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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arrgh! Mark!" data-source="post: 3368317" data-attributes="member: 14559">One of the reasons why I like Iron Kingdoms is that arcane magic is relatively new, being only a few hundred years old and they are making new, better, bigger things all the time. Magic with its own industrial age, basically. Magic being a dying force is of course heavily through celtic-influenced fantasy as we see through Tolkien and his many, many author-spawn. I think it's a great idea to have a growing idea of 'science' effecting magic.Rules wise, however, theres nothing to really show a great deal of difference. It's all in the description. My single player rogue hunted around to get a speak with dead spell at one point; I described a gypsy-type woman who cut off the corpses head, ripped off the face and nailed it to the wall where it was forced to answer questions or stay in that torment; much different to the stench of chemical, lack of eyebrows, yellow fingers and palsied condition of the wizard she'd come across, or even the sorcerer with flashing green pupils who effected fire magic like most people walk. It's all in the description. My suggestion to really work it into your game is to describe the ways of magic. Got a "primitive" mage? he mutters and mumbles and draws runes on the ground and spills chicken blood on them. Got an "Advanced" mage? His neatly inscribed latin forms a mathematical whirlwind on the ground, to which he adds the life essense distilled from a chicken. Note: Advanced mages will tend to reach higher levels quicker, simply because they already have a codified research and practise system, and a society that allows them to be as such. Primitive mages will tend to stay at middling levels; they level slower, have less spells and so on simply because they haven't the wealth of knowledge and access to research a society supported wizard may have. Imagine Lorenzo d'Medici patronising a court wizard, feeding him, clothing him, giving him access to rooms and methods to study and gain experience. Lorenzo purchases some ancient books on magic theory for our court wizard that have been long hidden and not available to any hedge-mage. The mage himself, perhaps a genius or perhaps just a working joe  would increase to and beyond the capacity that any hedge maze, shaman, or backstreet conjuror could simply because our court wizard has access to all of those other mages and they do not have access to his resources. Lorenzo may use him in battle or other reasons, but more than most he spouts it to the other lords that he has the "greatest" wizard in the land. Not to say with the most potential, or anything. But the most thorough, reliable, well educated and broad wizard.Our wizard, being intelligent and powerful, organises greater copies of these books to go around to his friends. They then organise for more. Perhaps a college, with magical researchers is set up to study magical phenomena, or so on.Arcane magic should be renaissance in tone, basically. There needs to be the society and culture set up to support aging finger wagglers; this didn't happen in human society a great deal until the renaissance.</blockquote>

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