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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 1371734" data-attributes="member: 6929">Cybertalus mentioned the un-interchangability of magical notation between wizards. That's a big thing. If spellbooks are indeed nonmagical, the only thing stopping anyone from printing 'em off is the fact that nobody could use them. They'd have to do some serious research to understand each page, presumably the result of days, weeks, years of research and experimentation on the part of the original wizard. And that research would, as Ace puts it, be on a par with university-level specialist science."Oh, I say these words and... um, the guy forgot to title the spell. I guess he recognises the words. Well, if I'm lucky I can point at a distant site and hope the spell doesn't rip my finger off, it could be too powerful. But if it's not ranged... or if some of these symbols are interchangable with other symbols and the guy just remembers his range variables by heart... this is too dangerous, dude."So what really needs to happen is for someone to start printing magical textbooks, each one detailing exactly how a spell was researched and what each part of the process does, resulting in a unified language of magic (I know draconic is supposed to fill this niche, but it's a language spoken by thousand-year-old snakes, it's not going to be perfectly understood by humans). It means you have far less spell content per book, but each spellbook teaches just about anyone how to cast that spell. (They still have to be literate and capable of handling the energies, but this way they know what the spell does, they know how it does it, and they know if they're up to scratch.)It's a revolution, baby.</blockquote>

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