a misleading and meaningless fake choice. We're never going to find Landor's spellbooks because they aren't at the College Arcane. So Read Magic is useless. And what we do find, the Sceptre of Bhukod, is not in a location that we even know exists nor can we access it, so Detect Magic with its 1" path, 6" long (so 10 yards X 60 yards at 'outdoor' scale) is useless too. And probably Detect Magic wouldn’t work on the sceptre at all, assuming it’s of Artifact power level.]---134Read Magic seems a little more useful [and is a requirement to be a functioning magic-user in AD&D], plus we originally set the condition that Thayne had to teach us enough magic to be able to understand our father’s spell books, so the next morning we rush to Thayne and ask him to teach us.Thayne hands us a rose quartz prism on a fine gold chain -- the material component for this spell. We make an INT test vs. 22.On a failure we can't follow Thayne's time-compressed instruction and we don’t get to add Read Magic to our spellbook.On a success, within the confines of one day, we are able to "spot the differences among such written languages as ancient High Elven, Archaic Common, classical Wizard's Scrawl, mirror writing, and other scripts." [Here the author shows off his anthropology chops. Nice. Also: Language matters!]We then ask Thayne how to cast the spell and use the prism. He spreads out a yellowed parchment which we recognize as a combination of Wizard's Scrawl and mirror writing. We dangle the prism so that the last rays of the setting sun refract over the parchment."Speak to me in my native language," we command. The words on the parchment swirl into the Common tongue.And it's a map of some pirate tunnels beneath Freeton. [Err… a map doesn't require translation. A map is a picture.]Thayne says he already collected "his rewards" from those tunnels, so he's either a pirate or stole from pirates! He then congratulates us on our success, tells us to keep the prism, and tomorrow we can learn either Find Familiar (225) or Sleep (117).</blockquote>

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