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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8073479" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 28: Jan/Feb 1986part 4/5The Specialist Mage: Well, this is a turnup for the books. Jon Pickens introduces another thing that would become core next edition, and stick around in all the subsequent ones too. We never saw this in Dragon, and it's very pleasing that I get to trace another thread of history back to it's relatively obscure genesis here. Even more interestingly, the mechanics are not the same as 2e specialists. While some elements are the same, like gaining a bonus to learning spells of your specialty and a penalty to the rest, they don't have the forbidden school wheel, instead imposing increasing xp penalties if your ratio of specialty spells to other ones drops below a certain level. (which is a bookkeeping nuisance for PC's, but isn't a restriction at all if you've already reached max level for your race) Overall, I think this implementation is more annoyance than benefit, and can definitely see why they changed it for wider publication. It's good to give things several years of playtesting so you can experiment with different approaches and iron out the kinks. Along with the general principles, they give lots of new spells for the school that needs it most, the Necromancer. If you're going to make specialists a thing, you need to make sure they have several spells of their specialty to choose from every single spell level. Mildly irritatingly, only two of these will make it into the 2e corebook, which means 2e necromancers once again struggle with a lack of low level spells unless you buy a load of supplements (or just the complete necromancer's handbook <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) So this is cool and historically significant, but also very much unfinished work. You still have a long way to go to make all the various types of specialist wizards both well differentiated and well balanced.</blockquote>

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