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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 3800635" data-attributes="member: 5435">In the Dying Earth stories, you had three degree of magic use.The "Cugel level": an educated person could study magic on their own, possibly learning to memorize one spell at a time and have a chance of casting it correctly. (Whence the 1e thief's ability to read scrolls).The "Turjan level": a mage had books containing many spells and a wide array of magical items at his disposal. Note that most of the items were so highly specialized as to be practically useless, with a few notable exceptions. All mages were pretty much the same in terms of spellcasting ability: beginners could memorize three spells, masters could memorize as many as five.  There were only a hundred or so known spells, so if you wanted to get the jump on a rival you had to do it with magic items.The "Rhialto level": an archmage can memorize and cast spells as a mage, but seldom bothers. Once you manage to obtain the services of a sadestin (a very powerful spirit who completely ignores the restrictions of space and time), that creature does all the heavy lifting for you--leaving you free to indulge esoteric, impractical research and/or hedonistic pleasures. Again, much of the competition between archmages is over magic items--in particular IOUN stones.In the Lyonesse series, magicians seemed to fall somewhere between the Turjan level and the Rhialto level. Some magicians had sadestins, but many did not. Those who did not seemed to have much a much wider variety of spells, and found it a little easier to cast them. This may be because most the magicians were (at least partially) inhuman, so some of their magic was actually faerie magic.</blockquote>

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